Candidate’s Wife, Friend, Adviser : Kitty Dukakis: She’s Had a Hard Road to Sweet Life

Michael S. Dukakis’ official portrait, hanging in the outer chamber of his Statehouse office in Boston, appears a study in discomfort. He stands awkwardly, his face limned in harsh contours, clad in an ill-fitting, olive-drab suit.

Kitty Dukakis, the governor’s wife, could do nothing about the painting. The suit was something else again.

“I gave it away,” she said recently, with a smile of satisfaction. “Within a week . . . some homeless person was walking around the city of Boston in his favorite suit.”

Pert, prim and proper, 51-year-old Katharine D. (Kitty) Dukakis has much to smile about this week. Her husband clinched the Democratic presidential nomination on Tuesday after the California primary and she went home two days later after a week in Massachusetts General Hospital for spinal surgery in her neck.

She has plenty to read while she recuperates for the next month. She already has received three gift copies of “Presidential Wives,” a breezy new historical survey of the 40 First Ladies from Martha to Nancy.

If Kitty Dukakis becomes No. 41, her chapter is likely to describe a presidential spouse unlike any before. Not only for her prominent role in policy and programs--refugees, drug abuse and homelessness, as opposed to redecorating the White House (“I have absolutely no interest in that area.”)--but for her life.

Helped Thai Orphan

In 1985, for example, on her second fact-finding trip to the Thai-Cambodian border, she sank to her knees to beg a Thai colonel to let her into an off-limits refugee camp. When he finally relented, she managed to find a missing Cambodian orphan whose only surviving relative lived near Boston. The youth, Hout Pich, was graduated last Sunday from Lynnfield High School and will attend Brandeis University next fall on a full scholarship.

“She has taught me determination,” said Kitty Dukakis’ son, John, 29, the eldest of the Dukakis’ three children and an operative in the campaign. “She gets things done.”

Even before her surgery, Kitty Dukakis’ life had not been easy. She fought with a domineering mother. Had a divorce that, her father says, “devastated the family.” Endured three miscarriages and delivered one infant who died 20 minutes after birth. Suffers bouts of insomnia. Had a 26-year dependency on amphetamines that even now, six years after quitting, is “very much” a struggle. Receives anti-Semitic hate mail and threats and has drawn so much flak for her aggressive role at home that one Boston newspaper columnist dubbed her “the Dragon Lady of Brookline.”

Focus on Addiction

Her drug dependency has raised the most questions, of course. Ever since she revealed last summer that she had undergone treatment in 1982 for her addiction to prescription diet pills, she has pleaded with students from coast to coast to avoid drugs, citing her own experience.

“Life is sweeter and better now, since I began recovering,” she told hushed high school students in Langhorn, Pa., recently. “Why start? Why start? Life has more meaning.”

Her emotional appeal was interrupted only when a wolf-whistle echoed from the back of the darkened auditorium. The thin, willowy woman with striking brown eyes and a rich husky voice blushed and smiled in appreciation.

Asked in an interview if it is still a struggle to remain drug-free, she replied: “Very much so. But I have resources around me. And I’m in touch by phone when I have difficulties and need help. I have a wonderful network of people I can call on.”

And if her husband is elected, she added: “I want to be active in substance abuse. Obviously. Doing more than saying no to drugs.”

Criticism of Mrs. Reagan, and her “Just Say No” to drugs campaign, seems implicit. “I’m not blaming Nancy Reagan,” she replied. “I think she’s done a good job of putting the problem out in the open. But you need programs. You need money.”

Protective of One Another

Like the Reagans, after nearly 25 years of marriage, Michael and Kitty Dukakis appear as protective of one another as they are ambitious. “We share everything,” Dukakis said in an interview last week aboard his campaign plane. “We talk about everything.” She “knows more than I do” about immigration, refugee policy and the arts. But on policy issues, he quickly added: “I make the decisions.”

‘His Closest Friend’

“She’s his closest friend,” agreed Nick Mitropoulos, a senior adviser and traveling aide. “And I’d say his closest adviser.”

In many ways, the Dukakises appear an odd couple, a curious study in contrasts. He can be icy, she can flare in anger. He is Greek Orthodox, she is Jewish. He is unflappable, her mother called her a “hurricane.” He rarely shows a sense of humor, she laughs easily and often. She says peanuts tell the tale.

“Michael can take a peanut out of the can,” she said. “I eat the whole can.”

He discards nearly every document he writes or reads. She is a self-described “pack rat” who spends “half my life retrieving things from wastebaskets.” (Neither keeps a diary.) He can’t recall the last novel he’s read and missed every entertainment and Hollywood question the one time they played Trivial Pursuit. She enjoyed Tom Wolfe’s “Bonfire of the Vanities” and taught modern dance for 30 years. He grows his own tomatoes, she has a sweet tooth for Gummy Bears.

“Michael is very frugal, Kitty isn’t,” said her sister, Janet Peters. “When Michael was governor the first time, he wanted a party for his campaign workers. She wanted to hire a caterer. He said no. He went out, bought all the food, did all the cooking and had 25 people over. When I came over later, he was vacuuming.”

Dukakis wears bargain-basement suits, washes his own shirts and complains if his hotel room is too large or fancy. His wife happily flies first class and pleads with aides to hide her Giorgio Armani shopping bags, and she spent three days just after Memorial Day dieting at the $301-a-night Canyon Ranch Spa in Tucson. She enjoys margaritas and has struggled for years to quit smoking.

“I’m gonna stop,” she vowed, lighting an extra-long Saratoga. She already has tried seven times, once with hypnosis, another time when her husband offered her a Cuisinart. Once she actually quit for seven weeks, but then succumbed to a stale butt in the bottom of her purse. Even worse, she said later, “the butt was a year and a half old.”

Aides say Kitty Dukakis presents a warm side, with honest, human foibles, to a candidate who is widely seen as a cool, cerebral technocrat. She said she and her husband share core values and philosophy, even if she occasionally dozes off at his speeches.

“I did it last week,” she said, shaking her head. “There was CNN and there was my sister watching.”

She says their differences are only in style. “He’s much calmer than I am,” she said. “Much more measured. Much more patient. I’m more emotional.”

She got involved in refugee policy, for example, after wearing a head scarf as a disguise to observe operations at an immigration office in Boston. And she led a state effort to find permanent housing for some 5,000 homeless families living in tents, motels and shelters after meeting privately with scores of homeless families.

Can Be Adamant

“She says, ‘Don’t tell me why you can’t do something. Tell me how you’re going to do it,’ ” said Nancy Kaufman, a human services aide who has worked with Kitty Dukakis.

But critics recall Kitty Dukakis demanding, “Do you know who my husband is?” to get her way. State legislators chafed when she interrupted meetings, parked in the minority leader’s spot or twisted arms on the Senate floor. State Rep. Chris Hodgkins recalls her calling him at home on a Sunday several years ago to “tell me off” because he had criticized her husband.

“She went on for seven minutes without stopping,” he said. “It just blew my mind.”

Boston Herald columnist and frequent critic Howie Carr describes Kitty Dukakis as a shrewish spouse who ordered her husband about in public and treated her staff badly. “I just don’t care for people who abuse the help,” Carr said.

Kitty Dukakis dismisses such carping as sexist.

“Have you ever heard the words assertive or aggressive used to describe the male spouse of a candidate?” she reponds. “I think there’s a real double standard when it comes to strong assertive women.”

Even her admirers recognize the rough edges. “Kitty’s activism rankles people,” Dr. Nicholas T. Zervas, a longtime family friend who supervised her recent surgery, said in an interview earlier this year. “Rankles them. Because they’re jealous. And for a lot of men, in particular, it threatens them.”

Judith Meredith, a Massachusetts human services advocate who has clashed with Dukakis, raves about his wife, however. “A lot of people don’t like Kitty,” she said. “I think she’s the best thing about him. She’s the only hope there’s a real soul there. . . . If she continues to love him so much, there must be something there.”

Few were surprised when Dukakis dropped everything in San Francisco to rush to his wife’s side when she was hospitalized, or when he plaintively first noted her absence before claiming victory in Los Angeles on Tuesday night. They nuzzle on the campaign plane and often hold hands as they walk. He introduces her as “my bride” and the “love of my life.” (She can tell when he’s upset: “He calls me Katharine.”) A Times reporter once found them dancing cheek-to-cheek in a silent, darkened airport terminal after a midnight flight.

“I think they’re more in love now than when they were first married,” said her father, Harry Ellis Dickson, the former Boston Symphony Orchestra violinist and Boston Pops conductor.

“He (Michael) is so proud of her, it’s unbelievable,” Dickson said. “Sometimes it’s a bit too much. He says, ‘Look at her, isn’t she beautiful?’ ”

As a child, she was high-strung, given to frequent crying. Her parents’ home in Brookline was filled with musicians and actors like Danny Kaye and Kitty’s namesake, actress Kitty Carlisle Hart. Her father would play violin for the sanitation men. “Before first grade, I thought everybody had a string quartet in the living room,” she recalled with a laugh.

Mother Was Strict

Her mother, the late Jane Goldberg Dickson, was strict and demanding, the kind who thought “children should be seen and not heard,” Kitty Dukakis recalled.

“She was very dogmatic and very definite about the way things should be done,” she said. “You didn’t go into town without stockings and gloves. You never traveled in sneakers. I came home from college in sneakers once, and she gave me a lecture for the whole ride home. The word ‘refined’ was very much in her vocabulary.”

Dukakis said she “argued a lot” with her mother, especially as she grew older. Then, barely 20, she dropped out of Pennsylvania State University to get married. “I think it was probably an excuse to leave school,” she said. She moved to San Jose with John Chaffetz, then in the Air Force and now a Colorado businessman. Within three years, she returned to Boston with her young son, John. The divorce of the young mother “was one of the worst things that had happened to our family,” her father said.

Introduced soon after by Dukakis’ former high school girlfriend, Michael and Kitty hit it off instantly. Although his parents were skeptical at first of the young divorcee, her parents were delighted. “Jane, my wife, used to call him Jesus Christ,” Dickson said. Ultimately, Kitty’s mother became so upset with the rigors of politics that she stopped reading newspapers. “She hated the criticism,” Kitty Dukakis recalled. “When they reported our tax returns, she was horrified.”

Has Job at Harvard

Kitty Dukakis later was graduated with a Bachelor of Arts degree from Lesley College in Cambridge, Mass., and a Master of Arts in broadcast and film from Boston University. She has an office in the Statehouse and holds a $20,000-a-year job at Harvard University on a project to help reclaim and rehabilitate urban parks.

Dukakis was one of the first to push her husband to run for President, and she has campaigned with her own staff for much of the last 15 months. During the Memorial Day weekend, she beamed when a burly bystander waved and shouted, “Mrs. President!” as she passed slowly by in a vintage Thunderbird convertible in Garden Grove’s strawberry festival parade. She instinctively hugged three Laotian children as she toured the San Diego Zoo, happily pointing out the pygmy hippos.

And she gave moving accounts of her visits to the Auschwitz and Treblinka death camps when she addressed about 50 Jewish activists at the Century Plaza Hotel in Los Angeles. She noted that President Reagan did not reappoint her to the U.S. Holocaust Memorial Council, which is trying to raise $100 million to build a museum and memorial.

“Nothing would please me more than to have President Dukakis reappoint me to the Holocaust Council,” said the woman who would be the first Jewish First Lady. “So we will never forget the 6 million.”

And with polls giving Dukakis the edge for November against Republican Vice President George Bush, even she could joke about the angst that drives Kitty Dukakis.

“I feel so good,” she told the crowd with a grin, “there must be something wrong.”