The Shaping of Marilyn Quayle : On the Eve of Her First Major Trip, a New Second Lady Talks of Her Need to Be Different

Dan and Marilyn Quayle will visit Australia, Indonesia, Singapore and Thailand this week, stopping along the way in Los Angeles on Monday. There are no funerals to attend and, in fact, one person close to the vice president speculated that the big story of the trip will not be what he does, but what she does.

The trip is a kind of coming-out party for Mrs. Quayle, who has not been highly visible since her husband took office in January. She has crafted for herself an itinerary so intriguing that one of the scheduled stops--at the Banthap refugee camp on the Thailand-Cambodian border--was expanded to include the vice president.

Looking at the schedule, “you can see the tugging and pulling” between the traditional and the modern roles of a political wife, one aide observed, “things Pat Nixon would never do and others she would.”

Mrs. Quayle, 39, herself acknowledged the fine line she must walk in shaping her role as Second Lady. “I’m trying to figure out what really is expected of me, what I can get away with not doing,” she said, with a bit of a laugh, “what I have to do. I’m just getting all of this settled.”

‘At a Crossroads’

Various people close to her describe Marilyn Quayle as “at a crossroads,” “struggling,” “balancing,” “frustrated,” and, in the true spirit of inner conflict, “really enjoying this new position.”

She “is not,” one friend said, “a ladies’ tea type of person.” Rather, she is the first vice president’s wife who is an attorney, a woman so academically able that her husband often has suffered by comparison.

Official Washington has been wondering what in the world a woman like this will do as Second Lady.

Although she is still considering a return to the paid work force, which she left 13 years ago to stay home with their three children, Tucker, 14, Benjamin, 12, and Corinne, 10, she could find such a move particularly treacherous given the current problems being encountered by Betty Wright, the wife of embattled House Speaker Jim Wright. The working practices of all political spouses could be up for closer scrutiny now that the House Ethics Committee has offered its view that Mrs. Wright did not earn the $18,000 yearly salary she received from an investment firm.

“There’s a lot of frustration in Washington among wives of public officials about the fact that they have to take a second seat behind their husbands. Their careers get sidetracked because of potential conflict-of-interest problems,” said Sheila Tate, former press secretary to Nancy Reagan in the White House and to George Bush during the campaign. “They really get limited and it’s very frustrating, and (Mrs. Quayle) must feel some of it.”

Indeed she does.

“Obviously we have a very interesting ethics climate,” Mrs. Quayle said. “But I haven’t ruled it out.”

Asked how she would handle criticism that might result should she take a paying job instead of concentrating on charity work, she said: “I think you can do both. Look at all the men and women who work who also work heavily in all charities. We rely on busy people to get things done. I don’t think anyone expects Dan Quayle not to be involved in charities even though he’s vice president of the United States. Same with George Bush. Why should I be different?

“I realize the power of the bully pulpit here,” she said. “At the same time I think we are moving to a place where the question shouldn’t ever cross anyone’s mind, ‘Why should the Second Lady work?’ I think I’ve been given talents I should use.”

Assembling her public persona, Marilyn Quayle is about to walk through several mine fields at once. She must guard against more than being so controversially modern that she offends a whole generation of women who have come to expect the vice president’s wife to be a cheerleader for charities and a hostess supreme. She also must follow the unwritten rule of not being so interesting and newsworthy that she upstages the First Lady. And she has the added burden of making sure she does not overshadow her husband, not appear so intelligent and engaged as to prompt a resurrection of the campaign stories about Dan Quayle not being smart enough to reside a heartbeat away from the Oval Office.

“He has such a terrible reputation, the stronger and smarter she looks, the more it is going to create a problem for him,” said William Schneider, a political analyst with the American Enterprise Institute, a Washington think tank. “The key word isn’t intelligence, it’s influence, the sort of things Nancy Reagan did. Clearly Nancy Reagan influenced her husband’s decisions and that’s still a liability.”

“That’s a man talking,” Mrs. Quayle bristled. She was giving her first interview to a major newspaper since her husband became vice president, and she was fully in charge. She had made it clear from the start that while a reporter was invited to join her inside the vice president’s residence, she did not want a photographer in the house because that would violate family privacy. When the issue of admitting the photographer was pressed, she responded by barring both the writer and the photographer and having the entire encounter outside on the veranda while a nearby construction crew made ear-splitting noises, which she ignored.

The underlying message was clear: Marilyn Quayle is not about to be pushed around, and she is quite cognizant of the difference between friends (who are invited inside one’s house) and the press (who are an occupational hazard to be dealt with from a distance).

“It’s almost a handicap to her that she is so intelligent and so direct to the point of being off-putting,” a family friend said. “She’d probably get along better if she were more honey-coated and syrupy. It’s just part of this image that people will not be ready for.”

Ready or not, Marilyn Quayle will do what she thinks is best.

“I haven’t focused on being different. I just will be because I am, and because I am from a different generation and there’s nothing anyone can do to change that,” she said. “I think that’s healthy.

“I just happen to be the one who’s crossing the threshold as so many other women have done who are my age. I think it’s exciting. I hope I can make, not breakthroughs, but just ease the path for the next person down the line so a little ice has been broken.”

‘Person-to-Person Basis’

Mrs. Quayle said that in the United States she hopes to travel extensively and give speeches “but it’s not going to be with very much fanfare. I see no need for me to court the national press. I prefer to do things on a person-to-person basis.”

When asked if those trips would be made separately from her husband, Mrs. Quayle didn’t respond directly. Instead she turned the conversation toward her view of press accounts that during the campaign she orchestrated her husband’s every move with nods, winks and arm tugs.

“When Dan campaigned for the vice presidency, I didn’t travel with him. Contrary to press reports, I wasn’t yanking at his coat,” she said. “I was with him for two weeks of the whole campaign. And the rest of the time I was alone. That’s hardly this Draconian lady that’s pulling the puppet strings. I was gone.

“Dan, to his credit, has always felt it’s a waste of time to have me sitting there being his adoring spouse. I have so much to contribute. He says, ‘Just go out and make your points.’ ”

She has described herself as her husband’s adviser and dismisses, with more than a little anger, the whole issue of her being smarter than her husband.

“Why even talk about it? How can you tell? We all have abilities where we excel,” she said. “Most of my friends who are very intelligent women are married to very intelligent men and none of us would sit down and say, ‘Well, I’m smarter than he is in this area, but he’s smarter than me in this.’ ”

Dan Quayle remains “very solicitous of her views,” someone close to him said. “It’s an area fraught with peril. She’s his closest adviser. He is not shy about saying no to her, but she has a lot of input.”

The possible perception problem is compounded by the fact that her husband is the vice president, a position that by definition “is emasculating,” Schneider said. “It’s hard for him to demonstrate that he’s independent, thinks for himself and is his own man. The quality that is valued in vice presidents is scrupulous, even slavish loyalty (to the President). I think the more she appears to take an interest in her husband’s substantive responsibilities the more questions will be raised about his ability to think for himself.”

‘Sexist Statement’

That, Mrs. Quayle said, “is a very, very sexist statement.” She will continue to function as an adviser. “You’re not going to change a lifetime of habits,” she said. “Why should we? It works. Whatever we do works. It works for Dan and Dan’s going to do whatever he feels is best for him. And if that’s using advice from me, that’s fine. And if it’s not, that’s fine too. What difference does it make?”

Barbara Bush has been offering advice on being Second Lady, “telling me ways to avoid problems,” she said, “so I don’t make pratfalls, you know, diplomatically or whatever. And at the same time she can kind of steer me away from the shoals so I can also add things that my generation would do.”

Just as Barbara Bush has been identified with literacy and Nancy Reagan with drugs, “The big question,” Marilyn Quayle said, “is, ‘What is going to be your area of focus?’ I’ve bridled at that. I guess I have so much energy I can’t imagine all of it being on one thing.”

Although Mrs. Quayle is determined to focus on a number of issues, her foreign schedule and her interview pointed to a predominant area of interest that is most untraditional: natural disasters.

In Indonesia, Singapore and Thailand, Mrs. Quayle is scheduled to visit disaster preparedness and relief programs that deal with everything from oil spills to floods.

Plans for Australia

In Australia, she is planning to visit some schools, but rather than sit back and watch a presentation and accept bouquets, she’s hoping to teach a class on the history of Australian-U.S. relations. She also wants to visit a rehabilitation hospital, an interest that stems from a college job she once held in rehabilitation therapy.

She also will do the diplomatic wifely duties of calling on a sultan and a princess or two. Disaster relief is an interest she acquired in Indiana, which is often hit by floods, drought and tornadoes.

She also is interested in speaking out on job training and teaching more history in schools, as well as “getting the business community involved in the school system (perhaps through) mentor programs in the inner city, adopting, basically, children who don’t have any role models, whose parents, if they know their fathers, have never worked or even their grandparents have never worked. So they don’t know why you work.”

Although she hasn’t ruled out many things, one offer she has rejected is playing golf with her husband, who is one of the best golfers in official Washington. Mrs. Quayle is very athletic. Her tennis playing is legendary, and she is such a skilled skier that her Secret Service crew could not keep up with her on the slopes during their Christmas vacation in Colorado.

Her husband would like her to join him on the fairways, “but I keep telling him, I’m going to wait until you’re a little worse than you are. Then it won’t be so humiliating for me to go out with you,” she said, having a good laugh.

The golf handicap system, which allows players of different abilities to compete equally, is not something that Marilyn Quayle will accept.

“That doesn’t matter,” she said. “When I tee off and get this dribble down the fairway and he zings the ball. . . . My goal is I’ll play golf when I’ve been to the practice range enough that almost every ball I hit, I don’t care where it goes, but as long as it zings when I hit it.”

That, in a nutshell, is the way Marilyn Quayle approaches things: on equal terms, with zing, or not at all.