Mrs. Helms Doffs Apron and Campaigns for Jesse

Just how contentious is Jesse Helms’ struggle to save his U.S. Senate seat and his status as America’s premier conservative?

Well, for the first time in his 18 years in Republican politics, Helms--the king of direct mail, attack advertising and take-no-prisoners legislative battles--has rolled out his previously silent ally: His wife.

In earlier campaigns, Dorothy Coble Helms had sprinkled the weeks between Labor Day and Election Day with a few “teas” that permitted her to be home by dinner time after an hour or two on the hustings. Mostly, though, she stood by her man at events with the smile that seems fixed on the faces of so many American political spouses.

But this year Dot Helms, daughter of a Raleigh businessman and a housewife for 48 years, has crisscrossed the state--without her husband. In numerous solo ventures, she has spoken to crowds of up to 2,000. She has filled in for “the Senator” at events he could not attend because of the budget wrangling in Washington.

And, of all things, she has allowed crews to thread wires through her clothes, her bluish hair and gold clip-on earrings for television microphones. She has endured what for her is a significant ordeal--facing cameras and invisible reporters back in distant broadcast studios.

“I tell ya, all these cameras and things have sort of discombobulated me, ‘cause I’m not used to media attention yet,” she said Tuesday night, when she was cozying up to about 80 well-attired white Republicans who hardly seemed to need all that much partisan prompting.

Mrs. Helms was the centerpiece that night of a rally at GOP headquarters in a shopping center in this port city on North Carolina’s coast. Most of those in the audience were charged up from the previous night’s Helms rally, which had starred Vice President Dan Quayle. But this night, they still wanted to see the candidate’s bashful wife.

In a seven-minute speech, Mrs. Helms barely mentioned her husband’s opponent, Harvey Gantt, 47, a Democratic architect who was mayor of Charlotte. Instead, with a red-polished nail keeping her place on her page as she read her speech, she spoke of those who have hounded “Jesse.”

Four times she refered to homosexuals and lesbians; twice she dropped Sen. Ted Kennedy’s name as if the liberal Massachusetts Democrat were Lucifer incarnate. In sum, she delivered a message that was as genteelly spoken as it was relentless in warning that her husband was a “symbol to be gotten rid of.”

“So this is what we are faced with and this is why I am out on the road,” she said. “We need you to get out and beat the bushes and to get people to the polls to vote because this not being a presidential year many people may not vote. We need our people to get out.”

Later, Mrs. Helms confessed that she finds public speaking difficult, painful and tiring. In all the years of her marriage--the couple’s 48th anniversary was Wednesday but they hardly had time to do much more than collapse together after a day of campaigning--she has rarely ventured outside her circle.

Instead, she has kept to home, children, church and selective volunteering in Raleigh and Arlington, Va., where the Helmses maintain homes.

“I wouldn’t be doing this,” she said, “if we weren’t up against people from out of state, all these, these funny people.” By “funny people,” she explained that she means “the homosexuals and the lesbians and the odd arts groups . . . those people who want to control our lives here in North Carolina and across America.”

The next afternoon, Mrs. Helms, at a “tea” in Teachey, N.C., a hamlet of about 300 about 30 miles up the coast, delivered another tocsin: “Our primary opponents are the homosexual and lesbian lobby and the so-called pornographic artists. . . . In California, there’s an 800 number and you can contribute to Mr. Gantt through Master Card or Visa. . . . The gay bars in San Francisco and all over this country have containers that are marked for Harvey Gantt. He’s advertising in homosexual newspapers and I heard last night that there’s even a homosexual group in Topsail Beach where we have a little summer home. . . . They have come in to work this area for Mr. Gantt.”

An audible gasp, like a hurricane-powered wave crashing on the Carolina coast, rolled through the living room in the home of J. D. and Mary Ann Teachey--the latest holders of a significant family name in these parts since the 1700s. The Teacheys had invited about 100 women to their brick and white-pillared home to meet Mrs. Helms.

J. D., a produce broker, is the Republican chairman in this Democratic-dominated county. His wife, a retired teacher, explained that the couple had invited to the tea many Democrats, who had voted for Helms in the past. “They’re good conservative people,” she whispered. “We just have to be sure they vote this time around or Jesse’s in trouble.”

She and a few friends had covered her dining room table with plates of itty-bitty biscuits, tiny fried chicken legs, crust-less sandwiches, vanilla cake and sherbet punch. There was also tea, already sweetened and poured from a silver pot on the sideboard.

In the living room, “Miss Dorothy,” as campaign workers called Mrs. Helms, made her way slowly through a knot of women, chatting about this and that but mostly accepting compliments for her husband.

“I saw him once at an event with his grandson and when that little boy asked for a (soda), don’t you know the senator just ran right over and got him one!” said Margaret Cassare, a Republican activist. “He’s everybody’s grandfather.”

Mrs. Helms smiled and nodded her head.

The women clustered so close to her that at one point someone left her Hello-My-Name-Is tag on the shoulder of Mrs. Helms’ pink lambs wool sweater.

Mrs. Helms met her husband shortly after attending the University of North Carolina at Chapel Hill. She was working for the Raleigh News and Observer as a reporter in the society section. Helms, the son of a small town police chief who had dropped out of Wake Forest College to be a sportswriter, worked nearby.

“He was just a nice person who worked next door and he’d bring me Coca-Colas and peanuts every day--a real Southern gentlemen,” Mrs. Helms said. “Gradually, he started taking me out to dinner on Friday nights, which was our late night.”

Today, Mrs. Helms is an attractive woman in her 60s. (She demures when asked her age.) Her round face makes her a dead-ringer for an older Olivia de Havilland, the actress who portrayed the saccharine Melanie in “Gone With the Wind,” a historic Southern portrait that hardly seems so distant in this spot on this particular afternoon.

Unlike Mrs. Helms, Lucinda Gantt, wife of Helms’ Democratic opponent, has not been on the tea and reception circuit for her husband since he announced his candidacy last winter. A campaign spokesman said Mrs. Gantt is an accounting professor at UNC Chapel Hill and could not take off time.

Dave Wofford, Gantt’s deputy press secretary, also said that Mrs. Helms’ “homophobic message of outside infiltrators is ridiculous.

“Yes, we have volunteers from out of state but it’s not as if we screen people’s sexuality before we allow them to help us,” said Wofford, noting that most Gantt volunteers were Tarheels. Wofford also questioned why, if the Helms campaign was so upset about “outsiders,” had 70% of the incumbent’s contributions exceeding $200 come from out-of-staters?

“And one more thing,” Wofford added, “we have not advertised in gay or lesbian publications or gone to San Francisco to drop off collection cans. Ridiculous!”

But, on a sunny afternoon in Teachey, there was no one in the audience to challenge that claim by Mrs. Helms, who delivered her message so softly, sweetly--and alarmingly.

In fact, the only questions she fielded concerned her grandchildren and her health. Two years ago, Mrs. Helms underwent colon cancer surgery.

Anne Haylar, a GOP organizer from nearby Pender County, stopped Helms toward the end of tea to recount what she called “a most amazing experience.”

“I was in bed with my two little ones reading ‘Little Lamb’ when your husband called to thank me for my work on the campaign and to say that if he lost he was ready to retire and spend time with his six grandchildren if that was what God willed next Tuesday,” she said. “I was so upset, I got right up called everybody on my list twice more to get them to work for the senator.”

Her county, she said, might prove a special problem for Helms because it was populated by many blacks “and they have vowed to make a 98.9% showing” to support Gantt. “We can’t have that.”

Mrs. Helms reassured Haylar, who is 42 and educates her children at home rather than put them in public school. She said recent polls showing her husband deadlocked with Gantt might be misleading because whites have fibbed to pollsters, telling them they would support a black candidate.

“I tell you, right here and right now, Jesse Helms isn’t retiring so fast,” Mrs. Helms said, tucking the straps of her brown handbag closer to her waist and straightening up her back. “We are not defeated so fast.”