West Virginia’s First Lady Is Also Its Maestro : Controversy: Rachael Worby suffers criticism, says many have a hard time accepting a political wife with career unrelated to her husband’s.

Rachael Worby is West Virginia’s first lady. She’s also its maestro, as conductor and music director of the Wheeling Symphony. And in both roles, she’s controversial.

It didn’t help that she kept her own name when she married Democratic Gov. Gaston Caperton in 1990, that she is a woman in what has traditionally been a man’s profession, or that she came from New York.

Some people complained about a superior attitude and started talking about her clothes, her taste, even her hair. Her snuggling with the governor in public raised eyebrows.

Then there were the stories about her terrorizing the governor’s security detail by yelling obscenities at one state trooper and kicking another.

Worby takes some comfort in the example of Hillary Rodham Clinton, who earned far more as a high-powered lawyer than her husband, Bill, did as governor of Arkansas. Mrs. Clinton only stopped using her maiden name, Rodham, and started using her husband’s last name after he lost his 1980 reelection bid.

Worby says many West Virginians, like other Americans, simply have had a hard time accepting a political wife with a career unrelated to her husband’s.

“It probably doesn’t sit too well with people. I think I’m a moving target,” Worby said recently.

But she acknowledges that the criticism hurts.

“I’ve spent many nights sobbing myself to sleep since I met Gaston, sobbing myself awake, sobbing through breakfast and sobbing through lunch,” Worby said.

Worby, 43, and Caperton, 52, married within a year of his highly publicized divorce from Dee Caperton, his popular first wife.

Nearly six months after the wedding, a poll showed that West Virginians still preferred Dee Caperton as the state’s first lady.

“Here’s a woman who’s Jewish in a Bible Belt, who wants to be more than the governor’s wife,” an Administration official who spoke on condition of anonymity said of Worby. “People would accept her very easily as Rachael Worby and symphony conductor, or people would accept her as just first lady, but not together.”

A native of Nyack, N.Y., Worby joined the Wheeling Symphony seven years ago. She also is music director of the Young People’s Concerts at Carnegie Hall in New York City and has been guest conductor in Los Angeles, Pittsburgh, San Diego, San Francisco and Seattle.

It’s easy to track her success. The symphony’s budget has tripled to nearly $1 million under her and sales have mushroomed.

Worby has also taken the symphony on the road, bringing classical music to the tiniest hollows of West Virginia.

“She is an extremely dynamic woman who has energy to burn and has done a tremendous amount to put the Wheeling Symphony on the map,” said Executive Director Laura Willumsen.

But even her efforts to improve the orchestra produced grumbling among some musicians who complained they were forced out.

“What she did with the local people was break down their confidence. She just made everybody feel inferior,” said one former symphony member who also spoke on condition of anonymity.

Worby wouldn’t talk about the incidents involving the troopers, reported by the Charleston Gazette in September.

But one of the troopers, 1st Sgt. Randy Blevins, the head of the governor’s security detail, played down the incident involving him, which occurred on a turbulent helicopter flight from Charleston to Bluefield.

“In her apprehension to find out the cause of the lurching, she repeatedly nudged my knee with her foot to encourage me to ask the pilots what was happening,” Blevins said.

Worby has her defenders, including Charleston Daily Mail Publisher Terry L. Horne, who publicly upbraided one of his columnists this fall for repeatedly criticizing Worby. Horne said Worby had urged him to intervene on behalf of fairness.

Caperton said he’s hurt by criticism of his wife. “I think to attack me is OK and to attack her is unfair,” he said.

But he conceded that it is the price of taking charge.

“I think anybody who is in a leadership position and is aggressively trying to do something has detractors,” Caperton said. “If someone doesn’t have detractors, they aren’t doing anything.”