Wilson’s Ex-Wife Makes an Uneasy Return to Spotlight : Politics: As governor wrestles with the issue of their housekeeper, Betty Hosie struggles to keep a private life.

It is one of the curious side effects of modern politics that, suddenly and without warning, a private person becomes public. That lesson has come home to Betty Hosie, retired real estate agent, bridge and tennis aficionado, mother of two and--in current context--former wife of Pete Wilson, the California governor who has designs on the United States presidency.

They have not been together now for 14 years and, by all accounts, even when they were married, she did not relish public life or the spotlight that came with it. But the spotlight is exactly where this 71-year-old woman is once again, as controversy swirls about her former husband over what must once have seemed the most mundane of acts: the hiring of a housekeeper.

The housekeeper, the governor’s office now says, was an undocumented immigrant, and Betty and Pete Wilson failed to pay Social Security taxes for her--a sticky problem for Wilson, who has made the fight against illegal immigration a cornerstone of his governorship and his presidential campaign.

It is a sticky problem as well for Hosie, who in a statement released by the governor’s office has accepted responsibility for hiring and paying the woman. Thus has she been thrust unwillingly into the public eye, the controversy a harsh reminder of a life she thought she had left behind.

Now, an entire nation of voters--people who never before knew she existed--are aware that Pete Wilson had a first wife. Hosie has become the latest casualty of presidential politics, but with a new twist: Hosie is not the candidate and she is not the candidate’s wife. She’s his ex.

“Every new presidential campaign opens new doors to media frenzies,” says Larry Sabato, political consultant at the University of Virginia and author of “Feeding Frenzy,” a book about the way journalists treat politicians. “So if Mrs. Hosie has a footnote in history, it may be in being the first of many such ex-spouses. If you have to make history, that’s not something to put on the mantle.”

When the scandal broke, Hosie holed up inside the white clapboard cottage she shares in La Jolla with her current husband, Bernard Hosie. He answered the telephone, fending off inquiring minds. In their brick-paved courtyard garden, they affixed a small hand-lettered sign to a webbed lawn chair that sits under the shade of a giant magnolia tree.

“Private Property,” it read, in thick black lettering. “Keep Out. No Statements.”

This has not been the full sum of her remarks, however. In a brief telephone conversation with a Times reporter early last week, she said simply: “I just hope none of this hurts Pete.” Otherwise, she declined comment, and has continued to do so despite repeated interview requests.

Meanwhile, at the office of her former employer, the La Jolla real estate firm of Willis M. Allen, television cameras were busy in the wake of the disclosures, filming through the windows, their lenses targeting an office where Hosie hasn’t worked since the late 1980s, and where many of the current crop of agents don’t even know who she is. An exasperated receptionist shooed reporters away early last week, while advisers to Wilson and friends of Hosie closed ranks to protect her from the media onslaught.

“If she wanted to be a public person, she would have been public a lot when they were married, which she wasn’t,” said one longtime Wilson adviser. “Right now, I think she thinks it’s an embarrassment because she didn’t pay the taxes for the last 10 years, and we all now know that they didn’t pay the taxes when they were still married. . . .

“She’s on to her own life now, she’s got a new husband, they’re trying to keep a life between themselves.”

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The official version of events, as put out by the Wilson camp, is this: On March 29, Hosie called the governor’s office to alert him that she did not pay Social Security taxes for the housekeeper, Josefina Klag. Klag told the governor’s office that she began working for the Wilsons in April, 1978--about a year before she received a green card that enabled her to work legally in this country.

But Hosie, in a statement issued through Wilson’s office, has said she cannot remember the exact start date, and Wilson’s office is now investigating. It was not against federal law at the time to hire illegal immigrants, but employers were required to pay taxes.

“I employed [her]; my husband did not,” Hosie said in a statement. “I paid her; my husband did not. The house was my responsibility, not his. He rarely even saw [her] before he moved out of the house in 1981.”

To Wilson critics, Hosie’s silence raises a disturbing question: Are the governor and his campaign advisers, in trying to stem the damage to his presidential campaign, forcing her to take the fall?

But to friends of Hosie, her silence is simply characteristic; she has been declining interviews for years. She is described universally as “a class act,” gracious and soft-spoken, with a good sense of humor, an easy manner and a simple desire for privacy. Fourteen years after their breakup, she remains intensely loyal to Wilson.

“She is a lady in every sense of the word,” said Maggie Mazur, who helped raise money for Wilson when he was running for governor, and then for U.S. senator.

Said Becky Irwin, a longtime friend who initially referred Klag to the Wilsons: “She’s a very nice person, honest and just trying to do the right thing by Pete.”

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Wilson was her second husband. They met in 1965 when he was running for the state Legislature and she was Betty Robertson of Palos Verdes, a divorced mother of two and full-time volunteer for the campaign of Robert Finch, who was running for lieutenant governor. He was then 32; she was 10 years his senior.

Newspapers would later recount their courtship glowingly--their meeting on the dance floor of the Hollywood Palladium, their reliance on commuter flights for brief weekend visits while he split his time between Sacramento and San Diego and she still lived on the Palos Verdes Peninsula.

In 1968, with Wilson having been elected to the Assembly, they were married in Finch’s Sacramento home. Like most who know them both, Finch recalls that Wilson was far more interested in politics than his wife was. “Betty is very warm and outgoing,” he says, “but I don’t think she has the political bug.”

It was in Sacramento that she launched her real estate career, mostly “to keep from being bored,” she once told a reporter. “I just couldn’t spend all that much time sitting around a swimming pool.”

When, in 1972, Wilson became mayor of San Diego, her career became a financial necessity. The pair lived modestly, in a three-bedroom, two-bath condominium. In 1978, tax returns showed that she brought in $36,452, compared to his mayoral salary of $27,267. The following year, she earned nearly $70,000, while Wilson’s salary remained the same. “She was the breadwinner,” Finch says.

Back in Southern California, Hosie joined a real estate firm in La Mesa, but later moved to the Willis M. Allen Co., a fixture in downtown La Jolla for decades. Its office, with white pillars and flagstone facade, bespeaks the quiet elegance of the town. Betty Wilson fit right in.

“She knew how to handle herself very well,” said Andrew E. Nelson, the company president. “She looked very sophisticated, and that’s the type of agent we have.”

Being the working wife of a mayor wasn’t easy, however. Hosie juggled her public responsibilities with her career.

“She was under a lot of pressure during her time as wife of the mayor, trying to fit 36 hours into a 24-hour day,” Nelson says. “She had her own personality. She wanted to do this. And the monetary rewards of being an independent working woman were sort of secondary to the psychological rewards of having her own life.”

Nelson and others say Hosie took care to keep her business separate from city affairs. “There were people who probably didn’t even know she was the mayor’s wife,” Nelson said. “She didn’t use it to further her personal business.”

Friends say she tolerated the political life, but did not cherish it. “She was always right there at Pete’s shoulder,” said Evangeline Burt, whose husband, attorney Richard Burt, has known Wilson since law school. “But I never saw her go ‘Rah, rah, rah!’ . . . That isn’t Betty’s nature.”

The strain of political life and constant campaigning may also have been what led to the divorce, friends speculate. The Wilsons announced their separation in July, 1981, in a terse statement issued by the mayor’s office. “Ours is a completely amicable parting,” it said. “We are and will remain the best of friends and feel only the greatest respect and affection for one another.”

The announcement was released as Wilson was leaving for a fund-raiser in Orange County. His wife was at home without him.

Years later, speaking about his first marriage, Wilson told an interviewer: “The most important thing I learned is that I had a tendency toward spending too much time on the job.”

Beyond the 1981 statement, little has been said about the split, either publicly or privately. “It was not anything in the community that was buzzing around,” Burt said. “For . . . being as public as Pete is, it was a very private breakup.”

Three years ago, having already retired from the real estate business, Hosie married her current husband. Bernard Hosie was a schoolmaster in his native Australia, and at the time of their marriage served as a consultant to the San Diego-based Foundation for the People of the South Pacific, a group dedicated to saving the rain forests.

They live together in a quiet bungalow, tucked behind a larger home, not far from the real estate office where Betty Hosie used to work. Petunias and geraniums decorate the garden, the air scented with the sweet fragrance of honeysuckle. A ceramic sign at the entrance bids visitors “Welcome.”

But on Friday, the dogeared sign--”Private Property. Keep Out. No Statements.”--remained.