She’s No Longer Just Mrs. Bono

In the last 12 weeks, she has lost her husband, put their estate up for sale and in every conceivable way wrenched herself from stay-at-home momhood and into the hurly-burly of a campaign for Congress. So here Mary Bono stands in a well-worn Beaumont restaurant, before the very audience her late husband Sonny once wooed, surrounded by 50 raucous Rotarians and looking utterly, desolately alone.

She wrings her hands, one still marked by a diamond wedding band. She flattens them against the jacket hem of her elegant olive suit, calming herself. Taking the podium, she starts talking--about this difficult transition, how the campaign has kept her going emotionally, her children’s endorsement of her political bid.

Then, abruptly, she looks down at her pumps, and grins. “I’m sticking to this floor here,” she blurts out, lifting her shoes off the filmy floor. “I hope you’re not hearing this, but I’m sticking.” She laughs, with her husband’s droll comedic timing: “Only in Rotary.”

The crowd laughs too, their communal tension eased.

Mary Bono is 36 years old, smack in the middle of what is a coming-of-age decade for many women. For her, life has exaggerated that process into a whipsaw roller-coaster ride, rife with peaks and valleys and frightening anticipation in between.

Hers is certainly not the typical campaign for Congress. It is sometimes wrenchingly personal, with her unpretentious recounting of death and grief and--just as painful--the strong suspicion that more heartache lies ahead when the bustle of the campaign ends and she is less distracted. It is also often astutely political. Mary Bono might not have been the politician all these years but, by the look of things, she was surely taking notes.

And, as the April 7 special election to fill her husband’s 44th District congressional seat looms ever closer, Mary Bono is undergoing an exceptionally public metamorphosis from wife to political front-runner, and enduring the criticism that comes with it. She is also figuring out who she is, stripped of her supporting role, and liking who she sees.

Only a week or so after the Beaumont speech, she is loose enough to make fun of her new self.

“It’s funny, when I originally started running, I’d say, ‘How can I get up and talk for 30 minutes uninterrupted?’ ” she told another audience in Banning. “I’ve been married to an Italian--I’m always interrupted after about the first three seconds. And now I look at a speech length, and it’s like ‘Forty-five minutes? Cool!’ ”

“It’s funny how it catches up to you,” she added. “You become a candidate no matter how hard you try not to.”

‘Sonny Is . . . Was . . . ‘

At times it seems that he might still be coming back, so regularly does she use “we” as her pronoun of choice and refer to Sonny in present tense. “Sonny is,” she told the Rotarians, before catching herself, “or was, a caring and compassionate person.”

Her husband’s death on a skiing vacation Jan. 5, Mary Bono regularly tells audiences, prompted the most searing yet defining moment of her life. She came down from the mountain where rescuers had found Sonny’s body and braced herself to tell their two children.

“Up until this point it was an extremely emotional time--I had lost it, I guess you could sort of say,” she says. “In any event, when I had to walk up to my children and tell them that their dad was gone, I realized that I didn’t have the luxury anymore to fall to pieces.”

Her telling of it is a perfect merger of the personal and political, and as such typically Mary Bono. On the one hand, it is a glimpse of her personal strength--on the other, a notice to voters and political opponents that she is no hothouse flower threatening to wilt.

She and Sonny met when she was out celebrating her college graduation. By the time Sonny Bono died at Lake Tahoe, they had been together for 14 years, married for 12. Thus the past three months have been, literally, Mary’s first as a grown-up without a partner, the first where she alone is on stage.

The strain has clearly taken its toll. She has lost 10 pounds from an already trim frame, and her eyes often seem sunken and pained. But she is also quick to smile, particularly when talk turns to their children, Chesare, 9, and Chianna, 7.

Apart from a shared last name and a bedrock faith in Republicanism, it sometimes seems that there could not be two less similar campaigners than the candidates Bono. Where he had a sometimes erratic relationship with the English language, she speaks with precision. Where he cracked good jokes, she is more sober. Where he relied on casual oral briefings and did not always have the best grasp of an issue’s intricacies, she is a voracious memo-reader who prides herself on detail. Where he was diplomatic, she is blunt.

Indeed, though she was publicly eclipsed by Sonny’s persona until his death, friends say this physician’s daughter was the force within the family. Despite their age difference--he was 62 when he died--their roles were in some ways reversed, one friend says.

“Though she had just come out of college, she brought a certain responsibility and level-headedness to his life,” said the friend, speaking on condition of anonymity. “Notwithstanding that he was very calculating, she still brought a certain maturity into focus for him.”

Friends say that the Bonos were true partners in their late Palm Springs restaurant, with Sonny the culinary wizard and Mary commanding the business end of things--an experience that helped earn her the endorsement of the National Federation of Independent Business. When he ran for Palm Springs mayor and congressman, she campaigned for him.

So it was not entirely surprising that within days of Bono’s funeral, friends and Republican leaders were asking Mary to run. She took some time to decide, then jumped in. And a jump it has been.

For several years before the accident, Mary says, her life was largely that of a well-to-do, stay-at-home mother, ferrying kids, making dinner and keeping books for the family and for Sonny’s business enterprises, including the residuals from his musical career. She stayed away from Capitol Hill and is little known except as Sonny’s wife.

Now she campaigns at up to 10 events a day--the Rotary here, a Republican women’s group there, radio shows, debates, precinct-walking, handshaking--wedged between taking the children to school or picking them up. She has jokingly titled her hypothetical campaign memoir: “Living on Slim-Fast and Breath Mints.”

Friends have come to her aid--big friends, with names like Gingrich, Kemp, Quayle, Herschensohn, Ford (as in former president Gerald) and that other well-known Hollywood conservative, Arnold Schwarzenegger, all donating time and money to her cause.

But she is still out there alone, and finding the road between silent spouse and vocal candidate an awe-inspiring one.

“It’s interesting to have people ask you how you feel about something and have it matter,” she said in an interview, picking over a greasy omelet at a Beaumont coffee shop. “It’s kind of scary to stand up there and talk about Iraq. Dan Quayle did a fund-raiser for me, and he stood up and said, ‘Mary’s going to be maybe making a decision here on Iraq.’ ” She paused. “What a responsibility. What an honor.”

It is a responsibility that she has a better-than-even chance of winning. The district is considered fairly safe for Republicans, and Bono is by far the best known of the GOP field. Her major competition is Democratic actor Ralph Waite--Pa on “The Waltons”--whose campaign has been hamstrung because he spends four days a week onstage in New York.

She also lines up well with the district on issues. She personally opposes abortion but favors abortion rights as public policy. She owns a gun but favors restrictions on assault weapons. She wants the federal government to diminish in size and local communities to bail out their own.

Some Criticize Her Candidacy

Although Bono is undeniably popular--it is difficult to find a voter who does not like her--she has also come under fire. There is subtle criticism of her decision to seek office at the same time she raises two young and now fatherless children. That front is clearly worrisome to Bono, personally and politically. To deflect criticism, she tells a story in every speech about taking her children into the wilderness near Palm Springs and talking to them about what her run for Congress would entail.

“They were fine with it,” she says, as if to silence concerns.

Yet she is running, after all, for a job that will require her to spend significant time in Washington and Southern California. She says she would like to keep her children in school in Palm Springs but is unsure whether that will work.

“I do get worried and concerned, but at the same time I believe that I have the ability to do it, to figure it out, to make it work,” she said.

“I think as a member of Congress I can bring some understanding of what women go through and, you know, just how difficult it is. And how you’re torn apart when you’ve got a job to do but your kid has the flu. What do you do? I think I understand that, and hopefully I can bring some of that to Congress.”

She hopes that people approve of the balance she reaches. “If they don’t,” she adds, “there’s just nothing I can do about it.”

More open and caustic criticism comes from the camp of Waite, who ran a strong but unsuccessful race for the seat in 1990.

“An objective observer would come in and say Mary Bono isn’t even the most qualified Republican on the ballot,” said John Shallman, a Waite consultant. He pointed to the other GOP candidates, among them a doctor and store owner--all a good 15 years older than Bono.

“She graduated from college and, you tell me . . . there’s not a whole heckuva lot after that,” he added.

In speeches, Bono dispenses of the qualifications question with a glib line--”Anybody who says a stay-at-home mom isn’t qualified to be a member of Congress has never been a stay-at-home mom.” And she lists her endorsements, among them the business group and the police departments in Palm Springs, Cathedral City and Hemet. But the gibe clearly grates.

“What do people want?” she asks rhetorically at the coffee shop. “You can’t be qualified to be a member of Congress unless you were a member of Congress before? There’s no one thing that you can do that qualifies you to be a member of Congress, and thank God that’s the way it was set up. It’s the most effective type of government in the world.”

“If people stop and think--that’s what we want: a diverse group of representative people, as diverse as we are.”

Then she laughs. “Got off on my soapbox,” she cracks.

An Independent Stand on Medicare

Off the soapbox and into the car. The 44th District ranges from Riverside to the Arizona border, taking in rich retirees and service workers in Palm Springs, stressed-out commuters in Moreno Valley and rural towns and farmlands farther east.

Today’s action is in Palm Springs, Bono’s home turf. But that gives her little consolation. She is fighting a case of nerves at a debate co-sponsored by the American Assn. of Retired Persons, a significant force in this community.

Bono runs through her opening remarks but does not hit her stride until the question-and-answer session. Her campaign is so new, her candidacy so unvarnished, that bluntness still rules.

The debate inevitably turns to Social Security and Medicare, the virtual lifeblood of this community of senior citizens. How would you keep Medicare solvent, a panelist asks. Should there be a means test?

“I believe we do need to means-test,” Bono says. “I do not think that Bob Hope needs to get Medicare.”

That is heresy in Palm Springs, especially before a senior citizens group that formally opposes that position. Bono wins only startled applause.

Part of her appeal is the unpretentious touch she shares with her late husband--and the fact that, like him, she easily exceeds expectations.

“Sonny very cleverly and very consciously played the hand of lowered expectations,” said one local political observer. “There was nowhere to go for him but up. In many senses, Mary is in the same position, but not intentionally. Mary made the decision to do what was best for the family and stay home. Now all of a sudden, she’s burst on the scene full-blown and impressive.”

Not the least of those impressed is Mary Bono herself. She has gone from sweating over Sonny’s success to contemplating her own, from being what she calls with some irony the “right hand doormat” political wife to seeking to etch her own name on the Capitol office door.

Whatever happens in the race, Bono says, she has found “inner peace” in the jampacked weeks since her husband’s death.

“It sounds strange, but when you go through something like this, the only thing you can do is be true to yourself,” she said. “If I get up there and I upset somebody or I can’t do or be what they want to be. . . .”

She shrugs. “Over the years, when I said my prayers I asked for strength. I’ve seen right now that it was the right thing to ask for. Little did I know.”