Tipper Gore, in Focus

If he’s a robot, she’s his heartbeat. When Tipper Gore takes center stage at Staples Center on Thursday to introduce the vice president at the Democratic National Convention, she will speak both as a veteran political spouse and as the person Al Gore whispers to as he fades off to sleep.

As for Tipper, her smile, her warmth and her confidence make her seem easy to know. Even those who fault her husband are inclined to have generous words for the woman he needs by his side.

More traditional than Hillary Rodham Clinton and less traditional than Laura Bush, this, after all, could be America’s first potential first lady who started married life in a trailer park. Ever since her parents called her Tipper, after a favorite lullaby, Mary Elizabeth Aitcheson Gore has carried mischief in her eye and feistiness in her spirit. With more envy than judgment, friends say she can be a little naughty. Whether it’s dueling the music industry, ditching the Secret Service or hanging out with the homeless, she just doesn’t always follow the rules.

Her husband agreed: “You know, she just does things her own way.” Habitually, Tipper Gore takes on edgy causes. Sometimes these issues get her in trouble; even last week, the New York Times recalled her “puritanical crusade” 15 years ago against explicit rock lyrics. But for the most part, if she has enemies, they fail to advertise themselves.

Part earth mother, part rebel, Gore says she has no model for the role of first lady, but that if the job is hers, she’ll do it her own way. Those who know the demands of this unpaid position wish her luck.

“It’s probably a healthy idea that she has, but it isn’t going to happen,” said Nancy Reagan’s former press secretary, Sheila Tate. Anonymously walking the streets of America? “If she’s the wife of the president,” Tate said, “that day is gone.”

For Tipper Gore, that day also is not yet here. In discussing what may happen in November, she speaks only in the conditional. No assumptions, and a standard feature of her stump speech is that every vote counts. Her stock address includes personal responsibility, tolerance, economic opportunity and, consistently, the Supreme Court. Along with women’s rights, mental health, physical fitness and the welfare of children and families, these are familiar issues for someone who, as longtime friend Jane Slate Siena put it, “is very clear about the things she cares about.”

So here’s what will happen if Tipper and Al move into the White House. He’ll run the country, she’ll invite homeless people to picnics in the backyard. He’ll handle foreign policy, she’ll play the drums at gay rights concerts. He’ll joust with Congress, she’ll go backpacking.

And if he doesn’t win?

The object of this discussion gazed off into some unknowable distance.

“Life will stop,” she said during a relaxed interview recently at the Biltmore Hotel. “Everything will turn to black . . . and fade away. . . . We’ll open the door . . . and who knows what will be on the other side?”

As a matter of fact, Tipper Gore knows exactly what will be on the other side: Her husband, her children, her grandson, her mother, her friends, her causes, her camera.

After nearly 30 years as a Washington spouse, she also knows precisely what awaits her if Al Gore wins in November.

Win or lose, Tipper Gore insists life--her life--will carry on. She vows she’ll still shop at Walmart, advocate for mental health issues, hike in the High Sierra. She’ll stuff her hair in a scarf and slip away to speak to troubled people who live under bridges. She’ll take pictures. She’ll worry about her mother and ride her son to study for his SATs. She’ll run, she’ll work out, she’ll battle those 20 or so rogue pounds.

This is a complex woman. She is not about tea parties or power lunches and is much more about connections than networking. Her philosopher of choice is Jean Piaget. And if she has a pressure point, it’s her family: Don’t mess.

She turns 52 on Saturday and is clearly comfortable with herself.

“Well,” Gore said in an interview here, “I know who I am, and I like it.”

A camera goes everywhere with her, so maybe her life is best told in snapshots.

Tipper the Enforcer

As a young mother, Gore banned her three daughters from watching “Mighty Mouse” on the grounds that the series demeaned women (the boy mouse was always rescuing the girl mice). Led by Tipper, the Gore household in 1977 began boycotting Nestle products, because the company pushed infant formula over breast-feeding in Third World countries.

The activist Tipper was in full throttle in 1984 when eldest daughter Karenna, then 11, brought home the album “Purple Rain” by Prince. Together, mother and daughter listened to “Darling Nikki,” about a girl in a hotel lobby, “masturbating with a magazine.”

Karenna’s mom--lead drummer in the Wildcats, a band she formed at her proper Episcopal girls’ school--was no rock ‘n’ roll naif. But if this was what her kids were hearing, she was worried. When she teamed up with her Republican friend Susan Baker, wife of then-Secretary of the Treasury James Baker, to form the Parents Music Resource Center, the media wasted no time branding them as right-wing prudes out to ban any music stronger than Sunday hymns.

The group proposed a voluntary ratings system similar to the method used for movies. When the recording industry fought back, it was Gore who took the heat. Liberals distanced themselves, characterizing her as a pawn of the Christian right. One punk-rock group, the Ramones, serenaded her: “Ah, Tipper, come on, Ain’t you been getting it on?”

At the time, Karenna Gore Schiff, now 26, recalled, “It seemed like the entire popular culture was villainizing her. Everyone from rock stars to talk show hosts to radio personalities.” Even Schiff had her doubts: “I wanted to be cool. I can honestly say that I was not on the same page with her.” But her husband, mounting his 1988 presidential bid, stuck with her.

Perhaps indirectly, Tipper Gore’s efforts had an impact. In 1996, the music industry adopted a voluntary “Explicit Lyrics” label. Some artists now package two versions of the same CD: one “parentally approved” and one with racier lyrics. Hollywood producer Rob Reiner said, “Over the years, clearly she’s been proven to be right.”

Once bitter ideological adversaries, the late Frank Zappa and his wife, Gail, became Tipper’s friends. Recently, Tipper did the drum work on a song written and recorded by the Zappas’ daughter Diva. Of the woman his father once called a “cultural terrorist,” Diva’s brother Dweezil said, “She was perfect for the job at hand.”

Tipper the Advocate

Almost before Oprah got a hold of it, Gore chose mental health as “her” issue.

“People told her it was a political loser, and she didn’t care,” Schiff said. “The truth is, she’s most comfortable as an insurgent.”

This insurgent takes a decidedly un-Hillary approach. Rather than a policy wonk, she’s the passionate advocate.

Last year, her passion stunned her communications director, Camille Johnston. Gore told Johnston she wanted to write an op-ed piece disclosing that in her 40s, she was treated and medicated for depression. The two worked in secrecy, passing the manuscript “from my bra to hers, and back again,” Johnston said, until the finished product and an accompanying interview appeared in USA Today.

Gore told the story of the so-called “situational depression” that sent her into counseling through occasionally sketchy personal anecdotes. But she was specific in calling for a health care system that should provide affordable counseling and should not overlook “how our minds affect our bodies.”

Gore speaks about her depression as something that happened, was treated and went away, like any other nagging medical condition. She dresses down reporters who ask her about “confessing” to psychological problems, noting that people do not confess to having toothaches.

But among Gore’s close friends, “there was almost an assumption that at some point it would come out,” said New Republic publisher Marty Peretz, Al Gore’s former professor at Harvard. But Peretz insisted there was no political calculation in the timing, just before Gore’s husband launched his campaign. “She saw, justifiably so, a public purpose in just saying it,” Peretz said. “There was not a political purpose.”

Advocates in the field hailed it as a landmark event last year when Gore convened the first White House summit on mental health, followed by the first Surgeon General’s report on mental health. Working behind the scenes, she helped win passage of the 1996 Mental Health Parity Act, which prohibits group health plans from setting lower limits for mental health care than for general medical treatment.

Laurie Flynn, executive director of the National Alliance for the Mentally Ill in Washington, said Gore’s work as White House mental health advisor has been “actual, substantive and real.” She added: “It’s hard to overstate the importance of her coming forward and talking candidly about her own experience.”

Tipper the Friend of the Homeless

It’s a lot grittier than giving museum tours. Six years ago, Gore took her first ride in a Washington homeless outreach van.

Patricia Letke-Alexander, a physician’s assistant who rode in the van with Gore, was skeptical: “I thought, vice president’s wife. No cameras. Yeah, right. I almost wanted to say no.”

But Gore surprised Letke-Alexander. The nation’s second lady turned up almost every week and “just became one of us.” Gore excelled at the type of relationship-building that is central to helping the homeless, Letke-Alexander said. “Tipper was out there sitting on the ground with people, going under bridges, traipsing through the woods,” she said.

“These are people that the rest of the world tries not to make eye contact with,” Letke-Alexander said. “And she would sit with these folks and tell them what beautiful eyes they had. Or: ‘Oh, I like the way you laugh.’ ”

One day, a Georgetown street regular tipped off some Canadian journalists about when Gore would be there. Spotting the camera crew, Gore had the Secret Service shoo them away. When Letke-Alexander heard the homeless man talking about what he had done, she went to Gore.

“Instead of jumping on him, like you would have expected, she turned it into a positive. She told him, if there are journalists around here, I can’t do this. She gave him the job of helping her to continue.”

Working with schizophrenic street people sometimes strains the patience of Gore’s Secret Service detail. But Nan Roman, head of the National Alliance to End Homelessness in Washington, said Gore has helped to raise the profile of an otherwise unpopular issue.

Gore regularly invites formerly homeless people to holiday parties at the vice president’s residence. If she moves to 1600 Pennsylvania Ave., she will continue this practice.

“Of course,” said Gore, surprised the question came up. “Why wouldn’t I?”

Tipper the Lens Meister

As her husband announced his running mate last week, Tipper was up on the podium, shooting pictures. This may have shattered protocol, but it was predictable. Almost like a protective device--an object she can pick up when the world is looking at her--the camera is always with her. Gore uses her lens to choose sides, a behind-the-shutter role that shields her from the spotlight. When Shimon Peres and Yasser Arafat shook hands on the White House lawn in 1993, for example, there was Tipper, shooting pictures. Campaigning in 1992 and 1996, she stuck her head out the window to record the scene as the bus rumbled by.

Gore took up photography about 30 years ago, when she shot pictures for the Nashville Tennessean. After her husband went to Congress in 1976, Gore freelanced in newspapers and magazines, and in 1996 compiled a book, “Picture This,” which included near-beefcake pictures of Al Gore shaving. Gore also was among a dozen photographers who fanned across America last year to assemble a new book and photo exhibit called “The Way Home: Ending Homelessness in America.”

Long before she published her first picture, friends say, Gore had the makings of a professional photographer. “Tipper always had independent reactions. She just saw things in a slightly different way,” said Peretz, who met Gore when she was 18. “She was always seeing things in nature--for example, lavender on the hill. The rest of us just saw a hill.”

John Siegenthaler, her former boss at the Tennessean, has his own take on Gore’s relationship with her camera. “It’s viral, that’s what it is,” he said. “It got in her blood and went up to her head. She’s always taking pictures! God knows what pictures of the vice president she has that we’ll never see, but I’d love to get into that stack of negatives.”

Tipper the Mom

They met at a dance at St. Albans, Al Gore’s prep school on the grounds of the Washington National Cathedral. She was 16, the only child of parents from Arlington, Va., who divorced when she was 4. He was one year older. Even as teenagers, both knew they wanted a large family. After they married, the babies came smoothly: three girls, and then baby Albert.

Karenna Schiff, now the mother of 1-year-old Wyatt, the Gores’ first grandchild, traces her mother’s “super-empathic” qualities to a childhood surrounded by women: her “totally iconoclastic” mother, her aunt and her grandmother. “Being an only child, growing up the way she did, her personality was always very bright,” Schiff said of her mother.

Tipper’s mother, who worked as an accountant, never remarried and now lives with the Gores. Her father, who still lives in the Washington area, remarried several times, bringing an assortment of step-siblings in and out of Tipper’s life. If it wasn’t exactly “Ozzie and Harriet,” Gore thinks “maybe it made me the kind of person I am.”

Tipper set limits when the kids were growing up, Schiff said, “but we always knew we’d have to answer to Dad.” Tipper ran the household on a family meeting system, in which anyone could call a meeting to discuss any issue.

This is what matters most in life to her, her husband said in an interview this month in Washington: “the family, the children and our time together.”

Tipper the Friend in Deed

Campaigning in Connecticut last month, Gore walked arm-in-arm with Hadassah Lieberman and exclaimed, “I love this woman!”

Years ago, the two bonded over yoga, long before their husbands became running mates, placing Lieberman in an army of Tipper Gore buddies of varied stripes and persuasions. Friends form an extended family to Gore. She sends notes or flowers or goofy gifts. She trades book titles or jokes or fitness tips.

“She understands the value of relationships,” said Tony Coelho, her husband’s former campaign chairman, who has received regular shipments of his favorite cinnamon bread from Gore as he recovers from a brain cyst.

“She connects,” said Gail Zappa. “There’s people that you just connect with, instinctively, immediately. You know when you meet one, you just know you have a friend for life.”

Jane Slate Siena, who has known Gore since she began dating her husband, said, “If she tells you she’ll do something, she’ll do it. If she asks for your help, you know it’s important. She doesn’t impose on her friends. She’s a very easy person to be friends with.”

Tipper the Campaigner

Like Laura Bush, Gore did not dive head-first into this campaign. Rather than reluctant, she insisted she was clear that “the campaign is not my whole life. The campaign is something that is occurring in my life.”

In Washington, her husband later explained: “She’s not ambivalent. She wants me to win, and she believes in my ability to be a great president. But as far as her own life is concerned, she’ll be happy if we win and happy if we don’t.”

His handlers would like to clone Tipper. Following a recent 24-hour swing through three states, Democratic National Committee chairman Ed Rendell said Tipper out-campaigns her own husband.

“Al Gore is better than his public persona,” Rendell said. “But he’s not Bill Clinton. Tipper just might be.”

She sits in on campaign strategy sessions, Coelho said, acting as “sort of that protective source for Al.” Since she has no such protective source for herself, if there are unkind words about her husband, she tunes them out.

“I guess what I’m trying to say is that there’s not that much time in my life for that kind of stuff,” Gore said. “It’s kind of gotten crowded out by the positive things. Which is a good thing, actually.”

9 Tipper the Partner in Passion

From out of the crowd in Des Moines, just after Al Gore secured the Democratic nomination, out stepped a blond. It was a surprise. Al Gore did not know his wife would be there. And in front of everyone, they locked in a deep kiss.

Yikes! Thirty years of marriage and they still do that?

“Well, yes,” said Tipper, who on their 30th anniversary conspired to whisk her husband away to a mystery destination. It turned out to be Bethany Beach, Del., where the two took day trips when they dated as teenagers.

They met in 1964 and were soon inseparable. Al went off to Harvard, and when Tipper graduated from St. Agnes School in Arlington, she headed to Boston’s Garland Junior College. She finished off at Boston University, with a degree in psychology.

“One could get the wrong impression from the fact that she followed him to Boston,” said Marty Peretz. “This was very much a two-way love affair.”

It was also, Peretz said, “never a relationship where the man knows best. I don’t think Tipper ever saw herself as just a sidekick to Al. She was never intimidated. She was confident, even a little brash.”

As newlyweds in 1970, their first home was a trailer park in Alabama, where Gore was stationed in the Army. Next came Tennessee, where Tipper passed up embryonic careers as a photographer and as a psychotherapist so Al could pursue politics. It was a rude shock to her when Al decided to run for Congress in 1976--without even telling her. And in Washington, she was the one who was home with young kids weekend after weekend, while Al flew off to his Tennessee district.

Yet even now, said former aide Jennifer Devlin, Tipper brushes her hair and puts on makeup when she heads home after a trip. “She just can’t wait to see him,” Devlin said.

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Elizabeth Mehren can be reached at elizabeth.mehren@latimes.com.