A Widow’s Story

Lisa Beamer sits patiently under the camera crew’s bright lights in a West Los Angeles bookstore while a photographer scampers around her. She is running late and her publicists hover just off camera, urging reporters to free their client.

Larry King is waiting across town at CNN studios to talk with her about her new memoir. “We need to go!” says Tina Jacobson. The publicist sighs loudly when no one appears to budge. She tries again. “We’re walking to the car!” she says, prompting everyone to give Beamer some room.

To her credit, Beamer remains the most poised of the group. She greets a visitor with genuine warmth, seemingly oblivious to her publicists’ anxiety. The bookstore manager is so moved by her composure that she whispers to an acquaintance, “Whenever I talk about [Sept. 11] I start to cry. But she’s just fine.” Within moments, Beamer and her harried entourage are off.

In the last 11 months, the 33-year-old mother of three has become one of the nation’s most in-demand media celebrities. She can’t leave her home in bucolic Cranbury, N.J., without being stopped by a stranger who knows intimate details of her life.

She is bombarded by thousands of speaking invitations and letters from well-wishers every week. She’s booked months in advance.

This is the most public way her life has changed since her husband, Todd Beamer, a 32-year-old software accounts manager, died aboard the hijacked United Airlines Flight 93 on Sept. 11. He and other passengers are believed to have rushed the team of terrorists aboard their flight, sending their plane crashing into the Pennsylvania countryside and saving an intended target in Washington, D.C.

His last known words-- “Let’s roll”--became the battle cry for the nation and elevated his then-pregnant widow to near icon status.

“I hate the thought of people recognizing me because I’m attached to this tragedy,” said Beamer, during a phone interview last week. “But I think it’s important for people to connect with the people ... intimately connected to the tragedy.”

The media wholly embraced Beamer in the days after the crash as a gentle presence in the storm of bad news, calling her “calm and radiant.” And she seemed comfortable in the spotlight. Early on, she grieved publicly during interviews on ABC-TV’s “Good Morning America,” “Dateline NBC,” “20/20,” “60 Minutes” and “Oprah.” She was heralded a hero after a joint session of Congress on Sept. 20 gave her a standing ovation.

In October, she boarded the United Airlines Newark-San Francisco flight that her husband had taken, telling “Good Morning America:” “I refuse to be held captive, and I will not be fearful.”

The birth of her daughter, Morgan, in January was international news. During a February prayer breakfast at the White House, Beamer joked about her attempts to trademark her husband’s words. When the president introduced her with “Let’s roll,” she quipped: “Mr. President, those two words are copyrighted. That’ll be $1,000.” (Actually, the trademark is pending.) Even People magazine named her one of the “25 Most Intriguing People of 2001.”

This week, Beamer resumes her position in front of the cameras--specifically on CBS, NBC’s “Today,” “Good Morning America” and of course, “Larry King Live.” Her memoir, titled (naturally) “Let’s Roll!” details the couple’s roots, their early years together, their marriage and their strong commitment to evangelical Christianity. (The book was published first with the subtitle, “Finding Hope in the Midst of Crisis,” but is now subtitled “Ordinary People, Extraordinary Courage” [Tyndale House Publishers]).

The book offers a painfully intimate look at the tragedy from Beamer’s perspective. She writes that she learned of the crash from a television news report, and collapsed when the newscaster confirmed that the flight originated in Newark and was bound for San Francisco. She intuitively knew Todd had taken that flight. She remained in a “near-catatonic” state for hours while friends and family managed the household.

In the months after, she struggled to deal with the loss, sometimes sitting on the floor of her husband’s closet and weeping alone.

The idea for the book wasn’t hers. Earlier this year, friends encouraged her to write it, she said. “Initially, I kind of laughed, thinking that it would be a five-page book,” said Beamer. Later, however, she teamed with writer Ken Abraham, who wrote “Payne Stewart: The Authorized Biography” (Broadman Press, 2000) with the golfer’s widow Tracey Stewart.

Beamer’s book was written from interviews that Abraham conducted with the couple’s friends and family, with some passages written by Beamer. It was completed in three months.

“I thought there could be some value in painting a bigger picture of [Todd] than what was known of him in one half-hour” at the end of his life, said Beamer.

Now, however, the public persona seems to have worn thin. “It’s sort of another thing I have to deal with at this point,” she said. “I guess, for me, I’m sort of done reshaping Sept. 11, in a lot of ways.”

Beamer is ready for life to return to some semblance of normal. On the anniversary of her husband’s death, she plans to be at home for a quiet and very personal memorial with her children, David, 4, Drew, 2, and Morgan, 8 months, and a friend whose husband’s died in the World Trade Center. “I have a limited bandwidth to all the things I can handle,” she said. “My primary concern is just to take care of my piece of the world.”