THE VIRGINIAN-PILOT
Copyright (c) 1994, Landmark Communications, Inc.
DATE: SUNDAY, June 19, 1994 TAG: 9406150435
SECTION: COMMENTARY PAGE: J2 EDITION: FINAL
SOURCE: BY EDITH R. WHITE
DATELINE: 940619 LENGTH: Medium
VIRGINIA KELLEY WITH JAMES MORGAN
{REST} Simon & Schuster. 286 pp. $22.50.
\ \ THEY CALLED ME ``the Ruffian of First Mothers'' says Virginia Kelley, the late mother of President Clinton, as she recounts her life in Leading With My Heart.
Ruffian was a racehorse, a filly that snapped her leg in a race with the colt Foolish Pleasure but kept right on running. She is buried at Belmont Park, her head toward the finish line.
Now that was a filly with heart! And heart is what Virginia Kelley has and shares in this posthumously published book written with freelance writer James Morgan.
As an only child of a jealous, angry mother and a gentle father who considered himself a failure, Kelley struggled through a Depression-era girlhood in Hope, Ark. To be as unlike her cynical, suspicious mother as possible, she accented optimism, flamboyance and trust.
The story of Kelley's four marriages has often been told. She fell in love at first sight with Bill Blythe, who was overseas for the first years of their marriage. Soon after he came home he was killed in a car accident, leaving Virginia six months pregnant. Little Bill never knew his dad, but came to love his mother's second husband, Roger Clinton, a charmer devoted to ``foolish pleasure.'' He became an abusive alcoholic. Though the future president took Clinton, rather than Blythe, as his surname, he had to learn to stand up to his drunken stepfather to protect his mother and younger half-brother, Roger.
Kelley divorced Roger Clinton, then later took him back out of pity. She cared for him during his lingering death from cancer. Her third husband was a handsome, compassionate, tango-dancing hairdresser who had spent time in prison. He died of diabetes.
When thrice-widowed Virginia met Dick Kelly, she warned him of her disastrous marriage track record. But he married her and gave her love and encouragement in her final race against cancer.
Besides marriage, Kelley's career as a nurse anesthetist was at the center of her life. As she tells it, she had bitter fights with the medical doctors to keep her independence. Male doctors did not want women in the field. Looking back, she admits to hardheadedness and mistakes in dealing with the doctors, but she is fiercely proud of her skill at handling patients. She hit an emotional bottom when she was forced out of practice - in shame - after many years of hard work.
Kelley managed to keep on track over the rough spots, which included her son Roger's drug addiction and his prison sentence, by concentrating on living in the present and believing in herself.
``I'm not one to beat myself up'' she writes. ``Life is hard; don't try to go it alone.'' She started each day with 30 seconds of prayer and 45 minutes of putting on makeup - contacts, false eyelashes and eyebrows. ``No telling what I could have done in this world if I had been born with eyebrows,'' she jokes.
Outspoken, Kelley readily admits to being loud and funny with a flashy streak. ``I'm friendly, I'm outgoing, and I like men. Men like me, too.'' But her greatest support came from the women friends who shared her love for laughter, lunch dates and the race track. ``To me a day at the races is like life itself - every race is a new chance to win, and what went before doesn't count at all.''
Kelley's pride in Bill Clinton and the zest she brought to campaigning for him are also told in good political racing form. ``I put on my buttons and my funny hat and hit the road,'' she says. ``I am one crackerjack of a cold-call campaigner.''
Kelley's open account of how she and future daughter-in-law Hillary Rodham Clinton reacted to each other at first is right on the nose. Rodham wore no makeup, Coke-bottle glasses and her brown hair in no apparent style. ``I might have resented her being a lot smarter than I am,'' Kelley writes.
``Just think about what she was seeing. A mahogany brown woman with hot pink lipstick and a skunk stripe in her hair.''
Among the 16 pages of pictures illustrating the book, a photograph of the two women standing close together appears, with this label by Kelley: ``Hillary and I - so different and yet so much alike.''
Virginia Kelley's resilience and enjoyment of life bubble up in Leading With My Heart, along with her hindsights and her shrewd knack for assessing the good and bad in each of life's encounters. She comes across as a woman in touch with herself even while acknowledging that the book often leads her off-track.
``Virginia,'' the presiding minister said at her funeral in January, ``was an American original.'' Leading With My Heart races to the finish line in style. by CNB