On the one hand was Kitty Dickson Chaffetz: a 24-year-old college dropout, a divorcee back in 1960, when no one east of Hollywood was divorced, rearing her 3-year-old son, Johnny, taking money from her parents to finish school and hiding an addiction to diet pills that had started when she was 19. Not her finest hour.
”I felt shaky,” she says, in a grand understatement.
On the other hand was Mike Dukakis, a 27-year-old hotshot. He had been one of those high school and college superstars who runs everything, excels at sports and gets top grades. He had served in Korea, graduated from Harvard Law School and already was making a name for himself in politics.
In between was Mike`s old girlfriend, Sandy Bakalar.
”Mike called me one day and said, `I`d really like to meet a nice gal,`
” recalls Sandy. She was living in the same apartment building in Brookline with Kitty`s parents, and she told him she had someone in mind.
Remember Kitty Dickson, the cute brunette from Brookline High?
Not really.
She`s adorable, she told him. But there`s a couple of hitches: She`s divorced, and she has a child.
”He didn`t hesitate for a second,” Sandy says. She didn`t think it was important to mention that Kitty was Jewish. After all, Mike, who was Greek Orthodox, had dated Jewish girls before, namely her. So she marched across the hall and asked Harry Ellis Dickson if his daughter would like to be fixed up with Mike Dukakis.
”Mike Do-what?” he said.
”Never mind,” said Sandy.
But Mike persisted and Kitty was agreeable. She knew who Mike was. ”Even when he was in grammar school everybody knew him. He was the brilliant kid from the (better) side of town,” Kitty says. On their first date they went to dinner and to see ”Rocco and His Brothers.” They both hated the movie and walked out.
”I didn`t realize at the time how unusual that was,” says Kitty.
”After he pays his money, he doesn`t walk out.” By the second date, Kitty knew that something special was happening. So did Mike. He called Sandy and said Kitty was ”wonderful.”
Kitty`s family liked Mike immediately. They were ready to. Her father, Harry, 79, a former violinist with the Boston Symphony Orchestra and the retired associate director of the Boston Pops, says Kitty`s divorce was the worst thing that ever happened to him.
”I thought the world had come to an end. In our family we had never had any divorces. I would think, `What will happen to Kitty?` ” His mother, Ethel Dickson, took the divorce as a personal insult.
And then in walked Mike Dukakis, exuding confidence, ready to be not only a husband to Kitty but a father to Johnny. He baby-sat for the boy when Kitty was finishing her degree in education at Lesley College, taught him to ride a bicycle, took him along as he campaigned for the Massachusetts legislature.
”He knew how to lure me into liking him,” says John, who was a senatorial aide and now campaigns full time for his father. ”He spent a lot of time with me, bought me my first baseball glove.”
”Mike was so good for Kitty`s ego,” says her sister, Jinny Peters. ”He bolstered her self-confidence, which was low after the divorce.”
The Dicksons, whose name had been changed from Duchin, didn`t care that he wasn`t Jewish. They weren`t observant Jews. Every year they had a
”closet” Christmas tree. ”We kept it in front of the closet, so if my grandmother came over, we could shove it in,” recalls Jinny.
”My mother said Mike had a Jewish face,” says Harry. Later, she gave him a campaign slogan: ”If you vote for Mike, you`ll have nachas (luck) from Dukakis.”
Kitty`s mother, the late Jane Goldberg Dickson, had two nicknames for him: the Saint and Jesus Christ. She told him he was too ”fine” for politics. Be a judge, she told him.
Mike`s parents weren`t quite as thrilled. It wasn`t that Kitty was Jewish but that ”she was divorced, with a child,” says Euterpe Boukis Dukakis, Michael`s 84-year-old mother. ”I was worried. But my son was 28 years old, and he had made very good decisions all along, and I had faith in him to make the most important decision of his life. He never would have come this far without Kitty.”
On June 20, 1988, Mike and Kitty Dukakis celebrated their 25th wedding anniversary. Out of sympathy for her recent spinal surgery, all 50 guests at their party wore neck braces just like the one she was wearing.
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Boston is sweltering. The temperature has been butting against the 100-degree mark for days, and the air has officially been declared foul. The Dukakis home (Massachusetts has no governor`s mansion) is a modest, well-worn duplex with mismatched furniture and lots of plants and books. (A young couple with a baby live in the adjoining home.) It is steamy inside. There`s only one air conditioner, and the family moves fans back and forth.
”Would you bring down a fan?” Kitty Dukakis asks an aide before she sits down for an interview. She`s a thin, pretty woman. Prim, in a
conservative, short-sleeved red dress, black patent pumps and simple jewelry. Her mother used to drill her two daughters on dressing properly, and one of the things Michael`s mother remembers about her first meeting with Kitty was that she was dressed ”simply and in good taste.”
Her hair is reddish-brown, cut in a modified Geraldine Ferraro bob, and her best feature is her deep-set, dark brown eyes. Her makeup has been applied this morning by a specialist who has set up a makeshift headquarters in the red-and-white kitchen. Next to the sink there`s a sign on the cork board that reads ”Pennsylvania Ave.”
Kitty Dukakis is living right now in that twilight zone between full-out power-when people make things happen before you even think of them-and running her own household. She still loads the dishwasher, but she has one aide bring her cigarettes while another fetches a white-silk dress for a black-tie dinner and another negotiates with the cleaners to have her wardrobe ready for her husband`s nomination for president at the Democratic National Convention, which will begin Monday in Atlanta.
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There are two theories about Mike and Kitty Dukakis. One is that they`re completely and irrevocably different. He`s neat. She`s messy. He`s cheap. She`s extravagant. He`s controlled. She`s a wild card. (”Unpredictable,” her son, John, calls her, then decides that ”spontaneous” might be a better word.)
There is truth to this theory. Kitty is the first to say, ”We have very different personalities.” The way they spend-or don`t spend-money tells the tale.
”I think Mike still has his sweaters from high school,” says Sandy Bakalar. He`s the one who refuses to air-condition the house-he doesn`t even like to turn on the air conditioning in the family`s one and only car, a Dodge Aries. He`s the one who thought it was fine to raise three kids with one-and- a-half bathrooms. (John, who took the name Dukakis in 2d grade, is now 30 and married, awaiting the birth of his first child in January; Andrea, 22, works at Women`s Day magazine in New York; Kara, 19, whom they call ”Baby,” is a sophomore at Brown University.)
Kitty`s father bought her a mink coat, but her husband doesn`t like her to wear it when she`s with him. ”He`s embarrassed by the opulence of it,”
says her sister, Jinny. ”When we go shopping, we leave the things in the car if Michael`s home. If we have to bring them in, we take the price tags off.” ”He never has any money in his pocket,” says her father, Harry. ”I don`t think he`s ever had a credit card in his life.” The night before he announced that Sen. Lloyd Bentsen of Texas would be his running mate, Mike Dukakis mowed his own lawn with a push lawn mower.
”My mother gave me some very good advice before I got married,” Kitty says. ”She said, `Keep your own separate checking account.` Michael has very few material needs. That`s the way he is. I don`t share his philosophy.”
Their philosophies banged into each other the year he gave her a cookbook as an anniversary gift. This year Sandy Bakalar acted as the go-between to get Kitty the gold-and-diamond wedding bands she wanted. Yet she wouldn`t buy a $200 lamp without Mike`s approval.
Emotionally, Mike Dukakis is cool, controlled and rational. Kitty says,
”I have a more excitable kind of personality.” She has been called ”The Dragon Lady of Brookline” in the Boston papers because of her temper and her willingness to throw her clout around. She was roundly criticized for telling the governor in public to take off a hat because he looked stupid. And she`s the one who reminds him he doesn`t have to wait in lines: He`s the governor. She can be impatient, and she has a short fuse, although kicking her 26-year addiction to diet pills has mellowed her out, at least somewhat.
”We all took diet pills in those days,” is the way Jinny describes the
`50s. But not everyone continued to take them into the `80s.
”I probably knew I had a problem two months after I started to take them,” says Kitty. ”But they were important to me. They gave me a kick, they gave me energy. I became dependent on them. I gave them credit for everything I did that was positive.”
She made her first attempt to kick her 5-milligram-a-day dose of amphetamines in 1974, when her husband discovered her cache, but it didn`t work, and she went back to using them and hiding them. ”It was terrible,”
she says: the secrets, the lying. And the pills were exacerbating all her worst qualities: Her temper got worse, she grew more irritable, she couldn`t sleep. But the changes were so gradual-she had always been ”flighty”; her mother called her ”the Hurricane”-that no one caught on. Only she knew that she wasn`t in control.
”I just increasingly began to dislike myself,” she says.
So, in 1982, during Mike Dukakis` gubernatorial campaign, his office put out a press release that Kitty was down with hepatitis, but actually she had checked herself into the Hazelden Clinic in Center City, Minn. ”I was anxious, but I was so grateful that there was finally help. I couldn`t do it by myself, that was clear after all those years.”
She says there were times during the first six months after her treatment at the clinic when she thought about the pills, ”but I`ve never been tempted. I feel so much better about myself as a human being. I take the credit and blame for my actions now. That`s not what happens when you`re using (pills). I`m calmer, more confident now.”
Mike Dukakis has taken a lot of heat over his wife`s addiction. The questions are obvious: How could he not know that his wife was popping a pill every morning? What kind of a husband was he? Kitty defends him. ”It`s easiest to hide it from the ones closest to you,” she says. And he supported her decision to get help and then to go public with the news during his presidential campaign.
During the last 25 years, Kitty and Michael Dukakis have worked out a marriage that people say is a true partnership. They were married by a Unitarian minister and share their religions, celebrating Passover and Orthodox Easter, Hanukkah and Christmas.
She has worked or gone to school during most of their marriage. She has taught dance, worked in broadcasting and been active in public affairs and community projects.
And Michael has always been an actively involved husband and father, her family and friends say. He attended PTA meetings, walked the kids to school, read them bedtime stories and always tried to keep 6 to 7 p.m. open so he could have dinner with the family. He`s done the grocery shopping for 20 years. He does his own laundry, wearing wash-and-wear shirts to avoid ironing. Kitty`s college roommate, Anne Forgy, celebrated the Dukakises` 20th wedding anniversary with them at their home. After dinner, Mike and Forgy`s husband did the dishes so the two old friends could talk.
”When he first ran for governor, he wanted to give a party for his campaign workers,” recalls Jinny. ”Kitty said, `Fine, we`ll have it catered; I can`t do all that work,` but he didn`t want to. So he cooked the whole dinner-turkey tetrazzini-and when I stopped over later, he was vacuuming. Kitty will come home and find him rearranging the kitchen cabinets because he didn`t like the way the pots and pans were organized.”
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The other theory about Kitty and Mike Dukakis is that they`re really not that different at all. They`re both smart, ambitious, hard-driving, tough. She has had three miscarriages, lost a baby that died shortly after birth and just had major surgery for two herniated discs that could have left her paralyzed from the neck down, but says she doesn`t consider herself fragile. ”I`m a very strong woman.”
They`re both perfectionists. ”She was supposed to pick me up at 10 a.m.-we were going to do errands,” says Sandy Bakalar, ”and she called to say she would be 5 minutes late. I said, `Don`t worry about it.` ” Any aide who survives around her has to ”get the job right the first time around,”
according to her friend Anne Harney. ”They have to be thorough, smart and able to make decisions fast.”
”When you look at the real stuff-their very hearts and souls-they`re very much alike,” says Bakalar. ”They have a genuine fondness and caring for people.”
Everyone around her has a favorite story to tell about how Kitty relates to people. Her sister tells how she used to bring stray kids home from school, like the funny-looking, cross-eyed boy that the other kids made fun of. Her father tells how she collected several thousand dollars for a widowed neighbor and donated the money anonymously.
Friend Harney remembers a plane ride when Kitty noticed an exhausted mother and child and took the little boy on her lap so the mother could rest. ”And there was no press there to see it,” says Harney.
Her son relishes the story of how she dropped to her knees to beg a Thai officer to allow her into a refugee camp so she could reunite a Cambodian boy with his only relative, who lives in Massachusetts.
Her daughter-in-law, Lisa, appreciates that when Kitty talks about her children these days, she talks about all four of them.
”She has a unique ability to zero in on the other person,” says Harney. ”I have four kids, and no matter how busy she is, she always remembers which one is studying for which test.”
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The people closest to Mike and Kitty Dukakis-Peso and Panda, as they`re now known to the Secret Service-say that after 25 years of marriage, they`re still very much in love. They still hold hands. They dance in the living room. He watches her walk into a room. He calls her his bride and says, ”Isn`t she beautiful?”
”He treats her like a newlywed,” says Jinny. When he didn`t realize his microphone was on, the country accidentally heard him whisper to her during the St. Patrick`s Day Parade in Chicago, ”Tonight if I`m asleep, wake me up. Don`t let a moment go by.”
”He gives her an absolutely unconditional love,” says Anne Harney.
”She has thrived on it and blossomed.”
Kitty Dukakis doesn`t really like to talk about the White House, yet. She`ll answer the questions-yes, she knows what her areas of interest will be: the homeless, the arts, refugees, the Holocaust Memorial, Soviet Jewry, chemical and substance abuse, the preservation of open spaces. Yes, she`s proud to have the opportunity to be the first Jewish first lady. Her father says he`s looking forward to celebrating Passover at the White House. But there`s too much work to do, too much ground to cover before a possible moving day to dwell on it.
Yet Kitty`s sister, Jinny, says that even without talking about it, something has happened to her sister lately. ”I look at her, and there`s something almost elegant about her. She`s starting to look like a first lady.”
