Acouple of months ago, having lunch all alone in the food court in Marshall Field`s basement, was Heather Bilandic, former first lady of Chicago. No one recognized her. No one approached her. She finished her chicken salad and left.
The former mayor of Chicago, Jane Byrne, nods her head, with a half-smile on her face, as she hears this story. Tales about the ephemeral quality of fame touch a nerve.
”You should know what it`s like to be Heather Bilandic, knowing no one knows who you are,” she says.
”I was on a plane right after I lost the (1983 Democratic primary)
election and I had asked for the smoking section. I thought the stewardess said the first two rows. What she said was not the first two rows. So we take off and I light up, and there`s this man sitting next to me and he says,
`You`re not supposed to smoke up here!` And he`s screaming and I`m thinking, `Four months ago, no one would have talked like that to me. No one would have ever embarrassed me like that.` ”
Time flies.
It`s 13 years since the Blizzard of `79, when the snow started to fall on New Year`s Eve and it was still on the ground in March. Chicagoans stood next to 90-inch-high snowbanks, waiting for buses and trains that never came, while, in campaign commercials for her husband Michael, Heather Bilandic strolled through a Gold Coast apartment that looked like Versailles, telling us everything was okey-dokey.
Out of practically nowhere came Mayor Richard J. Daley`s commissioner of consumer affairs, Jane Byrne, in that god-awful wig, taking on the Machine, running for mayor.
It seems so long ago, the days when Jane Byrne campaigned for mayor, won and ruled for the next four years. That goofy photo in People magazine of Byrne and daughter Kathy posed like the Blues Brothers. That crazy car chase down the Dan Ryan with the media in hot pursuit of aides Michael Brady and Bill Griffin. Byrne and hubby Jay McMullen, the roguish former reporter, setting up housekeeping in Cabrini-Green. All those Fests. Plans for a Grand Prix down Lake Shore Drive, a World`s Fair.
`I`m not saying never`
It seems so long ago. Before Harold Washington and Council Wars. Before Mayor Daley II.
Jane Byrne, Lady Jane, as she was called-among other things-is unique among the city`s mayors. Besides being the only woman mayor we`ve ever had, she goes against recent history by being non-Daley and non-black.
She also wouldn`t go away. She kept running and running. And running. Twice in 1983, in the Democratic mayoral primary and, for 36 hours, as a write-in candidate for mayor. Twice in 1987, in the Democratic mayoral primary and for clerk of the Circuit Court. Again, in last year`s Democratic primary, when she pulled only 6 percent of the votes.
And she may run again.
”I`m not saying never,” she says.
But she`s not running today. Today, Jane Byrne, 57, is sitting very comfortably, in black stretch pants and a white sweater, in her Chestnut Street high-rise. From her apartment, on the 43rd floor, she has a perfect view of Navy Pier, which seems almost to mock her. She had such high hopes for it. Her project now is promoting her book, ”My Chicago” (W.W. Norton & Company, $22.95).
She has been working on it for four years. That, and her occasional speaking engagements, and cooking dinner for Kathy, a lawyer now, who lives three blocks away and comes over every night, and taking care of Jay, who has lung cancer, is her life.
”She`s much more contemplative now than back when she was in campaigns,” says Kathy Byrne. ”She has time to relax and think about things. But she`s always busy. She`s never been like anybody else`s mother.”
Jane Byrne says they live on Jay`s pension and investments, the political consulting fee she received from WBBM-Ch. 2 during the 1989 special election and the advance on her book.
It`s not the book most people expected. Good Jane must have written it. It`s not particularly bitchy. It`s not a kiss-and-tell autobiography. There are no bombshells. People won`t fall off their chairs when they learn she doesn`t like Richie Daley, or any of the Daley family, for that matter.
Meeting Daley
The book is a history of Chicago and the story of a young woman who was married less than three years when her husband, Bill Byrne, a Marine pilot, crashed as he landed his plane at Glenview Naval Air Station, a month before he was to be discharged.
Suddenly, Jane Burke Byrne, the Irish Catholic daughter of a wealthy steel executive, educated at Barat College of the Sacred Heart in Lake Forest, was a 25-year-old widow with a 17-month-old baby. She didn`t know what she wanted to do with her life-she just knew she had to do something. As much for her daughter as for herself.
”I had to . . . achieve a name for her,” she writes.
Then, in a radio address, she heard John Kennedy talk about the servicemen who had died in the Cold War, and about the wives they had left behind, and the children.
”It was like he was talking to me,” Byrne says. ”He knew what hurt was. I was committed from that point on.”
As Byrne became active in Kennedy`s campaign, she caught the eye of Mayor Daley. He was almost like a jealous suitor. Why was she working for them, he wanted to know, when she could be working for him.
”He was like that. It`s like he thought, `If they want you, I`m going to have you.` ”
And he did. Daley took this young woman, with no local political experience-when he asked her what ward she lived in, she said Sauganash-and pretty much gave her the keys to City Hall.
”I can make you anything I want,” he told her. In 1964 he gave her a position with the anti-poverty program, and in 1968 he made her a
commissioner, the first woman to serve in a cabinet in a major city, and one of his closest aides.
”You owe your loyalty directly to me; you answer only to me,” Daley told her, according to Byrne`s book. ”When I appoint personally, that person is handpicked by me-and is mine.” At meetings, she always sat next to him.
A mother figure?
To this day, Byrne says she has ”no idea” what Daley saw in her. Although there were rumors, she says she never believed he had any romantic interest in her. If anything, she reminded him of his mother. They shared a certain toughness.
”People thought I got away with murder,” says Byrne. Especially the Daley children, who resented her.
”The more (Daley) tried to include me . . . the more the family wished me gone,” Byrne writes.
Basically, Daley just liked having her around. During the utter chaos that was the 1968 Democratic national convention, Byrne says Daley got jealous because one of the speakers was consumer advocate Betty Furness, not Byrne. The next day, she received a hand-delivered letter from Daley`s son John inviting her to join the family that night.
”I must have turned that letter over 10 times trying to figure it out,” Byrne says. ”The whole place was up for grabs. Chicago was looking like hell, but that was the mayor`s ego. With everything else going wrong, he`s thinking, `There`s a woman, I have a woman, why isn`t she up there?` That`s how it was with him.”
The world Daley brought her into could be vicious, dangerous-and incredibly petty. One committeeman never forgave her because, in a budget crunch, he lost a tree-trimmer. Politics, she says, is ”a rough game. You have to run faster, just to keep up with them. The long knives are always out.”
But it`s a world she came to love. Even now, McMullen says, she misses it. ”She`s a career government person,” he says. ”She`ll never leave politics.”
As Chicago`s first and, so far, only woman mayor, Byrne ran into some special problems and she had no old girls` network to turn to. That became clear when Cardinal Joseph Bernardin first came to Chicago. Byrne wanted to have a welcoming dinner, but the city wasn`t allowed to spend public funds on it. She called a political heavyweight, an Irish Catholic insider, and asked him if he could raise $50,000 from the private sector. He said he`d get on it. ”We talked, and before he left I said, `When do you think you can get together a list of people who might care to underwrite this?` I was being very leery. And he said, `Oh, this afternoon, Mayor. Is that soon enough? I`ll see all these guys for lunch.` And it was true. I never had any women I could ever call and say, `Could you give me five?` They weren`t around in `79.”
And, of course, there was the nearly constant criticism over her clothes and hairdos. Some of it, she admits, she brought on herself.
She was at a formal dinner when she heard about the city`s first Tylenol death. She went right down to City Hall to hold a news conference, never realizing she was wearing a low-cut pink lace gown.
”I come home and they`re rerunning the press conference and I take a look and I think: `Oh my God, people are going to think I got up out of my bed and went down to City Hall in my nightgown. I cannot believe this is happening to me.` ”
As a woman, Byrne was also vulnerable to the B-word. And it was often used against her. She watched one man, part of a focus group of recently unemployed, go ballistic when he was casually asked, ”So, uh, what do you think of the mayor?”
”The guy said, `Don`t bring up that bitch. In my family I used to wear the pants; now my wife works. If I walk over to the refrigerator to get a can of beer she says, ”Watch the beer.” Then I turn on the TV at night and there`s that other bitch telling me what to do.` ”
`How much worse can it get?`
After she was defeated in 1983 by Harold Washington, Byrne says she started wearing dark glasses when she went out because she never knew what kind of response she would get. She and Kathy were walking down Michigan Avenue a month after the election when a black man recognized her and screamed: ”You bitch! We got you! What does is it feel like?”
”I thought: `My God, what more does he want from me? I`m walking the streets. How much worse can it get?` ”
Byrne found defeat physically difficult. For the four years she was mayor, a separated shoulder, an old injury, never bothered her. After all, she never drove; she never even carried her own purse.
”After I lost, I came home one night and I could barely turn my head and all I`d been doing was turning the wheel and opening the door, the things that everybody does. I could have felt like poor pitiful Pearl that night. `What happened to me? Where`s the driver? Where`s the car?` But after a while, you adjust.”
And some things made it easier, she says. Like the time she was picking out a coffee cake at the bakery at Marshall Field`s in Water Tower. A black youth behind the counter kept staring at her and finally said, ”Aren`t you Mayor Byrne?” When she said yes, he told her to wait a second, walked into the back and came out with a fresher cake.
”He said, `I lived at Cabrini-Green when you were there. I was little, but my momma says if you hadn`t come right when you did, my two older brothers, she`d have lost them.` I had tears like you wouldn`t believe. It`s like, with all you`ve been through, it was worth it.”
Fate is a funny thing. When asked how her life might have turned out if Daley hadn`t recruited her, Jane Byrne says: ”I have three sisters, all of whom lead very normal lives. I probably would have taught. In my family I was never known as the fighter, like I became all of a sudden. I think I probably would have been just like them.”
