So there was Tipper Gore last week in a room on the fourth floor of the Lawson YMCA on Chicago’s Near North Side.
It wasn’t much of a room–barely three people wide and shabbily furnished, but neatly kept, and clean. The man with her there, Carver Mason, was very proud of it, however, and called it “my apartment.”
Despite the soggy afternoon heat, the man was dressed in black suit, white shirt, print tie and cloth, rubber-soled shoes. As Gore noted, “you look very dapper, by the way.” He had few possessions but picked one up with a reticent pride–a wooden flute. He played a few notes for her. Many years before, in another life, he had been a member of the U.S. Army Band.
More recently, Mason had been living in abandoned buildings and warming himself by trash barrel fires. He was also suffering from mental illness. Thresholds, an organization that runs 17 rehabilitation centers for the homeless in the Chicago area, had taken him in when he turned up at a clinic in frigid January. Now his life has been “stabilized.”
“You’re taking your medication?” Gore asked Mason. “Show me your medication.”
This week, Mrs. Albert Gore has been performing her dutiful role at the Democratic National Convention as a “wife of.” In addition to all the smiling and waving and turning up at Democratic Party events, Tipper Gore was accorded the opportunity of making a speech–introducing Hillary Rodham Clinton.
But last week, Gore was traveling through the Chicago area on her own, ostensibly to publicize her new book, a photographic memoir called “Picture This.” It afforded her the chance to stop by such places as the Lawson YMCA–which, demonstrably, she likes to do.
A quiet volunteer
Throughout her 3 1/2 years as wife of the vice president of the United States, Gore has gone out on Friday mornings as part of the crew of a Health Care for the Homeless van. She knows that mental illness is probably the major component of the homeless problem.
“I’m comfortable with people who are mentally ill, who are down and out,” she said later. “I have no problem working with them and relating to them. I like to do that. I like to go out on the van.”
At the Lawson YMCA, she met with three other rescued homeless, among them Maureen Jolly, an older woman who had been evicted from her low-rent Chicago hotel in the middle of winter–“You must have been scared to death,” Gore said–but was rehabilitated and last April won the “employee of the month” award as a stockroom worker at the Highland Park Kmart.
But the gentlemanly Mason seemed to touch her in a special way. She gave him an inscribed copy of her book, and he afterward went about showing it to other residents of the YMCA as he might show some thing of value he had found in the street.
“Look,” he’d say. ” `Congratulations–on your new life! Love, Tipper.’ “
The book is significant to Mason and the others in another way. All of Gore’s royalties will be given to organizations involved in work with the homeless and mental health. Part of the money will go for Mason’s rent, toothbrush and other things the state of Illinois and the federal government used to pay for, but no longer do.
“And think,” she said. “There are 50,000 homeless people just in Chicago.”
As she states forthrightly in the book, her involvement with this field didn’t begin with her assuming a high position in Washington, but with “my own childhood, when my mother suffered from serious bouts of depression.”
“This was bad enough, but the situation was made worse by her fears that someone would find out,” Gore wrote. “It broke my heart. For decades, she suffered in silence; only in the past year or so has she been willing to speak openly about her experience.”
For much of her life, she said, “I found it difficult to look a homeless person in the eye. Basically, I would turn away and not want to be faced with reality.”
But one afternoon she was driving through Washington with her children and they noticed a homeless woman, and one of them said, “Who’s she talking to? Because there’s nobody there.”
“I said, `Well, she’s probably mentally ill and she’s having hallucinations, so she’s seeing people that aren’t there.’ And they said. `That’s really terrible. We can’t leave her here. Who’s going to take care of her? Can we take her home with us?’
“And I said, `We can’t do that, but we’ll sit around at the table tonight and talk about what we can do.’ “
Unique perspective
There’s a picture of just such a homeless woman in her book, but there are myriad more and different images–as varied a photographic diary of her vice presidential experience as any news agency’s–made all the more compelling by “my special vantage point.”
One shows her vice president husband in the Oval Office raising a cautionary forefinger to his president, who gazes back with lifted brow.
Tipper Gore and her husband once worked together in Nashville as journalists at The Tennessean. She was able to rise from film processor to staff photographer after completing a photography course in which she was asked to take a picture that shows that the subject of the picture “loves you.”
Her entry is in the book, showing a bare-chested Al Gore looking moon-eyed at camerawoman Tipper with shaving cream over half his face.
“Most people think it’s Jeff Goldblum,” she said.
There are no fewer than six pictures of the vice president without a shirt on, and two that show him decidedly unshaven by a wilderness river, with the words, “Live to Paddle” painted on one side of his face and “Paddle to Live” on the other. Another shows him made up as Frankenstein for the annual Halloween party the Gores give at the vice president’s house.
One has as difficult a time calling her anything but Tipper Gore as one does remembering to insert the Rodham that First Lady Hillary Rodham Clinton insists upon in her name. Tipper Gore is often asked what her official title is and she has a lot of fun responding with the suggestion of one woman she had encountered: “Second Lady of Vice.”
She is very careful of the image she presents. Her blond hair is worn for Chicago in the same simple but well-brushed suburban style it always is in Washington. In the book she confessed to a struggle with a weight problem and on her Chicago-area travels she dressed in a loose velvety green pantsuit that was very simple but consequently elegant, somehow perfect for both the visit to the YMCA and for her well-heeled next stop, posh Republican Winnetka, where she signed books at the Book Stall.
GOP stronghold or no, the place was mobbed by Tipper Gore fans, including local Democratic state Rep. Jeff Schoenberg (D-58th) and his 9-month-old daughter Michal.
“I brought her to have her picture taken with Mrs. Gore,” he said. “It’s conceivable Mrs. Gore will be the first lady sometime.”
No 2 days are alike
In her official car, a nondescript Mercury sedan, en route to her final destination that night in Milwaukee, she talks about the hardest part of her time as “Second Lady”–the intensity of the workload and responsibilities and crises that surround her husband and his boss.
“I always try to put the most positive light on these things that I call the challenges,” she said.
The best part of it has been “no two days being exactly the same, which I love.”
She doesn’t think she has changed fundamentally, “but I would like to say that I’ve gained a new confidence and maturity, because, if not, I have a problem.” She bursts into laughter, then adds, “I am 48, you know.”
Was she intimidated by the bravura performance turned in by would-be Republican First Lady Elizabeth Dole at the Republican convention?
“I’ve known Mrs. Dole and I have a great deal of respect for her as a person–and especially for her abilities as a campaigner. . . . I think this is going to tighten. The race is going to tighten considerably, and my husband keeps telling me it’s going to be a very close race and we’re going to have to fight hard.”
As a homeless care official noted in Milwaukee, “Truth to tell, the Gores are a lot more popular with folks here than the Clintons are.” If the Clinton-Gore ticket succeeds, Gore will instantly be proclaimed a candidate for the year 2000. Is Mrs. Gore preparing herself for a title that begins with “First”?
“I’ve chosen not to,” she said. “I know it’s all out there, but I don’t think past November. In fact, I’m not thinking past this convention.”
