I Led Two Lives

The two handsome young men were remarkably alike. Each lived in a ranch-style house with a wife and family, one in Morganton, N.C., and the other in Roanoke, Va., 140 miles away. One was the state's Republican chairman and a former North Carolina state senator running for another term, ranked among the most successful and energetic of the South's new breed of rising young Republicans; the other frequently talked Republican politics among his neighbors. Each was in a business that kept him away from home a lot, and each flew in his own private plane. In fact, as it turned out last week, the two men were really one: William Edward Cobb, 39, whose double life, as it became public last week, shook North Carolina's Republican Party and probably put an end to a budding political career.

Yaleman Cobb's double life began three years ago on a business trip to Raleigh, where he met Linda Renfrew, then 31, a secretary who had won four beauty contests and divorced her husband. In August 1960, six months pregnant by Cobb, she moved into a house he rented for her. Cobb, known as "W. Edward Cobb," showed up in Roanoke only sporadically --he was thought to be an insurance claims adjuster and aircraft inspector whose work kept him traveling. In Morganton, where he was actually a successful lumber broker, he explained his frequent absences to his wife of 19 years and to his adopted son by pleading the pressures of business and politicking. He shuttled back and forth between both homes like an airborne Alec Guinness, and fathered two children by Linda.

Spotted. Success was his undoing. When his picture ran in TIME, July 13,* as North Carolina's G.O.P. chairman and one of the South's rising young Republicans, it was spotted by a neighbor in Roanoke. She called the Roanoke Times, which enlisted the aid of the Charlotte (N.C.) Observer. Last week two Observer reporters buttonholed Cobb as he was leaving a G.O.P. meeting in Morganton.

Cobb invited them into his station wagon for a chat and, after they confronted him with curious similarities in the two lives, finally said with the hapless resignation of a man awakened from a beautiful dream: "Let's stop kidding around, fellows. You know the truth." Soon he issued a public statement: "I hold a deep affection for my legal wife and adopted son. I hold a deep affection for the mother of my two young natural sons. I intend to resign." He quit both the senatorial race and the state chairmanship.

Inevitable Change. In Morganton, the legal Mrs. Cobb, who had known nothing about the other woman, sent out the conventional message that she planned to "stand by" her husband. In Roanoke, Linda Renfrew, 34, said that she meant to keep her children, "sink or swim." She had known all along about Cobb's wife, but added that life in Roanoke had been "quiet and normal, while feeding the babies." But, of course, "it is inevitable that there will be a change." As for William E. (or W. Edward) Cobb, he had a hard choice to make--and he made it sadly. Said he: "This relationship with Linda will be terminated."

* Cobb was not particularly worried when he found that TIME was including him in its story, but he did not know his picture would be used. "I didn't even know they had the picture," he said later, "although I should have realized that one was available to them. The picture is what really hurt."

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