Journey of a Small Town Boy

By Evan Thomas

As Hart's fortunes rise, so does scrutiny of his past

Most Americans are free to start over. They can leave home, shed old personas, lose their pasts, become the people they want to be. Rarely must they justify or explain. Presidential candidates are not so fortunate. Their lives are retraced in unforgiving detail by opponents and reporters. For Gary Hart, the scrutiny is becoming particularly intense. Says Frank Mankiewicz, who with Hart managed the 1972 George McGovern campaign: "There are more investigative reporters looking into Gary Hart's background than Watergate."

For the past month, reporters have been poking around Hart's old home town of Ottawa, Kans. Inevitably, perhaps, the trail has led to Hart's mother, who died in 1972. Nina Hartpence is portrayed by neighbors and relatives as strict and domineering. "We always had trouble getting Gary to come out and play," a childhood friend, Duane Hoobing, was quoted as saying in the Wall Street Journal last week. "He was lonely lots of times. His mother never let him get too involved with other kids." A devout member of the Church of the Nazarene, Mrs. Hartpence enforced the church's injunctions against smoking, liquor, going to the movies and slow dancing. She was also oddly restless, moving Hart and his adopted sister Nancy from one cheap rented house to another, while Husband Carl drifted from job to job. For young Gary, worldly pleasure meant driving to the town airport on a double date and dancing on the empty runway to the car radio.

When Hart left Ottawa to go to Oklahoma's Bethany Nazarene College at the age of 18, he was shy, serious and determined to leave the small-town boy behind. Over the years, he changed his name from Hartpence to Hart, changed his age to make himself a year younger, changed his signature, became a movie buff and began drinking margaritas (in moderation). His circle of friends broadened from Duane Hoobing to Warren Beatty and Shirley MacLaine. An antiwar activist in the late '60s, he obtained a commission in the Naval Reserve in 1980 at the age of 44. He wanted to be ready to serve in the Persian Gulf if war broke out, he explained, although as a noncombat officer in the Judge Advocate General's Corps--a military lawyer--he would probably get no closer to the front than the naval base at Norfolk, Va. In 1979 he separated from his wife Lee, who had been his college sweetheart; they got back together in 1980, separated again in 1981, then reconciled a few months before he announced his presidential candidacy.

Hart professes not to understand why anyone would care whether he changed his name or age. "I don't think they're issues with the people," he says, "though they seem to be issues with reporters." Has he tried to remake himself after a rigid and unhappy childhood? "What a lot of baloney!" he exclaimed in an interview with TIME last week. "Everybody's going to be psychoanalyzed. Jimmy Carter was, Richard Nixon was, George McGovern was. It's just part of the deal. But my childhood was as happy as one can be in not plush economic circumstances." He changed his signature, he explained, "to make it easier to read." (To make his Senate letterhead signature legible, Hart dropped his middle name and switched from script to print.) As for the age change, which apparently occurred about the time Hart turned 30, "There's nothing sinister there. There is no benefit to me from it. It didn't help me politically, it didn't help me financially, it didn't help my career. So therefore, what? If it seems mysterious to people, it'll just have to be mysterious." (In earlier interviews, Hart has vaguely attributed the age change to a family joke.)

Hart scoffs at the notion that he is a "man of mystery." Says he: "I'm a private man. We have not been social butterflies on the Washington scene. I have not courted the opinion makers in Washington or New York socially, the way you're "supposed to." He has, however, cultivated friends in Hollywood since his McGovernite days. His more glamorous backers include Beatty, Robert Redford, Jack Nicholson, Goldie Hawn and Margaux Hemingway. In Washington he keeps close ties to influential reporters. For about a year before his most recent reconciliation with Lee, he lived at the home of Bob Woodward, the Washington Post investigative reporter who helped break open Watergate.

For all the changes in Hart's life, he remains in many ways just as reserved, self-contained and ambitious as he was when he left Ottawa 30 years ago. He prefers reading or modeling clay birds (eagles, mostly) in his office to jollying up his colleagues in the Senate cloakroom. On the stump "he's miserable at working crowds," says Colorado Governor Richard Lamm, a friend and supporter. Yet Hart this winter has worked hard to overcome his shyness and to press flesh cheerfully. "At times he is shy and withdrawn. But he has a great sense of humor," says Colorado Congressman Timothy Wirth.

But Hart's humor can be clunky or even mean. After Senator Edward Kennedy glowingly introduced Hart at a fund raiser at Kennedy's home last year, Hart mimicked his host: "Well, ah, Gary, I'm not, ah, ah . . ." The Democratic fat cats listened in embarrassed silence. The next morning Hart called Kennedy to apologize, as he invariably does when his sharp tongue wounds. When, after beating Walter Mondale in New Hampshire, Hart ungraciously and sarcastically sympathized with Mondale for having nothing more than organized labor and $12 million on his side, one of Hart's old acquaintances wondered, "Does he have an angry man inside of him?"

His close friends say no. To them, Hart can be warm and trusting, perhaps too much so. "When he trusts somebody, he is very candid," says Denver Lawyer Hal Haddon, who has known Hart since 1968. "And some of the people he trusts are going to burn him publicly. He's not been burned as much as he is going to be burned."

Will he be able to take the pounding of the campaign? He has managed to control himself in the face of hostile questioning, but barely. He does not come off as self-righteous, as Jimmy Carter sometimes did. But he has not shown the capacity of his model, John F. Kennedy, to disarm critics with self-deprecation. J.F.K., for instance, defused the issue of his family's heavy spending in the 1960 election by telling his audience that he had received a wire from his father: "Dear Jack, Don't buy one more vote than necessary. I'll be damned if I'll pay for a landslide." Frank Mankiewicz suggests that Hart could turn the age-change issue into a joke simply by beginning a speech with a statement of fact and then, after pausing a beat, adding, "I'm as certain of that as I am of my own age." Hart's arduous climb from restless small-town boy to presidential contender has sharpened and toughened him. The campaign will test whether his steely cool is well tempered, or too brittle. --By Evan Thomas. Reported by Hays Gorey/Washington and Jack E. White with Hart

With reporting by Hays Gorey/Washington, Jack E. White, Hart