"I'M OLD ENOUGH TO NEVER SAY NEVER"

By MARGARET CARLSON

Oh, to be in trouble and have Eileen McGann at your side. One of Connecticut's finest trial attorneys, she didn't become famous until she displayed her skills on the lawn of her house protecting her husband, presidential adviser Dick Morris, who had just resigned in disgrace at the Democratic National Convention. McGann has finally agreed to have a drink with me the day Morris is emerging after five months of self-imposed exile writing his much anticipated book, Behind the Oval Office. She begins our conversation while moving furniture 10 times her size back into place in her newly painted apartment overlooking Lincoln Center. As she gives a heavy table the sort of shove she would no doubt like to direct at the camera crews still blocking the driveway of her house, she recalls two rainy days spent walking on the beach in California over New Year's, her first time alone since the Star published pictures of her husband with prostitute Sherry Rowlands. "I would wake up optimistic until I remembered this heavy thing hanging over me." She was also "amazed that people were still coming up to me, giving their opinion on my marriage. The story was everywhere I turned."

It didn't help that in addition to Rowlands' diary, the woman in Texas with whom Morris had fathered a child six years earlier was giving television interviews and was rumored to be shopping her own book, despite the fact that Morris had faithfully paid her $4,000 a month in child support. McGann knew she had made the right decision when, after a few days back from California, she was so besieged by reporters when she showed up at the courthouse for a murder trial that she had to drop the case. "I stayed out of the limelight when he was on top. I got pulled in when he was at the bottom. Surely I should be able to withdraw now."

But when your prefeminist, stand-by-your-man performance prompts millions (including me) to label you a doormat, it is hard to reclaim your anonymity. Like a state trooper who keeps hundreds from speeding by pulling over one scofflaw, McGann might have slowed down a few philanderers with a decisive show of force. But she resisted playing to the crowd or saving face, to the near universal scorn of the sisterhood. "I didn't know that feminists had decreed what the politically correct rules were for personal relationships," she says. "I did what was right for us."

It's a marvel the weight of trouble a family can buoy you through. I like her best when she admits, "I would come home from the office some days and want to smash the laptop over his head," rather than read his manuscript over Indian food, as she often did, carefully excising references to herself. But I admire that she honored the "for worse" part of her vows instead of running to Oprah when the world came crashing down around her. She turned down all television offers. "I didn't owe anyone an explanation of who I am." She's barreled through these past few months in some ways feminists should applaud, missing only a few days at her law firm, Cummings & Lockwood, and finding comfort in working late with her partners (some of whom are her best friends). The crease between her eyebrows that gives her a fierce demeanor disappears when she talks about the weekend in Paris she begins the next day with the two sisters, a brother and a niece she adores, thanks, she says, laughing, "to the $299 Air France special Bob Dole advertised right after the election." Whereas Morris was a slug for preaching family values to the campaign while violating them himself, McGann really believes in the notion. Over Christmas, she welcomed Morris' daughter to their Connecticut home for the holidays.

On Thursday evening I encounter Dick Morris on the 5:30 shuttle to Washington for his appearance on Larry King Live. He introduces me to his frail 86-year-old father, whom he puts his arm around, happy that he's come from Florida to keep Morris company. He's willing to talk (of course), but not about Eileen, because he doesn't "want to intrude on her interview." He's promised to protect her privacy.

I had asked McGann earlier in the day if she would consider taking Morris back, but she made a persuasive case that hers was a thoughtful decision. Though she had missed Prime Time Live on Wednesday night, she knew that her husband had gone into Duke of Windsor mode, pledging on four networks to win back the woman he loves. While she was airborne over the Atlantic, he was recounting to Larry King how he had got a huge lump in his throat earlier that evening at the sight of pompano on the menu--because he and Eileen had discovered it together on a vacation to Key West, Florida.

There are worse things after 20 years of marriage than a man who gets teary over a fish and who has entered intense therapy. But all McGann would say is that "life is complicated, and I'm old enough to never say never." It's easy to see why Morris leaned on her. Any one of us unlucky enough to find ourselves with just one call from the police station would want to do the same.