Trophies and an Iguana

By James Carney/Phoenix

Cindy! I'm gonna show Jay the iguana!" It's not yet 8 a.m. on Monday morning, and John McCain is marching through the living room of his house in Phoenix, Ariz., headed for the back bedrooms, leading a reporter who is asking about the New Hampshire primary on a tour of his children's pet collection. Before his wife Cindy can holler back--"Just don't show him the bedroom! It's a mess!"--McCain has swept past the wide-open door to their bedroom, where clothes are strewn across the floor and bed, into the lair of McCain's 13-year-old son Jack, where a 25-in. iguana is staring back from a glass case. "We've had him since he was this big," McCain says, holding his index fingers about 5 in. apart. Standing there, he remembers the question about New Hampshire. "I don't know," he says matter-of-factly. "Maybe I have peaked too soon." But then he dismisses the notion--"We're still way behind" everywhere else--and the thought seems to give him energy.

Not that he needs it. Reporters who say they want to spend the day with him but don't show up until 8 get voice-mail messages from the Senator. "Hope I'm not disturbing your sleep, you lazy bastard!" In Phoenix on Monday morning, he darts around the house, from room to room, pointing to his collection of Hopi kachina dolls or the autographed boxing gloves from Evander Holyfield. Every surface in the living areas of the house, horizontal and vertical, is covered with something--photographs or plaques; framed programs from the 1992 christening of the U.S.S. John S. McCain, a guided-missile destroyer named after both his father and grandfather; a model train designed after the full-size one McCain used to win his first Senate victory, complete with a tiny version of him with a shock of white hair at the back of the caboose. And there are three bricks from the Hanoi Hilton, the prison where McCain spent a part of his POW years.

But McCain is more interested in showing off the pets--the iguana, the hamster and Leo the snake--as well as the house itself with its vast deck, pool and hot tub off the master bedroom, as if to say that life has been good to him after all. The four kids have already been packed off to school. And now Cindy, in this Phoenix home where she grew up, is in charge. She's more commanding here than in Washington, where even after 19 years in the role of a politician's wife, she still seems tentative. She says all the right things about believing her husband would make a good President, but her ambivalence about the race is palpable. Asked about living in a confining White House, her smile is tight. "I've told the kids that we'd all be serving the country," she says.

McCain's people are still worried about the stories about his temper. The campaign staff in Washington pages a reporter later that day to ask why he's interviewing McCain's critics in Arizona. The staff has taken on the us-vs.-them world view of the candidate himself. At the next stop on the house tour, in front of Leo, the garden snake that once got lost for more than a week in the innards of the family's Chevy Suburban only to pop out of a cup holder one frightful day, McCain is momentarily broody. "What's happening now is just unbelievable," he says. He means the "whisper campaign" about his alleged emotional volatility. "But I guess you have to expect it." What McCain had not expected is something closer to home: not long ago, he was told the iguana, named Henry, had to be renamed Henrietta, after she laid an egg.

--By James Carney/Phoenix