She stood out for what she was not. As a little girl, she didn’t fidget. “She
never had to go to the bathroom like children do,” one who knew her in the
early days remembers.
Condoleezza Rice began her musical studies at the age of 3. Her father, John,
a Presbyterian minister, promised that if she learnt to play her
grandmother’s piano, he would buy one for her. She practised What a
Friend We Have in Jesus relentlessly until she conquered it. John borrowed
money to fulfil his promise. Before Condoleezza could read, she could read
music.
In the summer of 1959, the Superintendent of Negro Schools ruled that
Condoleezza’s mid-November birthday meant that she would be too young to
start school in September. Determined that her daughter would not be
penalised by an accident of birth, her mother, Angelena, took a leave of
absence to home-school her. Condoleezza’s friends found it strange that she
didn’t go to school with them, but Angelena knew what was best – and that
was a serious education, especially for a girl who could read fluently by
the age of 5, even if it added to the aura of otherness that was starting to
surround her, from her serious face to her remarkable discipline.
“She seemed different from the other girls. She was smarter and more reserved,
more polished. You heard her playing piano all the time.”
Condoleezza’s schoolday ritual didn’t help her to seem any more normal. At the
beginning of the day the chubby little girl, her thick hair divided into
pigtails, would put on her coat, leave her front door, walk to the end of
the path, then turn round and go back into the house. Then she would have a
full day of classes – reading, writing, maths – just like any other pupil.
At set times Angelena and Condoleezza would break for lunch and playtime,
then go back to their studies.
Angelena taught Condoleezza until she started public school in 1961 in the
second grade. Up to that point, Condoleezza’s life had been extraordinarily
sheltered, even for a middle-class girl in Titusville, a small suburb of
Birmingham, Alabama. She had school with her mother and spent most of her
time with her extended family, which was both close-knit and close at hand.
Condoleezza did have friends. She played with Vanessa Hunter from across the
street, and other girls such as Margaret Wright and Carol Catlin. Like
little girls everywhere, they played hopscotch, drawing the boxes on their
driveways in chalk; dolls on Condoleezza’s porch; school in the Hunters’
garage, where Vanessa’s father had made a blackboard. But even in their
world, the games were about advancement.
In one, “Alabama Hit the Hammer”, a girl stood on the top step and held out
her fists. One hand held a pebble; the other, nothing. She placed one hand
on the other, then chanted “a-LA-ba-ma-HIT-the-ham-mer-HIGH-or-LOW?”
alternating which was the upper hand with each syllable. The others guessed
which hand held the rock. Whoever guessed correctly would advance one step,
and each step represented a higher grade. Whoever reached the top first,
graduating, won.
The game suited Condoleezza. She was fiercely competitive and wasn’t shy about
performing or out-performing. The Rices were raising their little girl to
believe that she was extraordinary – smart, talented and beautiful – and to
believe that she was capable of anything.
Her strong will, which became a running joke among her relatives, grew in part
from the fiercely protective bubble with which Angelena, especially,
surrounded her. Other children were allowed to ride their bikes lazily along
the avenues of Honeysuckle Circle. Not Condoleezza. Other children played
ball or jumped rope in the streets, but not her. She didn’t stay at friends’
houses for sleepovers, either, or roam the neighborhood at Hallowe’ en.
Reverend Rice had to escort her trick-or-treating, and even then she went
only to the homes of church members.
Years later Condoleezza told her stepmother, Clara, that no one was allowed to
babysit her except her grandparents, Mattie and Daddy Ray. John’s sister
Theresa was permitted to take her niece out only once, and Angelena kept a
vigil until Condi returned. The Hunters’ was the only house where she was
regularly allowed to play and, even though her daughter was just across the
street, Angelena kept watch from her kitchen window.
Angelena’s protectiveness struck many of the Rices’ neighbours and even some
of the Rev Rice’s flock as excessive. They still debate whether her mother’s
attachment to Condoleezza was healthy. “If her mama was still living I don’t
think she would even be out of her grasp now,” said George Hunter Jr,
Vanessa’s father, imitating a suffocating hug. “Mrs Rice was just like that”
– he wrapped his arms even more tightly around himself – “tight. And
Condoleezza was just like that, too.”
Condi lived a life of privilege rare for a middle-class girl. As well as
buying her the piano, a $13,000 Chickering baby grand, when John was making
only $16,500 a year, the Rices were paying for private school, skating and
tennis lessons.
After the family moved to Colorado in 1967, when Condoleezza was 12, the
family’s investment in her paid off. By the end of her junior year at St
Mary’s Academy, Condi had completed enough classes to graduate. Her parents
wanted her to skip her senior year, sparking one of the rare disagreements
between John and Angelena and their dutiful daughter. “I was adamant that I
was going to finish high school,” says Rice. She was already two years ahead
of everyone else, and she had a sense that senior year was a rite of
passage. So, instead of leaving early, Condoleezza compromised: she enrolled
at Denver University and completed her high school senior year at the same
time. At 15 years old she went to early morning skating practice, then to
college classes, then school classes in the afternoon.
FIRST SETBACK
When young Condoleezza suffered the first major disappointment of her young
life, she took it surprisingly well – reflecting both her resilience and her
detachment. It happened the summer after her second year at university.
Condi was attending the Aspen Music Festival when she had a startling
revelation about her abilities as a musician: “I wasn’t even in the
important part of Aspen, the conservatory school. I was just in the
piano-school part, and these kids were unbelievable. They could play from
sight things that had taken me all year to learn. I thought, what are you
doing? You’ll end up teaching 13-year-olds to murder Beethoven or playing in
a piano bar. So I decided to change.”
By change, she meant change the only long-term goal she’d had in her young
life: to be a concert pianist.
Condi’s epiphany didn’t surprise her piano teacher at the university’s Lamont
School of Music, Theodor Lichtmann. In his view she was technically
competent but too detached emotionally to be a great pianist: “To be a
musician you have to make someone else’s thoughts and emotions your own. I
don’t think she has that interest or inclination.”
When it came to music, hard work and an iron will were not enough. “At Aspen,
particularly then, the students were the top of the top,” said Lichtmann.
“Condoleezza asked me, ‘Should I pursue this?’ and I asked her, ‘Do you have
other interests?’ ”
Despite having devoted her life to piano from the ages of 3 to 17, Condi
reacted with no visible emotion – a dispassionate reaction that she would
later explain by saying: “I don’t do life crises. I really don’t. Life’s too
short. Get over it. Move on to the next thing.”
The root of Condoleezza’s resilience was probably the unshakeable confidence
that her parents had planted in her. So, even when she failed, she did not
experience the failure as a personal reflection; she saw it merely as a fact
of life.
RELATIONSHIPS
She was an alpha female, and she was unwilling or unable to forget the fact –
even in service to the polite conventions of courtship. It seems that she
wanted a man strong enough to handle a woman as strong as her, not one who
required a needy or submissive woman. Vanity wasn’t one of her problems. She
wasn’t self-centred or materialistic, despite her near-obsession with
shoes.But the fact was, Condi was never very focused on starting a family.
“She’ll pick up little kids but she’s through with them after that,” as her
stepmother put it. “She doesn’t care much for children.” Not that any of her
relationships ever got that far. Except for her liaison with the former
Bronco Rick Upchurch, Rice’s most serious relationship, according to friends
and family, was with Gene Washington.
After graduating from Stanford in 1969, Washington joined the San Francisco
49ers and spent a decade playing in the NFL. He then became a TV sports
reporter, an assistant athletic director at Stanford, then an executive with
the NFL. He met and dated Condi in the 1980s. If she was ever going to get
married, Rice’s friends said, Washington was the most likely candidate.
Instead he became a kind of permanent escort.
Most of Rice’s friends said that the romantic part of the relationship ended
long ago, and both Rice and Washington insisted publicly that they were just
friends. By 2007, many of Rice’s friends doubted that she would ever marry.
Rice often said, “I always thought you get married because you want to get
married to someone.” And she had simply never met that person.
RACE
The idea of blackness as a link that bonded all people of the same colour
didn’t figure in Rice’s view of the world or herself.
When Hurricane Katrina hit New Orleans, the gossip and news web-site Gawker
posted a story headlined “Breaking: Condi Rice Spends Salary on Shoes”. “So
the Gulf Coast has gone all Mad Max,” it read, “women are being raped in the
Superdome and Rice is enjoying a brief vacation in New York. We wish we were
surprised. What does surprise us: just moments ago at the Ferragamo on 5th
Avenue, Condoleezza Rice was seen spending several thousands of dollars on
some nice, new shoes.”
Rice says: “On Thursday morning I got up, I had breakfast and I went down to
Ferragamo. I came back. Things had gotten pretty bad [in New Orleans] . . .
the pictures were really ugly. I called the President and said, ‘I think I
should come back’. ”
In Spike Lee’s searing documentary When the Levees Broke, the
African-American social commentator Michael Eric Dyson took Rice to task:
“While people were drowning in New Orleans, she was going up and down
Madison Avenue buying Ferragamo shoes. Then she went to see Spamalot!”
Dyson captured the sense of anger that many African-Americans felt toward
the Administration in general and Condoleezza in particular after Katrina.
The criticism took Rice by surprise. “I was watching on the news what was
going on. I wasn’t getting the reports of what the hurricane was going to do
or anything like that,” says Rice. “And so I responded like the secretary of
state, which is [to] worry about the foreign contributions . . . but it was
less than 24 hours before I realised it was time to get back.
“Look, I’d be the first to say I learnt something from that. I thought of
myself as secretary of state; my responsibility is foreign policy. I didn’t
think about my role as a visible African-American national figure. I just
didn’t think about it.”
That Rice hadn’t realised that she had a role to play as a black leader was a
result of how she saw the world. John and Angelena’s efforts to invest their
daughter with a limitless sense of possibility, to make her unconquerable,
had made her both less confined by race and less conscious of it.
A special friendship
Friends and family speculate that Rice’s personal relationship with Bush
blinded her to his failings. “She thought he could do no wrong,” said one
friend, an assessment shared by many.
Rice first met Bush at a White House event when she was working for his
father. She had telephoned Bush Sr to tell him that she was coming to
Houston for a Chevron board meeting and would love to say hello. But the
President was planning to be in Austin, Texas, for George W.’s first session
as governor. He invited Rice to come along. Condi arrived early and sat in
the governor’s office for an hour, talking life, politics and baseball.
By the time they sat down for coffee and cookies in George Shultz’s living
room at Stanford in April 1998, with a handful of Republican intellectuals
whom Shultz had gathered to “chat” with Bush, the chemistry between Rice and
George W. was palpable.
Condoleezza Rice: Naked Ambition by Marcus Mabry, Gibson Square, £20.
Available for £18 from Times
BooksFirst, 0870 1608080
