"Madam Secretary, she is pictured looking almost saucy"
Posted on 10/30/2003 4:25:53 AM PST by Oldeconomybuyer
| Born in Czechoslovakia, moves to America, wins Ivy League scholarship, marries newspaper heir, suffers desperately sad divorce, becomes the most powerful woman in the world... Madeleine Albright has lived a bit. Now 66, she tells Emma Brockes she is ready to start dating again It is two years since Madeleine Albright was US secretary of state, but she still inspires the sort of deference reserved for the World's Most Powerful. In an alcove in Claridges we are approached by a woman who introduces herself as the hotel's PR director. "Just to let you know," she says, in the hushed tones one might use to betray a national secret, "there will be two policemen outside while you are here." Albright regards her with mild disdain. "Thank you very much," she says, and as the woman retreats, whispers to me, "Silver shoes with black tights, not a good look." The recurring frustration of Albright's life - apart from her daily war against sexism - is the misconception, carried since childhood, that she is intractably earnest. On the cover of her memoir, Madam Secretary, she is pictured looking almost saucy, the corners of her mouth dipping towards a smirk. But this is unusual. The 66-year-old's public image is of a woman with a power frown, unforgivably serious, the sort who if you were to ask her the time of day, might serve you with a spot quiz on the Dayton Accords or the dual key system in Bosnia. It is not lost on her, of course, that where a man has gravitas, a woman is simply gloomy. Today, Albright is actually twinkling, via a huge eagle brooch on her jacket. She has several of these, she says, which she likes to wear in public because she is "proud to be an American". Nationality isn't something she takes for granted. When Albright became a US citizen in 1957, she was 20 years old and spoke four languages: Czech, her mother-tongue, Serbo-Croat, which she learned when her diplomat father was posted to Yugoslavia, French, from schooling in Switzerland, and the English she learned in London, where the family evacuated to during the war. When, after returning for a short time to their native Czechoslovakia, the Korbel family fled the communists to America, the young Madeleine hastily dropped her English accent and became, as she puts it, "thoroughly American Maddy". She now comes in two versions. "There's Madeleine, and then there's," - she puts on a pompous voice - "'Madeleine Albright'. And I sometimes kind of think, who is this person? Once you become 'Madeleine Albright' it doesn't go away." Nevertheless, she says, "I hope it is evident to you that I am fairly normal." The Albright back story is a publisher's dream: child of asylum seekers wins Ivy League scholarship, marries heir to newspaper dynasty, sacrifices career for children, suffers shocking divorce, gets stuck into politics and - who knew? - at the age of 54, becomes the highest ever appointed woman in American government when President Clinton makes her secretary of state. Then she finds out she isn't Catholic, as her parents led her to believe, but Jewish, and her grandparents died in the Holocaust. The manner in which Albright tells this story is unflinching to the point of masochism. There is an awful incident at the beginning of the book, in which she describes being taken out on a series of dates by a desirable boy at school, only to discover that he was doing it as a dare set by his beautiful girlfriend. "Is there any group meaner to one another that girls in high school?" I wonder if she thinks the Americans are ready to elect a woman president? "It's hard to say. I think people wondered if there could be a woman secretary of state, and now there's a woman national security advisor. I hope people are ready for it." What does she think of Hillary Clinton's chances? "I think she's terrific, and very smart and committed. I think she'd be great." Albright was recently encouraged, by Vaclav Havel, to run for president of the Czech Republic. ("Very flattering," she says, "but it didn't make any sense. I thought that the president should be someone who's living there.") I wonder if she wishes she'd been born in America so she could run for president? "It's such a hypothetical. It never ever occurred to me that I could be secretary of state and it certainly never occurred to me that I could have been president. Since it's not possible, I don't think about it." This is the Albright credo, pragmatism, applied in equal measure to her professional and her private life. It comes, she says, from having been a refugee child of refugee parents: one learns how to adapt quickly and overcome problems. Which is why, says Albright, she was so utterly thrown by the circumstances of her divorce. Coverage of Madam Secretary has largely centred upon this, its biggest jaw-dropper, in which the woman who told Fidel Castro he had no cojones, rolled over and took it when her husband of 23 years told her he had found someone younger and prettier. Joe Albright would give his wife a daily score of how much he loved her, ranging from 30% to 70%. And she put up with it to the bitter end. "I had no choice," she says now. "The thing that really undid me, is that I was not in control. If you look at my life, generally, I've been put in situations which were difficult and which I conquered. With Joe and me, we didn't have a discussion about how can we fix this marriage - he just said I'm in love with somebody else, I'm leaving. And the truth is, on those percentage days, I actually saw some potential in it. It wasn't 100% I don't love you. And then because I thought he might actually win the Pulitzer..." Joe told her if he won the Pulitzer prize, he would stay with her, if he didn't, he'd leave. He didn't win. "What bothers me now is that I was actually willing to go along with it. I would have done anything to save that marriage." But then, she says, if she'd saved the marriage she would never have become secretary of state. I wonder whether her subsequent success was in part motivated by screw-you revenge politics. "No, actually. No, no, no. my motivation was that I needed to be completely and fully absorbed. My children were grown up, and I didn't want to have them think, 'Oh God, what are we going to do with mum?' I really didn't have a sense of revenge. I had a sense of incredible sadness. I really hurt, physically." How long did it take to wear off? "A long, long time. I really did feel sorry for myself. I loved being married to Joe and I loved our life. I felt that I'd been thrown into the middle of the ocean and I had to figure out what to do." Albright remade herself by getting stuck into her academic career - she'd taken her doctorate while raising the couple's three daughters - and was made professor of international affairs at Georgetown University. From there she went into foreign policy advising. As she rose through the ranks, she was regarded with increasing suspicion by male colleagues. Would she have had an even tougher time in the Republican party? "No, I don't think so. In fact, initially there were more high-level women in the Republican party. And people wondered why. This is pure speculation, but for a period of time, a lot of getting into a party was through fundraising and volunteer work, and Republican women had more time to do that than democratic women, who were out there getting jobs." Although I'm wary of essentialism, I wonder if she thinks women approach things differently from men. "Well, I'm wary of it too. But I think, yes, in many ways. I think that we don't like to have head-on arguments with people. We try to develop some kind of consensus, we like to talk things through. And when there is a policy difference, I think we take it personally. Much more than men do. But I do not believe that the world would be entirely different if there were more women leaders. Maybe if everybody in leadership was a woman, you might not get into the conflicts in the first place. But if you watch the women who have made it to the top, they haven't exactly been non-aggressive - including me." She must be gutted not to be in the thick of the Iraq crisis. "Yes, I am. I loved what I did. I could've been secretary of state for ever." While Albright makes noises about the futility of blame, she is nonetheless adamant that under Clinton, or Gore, Iraq would not be in the mess it is now. She doesn't buy the argument that containment of Saddam Hussein wasn't working. "I thought our problems had to do with the way the sanctions coalition was fraying, so we were looking at various ways of getting so-called smart sanctions in, and targeting them much more at the leadership." She was willing to believe that Saddam had weapons of mass destruction, but did not believe they posed an imminent threat. Before taking office, Albright served for four years as US ambassador to the UN. Now she spends her time teaching and serving on various boards to promote ethical foreign investment. She has just been elected to the board of the New York stock exchange. How is she ever going to get a date? It is 20 years since Joe left her and Albright is single. I imagine most guys are too terrified to ask her out. "Well apparently, because I haven't been asked out." What's she going to do about it? "I don't know. I've been so busy with my book, and maybe after the book they'll want to ask me out even less." What about online dating? "I don't think I'm quite up to that. But what I have, which I love, is a lot of really good male friends, because I've operated basically in a man's world." After the divorce, her daughters asked her what her requirements might be for a new man. She only had one: "I can't go out with a Republican." For the record: the at-home Albright is a slob; she doesn't want to talk about foreign policy after hours. "I come home, I put on a flannel nightgown, make myself the most disgusting thing, which is cottage cheese with ketchup, and go and watch some ridiculous programme on television." Her favourites shows are The West Wing and, unexpectedly, the Judi Dench/Geoffrey Palmer sitcom, As Time Goes By, which she catches on BBC World. It makes her wonder rather wistfully whether someone might emerge from her past to reignite a romance. Meanwhile, when The West Wing was filming round the corner from her house, Albright went out and collared the writer, Aaron Sorkin. Why she asked, did he put so much power in the hands of the drama's male chief-of-staff? What the show needed was a high-ranking woman, at the level of say, secretary of state. In the next series, Sorkin had written a new character into the script: a national security adviser called Nancy. · Madam Secretary by Madeleine Albright is out now priced £20. |
"Madam Secretary, she is pictured looking almost saucy"
Too bad this guy's not currently available. A match made in heaven.
Any takers out there? hahahaha
Just in time for
HALLOWEEN !!!
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