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Thursday, Nov 26, 2009
Being the wife of a world leader clearly sucks, but aren't Laura Bush and Cherie Blair revealing a bit too much about their husbands?
May 5, 2005 | "As we walk to the platform I have a curious feeling. I always have it. I feel like the invisible woman. I feel their eyes sliding across to him. They want to see him, not me." So said Mary Wilson during her late husband Harold Wilson's election campaign. But, my, how times have changed, judging by recent events, which we will refer to henceforward, in B-movie style, as "The Week the First Ladies Went Mad" (well, slightly odd, anyway).
Far from eyes sliding off them, today's first ladies seem to be shoving their boring husbands out of the way and planting themselves in front. First we had Laura Bush, whose strongest statement until then had been her adoring glances at her husband, suddenly coming over all Les Dawson on us with her wacka-wacka comedy routine at the White House Correspondents' Association dinner last weekend. Telling her husband to sit down, she proudly took center stage.
Ladies and gentlemen, we had jokes about genitals ("I'm proud of George. He's learned a lot about ranching since that first year, when he tried to milk a horse. What's worse, it was a male horse"); we slapped our thighs to a reference to lack of sex ("Nine o'clock. Mr. Excitement here is sound asleep and I'm watching 'Desperate Housewives'"); and, oh, how we hooted at the obligatory mother-in-law crack ("People think she's a sweet, grandmotherly Aunt Bea type. She's actually more like Don Corleone").
Apparently, mother-in-law jokes are having something of a revival. (Nothing like an old joke, as Benny Hill might say, for putting one's audience at ease.) In an interview in a tabloid Wednesday, British First Lady Cherie Blair (photographed doing her best adoring stare with her darling husband) announced that Tony will never be unfaithful because "I would kill him. But he's not really frightened of Cherie killing him. What he is really frightened of is his mother-in-law killing him."
Why Cherie has started to refer to herself in the third person is an intriguing question, but more pressing is the way a woman who used to complain about intrusions into her family's personal life suddenly can't stop revealing details that none of us really wanted to know. Maybe it's just me, but hearing Cherie gushing about Tony's handmade Valentine's Day cards, scrawled with "Tony loves Cherie," prompts the sort of queasiness normally inspired by walking in on one's parents enjoying an overly amorous Sunday afternoon moment. "Come on Tony, strip off. Let's see that fit body we've been talking about!" she trilled, sounding weirdly like some embarrassing mother, humiliating her son on his first day of school, before informing the grateful nation that her husband is "always [up for it]."
But by far the best first-lady moment of the week came courtesy of Lucy Kibaki, one of Kenyan President Mwai Kibaki's two wives, who stomped into the Nairobi offices of a national newspaper and allegedly slapped a cameraman, shouted at reporters and generally behaved in a manner that Grendel's mother would have admired.
Whether this was the best way to disprove the newspaper's stories about Mrs. Kibaki's eccentric behavior is, admittedly, debatable. But at least her display was a protest that related to herself, whereas Cherie Blair and Laura Bush were merely performing for the sake of their husbands. The Republicans have finally realized that Laura is the best thing the Bush family has going for them and have been increasingly pushing her forward. So her little comedy routine managed to tread that merry line between wittily mocking her husband and being reassuringly self-deprecating, all wrapped up with the ribbon of insinuation that George must be smarter/nicer/better than previously imagined to have landed such a clever wife.
Similarly, Cherie's display was merely another step in the smoothing down of her voter-scaring sharp edges. In Wednesday's interview she claimed that she avoids arguing with her husband because "he has a tough job already." Instantly she conjured an image of a dutiful housewife keeping the children quiet as Daddy works hard in the study, while seeming to forget that she has a job, too. But what the heck -- at least in exchange for all this makeover as a gushy, Bree-like desperate housewife (or perhaps she's been watching Laura), the Sun, for once, didn't print an ugly photo of her and make some joke about her wonky smile.
