Now these oft-told tales are told again in Leading With My Heart, by Virginia Kelley with James Morgan (282 pages. Simon & Schuster. $22.50). Not surprisingly, the stories feel familiar here, especially since the book arrives just a few months after a battery of obituaries of Mrs. Kelley. But the book has another problem: as is often the case with co-written memoirs, it feels inauthentic. Written in a prosaic, colorless style, this doesn’t sound the way we imagine Mrs. Kelley talked. There are no Southern locutions, and the grammar is impeccable. Where are the spicy stories or the occasional “damn” or “hell”?
Anyone approaching this celebrity book with an eye for gossip will also be disappointed. What feels fresh, though, is Mrs. Kelley’s descriptions of her shock I at meeting Hillary Rodham when Bill brought her home from Yale Law School. The young woman wore Coke-bottle glasses, no makeup and had perfectly styleless hair-nothing like the Dixie beauty queens that Clinton usually dated. She was also a blunt Yankee, and not adept at Southern blarney. “There was almost a kind of cultural tension between Mother and Hillary,” said Clinton. “I guess that’s as good a way to put it as any,” replies his mother. But there was no going back: “I want you to pray for me. Pray that it’s Hillary. Because I’ll tell you this: For me it’s Hillary or it’s nobody,” he told his unhappy mother. “I couldn’t stand it,” she writes. “Here was this woman I didn’t understand, didn’t feel comfortable with. And she was all he wanted.”
There’s a lot that’s moving about Mrs. Kelley’s story, partly because of the way she handles her final illness. “You can’t tell my sons about my condition,” she tells her shocked doctor. She may have had a disaffected mother and a parade of mostly bad marriages. But in the last year of her life, she also had a memory granted to few parents-the thrill of attending her son’s Inauguration and the gala that night. “What a night it had been,” she wrote, “–a magical evening.”
