Howard Margo - Eat, drink & remarry: confessions of a serial wife

I was twenty years old. It was the summer between myjunior and senior years at Brandeis University in Waltham, Massachusetts. Duringthis three-month interval, I planned to kill many birds with one stone. I wouldlive independently of my parents, but not in a dorm. I would have a ringsideseat to participatory democracy as a worker bee in the hive of the U.S. Senate.And I would be in a brand-new dating pool! I was about to begin a summerinternship for Minnesota Senator Hubert H. Humphrey who, at that moment, wasrunning against John F. Kennedy for the Democratic presidential nomination.Humphrey was best known for being liberal and loquacious. Like Gene McCarthy andFritz Mondale, he came from the Minnesota DemocraticFarmerLabor Party. Havingknown Hubert from the time I was a kid in Wisconsin (because Mother was chairmanof the Eau Claire County Democratic Party), I wanted to pitch in and be part ofthe campaign. And did I mention the new dating pool?

Mother had arranged for me to stay with the Stolars, close family friends wholived in Washington. Bob Stolar had been in our lives from the time I was threeyears old when we lived in New Orleans. He was a renowned dermatologist whopioneered the treatment of vitiligo, and he was one of the few American expertson leprosy. He was also a psychiatrist, being early in making the connectionbetween skin eruptions and emotions. Mother had met him while volunteering atthe naval hospital where he was chief of dermatology. They had struck up afriendship, and over time he would become an informal advisor/shrink to Mother,Father, and me. It was he who encouraged my mother to ditch the twin act andcarve out her own identity. (Alas, the twin saw to it that this effort was notentirely successful, choosing to piggyback Ann Landerss popularity to becomeDear Abby.) I had seen a great deal of Uncle Bob during seven years of summercamp in Maryland because he had been the medical director who came up onweekends.

He married his wife, Frances, when they were both well into their forties. Shewas a prim Southern schoolteacher, the archetypal spinster. They would functionin loco parentis, as they say in Latinand Frances may haveactually been loco, as they say in Spanish. Frances likely had what wewould today call mood swings. She was convinced that Bob and my mother had tobe sleeping together because they talked so much on the phone, and when I wastheir extended-stay houseguest that summer of 1960, she was convinced that Bobwas sleeping with me! The situation was manageable, however, and therewere only a few outbursts from Frances. Bob was somewhat peculiar himself,perhaps owing to his genius IQ of 200. Quite tall, he looked owlish in his largeglasses, and he spoke very slowly. Every day he wore black leatherclodhoppers built for comfort, not stylewhat were then called spaceshoes.

Their two-story house was unlike any residence I had ever seen. It wasindifferently decorated and clean but had major collections, often to theceiling, of National Geographic magazines and medical journals. Theplace was cluttered beyond belief. The word had no currency then, but today allthat stuff would surely qualify these people as hoarders. Happily, neatnik thatI was, I spent very little time at the house, as I was working during the dayand out most evenings.

Although my job for Humphrey was essentially scut work, I felt like a cog in avery important wheel. This was the nations capitol, after all. And I was alsoon the lookout for smart, interesting men preferably Democrats, havingbeen more effectively indoctrinated by my mother than my father, who was aRepublican. My intern duties, in the beginning, were typically to get coffee andDanish for the staff from the cafeteria each morning, man the reception deskphone at lunch, and ride the subway in the basement to deliver folders ofdocuments either to the House or the Capitol. (This train was like a string oflinked golf carts on a track.) I spent a fair amount of time filing, something Ihad never done before. This task struck me as no more difficult than it wasinterestingwhich is to say, not at all. As it turned out, however, I managed tomake a bit of a mess of it, filing Christmas-related mail under X (for Xmas)and making other idiosyncratic choices that made it challenging for people tofind what they needed. When Hubert was eliminated at the Democratic NationalConvention in mid-July, he returned to the office and said jocularly, ItsMargos fault. She loused up the filing system.