About her first marriage: In the early ‘70s, when I knew her as a fellow parent at Greenfield Elementary School in Center City, Mitchell was married to Gil Jackson, a black man who worked in the public affairs department at Smith, Kline & French (now GlaxoSmithKline) while struggling to launch a career as an independent film producer. An interracial marriage to a man suffering from a very malignant case of multiple sclerosis cannot have been easy for a young Jewish woman barely out of college, yet Mitchell (as far as I could tell) loyally stood by her man while also caring for his two sons from a previous marriage— so conscientiously that I presumed the boys were her own. The marriage broke up shortly before Mitchell left Philadelphia for Washington in 1976, and Jackson subsequently died.
But in Talking Back Mitchell doesn’t mention Jackson or that marriage at all. On the contrary, she seems to bend over backwards to erase its memory. She mentions, for example, her role as godmother to the three children of her NBC News colleague Judy Woodruff, commenting that “In many ways, they and my nieces and nephew have become surrogates for the children I never had.” But she did once have children, or at least stepchildren. She simply declines to acknowledge them.
About her makeover: A 1974 profile in Philadelphia Magazine described Mitchell as “very average-looking…someone with the frizzies…She’s a little too short and her face isn’t peaches and cream and she has a very intense businesslike voice, a voice that doesn’t sound right doing happy talk.” Mitchell herself is quoted to the effect that “We’ve had a lot of fine reporters in this town who’ve been shunted to the side because they don’t have the kind of looks they’re looking for on TV now….There are just too many people who don’t fit into the cookie cutter.”
So why has Mitchell now subjected herself to the network’s cookie-cutter? It’s an intriguing question— and again, one that Mitchell declines to address. In her account of the Jonestown massacre, a wise-cracking NBC script editor refers to Mitchell as “the Peruvian handmaiden,” causing Mitchell to explain parenthetically to readers, “(At that time, I was a brunette.)” After Mitchell served as a panelist for one of the Bush-Dukakis presidential debates in 1988, she tells us that David Letterman asked his late-night audience whether anyone noticed that she’d become a blonde. “I was a throw-away line on late-night TV,” she complains. In a book of more than 400 pages, these are the only references to her radical physical transformation.
To be sure, many of us have old marriages and old personas we’d just as soon forget. But why write a memoir if you won’t confront the past? Andrea Mitchell’s life is indeed the stuff of drama, and maybe even a movie. But she is not the one to tell it. When you’ve spent your life hop-scotching the globe for big stories in the glare of TV lights, it’s difficult to imagine that the biggest story of all might be somewhere inside of you, if only you had the inclination to dig for it.
http://www.broadstreetreview.com/index.php/main/article/Andrea_Mitchell_reinvents_her_past/
= new reply since forum marked as read
