[© THE CHARLESTON POST & COURIER]
By DOTTIE ASHLEY
Jenny Sanford stands at her basement back door admiring the family’s new black Lab puppy, Jet, busy chewing on lawn furniture and old toys in the back yard.
“He isn’t fully trained right now because he’s only four months old, but the boys are just crazy about him,” says Jenny. Jet looks through the glass door and smiles an endearing doggy smile at his owner.
One question is how Jet will fit in at the fussy, formal South Carolina Governor’s Mansion in Columbia, where Gov.-elect Mark Sanford, his wife, Jenny, and their four young boys will make their home come Wednesday.
“We’re having a big cage built so Jet won’t destroy anything at the Governor’s Mansion,” says the state’s new first lady. Slim, with dark hair and flashing brown eyes, Jenny Sanford managed her husband’s gubernatorial campaign through a primary, a runoff and a nerve-jangling general election while at the same time looking after the boys.
“Mark was definitely considered a long shot because he had name recognition in only a sixth of the state,” she says.
During the fast-paced campaign, Jenny fielded calls in her basement office and then dashed upstairs to cook supper for her youngsters. She was integral in generating an astonishing number of Democratic votes for her Republican husband, which surprised political experts.
“She’s beat out all the political strategists with her ability to steer her husband’s campaign behind the scenes,” says Edward K. Pritchard Jr. of Sullivan’s Island.
“I’ve been a lifelong Democrat, but I crossed over and voted Republican this time, partly because I got to know Mark after my wife, Sallie, and Jenny Sanford served together on the MUSC Children’s Hospital board,” says Pritchard, 64.
“Sallie was always coming home telling me about how remarkable Mark’s wife was. Then when I got to know Jenny, I discovered she is true class.
“Since Sanford was elected governor of South Carolina on Nov. 5, the family’s oceanfront home on Sullivan’s Island has been more chaotic than usual. But this dynamo from Chicago is not at all fazed by the prospect of having her every move scrutinized by the press, or having a portion of her new home open to touring groups.
“Right after the election, I did wake up once in the middle of the night realizing that we would be using that big industrial-sized kitchen downstairs in the Governor’s Mansion, even to fix a cheese sandwich,” she says. “I probably would no longer be cooking dinner while the kids did their homework in the kitchen. But we’ll have to see.”
In truth, she says that all four sons, Marshall, 10, Landon, 9, Bolton, 6, and Blake, 4, were excited about moving to Columbia, where they started at Heathwood Hall, a private Episcopal school, the first week in January. So that the boys could start school on tune, the Sanfords moved Jan. 2 to a temporary home in Columbia.
“Of course, the boys will miss their friends, but we plan to come back, especially in the summer. We will probably rent out the house just part of the year,” says Jenny as she rubs the head of Blake, who has a cough and has stayed home from kindergarten.
One could call the Sanford’s beach house, which some doubted could be made livable, an apt symbol for Sanford’s campaign for governor, which some doubted could be winnable.”
Absolutely, no one would touch this house because it was in such awful shape,” says Jenny of the modest home built in the 1950s. For several years, it was common for those who were walking by on the beach access path to remark about what a shambles the house was.
“We bought it because it was the only place we could afford on the beach,” says Jenny. “We just decided to take the chance, sell our house downtown and buy this one to fix up. It was the right decision because this place is designed so much better for the boys, and they have so much room to play,” she says, waving a hand toward a spacious back yard.
To save money and for convenience, the Sanfords used the barely finished basement as a campaign headquarters until after the Republican primary. The basement turned into an office later became the children’s playroom.
“Sometimes when the kids would come home from school, the younger campaign workers and volunteers would take a break and shoot some basketballs with them,” says their mother. “It was really a fun time for everybody.”
On this afternoon, having just arrived from a farewell luncheon given in her honor, Jenny is wearing a chocolate brown sweater and matching long skirt. The tasteful outfit is accessorized with a three-strand pearl necklace and bracelet.
At age 40, Jenny radiates unquestionable intelligence and intensity. These are two characteristics that many politicos credit with helping to boost her husband in his first campaign in 1994 for the 1st Congressional District. For this first race, Jenny served as campaign manager and oversaw each detail of the operations. Her husband was reelected to the House of Representatives in 1996 and 1998 with greater than 94 percent of the vote. Also, she was Sanford’s campaign manager for the governor’s race, which she notes was “a hard-fought campaign against an incumbent governor who had so much more money than we did.”
Even though she was under tremendous stress, Jenny found time to bake cookies for neighbor Frannie Reese’s little daughter when she had her tonsils out. “She’s my role model,” says Reese.
“Jenny is exceptionally brilliant,” says friend Marjory Went-worth, also a longtime Democrat ho crossed over to vote for Sanford. “Jenny and I became friends because we had both worked in New York and had that in common. When I was in New York, my best friend was an investment banker, and I know how hard a person has to work and how very sharp they have to be in order to succeed in that competitive business in Manhattan.”
She adds, “Jenny succeeds in whatever she puts her mind to, something I can’t say about very many people I know.”
Equally admiring of South Car-olina’s future first lady is Linda Brinkley, owner of the Linda Brinkley Salon in Mount Pleasant.
“Jenny Sanford is totally nice to everybody,” says Brinkley, who has styled Jenny’s hair for about a year. “She treats everybody the same, which I think is so unusual for someone in a position of power. Also, Jenny is a very down-to-earth person, very unpretentious.”
Brinkley, however, was a little disappointed that there won’t be a formal Governor’s Inaugural Ball this year. “I was hoping to go to Columbia to maybe do Jenny’s hair,” she says with a chuckle.
“We thought it would not be appropriate to have a ball this year given the third round of state budget cuts, the state of the economy and the high rate of unemployment,” says Jenny.
“The Hodges’ ball, with the tent, cost in the neighborhood of $800,000, and that just doesn’t send the correct message for these hard times,” she says. “And so we decided on a barbecue with everyone dressed in a casual manner, like blue jeans, and no renting tuxedos.”
In typical Sanford, low-key style, the couple has selected the watermelon shed at Columbia’s Farmers Market as the site for the inaugural celebration.
“We definitely wanted to make the barbecue accessible, but if you know Mark, you know it’s NOT going to be free,” Jenny says with a wry laugh, acknowledging the famous penny-pinching reputation of her husband, who spent nights in his office while serving in Congress rather than rent a D.C. apartment.
“We’ll have several different kinds of barbecue and a couple of bands,” she says. “The cost is $50 a person with children admitted. We’re sending out invitations, but anybody who wants to buy a ticket can.”
HAILING FROM CHICAGO
For her uncanny ability to deal with business transactions, Jenny credits her grandfather, Bolton Sullivan, founder of Skil Corp., which made the first portable electric saw. She also says her father, John Sullivan, who continued in the business, was an influence on her career choice.
A native of Winnetka, Ill., a town about a 40-minute drive from the “City of the Big Shoulders,” Jenny Sanford was the second of five children. Growing up, she took advantage of the cornucopia of culture Chicago offered. She and her siblings were taken into the city to visit the museums and to see plays and musicals.
“I was kind of a shy child, and so I went to a Catholic girls school with only 50 in my class while my sister went to a public school nearby with 1,500 in her class. She was captain of the golf team and other things,” says Jenny, who was selected as an Illinois State Scholar. “But I had a great time growing up surrounded by family. My aunt had nine children and lived on the same street we did, and so we always had people running in and out of the house.”
Planning to return to Chicago to live as an adult, Jenny applied to colleges only on the East Coast. “Chicago is so friendly, unlike New York, and it is such a livable city. It gives you a feeling of a sense of place,” she says. “I was lucky that I got an early acceptance at Georgetown University, a Jesuit liberal arts school I really loved.”
She points out that people have made a lot over the fact she did a summer internship on Capitol Hill. “But the job had nothing to do with politics,” Jenny says. “I was working for an economist, strictly crunching numbers.”
After graduating magna cum laude in 1984 with a degree in finance, Jenny moved to New York to work for the firm of Lazard Freres & Co., where she stayed for seven years and was promoted to vice president in mergers and acquisitions with a focus on media and communications companies.
“I was only supposed to work for two years in a program designed for newly graduated business majors before they traditionally would return to school to earn an MBA,” she says. “But after a year, they promoted me to a new level even though I didn’t have an MBA.”
Asked to describe the nature of her work, Jenny explains: “If a company that owned several television stations wanted to sell some of them, they came to our company for assistance. I would appraise the value of the stations and then do the research to find who would be possible potential buyers for that market,” says Jenny. “It’s determining the value of something and then matching it with appropriate buyers.”
As busy as she was, Jenny still would take some time off on weekends. It was in the summer of 1987 that she met Mark Sanford at a beach party in the Hamptons on Long Island, a vacation spot for the well-heeled. “It wasn’t exactly love at first sight,” Jenny says. “It was more like friendship at first sight.”
She adds, “Mark was like a breath of fresh air to me because I had been surrounded by hard-driving, cigar-smoking men who worked into the night in the intense mergers business crunching numbers.”
Sanford was still earning his MBA at the University of Virginia at the time and was working that summer at Goldman Sachs.
“I had never dated a Southern man, although I had male friends who were Southern,” says Jenny. “I liked his easygoing manner, and yet he was so smart.
In a formal ceremony attended by about 200 guests, the Sanfords were married in 1989 in Hobe sound, Fla., where her parents had moved. For their honeymoon, they went on a safari to Africa, where they had an adventurous time on a rafting trip.
After another year in New York, the couple left the Big Apple for the Holy City. Sanford, a native of Florida, had numerous South Carolina connections since his family has long owned a plantation home with 3,000 acres near Beaufort called “The Farm,” where he spent each summer.
Adjusting a white orchid in a terracotta pot on the coffee table, Jenny settles back on the beige sofa and recalls her impressions before moving to Charleston.
“Mark had tried to prepare me, to make me realize that it might be hard to make friends here. He told me Charleston was different from other places in the South. He said maybe I might want to make certain that I had some projects to work on because I think he really wondered how Charleston bluebloods would accept a Yankee from Chicago,” she says with a smile. “I actually didn’t know whether anyone would ever speak to me, or ask me to go anywhere.”
However, when the couple moved into their downtown home, Jenny found people to be just as friendly as those in Chicago.
“They brought over pies when I would have a baby. What’s not to like in this state? I even learned to like grits!”
PARTNERS IN POLITICS
On a cloudy afternoon, Mark Sanford is working in his basement office while two of the boys chase Jet around and Spot the tabby cat meows to be let in the sliding-glass door.
In a thoughtful, deliberate manner, the soft-spoken governor-elect explains how he was first attracted to his wife.
“I live in the world of ideas, and Jenny had such an engaging intellect, it was unbelievable,” says Sanford. “I love coming home and discussing matters with her, and she understands absolutely everything. Another reason I admired Jenny so was when I learned she had held fast onto her faith even while living in a place like New York City, where it is so difficult to do so. Most of all, Jenny and I have the same feeling about the importance of family. Family always comes first.”
Concerning the campaign, Sanford adds, “One reason Jenny and I work so well together is because I will come up with the big picture, and she will then figure out the nuts and bolts as to what should be done to reach a particular goal. For example, if I said I want to climb that mountain, she would tell me how many trucks and mules and pick axes I would need to do that. And then, I might think it over and say, ‘Maybe I’ll try another mountain.’”
Jenny agrees with her husband.
“The real beauty about my and Mark’s relationship is that I manage the basics, while Mark comes up with the new, bold ideas. My role has been to ask him what our message is and to get that message out to the public. I do the research regarding tax policies and education plans. I then research what other states are doing in these areas and compare and contrast, just like in the merger business.”
“For example, Mark believes we need to change things in Columbia. We need a governor who is not afraid to go against the wishes of the Legislature, which really runs the state,” says Jenny. “Also, there is so much duplication and waste in state government. Things need to be streamlined.”
The future first lady has made a number of trips to Columbia as a member of Sanford’s eight-mem-ber transition team, which will advise the new governor about filling more than 100 positions. “It may seem unusual, but I am on the team because I have the best knowledge of who really supported us in the campaign, and also I am the most familiar with Mark’s platform.”
And what will be the role of the new first lady?
“Having just come off an extremely intense campaign, I will have to take a long, hard look at what I should focus my efforts on,” says Jenny. “At first I think I will just concentrate on making certain that my children are well-adjusted in their new environment. Then I will get involved in various projects.”
There are so many things a first lady can take on to make a difference. One of them might be determining why South Carolina ranks so high in the nation in various diseases, such as types of cancer, and what can be done about this,” she says.
In a hallway near the master bedroom are photographs and framed newspaper articles featuring Sanford with dignitaries and family members. Several of the pictures show the Sanfords with former President Bill and Hillary Clinton.
“We were never invited to state dinners, but we attended the annual White House Christmas party several times,” says Jenny. “Personally, I liked both Clintons. They were very nice to us.
“I think you can like people even if you don’t always agree with them about everything,” says Jenny.
One example of this might be the fact that Emily Condon, wife of S.C. Attorney General Charlie Condon, who ran against Sanford in the primary, has expressed her admiration for Jenny, saying, “She made it all look so easy.”
“I didn’t really get to know Emily until she and I showed up at some of the same Republican gatherings representing our husbands. When Mark was in the runoff with Bob Peeler, and Charlie threw his support behind Mark, then we really got to be friends.”
Those who worked in the campaign say they always knew where they stood with Jenny. “I’m a very direct person, and I try, within reason, to say what I really feel,” she says. “I’ve learned you can disagree in a polite manner. I was raised around strong women who taught me that it’s good to be honest and forthright.”
Ultimately, how will the new first lady stack up against former governor’s wives?
“People in Columbia will be in awe of Jenny,” says Sullivan’s Island neighbor Frannie Reese.
“She will be a different sort of first lady. Things…will change.”
Dottie Ashley is the Arts Editor. Contact her at 937-5704 or
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