DENVER—Tethered to the leader of a nation, a state or a city, a first lady is, unconsciously at least, a figurehead. Maybe even a mommy figure.
She’s got to represent.
But how?
Hillary Rodham Clinton stood by her man, while Maria Shriver quit NBC to co-host California. Jeannie Ritter pushed mental-health reform, and Michelle Obama crusades against obesity—even as her outfits are scrutinized as cultural anthropology.
So what aspects of ourselves and our state will Helen Thorpe project as Colorado’s new first lady?
“I think I’ll be much more elusive than that,” she says. “I don’t think I’ll be setting the tone.”
The muted sound you hear is Thorpe not setting a tone. She doesn’t want to make noise about it, but she’ll do things her way.
The wife of Colorado Gov. John Hickenlooper vows to avoid the spotlight that comes with her husband’s office. An active player behind the scenes (who do you think helped write those memorable political commercials and designed the funky Christmas cards?)—she is happiest off the radar. Don’t expect a calendar of ladies luncheons, gala sponsorships or parades of her latest fashions. Thorpe is committed to her career as a writer and to staying out of the conversation. You can almost hear the postmodern air- quotes when she uses the title “first lady.”
“I recognize that you can’t be 100 percent a private person,” Thorpe says. “I’m thinking a lot about where that line is.”
Hickenlooper, 59, was sworn in as governor last month after serving nearly two terms as Denver’s mayor. His arrival on the local political scene followed his years as a microbrewery owner and shepherd of Lower Downtown’s urban renewal. His whimsy and flair for publicity often have been contrasted, fairly or not, with the more bookish persona of his wife.
Thorpe was introduced to Hickenlooper, 11 years her senior, in October 2001. They were married in January 2002 in a Quaker ceremony in Austin, Texas, where she was living, and soon after moved to a loft in Denver’s LoDo. Son Teddy was born July 5, 2002.
Thorpe never had a long-range plan for marriage, motherhood or life as a political spouse. As wife of the mayor, she didn’t wear the title like a beacon, as Wilma Webb had before her. She kept the “first lady” construct out of her daily life. Now, as wife of the governor, that’s a trickier proposition. Thorpe would drop the honorific altogether except that might cause a bigger stink.
“We checked. I would be the only person in the country that we could find who declined to use the title officially. And that just seemed a little pioneering. I didn’t necessarily want to be the first one.”
That would only invite media scrutiny, she figures.
Now that Hickenlooper is governor, Thorpe’s response is to focus on her life as an author. Her work has appeared in The New Yorker, The New York Observer and Texas Monthly.
Her first book, “Just Like Us,” was critically well-received. A combination of journalism, sociology and a bit of immigration politics, the nonfiction narrative, set in Denver, interweaves Thorpe’s own well-connected life with that of four high-school Latinas, two of them undocumented immigrants.
She just finished an update for the paperback release. Next, a stage adaptation has been commissioned by the Denver Center Theatre Company. Thorpe will serve as adviser to playwright Karen Zacarias (who adapted the novel “How the Garcia Girls Lost Their Accents”).
Born in London, raised in New Jersey, the intellectual child of Irish parents, Thorpe has a passion and discipline: 1,000 words a day, four double-spaced pages, even on vacation.
Author and NPR contributor Peter Heller, a longtime friend and member of her writers group, believes she is a rarity: “If she keeps going, she’s going to be a master of the American essay.”
Traditionalists may bristle at Thorpe’s approach to first lady-ness. From her arty purple eyeglass frames to her dedicated yoga practice and refusal to live in the Governor’s Residence, the 1987 Princeton graduate is a new breed.
Leading a reporter on a tour of a Head Start school recently, she brightens when a young child peeks out of a classroom and engages easily at knee level.
In November, just after the election, Colorado’s first couple attended a weekend retreat of the National Governors Association for incoming first families, held in Colorado Springs.
Thorpe felt alienated until, in the last hour of the last seminar on the last day, the hulking spouse of a newly elected Western governor stood to say he was having trouble grasping his role in all of this. “That was the person I identified with most.”
“Personally, I don’t think most people today subscribe to the notion that a first lady has to fit into some kind of predetermined mold,” says former mayoral press secretary Lindy Eichenbaum Lent, now executive director of the Civic Center Conservancy.
“I’d like to think the proliferation of male ‘first spouses’ has contributed to that evolution. Helen will have—and should have—the same opportunity to chart her own course that Jeanne Ritter, Frances Owens and other gubernatorial spouses around the country had before her.”
But she will no doubt do it differently. While those women were first on the scene at charity events, middle-school graduations and grand openings, Thorpe says she will have none of it. And she’s serious. Asked what public appearances are next on her calendar, she pulls out out her smartphone and finds nothing for a month.
“Delightful,” she says.
Unlike previous governors’ wives who were more homemakers than professional strivers, Thorpe gave a thumbs-down to moving into the governor’s mansion. The family will remain in their Park Hill home to maintain relative normalcy.
After the election, Thorpe had lunch with former Denver first lady Wilma Webb, who advised her to be herself. “She gave me permission,” Thorpe says.
Although perceived as opposites, Hickenlooper and Thorpe are often in sync. When they mingled their libraries after the first year of marriage, she says, “We had a surprising number of books in common.”
The couple aim to keep John home three or four nights a week—”that’s home for dinner with me and Teddy at a reasonable hour. For me, honestly, it would be too hard if he was out every night and I was putting our child to bed every night. I’m not a martyr.”
Thorpe continues to shelter Teddy from media exposure, declining to discuss him other than to brag about his reading prowess.
As in her first book, she relishes her ability to segue from the world of power and wealth into the world of the underclass and back, sharing cultural contexts and seeking her own comfort zone.
She won’t formally espouse an agenda as first lady. She will, however, shine a light on Colorado’s miserable record when it comes to child poverty (the state has the fastest-growing child-poverty rate in the country). She has asked to be briefed when anything on the subject moves through the legislature. She was on the board and helped establish an exemplary Head Start program at Clayton EduCare in Denver, which offers early childhood education services to low-income children and their families. (She had to leave the board when Hick ran for governor because the facility gets state funding.)
This conflict and others—like the fact that certain political stories might be ethically off-limits to her journalistic probing—dog her. If she wanted to tap her traditional reporting skills, she probably couldn’t work for Colorado Public Radio or The Denver Post now, she says.
Katherine Gold, who got to know Thorpe on the board of the Colorado Children’s Campaign, calls her a strategic thinker. “She helps John more than people are aware.”
