SACRAMENTO, Calif. — Maria Shriver was sidelined as a network TV journalist when her movie-star husband, Arnold Schwarzenegger, suddenly decided to jump into politics — the business of her family.
Being California’s first lady, a job usually involving more pomp than policy, was no easy fit for the ambitious feminist who had worked hard to carve out an identity separate from her Democratic family dynasty as a Kennedy and a Shriver.
In a joint statement Monday night announcing their separation after 25 years of marriage, Shriver and Schwarzenegger said they will keep raising their four children together, calling them “the light and the center of both of our lives.”
The new role Shriver took on 7 1/2 years ago was not one she necessarily coveted, but she made it her own.
“You’ve got to be kidding! That’s not me! I didn’t grow up wanting to be first lady of anything!” she wrote in her 2008 book “Just Who Will You Be?” about her sentiments after her husband was elected in the 2003 recall. “But there I found myself, and I didn’t have a clue what to do.”
What she did not do was seek to fit in in Sacramento, a company town where politics and state government are the core business. She and the couple’s four children, now ages 13, 17, 19 and 21, never made the move to the state capital, instead jetting in for special events while Schwarzenegger flew home to Los Angeles most nights on his private plane.
Still, Shriver was never far in spirit from the governor’s office, and she was said to weigh in with opinions on policy.
“It appeared that she was the governor’s most important political and policy adviser,” said Dan Schnur, director of the University of Southern California’s Jesse M. Unruh Institute of Politics.
