-Caveat Lector-
Begin forwarded message:
From: [EMAIL PROTECTED]
Date: July 5, 2007 9:51:10 PM PDT
To: [EMAIL PROTECTED]
Cc: [EMAIL PROTECTED], [EMAIL PROTECTED], [EMAIL PROTECTED]
Subject: Red-Scare Herring (Cropped from the Photo: James Baker,
OIL, CIA/Mossad)
SOCIETY MEETS POLITICS;
The belle, the politician and the CIA
Joanne Herring played a pivotal role in ending the Cold War
CLAUDIA FELDMAN, STAFF
http://www6.lexisnexis.com/publisher/EndUser?
Action=UserDisplayFullDocument&orgId=574&topicId=100007243&docId=l:
631694753&isRss=true
Joanne Herring has been compared to Scarlett O'Hara, Marilyn Monroe
and Dolly Parton. She is all of them and more as she waits for a
photographer in her River Oaks condominium. The place is great - an
elevator delivers guests right into the French-style living room -
but it's a step down from the mansions she's shared in the past.
In midafternoon Herring wears a foamy white evening gown, form-
fitting and strapless, with her faithful poodle, Chulo, by her
side. She has an hourglass figure, taut skin - she cheerfully
admits she's had some surgical help - and blond hair. When she
entered middle age, she says, she dyed her hair a color she
actually likes.
Herring is funny and charming and smart. And she hopes actress
Julia Roberts portrays her just that way in the movie Charlie
Wilson's War, which opens in theaters across the country on
Christmas Day.
The movie is about two civilians and a CIA agent who helped fuel a
semisecret war in Afghanistan in the '80s. The unlikely trio,
Herring, former U.S. Rep. Charlie Wilson and Gust Avrakotos, may
have changed the course of history by helping bring down the Soviet
Union and end the Cold War.
Herring is flattered that the lovely and talented Roberts is
playing her character, and she's happy to be back in the spotlight.
At least she was happy until she read the script and nearly passed
out.
In the old days, Herring played to the Southern belle stereotype.
In fact, she used it to her advantage. These days, she finds it
less amusing.
"In one scene I'd seem really intelligent," she says, "and in the
next I was a hypocritical, bipolar tart."
Herring, ultraconservative and a born-again Christian, found the
tart parts so insulting she hired attorney Dick DeGuerin. Perhaps,
she thought, DeGuerin could persuade veteran Hollywood director
Mike Nichols to clean up her character in the script.
Nichols doesn't scare, but he did cut the bad language from
Roberts' lines because Herring really doesn't curse. At least not
often and not much. Meanwhile, Houston-Hollywood relations have
thawed a bit.
Herring was invited to the movie set, where she met Nichols,
Roberts, and Tom Hanks, who plays Wilson.
Hanks, Herring says, "is the nicest man. He came up to me and said,
`I've been in love with you for six months. Let me kiss you.' "
That day it was nice to be a Southern belle.
"It was very muddy," Herring remembers, "and he said, `Oh, the
queen can't get her feet wet,' and he scooped me up and carried me
to the car."
The early years
Herring wants to know: Is the reporter who is drinking her hot
cocoa and petting her dog a liberal?
She hates labels and likes liberals, she says. It's just that
sometimes they see her more as a caricature than a real flesh-and-
blood person. With brains. And feelings.
Joanne's maiden name is Johnson. She was born July 3, 1929 ("my
mother and I couldn't wait") into a family that valued beauty,
charm, good works and good manners.
They also valued intelligence but worried about Joanne. Clearly she
was bright, but she couldn't do math.
"I have dyslexia," Herring says. "But back then, they thought I was
not only unattractive but dumb."
"How," she wonders to this day, "can you add numbers that seem to
be jumping around on the page?"
Herring, an only child, grew up in elite, clubby River Oaks. If she
ever was an ugly duckling, she morphed into a swan in junior high.
That's what James A. Baker III, the former secretary of state,
remembers, as does his cousin Annie Baker Horton.
"Dances were always held in the school gymnasiums," Horton says.
"There'd be girls on one side and boys on the other. All the girls
would watch their dates line up to dance with Joanne. She was so
much prettier than we were, we couldn't possibly be jealous."
Horton can tick off countless favors that Herring has done for her
over the years -- from bringing her vegetable soup when she was
feeling poorly to lending her French designer fashions.
"I have so many nice things to say about her," Horton says. "She's
just so darn good-looking people have the wrong impression."
Herring says her parents were very comfortable, but not like some
of their neighbors, who were very rich. And while the Johnsons
spoiled their only child, there was a dab of tough love mixed in.
She was 11 or 12, for example, when she looked down and saw a snake
wrapped around her leg. She screamed for her father, who told her
to shake it off and kill it with a hoe.
"I thought my daddy would come to my rescue," she says. "But I had
to rescue myself."
Herring attended the University of Texas at Austin, where she had
friends and boyfriends at her beck and call. When a boyfriend
offered to take an economics class for her, she accepted. He
mastered the course work, and she pursued other interests.
Unfortunately, when it came time to take the final, that boyfriend
had a scheduling conflict.
Herring took the test and made an A. "He tutored me for two days
straight," she says. "It taught me I have a little of a
photographic memory and a very analytical mind."
Also, she says, she learned not to cheat.
Herring dropped out of UT at 20 to marry Houstonian developer
Robert King, whom she'd met at a debutante ball. In that era, many
bright women didn't set goals for themselves; they set goals for
their husbands.
"I was really engaged to somebody else," she says, "but Bob King
decided he was going to marry me, and he followed me around and
courted my mother and grandmother. I thought anybody who loved me
that much would make a wonderful partner."
And he did, Herring says. "But we were just too young when we got
married, and we grew apart. He liked to live a very quiet life."
Herring craved excitement.
Ironically, it was the quiet King who wanted to give his wife a
30th-birthday party -- and stories from that night of excess in
1959 live on even now. Suffice it to say the theme was "Roman
orgy" -- all guests came in costumes, there was a slave auction, a
Christian was burned at the stake and underage boys poured drinks.
Herring was the first of many to be thrown into the pool fully
clothed, and some guests walked home from the King mansion after
sunrise the next day.
The party might have been forgotten if it hadn't been for Life
magazine photographers and the local press recording every detail.
Herring's mother was not happy. Herring herself is still
embarrassed. She also wonders if it's not time to forget about
parties that took place almost 50 years ago.
She's a different, more serious person now.
Mover and shaker
Herring was in her early 30s when she appeared on a noontime TV
talk show to raise money for her great-aunt's favorite charity. The
next thing she knew she herself was the host of the noon show.
It was Herring's first serious job, and she took it, she says,
thinking that a challenging professional life might save her
marriage. It didn't work that way, but her TV career lasted 15
years. By the time she quit because she was overcommitted, most
Houstonians felt they knew her. Many loved her.
She called her guests "darlin'."
"I wanted them to look good and be successful, and they knew that
and just relaxed. They'd tell me anything."
Guests included high profile folks - kings, queens, movie stars. At
the time, a less well-known interview subject was interior designer
Bill Stubbs.
"She was such an encourager," says Stubbs, who was in his 20s then.
"She had that dewy-faced innocence, and she would bat her pretty
eyes and make me feel like I was the only man in the world."
Ron Stone, Herring's friend and mentor at Channel 11, remembers The
Joanne King Show well. He says a lot of sweet things, then sums up:
"Joanne learned on the air and turned out to be quite good at what
she did - even if she was over the top most of the time."
After Herring's divorce from King, she was a single working mother
and broke, by River Oaks standards, for the first time in her life.
She struggled to take care of her boys, Beau and Robin, do her job
and pay her bills.
But she wasn't single long. After five dates with millionaire
oilman Robert Herring, she felt she'd found a true partner, someone
who valued her intelligence and business acumen as well as her
beauty and social skills.
After their marriage, the Herrings made dozens of trips to the
Middle East to make oil and gas deals. During the plane rides,
Robert would fill her with facts, figures, persuasive arguments.
Inevitably, there would be social events, and the men would swarm
Joanne. While they were swooning, she was selling.
But the foreigners weren't fools. They recognized her analytical
mind, they sought her advice, they took her calls. At a time when
doing deals with other women was out of the question, they worked
with her. And in the twin worlds of diplomacy and oil and gas,
those relationships and connections were priceless.
By the late '70s, Herring had three volunteer positions in the
Middle East -- she was honorary consul to Pakistan and honorary
consul to Morocco, and she also helped poor Pakistani villagers
redesign their handmade crafts -- everything from rugs and fabric
to copper and silver goods -- to appeal to Western consumers. Along
the way, she enlisted influential friends in the fashion industry
to design dresses using Pakistani materials.
Herring says the projects were financial successes. But she
intended a fair share of the money to go to the villagers. When
bureaucrats and middlemen started skimming off the profits, she quit.
Robert Herring was the anchor, the mentor, the cheerleader Joanne
had always wanted, but they were together only nine years. In early
1980, he found out he had terminal lung cancer. She stayed by his
side until his death in '81, though she did break away for one
dangerous trip.
Herring was deeply concerned that Americans were dismissing a
conflict in Afghanistan as intramural, tribal warfare. The
president of Pakistan told her Afghan soldiers were actually
fighting well-armed, well-trained Soviet soldiers and that the
Soviet plan was to use Afghanistan as a steppingstone to domination
in the Middle East, then the world.
Convinced American security was at risk, Herring decided to form a
small crew, sneak into Afghanistan and film the Soviets in action.
Which she did.
Herring, the former talk-show host, interviewed the tribal
warriors, and Robin King, her son and then a professional combat
photographer, filmed Soviet helicopter attacks. Charles Fawcett, an
experienced filmmaker, put it all together. They showed the movie
to every influential politician who would sit still, including
Charlie Wilson.
Back then Wilson was a congressman from Lufkin and regularly in
trouble for lifestyle habits (lots of women, lots of alcohol) he
seemed unable to control. But he, like Herring, believed that the
Soviets' long-term goal was to destroy the United States, and he
fell in love with the beautiful crusader and staunch anti-communist.
Over the next few years, Wilson helped channel billions of dollars
in American aid to the war effort. He was motivated by Herring,
whom he hoped to marry, and his own patriotic zeal. The Soviets
soon found themselves outmanned, outgunned and outsmarted.
Today, Wilson lives with his wife, Barbara, in Lufkin. When he
reflects back, he is proud of his congressional career, proud of
his contributions in Afghanistan and unconcerned about past foibles.
He and Herring call each other once in a while to talk.
"Joanne," he observes, "is a very difficult woman to say no to."
From his back porch, Wilson looks out on birds flitting about in
the woods, and he enjoys explaining how Herring manipulated some of
the most powerful members of Congress.
It goes without saying -- at times Herring also manipulated him.
Their affair died a natural death in the mid-'80s, and Herring
married Lloyd Davis. The millionaire Houstonian owned Fisk
Electric, one the biggest electrical contracting companies in the
country.
"He's a fine man, and we had a lot of fun," Herring says. "But I
had the same problems with Lloyd as I did with Bob King. He wanted
to live a very secluded life."
And she did not.
They divorced in 2005.
Says Herring, "We still have a very cordial relationship. But I
figured 20 years of marriage was enough."
So much to do ...
Author and journalist George Crile took 15 years to research, write
and publish his book Charlie Wilson's War. It was the inspiration
for the movie that has Herring so excited - and worried.
Most of the time, of course, Herring is busy with other projects.
She lists just a few of them to make it clear how she spends her time.
These days she funds a group of 100 single mothers in five counties
who need help with everything from personal hygiene to money
management. She's involved in starting a camp for foster children.
She helps support a group that keeps at-risk children in school.
She works on the problem of high school dropouts, too.
Her list of projects involving children and families goes on and
on. She still supports the local arts. In all, she gives away about
20 percent of her income, which comes from investments and real
estate. She's not rich, she says, but she's pleased to share what
she has.
She also spends time with her sons and business partners, Beau and
Robin.
"Her essence is her energy," Robin King says. "She doesn't
procrastinate."
Which is to say she's a woman in a hurry.
A few weeks ago she needed minor surgery, and she was supposed to
stay in the hospital four days. She stayed less than half that
time, then put on her street clothes and walked out. What really
upset her was that she couldn't drive.
Sometimes, like everybody, Herring loses perspective. Sometimes she
worries as much about a newspaper story as about a Hollywood movie.
She leaves a reporter with a short story.
Three salesmen were in such a hurry to catch a plane home that they
knocked over a young woman's apple stand. They didn't stop to help,
they just rushed on board and started buckling their seat belts.
Then one of the salesman came to his senses. He told his buddies
goodbye, he got off the plane, and he went to help the young woman
restore order at the apple stand.
That's when he realized she was blind, her boss had doubts she
could really do the job, and she was working to pay for her
education. He also realized that some of the fruit was bruised
after the fall, and he paid her $40 for the damage.
That's what drives Herring, perhaps.
She says softly: "I've spilled some apples."
...
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