This summer has been hard on her Kennedy kin. Cousin Patrick Kennedy launched into a drunken outburst at a political fund-raiser. Cousin Kerry Kennedy Cuomo is divorcing after her husband outed her in the tabloids for infidelity. A new book with allegations about cousin John F. Kennedy Jr.’s rocky personal life stung the family. And now this: a picture of a youthful Schwarzenegger with a naked woman has already appeared on the Internet. “She didn’t want to be the next person to go through the wringer,” says a family friend.
But politics and public service are the Kennedy credo. A recent visitor to the couple’s palatial compound reports a series of Andy Warhol paintings of Shriver on one wall offset by two framed photos at opposite ends of the living room. One is “To Maria from Uncle Jack,” the other “To Maria from her boyfriend Lyndon.” It’s a way to keep history around her–history that’s both political and personal.
Shriver was born in Chicago in 1955 and raised, along with four brothers, on the family estate in Maryland. In 1977, NBC anchor Tom Brokaw introduced Shriver to Schwarzenegger at a charity tennis tournament at Ethel Kennedy’s home. Shriver liked Arnold’s blunt way of speaking, his drive–“I was fascinated by his ability to say, ‘I don’t care what they say, I know where I’m going’,” she once told Us Weekly–and the way he could get away with saying things nobody else could. He told her mother soon after they met, “Your daughter has a great butt.” The couple wed in 1986 in the same white clapboard church in Hyannis, Mass., where her uncles were once altar boys. Caroline Kennedy was maid of honor. She and Maria are the closest of friends.
Maria’s father, Sargent Shriver, the founding director of the Peace Corps, gets credit for helping shape his son-in-law’s political views. Schwarzenegger is bright, with a lot of street smarts, but he doesn’t have an advanced education. “There were a lot of discussions over cigars,” says a friend.
The Shrivers are Kennedys without the tawdriness–“all that great taste and less scandal,” says an adviser. Maria has taken her kids to Rose Kennedy’s house, where Maria spent time as a child, but the Kennedys are Boston and she’s L.A. She’s Georgetown (class of 1977), not Harvard. She went into journalism, tackling it with gusto. Neal Shapiro, her boss at “Dateline NBC,” recalls Shriver’s climbing a ladder outside O. J. Simpson’s estate to make sure she didn’t get lost to the cameras amid the media mob. Yet after the first of her four children was born, exhausted from cross-country commuting and guilty about time away from home, she took herself off the fast track. “Maria has never defined herself strictly by career,” says Shapiro. She once postponed a prized interview with Fidel Castro because it was her eldest daughter’s first day of preschool. Charmed by her commitment, Castro rescheduled.
The question now is whether Shriver, a staunch Democrat, will help Republicans close the gender gap in the one state critical to the Democrats’ chances of winning the White House. “If she says, ‘Vote for my husband, he’s a good man and he understands your life,’ that would be huge,” says a Team Arnold adviser. Politics, after all, is in her blood.
