Private person in public role - Chicago first lady Maggie Daley has walked a fine line between guarded and outgoing, taking on several public roles in

Private person in public role - Chicago first lady Maggie Daley has walked a fine line between guarded and outgoing, taking on several public roles in the city
By Rick Kogan
Copyright © 2010, Chicago Tribune
June 27, 2010


Long a prominent player in the drama of big-city politics, Maggie Daley remains by her determined choice an elusive star.

That did not change last week when Chicago's first lady made a rare formal speech to the City Club of Chicago about her nonprofit initiative After School Matters. She was eager to talk about programs for teens, but not about herself. And not about her battle with cancer.

At one point in front of the crowd of 320 — with 500 more left on a waiting list — Maggie Daley's crutches toppled to the stage. "It's OK," she said. "We'll just leave them there."

When she departed, a reporter asked, "How are you feeling?" She flashed a smile and said, "Just fine, thank you." And that was it.

Self-revelation comes naturally to many political wives, but not to Maggie Daley. And so the air remains heavy with speculation and rumor, especially about her illness and how it might influence the mayor's decision whether to run for re-election next year.

The first lady, who is well beyond the average survival time for someone with metastatic breast cancer, has maintained both a public schedule and an upbeat demeanor in the eight years since the diagnosis.

She is never far from the mayor's mind. He choked up when talking about her at a June 3 event celebrating the Loop theater district. A few days later, asked by a reporter about After School Matters being paid almost $15 million by the city in 2009, the mayor snapped: "It's a charity for teenagers in Chicago. Are you questioning my wife now?"

Maggie Daley's dealings with the news media have been less frequent — and far less contentious.

This month, she emerged on crutches from an elevator at the Cultural Center, dressed in red and looking healthy. Seeing a Tribune reporter, she flashed the smile that more than one friend describes as "genuine and sparkling."

"So nice to see you," she said, though she had previously turned down requests for an interview (as did her husband), saying through a representative, "I don't want to talk about myself."

She had just spent time upstairs with Lois Weisberg, the city's commissioner of cultural affairs and a close friend for decades.

"Didn't she look wonderful?" Weisberg said. "I understand why she doesn't want to talk about herself and Rich. She is a very private person. Even her friends who have nothing but good things to say won't say anything for print."

The few who will talk on the record marvel at the Daleys' love affair.

"They thrill at traveling, love movies and often laugh at the same things," said television and film producer Donna La Pietra, the longtime companion of TV's Bill Kurtis. "These are two people who watch over each other, without being cloying or dysfunctionally protective."

"They respect one another," said Steppenwolf Theatre artistic director Martha Lavey, "and it's vivid in the way they listen to each other, the way that they include one another in conversations, in the way they look at one another."

"Have you ever seen them dance?" Weisberg said. "They just love to dance together."

The most influential first lady in the city's history met her future husband at a 1970 Christmas party. Richard M. Daley was a lawyer of what many considered modest ability but golden pedigree, the fourth of seven children and eldest son of the mayor of Chicago. She was Margaret A. Corbett, the youngest child and only girl among the seven offspring of Patrick L. and Elizabeth Corbett of Mount Lebanon, a Pittsburgh suburb where her father owned an auto parts dealership. She was in Chicago working as a sales representative for Xerox Learning Systems.

They were married — he 29, she 28 — on March 25, 1972, in Pennsylvania and honeymooned in Europe. While in Rome they joined some 10,000 other people for a general papal audience. But the fix was in from Chicago, and Pope Paul VI descended from his throne, walked up to the couple and congratulated them on their wedding. "I wish you a long and happy life," said the pontiff.

For the first years of her marriage, Maggie Daley assumed the role of political wife. Her husband won election to the Illinois Senate in 1972 and was appointed by his father to head the powerful 11th Ward Democratic Organization.

Daughter Nora was born in 1973, and son Patrick arrived nearly two years later. By 1976, the young family was sharing its Bridgeport home with two dogs named Casey and Murphy and dealing with the death in December of Richard J. Daley.

In 1978 the couple's third child, Kevin, was born with spina bifida, a condition in which the spine is not closed. Though busy in the legislature downstate and also running for Cook County state's attorney — an office he would win in 1980 — Richard Daley flew home almost every night. But Maggie bore the brunt of the caretaking.

Kevin died March 1, 1981.

A decade after his death, Maggie Daley told the Tribune: "I like to think that the experience with Kevin affected us in a good way. We learned to appreciate what's really important and to ignore the superfluous. Kevin taught us to take each day and enjoy each day and each other."

But the wound has not healed.

"Over the last few years, I have seen Rich cry about his son Kevin, who died so many years ago," says Catherine O'Connell, a singer and former St. Patrick's Day parade queen who has known the Daleys for years.

As the Daley children were growing up — a daughter, Elizabeth, known as Lally, was born in 1983 — the family enjoyed field trips to the zoo or to movies. But as Mrs. Daley said, "We're as likely to play Monopoly with the kids as anything else."

Maggie Daley assumed an increasingly active role in the civic and cultural life of the city, serving on the auxiliary board of the Art Institute and the Women's Board of the Rehabilitation Institute of Chicago. After her husband was elected mayor in 1989, many other organizations sought the first lady's help.

In those endeavors, one intimate said, Maggie Daley proved herself to be "a skilled organizer, forward thinker and total professional."

Along with Weisberg, she became the driving force behind the Gallery 37 arts program, which began in 1991 and for more than a decade nurtured thousands of children and employed hundreds of local artists. It became a model for similar programs in London, Australia and a dozen U.S. cities. In 2000, it morphed into After School Matters.

Most of what she has done professionally has been volunteer work, though Maggie Daley collected paychecks of $100,000 in 2006 and $50,000 in 2007 as a consultant for the Academy of Achievement, a Washington-based nonprofit, scouting locations for the academy's annual conferences of outstanding graduate students. She also has held paid positions as chairwoman of the Education Committee of the Terra Foundation, which operated the Terra Museum of American Art, and as president of Pathways Awareness Foundation, a nonprofit organization that advocates for the inclusion of disabled children in mainstream education and recreation programs.

Her life has not been without controversy. Some of the mayor's detractors label her "the velvet hammer" and claim that she wields considerable influence at City Hall. They point to the awarding of O'Hare International Airport retailing contracts to two of her closest friends. They also say she persuaded her husband to adopt various beautification projects by, as one critic phrased it, "making the mayor do what she wants him to do."

She once explained: "We don't talk about politics a lot. But we do talk about government, the kinds of things that could be done to make people's lives better."

Their marriage has been a study in contrasts.

"She has a lot of charm that comes on right away," Weisberg said. "And he's shy. When they are scheduled to be at an event together, the first thing he does when he gets there is look for her and if she's not there he will kind of move to a corner. Oh, he's so shy. But when he sees her he just lights up and she has this way of making him endearing to other people."

The Daleys have constructed a lifestyle in which they are public people with a remarkable level of privacy. Part of that lifestyle-shaping was their move from Bridgeport to a $440,000 home in the Central Station development on the Near South Side in 1993.

For many years now, the Daleys have guarded their Sundays as family time, sometimes spending the day at their vacation home in Grand Beach, Mich. La Pietra recalled Maggie Daley at an event for the Rehabilitation Institute when the subject of Sundays came up.

"It was a Sunday afternoon and I was standing with Maggie and she told me that this was probably going to be the last Sunday appearance they would be making," La Pietra said. "She told me that she realized the importance of having time together for themselves and with their children and extended family members, and this is a commitment they have kept."

On June 7, 2002, it was announced that Mrs. Daley had been diagnosed with metastatic breast cancer, meaning that her breast cancer had spread to other parts of her body. Daley praised his wife as the strongest family member, saying, "She's doing very well. ... She's very positive. Unfortunately, there are many, many people out there who have it. (Maggie) is very strong, very independent."

Details of her treatments have been few. In December, the mayor announced that his wife would use a wheelchair because she was undergoing radiation treatment for a bone tumor in her leg. In March, she underwent surgery for nearly two hours in order to place a titanium rod in her right leg to help support the bones, and has mostly been walking with the aid of crutches since then.

She remains, her friends said, as calmly optimistic as she was at the outset of this medical journey, when she said: "You pick up and you move on. ... I'm not alone here. (Rich and I) are a team and we're working together."

Last month, at the opening of "Tulips on the Magnificent Mile," a new tulip was named in honor of the city's first lady. "Tulipa Maggie Daley" was abloom at several locations along North Michigan Avenue. At the ceremony, she was transported back nearly four decades — "I carried tulips on my wedding day," she said. "So I do have a love affair with them" — but also thrust into a future in which "every spring I can look forward to it coming to bloom."

O'Connell, who sang at the wedding of the Daleys' daughter Nora, noted how the mayor and his wife are in touch with their mortality.

"Rich told me that he and Maggie had been talking one night," O'Connell said, "and they had promised each other that whoever was to go first, the other was to make sure that I sang at the funeral."

rkogan@tribune.com