Washington--On primary night last month, Marion Barry's new wife stood by his side at the microphone, drinking in the glory of his resurrection just as she had shared in the humiliation of his fall.
After his triumphant speech, as the ebullient mayoral candidate and his wife were ushered out by a security retinue, she broke away from the guards and made a beeline for a local columnist who had attacked Mr. Barry in print and predicted his sure defeat.
"What are you going to write now?" she shouted in what she would later describe as a spontaneous outburst she could not fight. "What are you going to write now? Well, write that you were wrong! -- that you were wrong before, you're wrong now, you're always wrong! Write that!"
Even on this most remarkable night, when the man considered an embarrassment by much of the city's white power structure had defied the odds, victory wasn't enough for Cora Masters Barry. She had a score to settle -- and when it comes to Marion Barry she always takes names.
Rough where her husband is smooth, stubborn where he is forgiving, cool where he is gregarious, the woman who has been buddies with Mr. Barry for more than 20 years and in January became his fourth wife, is the unofficial gatekeeper, the image guardian, the emotional anchor. She is the fiercest protector of the man who -- despite being caught on videotape smoking crack cocaine in 1989 -- is poised to become the District of Columbia's mayor once again.
"She is the most stabilizing, influential, determined spirit in the life of Marion Barry," says the Rev. George A. Stallings Jr., the renegade Catholic priest who is a close friend.
Sometimes called "the local Hillary" because of her active role in her husband's career, Cora is a far different political spouse than Mr. Barry's previous wife, Effi, who never wallowed in the hurly burly of politics the way Cora does.
She campaigns with her husband often, wading easily into a crowd of supporters by herself, standing on a stage at a rally with him clapping and dancing to the music, pulling aside reporters to chide them about their coverage, telling her husband when it's time to go -- and when it's not.
At a recent campaign stop, she sat for a caricaturist who drew her in a Superwoman outfit, saying "Marion, we can win this thing." She liked the portrait.
She won't discuss what specific role she will play in a Barry administration, except to say she would like to focus on "empowering" the District's residents and bringing the racially divided city together. But if her role in the campaign is any indication, she will be a powerful player.
"She views herself as a major political adviser," says Mark Plotkin, an analyst of D.C. politics. "She will have a lot to say about who serves in government."
Mr. Barry calls the strong-willed 49-year-old political science professor his "helpmate" -- "very bright and beautiful and tough."
Just how tough?
"I have two sons," says her mother, Isabell Masters, "and they were more afraid of her than of me."
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The renovation -- of just about everything in Cora Masters Barry's new life -- is still going on.
This summer, the Barrys moved into a beige clapboard house in Anacostia, the city's poorest section, where Mr. Barry began mounting his comeback in 1992 by winning a seat on the D.C. City Council. They have been knocking down walls and tearing up carpeting, stripping paint and refinishing floors, installing French doors and bedroom skylights, ever since.
Today, men are working on the basement, which Mrs. Barry hopes will become a refuge for her husband's 14-year-old son, Christopher, who lives with them. The drilling and banging is so ferocious that, upstairs, a large photograph of a beaming Marion Barry on the campaign trail is knocked over on a shelf.
"It's nothing like it was before," Mrs. Barry, sitting on the porch, says of the house.
She could say the same thing about her husband's political renovation, which will be complete if, as expected, he wins a fourth term as mayor on Nov. 8.
Mrs. Barry, a professor at the University of the District of Columbia who had her own brush with scandal and the law in the late 1980s, has been at the center of both his political and personal make-over, lending a spiritual direction to his life that resonated with voters.
A mother of two grown daughters, divorced from her first husband in 1987, she says her friendship with Marion Barry -- whom she met at a campaign event in the early 1970s when the civil rights activist was taken with her big Afro -- ebbed and flowed over the years.
"I've always been a person who, if Marion wanted the truth he called, and if he didn't he wouldn't," she says, puffing on Benson & Hedges cigarettes, which she has vowed to give up after the election.
She worked on his campaigns and eventually named him the godfather of her first-born daughter. In 1980, Mayor Barry appointed Cora Wilds to the D.C. Boxing and Wrestling Commission, a post she would be forced to step down from seven years later when she pleaded guilty in federal court to a theft charge for double-billing the city for $2,680 in travel expenses.
Although she admitted guilt, repaid the money and spent one year on probation, she believes her prosecution was part of an effort by federal authorities to damage Mr. Barry and his administration.
Though she was no longer part of his administration, she always remained part of his inner circle, his party circle. Friends say they were so close that the mayor would bring some of his women friends to her house. She was no stranger to his private frailties and temptations.
So on the night of Jan. 18, 1990, when a news flash interrupted "L.A. Law," her favorite show at the time, she somehow knew what the news anchor was about to say.
Marion Barry had been arrested on a drug charge, busted in a hotel room in the company of cocaine and a woman not his wife.
A loyal friend
Angry at the government's sting operation -- as she was at its prosecution of her two years earlier -- Cora was a frequent visitor at Mr. Barry's trial, sitting next to his then-wife, Effi, who also had become a friend. When Effi (who could not be reached for this story) left him, Cora took over his financial and personal affairs.
"I didn't step in," she says. "I just never stepped out."
And, indeed, many of the mayor's friends would have little to do with him. She explains her loyalty in simple terms: friendship. "I don't understand friendship that's only for good times," she says.
Some who know her say she always admired Marion Barry, maybe always loved him.
"She always wanted to be important in his life," says Howard Croft, head of urban studies at UDC. "She always wanted to be close enough so she could fill the vacuum."
Convicted of one misdemeanor count of drug possession, Mr. Barry spent six months in federal prison. During that time, the future Mrs. Barry visited often and spoke to him daily by phone.
"I was keeping him focused on 'there's a reason for everything,' " she says. "I always believe that something positive comes out of everything if you just wait."
While Marion Barry was in prison, something else happened. Her friendship for him turned into love.
"He began to develop into the type of person I could fall in love with," she explains. "I saw him evolve into a more spiritual person. I saw his value system grow. A lot of things that were at the root of his problems began to reveal themselves to him -- his need to be liked and please people."
Taking charge
When Mr. Barry was released from a federal prison near Johnstown, Pa., on April 23, 1992, she was there -- with a bus caravan of 300 supporters that she had organized to welcome him back.
Politically astute, she choreographed the day so that Mr. Barry would quietly slip out of prison and to a nearby hotel before dawn, so TV cameras would film him emerging from the hotel, looking fit and sharp in a dark gray suit with an African kente cloth draped around his neck.
Her loyalty and support was "profound" to Mr. Barry, says Rock Newman, a millionaire who manages former heavyweight champion Riddick Bowe and is one of Mrs. Barry's best friends. "That somebody stayed there through it all and was not judgmental and was supportive -- that in and of itself was profound. He felt a protectiveness in that kind of friendship. And at some point it leaped over into loveship."
When they married this year, in a long, spirited African-style ceremony at the Baptist church they attend near their home, skeptics believed it was another move to expedite a Barry political comeback.
Even close friends were dubious. "They are very different and I had concerns for both of them because I saw them as so different," says Mr. Newman.
But Mrs. Barry says she had no doubts -- about Mr. Barry's love for her, his recovery from alcohol and drug addictions or his ability to remain faithful.
"I know he loves me. And he loves himself. A lot of the womanizing was connected to his trying to get affirmation from without rather than within," she says. "He doesn't need all that now."
Mrs. Barry's mother says her daughter is not the type to stay around for very long if her husband begins to stray. "It behooves him," Mrs. Masters says, "to stay on the right track."
Contrary to popular belief about the aggressive, ambitious woman Mr. Barry married, the new Mrs. Barry insists she was not desperate for her husband to run for mayor again.
She and her husband, joined by Mr. Newman and the Rev. Willie Wilson, the Barrys' pastor -- a group of people "who share a belief in the power of the God force," says Mr. Newman -- began to discuss it early in the year. But Mrs. Barry says she was still unsure.
One night, when she was leaving her husband's city council office with him after he had been working late, homeless people, who were allowed to sleep in city government buildings during the winter, approached him. "They would get up off their cots and ask him to run," she says.
Their pleadings did not grab her soul, she says, until another one of Mr. Barry's spiritual advisers, the late Rev. Tom Skinner, a Maryland pastor and motivational speaker, told her that "God speaks through the poor."
"And it made sense, it all clicked," says Mrs. Barry. "All those great signs I was waiting for, like a bolt of lightning, I realized was not necessarily how God worked."
She insisted that the campaign maintain a spiritual course, that it be about redemption and forgiveness and, most of all, "empowering people."
"So what do you do?" she says. "You register them. You get them to the polls."
In an effective get-out-the-vote effort, Mr. Newman, driving around town in his gleaming white convertible Rolls Royce with the vanity tags "Rock 1," paid people $1 for every person they persuaded to register to vote. The campaign was a spinoff of a "Funds for Guns" effort he and Riddick Bowe launched last January in Washington to get gun owners to turn in their weapons.
And Mrs. Barry would not allow the campaign to respond to negative attacks on Mr. Barry. "I knew that every force of negativity was coming against Marion," she says. "But I also knew that the Bible said if God is for you, it's more than the whole world against you."
Mrs. Barry says she isn't sure she could successfully run someone else's political campaign. But somehow, with her insistence on spiritual and Afrocentric themes and her focus on voter registration, she had a handle on a strategy that would work for a fallen leader in the anxious and beleaguered, racially crackling Washington, D.C. of 1994.
On primary night, she was soaking in the tub of their hotel suite when she heard Rock Newman pounding on the door and yelling, "We got it! We got it!" She says she never doubted it.
She got dressed, hugged her husband and they all sat down together to write the words Marion Barry would deliver later that night. There was no question about how he would begin:
"Amazing Grace, how sweet the sound that saved a wretch like me."
The early years
Born in Oklahoma, Cora Masters was raised with her three
sisters and two brothers in predominantly white neighborhoods -- which the family often integrated -- in Pasadena, Calif. Her strength, she says, comes from her mother, who taught school, received her doctorate at age 68 and has run for president three times after a "divine revelation" told her to. Her spirituality comes from her brother, Thomas, a minister in Florida who started preaching at age 6 when he traveled the country known as the "Wonder Boy Preacher."
She attended Lincoln University and then Texas Southern University, before moving to Washington in 1970 and earning a master's degree in urban studies at Howard University.
It was in college in Texas in the 1960s that she had a racial awakening, she says, reading everything she could find about her black identity and heritage. "It changed me forever," she says.
She describes herself as strongly Afrocentric, wearing African attire since her college days as Mr. Barry does on occasion, and attending with him Union Temple Baptist Church, a large popular church where Rev. Wilson preaches before a mural of a black Christ and 12 black apostles.
She believes her Afrocentrism is behind the perception -- the misperception, she says -- that she is anti-white and anti-Semitic.
"That's directly contradictory to my spirituality," she says. "I don't think it [the perception] comes from anything other than just being Afrocentric. And I think people don't understand Afrocentricity. They think because you love yourself, love your history, love your culture, love your people, that there's no room to love anybody else. And that is just not the way it is."
Those who know Mrs. Barry say they've never seen her display any bigotry.
VTC "There are criticisms you can make of Cora. That one is an unfair one," says Mr. Croft. "Given that she's not particularly diplomatic, and given that she's not someone who, upon first meeting, you would call warm, she's an easy target."
Mr. Newman says it is true, however, that she is less tolerant than her husband. "For those white people who are unforgiving (of Mr. Barry), who just, no matter how much of an olive branch he extends, they just keep slamming his hand in the door, Marion has the kind of patience that he will still make the effort.
"Cora wants unity in the city, but she is less tolerant of having her hand slammed in the door. If she makes the effort and you don't respond, she will say, 'OK, you live your life and I'm going to live mine. You don't need me and I don't need you.' "
And then there is the matter of controversial black nationalist leader Louis Farrakhan, whose photo is among the many in the Barrys' den. When Mr. Farrakhan spoke in Washington last year, Mrs. Barry and Mr. Newman sat in the front row.
She makes no apologies for her support of the Nation of Islam leader -- who has been accused of anti-Semitic rhetoric but whose message of self-help appeals to many African-Americans -- saying the black community sees him as "someone who loves African-Americans."
She believes if the Nation of Islam and the Jewish community would sit down and talk, Jewish leaders "would see a lot of evolution in him like they did in Malcolm X."
But Mrs. Barry is concerned enough about perceptions of her that she asked a friend in the predominantly white, affluent part of town to set up coffee chats with women there -- "Conversations with Cora," they've been called -- so people can get to know her.
"It's in Cora's interest," says Mr. Croft, "for people to see she's not the grizzly bear."
She agrees, in fact, that her bark is worse than her bite. And believes that, if she comes across as a ferocious protector, it's because "that's the way women are, period. Wives tend to be a lot more caring and insightful than their husbands."
If she becomes first lady of the city, she says she would like to continue her sessions with women, calling them "Further Conversations with Cora." They would be focused on everything from child care to racial harmony.
"She wants to be first lady of D.C.," says Mr. Croft. "It's another jewel in the crown for her."
But more importantly, he says, "It's the completion of a circle, an ending that Greek tragedies don't ever get. In November, if Marion wins, it will be his final vindication. And it will not just be Marion's triumph. It will also be Cora Masters Barry's triumph."