Practically everyone thinks they’re divorced. But John and Maureen Dean are married. Still. About to celebrate their 16th anniversary.
Watergate didn’t bust them up. They survived the hearings, survived John’s year in prison, even managed to survive working together during their “starting over” phase.
“It wasn’t easy working together,” confides Maureen over lunch at Miami’s Inter-Continental Hotel. “I’m a chief and he’s a chief.”
She pauses for emphasis — Maureen wants the reporter to get this down. She likes to think of herself as a strong, independent woman, and she likes others to think of her that way, too.
“Anyway, John and I have a truly wonderful life together now,” she continues. “We live in Beverly Hills, John’s doing well as an investment banker, I just retired from a stockbrokerage so we have plenty of time to take long walks together, go on bike rides, watch videos …”
How humdrum. How unlike the couples in her novel.
They were both aware of the sexual tension between them. One night after Polly had gone to bed, they sat in the kitchen trying tipsily to make French toast. Suddenly his mouth was covering hers. It was as though every nerve in her body was exposed.
Washington Wives is Dean’s second book. (Her first, Mo Dean: A Woman’s View of Watergate, hardly counts. She didn’t write it, says she hasn’t even read it.)
Dean is trying to drum up sales with a whirlwind 11-city tour, Miami being the second stop. Her book hit the stores last year and reportedly sold well, but now — just in time for the election season — it has been reissued in paperback.
And it’s a potboiler, virtually bubbling over with sex, greed, sex, ambition, sex, politics and more sex. The plot — such as it is — revolves around the death of the president’s chief of staff and the lusty scramble that leads to the naming of a successor. Surprisingly hot stuff, coming from the Ice Queen of the Watergate hearings.
Remember those endless hearings in 1972 and ’73. Remember Maureen sitting like a wax doll behind her husband as he described the dirty deeds of the Nixon White House.
She never moved. She didn’t want to give the photographers lying at her feet, practically staring up her skirt, a reason to take her picture.
Now she poses for the cameras. Inclining her head ever so slightly toward the photographer sent to capture this moment with Mo.
It is hard to believe that 15 years have gone by, that she is 43 years old.
Dressed in red silk and diamonds, her platinum hair pulled back in a loose ponytail, she is the perfect wife, the nice Catholic girl, the middle-class daughter.
Not someone who would write tawdry bodice-rippers.
“Do you really want it?” he taunted softly. Of course this is what she wanted. (Making love) in the White House was like joining the mile-high club, except the membership was far more exclusive. And Jan was excited by being in a special class of anything.
Laughingly, Dean says there’s a bit of her in all her characters. “I wanted to reveal another side of myself. I wanted to shock people a little, let them know that despite what the press said during Watergate that blood really does pump through my veins.”
Dean began writing the book nearly four years ago after being approached by Arbor House. The publishing company just wanted her name, but Dean balked after she read the first draft, written by a ghostwriter.
“It was terrible. Not at all sympathetic to women,” says Dean, who by-the- by considers herself a feminist. “So, I insisted I be allowed to try my hand.”
Writing was a whole lot tougher than she expected. “I guess because I was never really a Washington wife — Watergate broke shortly after John and I married — so I had to rely on my imagination.”
Judging from the book, that was not a problem.
“The prince wants a beautiful blonde transvestite sent over to Blair House for tea this afternoon,” Jan repeated, trying to throw some humor into her tone.
No, Washington Wives is not classic literature. But you have to remember that not everybody can write such stuff. Most people would be too embarrassed.
“Oh I was embarrassed sometimes,” Dean says. “Whenever I’d get stuck writing a love scene and needed John to read it over, I’d just hand him the manuscript and go into another room. I couldn’t watch.”
Certainly, though, it would have been something to see — serious, button- down, bespectacled John Dean, former counsel to President Richard Nixon, reading … The water jet turned his hair into a shiny black hood, plastering it to his forehead and into his eyes. He reached for her as she stepped into the tub and pulled her against the matted hair of his chest.
Dean says her husband was a great help during the 2 1/2-year ordeal that spawned Washington Wives. “It’s John that is the perfect spouse,” Maureen says. “Not the other way around.”
Maureen was 24, twice married and once a widow when she met John. (She had been married briefly to a Dallas Cowboys scout who, it turned out, had never divorced his previous wife. Following that domestic disaster, she wed her high school sweetheart, who was killed in an auto accident two years later.) She was living in California when John looked her up on the advice of a friend.
They fell almost instantly in love.
Within six weeks Maureen moved to Washington to be near John. And for the next year, they more or less lived together.
Finally John proposed and they were married, four months after the break-in at the Democratic National Committee headquarters in the Watergate.
It was Maureen’s idea to return to California after the hearings, after John was disbarred.
“I thought it would be a good place to start over,” she says. “And we made friends pretty quickly, despite that fact that initially we were treated as curiosities.”
Pretty soon, Watergate gave way to Abscam and the Deans became old news. “That was a real relief,” Maureen says. “Although we did feel something of a letdown. Not because the spotlight had moved off us, but because Abscam was such clear evidence that no one learned anything from Watergate.”
That fact made Maureen angry — still does — but she had little time to dwell on real-life political shenanigans. She had to concentrate on the fictional tomfoolery.
“I had started a new career as a stockbroker, signed for the book and didn’t know how to use a word processor. I thought I’d never be able to deliver. And if it hadn’t been for John and some very dear friends …”
Such as Judith Krantz, Sidney Sheldon and Stephen King.
“They gave me a lot of encouragement,” Dean says. “And of course, Los Angeles was a good place to be writing. All I had to do was listen to get inspired. Everybody out there has this perception that Washington is a very fast-paced, sexy city.”
Certainly, no one’s mind will be changed by Washington Wives. Or by the book Dean has in the works. Although she promises it will be a “more substantive” work, Dean says it will be just as “politically and sexually charged” as Washington Wives.
Suddenly it dawned on Sinclare that she and her girlfriends had a tremendous role in this “man’s town.” Maybe it was time for a sex scandal …
Who would have guessed that beneath Maureen Dean’s Stepford wife exterior there beats the heart of Jackie Collins?
