New Jersey has produced its share of colorful political figures, but the late Rep. Millicent Fenwick stands out. Elected to Congress in 1974 at age 64, the socially liberal Republican became an icon for her forthrightness, her patrician air and her somewhat incongruous pipe.

Fenwick even had a cartoon alter ego — the equally blue-blooded congresswoman Lacey Davenport in the “Doonesbury” strip — a feat few politicians could match.
In her new biography of Fenwick, Millicent Fenwick: My Way — a project that began as a college thesis — Washington-area writer Amy Schapiro delves into Fenwick’s life, providing a description far richer than the Lacey Davenport façade.

Millicent Hammond was born into an aristocratic New Jersey family, and spent an idyllic early childhood on the Hammonds’ Bernardsville estate. But when Millicent was five, in 1915, her parents embarked for Europe on the ill-fated Lusitania, which was torpedoed by the Germans. Her father returned; her mother perished.

This tragedy was followed a couple of years later by the arrival of a stepmother who favored her own child over Millicent and her siblings. But Millicent, clearly strong-willed even as a young girl, plunged into her life at boarding school in Virginia and, later, into the glamour of the diplomatic world when her father was named U.S. ambassador to Spain. Although she was an avid reader, her formal education ended in the middle of high school when the family moved to Spain.

In 1929, the Hammonds returned to the United States, and Millicent soon met Hugh Fenwick, who was married at the time. But, as Schapiro describes it, Hugh’s wife, Dorothy, was no impediment. Millicent made a surprise visit to Dorothy, in bed with a fever, and announced that she loved Hugh. Dorothy and Hugh were divorced in 1931, and Hugh married Millicent the following year.

Millicent Fenwick was reticent about her private life, and Schapiro describes her marriage — which produced two children but fell apart after only six years — as a “mystery to others throughout [Fenwick’s] life.”

Hugh departed for Europe in 1938, leaving financial debts. So Millicent set out in the to find a job in the Depression-era job market, minus a college — or even a high school — diploma. She ended up at Vogue, where the editors were impressed by her social connections, and by 1948 had authored the best-selling Vogue’s Book of Etiquette. In 1949 she had a mastectomy, which — in keeping with her private nature — she did not discuss.

Fenwick left Vogue in 1952 and gradually became active in local politics, as a Republican. She said the rise of Adolf Hitler in Germany led her toward a distrust of government, and toward the GOP. Civil rights grew into a passion for Fenwick, a committed member of the NAACP, and in 1958 she was named to the New Jersey Committee of the U.S. Commission on Civil Rights. In 1969 she won a state Assembly seat, and later — after a stint as director of the state’s consumer affairs division — was elected to the U.S. House, representing what was then New Jersey’s 5th District.

When Fenwick arrived in Washington in 1975, she was one of only 18 women in the House. Selected to speak that year at the annual Washington Press Club dinner, she wowed the crowd, and became one of the better-known members of Congress. A hard-working lawmaker, Fenwick often drove her young staff crazy. “Staff members were a necessary evil,” Schapiro writes. “During her first months in office, Millicent often answered the phones herself. When callers asked to speak to one of her staffers about a specific issue, Fenwick would say, ‘They are too busy. Talk to me.’”

One of Fenwick’s biggest legislative accomplishments was the creation of the so-called Helsinki Commission on human rights, based on a Fenwick proposal.

Fenwick ran for Senate in 1982, but was defeated by Democrat Frank Lautenberg. After serving as U.S. ambassador to the Rome-based United Nations Food and Agriculture Organization, she retired to New Jersey, where she died in 1992.

Schapiro, who clearly admires Fenwick, is a dogged researcher, and her book is filled with myriad details, down to the young Millicent’s grades at boarding school. The book perhaps could have used a bit more analysis amidst the narrative of Fenwick’s life, but on the other hand, it is refreshing to read a biography that is virtually free of authorial polemics.

Fenwick’s favorite song, Schapiro writes, was Frank Sinatra’s “My Way,” and Schapiro — who plays on that name in the subtitle of her book — has succeeded in creating an entertaining portrait of a unique American politician.