Valerie Jarrett & Desirée Rogers

From August 2000: Jarrett and Rogers, both now headed to the White House, form two-thirds of a high-profile Chicago sisterhood along with publishing heir Linda Johnson Rice. Their friendship is described in this story by Marcia Froelke Coburn. Jarrett has been named a senior adviser to Obama and Rogers is said to be in line to be White House social secretary.

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THE RISKTAKER

When she first got the idea, back in 1987, Valerie Jarrett was considered crazy by everyone who knew her. She had a law degree from the University of Michigan and was working at Sonnenschein, Carlin, Nath & Rosenthal, where she specialized in commercial real estate. Her beautiful office, on the 79th floor of the Sears Tower, had a view looking east. Yet she was unfulfilled.

“I thought, There has to be something better for me than this,” recalls Jarrett. She decided to go to work for the city of Chicago. Harold Washington had been re-elected mayor, and two close friends of hers had left big law firms to work in local government. “They said, ‘Try it for a year—you are obviously bored to tears where you are.’” She started as the deputy corporation counsel for finance and development and then, two years after Washington died and Richard M. Daley won a special election for mayor, she was named deputy chief of staff. Finally, she ran the Department of Planning and Development for four years. She quickly got over any shyness; there just wasn’t time. Besides, as she learned to say at frequent speaking engagements, government service is not for the faint of heart.

“It really isn’t,” says Jarrett. “Not at the top. You know the press; you’re fair game just because you are there. So you have to look within yourself and say, Do I have the fortitude to do this?”

She did, for eight action-packed years. “And if I had been unwilling to take a risk and try something completely different, I wouldn’t nearly be where I am today.”

That would be ensconced in the executive vice-president’s office of The Habitat Company, a premier developer and manager of residential apartments, primarily in the Chicago area. Sitting in her River North office, Jarrett is poised, soft-spoken, and intense. Dressed in an impeccably cut navy pantsuit, a white shirt with French cuffs, and a string of pearls, she looks fresh and delicate. But her friends say there is an underlying strength to Jarrett. “She was always very smart and very thoughtful,” says John Rogers, who grew up with her. One woman friend tells a story about Jarrett dropping her daughter off for a birthday party. “Valerie was obviously going to go shopping, but she took one look at the situation—there I was with a bunch of overexcited kids and the only other adult was the husband I was newly separated from—and she just stayed to smooth out the situation.”

“She has mastered the art of doing lots of things well,” says her mother, Barbara Bowman, the president of the Erikson Institute, a graduate program in child development. Perhaps there is a restlessness beneath that polished exterior, for Jarrett continues to search out new challenges.

A case in point: In addition to her position at Habitat, Jarrett is the chairman of the board of the Chicago Transit Authority—a part-time job and a full-time challenge for which she is paid $50,000 a year. The CTA has 11,000 employees and an annual operating budget of $850 million, and Jarrett has made it a point of pride to respond to every letter she receives about the CTA. “Just this morning I was reading a letter from someone who was furious about a bus driver. I mean, this person was almost too irate to write.”

So how will she handle that letter?

“I send it to the appropriate department to get relevant information. Then I will either write back or sometimes even call on the phone, if they include their number. I get a kick out of calling people and saying, ‘This is the chairman of the CTA and I have your letter here.’ People usually say, ‘Oh, my God. I was having such a bad day when I wrote you.’ I have had the most interesting conversations with people this way, and some of them have come up with very good ideas.”

Jarrett was born in Iran, where her parents had moved in 1955, when the shah was trying to Westernize health care. Her father, James Bowman, was a physician who helped start a hospital there. In 1960, the family moved to England for a year and then back to Chicago. Her father worked for the University of Chicago Hospitals; her mother helped found the Erikson Institute.

At the Lab School in Hyde Park, Val- erie became friends with Linda Johnson. “Valerie was always very centered,” Rice says, “even at a young age.” At 15, Val-erie attended a prep school in Massachusetts and then went to Stanford University, where she received her B.A. in psychology in 1978. Three years later, she graduated from the University of Michigan Law School. Back in Chicago, she settled into her unsatisfying law career, then married William Jarrett, a physician and the son of the journalist Vernon Jarrett. They had a daughter, Laura, who is now 14. The Jarretts divorced in 1988, and four years later William died at the age of 40 of a rare rheumatological condition.

As a single parent, Jarrett began to reconsider government service. “It’s never too early to start thinking about tuition,” she says. But the years in government had boosted her self-confidence.

Not that her current job is a piece of cake. “We face some very tough issues here,” she says. Certainly one of them involves public housing. In 1987, The Habitat Company was appointed by a federal judge to step in where the Chicago Housing Authority had failed—in developing family public housing units. Along with luxury high-rises, Habitat now builds all those units. That is one of the strange twists in Jarrett’s life. Her maternal grandfather was Robert Taylor, the former head of the Chicago Housing Authority and the person for whom the South Side public housing towers were named. “It’s funny because he was into housing,” she says, “and now, many years later, here I am. Another irony is that he resigned from the CHA in frustration because he was unable to get elected officials to go along with integrating public housing into the urban landscape, and that is exactly what Habitat is doing right now. So I feel I’m continuing his legacy.”

This could be one of Jarrett’s toughest challenges. “The city wants to end up with 25,000 units of public housing,” she says. “Well, how do you fit that back into an urban fabric where public housing has been segregated, where many people—sometimes for two or three generations—have been living in isolation, stigmatized by the rest of society? You can’t just shuffle people around like they’re deck chairs on a ship. You have to help them change their lives, and you have to give them the requisite resources to do so.”

Her proudest accomplishments so far? The work she did with the city’s Department of Planning and Development, she says: “I was just walking through the North Kenwood neighborhood last weekend, and the community looks totally different now than it did when I took over the position with the department. We were able to entice some developers to go into depressed neighborhoods, so seeing how targeting and focusing city dollars early on leads to enormous private sector investing down the line is very satisfying.” Also, she remembers working with several large companies—Tootsie Roll and Nabisco, for example—whose owners were thinking of moving them out of the city. “I can still remember going out on the factory floor and standing there when the announcement was made that these companies were staying. To see the faces of the employees who were hearing that they were not losing their jobs, that was enormously gratifying.”

Some are less enthusiastic about her tenure in city government. “I never thought of her as more than a political apparatchik,” says the political consultant Don Rose. “Not evil, certainly, but not tremendously original. More of an apologist for Daley’s plans.”

Off hours, she chauffeurs her daughter around. She counters her guilty-pleasure indulgences in ice cream with regimens from the best-selling diet book The Zone and with bouts of exercise at the East Bank Club. And then there is her friendship with Rice and Rogers. “Linda has a real ability to see all sides of a situation,” Jarrett says. “And when I’ve had a horrible day, I’ll call Desirée and say, ‘Meet me for a drink.’ I need friends I can trust to keep my confidences.”

Jarrett also values friends who cut her a little slack. Besides her two jobs, she sits on 11 boards—including those of the USG Corporation, WTTW, and the Museum of Science and Industry—so she is often insanely busy. “If Desirée calls and says it’s important, I’ll drop whatever I am doing and take that call,” she says. “But if she says it’s not important and I have a hundred phone calls to make, she’s fine with that. Other friends, from quieter times, don’t understand why I can’t get back to them immediately.” But since the friendship with Rogers and Rice operates on flextime, it continues to thrive.

Every year, for too many years, Jarrett used to tell herself that she was too busy; something simply had to give. “When I worked for the mayor, my schedule was out of my control. But I’m not in that situation anymore. I thought, If you didn’t want to do all these things, you could say no. And you’re not. So stop complaining. And overnight, I did stop. Now I think of myself as lucky—lucky to have my jobs, my friends; lucky to be involved with the organizations I’m involved in. Sometimes frazzled, but still lucky.”

THE EMPIRE EXPANDER

She says that she got to the top of the Ebony tower the old-fashioned way: by paying her dues. Of course, being the only surviving child of one of the richest African American tycoons and the sole heir to his more than $350-million publishing empire didn’t hurt. “But you can’t work for John and Eunice Johnson and not pay your dues,” says Linda Johnson Rice. “That dog won’t hunt here.”

Today Rice, a woman of easy charm, occupies a ninth-floor office at the Johnson Publishing Company, a privately held family business that publishes the phenomenally profitable black-oriented magazines Ebony and Jet. Her title of president and chief operating officer was bestowed in 1987, two days after she graduated from Northwestern University with an M.M. degree. The scale of her office, like much in Rice’s existence, is larger than life: Windows frame a view of the lake, Grant Park, and the city’s skyline. An aromatherapy candle burns on the massive desk. The ceilings are high enough to fly a kite. The subtext is high power, but Rice is surprisingly down to earth as she discusses her domain. “My father did not work as hard as he has to turn this company over to someone he didn’t think was qualified,” she says. “Relative or not.”

The Johnson Publishing Company is the largest black-owned private company in the United States. Yet the entire operation—with 2,000 employees—retains a hands-on feel. John H. Johnson, Rice’s father, has reserved for himself the titles of publisher, chairman, and chief executive officer, along with an active role in the day-to-day decisions. Eunice, his striking wife of 58 years, is the secretary/treasurer and fashion editor. And then there is Linda, polished and vivacious, poised to take over someday. (Her brother, John Jr., died of sickle cell anemia in 1981.) Besides its magazines, the Johnson empire includes Fashion Fair Cosmetics, an extensive makeup and fragrance line sold in department stores, and the annual Ebony Fashion Fair, the world’s largest traveling fashion show.

But the magazines are the crown jewels of the company. It is estimated that Ebony, with a current circulation of 1.7 million, reaches about ten million people a month; together, Ebony and Jet go to more than half of all African American households. (Ebony’s closest rival, Essence, has a circulation of one million and reaches 7.6 million people; Johnson Publishing has a 20 percent interest in the company that owns it.) That makes Johnson Publishing a vastly influential forum.

That is a substantial amount of power to shepherd into a new century, especially given the significant changes in society since 1945, when Johnson created Ebony. Can Rice fulfill her mandate not only to manage but also to expand the empire?

“Ebony is the magazine for African Americans,” says Samir Husni, the head of the magazine journalism program at the University of Mississippi at Oxford and a recognized expert on the magazine business. “You can call it a monopoly—and, to some degree, it is hard to imagine how much more a monopoly like Johnson Publishing can expand—but the mere fact that they are still viable, with such a dedicated readership, makes Ebony a continuing force to be reckoned with.” Some employees at Johnson Publishing think that Ebony, which is modeled on Life magazine, is a little too dated for today’s market. “I’d like to see Linda decide whether we are an entertainment magazine or a newsmagazine,” says one well-placed employee. A magazine consultant adds, “Now that we have entered the 21st century, it would be nice for Ebony to get a little hipper, a little more current.”

Finding staff, Rice says, is one of her biggest challenges. “There are more African American people who are well educated now, and they have other choices for jobs—particularly in journalism—than to work for me. The world has opened up more, particularly the world of dot-coms, and it is a constant struggle for us to compete.”

Whatever future awaits the company, Rice says, she is fully prepared to face it, “thanks to my great mentors, my parents. My father has taught me that you have to look at the other person’s point of view. He has also taught me that sometimes you just have to say no, which can be very hard to do. And my mother has given me the ability to laugh at myself. She has also taught me that you cannot let things people say that you know aren’t true affect you. You simply stick to what you know you believe in.”

She was adopted as a three-month-old baby in 1958. (John Jr., also adopted, was two and a half years older.) And that beginning still shapes Rice’s approach to life. “I take nothing for granted,” she says. “Absolutely nothing. Because there, but for the grace of God, go I. Now all of my friends say that I was the one standing up in my crib, waving my arms, saying, ‘Pick me, pick me!’ But I never forgot that I am the lucky one.”

She was a curious and outgoing child. From an early age, she and her brother were allowed to romp through the offices of the Johnson Publishing Company, and she quickly set her sights on a high-level job there. “At first, I thought, Oh, I’ll be just like my mother because she gets to do interesting things,” she says. “But gradually I started watching my father and I thought, You know what? He’s got a bigger job. But neither one of my parents ever said they wanted me to come into the business.”

Still, Rice laid the groundwork with a journalism degree from the University of Southern California and then the M.M. from Northwestern. She is proudest of having won the respect of the Johnson Publishing Company’s employees, especially the ones who have been there more than 30 years and have watched her grow up. “I have basically become their boss,” she says, “and I think that transition has gone as well as it has because I have listened to them. I may not always agree with them, but I give them respect.”

Currently, she sits on five corporate boards. She and her parents are generous supporters of the United Negro College Fund. Her personal areas of interest, which draw her to numerous other charities, are culture, education, and children, especially African American children. Like Rogers, she has no interest in discussing why she left the board of the Museum of Contemporary Art. “That topic is a dead end,” she says. “There is nothing to say about it.”

Part of Rice’s charm is that she never stands on ceremony, often returning calls and making appointments herself. She radiates approachability, and her facial expression is most often a bemused smile, as if she has just heard a good joke. “The one word for Linda is ‘refreshing,’” says Ralph Moore, the president of a management consulting firm who has known Rice for 20 years. “You could put a stranger in a room with 100 people and a description of Linda’s personality and that person could find Linda easily. She stands above the crowd.”

“Once you are her friend, you are a friend for life,” says Jill Graflund, who met Rice at summer camp when the two were 13. “I’ve lived in California, Texas, and now Tennessee, and still Linda and I manage to see each other every couple of months. And our phone calls can seem almost constant.”

Rice’s indulgences: collecting art and wearing racy high heels, which add a little height to her curvaceous five-foot four-inch figure. Her annual Christmas party—held in her North Lake Shore Drive apartment in the same building where her parents live—is legendary for both its guest list and its lavish attention to detail.

In 1984, she married André Rice, then a stockbroker, now the president of his own investment firm, in a storybook wedding with 700 guests. They had a daughter, Alexa, now 11. Four years ago, they divorced. “But my ex-husband is my dear friend,” says Rice. Indeed, some observers claim that the two could be role models for a friendly divorce. “We both decided to put our selfishness aside in the interest of Alexa,” she says. “We absolutely refuse to make this any harder for her than it has to be. So André and I are friends. He has since remarried and I really like his wife.”

That is quite a feat, I say.

“Girl, that’s almost unbelievable,” she says with a laugh. “But I’m proud of the way we have handled it.”

Rice is prouder still of her daughter, who, she says, has already told her mother that she wants her job. “But she has yet to experience boys or college. We will see where she is in ten years.”

What does Rice know now that she didn’t know ten years ago?

“Maybe how to read people better, how to learn if they like you for yourself or for your perks.” That is where her friendship with Jarrett and Rogers comes in. “They are solid and trustworthy. We  hang out as girlfriends; we share hopes and dreams. And there is something very comforting about that. A home-away-from-home kind of feeling.”

“Girlfriends”—there is some- thing cozy about that word, and yet it falls short in describing these women. Two single and one soon-to-be single—if they have serious romantic interests, that, like many of the other secrets they share, remains just among friends. They mix easily in Chicago’s white dominated A-list society, and in part because of that, some may see them only as women of privilege and position, but that underestimates their hard work, both in their own careers and for Chicago’s cultural institutions. “They represent an emerging generation of black middle-class professionals who unapologetically contribute to their communities by working within the system, rather than the traditional civil rights approach of changing the system from without,” says the Chicago Reporter’s Laura Washington.

Linda Johnson Rice puts it more simply. “You get this life and you live it the best way you can,” she says, “doing the best that you can do.” Perhaps that philosophy, more than anything, explains the long-standing friendship of these three remarkable women.

Photograph by Tom Maday

This article appears in the August 2000 issue of Chicago Magazine.

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