None of the gossip is true, Effi Barry insists.
She can support herself, she says. "I have a home, thank you very much," she says, a townhouse in Hampton, Va., she bought in 1994 for $79,000, according to real estate records. Her mother lives there now, while Effi lives alone in a rented apartment in the District (she is vague about where). "I have two cars, thank you very much. Well, the bank has them. I'm not a needy person. I'm not down and desperate. I don't need Marion Barry," she says, or anything his cronies could offer. She is doing some work for Children's Hospital, and, she said, "weighing other prospects." The job she had as an executive assistant when she returned a year ago from Hampton didn't work out. "The boss and I had philosophical differences," she says. As in much of what Effi Barry says about herself, the details remain vague enough to be unverifiable. She does want Christopher, a student at the University of the District of Columbia, "to work alongside his father, doing something good," and that is as specific as she will be during more than three hours of lunchtime conversation. "My son is my heart. His father is his father. I was particularly affected by never knowing my father, I guess. Even today, I'm incomplete."
Effi Barry has re-teamed with her ex-husband, who recently won the Democratic primary for a Ward 8 seat on the D.C. Council, to help his resurgent political career.
(Bill O'Leary -- The Washington Post)
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Effi Slaughter was born in Toledo. Her mother, Polly Lee Harris, was 16 and black. Her father was Italian.
"There were miscegenation rules back then," says Effi, "that didn't permit them to be together, and so," she adds, waving her long fingers through the air, dropping her voice to a whisper, "suicide." Her father committed suicide? She nods, soberly. "So that whole half of me is not there." She was 30 before she asked her mother about him. Her mother married a man who managed parking lots, which did provide some stability until their divorce, when Effi was 16.
Effi was smart, and she was striking, and she went off to Hampton University, where she got a degree in home economics. She moved to New York to join her childhood sweetheart, Stanley Cowell, an accomplished jazz pianist who now lives in Upper Marlboro. They married, and Effi worked as a flight attendant, a credit reporter and a junior high-school teacher. She got a master's degree in public health from City College, she has said. When the marriage ended, she moved to Washington for a job with the city.
She met Marion Barry in 1976, at a Bicentennial celebration in Southwest Park. "I was looking in my purse for something, and suddenly he was there. "Is there anything in your purse for me?" she recalls him saying. Barry was an activist, the former head of the Student Nonviolent Coordinating Committee, a former school board member running for reelection to the D.C. Council. She was apolitical and had no idea who he was. But he was "very vibrant, very charismatic, that Southern charm," Effi says. (He was also still very married, to Mary Treadwell, who years later was convicted twice for stealing public funds.) Effi gave Marion her number, and he called the next day.
In 1978, after Barry had announced his bid for mayor, they got married. Newspaper photos from that period show a happy and handsome couple -- the Barrys at inaugural parades, Effi in one of her sophisticated hats and furs; on official visits to Africa; greeting heads of state from other nations.
"It was a wonderful education being exposed to all these different cultures," she says. "I had a life where I might be at the White House in the morning and serving soup to the homeless in the afternoon; there was that diversity of experience. I so much admired Anwar Sadat, and that was a highlight, entertaining his wife in my house, in my house! As a result of Marion, all this was possible."
If being the first lady of Washington brought opportunity, it also brought scrutiny. She drew criticism for taking a birthday gift of $1,150 in clothing from a lobbyist who met repeatedly with the mayor. The couple got a discounted home loan from a bank on whose board she sat, and after that became public, the bank rescinded the preferred rate and she quit the board. She took a job with a public relations firm with a city contract, and then quit, amid questions of conflict of interest. When she arranged for Christopher to have his eighth birthday party at an amusement park with friends, she brought along an entourage that included three members of the mayor's security detail, a plainclothes cop, a government photographer and one of Effi's city aides.
In the photos, as the mayoral years march on, the expression on the face of Mrs. Marion Barry changes. The early unguarded joy and authentic excitement vanish. They are replaced by the inscrutable smile born of necessity and worn by the sorority of betrayed political wives -- Lee Hart, Hillary Rodham Clinton and, most recently, New Jersey first lady Dina McGreevey.
On camera, Mayor and Mrs. Barry stayed hand in hand. Off camera, they were living separate lives. In the course of their 12 years together, she once said, the couple had only a half-dozen "family-style dinners." She acknowledged that she knew all about her husband's infidelities -- and accepted them.
Of Marion's friend Karen Johnson, who pleaded guilty to drug conspiracy charges in 1984, Effi said in a television interview that she chose to take at face value her husband's explanation that his relationship with Johnson was "non-intimate" and added: "There are very few men in this town who can say they have not been involved in some way or the other with another woman during the period of their married life, be it platonic, romantic, sexual or whatever. What I blame him for is indiscretion."
And she warned him: "I told him all along, 'You're going to be set up with a woman,' " she said after his 1990 arrest at the Vista Hotel with Moore. When she got the call late that night, she knew what had happened. "Who was she?" was her first question.
During her husband's trial on drug and perjury charges, the ever-controlled Effi Barry sat most days beside a woman named Cora Masters. "I guess Cora and I, then, were the closest of friends," Effi says now. Cora went on to become Mrs. Marion Barry No. 4, and the new first lady of Washington; Barry was elected to a fourth term as mayor after his release from jail. The couple are now separated; Cora Masters Barry declined to be interviewed for this article. Asked if she ever speaks to Cora, Effi pauses, arches an eyebrow, and smiles. "Whatever would I say?"
