A Mom-umental Failure

And, through it all, there is Mother's Day, the time of year when we let our mothers know that we love them. We adorn homemade cards with crudely lettered poetry and deliver well-intentioned, if disastrous, breakfasts in bed. Ah, Mother's Day breakfast in bed. The smell of burnt toast is in the air. Dad is hanging back in the doorway. The look on his face says: "You see what life would be like without you? You see? Chaos."

THE WOMAN AT THE CENTER of Washington's great Mothers' Memorial blackmail scandal was born in Philadelphia in 1864 and christened Margaret Rose Anthony Julia Josephine Catherine Cornelia Donovan O'Donovan.

Her friends called her "Daisy."

Daisy was born into wealth and society and brought up in New Orleans. In her youth, she was known for her smart aleck sense of humor and coquettish beauty: chestnut hair, hazel eyes and a round, pretty face. When she started attracting the attention of boys, her mother sent her off to the Georgetown Visitation convent school in Washington.

By the time Daisy marched through the forest to watch the flag be raised at the Mothers' Memorial site, she'd been married three times and widowed twice. Her first husband was a wealthy Charleston, S.C., banker named Andrew Simonds, whom she married in 1885 and who invited Daisy to design a house for them to live in, a mansion that still stands on the city's South Battery.

After Simonds's premature death in 1905, Daisy and their 5-year-old daughter, Margaret, were left in a precarious financial position. With a practical streak that belied her debutante upbringing, Daisy turned her Charleston home into a luxury hotel. She named it after herself: the Villa Margherita -- "margherita" being Italian for "daisy."

Daisy conjured up the hotel's motto out of fractured Latin: "Sic tibi pecunia non intrare non licet est." Daisy translated it this way: "If you ain't got no money you needn't come around."

Daisy's second husband was Barker Gummere Jr., a banker whose political influence earned him the nickname the "Kingmaker of New Jersey." They met when both happened to be aboard the same yacht during a congressional junket to the Panama Canal.

After their marriage in 1907, Daisy designed another house -- a mansion called Rosedale on 57 acres Gummere owned near Princeton. And when Gummere died of pneumonia in 1914, Daisy again showed her repurposing skills. She hired nine teachers and transformed Rosedale into a private academy for girls, enrolling her daughter as the first student.

She married her third husband in 1918. Capt. Clarence Crittenden Calhoun was a Kentucky lawyer and Spanish-American War veteran who had established a lucrative law practice in Washington.

In the summer of 1920, the Calhouns traveled to San Francisco for the Democratic National Convention. There Daisy Calhoun noticed something interesting: Female conventiongoers were being treated with a surprising amount of deference. The 19th Amendment was about to give women the right to vote, and politicians were eagerly courting this new constituency. Recalled Calhoun in a later memoir: "While I had always believed in woman's political power behind the throne, I came away from the Convention a thorough convert to her new place in the world, not only for equal rights in politics and business, but as a public speaker."

She pondered this on the long ride back to Washington. By the time the train pulled into Union Station, Calhoun had decided to harness what her husband had dubbed "dynamic woman power" and turn it into a nonpartisan political force. She would focus this power, magnify it, be the prism through which it would be refracted.