Stealing a reporter's heart, striking fear in handlers'

It's over between Roberta and me. At least for now.

What with her constant travels, her series of handlers and the 3,000-mile separation (she's in D.C., I'm in L.A.), it just wasn't working.

I concede, with only a tinge of embarrassment, that I've been captivated by that world traveler, grandmother, freeway speedster and potential First Mother of the United States, Roberta McCain.

But after months waiting in vain for a formal interview, I'm beginning to believe that her son's presidential campaign really isn't interested in getting Roberta McCain and me together for, as the man likes to call it, a little "straight talk."

"They've got me muzzled," Mrs. McCain, 96, said when I phoned the other day. She added with a chuckle: "Now don't you print that. . . . I really don't like to be interviewed."

Democracy will not collapse for want of another Roberta McCain profile. But it makes me a little sad that the presidential season apparently will feature only rare media outings for Mrs. McCain, a charming and feisty woman who enjoys life more than many people a quarter her age.

The McCain camp insists that Mrs. McCain will face the public and the press again. But her low profile of late seems at least partly designed to prevent the kind of distractions she created during the primaries.

In one television interview, she razzed fellow Republicans for tepid support of her son. ("I think, holding their nose, they are going to have to take him.") In another she blamed the Mormons for the scandal that tarnished the 2002 Salt Lake City Winter Olympics.

So she's not always on the money. But the woman is older than John Paul Stevens, the Supreme Court justice. She's as garrulous as, well, John McCain. Wouldn't it be nice if we lived in a world where Roberta could just be Roberta?

Then she could tell those stories. Like the one about how, as a 20-year-old USC student, she eloped to Tijuana with a Navy ensign, John Sidney McCain Jr., who went on to become an admiral.

There would be time to replay her world travels, when Roberta and identical twin Rowena, a pair of striking debutantes, hobnobbed with luminaries like Madame Chiang Kai-shek and oilman J. Paul Getty (as Maureen Orth recounted in the New York Times last year).

As an admiral's wife, Mrs. McCain could embassy-hop around the world, but the twins also enjoyed eating and sleeping on the cheap across Europe, the Middle East and beyond.