Read The Real Romney for Free Online Page A

was the only African-American student in our graduating class,” Barthwell said. Though Mitt and Sidney were not close, they were friendly and went through all six years at the school together. It made an impression on Barthwell that the Romney family opposed the Mormon prohibition against blacks holding the priesthood. His recollection of Mitt is that he seemed like a “very nice guy” although “not a standout student.” During one of his father’s gubernatorial campaigns, Mitt and his brother, Scott, were sent to talk to African Americans in a Detroit neighborhood, and they came away pleased that their father was respected by blacks, even if they didn’t receive assurances of votes.
    In his final years at Cranbrook, Mitt emerged a more serious student and a good-looking teen. Adding to the package was his great head of hair. Mitt had grown up hearing people comment on his father’s sweep of slicked-back black hair, white at the temples. But since his early teens, Mitt had patterned his own hairstyle after a man named Edwin Jones, who served as his father’s top aide in running the Detroit operations of the Mormon church. “He sat up front, to the side at a desk, keeping records,” Mitt would recall years later. “I remember that he had very dark hair, that it was quite shiny, and that you could see it in distinct comb lines from front to back. Have you looked at my hair? Yep, it’s just like his was some forty years ago.”
    W hen graduation arrived, the speaker was none other than George Romney. He hit upon a surprising theme. Girlfriends, the governor told the seventy-six graduating boys, “will have more to do with shaping your life than probably anybody else. . . . If the girl you’re interested in doesn’t inspire you to greater effort than you would undertake without knowing her, then you’d better look around and get another.”
    Mitt had looked around and, just like his father, had found at a relatively early age the girl he wanted to marry. Her name was Ann Davies, and she was beautiful, smart, and independent-minded. The parallels to Mitt’s mother were unmistakable. But there was one difference—and a major problem: Ann was not a Mormon; she came from a mainline Protestant family.
    Mitt had first met Ann when they were both in elementary school in Bloomfield Hills. He was dressed in his Cub Scout uniform and saw Ann riding her horse over the railroad tracks. He picked up some stones and threw them at her, he recalled years later. They lost track of each other over the years. Then they were at neighboring prep schools. Ann attended Cranbrook’s sister school, Kingswood, on the other side of campus. Mitt had just turned eighteen and Ann was fifteen, almost exactly the same ages his parents had been when they met. One day, Mitt went to a friend’s birthday party. Across the room, he spied Ann. “Wow, has she changed,” Mitt said he thought to himself. He went over to Ann’s date and offered to drive Ann home.
    Cranbrook in the 1960s still adhered to a strict separation of the sexes. The girls were allowed to see the boys for athletic events, dance lessons, and a weekly movie night in the gym. Beyond that, their interaction largely was confined to letters, which the Kingswood girls lined up to receive daily. Shortly after they ran into each other at the party, Mitt asked Ann out for a date. It was March 21, 1965, and they saw the movie The Sound of Music . “I caught his eye and he never let me go,” Ann recalled years later. “I mean, he hotly pursued me.” They fell “deeply in love,” she said, but “we didn’t tell anyone, because no one would have believed it.” Mitt later said, “I fell in love with her the second I saw her.”
    When Ann arrived at the Kingswood School, she wasn’t much interested in academics; that would come later. She was more into riding horses and playing field hockey, lacrosse, basketball, and tennis. Mitt learned to keep up. They strode across the