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sprawling Cranbrook campus, past the lake, amid the emerald landscape with its bubbling pools and surfeit of sculptures. Mitt taught Ann how to water-ski, and they went almost every day when the weather allowed. She taught him to snow-ski. She found Mitt funny and fun to be with, and “no matter where he was, there was a lot of action.” Other boys pursued her, and she would date them in Mitt’s absence, but she said Mitt “stole my heart from the very first.”
    Ann, like Mitt, had grown up in Bloomfield Hills. Her father, Edward R. Davies, was the city’s former mayor and had become the wealthy president of Jered Industries, which made maritime machinery. He was also something of an inventor. One time, her father got mad at her and her two brothers for not closing a sliding door. So he built a pulley system that automatically closed the door. Ann considered him a “creative genius.” What Mitt didn’t know about Ann was that she had been brought up in a home with a father who had no use for religion, and that she had been on a spiritual search since a young age. Her father had grown up in a coal-mining family in Wales, and Ann’s brothers say he associated the religion of his childhood—a Welsh Congregational church he found as dreary as the climate of Wales—with drudgery and hogwash. Before their dad married their mom, Lois Davies, he insisted that she give up organized religion. “Dad,” said Ann’s older brother, Roderick Davies, “considered people who were religious to be weak in the knees.”
    But like Mitt, Ann had a special relationship with her father. So he occasionally indulged his only daughter’s requests that the family attend services at one Protestant church or another. He remained unswayed by the pulpit and believed his daughter would eventually come to her senses. As for her romance, Ann’s father knew that Mitt was heading to California for college while Ann still had two years of high school left. So how serious could they be?
    They were serious. One night, Mitt went to pick up Ann for the prom, driving his “goofy-looking” AMC Marlin, a two-door fastback with a sloping roof. After they had been at the festivities for a while, he nervously took his sixteen-year-old girlfriend aside and asked—informally—if she would one day marry him. Yes, Ann said. It was a tentative yes, with the couple knowing they would soon part ways as Mitt headed to college. Years later they would remember the moment not just for the romance but for also the hilarity. Mitt, the car guy, had forgotten to gas up. He blamed it on nerves. The Marlin puttered to a halt as he drove Ann home. Somehow, Mitt and the exquisitely outfitted woman he had just asked to be his wife made it home.
    From Mitt’s perspective, their path was set. But there had been a lingering, critical question. On one of their earliest dates, Mitt had leaned in for a kiss, but Ann had other ideas.
    “What,” she asked, “do Mormons believe?”
    Mitt was suddenly uneasy. He knew his religion made him something of an outsider. He didn’t want Ann to consider changing religions just because of him. It had to be from her heart. Now here he was on a date with one of the prettiest girls on campus, someone he knew came from mainline Protestant stock, and she was asking for a tutorial on the Mormon Church?
    “I was not in the mood to talk about religion,” he would say later. “I was much more interested in physical expressions of love.”
    Mitt looked Ann in the eyes and tried to answer her question. He turned to the church’s “Articles of Faith,” propounded by church founder Joseph Smith and typically memorized by followers. Mitt began by quoting the first article. “We believe in God, the Eternal Father, and in His Son, Jesus Christ, and in the Holy Ghost.” When he finished, he noticed that Ann had started to cry.
    There was, of course, much more to explain, much more to the story of this little-known faith. It was a story in which