Celebrity Secrets

ThirdAge: Your father, Senator Hale Boggs, was a very powerful political figure. I wanted to ask how strongly do you think your father's character influenced your choice of husband, Cokie.

Cokie: Now that's impossible for me to know. Somebody asked me the other night, because I had been talking a lot about my mother, they asked me about my father. And I do think that for girls, at a certain point in their adolescence, the relationship with their fathers is probably the most important thing that can happen to them. Because it's basically the first male that reacts to them, and it's their first sort of sense of themselves in the eyes of a man. So that can be very encouraging and very discouraging. My father adored me.

TA: And you adored him.

Cokie: And I adored him. You felt a lot of support and inclusion. So I've got to believe that it had everything to do with it. The fact that I looked for a, I mean I don't have any conscious sense of this, I mean, I fell in love. But I'm sure that I fell in love with somebody who was as smart and public-minded and articulate and literate and all of that as I did, because of my father. And somebody who liked women and liked my opinions, or liked my having opinions most of the time.

Steve: [Laughs]. Next: Faith & Spirituality >

Back to Intro