Democratic Convention: The Women Who Made Al Gore

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If Gore is right when he says his parents shaped his reflex to turn to his head instead of his heart, it was still his heart that found Tipper. They fell in love the night of his high school graduation dance, and by his first date with Mary Elizabeth Aitcheson (known as Tipper for a lullaby her mother used to sing), "it was just like everyone else melted away," Tipper wrote.

They were--and are--as different as two people can be, "the old cliche about opposites attracting," Al says. He once gave a dinner party for the specific purpose of discussing the declining role of metaphor in American life. Her idea of fun: family Rollerblading in the historic marble hallways outside Al's Senate office--which explains why, even after they have been married 30 years, Karenna describes her parents as "mysteries to each other."

While opposites may attract, they don't always connect. It was difficult in the early years of Al's political career for them to have anything like the partnership that Albert and Pauline had forged and that Pauline had urged on Tipper. His wife always seemed to be the last to know when Al made a decision that would change their lives, or maybe she was just in denial about whom it was she had married.

That first congressional campaign should have clued her in to what was ahead. She reluctantly quit the newspaper-photography job she loved, set aside plans for using the master's degree in psychology she had earned the year before and submitted to the daily mortification that came with asking strangers to vote for her husband. So obvious was Tipper's discomfort with the whole business that one nasty man made sport of the naive 27-year-old from Virginia, demanding that she name all 25 counties of the Fourth Congressional District. "Unfortunately," Tipper later put it, "I was not what you would call a natural politician."

Once they got to Washington, Al's ardent courtship of the voters of Tennessee left the woman he had married alone on Friday and Saturday nights. "There I was with three young children and a hardworking husband who spent three out of every four weekends back in Tennessee with his constituents--a pattern he continued the whole time he was in Congress," she later wrote when she published a book of her photographs called Picture This. "For me, it meant having virtually no social life, since most people entertain or have dinner parties on the weekend, and I never liked going alone. Most of the time, I just stayed home with the children."

Until 1985, that is, when Tipper heard the lyrics of a Prince album that 11-year-old Karenna brought home. The title of one song, Darling Nikki, seemed sweetly romantic on the album jacket. Then Tipper heard the lyrics: "I met her in a hotel lobby masturbating with a magazine."

That was when Tipper became America's most famous ticked-off housewife. She joined forces with other well-connected Washington wives to pressure the record industry to put labels on record albums that had violent or obscene lyrics. Frank Zappa had a label for her--"cultural terrorist"--and punk singer Wendy O. Williams questioned whether the real problem here was that Tipper was afraid her own children might masturbate. But Tipper found allies in other parents and the national PTA. Her book on the issue was selling briskly.

Time.com

Democratic Convention: The Women Who Made Al Gore

Pauline raised a tough, pragmatic politician, but it took a life-altering family crisis to make Al see how much he had to learn from Tipper