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Marion Ann Borris Javits, 21 years the Senator's junior, was born in a Jewish slum in Detroit, moved to The Bronx after her parents were divorced when she was ten. She graduated from high school with honors in speech, soon afterward decided "to try Hollywood for a minute." The minute lasted for a couple of years, but she never made it as an actress, and at 20 she returned to make the rounds of the New York producers while working at odd jobs "for carfare and stockings." One of the jobs took her to the research department of Jonah Goldstein's 1945 mayoral campaign, and there she met Jack Javits.
"We had three dates," she says, "but he seemed suspicious. He'd had bad experiences with, uh, ladies of the theater." After he was elected to Congress, Marion dropped him a note to congratulate him. He began dating her again, and they were married in 1947.
The Javitses have three children: Joy, now 17 and a senior at Dalton School, who after graduating plans to spend this summer with her father in his two-bedroom apartment at 4000 Massachusetts Avenue as an unsalaried "intern" for Rhode Island's Democratic Senator Claiborne Pell; Joshua, 16, a Riverdale Country School junior who will be going off to London for the summer with his mother; and Carla, 10, a precocious fifth-grader at Dalton.
Kooky Like a Fox. In political circles, particularly, Marion is regarded as the eccentric, flighty antithesis of her earnest husband. While Government interests her peripherally because it is her husband's life, her real concerns are art, literature and the theater. "She drives him crazy and his staff up the wall," says a Washington friend of the Senator's. "She is terribly disorganized. Her idea of whom he should see before going to Viet Nam was Actor Hugh O'Brian and Columnist Jimmy Breslin!" Withal, admits the friend, "she is a warm and lovable woman with deep feeling for Jack and their children."
To other acquaintances, Marion is kooky like a fox. A shrewd art spotter (and haggler), she has furnished their $150,000, twelve-room Park Avenue coop with a couple of Venards, a Man Ray sculpture, a Guardi, a Pol Bury kinetic, a Yaacov Agam (her newest and proudest acquisition), and some superlative samples of pop and op.*In the library of the Javitses' Park Avenue place there also hangs a striking, feline oil of Marion by Boris Chaliapin. The mouth is sensual and slightly parted, the eyes tigerish and burning bright. But why, the startled subject asked on seeing the finished portrait, why on earth the golden arrow through her head? "Normally," came Chaliapin's cryptic reply, "when you shoot someone with an arrow, he bleeds. With you, the arrow only changes to gold."
Escape. The Senator—as Marion always refers to him—bleeds only on those rare, agonizing occasions when he is caught without book, paper or audience. Even while accompanying Son Josh to a baseball game, Javits surreptitiously scans the briefcase in his lap. His hard-cover reading currently includes Winston Churchill's The Second World War and Andre Maurois' Disraeli —books that, for him, come close to escapism.