If it's true that people hunt for the person who somehow gets us closer to the dream of who we hope to become, then the gaze of the attractive, petite brunet often at Bill Bradley's side is instructive. From the beginning, academic and author Ernestine Misslbeck Schlant, 64, seemed to see him for who he wanted to be: a thinker, not just a jock; a statesman, not just a pol; sensitive and warm, not just arrogantly bright. Indeed, Dan Okimoto, Stanford professor and Bradley's college roommate, recalls that when Bradley first told him of Ernestine, he didn't start off by describing what she looked like but, rather, how she looked at him: though 30 cm shorter than the Knick, she would trot two steps ahead, looking intently up at him as they debated. While others stared at the athlete or fawned over the star, she clearly was searching out the intellectual, the man he craved as his truest self.
The two should have met in an elevator bank in 1969, since they lived on the same floor of a New York City building near Madison Square Garden. But while Schlant was many things--a German World War II survivor, a former Pan Am stewardess, an emigre, a divorced mother (she was married to an Atlanta doctor for five years and had a daughter, Stephanie St. Onge, now 40), an older woman (she's eight years Bradley's senior), a comparative literature Ph.D. and professor--she was not a sports fan. She says she had no idea who "Dollar Bill" was. "I saw him once or twice. We didn't even say hello," she recalls. She had taken the year off from her teaching to work for a film company. One project was to get an athlete to interview Marianne Moore, the poet and baseball fan, and Schlant was asked to approach Bradley. Moore died before the project began, but three months after they met, Schlant and Bradley had their first date, on New Year's Eve 1970. It was not wildly romantic: they took the bus and had dinner with a group. But soon the relationship deepened. Schlant had to be tutored in basketball and still was often found in the stands more focused on her books than his play. Some might have been offended, but "he found it reassuring," says Schlant, speaking English with a German accent. "He was sure I was there for his person, not his history or status." And so both found something the other needed when they married in 1974: the divorce got a hunky, younger second husband who loved to listen to her literary lectures; the hoopster got a wife whose erudition and command of five languages nurtured a side of him the tabs and fans overlooked.
These days Bradley's wife often helps him appear more whole. Both are smart. But while Bradley is reticent in public, Schlant is fun, her megawatt smile and crinkling blue eyes on display as she leads girlfriends into the New Jersey surf--giggling about how the waves break up cellulite--or pulls her husband onto a hotel dance floor after a serious speech. "She brings him joy and laughter. They tease each other a lot," says St. Onge, mother of Schlant's four grandchildren. Friends say Schlant relaxes Bradley and, when need be, defuses his icy temper. "She lets him be himself," says Cornel West, a Harvard professor and longtime Bradley friend. "She comes back and accesses his charming side. And soon he's back on track."