A First Lady With Flair : Politics: Gayle Wilson is smart, articulate, charming, pretty and never forgets a joke. ‘She’s the woman you love to hate,’ says a friend. .

With the plainclothes officer who has become her shadow since the election, she walks briskly into the outer room of her husband’s new suite of offices. Heads turn; eyes follow the tall, thin blonde in the Reagan red skirt and white satin baseball jacket. Gayle Wilson utters a cheery hello before disappearing behind a heavy oak door.

Does the governor’s wife pause for just a moment before leaving the room? Maybe. After all, the back of her jacket is meant to be seen. The flag of California--with its proud golden bear--is emblazoned across it.

This is encouraging. A first lady with flair, a sense of humor. Not that previous first ladies of California haven’t been stylish or funny. But Nancy Reagan was a long, long time ago. And if Gloria Deukmejian was known for anything, it was her aversion to the spotlight.

Gayle Wilson is used to being center stage. She’s not the kind of woman who stays home. She gets into the thick of things.

She is also charming. She is articulate. She is loyal. She has a beautiful singing voice. She never forgets a joke. And she can sew.

“It’s really kind of sickening,” says her close friend, San Diego family law attorney Kathryn Ashworth, who has known Wilson since their college days.

“I always introduce her as ‘the woman you love to hate,’ ” says her pal Joann DiGennaro. “She is not only beautiful outwardly, she is beautiful inwardly.”

It wasn’t her internal beauty that snagged the eye of Adm. Hyman Rickover one day in 1983 at the National Academy of Sciences in Washington. She was perusing the winning projects of the Westinghouse Science Talent Search, a prestigious national contest for high school students, and introduced herself to Rickover, who founded the Center for Excellence in Education in MacLean, Va.

“She was articulate in discussing some of the projects in biology and immediately started speaking to us about the importance of helping students to pursue careers in math and science--particularly women,” said DiGennaro, president of Rickover’s center. “As she left, the admiral said, ‘Hmmm. She’s good-looking. Why don’t you talk to her about being on our board?’ ”

But Rickover and DiGennaro soon learned that Wilson had more to offer than window-dressing. She had been a Westinghouse honoree herself in 1960. She had majored in biology at Stanford. And she had graduated Phi Beta Kappa, a fact that every friend of hers interviewed for this story managed to mention at least once.

In a sense, the election of Pete Wilson as governor, a job he has coveted for years, is the apotheosis of 49-year-old Gayle Wilson’s career, too.

She has a long history of community volunteerism. She has educated herself on Alzheimer’s disease, AIDS, mental health issues, drug-addicted babies and pregnant teen-agers, and in the process has wielded a good deal of influence on her husband, who often sounds curiously like a Democrat on these issues.

“In raw terms, you have a real great product and you don’t have to do very much,” said Otto Bos, Pete Wilson’s longtime press secretary.

“She has been so helpful to Pete,” said Pete’s 88-year-old father, Jim Wilson. “Let’s put it this way, to use an old-fashioned term: She wears well.”

Said Bob White, Pete Wilson’s chief of staff and a confidant of Gayle: “She is as much a part of the process as we ever hoped she would be. I cannot imagine not counting on her.”

Some miscellany about Gayle Wilson:

* She dyes her own hair.

* She has never had plastic surgery but isn’t averse to it.

* She owns a mink coat.

* She had a brief network TV career , during which she profiled the pets of high-powered Washingtonians .

* She was mugged in a Washington supermarket parking lot in 1986 .

* She went to a high school ball with Wayne Newton.

Many of Pete Wilson’s associates say that Gayle has influenced her husband, a U.S. senator for eight years, in the areas of child care and public health.

Pete Wilson agrees.

“She has, over the past eight years, conducted her own education, not only by reading but by traveling around the country,” said the 57-year-old governor. “She has been in hospitals, in residential homes for pregnant teen-agers and post-partum women undergoing drug rehabilitation, mental health clinics, all kinds of developmentally disabled facilities, so she has gathered to herself a great deal of practical knowledge. She has given me a great deal of information both in anecdotal form and she has given me things to read, and we just talk a great deal about things.”

Said Gayle: “I have never sought to sway him on whether he should vote for the B-2 bomber or the targeted export assistance program or some of the things he has real expertise in, but there are certain things we all consider we have a certain expertise in and that’s where I weigh in.”

After visiting the National Institutes of Mental Health, she says she complained to him about how little money goes to mental health research.

“He would say, ‘That’s really interesting, I didn’t know that.’ And I might not see any evidence of that surface for a long time, but certainly when, in 1986, he tried to have the Senate outlaw congressional newsletters to constituents and use that money ($74 million annually) to AIDS research, I have to believe it came from some of the things we talked about on our walks.” (The Senate passed the bill, but it failed in the House.)

“Of course, he doesn’t always change his mind,” Wilson said.

Take, for example, the issue of federal funding for abortions.

“I do feel strongly that there should be federal funding for abortions,” she said, “and he has voted no. He said the information he got showed that women were not being denied abortions because there was no federal funding. Now, he said he could be convinced otherwise if someone could show him women are not getting what they need.”

They do agree on most issues. For example, both support legal abortion and the equal rights amendment--and both invoke the annoyingly timeworn example of a woman who enjoys having a man open the door for her to illustrate why Gayle is not really a “feminist.”

Gayle Ann Edlund was the second of three children, whose mother was very ambitious for them.

“I lived for them,” said Charlotte Edlund, 81, who lives in a Phoenix retirement home.

Clarence Edlund and Charlotte Davison met and married in Denver in 1933. In 1938, Clarence was transferred to Phoenix, where he became president of the Rainbow Baking Co. Philip was born in 1941. Gayle was born Nov. 24, 1942, and four years later, Tina was born. In 1942 the family built a home near Encanto Park, and in 1959 moved to a five-bedroom house on the golf course of the Phoenix Country Club. The Barry Goldwaters were neighbors.

“It sounds wealthy, but we had mansions next to us, and we had a little house where we did not have maids, where we did the yardwork,” Wilson said. “My mother was very frugal.”

Two tragedies marred Gayle’s childhood. When she was 7, her brother lost his right thumb and spent five weeks in the hospital after tapping a machine gun bullet against the sidewalk to see if it was a live round. Gayle, who was standing over him, suffered powder burns on her face, from which she recovered completely.

When Gayle was 13, her father fell ill with colon cancer and died three years later, just as she was starting her senior year of high school. The family was traumatized, but the death was not unexpected and Gayle excelled in school that year.

Charlotte Edlund expected the best from her children. She gave them music lessons, drama lessons, skin-care lessons, golf lessons. . . . “I think Gayle felt under pressure to never make anything but an ‘A’ and never do anything that wasn’t close to perfect,” said Phil Edlund, 49.

“She started me taking dramatics and dancing when I was 4 and I always was the one that got the starring role,” Gayle said.

There were performances in local professional and amateur theater.

“In many ways, I think my mother was living vicariously through me,” she said. “She was a very shy lady. I had a lot of pressure on me to excel. My mother’s way of motivating me was very negative. She would say, ‘You aren’t pretty enough, you aren’t smart enough, you aren’t well liked enough’ to do whatever it was. . . . I don’t really appreciate the negative way I was motivated, but, fortunately, I have the kind of personality where I was able to say, ‘Well, I’ll show her.’

“The perfect example was the Westinghouse Science Talent Search. This was the time my dad died. I remember her saying, ‘I don’t know why you’re spending so much time down at that hospital (where she was researching the project). You’ll never win.’

“I was up for military queen (for an annual ROTC ball) and she would say, ‘I know so and so is going to win because she is so much better liked than you.’ ”

“I don’t think I was particularly hard,” said Charlotte Edlund. “I just thought they should have every opportunity.” She recalls a time when “Gayle came home and was running for military queen, and I told her, ‘Well, I wouldn’t run for it if I were you, and she twirled around on her heels and said, ‘ Well, I won! ‘ “

Gayle’s escort was none other than Wayne Newton.

“She and I were very, very close,” said Newton, who headlined the inaugural gala in Sacramento Sunday. “Gayle was one of those people that always made great grades with very little effort--the kind of girl who irritated most of us who didn’t do well. All the guys had a crush on her. She was just pure class, and I hate that word, but some people one has to use it for and she’s one of them.”

There was never a romance between them, Newton said, but not because he wasn’t interested.

Dave Childers, at the time a medical technologist at Phoenix’s Good Samaritan Hospital, mentored Gayle for her Westinghouse project.

Her winning paper described how some plants of the Arizona desert could be used as a basic ingredient in a blood-typing serum.

“She did some really seminal work that has been picked up by scholars,” Childers said. “I later heard some discussions of her paper (in medical circles). They talked about the work done by ‘some girl in Arizona.’ ”

Besides the science award her senior year, Wilson was valedictorian of her class and an Elks Most Valuable Student. She was accepted at Stanford, which she had never seen before stepping off the train in September, 1960.

One hears, in interviews with Gayle Wilson’s friends and relatives, that everyone thinks she is perfect:

“Her flaws, if there were any, were unapparent to me.”

--Dave Childers, high school science mentor

“Everyone is always looking for a flaw. I have never seen it.”

--Barbara Stemple, Pete Wilson’s former personal assistant

“If she does have skeletons in her closet, it’s ones that only she knows about.”

--Wayne Newton

“I think that Gayle is the perfect political wife.”

--Jim Wilson, father-in-law

“If you were going to write an unflattering story about Gayle, you’d have to make it up out of whole cloth.”

--Ted Graham, ex-husband

“I really think she is perfect.”

--Phil Edlund, brother

“She isn’t perfect. But she is awfully good to me.”

--Charlotte Edlund, mother

Well, almost everyone.

In her junior year of college, Gayle Edlund married law student Ted Graham. She missed her 1964 graduation ceremony because she was eight months pregnant with Todd, her first child. Her second, Philip, was born three years later.

When Ted got a job in San Diego, she settled into a role she had expected to play: housewife. She dedicated herself to her husband, her children and her home. Her husband joined a law firm, so she joined the ladies’ auxiliary. When he began to practice a lot of real estate law, she took an 18-week real-estate course so that she could better understand his work.

But in the early ‘70s, devoting herself to the family wasn’t enough any more. The century’s second wave of feminism had crested, and some housewives like Wilson were confused.

“I found my 30s very hard,” she said. “My children were in school and all of a sudden, it was time for me, but what was I going to be? I wasn’t going to go back and be a doctor. What was I going to be when I grew up? I think I probably had at least three midlife crises. Real depression. Crying a lot. A lot of it was the whole women’s movement. The worst question I could get was ‘What do you do?’ ”

“She was a very devoted and attentive and a loving mother,” said Ted Graham, 51, a San Diego attorney. “With respect to her midlife crises, she kept those to herself for the most part. I remember she was concerned about what she would be after the boys grew up. We talked about her going to med school, but decided against it.”

In 1972, she began a home-sewing business. “But what I realized was, I didn’t like staying home,” she said. “I wanted to be out with people.”

She got a job at the University of San Diego teaching a course in resume writing and interview skills. She was also invited to join the San Diego Junior League, which she loved. In 1978-79, she served as president.

“I really enjoyed it. I enjoyed the women. When (the presidency) was over, I had a very hard time. This was another of my midlife crises. I had been busy, I had been focused and you know, what do you do after that?”

The next year, she and her husband moved to Davis, where he taught at the UC law school for a year. She took courses in preparation for an MBA (which she never completed).

Her marriage, apparently, was unraveling at the time.

Wilson will not discuss the reasons she and Graham divorced in 1982 after 19 years of marriage. “It’s not relevant,” she said. “These profile interviews are so psychoanalytical. You ask questions that, No. 1, I never think about and, No. 2, not even my best friends would ask.”

In a long phone conversation, her sister, Tina Edlund-Hafer, 44, shed some light on the marriage.

“Ted is a perfectionist also,” Edlund-Hafer said. “The problem of being married to a perfectionist, when you come from a family like ours and were raised by negative reinforcement, you do only your best, but they can still find things you didn’t do. Maybe there were sometimes moments between them that I would describe as a little tense.”

Said Charlotte Edlund: “She tried awful hard for a long time for him to be different, but it just didn’t work out. She did give it her all.”

As it happened, Pete and Betty Wilson, who had been married for 14 years, were divorcing just as his 1982 Senate campaign was getting off the ground. After long marriages, Pete Wilson and Gayle Graham, who had been casual acquaintances for years, found themselves starting over single at the same time.

You’ll hear only one story from Gayle Wilson about what you might call failure, although that is probably too strong a word since it happened when she was a kid:

“ In the summer, I was swimming on the swim team. It was sort of what all the kids were doing and a way to keep busy, but my mother couldn’t stand to watch because sometimes I would lose. She would sit in the car. We had a real argument. I just said this isn’t worth it to me, I don’t want to be a professional swimmer, who cares whether I win? What difference does it make. So I quit.”

Gayle Graham and Pete Wilson had known each other since about 1964, not well, but their paths had crossed a number of times. They got to know each other at the end of Gayle’s term as president of the Junior League, when the group presented a musical revue to raise money and celebrate its 50th anniversary. As mayor of the city, Wilson was asked to sing in the show. Gayle performed, too.

That year, Pete Wilson appointed her to the San Diego Parks and Recreation Commission, on which she served for several years.

She had volunteered with the speaker’s bureau of Wilson’s Senate campaign, and they began dating just before he won the primary in June, 1982.

“I knew immediately he was someone I could fall in love with,” she told an interviewer shortly after they were married on May 29, 1983. “And I think he felt somewhat the same way.”

Still, Gayle Wilson was a political neophyte when she arrived in Washington in 1983. The adjustments were enormous. At 40, she was in a new city, with a new husband who had a new job. She had always been a full-time mother to Todd and Philip. Suddenly, she didn’t have the kids to care for. Todd was at USC, and Philip opted to move in with his father and finish high school in La Jolla. (Now 25 and 22, both have graduated from USC.)

There was also the adjustment of becoming the second wife of a public figure.

“Here’s a gal who comes along and falls in love with Pete, and everyone really liked Betty Wilson,” said Pete’s old friend, Dr. Bill Friedman, head of pediatrics at the UCLA School of Medicine. “He has a cadre of close friends, and a new wife emerges. It’s a ticklish dynamic. And the issues are, ‘Am I going to be liked? How do I behave?’ Gayle walked on eggs for awhile. You can’t plead with people to like you, but you can make an honest request. We had an immediate bonding. I always kid Pete that it’s terrific he married so high above himself because it augurs well for his career and for the state.”

Not only that, said Friedman (who is not alone in this assessment), but Gayle gives Pete something he can’t seem to muster on his own: charisma.

“Some people are more theatrical than others,” Friedman said. “But in public, Pete comes across as sort of atonal. He comes across as a lawyer (which he is). He really isn’t that way at all, but Gayle is the opposite. She has a marvelous ability to be expressive. I have heard people comment that there is a quality of excitement that she provides that Pete doesn’t.”

“She is a real plus to him,” Kathryn Ashworth said. “I think he had no clue when he married her what he was getting.”

“Oh yes, I would say that is truer with every day that passes,” Pete Wilson said. “I was not only in love with her, but I had tremendous respect for her. I knew she was a woman with great energy and curiosity and capacity, but she surprised me by the degree. She campaigned for four years virtually nonstop (first for his reelection to the Senate; then for governor), and I mean that was a sustained transcontinental sprint. She maintained good humor throughout. Of course, she would need a sense of humor being married to me.”

A few of the things that irritate Gayle Wilson:

* When her husband is criticized as boring.

* When her office door is accidentally slammed.

* When her staffers forget to tell her a political event is outdoors and she freezes.

After the wedding, she had stationery made with her new name--Gayle Wilson--and soon discovered she would have to order a new batch.

“It didn’t take me long to realize that in Washington, I had to have stationery that said, ‘Mrs. Pete Wilson,’ ” she said. “Everything is what you do. It has nothing to do with education, how much money you have, how you look. It’s the job you hold. At first, I was almost apologetic, like, ‘I’m just a Senate wife.’ It didn’t take me long to get over that.”

She hired on briefly with a short-lived TV show called “America,” to report personality segments. (Her first and only segment was the pets-of-the-powerful piece.) She quit when she realized that, as a senator’s wife, she was being used as an entree to political circles.

She went to Wilson’s Senate office every day, sat in on scheduling sessions and threw herself, once again, into volunteer work.

“The Senate is a very strange lifestyle,” Pete Wilson said. “Senators are notoriously unreliable dinner guests, because they’ve got to go vote or they’re in the middle of a debate on the floor. We’ll miss Washington, but we’ll see more of each other here.”

While her husband was off doing Senate business, Wilson joined the Senate Wives (just as she had once joined the bar auxiliary) and succeeded Marilyn Quayle as chairwoman of the Republican Women’s Federal Forum. She joined the boards of the Center for Excellence in Education, Shakespeare Theatre at the Folger, Phoenix House (drug rehab), Children’s Institute International (child abuse) and the American Council for the Arts.

The Wilsons had dinner parties for which she cooked and hosted singing parties--where they would sing to piano accompaniment or croon into the microphone of a singing machine. They entertained senators and San Diegans. Dan and Marilyn Quayle were periodic guests.

But what they loved best was to barbecue chicken and watch a video at home. Alone.

Over the years, Wilson says she has resolved the conflicts she felt about her identity. With her husband’s staff and in public as well, she seems comfortable wielding the authority she derives from being married to first a senator and now the state’s most important elected official.

“Bob White and I laugh about the commas after our names,” she said. “He is introduced as Bob White, comma, the chief of staff to Sen. Pete Wilson, comma. And Gayle Wilson means nothing to anybody. I have had reporters say to me, ‘Do you have a problem being taken seriously.’ And I tell them, ‘Not for long.’

“People will judge me by what you write. I will not enjoy being judged by people who haven’t had the chance to get to know me. I can’t say that to know me is to love me or anything like that, but I think I have a good sense of myself. I try not to hurt people. I try to remember my friends. I try hard and if I don’t measure up, I guess I can’t help that.”