Backstory: Behind the golden Gates

For 20 years, Sundar Sundararaman has led a stream of well-intentioned Westerners into India's dark corners, bringing his often-wealthy guests face-to-face with AIDS-afflicted sex workers to drive home the depth of need.

"For many of them it's a big challenge to step out of the glass case," says Dr. Sundar, a mentor with Mysore and Mandya Direct Intervention, an organization that works to stem the spread of HIV.

About two months ago he welcomed Melinda French Gates, a woman whose own guest list – at the earth-sheltered lakefront mansion in Medina, Wash., that she shares with her husband, Microsoft multibillionaire Bill – has included the premier of China.

"As an onlooker, I was taken aback," says Sundar. Even away from the cameras Ms. Gates had an easy rapport with "the marginalized," he says, the drug-addicted and the transgendered. "She was engaged in asking very specific questions about whether this project was touching their lives.... There was a natural person in her, an individual who connects with people."

It is a selective kind of connectedness. The enigmatic Gates – her interviews famously rare, her close associates reticent, her three young children shielded – could be considered the anti-Angelina Jolie in her approach. Gates – by all accounts an active partner in the Bill & Melinda Gates Foundation – is, as a Fort Worth, Texas, paper recently declared, "the most powerful woman you know next to nothing about."

Her clout has begun to swell of late, and along with it public curiosity about her. Philanthropist (and close family friend) Warren Buffett's recent record-setting $31 billion gift to the foundation heightened the mystery around the woman whose face recently was book-ended by those of Mr. Gates and rock star Bono on the cover of Time – but was unrecognizable to all but four of 20 Seattle-area residents shown her photo, without context, by the Monitor.

"There are many other people in Seattle who make sure they're seen at all the big events," says Dottie Simpson, wife of the late Seattle philanthropist W. Hunter Simpson and a longtime friend of Bill Gates's parents, William H. and Mary. "That's not Melinda's style."

A spokeswoman for Gates Foundation rules out an interview in a month largely set aside for family. "When they're off," says Amy Siegel, "it's very guarded time." A portrait emerges slowly from scattered clues among Gates's public statements and from tales coaxed from those just outside the formidable cone of silence.

A distance-runner and kayaker, she admits to bouts of stage fright. She considers the late independent and tenacious Washington Post grand dame Katharine Graham a role model. Gates reportedly had her activist's epiphany when, while on safari in Africa in 1993, she watched women trekking shoeless for miles in the dust to sell a few vegetables.

"Bill and I believe one life is worth no more or less than any other," Gates told the Times (London) last year. "That issue of equity is what the foundation stands for."

In another sense, greater equity could be key to the foundation's success. It could call for Gates to shed the relative anonymity she has nurtured since she met Bill Gates at a company event in New York in 1987. It's a step out that she indicated in a 2002 Newsweek interview she'd probably try if it would help advance the development of an AIDS vaccine.

"Women often do not claim their power and put their whole identity out there in the public so that they become the engine," observes Swanee Hunt, the former ambassador, philanthropist, and director of the Women and Public Policy Program at Harvard's Kennedy School. "I think it will be great as she increases her voice."

***

Page: 1 | 2