Eleanor Mondale’s Long, Strange Journey

C. J., the Star Tribune’s then-freshly minted gossip columnist, was stalking and chronicling Mondale’s every move like a panther tracking a flamingo. Entire forests died in service to C. J.’s coverage of Eleanor at lunch . . . Eleanor shopping . . . Eleanor clubbing . . .  Eleanor schmoozing . . . . You’d have thought there had never been a statuesque blond cursed with unapologetic joie de vivre in the Twin Cities.

“God,” Mondale remembers, “it was so insane.”   

Friends, family, and acquaintances universally regard Eleanor as one of the world’s happy people, an incurable optimist. The kind of person who springs out of bed every morning cheery and forward-looking. That probably explains why they also don’t think of her as particularly reflective. Regular personal reflection requires a propensity for remorse and regret: a morbidity gene that she doesn’t seem to have.

But there’s no question that her experience with WCCO–TV in 1989 and 1990 cemented a reputation that still dogs her in her hometown.

The unmistakable inference of the picture—painted primarily by the Star Tribune, but also by this publication, which applied the phrase Wild Child to a cover feature on Mondale around the same time—was of a spoiled party girl, living off a famous name, running amok. Or, in today’s pop vernacular, Kate Moss by way of Paris Hilton. And if what was printed wasn’t bad enough, the rumors spawned by the published stories applied another oppressive outer layer to her persona.

“As crazy as it was,” Mondale says now, “what hurt most were the rumors that weren’t true. I mean, I had people telling me they’d heard stories of me swimming naked at parties. You can imagine how a conservative TV station like WCCO reacted to stuff like that.”

For the record, WCCO grunts at the time—producers and photographers who actually worked with Mondale, shooting nightclub acts, interviewing touring rock stars, and such—insist she was not only fun to work with, but was a hard-working professional.

The way WCCO photojournalist Brad Earley remembers it, “They brought her in to be this personality covering the kinds of things younger viewers wanted to know about. Every station always wants younger viewers, and management at the time loved the name and the hometown angle. They loved the whole premise of someone who looked like Eleanor being out there doing those kinds of stories.

“But what actually happened was they pretty much tossed her a rock and said, ‘Swim.’ She was supposed to have a producer assigned to her full-time. They never gave her one. The feeling you got was that if it worked out, management would take all the credit. And if it didn’t, it’d be her fault.”

Kevin Smith, now executive director of public affairs for the Minnesota Twins, was a producer at WCCO at the time. He was assigned to a couple of Mondale’s early stories, but then shifted to other work.

“She was fine to work with,” says Smith. “Sure, she was inexperienced. But she freely admitted it and worked hard at learning the game. There was never a problem with her being late, playing the diva, or trying to be Miss Know-It-All. I remember she was a lot of fun.”

“The basic problem,” Earley says, “is that management just got more than they bargained for. I mean, we all know TV is a very conservative environment. It didn’t help that C. J. made a living off of her, writing stories in bars and all that. But that was the whole idea. Eleanor was just being herself and doing what she thought they wanted her to do.

“She got a bad deal. She got a lot of mixed messages about what management wanted. It’s a whole different monster, doing a story about some band playing at a club and reporting what the governor did today.”

He adds ruefully, “This town is so desperate for celebrities.”

Smith jokes: “Yeah, it wasn’t like C. J. was going to get anywhere writing about Dave Moore.”

Eleanor remembers the episode as a “brushfire” with a lunatic level of attention roaring up around her. It reached its climax as the “Wild Child” story was about to hit the stands, nine short months into her WCCO career. The station got wind of it, and twitchy management decided they had had enough. Mondale was told they’d they’d pay her for three more months, but that her services were no longer required. Her response was, basically, “Keep your money. I’m out of here.”