Cunningham’s Calling : Corporate Commando’s New Career Is ‘Nurturing’ Pregnant Women

OSTERVILLE, Mass. — In a class at the Harvard Business School, graduate student Mary Elizabeth Cunningham was asked what she expected to be doing in 30 years.

Running an orphanage, the Phi Beta Kappa graduate of Wellesley College replied, and then, she recalls, expressed astonishment that none of her classmates voiced equally socially responsible aspirations.

They, on the other hand, may have been less surprised when Cunningham catapulted to overnight prominence, first by landing a position as executive assistant and in-house prodigy to Bendix Corp. president and chief executive officer William Agee, then by landing Agee. The uproar over what her future husband (then married to someone else) described in 1980 as their “very, very close” relationship forced 29-year-old Cunningham (also still married to someone else) out of what was by then a vice presidency of Bendix.

Cunningham earned her revenge with a best seller called “Powerplay: What Really Happened at Bendix” (Simon & Schuster). By age 30, she was an executive vice president at Seagram & Sons.

History Comes Full Circle

Six years later, ensconced in a cottage-like office in this exclusive Cape Cod community, Mary Cunningham Agee recently spun her personal history full circle by applying to the state of Massachusetts for a license to run an adoption agency. It’s not an orphanage, exactly, but as founder and chief staffer of a nonprofit organization called the Nurturing Network, Cunningham said she has finally answered her calling, finally found the job she was meant to do all along.

“Everything else, everything I’ve ever done, pales in significance next to this,” the former corporate commando said of her service for young professional women facing unplanned or unwanted pregnancies. “This is what I was always meant to do.”

Cunningham, as she still feels comfortable referring to herself, stretched out her arms and beamed, the portrait of personal and professional satisfaction in an office decorated with ruffled, eyelet curtains and bestrewn with teddy bears, tiny stuffed dolls and other accouterments of the nursery and maternal bliss. Here she was, running a service that urges young women to complete their pregnancies and helps provide them with resources--new jobs, transfers to different academic institutions, even new “nurturing families”--to do so.

“It’s like arms have just enfolded you, like a religion,” she said.

The metaphor is apt. In her book, devout Catholic Cunningham likened herself to “a latter-day Joan of Arc.” As a schoolgirl in Lebanon, N.H., she recalls, she was a favorite student regularly chosen by the nuns to place the crown on the statue of the Blessed Mother. She still attends daily Mass.

In an interview several years ago in a national magazine, Cunningham offered this explanation of her dream of running an orphanage: “I saw myself, frankly, as a nun of some sort. I have considered the prospect of working with men in a more celibate situation, where I’d be a nun and they’d be priests. Being a member of the Church is a little like being a member of a family--like being a member of that corporation.”

It was Cunningham’s uncle, and lifelong mentor, Monsignor William Nolan, who most strongly guided her religious zeal. Nolan, in many ways her surrogate father, may also have shepherded the driving ambition that surfaced in his niece as early as anyone can remember.

“When I was 5 years old,” Cunningham explained, “someone stepped into my life. . . .”

It was then that Cunningham’s parents’ marriage collapsed, the casualty, Cunningham has said, of her father’s heavy drinking. From their big, comfortable house on Casco Bay in Falmouth, Me., Cunningham’s mother moved her four children to a small rented apartment in Hanover, N.H. Beyond an annual birthday card, Mary Cunningham never again heard from her father. But so influential was Father Bill in her life that her first-born son, William Nolan Agee, was named for him.

Little Will, as she often calls the 3-month-old baby, is Cunningham’s second child, but her third pregnancy. The fact is significant because it was while recovering, grieving, pulling herself together from the loss of her first pregnancy, a miscarriage more than two years ago, that Cunningham dreamed up the idea that would become the Nurturing Network.

Cunningham was shocked when she lost that first pregnancy. “It was something I had wanted so deeply,” she said. “I had never thought I would have a miscarriage.” In a life marked by meteoric success, “everything else had gone right.”

Cunningham said she was unprepared for the emotions that enveloped her following the miscarriage.

“I just remember the most horrible, horrible sense of loss,” she said. Many people dismiss miscarriage as a routine process of nature, but, “for me,” Cunningham said, “it was definitely a death,” and what she experienced “was definitely a post-mortem depression.”

Normally the quickest of studies (“in a few days,” she boasts in her book, she had made changes at Bendix that “an outside consultant would . . . take six months to complete”), Cunningham said she was surprised at how long--”about six weeks,”--it took her to recover.

But during that healing process, Cunningham had a kind of epiphany.

“I remember,” she said, “a sense that the only way I could put closure on this experience was to do something else for someone who was experiencing something worse.”

As a strategic planner at Bendix and Seagram’s, Cunningham was trained to think of worst-possible-case scenarios. “I started to think about the woman who didn’t have a husband to put his arm around her,” she said. Or, worse in her view, “the woman who had been forced into having an abortion.”

Until then, Cunningham had avoided the strident tone of the abortion debate. But suddenly, she found herself thinking about what she concluded was “a true choice.”

“That is why we exist,” she wrote in the pink-and-lavender brochure introducing the Nurturing Network. “To let a woman know that the alternative to abortion can be hers if she chooses.”

Suburban Matron

Dressed today in high Talbot’s--a deep scarlet skirt, matching lace-trimmed sweater, silk blouse knotted with a soft flowered scarf, sensible, low-heeled pumps--Cunningham looks more the suburban matron than Cape Cod’s resident champion of feminism. On her left hand resides a heavy diamond wedding ring; on her right, a serpentine ring with a profusion of diamonds. Her single-pearl pierced earrings are trimmed with diamonds, and diamonds ring her gold wristwatch. Her right wrist reveals a diamond tennis bracelet. She wears only a hint of makeup: a trace of mascara on her blue eyes, a hint of lipstick, a well-scrubbed look on skin that seems, perhaps because she has been up since 5 a.m. attending to a fussy newborn, older than 36.

Most of all, Cunningham presents a picture of complete self-control, as if not a single hair would dare wander out of place.

Cunningham is married to a very rich man, and her own $10,000-$12,000 per-engagement speaking fees and hefty consulting charges make her no financial slouch herself. She serves on an array of impressive boards of trustees, boards of directors and influential advisory panels. In a five-page official biography, describing herself as “business executive, author and entrepreneur,” Cunningham counts “among her numerous accomplishments” listings in Who’s Who in American Women, Who’s Who in the World, Contemporary Authors and Les Compagnons du Beaujolais, “one of the most prestigious of France’s wine fraternities.”

She and Agee move in a mega-fast-track circle of business executives, academics and largely Republican politicians, so much so that Cunningham vetoed one interview appointment because “it’s impossible, Bob and Liddy Dole are coming to dinner.”

She has a reputation for being controlling, rescheduling another interview date at the 11th hour because she wanted to pace her media coverage.

She talks about anger and suffering and compassion, but at some deep level, the emotions of this woman selected twice by the World Almanac as “one of the 25 most influential women in America” seem always to be in check, visibly softening only when she produces pictures of her husband and two children. So formidable is she, in fact, that even off the record, former colleagues will not discuss their relationships with her.

But in “Powerplay,” Cunningham portrayed herself as a victim of gender, maintaining that no one would have blinked at a male executive who traveled in the same limousine or stayed at the same hotel as his boss. Her new venture, in Cunningham’s view, is “highly feminist” in its dedication to young professional women.

And yet feminism, Cunningham said, has actually “betrayed” those very women. “Feminism has been so busy trying to defend the right to abort, they haven’t defended the right to be a mother,” she said. “I do feel that is a betrayal of the majority of women.”

Cunningham and Agee, whose departure from Bendix in 1983 is widely reported to have been assisted by one of modern history’s more generous golden parachutes, settled here in Osterville, a community with a shoreline so pristine Boston magazine called it one of the state’s two most desirable private beaches, soon after Agee left Bendix. Cunningham quit Seagram’s, and together they set up shop in a little building on Osterville’s Main Street as Semper Enterprises, a venture capitalist consulting firm.

Cunningham said her husband threw all his support to her when she decided to research, and eventually establish, the Nurturing Network. Often, Cunningham said, Agee stays home to baby-sit for little William and Mary Alana, 2 1/2. Seed money for the two years of exploration, office equipment and rehabilitating the attic of Semper Enterprises to house what Cunningham sometimes calls “the Nertch” came mainly from the $200,000 proceeds of the sale of the couple’s vacation property in Agee’s native Idaho.

Cunningham, whose best-selling book and notoriety following the Bendix matter have made her a popular fixture on the national speaking circuit, also pours all her speaking fees into the Nurturing Network. Increasingly, she said, she chooses audiences that may in fact help the Nurturing Network as she shifts her focus away from the standard women-in-business theme and toward topics that pertain to motherhood-and-business.

Characteristically, Cunningham embraced her new mission with religious ardor, approaching it “almost like a marketing project.” She pulled up the figures on abortion: “last year, more than 1.5 million . . . in the United States.”

She herself, however, has vowed to stay aloof from the bitter arguments either of pro-lifers, those who oppose abortion, or pro-choicers, those who support it. “I refuse to be part of the zealotry on all sides,” Cunningham said. “The only person who needs to know my view on abortion is my husband.

“And,” she said, primly folding her hands on a desk where not a paper lay out of place, “he already knows.”

Unlike the proverbial unwed teen, Cunningham said the women she intended to reach were “college-age and professional women who were not getting pregnant for self-esteem reasons,” women, she said, who had been overlooked in the abortion discussion.

They were women, she said, “like your sister, your roommate, your daughter,” women who for a variety of reasons, found themselves unmarried and unexpectedly pregnant. Each of these women, Cunningham said in a somber voice, was a victim.

Since the Nurturing Network opened its ruffled-curtained doors last Mother’s Day, Cunningham’s more than 100 clients have included “corporate vice presidents, bankers, nurses, two lawyers and many, many administrative assistants.” Because she remains so intent on “not imposing my own values,” her 150-160 “nurturing families”--families around the country who volunteer to shelter the pregnant woman--are “Christian, Catholic, Jewish, Muslim and Buddhist.” Her network of colleges and universities willing to consider Cunningham’s clients as transfer students now numbers almost 100. Her personal and professional experiences have been helpful in drawing up this list, she said, since “Many of Bill’s and my friends are college presidents.”

In much the same fashion, Cunningham called on “old friends” from the corporate world to help find “nurturing” employers. For example, “the first 10 corporate contacts were all through the Bendix experience.”

Soon Cunningham was leaning so hard on her acquaintances that “I thought some of my friends would say, ‘It’s not fun being a friend of Mary.’ ”

But acceptance of her idea was “instant,” Cunningham said.

Cunningham’s clients pay no fees to the Nurturing Network. For many, the single expense may be the sliding scale charged by some of the counselors Cunningham “encourages” her clients to visit. Cunningham herself draws no salary from the Nurturing Network, and at present, she has just one full-time paid employee.

But financial self-aggrandizement, Cunningham said, has never been her primary aspiration. “I am someone who used to baby-sit and forget to ask for the money,” she said, laughing. Gratified by donations that have come in, she said some in the network have donated indirectly, by refusing to charge fees, for example, for legal consultations.

Outlining a future that includes, at the request of at least one Nurturing Network client, adoption services and perhaps one day, day-care services or even services for senior citizens, Cunningham politely bristles at the suggestion that “Mother Nertch,” as she sometimes signs letters to close friends, has somehow drifted away from the arena of power that earned her a national name.

“What do we mean by personal power?” she asked rhetorically. “There is the power that comes from titles and Dress for Success suits. But I think ‘powerful’ is that sense that you can effect an influence on things that matter most to you.

“Now in 1980, what mattered most to me was how much women could do in the corporate world, and as well, what would happen to women in the corporate world. That was what power meant to me, trying to have an influence on an environment that mattered to me then.”

Now, Cunningham said, “power has shifted closer to what I’m all about.”

So where does Mary Cunningham expect to be in 30 years? She smiled. The corporate rat race, “back where I was,” is out of the question, she said.

On the other hand, “I wouldn’t be surprised if in 30 years I am somewhere very much like this, like what I am doing now, if not the same thing.

“It is not something I should do,” she said. “It is something I want to do.”

Cunningham looked serene.

“It is almost like a feeling of destiny,” she said.