Anne Martindell, 93, lawmaker and diplomat
NEW YORK - Anne C. Martindell, who entered politics in her 50s, found true love as ambassador to New Zealand in her 60s, earned a college degree in her 80s, and published a memoir, "Never Too Late," in her 90s, died Wednesday in Princeton, N.J. She was 93.
Her birth, her breeding, and her iron-willed father seemed to have condemned Ms. Martindell to a life she later dismissed as utterly conventional - "I didn't do anything real until I was 50," she told a reporter - but feminism and the 1960s changed all that.
Racing to make up for lost time, she carved out a career in New Jersey politics, serving as a state senator in the 1970s, and held posts in President Carter's administration, including that of ambassador to New Zealand. She also resumed her education at Smith College six decades after her freshman year, and in her 90s wrote her memoirs, published last month by Boxed Books. The book's theme, neatly expressed by its author in two words, is carpe diem.
Anne Clark was born in 1914 in the Plaza Hotel in Manhattan. Her memoirs describe a pampered but miserable childhood. Her sickly, mentally unstable mother, the former Marjory Blair, was the heiress to a railroad fortune. Her cold and distant father, William J. Clark - an alcoholic, she later discovered - was a prominent lawyer who in 1938 became a judge for the US Court of Appeals for the Third Circuit.
After attending private schools in Manhattan and Princeton and boarding school near Baltimore, she entered Smith College in 1932.
Midway through her freshman year, she announced to her father that she intended to earn a degree and study law. "He was a federal judge, and I thought it would please him," she told a reporter for The
By parental decree, she dropped out of Smith, then married George C. Scott Jr., a stockbroker, with whom she reared three children: Marjory Luther of Ann Arbor, Mich.; George C. Scott III of Richmond, Va.; and David C. Scott of Princeton. The marriage ended in divorce after 13 years.
In 1948, she married Jackson Martindell, the publisher of Who's Who and the father of her son Roger. In addition to her children, she leaves a brother, J. William Clark, of Great Barrington, Mass.; nine grandchildren; and six great-grandchildren.
Dismayed by the United States' involvement in Vietnam, she began raising money for the 1968 presidential campaign of Senator Eugene J. McCarthy.
After McCarthy failed to win the nomination, she agreed to become the vice chairwoman of the New Jersey Democratic Party. In 1972, Ms. Martindell was the state chairwoman for Senator George McGovern's presidential campaign, and she led the New Jersey delegation to the Democratic National Convention, the only woman heading a state delegation. In 1973, Ms. Martindell won a seat in the New Jersey Senate.
In her four years as senator, during which time she and her husband separated, Ms. Martindell focused on women's rights, education, and the environment. She helped create the New Jersey Division on Women, one of the first state-level offices in the country that addressed exclusively issues affecting women.
Her campaign work for Jimmy Carter led to an appointment with the US Agency for International Development. In 1979, she was named ambassador to New Zealand and Western Samoa.
