OVER many years, Susette Kelo stood up against corporate power and New London officials, and became known around the country as the woman who couldn’t be moved. But four years after her eminent domain case was decided by the United States Supreme Court, how would the former owner of the “Little Pink House,” as the title of a new book refers to it, manage an interview in Manhattan by Sean Hannity? In her long campaign to save the house from demolition she was never a camera hound.
Ms. Kelo and the book’s author, Jeff Benedict, a New London native, arrived at the Fox News green room on schedule. They watched as another guest on the show, Ann Coulter, commanded attention — a makeup artist required a full 40 minutes to prep the glamorous basher of liberals. When it came time to apply the blush to the other woman in the room, Ms. Kelo said, “I haven’t worn makeup in 10 years.”
A longtime nurse, Ms. Kelo also thought — as she confided later — that Ms. Coulter resembled patients she had seen.
“She’s way too thin,” she said. “This poor girl needs to eat.”
Mr. Benedict thought of other contrasts between the two women. There was a great buzz in the building when Ms. Coulter arrived. Ms. Kelo was greeted as any ordinary citizen off the street, without heads turning. Yet Mr. Benedict wrote in his journal that night that 50 years from now the name Susette Kelo will be far better known than Ann Coulter.
Ms. Kelo appeared on Fox at the request of Mr. Benedict and his publisher. But Ms. Kelo had made it clear that New York City did not impress her. This was only the second time in her 52 years that she had been there. The first was a few weeks earlier, when she visited the offices of Grand Central Publishing to help plan publicity for the book. There will be no third time, she said — the city is too crowded, too fast-paced, too un-Connecticut.
During the interview, Mr. Hannity was strongly in the corner of Ms. Kelo, the woman who repeatedly said no when New London, devastated by job losses and budget shortfalls, tried to take her house and many others as part of a plan to leverage Pfizer’s arrival in the city — and, it was hoped, create new jobs. Like many other commentators and citizens around the country, Mr. Hannity had been outraged by the Supreme Court’s 5-to-4 decision in 2005 that allowed the city the rights to the Fort Trumbull neighborhood.
Ms. Kelo’s answers to Mr. Hannity’s questions were short and only what was required. On the one hand, the interview brought up difficult memories. On the other, she saw opportunity to remind viewers that a home is supposed to be a sanctuary, not a place where wolves are always at the door. When the taping ended, the host put his hand on her knee and said, “You don’t like this, do you?” Ms. Kelo replied, “No, I don’t.”
And yet a kind of national stardom has been thrust upon her since the case went to the Supreme Court. When Congress asked her to testify later as it took up the question of how to legislate eminent domain, she gave her name and said, “I am the Kelo in Kelo v. City of New London.”
The journey from courtroom to bookstore was not instant, however. Amazingly, although the case, a classic David and Goliath story, was widely discussed, no authors followed up in a timely fashion with a book proposal. Mr. Benedict himself had been busy with other projects. (He has written several books and had a brief fling at politics, losing the Democratic nomination in a run for the House of Representatives from Connecticut’s Second District.)
When he knocked on Susette Kelo’s door without an appointment, he girded himself for a cold reception. Mr. Benedict introduced himself and said he was an author. She stared at him and said: “I know who you are. What took you so long?”
Ms. Kelo’s colleagues at work had mentioned her case as a natural book, and one of them had talked specifically about Mr. Benedict, whose hard-edged investigation a decade ago, “Without Reservation,” questioned the authenticity of the Mashantucket Pequots who built Foxwoods, one of the largest casinos in the world.
Mr. Benedict knew that to have a book he had to have Ms. Kelo’s story. And he would also need the stories of other players in the drama — including that of Claire Guadiani, who as president of Connecticut College when the case took shape, was a perfect foil for Ms. Kelo. Mr. Benedict conducted more than 300 interviews, and finally wrote what he called the “the most complicated book I’ve ever worked on.”
Even so, Mr. Benedict, who wrote much of the narrative in the attic of his grandfather’s house in Niantic even as he accepted a teaching position at Southern Virginia University, has produced what a critic in The New York Times Book Review called “a fascinating narrative.”
It points out, too, that the state of Connecticut has yet to pass an eminent domain bill that would prevent the taking of homes for private development, and also that Ms. Kelo now lives in nearby Groton. Her former house was saved from demolition when it was moved, with the help of state funds, to another part of New London. The tract of land on which it sat and which Ms. Kelo defended so staunchly is now empty. No buildings, no enterprise, no jobs. And yet a barren reminder of one woman’s courage.
