Romance is in the air and it links one of America’s richest widows and the grandson of a Bajan.
The story goes like this: when Adrian Malik Fenty became mayor of Washington, DC, by winning the 2006 election in the nation’s capital, he told a Barbados diplomat there about his Bajan cousins.
Actually, Fenty, 42, has Bajan roots stretching back to his grandfather, who went to Panama from Barbados, worked on the canal and raised his family.
Buffalo, New York, was the next stop for the Fentys before Phil and Jeanette Fenty, Adrian’s parents, moved in 1967 to Washington, where he was born on December 6, 1970.
When Fenty lost his re-election bid in 2010, he quietly slipped out of the limelight. Now he is back in the headlines, albeit for a different reason.
The Bajan-American is currently the buzz of the social elite because of his reported budding romantic relationship with one of America’s richest and most eligible women, Laurene Powell Jobs, widow of the late Steve Jobs, the founder of electronic giant Apple who died two years ago of pancreatic cancer, leaving his wife and their three children an estate of US$10 billion (BDS$20 billion).
The Washington Post, one of the United States’ leading newspapers, didn’t ignore the story.
“Looks as if Adrian Fenty took the phrase ‘Go West, young man’ to heart – and has done very well for himself,” reported The Washington Post. “Last year, the former DC mayor scored a plum job with Andreessen Horowitz, one of Silicon Valley’s hottest venture capital firms. Now, we learned that Fenty is dating Laurene Powell Jobs, the billionaire widow of Apple co-founder Steve Jobs.”
Within 24 hours, the story was splashed across the country, informing people about the man who had the District of Columbia and has captured the heart of the elegant woman whose passion for education, social development and immigration reform is well known.
By all account, Jobs and Fenty met at a conference in Houston in 2011 and things soon clicked between them, largely because of their deep interest in education and social reform.
When he ran for mayor, Fenty based much of his election campaign on reforming the city’s schools. After all, they were among the worst in the country. On assuming office, he set about restructuring the school system. He reduced its central administrative staff, changed the curriculum, closed 23 schools with low enrolments and shocked the capital’s education establishment by bringing in Michelle Rhee to run the system.
The upshot: student scores on achievement tests at the secondary level skyrocketed by 14 points in reading and 17 points in math, the results of the scholastic aptitude test jumped by 27 points in 2010 and graduation rates rose every year. But that stunning performance wasn’t enough to save his job. The electorate voted him out of the mayor’s office in 2010, putting Vincent Gray in his place.
Forced to return to private life, Fenty began making speeches around the country on education, taught at Oberlin College, his alma mater, and was invited to join the board of College Track, a non-profit college founded by Powell Jobs and Marc Andreessen of Andreessen & Horowitz that prepares poor students for college or university classroom work.
Sitting on the College Track board may have opened up a plum position for Fenty at Andreessen & Horowitz, which hired him to advise the firm on how it should relate to federal, state and local governments.
There was another connection: Marc Andreessen’s wife is a close and personal friend of 49-year-old Powell Jobs. By then, too, the former mayor’s 15-year-marriage to Michelle Fenty, the mother of their three children, was said to be falling apart. As a matter of fact, Fenty’s wife took a job with the Inter-American Development Bank in Trinidad and Tobago and they officially separated earlier this year. Their divorce is set to become final in a matter of months, according to published report.
Powell Jobs, a graduate of the Wharton School of the University of Pennsylvania, where she earned an MBA, kept a low profile throughout most of her 20-year marriage to Steve Jobs. However, she was noted nationally for her philanthropic impulses, founding the Emerson Collective, a non-profit enterprise devoted to entrepreneurship and social reform, sitting on the boards of a variety of education and social charities and being appointed to President Barack Obama’s White House Council for Community Solutions.
And what’s her assessment of Fenty?
“Adrian Fenty is one of our country’s great advocates for education reform,” she said in a statement when he joined the College Track board. “His sense of urgency and record of accomplishment is unparalleled.”
None of this means her late husband’s memory has faded: “His private legacy with me and the kids is that of husband and father. And we miss him everyday.”
Neither Fenty nor Powell Jobs would comment on their romantic link.
