THE NINE LIVES OF MARION BARRY JR.

Marion Barry is the subject of a documentary on HBO
DAVID CARR Published: August 9, 2009

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Marion S. Barry Jr.
The Washington Post

Marion Barry in front of the White House during a parade in an undated photo. He now serves on the Washington City Council.

A career that has spanned five decades and included four terms as mayor of Washington, a trip to federal prison for possession of cocaine, and his current position as a City Council member in the capital. Throughout it all he has displayed an almost feral gift for retail politics: a quiet sidebar conversation here, a big-clap hug there and always, always, even now at 73, lavishing attention on the women in the room.

After a youth of extreme poverty (which included picking cotton) in Itta Bena, Miss. — “dirt, dirt, dirt poor” he says in the documentary — Mr. Barry became an Eagle Scout and earned a master’s degree in chemistry at Fisk University in Nashville. But his head was turned by the civil rights movement after he got involved in the Student Nonviolent Coordinating Committee and he quit a doctoral program in chemistry at the University of Tennessee. In 1965 he moved to Washington and commenced an enduring affair with a city that was then a ward of the federal government.

Mr. Barry has the reputation of being a less than scintillating interview, and a conversation on Thursday evening did little to change that view. He tends to lean on platitudes and civil rights movement aphorisms to describe his “50 years of public service that served as a blueprint for those who came later” while continuing to blame most of his legal problems on his opponents.

The news media have generally not been friends to Mr. Barry, nor has the federal government, a persistent antagonist throughout his career. He maintains that the United States Attorney’s Office, in enticing him to a hotel room where drugs were present back in 1990, was trying to kill him.

In the documentary directed and produced by Dana Flor and Toby Oppenheimer, it is clear that age has caught up to Mr. Barry. Afflicted with high blood pressure and diabetes, and having had his prostate removed, he often moves slowly and cat-naps between appearances. Watching him in the documentary is a little like witnessing Willie Mays no longer able to run down a fly ball, but he was completely on his game for the premiere.

Mr. Barry has never been especially enlightening on the subject of himself or his contretemps, and the documentary reflects his absence of self-awareness. But Mr. Barry’s ex-wife, Effi Barry, an elegant and eloquent woman who divorced him in 1993, is a steady and telling presence throughout the documentary. (Effi Barry, who died in 2007, was his third wife. He has been married four times.)Mr. Barry initially had little interest in the project. “He wasn’t friendly, he wasn’t receptive, but eventually, I wore him down.” (Mr. Barry said, “I figured it would be the one time when the whole story could be told.”)
Mr. Oppenheimer, whose credits include co-producing “Devil’s Playground” (about Amish teenagers), said there were protests and counter-protests at the film’s premiere in June at the Silverdocs festival in Washington, with people shouting and arguing about whether Mr. Barry was worthy of a film.“We both watched and said to each other, ‘This is what our film is about,’ ” he said. “The passions that this man’s career has generated continue to this day.”

Mr. Barry’s credentials as an early and effective warrior in the civil rights movement receive significant attention in the 78-minute documentary. A leader of the Free D.C. Movement, Mr. Barry founded a jobs program called Pride Inc. for unemployed black men. He was elected to the school board in 1972 and when the city achieved home rule in 1974 was elected as an at-large council member. He was shot when Hanafi Muslims took over the District Building in 1977 but survived, cementing a reputation for both fearlessness and durability.

With the sought-after endorsement of The Washington Post in 1978, he became the city’s second mayor and was re-elected twice. During the third term rumors began to circulate that he was using cocaine even as the city he ran was tipping over under the weight of a crack epidemic. On Jan. 18, 1990, Mr. Barry went to the Vista Hotel to visit a former girlfriend, Rasheeda Moore, who was working as a government informant. He was caught on tape by the F.B.I. and city police using crack cocaine.

Most political careers would have ended there, but Mr. Barry is not any politician, and Washington’s voters and juries have a complicated relationship with authority. The jury deadlocked on the multiple felony counts stemming from the Vista arrest; Mr. Barry was convicted on a single count of possession for an earlier incident. After serving a six-month sentence he ran for City Council using the slogan “He may not be perfect, but he’s perfect for D.C.” In 1994 he ran for a fourth term as mayor and won.

His successful campaign to return to the City Council in 2004 on behalf of Ward 8 — one of the city’s chronically impoverished areas — serves as a centerpiece of the documentary. Mr. Barry’s public life continued to suffer from steady brushes with the law, including failed drug tests, a conviction for failure to pay taxes, probation violation, traffic offenses and, last month, a charge that he was stalking an ex-girlfriend. (That charge has since been dropped.)“Those are all just distractions, efforts by the government and the media to distract me, to discombobulate me and separate me from the community,” he said. “I was re-elected with more than 90 percent of the vote in 2008, so that stuff isn’t going to keep me down. They know who I am.”