Mitt's Mission

George drove his children hard, encouraging them to be industrious and to "make good choices," a phrase common in Mormon circles. Phillip Maxwell, who went to high school with Mitt and is a Birmingham, Mich., lawyer, says it was difficult to make plans with the Romney boys on weekends because, in addition to the demands of their church, their father gave them so much yardwork to do. "When old George looked you in the eye, you did what he told you," says Maxwell.

George also enforced his belief that his Mormon children had to be integrated into the world and respect people of different backgrounds. Cortella remembers his Roman Catholic mother's being apprehensive about sending her son into the bosom of a Mormon family—until the first Sunday he spent at the Romneys' house. "It was about 11 o'clock in the morning," Cortella says. "Mr. Romney said, 'You come with me.' He took me to the Catholic church not far from the house. He said, 'From now on, every Sunday you will come to this church,' and he was getting mad if I was not going." In an even starker example of the senior Romney's live-and-let-live policy, Cortella says the Romneys allowed him to smoke cigarettes in his room.

If Mitt chafed under the demands of his idiosyncratic father and his faith, he didn't show it. At Cranbrook, the elite private high school he attended in Bloomfield Hills, Mich., classmates say he was the only Mormon they knew, but that he wore his religion, and his social status, lightly—seemingly perfectly at ease with the contradictions in his life. He was known as an amiable, unpretentious boy who enjoyed a joke—a quality inherited, perhaps, from his mother. "My mom had a great sense of humor," says Romney, "and she had an infectious laugh, which, I've determined, is a great attribute. It makes you instantly popular." The teenage Romney was a prankster. His classmate Maxwell remembers one evening when the boys borrowed Maxwell's father's Chevy coupe, which looked like an old police car. Mitt cadged his father's State Police badge and Maxwell put on his uncle's Air Force uniform. Posing as cops, the boys pulled over two buddies on a double date, "arrested" them and drove away, leaving the astonished girls behind.

At 18, Mitt fell in love. Ann Davies was three years his junior, Episcopalian and by all accounts a knockout. She soon converted to Mormonism; George performed the ceremony. Mitt and Ann agreed that they would marry. But first, Romney had to go on his mission. After an undistinguished year at Stanford University, he flew to France, where he set about knocking on doors—and pining for Ann. He persuaded his father to send him extra money so he could call her, says Michael Bush, a professor of French at Brigham Young University who served as a missionary with Romney. This was unusual: Mormon missionaries rarely called home, both because it wasn't encouraged and because most of them couldn't afford to. (Now rules dictate that missionaries can call home two or three times a year.) But Mitt "was totally in love," says Donald Miller, a dentist in Calgary who was one of Romney's missionary "companions," which means that they almost never left each other's side. "I would have to go down to the post office every other week while he phoned home and talked to his girlfriend," says Miller.

The life of a Mormon missionary is relentless, but to be in France during the Vietnam War was especially grueling. Anti-American sentiment was fierce, and the people Romney approached—Catholic-born, secular-minded—were mostly not interested in his message. Miller says he knocked on hundreds of doors every day for 30 months and was responsible for just two convert baptisms.

But during the mission, the mature Romney came into focus. He excelled at the French language and at memorizing the lessons he was to give listeners. The local mission office kept records to quantify missionaries' success, and Romney was a top performer. He was eventually promoted to assistant to the mission president, the highest mission post. In the summer of 1968, he set to work motivating his fellow missionaries. "Nothing is impossible for men who are marching in unison," he wrote in a pamphlet. "They can destroy bridges or they can build new ones." LDS members say nothing molds a man as much as his mission, where, deprived of any diversion, he must concentrate fully on his future and his God. Mitt became a serious person in France.