RACHEL ANNE MADDOW was born on April Fools’ Day 1973, and almost from the very beginning, she was showing signs of the wonky but entertaining public persona she’d grow into several decades in the future.
“Rachel arrived with a real quizzical look on her face, wanting to check everything out,” said her mother, Elaine Maddow, adding that her daughter was a pretty lively kid to boot.
“She was born grown-up, and she never talked baby talk,” said Elaine, noting that Rachel had taught herself to read around the age of three by reading the newspaper each morning. “We [kept] saying to ourselves, Who is that kid and where did she come from?”
Which was a reasonable question, given her parents’ heritage.
Elaine Gosse was born on June 16, 1941, in Newfoundland, Canada, into a conservative Catholic family where she was one of eight brothers and sisters; her father was a fisherman. “All I ever saw my mother do with eight children was work hard, so I thought, well, maybe I would just not do that,” Elaine remembered. “I’d be a career lady or sail the seas or do something really different.” She moved to California in 1963 to become a portfolio analyst for the financial company Dean Witter.
Robert—Rachel’s father—had grown up in Arizona and Southern California and graduated from Stanford University in 1964. He was in his second year at UC Hastings College of the Law in San Francisco when he met Elaine at a party. He served in Vietnam as a captain in the Air Force between 1967 and 1972, working as an attorney and liaison between the military and various gun and weapons manufacturers. He and Elaine married in 1968, and their first child, David, was born in July 1969. When Rachel was born, he changed careers and began working for the local water authority, the East Bay Municipal Utility District.
Rachel’s paternal grandfather emigrated from Russia, and though he was Jewish, he raised Rachel’s father as a Protestant. Robert and Elaine—who came from a devoted Catholic family—decided to raise their future children as Catholic, and Robert actually converted to Catholicism in 1981.
Elaine became an American citizen—when she was eight months pregnant with Rachel—because she wanted to vote in local and national elections, though it could also have been because she spent the afternoons during her pregnancy with Rachel watching the Watergate hearings on TV. In fact, Elaine marveled at her young daughter’s sense of compassion. “She always seemed to be concerned about causes and people that were overlooked,” said Elaine, a trait that was sparked in young Rachel when she entered kindergarten, the same year that California’s Proposition 13—an amendment that reduced property values and tax rates—became law.
“I can actually remember the library hours changing because they couldn’t afford to staff it anymore,” said Rachel years later. That, coupled with the state’s worst (to date) drought in 1977 due to record-low levels of snowpack across the state, also fostered her lifelong environmental activism, not to mention her father’s work on water issues. “Growing up in a time of drought made a lasting impression on the wet cement of my very young mind,” she said. “It gave me a lifelong appreciation that water is rare, fragile, and also that water is power.”
“There was a lot of discussion of fairness in our house,” said Elaine. Every night in the Maddow household the family would gather for dinner and grill the kids about how their days went, asking, ‘What went right and what went wrong in your day?’
“We discouraged whining,” she added. “If they whined, we’d say, ‘Whining is not going to do a thing. Now, how are you going to take care of it?’”
When Rachel and David were young, respectively only three and seven years old, they begged their parents for a pet, but Elaine always refused; after all, she had been raised to believe animals were there to work—such as dogs who herd sheep or help with hunting trips—or to be eaten. But they kept badgering, and their parents finally gave in and brought a golden retriever home. “My brother and I were really excited for about a half an hour, then we lost interest and it became my mom’s responsibility,” said Rachel. “The golden retriever ate her plants and then went straight back home.”
Like many kids growing up in the 1970s, young Rachel also watched her fair share of Saturday morning cartoons, but what really caught her eye—and incidentally also influenced her path—were the educational segments known as Schoolhouse Rock!, a series of three-minute animated shorts that aired on ABC, designed to convert dry educational topics such as science and grammar into fun learning experiences.
One of the best-known segments was “I’m Just a Bill,” which explained how the legislative process works. In fact, Rachel points to Schoolhouse Rock! as serving as a major influence on the segments of her show where she explains complex stories in plain language but with an entertaining and often humorous twist. She still has a soft spot for them. “When I see those, I get misty,” she said.
She also took careful note of how her father “watched” sports on TV—with the sound off while he listened to the radio—which would play an important role later on when she launched her radio career. “I thought, right, radio is harder. He’s getting a higher-level audio experience from people who know you can’t see the picture,” she said.
Another equally important formative moment arrived in 1980 when she watched Ronald Reagan on the family’s black-and-white television after the presidential election and couldn’t stand the sight of the future president. “All I remember is the feeling of dislike,” she said, which wasn’t a surprise, because even at an early age she was becoming aware of the huge disconnect between her burgeoning social values and those that surrounded her in her hometown of Castro Valley, which she would later describe as a “very conservative, nasty little town.”
But in the sea of red, Rachel’s parents were centrists, Reagan Democrats, which sometimes resulted in arguments and dug-in heels on both sides, and her family acknowledges that these lively debates helped shape Rachel’s debate skills later on. “Anytime we would have a disagreement, she could outtalk me and give me a run for money,” Elaine says. “It got to the point where I’d have to say, ‘Okay, we’re not going to discuss it anymore.’”
California presented a world of dichotomies to young Rachel. On the one hand, she grew up in the Bay Area, one of the most liberal parts of the United States. On the other hand, Castro Valley was an island of red Republican values surrounded by a sea of blue, and she realized that her intellect and compassion for the underdog were at odds with the sentiments of the majority of the population in her hometown. The grown-ups in her midst would talk fondly of someplace called Orange County, a conservative bastion in Southern California. “I thought Orange County was a very specific thing where the people would glow a different color,” she said.
Her first act of rebellion occurred at a gathering of the local chapter of the White Aryan Resistance, the modern term for the Ku Klux Klan, the skinhead racists who were common in the region. The group held rallies to attract new members at Rachel’s high school and put on concerts at local auditoriums.
Rachel gathered together a group of friends and put up anti-racist posters around town and asked a group of skinheads in nearby Oakland who were anti-racists to go to an upcoming concert organized by the racist skinheads. “We were just high school kids and we were afraid of them, but we asked them to please go and beat them up,” she said.
She was also a hard-core punk fan, favoring the Dead Kennedys and Hüsker Dü. “My parents were horrified,” she said. “I was grounded when my mom found an SST records sampler LP in my room, I think it had particularly porny cover art and she was very rattled by it. As a teenager, I thought at the time that it was probably the apex of my coolness.”
Despite her taste in music, she played several instruments when she was in junior high school. “But I was terrible at all of them,” she admitted. “I was best at being the conductor.”
She did better at athletics, especially when she arrived at Castro Valley High School, where she dove into playing as many sports as possible: basketball, swimming, and volleyball, which she excelled at. Rachel was more than a bit obsessive about showing up for practices and competitions; she was injured regularly but pushed through games and workouts anyway.
She’d understandably developed a reputation as a jock around school—and even dreamed of pursuing the Olympics—but she knew she was destined for more than a one-dimensional life. “Sports were the thing I did in high school, but the rest of my life didn’t reflect that aspect of my personality,” she said.
When it came to the movies, she favored John Hughes movies, The Breakfast Club in particular. And while she considered herself to be a mix of the jock and the rebellious character played by Ally Sheedy, she saw herself as John Bender, played by Judd Nelson: the outsider.
One outsider she particularly respected was Jessica Mitford, an Englishwoman who grew up in an aristocratic family and denounced her background. She became a muckraker of sorts and authored The American Way of Death, a book that took a critical look at the funeral industry in the United States. “[The book] was uncompromising and tough, but [written] in this witty and interesting way,” said Rachel. “And for her to have come from that family and take such an outsider’s perspective seemed so great.”
She was slowly becoming aware that she was already an outsider in another way. In the summer of 1989, between her junior and senior years of high school, Rachel volunteered at the Center for AIDS Services in nearby Oakland, pitching in where necessary by handing out food, running errands, and answering questions for clients who she inherently realized would be alive for only a short time.
As a result, she had intuited that her “tribe” was under siege even before she had admitted to herself that she was a lesbian. She said, “Growing up in the Bay Area as a gay kid defined the world in a life-or-death sort of way. There was a sense of: Look, your life is happening now, and this may be all you get.”
But coming out just to herself was still a gradual process, and while Rachel had dated guys in high school, they tended to be boys she was already friends with. In one instance, she primarily went out with one guy because she loved his car, a Mustang Fastback. “Except, I didn’t want to ride around in his car and be seen in it, I wanted that to be my car.”
She actually became serious with one guy who was a marine, and they went to her senior prom together, with him in full dress uniform and Rachel resplendent in a powder-blue dress.
But something didn’t feel right. “Boys weren’t as thrilling to me as they were for my girlfriends, and I definitely found myself drawn more to the charming young women in my life than to the men,” she said.
When she was sixteen, Rachel finally admitted to herself that she was a lesbian. “So that’s what’s going on below my chin,” she realized.
“It didn’t come to me in terms of ‘I think I like that girl,’ or ‘I think I’m falling in love,’ it was, ‘It would make sense to me if I ended up being a gay person,’” she said, adding that once she began to consider the possibility, more of the pieces fell into place. “It came to me as an abstraction and then very quickly became a hormonal urge. My next thought was, ‘But I hate softball! I can’t possibly be a lesbian because the only thing I know about lesbians is they play softball and I will never.’”
But when it came to telling her parents—or any of her classmates—well, that wouldn’t be in the cards for a while. After all, her parents were devoted Catholics at the time and two of her maternal aunts had even become nuns. “I knew it was going to be hard for them to accept me,” she said.
“One didn’t talk about those issues at that time,” admitted Elaine.
Besides, since Castro Valley was very conservative, Rachel worried that if she came out, she’d face physical and emotional harm. “I knew that it was not going to be very safe,” she said.
She also had another secret that she wasn’t going to reveal anytime soon: several years before she wrestled with her sexuality, she experienced her first major struggle with depression. “I was a weird, depressive little kid who never really thought I’d get to be an adult,” she said. “I never thought I’d reach drinking age.”
The combination of the two—being gay and having cyclical depression—caused a split reaction. On the one hand, “I was worried that I was going to have a hard life,” she said.
But on the other hand, once she came out to herself, she was incredibly relieved. She also turned her sights on leaving Castro Valley. “I knew this was not a place I wanted to be a gay person in,” she said.
Not only did she regard San Francisco’s gay community as her ticket out to live an authentic life, she also felt compelled to help her people any way she could. “It’s a galvanizing thing to know people who are dying in numbers,” she said. “To see a community come together and to see people fighting for each other and forming a secular, badass army to fight for their lives against a country that doesn’t care, it was very obvious to me that that’s the thing that I should do.”
If her parents suspected that their daughter was a lesbian, they shied away from mentioning it. Since she had dated boys, they might have rationalized any behavior in their daughter that felt contradictory. But young Rachel had a subversive streak that ran deep and needed to be aired. So in lieu of coming out to her parents, she conducted small acts of defiance.
Her favorite act of rebellion was to “relieve” the family of its vehicles. The Maddows were a Volkswagen family: her brother had a 1967 Bug and they also had a Vanagon, a precursor of the minivan that the family affectionately dubbed “the Blue Space Twinkie.” One day when Rachel was in high school, driver’s permit in hand, she “borrowed” the Bug, turned onto the highway, and just kept going. Thrilled to be escaping the tight confines of her family and her politically conservative town, she drove for hours. And although she was book smart, she knew zilch about cars. As she drove, she’d occasionally glance at the cluster of gauges and needles on the instrument panel and wonder what it meant when one of the needles was inching closer to the E.
She found out soon enough when the car started to lurch and suddenly stopped, giving her just enough time to pull into the breakdown lane. The car’s broken, she thought.
Despite the stress of keeping two huge secrets, Rachel continued with her eye on the prize of future Olympic gold, mostly because she believed that she had invested so much time and effort that there had to be a payoff down the road. “Because I spent so much time doing it, [I thought] this better be building toward something,” she said. Indeed, she appeared on the radar of several colleges that were scouting for athletic scholarships. But then fate intervened in the form of an injury that she could no longer power through.
One day in her senior year while playing volleyball, she hurt her shoulder so badly that a quick diagnosis revealed she needed surgery, which required a lengthy rehabilitation period. It also meant that she would have to postpone college for a year if she wanted to pursue a scholarship.
She opted against the surgery—her shoulder healed on its own, though to this day she has trouble raising her right arm above her head—and hung up her Olympic dreams. “It was a blessing in disguise,” she said.
“All the energy she had put into athletics, went into her academics,” said her father.
When she was accepted into Stanford University, her father’s alma mater, Elaine gave away the motley accumulation of crutches that had collected during Rachel’s high school athletic career.
She wasn’t class valedictorian—with her 3.9 grade point average she placed third in the class—but she had approached the school board and asked to give the commencement speech, providing them with an outline of typical generic graduation boilerplate about pursuing your dreams, blah blah blah, entitled “What a Long Strange Trip It’s Been.”
The board signed off on it.
But she had another secret: Her final act of defiance against the town she detested was to give a different speech, one where she’d reveal the deep-seated contempt she held against the town where she’d grown up. She sat down to write the real speech, which had nothing to do with her original outline. Even though she was still in the closet at high school, it bugged her to no end that parents and the school were so skittish about sex education, HIV, and anything revolving around sex. Some parents and teachers even wanted to ban certain textbooks and to promote prayer in school.
On graduation day, instead of wearing a fancy dress like many of her classmates, Rachel wore a T-shirt and shorts under her gown and Birkenstocks and “old Grandpa socks” on her feet, as she called them. She stepped up to the podium and announced that instead of giving the speech the school board had approved, she was going to take a different tack and “say the things that I’ve truly wanted to say for the past four years.”
Murmurs and nervous laughter spread across the audience as she began by challenging her classmates to become active members of their community. She pointed out that Castro Valley was regarded as a conservative community tucked into the liberal area of the Bay Area, and that the adults in her midst regularly struggled with talking about sexual matters, including saying the word “condom” out loud.
“Castro Valley has the potential to be an exciting, interesting, progressive community, but the people who dominate it today, I don’t think, are ready to let that happen. To those of you that are getting full-time jobs, joining the military, or going away to college, I implore you, give something back to this town.
“We alone are the ones that have to do it. We can’t leave it up to our elders anymore because tonight we become those elders.”
Her speech was punctuated by gasps, laughter, and applause, though none of the assembled faculty or administration tried to boot her off the stage or end her speech early. And indeed, her classmates gave her a standing ovation at the end.
She later admitted she was hesitant and a bit terrified about actually going through with it because she was unsure of how people would react. “I was very full of myself, and I thought that I would scandalize people,” she said. More important, she came away with something that would fuel the rest of her life: “[I understood] that I could actually do anything at that point.”
A lightbulb went off that night. Rachel realized that she loved being in the spotlight, making people laugh, and passing along her take on current events, all mashed up in a palatable stew, while also sticking a thumb in the eye of people she felt rightfully deserved it.
She filed all that away as she prepared to enter the next phase of her life.