From party animals to the party faithful

We already knew they like to party. But we did glean some new information about the no-longer-so-elusive Bush twins this week: Jenna has a husky voice, inflected with the Texas twang of her daddy. Barbara sounds more like Connecticut than Crawford. They’re willing to tell bad jokes in front of a national audience. And nobody is supervising their wardrobes.

When the convention ended Thursday night at Madison Square Garden, the Bush twins rushed to nearby Gotham Hall in Midtown, where they made a brief appearance with the 25-year-old offspring of some other famous pols -- Emily Pataki (daughter of New York Gov. George), Emma Bloomberg (daughter of New York City Mayor Michael) and Taylor Whitman (son of former EPA head Christie Todd) -- at a party for 1,000 young Republicans.

The girls pulled up to the party space, a gorgeous marble vault that was once a bank, in a convoy of black SUVs. They went directly to a cordoned-off area on the mezzanine. A bit later, they emerged with their hosts (Pataki, Bloomberg and Whitman), who formally welcomed the guests from a makeshift stage bathed in light. The speeches lasted mere moments, and the twins stood with the group but did not utter a word. When the greetings concluded, the twins were ushered out a back door, got into their vehicles and took off into the night.

So culminated a very full week of parties and semi-public appearances for the 22-year-old Bush twins, who have been kept out of the limelight for most of their lives. They had three speaking engagements in a two-day period: On Tuesday, they introduced their mother at a luncheon in her honor. That night, they took the podium at the convention. On Wednesday, they introduced their father’s chief of staff, Andrew Card, at a gathering of Young Republicans. And every night, they were sought-after guests at parties.

“They had a very positive experience this week,” said their spokeswoman Susan Whitson. “They’ve had a great time, and the most encouraging thing was to be around people who support their parents and care about their parents. That’s reassuring.”

Their riskiest venture was without a doubt the comedy routine they performed Tuesday. An excerpt:

Barbara: Jenna and I are really not very political, but we love our dad too much to stand back and watch from the sidelines. We realized this would be his last campaign and we wanted to be part of it. Besides, since we’ve graduated from college, we’re looking around for something to do for the next few years. Kind of like Dad!

Jenna: Our parents have always encouraged us to be independent and dream big. We spent a lot of time at the White House, so when we showed up the first day we thought we had it all figured out. But apparently my dad already has a chief of staff named Andy.

Barbara: I knew I wasn’t quite ready to be president, but number two sounded pretty good. Who is this man they call Dick Cheney?”

All that was missing was a rim shot, though some were recommending a gong.

“Where was Chuck Barris when we needed him?” a former Ronald Reagan speechwriter wrote in the National Review Online. The New York Daily News reported that the president’s top political advisor Karl Rove turned to a colleague and moaned, “Whoever approved this, I’m going to put on a slow boat to China.”

Unfortunately, if he did, he’d be banishing the president’s other top advisor, Karen Hughes, who not only approved the script, but wrote it.

“Yes, that was Karen,” Whitson said. “Karen has known them for years, and knows the family history and has a personal insight.”

Emily Pataki, who has known the twins for several years, watched their speech from her family’s box at the convention. “I thought they were so cute,” said Pataki, a law student who had a part-time gig this week as an on-camera reporter for “Extra!” “I know it was incredibly nerve-racking for them to be onstage like that. For me, as a 25-year-old woman, it really hit home. It told me about their family. It really resonated with me.”

Mary George, a California delegate from Los Angeles who described herself as a friend of the Bush family, said she thinks the girls have their grandmother Barbara’s sense of humor, and that it was on display Tuesday night. In fact, one of the targets of their mild teasing was their grandmother, who looked puzzled when Jenna joked that her “Ganny” is so old-fashioned she thinks “ ‘Sex and the City’ is something married people do but never talk about.”

Earlier in the day, at the tribute to her mother, Jenna joked that the family considers Jenna “Barbara’s revenge on George.”

Like their father before them, the twins have given their parents a few gray hairs. In the twins’ case, underage drinking got them in trouble. In 2001, when they were 19, Barbara was sentenced to probation and eight hours of community service and Jenna was fined $600 and her driver’s license was suspended. Both cases stemmed from an incident at a Mexican restaurant in Austin. “We spent the last four years trying to stay out of the spotlight,” Jenna told the convention. “Sometimes we did a little better job than others.”

Stealing the line her father often used in his 2000 campaign when his own youthful foibles came up, she said, “We kept trying to explain to my dad that when we were young and irresponsible, well, we were young and irresponsible.”

The twins have become familiar faces in New York, generating tabloid interest in their apparently prodigious party habits. Last year, Jenna was photographed falling on top of a friend, a cigarette dangling from her fingers.

Jenna was also photographed sticking her tongue out at photographers while campaigning with her father in St. Louis in July. When her mother learned of the photograph, she told a reporter that she advised her daughter “maybe you should work on your issues of impulsiveness.”

Now that they are voluntarily in the spotlight, the twins’ wardrobes are also the subject of scrutiny. Doonesbury cartoonist Garry Trudeau in a strip that ran this week lampooned the attention that’s being paid to their clothes. Both like to dress up -- they were photographed in gowns for the August issue of Vogue -- but they spend a lot of time in jeans and T-shirts and sweat pants. “They are not clothes snobs in any way,” said Whitson, who said the sisters choose their own clothes, with advice from their mother “from time to time.”

Tuesday, in the convention spotlight, Barbara wore a black cocktail dress with a jeweled neckline by New York designer Catherine Malandrino. Jenna wore an Oscar de la Renta jacket over a white silk tank top by Los Angeles’ Louis Verdad, and white James jeans. They also like a Texas designer named Leila Rose. On Thursday night, at their father’s acceptance speech, Jenna wore a black slip dress by Leila Rose; Barbara, an aqua sleeveless Oscar de la Renta dress.

“They’re young and they can wear anything,” Mary George said about their Tuesday night appearance. “But I would rather have seen them dressed up.”

On the other hand: “Just remember, Grandma wore a $30 necklace when she was the wife of the vice president. They don’t like to be ostentatious. They are very simple people.”

Teen Vogue fashion director Jorge Ramon thinks the twins are a work in progress. “They’re not clueless, but they still have a little way to go,” he said. “When we were first introduced to them, they were party animals and it was a little hard core. You would see pictures of them falling over, getting busted, two hellion hellcats from Texas who were drinking and partying and by the way, my dad’s the president. Now, we are seeing kinder, gentler Bush twins.”

Before they arrived in New York, the twins were in Athens with their grandparents at the Olympics. At an event for Republican women Monday, their grandmother, Barbara, said she spent her time in Greece telling the twins to “stand up straight, smile, get their hair out of their eyes, be on time and pick up their rooms.” She also said she worried a bit when “the entire American wrestling team wanted to date them.”

The twins, whose Secret Service code names are Turquoise (Barbara) and Twinkle (Jenna), planned to spend this weekend campaigning with their parents in Pennsylvania and Ohio. Although their campaign schedules have not been finalized, Whitson said, the sisters will travel to various state Bush/Cheney headquarters to thank volunteers. So far, they have been to Missouri, Pennsylvania and Ohio, important battleground states.

Now that they have finished college -- Barbara studied humanities at Yale; Jenna majored in English at the University of Texas -- their official address is 1600 Pennsylvania Ave., said Whitson, although Jenna also has an apartment in New York. Both had summer internships in the city -- Jenna at a public relations firm and Barbara at the Proenza Schouler fashion house. After the election, Jenna intends to teach, possibly in Harlem. Barbara’s plans are “a little nebulous,” Whitson said, although she has talked about attending a Baylor University program that would allow her to work with HIV-infected children.