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Party Girls

Jenna and Barbara’s parents were far from strict, though their father was more of a disciplinarian. Both are close to their mother. Born five weeks early by C-section because of complications during Laura’s pregnancy, the twins had peripatetic childhoods, moving from Texas, where W. ran the failing Arbusto oil-drilling company, to D.C., where their father worked on his dad’s 1988 presidential bid, then back to Dallas in third grade, when their dad marshaled a group of investors to buy the Texas Rangers. Laura and the twins often accompanied him to the Rangers’ new ballpark—Laura estimates that she attended 60 or so games a year. When George and Barbara Bush (Gampy and Gammy) bequeathed one of their dog Millie’s pups to the twins, Jenna and Barbara named him Spot Fletcher, after the Rangers shortstop Scott Fletcher.

They liked sports in high school, too—Barbara played soccer and Jenna ran cross-country. Barbara was also homecoming queen, on the National Honor Society, and was voted “Most Likely to Appear in Vogue.” Jenna made a passable effort to involve herself in student government and the school newspaper. She was voted “Most Likely to Trip on Prom Night.”

But Barbara has changed since high school. At Yale, she was determined to hang out with the cool kids, and didn’t maintain her high-school schedule of extracurriculars. “Barbara came to every class and did all her homework, though she never said much,” says one of her Yale teaching assistants. “She was a B student—completely average.”

Barbara was reportedly tapped for Skull & Bones, the secret society that every Bush at Yale had been part of since Prescott Bush famously stole Geronimo’s skull from the tomb; she declined. The group she really wanted to be part of was the Pundits, the folks who throw the school’s famous “naked parties” and streak through the library during finals week, but they didn’t tap her. She also joined Kappa Alpha Theta, Yale’s oldest, highest-tier sorority (Jenna was in the UT chapter), full of girls from Dalton and Horace Mann. “Barbara tended to go through female friends rather quickly,” says a classmate. “There would be two or three girls who would be attached to her hip and then she’d ditch them. Then a few weeks later there would be another set.” Her male friends were “slacker prep-school druggie types,” says a classmate. “There was an air of ill repute with them. Some might call it mysterious. I call it sketchy.”

Barbara dated a gawky cutup named Jay Blount and an actor, Nick Tucci. She hung out a bit with guys from a sketch-comedy group called Suite Thirteen, which performed a few times a year and once fooled a bunch of would-be actors by holding mock auditions for “Un Certain Type de Col Roulé” (A Certain Type of Turtleneck): “In this dark comedy set in Paris in 1943, lovers Jacques and Bruce, fighters for La Resistance, struggle to define what it is to be human,” read the audition poster. Tucci, who played Don Juan in Much Ado About Nothing and Stanley Kowalski in A Streetcar Named Desire, was in this group. He also reportedly liked to carry around knives and throw them at walls, sometimes.

On certain Manhattan evenings, the girls can almost forget who their father is and live like any other 22-year-olds . . . almost. “Barbara came back to my boyfriend’s house once,” says a model and fashion publicist. Barbara was with a big group of girlfriends, including a friend from Texas who was an intern at Vogue. It was the middle of the night when a Secret Service guy knocked on the door. One of the other guests opened it, and the agent asked, “We’re checking on Barbara. Do you know if she will be spending the night?” The guest came back in the living room and asked, “Is there someone named Barbara here? Your dad’s at the door.”

The publicist sighs. “It was very nostalgic for me watching them, actually,” she says. “Everyone in New York is so jaded and impressed with someone who’s somebody and always looking at who’s around. But Barbara had this great group of girlfriends and they were just having fun, so oblivious to what was going on around them—just confident, cheerful, and strong.”

In July, Jenna invited about ten friends from UT to the White House for the weekend. Friday was movie night. One friend joked: “Fahrenheit 9/11?” Jenna didn’t think that was so funny. George W. and Laura showed up to play horseshoes the next day on the lawn, and then there was a costume party. The twins love dressing up—their 21st birthday at the Crawford ranch was a cowboys-and-Indians costume party—and Jenna even had a bunch of getups for their guests. The last person to arrive, a male friend, got the outfit no one else wanted. He had to dress up as a monk.

With reporting by Deborah Schoeneman