Ann Jordan is a very private person who lives a very public life. Her husband is the much-respected and much-feared lawyer Vernon Jordan, power broker extraordinaire. The Jordans are on the A-list of every Washington social event, serve on numerous corporate and charitable boards, and count a vast number of powerful people as friends.

She was born in Tuskegee, Ala., one of five children of a surgeon who ran the only hospital in the city that treated black patients. Jordan attended prep school and then went to Vassar, where she was one of four black students. She was so fair-skinned that she had to tell classmates she was black.

She took graduate courses in social work at the University of Chicago and later taught there and served as head of social services at the university's medical center. She married, had four children and divorced 11 years later. She stayed in Chicago, working full time and raising her children.

Her life was shaken by the 1981 death of a daughter in a car accident. Her other children were grown when she married Vernon in 1986. They had met years earlier while both were working with the Urban League. His first wife, Shirley, died of multiple sclerosis in 1985.