Suzanne Iannella

The power of a name

by Yvonne Abraham

"Hi, I'm Suzanne Iannella."

"Oh, Christopher."

"No. Suzanne."

Suzanne Iannella glad-hands strangers at a baseball game in Dorchester Park on a sticky Sunday afternoon, safe in the knowledge that a reputation precedes her. Just not her reputation. She's kept a low profile for the first 45 years of her life, but after much to-ing and fro-ing, she is a day away from declaring her candidacy for an at-large seat on the city council. Ordinarily, the going would be tough for a politician as green as Iannella. But this is the daughter of the late Christopher Iannella, longest-serving city-council president in Boston history, a municipal legend who has a chamber in City Hall named for him.

Christopher Iannella used to tell his kids, "When you die, they can take your house, they can take your car, but your name lives on forever."

"I never wanted to be what my father was," his daughter says. "But I know that if I go to city council, I have a good name, and I'm very grateful for it." That name stood her brother Richard in good stead, too. Elected to the city council in 1993, he served for three years and is now Suffolk County register of probate. And he's not done with politics. (Less-generous souls have suggested Richie won his council seat partly because voters mistook him for his father, who died five years ago.)

Iannella, a Back Bay real-estate broker, is outgoing, to say the least. She confidently strides up to folks gathered for the festivities, carrying her Diet Pepsi and her sunglasses. She takes spectators' hands in hers, holding them a while, as if she's known them for years. She cracks jokes at their expense if she thinks they can take it -- "I'm only joking! I'm only joking!" -- and listens patiently when they want to talk about her father.

She goes straight into the District 11 Police dugout to introduce herself to the team, one by one. Iannella is about 5-5 and fit, with a button nose, and her frosted blond hair is pulled up into a high ponytail in anticipation of her golf game later this afternoon. She has a loud machine-gun laugh, which bursts from her often. For brief moments, she strikes one as a smaller-scale, less political, Republican version of Marjorie Clapprood. As she talks to a young man, a gray-haired cop with a moustache interrupts them.

"You like older guys?" he asks her.

"Why? Does it seem like I'm flirting?"

"No, I said, Do you like older guys?"

"Oh," she says, with the laugh, "I thought you said, Do I like all the guys. Yeah, I like all kinds of guys -- older, younger. I like guys with hair on their face." She puts her hand on his shoulder for emphasis, the way she does with everybody. Her perfectly shaped nails are painted apricot.

The next night, she is wearing a linen suit in exactly that same shade as she stands before 150 supporters to officially announce her candidacy. The McKeon Post, in Dorchester, is decked out in huge orange-and-black campaign posters. The "Iannella" on the posters is huge; the "Suzanne" is considerably smaller. (It's even smaller on her bumper stickers, and absent on her letterhead.)

Iannella introduces her mother. "The way they talk about my father," she says, "You'd think he was a single parent." Christopher's widow, a handsome gray-haired woman in a red dress, rises for her applause.

This political campaign is riding on the momentum of a famous name and a war chest that already contains $54,000. The candidate, meanwhile, is playing catch-up. She has much to learn, from what the schools need to when she should show up for her own kickoff event. "Do you think I should get there at 6:30?" she asks me in the car on the way to Dorchester. "Or should I wait till everybody's there, and then arrive?"

But she has already learned the most important lesson of city politics: it's personal, not political. "The people who support me are people who don't like somebody else," she says. "I've yet to have somebody ask me where I stand on something." For the record, where Iannella stands is right of center, strongly advocating a hands-off approach to government. But she also thinks there should be more moderate-priced housing for middle-class families in the city, that the colleges should be giving much more back to the community, and that Boston should develop vacant state-owned land.

Not that that will matter to some of her fans.

"I know her brother and her father," says a middle-aged, husky-voiced Italian man at Suzanne Iannella's kickoff. He's passionate about voting, does it every chance he gets. "That's my only pleasure in life!" Who else does he like?

"Well, Dapper -- you can't kick him out. And McCormack, of course. I think he's doing a good job."

Mike McCormack left the city council in 1991.