A CAUSE SHE'S WILLING TO DIE FOR

HOMELESS ACTIVIST'S FAST TAKES HER OUT OF SNYDER'S SHADOW

Shortly before Carol Fennelly started her 48-day, water-only fast for the homeless, she binged on some of her favorite meals. For her final treat before renouncing all nourishment until Election Day on Tuesday, she dispatched her son James to buy her a cheeseburger.

James, 17, returned with a chicken sandwich. Fennelly, now 45 pounds lighter, racked by starvation and confined to her bed in Northwest Washington, can't stop thinking about that burger.

"Not just a cheeseburger," she says, nearly rising off her pillow at the thought. "A bacon cheeseburger. From Wendy's."

For 6 1/2 weeks, as Fennelly, 39, the woman many regard as the better half of Mitch Snyder, icon of the homeless movement, has weakened and brought herself to the verge of death, she has devoured cookbooks. She talks endlessly about food -- making it, smelling it, touching it.

How like Carol, friends say. She may be the heart of the Community for Creative Non-Violence, the city's most prominent advocacy group for the homeless, but at home, they say, Fennelly is, well, normal. Crashingly normal -- from her freshly laundered white cotton nightgown to the dog-eared copies of McCall's and Ladies Home Journal stacked at the foot of her bed.

Mom with a mission.

"When I first met them three or four years ago, I was touched by the issue of homelessness, but I was a little afraid of the dangerousness of Mitch," said Fennelly's friend, Suzie Goldman, wife of former K-B Theaters President Marvin Goldman. "But then I saw Carol, who was this bustling normalness. It gave a sense of legitimacy to Mitch. I thought, 'Here is Betty Crocker and Che Guevara.' "

Snyder smiles at the phrase. Fennelly, his longtime companion, bookkeeper, organizer, head cook and public relations agent, can be tough as nails. This is the first time in recent memory, he says, that a woman has fasted longer than 40 days on just water.

Fennelly, who has fasted several times before but always on nourishing juices, says she's following her faith in God, trying to show there is life in Snyder's shadow.

The fast is no stunt, she says. She wants to show that women, too, are leading the fight for the homeless.

"I'm a little concerned," Dr. Deborah Goldberg said Thursday after taking a reading of Fennelly's heart function, badly strained as her body has lost potassium. "I told her I can't guarantee she'll live through Election Day."

On day 35 of the fast, Snyder had called Fennelly at home from the group's downtown shelter after learning the results of her blood tests. Fennelly was in the kitchen, canning salsa and pickled corn. She already had put two weeks' worth of homemade pizzas, chicken soup and beef stew in the freezer for her son.

"My God, what are you doing?" Snyder said. "You've got to get in bed!"

"I can feel my body getting weaker and weaker," Fennelly said. Her only sustenance is Evian mineral water, which provides potassium, but turns her stomach.

"I think you'd better go now," she whispered to a visitor the other day, "because I have to throw up."

Twenty years ago, Fennelly's biggest battles were with her parents. They lived in southern California.

Tensions with her parents finally snapped over her choice of a boyfriend. "A short, blond, good-looking surfer. What else is there in southern California?" Fennelly said.

They were young. The 1960s beckoned. She moved out, then discovered her boyfriend was "a jerk." Fennelly hit the road.

In Pismo Beach south of Big Sur, Fennelly wandered into a head shop run by a local commune and stayed two years. The group called their house "Big Red" and Fennelly earned the nickname "Weird Carol." She sold pipes and other drug paraphernalia in the head shop.

Her talents for creative organizing quickly emerged. Larry Larson, one of the original group members, recalled Fennelly's transformation of one Halloween into a Pismo Beach event. She got group members to dress in costumes, made a boiling witch's cauldron and had their landlord, a makeup artist, fashion her a terrifying nose and warts.

Partygoers flocked to "Big Red." "We could have charged admission and made a fortune," Larson said.

Fennelly soon met a bartender, the man who would become her husband. Jim and Carol Fennelly had two children and moved to Piedmont, outside Oakland. She opened a day care center. He was president of the young couples club at church.

Carol Fennelly, though, was drifting away, from her husband and the middle-class values of comfortable Piedmont. "The church was always willing to spend more on uniforms for the baseball team than they were on the poor," she said.

She took up studies with a radical group in Berkeley. A visiting lecturer from Sojourners, a radical Catholic group in Washington, persuaded her to move here. She packed up her belongings and two small children, James, known to friends as Shamus, and daughter Carrie Sunshine.

Working in the soup kitchen of a shelter for the homeless at 14th and N streets NW, she met Snyder. "I fell in love with Mitch the minute I saw him," she said.

For the past 12 years, Fennelly and her children have lived in shelters, surrounded by homeless people and volunteers, consumed by efforts to prevent people from dying in the streets. James is now a senior at Archbishop Carroll High School; Carrie Sunshine, a Woodrow Wilson High School graduate, is a secretary at the American Red Cross.

"It's a unique way to grow up. Definitely unique," James said. "Not very many people are committed to anything they'd be willing to die for."

Snyder says he's at a loss to explain Fennelly's attraction to him. "I don't know what anybody sees in me."

"Mitch is a bore," admits Fennelly, noting that Snyder will eat out only at three restaurants he finds cheap and untrendy. "He's totally fanatic. He just fixates."

Fennelly and Snyder sometimes stage a good cop-bad cop routine, browbeating community leaders on homelessness. When they flew to Santa Barbara, Calif., to protest a local ban on sleeping outdoors, "Mitch had already gone out and raised hell," Fennelly said. "I met with business leaders and gave them the soft glove."

While Snyder wears the years of turmoil and stress like a mask, Fennelly shows hardly a mark. "Her femininity is tremendously important to her," said Goldman, who routinely digs into her own closet to help dress Fennelly "appropriately."

In weaker moments, Fennelly has thought about leaving. "There have been several plotted-out escapes. But I never did any of them," she said.

Snyder gets most of the attention. Fennelly said she was shocked at the way Hollywood portrayed her in a 1986 television movie in which actor Martin Sheen played Snyder.

"I just freaked because I realized that 20 million people who saw this piece of junk were going to see me as this simpering bitch," Fennelly said. "They think I'm there because I'm with the man."

Snyder doesn't understand Fennelly's need to break out. "But I'm not a woman," he said.

"In reality," Fennelly said, "it's women who are behind the scenes, cooking the soup and cleaning the sheets. But have you ever heard of a woman 'leader' in the homeless movement? I've worked very hard to focus attention on Mitch and the CCNV. But women are the saints of this movement, as far as I'm concerned."

Articles appear as they were originally printed in The Washington Post and may not include subsequent corrections.