American Rhapsody (8 page)

The two events, the balcony performance and Farrah's pooping, obliterated all talk in Hollywood of any of Bill Clinton's actions and habits for some time. America may have been in purposeful denial about what took place in the Oval Office, but Hollywood was in a gleeful dither about Arnold Rifkin's balcony and front lawn.

Bill Clinton was old news now. All this sound and fury . . . about another manicure done by a wanna-be Valley Girl . . . all this Sturm und Drang . . . all this kvetching . . .
Big deal!
It wasn't Farrah.

[5]

Hillary Lives, Tammy Wynette Dies

“I don't think he can be magnanimous,” Linda Tripp said. “It's not him. He admitted as much to you.”

“You mean monogamous?” Monica said.

O
ne of the many cheesy ironies in the whole lurid, sleazy melodrama was that as the president transmogrified into the Big Creep, Hillary was reborn as Saint Hillary. Because while, if you were a man, you couldn't run on holes, you could, if you were a married woman, go a long way on scorned holes.

The woman who told us she was not Tammy Wynette stood by her red-faced, finger-jabbing man, and Americans, both men and women, loved her for it. Women loved her because many of them knew that their own husbands were cheating. Men loved her because she wasn't leaving her husband, thereby justifying what they were telling their own wives, if forced to: Honey, you know how much I love you and the kids. It didn't mean anything, honey. It was just sex.

We were asked to believe that Hillary was shocked and wounded by her husband's dalliance with the thong-snapping, Altoid-sucking Monica. We were asked to believe that Hillary's marriage was shattered by her priapic beast of a husband. We were asked to believe that the First Family needed time for healing. Saint Hillary and her husband appeared in church; he even had a Bible in hand—and Saint Hillary wore dark shades, beneath which, Americans just knew, there were hot, angry, and martyred tears. And most of us wanted to believe it. We wanted to because the alternative was worse.

The alternative was this: The only part of Lewinsky even surprising to Hillary was the cigar. She knew the man she stood by. She knew him when she married him; she asked her dad to go down to Arkansas when Bill was campaigning, to try to make sure he kept his pants zipped. She wasn't stupid. She knew that the Arkansas state troopers drove him to Gennifer's apartment (with its zebra-striped couches). She knew about the girl in the basement of the statehouse. She knew that his jogs detoured into the bushes. But she didn't care anymore. Maybe, in the beginning, when she sent her dad down there. But not anymore. Her husband was an animal. It didn't matter what he did . . . as long as it didn't explode on the front page and on the evening news . . . and embarrass her and Chelsea.

Hillary and Bill Clinton had a cynical deal, whose roots were found in the idealism they'd shared in the sixties. They thought they could make this country, the country they loved, a better place. He'd run for office and she'd be there hand in hand with him. They'd share the power, and as long as they shared it, as long as he listened to her about public affairs, he could have his own private ones. She'd stand by her man . . . and he'd stand tumescent, telling others to “kiss it.”

He liked the deal. He had a smart wife with a passion for making this a better America, a savvy political theorist who wasn't afraid to take the gloves off against the forces of right-wing Republicanism, which were trying to undo the many legal and political victories achieved since the sixties. Hillary had real, heartfelt, and thought-out beliefs that weren't dependent on polls. She was a huge asset to have in the room when the subject was the state of the state or the state of the union. She was a real partner to him in a conference room, which is where she belonged, as surely as Gennifer belonged in a bedroom.

She liked the deal. She had a charismatic husband with a gift for eye contact and one-on-one, ten-second empathy. He was a relentless campaigner. He shook hands with fire hydrants and waved at telephone poles. He could work a room better than anyone she'd ever seen, a Method actor playing out a redemptive, lift-your-spirits drama on an endless rubber-chicken circuit.

No wonder all those bimbos got dewy-eyed just shaking his hand. There was something sexual about the way he touched people and seduced them into pulling the ballot lever. She knew she didn't have his ease—his
lubricity
—she had been stiff, wallflowerlike, and dry all of her life. He was like a sleek and dazzlingly waxed Cadillac. Well, fine. Then she'd drive it. Drive that Cadillac all the way to the White House and make sure it didn't turn into an Edsel. She believed in public service. If the price of doing good, of making this a better America, was letting him be privately serviced by white-trash mechanics in zebra-striped service stations, so be it.

There was one part of the deal that was dicey. He couldn't ever leave her while he was in office. He could
talk
about leaving her (he did with Gennifer and with Monica), but he couldn't
do
it . . . not if he wanted to stay in office. All of his polls said that if he broke up with her, he'd be history. Nor could he allow her to leave him. Dick Morris was adamant that no president could survive White House divorce. So all he could do was talk about it, playing with the notion, teasing the possibility of a life without Hillary in his own mind, and then dismissing it with a self-deprecating joke. He'd have to pee twenty times a day at a certain age, he told Monica. True, but he also knew—hot damn!—that he'd still be getting it up.

He also knew he couldn't afford to piss Hillary off . . . too much. He needed her for his presidency and he needed her to shape his policies . . . and he knew that she knew how much he was screwing around. This was a woman who read everything, who had her own network of mostly women friends, street-smart and cynically idealistic political operatives who heard everything and told her everything. Yeah, she threw things sometimes and called him names, but she wasn't going anywhere. She was running the country with him. She was “Mrs. President Mary Todd Clinton.” They were partners to better America. She couldn't get a gig like that anywhere else, with anybody else. There was no other gig like that in the whole world. So he was safe. He could piss her off . . . just not too much.

Then it almost hit the fan in 1992, in New Hampshire. Gennifer, the slut! She had tapes! He lied and denied and somehow got away with it. Partly thanks to Gennifer herself making money off of all this with the tabloids. (Thank God for women who needed money; their credibility was destroyed by the dollars men paid them.) Partly, he got away with it because
60 Minutes
sent simpatico and mild-mannered Steve Kroft instead of that junkyard watchdog Mike Wallace. But mostly he got away with it because of Hillary. She sat there holding his hand. She put a dollop of hominy and a teaspoon of grits into her midwestern voice. She stood by her man. He lied with his words, but it was Hillary's lie—with her eyes, her body language, her hands—that got him off.

.  .  .  

There were moments when Monica first hit Drudge's Web site that he thought it was the ball game. The details terrified him. Would the details get out? The death of his presidency—historical ignominy—lay in the details.

If this could be spun into an “affair” with a young woman—well, maybe there was some light at the end of the tunnel. But the details he remembered all too clearly and fearfully—the cigar, all the jacking off—would Monica give them the details? Would the details be in that smug, self-righteous, pompous dork's report? If the details wound up on the front page, how would Hillary handle it? Would his own daughter have to know that he put a cigar in there and then put it into his mouth and said, “Tastes good”? He had no choice but to lie. The details were Freddy Krueger hiding in the closet.

So Monica would have to be turned into trailer trash, too, just like Paula and Gennifer. She was a stalker. She was neurotic; she was sick; she needed psychiatric help; she couldn't be believed! Those twisted, perverse details that she fabricated out of whole cloth showed how sick she was! A cigar indeed! Right out of Krafft-Ebing! Beverly Hills trailer trash!

So he denied it to everyone—to Hillary, to Chelsea, to us—forcefully, emotionally, looking us in the eye, an outraged, innocent man, falsely accused. We said to ourselves, Maybe he really is innocent. Look how angry he is. Sure, politicians lie, but with this kind of vehemence? This kind of passion? This baldly? Right in our faces? Nixon's lame “I am not a crook” defense sounded like a lie when he said it—flat, dispassionate, masked words. But Clinton's words were fighting words: a guy sitting in a bar, ready to come across the table at you if you said it again.

Hillary was equally convincing. “A vast right-wing conspiracy.” Sure! Groovy! Right on! Power to the people! We knew they were out there—the conspiracy nutbags and abortion clinic bombers and militiamen and the flag-bedraped bigots and racists and homophobes. It made sense they wanted to get Bill Clinton, who was one of us. They wanted to get him because he was one of us. Because he dodged the draft and loved blacks and talked about gay people being in the army. They wanted to get him because they were still pissed off about the shit storm we'd unleashed in the streets thirty years ago. They were still pissed off that we'd ended that stupid and bloody and senseless war in Vietnam they had so much fun with.

When the
Starr Report
came out, Bill Clinton's worst nightmare came true, and then went away . . . like he'd had a nightmare about having a nightmare. The details were there all right. The cigar, the tongue, the Altoids, the onanism into the sink, and onto Nancy Hernreich's couch. But they were buried in footnotes and addenda.

The mistake Starr made politically wasn't that his report was too salacious. The mistake he made politically was that he was
afraid
of making it too salacious. So he buried the details, the Freddy Krueger details Bill Clinton was most afraid of, in small print in thousands of pages. He never brought all those poisonous little pellets of sleaze together in the body of his report. He never asked if the man in the Oval Office needed to be removed to get some hasty therapy.

Even though the details were out, the sordid nature of the details themselves came to Bill Clinton's defense. They were the blow jobs that rocked the world—bad enough for parents sitting at the dinner table to ask, “What did you do in school today?” only to hear, “Mom, what's oral sex?” in reply. But a cigar? The president of the United States sitting there playing with himself? On the front page? On the evening news? Are you kidding me?

And it didn't happen, either. It was as though the squalid nature of Bill Clinton's own actions was getting him off the hook. It was much safer and sanitized for the media to spin it as an affair, to cosmeticize, almost romanticize it, to put a Hollywood gloss on it, instead of showing the harsh, shadowy black-and-white reality: a middle-aged man using a young woman as a piece of meat.

Hillary, we were told straight-faced by her aides, didn't even read the
Starr Report
. Right. Her partner, that sleek Cadillac that she drove to the White House, was in danger of being booted and towed, and we were asked to believe that she didn't even bother to read the citation. She was allegedly off wonking over policy, making Post-its for the millennium.

No recent First Lady had been humiliated this way. Pat Nixon had been humiliated and had turned to the bottle, but
his
humiliation never reflected directly on her. Lady Bird Johnson knew that LBJ was using Bobby Baker's whoors, but she didn't have to read about it in the papers. No one knew that JFK was bringing three hookers at a time into his hotel suites. And if George Bush had a special friend who'd been his secretary for a long time, well . . . but none of them had used the Oval Office itself, the tabernacle of America's government, as a four-dollar-an-hour motel room. None of them had been caught spilling themselves on the White House sinks and couches. Some of them had smoked cigars, but . . .

I wondered if Hillary feared in those darkest days that her husband would wind up like Spiro Agnew, bribed with a bagful of frozen steaks, living reclusively on international flights and in the desert until the day he died. Or as a new partner at Dreamworks, keeping a twinkly eye on that new development girl with the nipple ring.

But she stood by him, wearing her grieving woman's shades, playing out the whole touchy-feely opéra bouffe of healing and forgiveness, pretending that Lewinsky was a mortar to her heart, that she really hadn't known. Hillary was a smart woman playing dumb to keep herself looking like the victim she had never been, knowing that her Saint Hillary incarnation was playing just fine in Peoria and upstate New York.

She even got Chelsea, the daughter she loved, to play a crucial public part in this extraordinary family soap opera. When she and Bill went vacationing in Martha's Vineyard, when we were all microscopically watching their every little twitch (Was Hillary holding his hand? How close was she standing to him?), she somehow got Chelsea to go up and down the reception line that was waiting for them. There was Chelsea, truly the innocent victim, shaking hands with the folks, pressing the flesh near her dad, smiling like an old pol, a true Clinton. The message we were meant to receive was clear. If Chelsea forgave him for his inner squalor and his lies, shouldn't we? It was the
60 Minutes
Gennifer Flowers ploy, shamelessly reenacted all over again. Hillary had gotten her husband off the first time. Now she'd pimped her daughter to perform the same act.

During the year of Saint Hillary's incarnation, Tammy Wynette died. Her daughters promptly accused her husband of killing the woman who had sung “Stand By Your Man” and made it a household phrase. Was there grisly, dark meaning here? Was that the ultimate fate of women who stood by their men? Would it happen to Hillary, too, someday in a figurative, political sense?

But then police officials cleared Tammy Wynette's husband of any involvement in her death. He, it seemed, had stood by his woman, too. It gave false hope to those who thought Bill Clinton would stand by his.