Blood Feud: The Clintons vs. the Obamas (27 page)

And indeed, Hillary looked ready. Weeks of rigorous dieting and fitness workouts had paid off: Hillary appeared to have shed several additional pounds since her Wellesley reunion lunch in May. She sported a new hairstyle, which one newspaper reporter described as “a shorter, feathered look with longer bangs swept off to the side.” But what really struck people who greeted her in
Little Rock was the transformation in her face. As one of them put it to the author of this book, “She looked like she did years ago—only a lot better.”

For months the internet had buzzed with rumors that Hillary had had a face lift. And indeed, as one of her close friends revealed in an interview for this book, Hillary did undergo a small nip and tuck shortly after leaving the State Department. Since then, this friend explained, Bill had been on her case to do something about her sagging neck, but she had resisted the idea of a second round of plastic surgery. Bill persisted; he argued that she needed not just another face lift but a complete makeover. He wanted her to toss her signature pantsuits and instead wear what he called “power outfits.” He asked Chelsea to help her mother pick an American fashion designer to create special outfits for her, the way Oleg Cassini had designed a look for Jackie O.

“Dowdy and old doesn’t win the White House these days,” he told Hillary, according to her friend.

To which his wife responded, “Fuck you. Get your own face lift.”

And that’s exactly what Bill did. He went to a Beverly Hills plastic surgeon and got a platysmaplasty, or neck lift. He also received Botox treatments and had work done on his bulbous red nose.

“I was starting to look like W. C. Fields,” he joked afterward.

Marveling at Bill’s transformation, Hillary agreed to have more plastic surgery. She talked about flying down to Rio de Janeiro to the world-famous Ivo Pitanguy Clinic, then thought better of it, because it would have been hard to keep such a foreign trip secret. In the end, she chose to have work done in the United States.

At her insistence, the plastic surgery was performed in a series of small steps so that she could evaluate the changes before she went any further. She told the surgeon that if his work started to make her look “radically different or weird,” she would stop it immediately. This approach required multiple surgeries, and over a period of several weeks the doctor painstakingly sculpted her cheeks, lifted her forehead, smoothed her neck, and Botoxed the wrinkles in her face and around her eyes.

“She won’t talk about it,” said a friend. “She just smiles impishly when asked about it. She’s actually very girlish and a little embarrassed. But she’s pleased with the result and proud that she got up the nerve to take Bill’s advice and do it. I guess she’d have had a head transplant if that’s what it took to get to the White House.”

After she had begun to heal from the surgery, Hillary returned to work on her memoirs, which were scheduled to be published in the summer of 2014. She invited her former aides at the State Department to come to Whitehaven, where they went over notes and classified documents.

“She’s been reading [Henry] Kissinger’s memoirs and others, including [Dean] Acheson’s, to get an idea of how other secretaries of state have handled their legacies,” said a close friend. “She doesn’t characterize her book as a tell-all, like [former secretary of defense Robert] Gates’s book,
Duty
, but she told me that her book isn’t going to make many friends in the Obama White House either.”

Hillary and a team of ghostwriters (including Huma Abedin, speechwriters Dan Schwerin and Ted Widmer, and researcher Ethan Gelber) cranked out chapters, but the project seemed to bog down and take longer than expected. “It’s a bit of a struggle to get it done,” said a friend. “She is not necessarily a natural writer.”

Meanwhile, Hillary set to work on the next phase in her physical makeover. To begin with, she had several hairdressers try out new hairdos before she settled on the one that she unveiled in Little Rock.

She took elocution lessons.

“She told the speech therapist that she had become self-conscious about the way she talked,” said a friend. “When she became excited, she said, her voice grew harsh and grating. She also had a tendency to slur and lisp a bit if she wasn’t careful.”

She shopped for a new wardrobe and visited the showrooms of major designers, who were naturally eager to be chosen as couturier to the first woman president. Anna Wintour, the powerful editor of
Vogue
and a longtime friend of the Clintons, acted as Hillary’s unofficial adviser on all things fashion. The year before, Wintour had visited the Clinton Library in Little Rock, where Oscar de la Renta’s lifetime work was on exhibit. Along with the crème de la crème of New York society, the Clintons had vacationed at Oscar de la Renta’s estate in the Dominican Republic. With Wintour’s endorsement, Oscar was the leading contender for the job of First Designer.

During the short time the Clintons remained in Little Rock, Bill made his usual rounds. He stopped by the bar of the Capital
Hotel for a glass of red wine and fried black-eyed peas. He was in high spirits, although he complained to the bartender that he was worried about his weight. Just a few months before, his medical nutritionist and Chelsea had met with the hotel’s chef to talk about Bill’s diet. The former president, they all agreed, had to go easy on fried foods.

While Bill was out on the town chatting up the bartender and flirting with the waitresses, Hillary paid a visit to old friends from the days when she was the first lady of Arkansas. She gave them to understand that, apart from politics, she and Bill lived very separate lives.

“Bill and Hillary haven’t had sex for something like twenty years,” said one of Hillary’s best friends. “They drifted apart in that way during the White House years. Monica [Lewinsky] had something to do with that, but it was the death of a thousand cuts. Hillary just couldn’t force herself anymore to have intimate relations with Bill. She says they never fought over it. Bill came on to her once in a while, and she avoided it. Then he gave up, and it has been an accepted thing for a very long time. They avoid sleeping in the same bed.

“Hillary is convinced that Bill still has a pretty active sex life,” this friend continued. “Women throw themselves at him all the time, and apparently he can still respond romantically. That’s Hillary’s opinion, anyway.

“But it doesn’t seem to matter to her. She and Bill talk and strategize often in the course of a day. I don’t think either one of them makes a major decision without asking the other’s opinion. Of course, Hillary doesn’t always take Bill’s advice, which makes him various shades of angry, from miffed to red fury. Sometimes
they come together to be with Chelsea. But more often than not, they even meet with their daughter separately.”

CHAPTER THIRTY

“A GHOST OF CLINTONWORLD PAST”

O
n a warm summer night at the end of July 2013, Bill and Hillary joined a friend at one of Chelsea’s favorite New York restaurants. Chelsea had called ahead and spoken to the executive chef, who prepared a special vegan tasting menu and a cherry cobbler for dessert. Hillary joked that the cobbler should be declared an illegal substance because it was so addictive.

As they finished eating, Hillary turned to her friend and said: “I’m sorry for the pain Huma and Tony are going through.”

She was referring, of course, to Huma Abedin, her former “bodywoman” and the chief of staff of her transition office, and Huma’s husband, Anthony Weiner. In 2011, Weiner had been forced to resign his seat in the House of Representatives after it was revealed that he had sent sexually suggestive photos of himself via his Twitter account. More than a year after his resignation,
Weiner was in the midst of a bid to become mayor of New York City when scandal struck again. Despite his protestations that he was a reformed man, more of his explicit photos turned up on the internet. Weiner held a press conference and, with Huma standing glumly by his side, admitted that he had continued to “sext” women using the risible alias Carlos Danger.

Apart from the impact this had on the New York City mayoral race—Weiner lost the lead in the Democratic Party primary and eventually came in last—the scandal proved to be a serious embarrassment to the Clintons.

“In a sense,” reported
New York
magazine, “the Weiner scandal is a ghost of Clintonworld past, summoning sordid images of unruly appetites and bimbo eruptions, exactly the sort of thing that needs to be walled off and excised in a 2016 campaign.”

And that wasn’t the end of the Abedin-Weiner scandal. Politico revealed that Hillary had set up a lucrative sweetheart deal for Huma. She arranged for Huma to work part-time at the State Department while pulling down paychecks at Doug Band’s company, Teneo, and at the Clinton Foundation. Questioned by reporters, Abedin denied that she had provided any inside government information gained from her State Department job to her private employers. But the matter left a bad taste in the mouths of many people and resurrected memories of the Clintons’ dubious financial dealings.

During this time, there was speculation in the media that Hillary had given Huma an ultimatum, demanding that she dump her husband if she wanted to stay on good terms with the Clintons. But Hillary, who had pulled through the Whitewater and
commodity-trading imbroglios, wasn’t so easily scandalized; in fact, she didn’t think either Anthony Weiner or Huma Abedin had done anything seriously wrong.

“Those stories made me look as though I was trying to force Huma to dump the father of her newborn child,” Hillary said, according to the friend who attended the July dinner in New York. “In my eyes, the guy isn’t guilty of a crime sufficient to take his son away from him and to deprive the little boy of having an intact family. I want Huma and Tony to work out their problems, and I think they will. If I become president, I’d love Tony and Huma to be part of my administration.”

Hillary’s passing reference to her future administration seemed to set Bill off on a new train of thought: the dimming prospects of working out a deal with Barack Obama.

“The guy really hates us,” Bill said. “As lovable as we are, he hates Hillary and me with a passion. I just don’t get it.”

Talking about Obama always gave Bill Clinton agita. Tonight he was particularly upset over a White House luncheon Hillary had recently attended. Obama had delivered the invitation personally when he ran into Hillary at the dedication of the George W. Bush Presidential Library at Southern Methodist University in Dallas. “Just the two of us,” Obama had said, meaning that Bill was not invited. When Hillary inquired if there was something in particular that Obama wanted to discuss, he laughed and said, “No, just social. I miss ya.”