Daring (49 page)

Tom Wolfe embodied the pop idiom in his winter white suit, lime tie, and—of course!—his white spats. There's Gloria! Long legs in black leather and streaked hair curtaining her beautiful, ageless face. And Clay himself, rather shy and nervous at first. I overheard snatches of conversation with the same phrases: “He gave me my first job”; “He changed my life”; “He loved me and left me, but I forgave him”; “Can you believe how many of us came out of that one place?”

Everyone wanted to say hello to Clay, so we formed a reception line in the Cotillion Room. Abe Rosenthal, the formidable former executive editor of the
New York Times
, had mellowed enough since leaving that post to be able to say to me, “I didn't so much know Clay as steal from him. He gave me the idea of giving readers information to enjoy—service reporting. That's when we added enjoyment to the
New York Times
.” Mort Zuckerman, for whom Clay had been a consultant, dropped a punchy compliment: “He dumped all over everything I did. He's a genius.”

It was better than a wedding. No infighting relatives among this bunch; every face that came past me was someone I cared about—Milton, Lesley Stahl, Helen Gurley Brown, Kurt Vonnegut, still playing the old fart smoking his fags; Chris Buckley, who would later write the spoof
Thank You for Smoking;
Pete Hamill, who would later write his moving memoir,
A Drinking Life
. Ken Auletta recalled Clay descending for the first time on the offices of the
Village Voice
, “like an astronaut landing on a strange planet. I remember wanting to strangle the bastard. I thought he was a showman, but I found out he is much more. The showman is a servant of his blinding talent as an editor.”

Terry McDonell remembered Clay telling him, when he was trying to raise money to start
Smart
magazine, “‘It's impossible.' Then he'd give me another idea for how to make it happen. He helped all sorts of people launch new magazines.”

Cyndi Stivers called herself a Claymate, from her brief but indelible stint as a member of the female cast at
East Side Express
. She had created a fifty-page booklet of reminiscences from Clay's protégés, titled
Uncommon Clay
, and recalled the first important lesson she got as a Claymate. “He would look into the middle distance, rake his fingers through the few remaining hairs, and tell you that your latest opus, felt, uh, thin and bloodless. ‘Go back and write it like you told it to me,' he'd dictate. ‘You've got to add your point of view.'”

Walter Bernard had one of the best stories. When the magazine moved uptown in 1974, it was suddenly transformed from a cozily choked garret to a large but sterile space. Clay designed himself a separate office with Georgian paneling and a private bathroom. “How could we overhear his private phone calls?” Bernard griped. “How could he hear our complaints and sniping? Would we have to knock on his door? Could we use his bathroom?” The move took place over a weekend. “On Monday, Clay was barricaded by paneling. By Tuesday, the staff felt out of touch and isolated. On Wednesday, managing editor Jack Nessel marched into Clay's office and used his bathroom. On Thursday, Clay moved his desk out of the office and into the newsroom. He never went back. We all used the bathroom.”

The witty literary jester Mary Ann Madden, of the famous
New York
magazine competitions, assembled a toast by combining the title of a percussion band, Adversity Breeds Malice, and a line from
Macbeth
: “Clay fostered unknown talent by instinct and smarts. From the
New York
of the
Herald Trib
to the
New York
ripp'd untimely by Rupert Murdoch, Clay remained wantonly original, gutsy, graceful. Success becomes him. And
in adversity, malice is not his gift
.”

Seeing Clay as the object of such deep affection and respect from the whole upstairs to downstairs of our profession, I was in awe. I couldn't believe how many people felt a personal attachment to this midwestern nobody who showed up in New York with no money, no connections, yet was able to transform journalism. He had changed so many lives.

By the end of the night, a little more than a million dollars was pledged, enough to create a foundation and endow the center, assuring its longevity. Clay had the last word. “This is kind of a tribal gathering of the magazine world,” he said. “Magazine people like each other. Even if I wasn't the honoree, I'd still really want to be here!”

THE
1990S
WERE FULL OF NEW PASSAGES
for my entire family. When Mohm graduated from Wellesley College and devoted herself to becoming an artist and an activist working with refugees of war, Clay and I were deeply moved. Eventually, she would have to go back to Cambodia to discover who she was.

Maura started out as a journalist—a successful staff and freelance writer for several major national publications. She earned an M.A. in cultural studies and a second degree as a master of social work. She found a new career as a psychotherapist in private practice. Early on, she and Tim Moss committed to an egalitarian marriage and were part of the great social shift of their generation, seeking an urban village where they could support a family-centered life. Settling in Brooklyn, they tag team as parents and self-employed professionals.

My own new passage began with the excitement of setting up a new bicoastal life for Clay and me in 1994. Six golden years would follow. Despite anxieties over Clay's health, the 1990s were also the most fertile years in my career. Looking back over my Day-Timer diaries from that decade makes me wonder what I was smoking. But now I think I know how I was able to do so much: in 1990 I was riding high on the booster rocket of energy that Mead defined as “post-menopausal zest.” It was exhilarating to feel healthier and stronger than ever. Who would have thought? This was nothing like the dreaded middle age that women had been conditioned to expect. I felt fortunate to be able in those ten years to write five books about which I was passionate:
Gorbachev: The Making of the Man Who Changed the World
(1990);
The Silent Passage
(1992);
New Passages
(1995);
Understanding Men's Passages
(1998); and
Hillary's Choice
(1999).

Through all the creative ferment of my writing life, there was one figure, and one story, that captured my attention more than any other. Hillary Rodham Clinton. I followed her from her entrance to the national stage in 1991 and wrote about her turbulent evolution over the next ten years, culminating in her own dramatic midlife passage—at the age of fifty-three—when she ran for and won a seat in the U.S. Senate. I found it fascinating that Hillary was the same age as Margaret Thatcher when she reached her goal of becoming elected to high office in her own right.

From my first exposure to Hillary in January 1992, I had a strong hunch that she would become the most important woman in American politics. I had never met a woman like her.

We met at Little Rock airport on the morning after she appeared on
60 Minutes
, a maternal arm around Bill Clinton as she leaned in to coach and cover for her husband while he weakly ducked one question after another about an alleged affair. He blew their strategy of total denial. Hillary jumped in and shook her fist and declared, “Ah'm not sittin' here, some little woman, standin' by my man like Tammy Wynette. Ah'm sittin' here because I love him . . .”

When all hell broke loose the next day, I was standing by Hillary's side. We had just entered the lounge of a nondescript motel in Pierre, South Dakota. Hillary flipped on the TV. The screen filled with the come-hither countenance of a black-rooted blond lounge singer, Gennifer Flowers, who was playing tapes for the media of the love-talk she used to “deflower” Governor Clinton. Not a whit of surprise showed on Hillary's face. Her eyes took it all in with the glittering blink of a lizard. She ordered her tearful campaign manager, “Get Bill on the phone.”

Returning from that call, she scowled and said Bill had brushed it off. “He said, ‘Everybody knows you can be paid to do anything.'” Hillary was furious, not at her husband's unfaithfulness, but at his carelessness. “Everybody doesn't know that,” she had told him. “Bill, why were you even talking to this person?”

An hour later, fortified with a mask of equanimity, she swept into a Pork Producers' Rib Feed and charmed the whiskers off the farmers—until her press secretary whispered in her ear, “All three nets led with the Flowers press conference.” Hillary made a beeline to another pay phone. Another woman had been offered a million dollars to say she had a one-night stand with Bill Clinton.

Squeezed into her six-seater plane, I sat knee to knee with this publicly scorned woman and listened, openmouthed, as she vented her frustration above the grinding hum. “If we'd been in front of a jury, I'd say, ‘Miss Flowers, isn't it true that you were asked this by AP in June of 1990 and you said no? Weren't you asked by the Arkansas
Democrat Gazette
and you said no?' I mean, I would
crucify
her.”

Jotted in my notebook:
She is angry
.
Not all of the time. But most of the time
.

I listened as Hillary rehearsed a retaliation strategy. “In 1980, the Republicans started negative advertising. In 1992, we have paid political character assassination. What Bill doesn't understand is, you've gotta do the same thing: pound the Republican attack machine and run against the press.”

We had scarcely bumped down through the black hole of the Dakota night before Hillary, coatless, clicked across the field to a shack with a sign reading
RAPID CITY.
“Get me Washington and Little Rock on the line,” she ordered. George Stephanopoulos and James Carville and the other baby-faced staffers were about to be “inspired” by the candidate's wife. “Who's getting information on the
Star
? Who's tracking down all the research on Gennifer?”

Hillary's ire was totally focused on the other woman. Not on him. Never him.

When I asked Hillary if she thought her husband had told her everything she needed to know, she dissembled. “Yes. I have absolutely no doubt about that,” she replied, her blue eyes unblinking beneath the dark hedgerow of brows. “I don't think I could be sitting here otherwise. That's been, over the years, part of the development of trust.” The real answer, I surmised, was that Hillary didn't know what she didn't
want
to know.

After years of protecting the philanderer's secrets, Hillary had built so thick a guard wall that it seemed to paralyze her judgment when it came to revealing almost anything at all, even to herself. The stories of her husband's infidelities appeared to register, consciously at least, as having nothing to do with her or their marriage, but rather as evidence of the depths of degradation to which the hit men behind George H. W. Bush would stoop. The face Hillary showed to the world was that of an innocent victim.

I later learned that Hillary mounted a counteroffensive to stanch further “bimbo eruptions.” After checking with her attorney on how far she could go legally, she joined with her sidekick Betsey Wright in a sub-rosa black arts campaign against the mounting list of women claiming sexual involvement with Bill Clinton. They hired a private detective, Jack Palladino, to handle the matter. When the detective ran into resistance, he would visit relatives and former boyfriends and develop compromising material to convince the women to remain silent. Palladino eventually gathered affidavits from six of the Jane Does who were later subpoenaed by the special prosecutor Ken Starr. For Palladino's services, Hillary and Wright arranged to pay him $100,000 out of federally subsidized campaign funds, initially disguising the payments as “legal fees,” monies they later repaid.

I often watched Hillary brush past her husband to the microphone while Bill Clinton danced in the background like a prizefighter trying to stay warm. Who was really running for president, she or he?

Hillary invited me to sit beside her at a Hollywood Women's Political Committee luncheon during the '92 campaign. She was warm and we eagerly engaged in conversation. After she gave a brilliant speech, a questioner asked when and if we would see a woman president. With the certainty of the
Farmer's Almanac
, she prophesied, “By 2008.”

The question on my mind, and voiced by just about everyone I interviewed, was obvious: Why did she stay with Bill Clinton? Did she love the boy in the hound dog, or was she simply unwilling to forfeit her seventeen years of investment in their political partnership?

WHAT MATTERED MOST TO HILLARY
was winning. Bill Clinton liked that.

She had the structure. He had the natural political sensibility. Hers was the precise, disciplined world of the tort, the logical argument. Bill had the common touch. He could slice through complex policy ideas and serve them up as simply as doughnuts and coffee at the local diner. From Bill's first campaign for Congress, Hillary took on the role of maker and shaper of the future president. She was the lawyer who bagged big clients like Tyson foods and Walmart and supported the couple financially. She was the avenging angel who flew in to rescue her wounded warrior every time it looked as if he was finished.

But after hitching her wagon to his star, like so many women of her generation, she resented having to do so. I have no doubt that they loved each other, and always have. They started out with a shared vision for the way they wanted to change the country. And both of them seemed to believe in 1992 that one couldn't do it without the other.

At each juncture of the couple's perilous political journey, people I interviewed would say with blind certainty, “She'll divorce him when . . .” “Now, for sure, she'll divorce him . . .” I became convinced that she never would.