Outside Looking In (15 page)

Arrived, she found that the woman was a black lay preacher who shouted about Jesus on the street corner of the little hamlet. Her arrest was for disturbing the peace. Hillary went to talk to the judge, then visited the woman. She asked where she came from. “California.” “Don't you figure there are souls to be saved in California?” Oh, yeah. “If I got you a ticket back to California, would you want to go there?” Yeah. Hillary went to the judge and said, “If I get the money to send her to California, will you drop the charges against her?” He said yes. What fascinated me was the way she spoke in character, both as the judge and as the woman preacher. It is a natural tendency that got her into trouble when she said she was not just standing by her man, like Tammy Wynette—people thought her accent was mocking Wynette.

Her humor came out when she told me how Bill and Taylor Branch worked for the McGovern campaign in Texas. She later joined them, taking leave from her work in Washington, but she had not gone there yet. Bill's director in Texas was Gary Hart. At one point Bill said he wanted to take a weekend off to go see his girlfriend in Washington. Hart was indignant: “How can you think of girlfriends in the heat of a campaign?” Considering Hart's hanky-panky in the midst of his own later campaign for the presidency, this amused Hillary no end. (She probably found it less funny after the Monica Lewinsky episode.)

We talked about religion, of which she is a sincere practitioner. And she was also humble. She told me she did not like her speaking style, and asked me what I would do to improve my speaking if I had trouble with it. “I suppose,” I said, “I would pay attention to good speakers and try to figure out how they do it.” Like who? she asked. I said I thought black Baptists were the best speakers alive, but she could not imitate them without looking as if she caricatured them. Who else? she asked. I suggested Mario Cuomo, and she later told me she was paying attention to his style.

When the Clintons were in the White House, Hillary invited me to the Millennium dinners she threw to prepare for the year 2000, but they all took place on days when I had an afternoon class, so I did not get to any of them. Then along came the Monica scandal. When Bill finally owned up to his dalliance, Walter Isaacson, then the editor of
Time,
called and asked me if I could write something about it overnight. I agreed to, and wrote that Clinton should resign and turn the White House over to his vice president, Al Gore—otherwise he would spend the rest of his term fending off legal and political challenges. When I did this, my wife said, “You know, he is supposed to be giving you a medal in a few weeks” (the National Endowment for the Humanities award). I said I knew.

At the NEH event, we met with the Clintons before going out into the Rose Garden for the ceremony. I did not know how the Clintons would treat me. I stuck out my hand to shake Hillary's. She said: “Don't I get a hug?” As we hugged, she said, “You're sitting next to me at dinner tonight.” Bill told me he had been reading Saint Augustine's
Confessions
. I don't think this was because he remembered my interest in the book. I had read that the preachers brought in to counsel him in his remorseful period after Monica were giving him penitential readings.

I knew the White House speechwriter who had composed the citation Clinton had to read before giving me the medal—Ted Widmer, who was serving a year there after getting his doctorate from Harvard. He told me it was a flattering document, as all such texts must be, and he was not sure that Clinton would read it as he wrote it, after I had called for his resignation. In fact, Clinton soldiered through it as written—but he stopped to interject one comment. Widmer had written something about my having incisive things to say across a broad spectrum of subjects. Here Clinton paused and said, “Sometimes I have a little problem with that”—which was, of course, the perfect way to handle the situation.

That night at dinner, I said to Hillary, “You are a poor planner. You have me at the same table with Gregory Peck. You could have put him beside you.” No, she said, she had planned well. “This way I get to talk with you and look at him.”

My wife and I were invited to one more dinner at the White House. This one occurred after George Bush's election but before his inauguration. Hillary said, “This time Bill gets you.” I was at the president's round table, and was conducted over to it before most people came in. I found my place card, and read the name on the next card: Stewart. My friend Susan Manilow, who was to sit across from me, came around and looked at it. “Who is that?” I asked. “Must be Martha,” she said. And it was. I asked Martha Stewart, when she arrived, to critique the table setting. “Oh, cut it out,” she said. After we sat down, she brought up Greek and Latin books. She knew I am a classicist from her son-in-law, a lawyer with a great interest in the classics. She told me she had bought him the Loeb Library as a gift. I was stunned—there are several hundred bilingual volumes of classical authors in the Loeb Library. After the dinner was over, he wandered by from a different table and I said I had heard about the Loeb—she nudged me. The gift, not yet given, was supposed to be a surprise. With a blank look, he said, “What?” I improvised in panic: “We were talking about the Leopold-Loeb trial at dinner.” He was still looking blank when he went off. I told her, “I hope I didn't blow it for you.” “No,” she said, “you just confused him. At least, you confused the hell out of me.”

Stewart was seated to my right. To my left, three seats over from the president, was singer Denise Rich, whom I had never heard of. At one point in the meal, she said, “You know, Nostradamus predicted the victory of Bush.” I nodded, to avoid getting further into that wacky subject. “What did she say?” Stewart whispered to me. “That Nostradamus predicted the election.” She laughed: “I don't think Nostradamus is in the Loeb Library.”

I learned who Denise Rich was after the Clintons left the White House. The pardon for her ex-husband Marc was the last scandal of the Clinton years. Some reporters who found out the seating arrangement at Clinton's table on that night called me up to ask if the pardon was discussed at the meal. I said, “Of course not.” Clinton came around after dinner and talked to Rich and me, but only about the election Gore had just lost (his was a non-Nostradamus version of it).

I kept my record for political prescience when talk arose about Hillary running for the Senate in New York after leaving Washington. I told her friend Sidney Blumenthal that I did not think she would (or should). I felt she needed some time to get free of the White House controversies. When she did run, I thought she would lose. In 2008 I was asked if she would be appointed as Obama's vice president if he won the primaries. I said no. Then, would she be secretary of state? No. My predicting record cannot match that of Nostradamus.

I
was often an outsider in my family. Neither of my parents went to college or read books. I mentioned earlier that they felt my reading was abnormal. My mother humored me without understanding my bookworm ways. I admired my father, Jack, and I didn't. I disliked him, and I didn't. I pleaded with my mother not to remarry him after a sad and draining divorce. But she did, and I was finally glad. He was hard to resist.

After that remarriage, we were vacationing on Michigan's Mackinac Island, my parents and my own young family. Out in a field, my father saw a horse roaming free. He had ridden horses as a boy in Arizona and Cuba, where his father was an engineer, but he was now in his forties and the horse had no bridle or saddle. Nonetheless, he tried to vault onto its back. It easily flicked him aside. I checked to see if he had broken anything, and told him, “Don't try that again.” Of course he did, unsuccessfully. As he told me several times, “There is no such word as ‘cannot' in the Wills dictionary.”

One of his many business ventures was a debt-consolidation scheme, when that was a new invention to keep creditors from garnishing wages. Jack would collect his clients' monthly wages and portion them out to creditors. One man kept trying to evade my father, to keep his wages. As Jack was pestering him, the man hit him. My father had been a Golden Gloves boxer, a college boxing coach, and camp champion in the army during World War II. He rarely resisted a fight. But this man was so big that he easily beat my father. Nonetheless, Jack went back and back to him, getting beaten every time, until the man finally said, “Shit, Jack, I have to pay you or kill you—so I'll pay you.” They became good friends after that, and the man was at Jack's funeral years later (where he reminded me that he had not killed him).

Jack was small and wiry—he admired actors and athletes who were just as small, Bob Steele in movie westerns, James Cagney in crime films, Alan Ladd in mysteries. Jack was a natural athlete who lettered in four sports at his high school (Georgia Military Academy). I read his school paper, which said he did everything on the football field, quarterbacking, punting, drop-kicking (when there was still such a thing). He played without a helmet, claiming that a helmet reduced his peripheral vision. Later, he refused to wear seat belts in a car, claiming that his quick reflexes would let him dodge any trouble.

He won golf prizes until his street fights broke so many bones in his hand that his grip was hard to manage—it bothered him that I hated golf, thinking it a waste of golden daylight hours when I could be reading. His older brother, Bob, with whom he never got along, knew that he was not only a good golfer but a natural teacher (a thing he proved in his days as a boxing coach), and Bob came back from California to Michigan to take golf lessons from him. I was sent out to shag balls until descending darkness made the balls unfindable. Jack's natural teaching skills made him show me how to serve a tennis ball and punt a football, the only (isolated) sport skills I ever acquired. He dearly wanted to show me how to drive a golf ball, but I resisted that evil knowledge.

Jack hoped to play football for Georgia Tech, but he was too small to get a scholarship when he graduated from high school in the depths of the Depression (1934). My mother, pregnant with me, had to drop out of high school, and Jack could not find work in the hard-hit South. My Irish grandmother was a locally famed baker, and for a while he peddled her bread from door to door. But then he headed north looking for a job. He had a small used convertible his father had given him. My mother was in the front seat, his Great Dane was in the backseat (Danes were a fixture in his life), and I, newborn, was in a dresser-drawer crib in the rumble seat. When he rammed into a halted car, the drawer was jolted out onto the road behind, but I rode it out safely.

Women always loved Jack, including my mother's mother, Rose Collins. Rose's own Irish mother (a Meehan) was crippled and could never leave the second-floor flat they lived in. When my father came to visit, he always carried Grandmother Meehan downstairs and took her for rare outings in the convertible, to a park or a movie or the church bingo game. That endeared him forever to Rose. In 1937, the Collinses had moved from Atlanta to Louisville when the great flood of the Ohio River hit Kentucky. Jack, then working in Michigan, instantly rented an outboard-motor boat, hitched it to the back of his car, and drove to Louisville. Parking the car at the edge of the flood, he took the boat to get Grandmother Meehan and my mother's two sisters (as much as the boat would carry). After taking them to safety, he went back and got my grandparents, Rose and Con.

This Irish side of the family welcomed Jack warmly into its midst. His own family, the English Willses from Virginia, had aristocratic pretensions—he was christened John Hopkins Wills, named (approximately) after the founder of the university. His prim mother, a Christian Scientist, always favored the older, more staid son, Bob. Jack's father, after whom I am named, was a bit of a rogue and always favored Jack, who was a lifelong hunting buddy. When Jack, at GMA, climbed up to the tower of a nearby girls' school and rang its bell in the middle of the night, the GMA authorities wrote a harsh letter to Garry Wills threatening Jack with expulsion. His father telegraphed back, “I did not know I was sending you to a kindergarten. Come home immediately.” That made the school back off. Later, when the two were hunting, they circled a copse and Garry inadvertently sprayed Jack with shotgun pellets. My father was rushed to the hospital to have the pellets removed. When he took his army physical in World War II, an X-ray showed he still had a pellet in his jaw.

My mother put up with my father's affairs for years, even offering to raise one of the children born to a mistress. But one night as I was up reading, I heard her weeping as she took a phone call from a young woman's mother, who said that he had begun an affair with her daughter, who worked as a waitress in the hunting lodge where Jack was staying with his father. That was the end, she thought. And though Jack pleaded with her not to divorce him, even getting her priest to say Catholics cannot divorce, no matter how a husband may stray, she threw him out of the house. My younger sister did not realize what was happening, and resented my mother for turning him away. My mother, with saintly forbearance, did not tell her the real reason—and when, years later, my sister found out the truth, she was so angry at Jack that I had a hard time persuading her to come to his funeral.