Rebels in White Gloves (28 page)

How to fashion themselves for the world has of necessity preoccupied each of the working women in the class of ’69. Leaving the private world for the public sphere meant having to choose a persona, a new set of manners, a style. They might draw on feminine models—like Rhea Dignam’s schoolgirl, or Kris Olson Rogers’s earth mother—or try to signal professionalism by mimicking masculine demeanor and attire.

Some have found those demands oppressive. Ivy Walker Parish wrote to her classmates in 1979 that she had “quit wearing underwear and shaving.” Nancy Wanderer, who earned a law degree in her forties, left one of Maine’s most prestigious firms in part because she did not want to fit herself to the requisite mold: “I’ve tried right through my life to be myself. Anytime I’ve had to wear a costume or appear something I’m not, I struggle. I resisted the heels and girdle and makeup and curls my mother pressed on me in high school. Even as a kid, my goal was to be natural. I hated Barbie because she was unnatural. I absolutely never wanted to have a hairdo. Now, panty hose represents to me all the repressive aspects of what women get into when they enter the professional
world. They’re expensive and confining and give you a stomachache. If I couldn’t be myself, I didn’t want money or power or prestige. It struck me again watching Hillary: It all comes down to hair. Hillary has to spend time worrying about it. I can do whatever I want with it. To me, that’s freedom.” Nancy now goes to work in trousers and close-cropped hair.

Many in the class share Nancy’s resistance to the dictates of acceptable female fashion, seeing it as physically debilitating (the eating disorders, the migrating silicone), self-hating in its abhorrence of the “natural” female body, and a perpetuation of women’s dependence on winning the admiration of men. These women have viewed Hillary Clinton’s much-attended- to experiments in reinvention with dismay. In the old Hillary of the frizzy hair and Coke-bottle glasses they saw a principled refusal to trade on her appearance or mask her confidence and power. (Hillary herself has said, “It wasn’t just that I didn’t wear makeup; it was a statement.”) These classmates lament what has seemed to them her capitulation: “I worry about the kind of message your highly publicized makeover may send to young women,” Louise Carter wrote in the alumnae magazine in a collective offering of advice to Hillary from the class. “Don’t be afraid to reveal your complexity.”

This has been one feminist stance: Erica Jong liked “Hillary’s fuck-you attitude, not giving a damn about clothes, proudly displaying her hillbilly taste in decorating, refusing to play her role as national saleslady. HRC may be chilly, but must all women be restricted to womanly warmth as defined by Pillsbury … simper to make Al D’Amato and William Safire feel potent?”

Others, who like Kris Olson Rogers and Rhea Kemble Dignam have discovered the usefulness of feminine manners, commend Hillary for wising up. “If Hillary has to change her hairstyle to get her ideas across, to get Mr. and Mrs. America to listen to her, then I admire her for having the guts to do it,” says classmate Michelle Lamson, a former top fashion model. “In politics you have to choose,” says Susan Alexander. “Do you play to perceptions to get in a position where you can really make a difference? I think yeah, since we’re paying prices whatever we do.” On similar grounds, Jan Piercy supports Hillary’s decision, seven years after her 1975 wedding, to assume her husband’s name. “Her name just wasn’t more important to her than returning Bill to office and making
a difference on education and health care. It wasn’t a sellout or a giving up; it was a trade-off.” It is not only politics, after all, that has demanded of women that they wrap themselves publicly in soft raiments. In a 1996 survey, female vice-presidents at the one thousand largest U.S. companies—women earning an average of $248,000 a year—said that after exceeding performance expectations, the second key to their success was developing a personal style with which their male colleagues were comfortable—a style they described as “nonthreatening … not too smart or assertive.”

Hillary Clinton is also not the first White House wife to strike a useful pose. Nancy Reagan’s besotted subservience was skillfully performed, and because she was “small and decorative and pippy poo,” as Germaine Greer put it, “she got away with running her husband.” Even the unvarnished Eleanor Roosevelt employed a kind of rhetorical camouflage, according to biographer Blanche Wiesen Cook, never missing an opportunity to discount her immense influence or to cast it as wifely caretaking of her invalid husband.

Just as the old unapologetically strong Hillary was damned by some as abrasive and praised by others as genuine and bold, so the flossier, more ingratiating Hillary has been both admired and despised for her skills as a real “pol.” Camille Paglia, at least for a while, liked both “the bitch with a quick sharp tongue” and the girlish “Southern blonde,” seeing both as “personae” useful to Hillary at different times. Connie Bruck admired Hillary for her agility at “invoking her familial roles—as mother, daughter, sister, woman, a wife there to help her husband—to soften her … using the myth to her advantage,” but also damned her as a chameleon, opportunistically mirroring her surroundings, and saw in her performance a kind of deceit: “What are we meant not to see?”
New York Times
columnist Maureen Dowd repeatedly tore at the “apple-pie and motherhood” scrim behind which the “real Hillary hid.” The cover of David Brock’s
The Seduction of Hillary Rodham
features her in sixteen different hairdos, presumably a map of her gradual corruption, like the picture of Dorian Gray. The attacks are often self-contradictory: In his book on the Clintons, Roger Morris depicts Hillary as both politically inept and slick as Willy. On one page she is a “cold-blooded heifer,” unfailingly condescending, on the next she is a charmer who schmoozes rural bosses with the best of them.

Whether there is something craven in a public figure’s image-making has been a vexing question at least since Shakespeare’s Coriolanus agonized over whether to parade his heroic war wounds before the Roman masses. The scars were real, but Coriolanus refused to pander, insisting that such a circus would express only contempt for the people, treating them as easily bedazzled children. His refusal proved disastrous. The dilemma is greater still in a culture so built on the machinery of publicity that it is merely foolish to imagine that simple, unadorned goodness will shine through without active manipulation of that machinery. “An eternity of false smiles … is the price you pay to lead,” Joe Klein wrote in a backhanded defense of the Bill Clinton character in
Primary Colors:
“You don’t think Abe Lincoln was a whore before he was a president?” He smiled his “backcountry grin … so he’d get the opportunity to appeal to the better angels of our nature.”

In the end, it seems that Hillary Rodham Clinton’s repeated refashionings of herself for public consumption have earned so much scorn not because she plays the image game but because for so long she played it badly. When she stitched together her image, the seams frequently showed—unlike the more adept Elizabeth Dole, who during the 1996 campaign was endlessly admired for “how well she hides her toughness and ambition” behind self-deprecation (her success is a mystery, as she tells it, something that merely happened to her), buttering up everyone she met with her honeyed drawl and the gracious manner of a southern belle. Lyndon Johnson called the former Duke University beauty queen a “sugarcoated steel magnolia.” In her autobiography, Dole recalled that during her years in the Reagan administration, she “seduced” her husband over a candlelight dinner into voting to sell planes to the Saudis. Though she has run an organization with a $1.8 billion budget and 32,000 employees, during the 1996 Republican convention Mrs. Dole stepped away from this “very imposing podium” to speak about “the man I love.” A decade older than Hillary Clinton, Elizabeth Dole comes from a generation of women who had little choice but to slip through quietly, to feign “traditionalism” even if they were shaping the world. Phyllis Schlafly successfully led the Stop ERA campaign in 1972, all the while carrying gifts of homemade jam to state legislators. Hillary herself has increasingly adopted the manners of an old-fashioned wife, standing by her man even as he publicly confessed to yet another infidelity, this
one with a woman half Hillary’s age. That demonstration of forbearance has had its own political benefits, winning Hillary—for the first time—the admiration of older, conservative women, who finally recognized a kindred spirit.

It is true that some styles are disastrous for women: The same caustic humor and brusque stiffness read as integrity in Bob Dole was despised when it surfaced in Hillary. But the constraints on women are probably no greater than they are for men: Bill Clinton is ridiculed for a moist style that when worn by Elizabeth Dole wins rapturous praise. What, then, is craven and what simply politically savvy? One is left, perhaps, to distinguish degrees of bad faith, to question whether the fabricated images are somehow faithful to the underlying truth and are in the service of some authentic purpose, or whether the initial conviction has evaporated and the quest to seduce and win (or simply survive) is all that remains.

Of course, the very idea of a “real self” revealed or concealed is dated. Postmodernists see a liberation of the self, not its betrayal, in the “masquerade.” Fashion, writes Anne Hollander, is “a costume trunk to express a woman’s complicated private character, a means of escape from fixed roles. A woman may keep wholly transforming through clothing with no loss of personal identity or consistency.” To be many things to many different people may be an expression of fluidity and wide-ranging empathy. Or it may be Machiavellian. Or it may be both.

“My hair has always been influenced by my life,” Chris Osborne wrote to her classmates in 1984, offering a chronology of hairstyles as the sum total of her entry in that year’s reunion book. “Short and lavender in ’65, it was by ’69 an inoffensive light brown … left scraggly in protest. By ’72, it was long enough for people to sit on. Cut and permed it in ’74, a huge mistake. I was fat then too.… By ’76, I was making big money in advertising so I used to take it down to New York and have Mr. Bobby at the Carlyle streak it. Much gray during my stint as a writer, then Associate Creative Director at J. Walter Thompson in San Francisco. I tried fighting back with wider streaks, but glare began causing mishaps on the Bay Bridge. At Doyle Dane Bernbach in New York … instantly more gray. I joined the Clairol group in 1982. While selling Nice ’n’ Easy Medium Golden Brown, I became one. This is the true me. Back in San Francisco as a senior writer at Foote Cone and Belding.… I breathe
clean air, support causes and date many men who don’t suspect about my hair.”

Chris’s shape-shifting paralleled her “careening” path out of Wellesley in 1969. Fatherless and “plumb out of money” she had to get a job, though, like most of her classmates at graduation, anticipating a domestic destiny, Chris had spent little energy contemplating what she wanted to do. “Most of us were pretty lost about our choices; it’s a mistake to assume, for all the achievers, that we were a bunch of directed student council types like Hillary.” Chris took a secretarial job at Harvard but was soon bored, so she became a live-in housekeeper and cook for five male students at the business school. “I was supposed to be like a little sister. Oh, all right, I did sleep with one of them; I kind of shared him with one of my Wellesley classmates. It’s perfectly okay to tell the truth. My father was dead and I could do anything I wanted.”

Another year, and Chris was “running off” to California. “I worked temp jobs in Berkeley and lived with twenty-two people in a house at the edge of the campus. Everyone was fucking like bunnies, which wasn’t the number-one appeal of living that way but was a great way to get to know your friends. It was not uncomplicated; somebody was always pissed at somebody else for sleeping with her boyfriend. I got really tired of it, though I’ve always been a little saver and saved lots of money by sharing living and food. But I finally just wanted to get a job and live well. A lot of them had grown up in rich families; everyone was content with antimaterialism except me.”

Back in Boston, she found a job by going through the phone book. “I got to the letter M. Marvin and Leonard needed a typist. I spent four years learning to write retail furniture ads, which is about four years more than you need. Then Marvin and Leonard laid me off. I went downstairs to Hill Holiday, who gave me a raise to $5,000 a year. I was still the archetypal sixties girl. I had hair to my ass and tie-dyed this and macraméd that. But then I started to dress differently, putting on suits and heels like the character in
Working Girl.”

Chris is now a chic platinum blonde, much younger looking and more fashionable than most of her classmates. And her twentieth reunion prediction—“It’s definitely beginning to look like I’ll get a neck lift before I have children”—has come true. “Advertising is full of twenty- and thirty-year-olds and I didn’t want to be obviously older
than my peers. The neck lift was great. I got the whole lower face thrown in as a bonus. I don’t even have those little lines between my nose and upper lip. They pull up everything behind the ears.” She celebrated her new face, and a home renovation completed at the same time, at a “neck and deck” party for all her friends.

Playing earth mother or parochial school girl is one thing. Playing vixen is potentially a more treacherous game. A woman leaning on her sexuality risks not being taken seriously, becoming a target for parody: When Hillary Clinton attended the Miss America Pageant,
The New York Times
mocked Miss Delaware’s talking about changing American demographics “from atop spike heels.” And if to get what she wants a woman must be able to stir male desire, her power is highly perishable and, in fact, not her own. “Left-handed, sidelong in the right-handed upright world of men,” wrote poet Randall Jarrell, “they try to get around by hook or by crook, by a last weak winning sexual smile, the laws men have made for them.”