Rebels in White Gloves (32 page)

Matilda Williams in 1992, during her years as a Buddhist nun in Thailand. Matilda understood that the nuns regarded having one’s picture taken with a fully opened lotus as arrogant, because it implies one has achieved complete enlightenment. (
Courtesy of Matilda Williams
)

Nancy Wanderer (left), all-American girl, playing “Curly” in
Oklahoma!
in 1960. (
Courtesy of Nancy Wanderer
)

Nancy as a high school senior in 1964. She beat out Hillary Rodham as representative to the National Student Association when they were juniors, had a storybook wedding by the end of 1968, and shortly thereafter became the class’s youngest mother. (
Courtesy of Nancy Wanderer
)

Nancy and her partner, Susan, in 1993, the “love of her life.” (
Courtesy of Nancy Wanderer
)

Dorothy Devine at her wedding to Daniel Gilbarg. Dorothy was engaged in the fall of 1968 and was married by January 1969—a “ring by spring.” (
Courtesy of Dorothy Devine
)

By the winter of 1969, Dorothy was cutting cane as a political activist in Cuba. (
Courtesy of Dorothy Devine
)

Dorothy being crowned with blessings and laurel at a recent Goddess Group meeting. (
Courtesy of Dorothy Devine
)

Alison’s adult life has been consumed with caregiving for her children and in-laws and battling her own ill health. (
Courtesy of Alison Campbell Swain
)

Alison “Snowy” Campbell (left) at her debutante ball; she later turned down
Glamour
’s invitation to be featured as a deb of the year, citing her grandmother’s rule that “a lady is in the paper only when she is born, when she marries, and when she dies.” She spent her youth among Rockefellers and Bouviers. (
Courtesy of Alison Campbell Swain
)

Kris Olson’s wedding shower for her marriage to Jeff Rogers was attended by Mrs. Spiro T. Agnew, Mrs. George Bush, Mrs. John Connolly, Mrs. John Ehrlichman, Mrs. H. R. Haldeman, Mrs. John Mitchell, Mrs. Elliot Richardson, Mrs. George Romney, and Mrs. George Shultz. (
Courtesy of Kris Olson
)

Kris with Hillary and Bill Clinton in 1993. Kris was appointed by President Clinton as the first woman U.S. attorney in Oregon. (
Courtesy of Kris Olson
)

As the young wife of a famous man, Janet learned early and well what Hillary Clinton learned late and imperfectly: how to polish her surface—her public persona—to such a high sheen as to be impenetrable. Janet presents such a practiced package that the glare of publicity merely glances off, lending her a brilliant glamor but exposing nothing beyond what she wishes to expose. The famous Janet Hill is therefore, paradoxically, the most private of all of her classmates. Far from blurting confessions, she reveals only as much as she chooses; her stories and aphorisms have the ring of tales told many times.

Even as she has secured her privacy, however, Janet has also refused the segregated existence she lived as a child, although now her family would be the ones in the “big house” sheltered by the walls of privilege. Though Calvin was making lots of money, Janet insisted that they raise Grant in an ordinary suburban tract home. When Cal moved to Cleveland to play for the Browns, Janet stayed behind so as not to disrupt her career (“I was not going to be Mrs. Football Player, polishing the trophies”) and to keep Grant in public school. Far from spoiling her precocious son, whose athletic gifts were revealed early, she was as strict as her own mother had been. “When I was a kid, there were places I couldn’t go. I couldn’t talk on the phone till my homework was finished; I always had a bedtime, and I was punished if I broke the rules. I raised Grant the same way. He had curfews when he was six feet five and a junior in high school.” John Nelson, a Yale classmate of Calvin’s who married Janet’s
Wellesley classmate Kim Ballard, lived a block from the Hills when Grant was in high school. Nelson recalls a summer evening, just past sundown, when he heard a knock at the door. When he opened it, he found on his front step an already towering fourteen-year-old Grant. “Hi,” Grant said. “Can you give me a ride home? My mother won’t let me walk home after dark.”