Bitch

by Elizabeth Wurtzel

  But in politics, many are afraid to even admit they so much as visited a psychiatrist for fear the stigma will push them out of office. And heaven knows, while coming back from hardship and overcoming adversity is always a favorite stump speech theme, only Marion Barry has ever parlayed drug addiction and jail time into elected office. A crazy wife is potentially damaging to a public servant’s rising star, so political wives have become the last bastion of womanhood that has learned to keep a stiff upper lip, not for themselves or for their own career advancement, but for the sake of their husbands—which they probably tell themselves is really for the sake of America or the sake of Tennessee or the sake of Wichita, or the sake of the big cause that this will someday fulfill: Someday health-care reform will make this all worth it.

  Running on this Ponzi scheme of political and personal promises and compromises, it seems an unusual number of crazy ladies have haunted the governor’s mansion or the White House throughout our history. Entire documentaries have been made about Mary Todd Lincoln’s mental condition—please note that she is the only First Lady besides Hillary whom we know by three names—but I get the feeling she was not quite right in the head long before she married Abe. Images of Kitty Dukakis drinking rubbing alcohol because the Massachusetts governor’s residence had been emptied of all other booze are complemented by images of Betty Ford drinking quite openly in the White House, getting fall-down drunk while her husband presided over an era John Updike calls “America’s longest-running one-night stand.” One of Watergate’s more amusing sideshows was provided by one of its more unstrung minor characters, John Mitchell’s now ex-wife Martha, who drove reporters crazy by calling them from her bathtub at all hours of the day and night with promises of inside information that turned out mostly to be her marital troubles. And one can imagine that Pat Nixon spent her share of dark nights of the soul listening to Rachmaninoff while her husband went outside to chat about football and surfing with anti-Vietnam War protesters. Rita Jenrette, former wife of the congressman turned ABSCAM convict John Jenrette, Democrat of South Carolina, was driven crazy by Washington, wrote an article called “Diary of a Mad Congresswife” that was published in the Washington Post Magazine, posed nude for Playboy, and suggested in the accompanying text that she knew she’d never fit in inside the Beltway when at “the Congressional wives’ luncheon for Mrs. Anwar Sadat, I was the only one in a gypsy outfit.” Ms. Jenrette then decided to become an entertainer, and has since faded into obscurity.

  And the statesman’s wife losing her mind, first furtively, then utterly overtly, is, like unfiltered Camels and M-16s and the Church of Scientology, one of those American exports whose growth potential in the worldwide marketplace is too large to estimate. Margaret Trudeau, whose name is barely recognizable today, was fantasy fodder for every gossip rag in the late seventies when she, as wife of Canadian Prime Minister Pierre Trudeau, was caught in all-night unladylike dishabille at Studio 54, the only Canadian in the club’s celebrity coterie of Bianca and Andy and Liza and Margaux and Halston and Mick and a revolving assortment of famous fashion victims and cokeheads. Maggie was beautiful and young and bored by her deadly dull husband—she was oomphless in Ottawa. In her autobiography, she confessed, with no regrets, that on the night her husband lost his bid for reelection, she was fucking Mr. Jagger. Unless you count Hamilton Jordan’s reportedly cocaine-filled forays into Studio 54, Canada’s First Lady was the only associate of an elected official anywhere to hold court in the discotheque. She was a cause scandale for a country that had not shown too many signs of life since the War of 1812, and what little talent it exported seemed to migrate to Malibu. Though Maggie eventually divorced, remarried and remained in Ottawa, for a brief shining moment she suggested an alternative approach to the life of the wife-of.

  Princess Diana, the first “American” in the British royal family—Dr. David Starkey, a scholar of English common law, has gone so far as to call Di “essentially Californian”—needed to sneak to the BBC and “leak” to author Andrew Morton to let the world know that the Windsors were trying to, as she said to the interviewer on the show Panorama, “dismantle [her] personality” by isolating her. In another instance of a foreign ruler’s residence imitating an American soap opera, the First Lady of Peru had a fight with her husband and locked him out of their residence in retaliation for perceived slights, which moved him to have the electric power in the house turned off in order to force her out. These examples are not meant to imply that political wives necessarily have it worse than, say, athletes’ wives—when you consider what Mrs. Magic Johnson must live with, it’s clear that’s not the case—but government, particularly elected office, is the last arena where wives play a role as wives per se, where their reflective value to their husbands has not really changed since 1955. But where Bill and Hillary were concerned, she was advertised as more than just a wife—it was “buy one, get one free,” in some weird attempt to appeal to the thrifty national character—and she was not going to be a Valium-silenced zombie leading first graders in the Pledge of Allegiance and squeezing the Charmin at supermarket openings in Compton.

  “If I get elected President, it will be an unprecedented partnership, far more than Franklin Roosevelt and Eleanor,” Bill Clinton said on Meet the Press during the 1992 campaign. “They were two great people on different tracks. If I get elected, we’ll do things together like we always have.” This assurance that Bill Clinton delivered is meant to be Hillary’s payoff for having to concern herself with the name Rodham and for the blonde hair—hers and many others’—and for Gennifer with a G and Paula with a shiny complexion and for investing in futures and giving up glasses and apologizing to Tammy Wynette and pretending to bake chocolate chip cookies.

  But, of course, it did not work out that way. Instead people have come to dislike Hillary so much for her duplicity: America’s disenchantment with Hillary, which has been seen as a referendum on career women, feminism, baby boomers or even power couples, is, if anything, about our distrust of those who don’t earn their own keep, who don’t prove their own worth. No one minds Elizabeth Dole, extraordinary and accomplished as she is, because what threatens most people is not women who work for a living (which is, after all, what most women must do whether they like it or not), but rather women who linger and connive behind the scenes, the shifty shrews who operate without position, and therefore have no real responsibility and therefore are not accountable, cannot be fired, cannot be trusted. Legendary termagants—Lady Macbeth, Anne Boleyn, Marie Antoinette—were given their due for overexerting their influence as wives; of course, back then women rarely exercised power in any capacity other than wife or courtesan. But Queen Elizabeth I and Mary Queen of Scots were both, for want of a male heir, properly crowned in front of God and everybody, and were therefore never reduced to stealthily sneaking their power like a couple of bulimics secreting away food to binge on, rightly embarrassed by the thought of anyone discovering that they are going to follow the entire box of Mallomars with an entire bag of Doritos. For these British rulers, power was their due and their duty—they had been anointed as queens by the divine right of kings, and their position, far from being a privilege, demanded that they serve more than that they be served. They could proceed with the integrity of knowing that, basically, they got the job! Not only was neither beheaded, but both remain among the most well-regarded of the British sovereigns in the eight hundred years of the monarchy’s existence—Mary even led her country into war—which would seem to indicate that even in the sixteenth century, the people could occasionally abide a woman in charge. For most of us, who actually fear authority figures more than we fear women, the main concern is: Is she supposed to be in charge? (Remember, Alexander Haig’s Iago act was not very popular either.)

  While it infuriates me to see Hillary Clinton impugned and despised with attitudes reminiscent of prefeminist misogyny, she has probably earned it because, well, she hasn’t got the job! She’s a power sneak-binger, stealing pints of Ben & J
erry’s Chunky Monkey from someone else’s freezer. Although she came of age in the women’s movement and ought to know better, she is living completely through a man, and seems to want the privileges of an independent woman without being willing to go through congressional confirmation or elections or whatever process one goes through when serving the public in a given capacity. It’s not just that Hillary’s health-care reform proposals were disliked by both liberals and conservatives, it’s that the plan’s lack of a constituency was a reflection of her own want of a clear base of support, since she was never elected to any office or put through the usual personnel procedures and entered into the government payroll.

  “Hillary isn’t under attack for being a strong independent woman with ideas,” wrote Barbara Ehrenreich in Mirabella in September 1996, by which time Whitewater was more than just up shit’s creek without a paddle or raft or anyone saying that you’re going to be the first female President any longer. “Hillary’s career is only a minor update on Barbara Bush’s. Yes, she had a job at the Rose Law Firm, but Yale Law School does not take great pride in seeing its graduates run interference for sleazy S & Ls and real-estate dealers. Hillary Rodham, the Wellesley valedictorian, was meant for better things, but chose to follow Bill. Even at Rose, her success depended on her being married to a governor who would reportedly jog over to Jim McDougal’s office and beg him to throw business Hillary’s way.

  “But the political wife plan worked better for Barbara Bush’s generation,” Ehrenreich continues. “Back then, when a husband philandered, you retired into a discreet depression and then emerged with undyed hair and a determination to write the autobiography of a pet dog. Hillary got mad, but even that didn’t lead her to conclude she needed more Bill-free space in her life, like a job where her second last name didn’t matter. Instead she dug deeper into his career, made herself indispensable as a strategist, even, at times, a co-candidate.”

  It is this, precisely this, that people despise.

  So what is strange about the story of the gas station attendant who would be king is that it offers a succinct illustration of what it is that makes so many Americans suspicious of Hillary—her controlling nature, her puppeteer position, her fingernail grip—and has resulted in disapproval ratings that have at times surpassed even those of Madame Just-Say-No, Nancy Reagan (who, you may recall, spent taxpayer money replacing perfectly good china and flew her hairdresser in from California). What is even more strange about this story is that it’s meant to depict Hillary as the strong, strong-arming woman, the bull-dyke nightmare feminist, the woman in charge. It is meant to remind us how scary it is to have a powerful woman living in the White House.

  It is meant to make us forget that this woman is not the President, and therefore does not really have any power at all.

  It is meant to make us forget that there have been female Presidents and Prime Ministers in countries as varied, as religious, as backwater and as forward-thinking as England, Israel, Pakistan, India, the Philippines, Ireland and Australia. It is meant to make us forget that in the United States, we couldn’t even elect an unmarried man into office, much less a married woman. It is meant to make us forget that the ceremonial duties of the First Lady are so essential to the executive branch’s success that to elect anything less than a man and his wife would be to vote for much less than we believe we need—although, in a survey commissioned by Vanity Fair from Yankelovich Clancy Shulman during the 1992 campaign, 84 percent of the respondents said they would condone a First Lady with a second career. Christopher Buckley, however, expressed displeasure in a September/October 1996 issue of Mirabella. “Hey, look, this country needs a First Lady. And the last time I checked, it was a full-time job,” he wrote. “We need her to be the nation’s mother and, to an extent, wife.” Of course, Mr. Buckley’s own mum is a society grande dame, so perhaps it’s hard for him to imagine a woman who wants more than to lunch out on the taxpayers’ expense, but he is at least being honest. “What sort of demands will be placed on Georgette [Mosbacher] as the wife of a Cabinet secretary?” asked John Davidson with regard to the famously redheaded cosmetics company CEO in the February 1989 Vanity Fair—a grim reminder that “First Lady” duties even extend to a woman who happens to be married to a man whose job is pretty much to do PR for American industry abroad.

  And still the notion that being the power behind the throne is akin to being the power itself goes on. During the 1992 presidential race, the high quality and caliber of wife folk was a favorite topic, with Hillary only the biggest chick among a whole pack of Chiclets. The charismatically challenged (though aquatically gifted) Paul Tsongas joked that he ceded charm duty to his attorney wife, Niki. “If you don’t have charisma, you marry it,” he remarked. Marilyn Quayle, another lawyer—both she and J. Danforth went to Indiana University Law School, though she got in on the merits and he got in, mysteriously, as an affirmative action applicant (don’t ask; the school couldn’t explain and neither can I)—insisted at the 1992 Republican convention that women would not want to put career before family because that would deny “our essential nature.” Just the same, Mrs. Quayle commandeered a six-office suite across the hall from the Vice President’s work chambers, and acted as gatekeeper and screener to any of those who might wish to bring their agendas to her husband. Ruth Harkin had once been a prosecutor, but became her husband’s full-time adviser for his half-dead campaign. And Hillary Clinton—well, she tended to inspire remarks like: “She’s a spectacular candidate in her own right. She’s got my vote.” “You can’t help but think, Why isn’t she the candidate?” Or, as her own husband said at a dinner roasting the then-governor’s wife, “Some say the wrong Clinton is in the statehouse, and I wouldn’t disagree with them.”

  But all those women wielding power—really, what did that mean? Because it wasn’t their power, it was their husbands’ power, which they could occasionally touch by proxy or by persuasion. Clinton’s remark about the wrong person being governor is clearly the good-natured condescension of a man who knows that it is his to offer or deny. As Marianne Moore wrote in her poem “Marriage,” “men have power / and sometimes one is made to feel it.” There is no greater display of power than apparent nonchalance.

  Americans’ inability to bring themselves to elect a woman to its highest office—and the fact that the Democrats made it appear that they had to beat through all the bushes (double entendre absolutely intended) to come up with a fairly obscure, hopelessly unelectable Queens, New York, congresswoman to share the ticket with an even more unelectable Walter Mondale in 1984—has become something of an international joke. Of course, the fact that Italy has had a former porn star who is now the former wife of American artist Jeff Koons in its parliament is also something of an international joke—but it is one that should only serve to highlight that even in the land of the Vatican, they are not nearly so uptight as we are about girls in government. This squeamishness is the sole reason that, if we assume pragmatism before principles, we can justify Hillary’s decision to realize her own political ambitions through her husband: in a country where even Ivy League schools and snooty white-shoe law firms and wheeler-dealer Wall Street concerns and other ancient male bastions all have their share of women wielding power as they do nowhere else on earth, we have not even come sort-of kind-of close to sending a woman into the Oval Office. And it’s at the point where we just accept it, we think it’s normal for it to be that way, we think it’s acceptable that the best we can come up with is a First Lady with a fancy law degree and no job, we think it’s normal that the Vice President’s wife is a grown woman called Tipper—we don’t even notice how strange this political impasse is. And maybe Hillary figured it out, and decided she’d rather light than fight.

  “The American failure to understand women is most strikingly evident in the case of Hillary Clinton versus Margaret Thatcher,” wrote Julie Burchill, a British feminist of observant wit, in an issue of The New York Times Magazine devoted to the way the world views the Unit
ed States. Ms. Burchill is of the opinion that when it comes to sex, Americans are not too swift, strangely uptight, swinging harum-scarum between talkety-talk-talk-talk—with Jerry Springer and Jenny Jones acting as confessional priests to teenage boys who are bedding down their girlfriends’ mothers, or promiscuous twelve-year-olds who complain that everyone thinks they are sluts—and then disregarding all this ghoulishness to say that we are afraid that a woman who might be going through menopause while in office is a threat to national security, as if Bill Clinton’s dick is not. “Hillary was a woman of great ability and intellect active in a party that was, in theory, sympathetic to the idea of the equality of women,” Burchill continues. “Margaret Thatcher was a woman of middling ability and intellect active in a party completely hostile to the idea of the equality of women. Yet it was Mrs. Thatcher who ended up radiantly in power, while Mrs. Clinton ended up pushing her chocolate-chip-cookie recipe, being humiliated on a scale that would have shocked Jackie Kennedy and generally standing by her man to a degree that would suggest that women come not from Venus but rather from Planet Dog. A country at ease with women and sex would not have effectively castrated its First Lady.”

  That any prerogative that is handed to anyone in a democracy is meaningful only if it is given by direct mandate is shown in the fact that the proud display of Hillary as the unsalaried half of the slogan “buy one, get one free” has recast her as the Wicked Witch of the West Wing, banished by popular demand. And if in 1992 all the candidates were showing off their sassy, brassy, capable and competent better halves, the 1996 campaign was about the silence of the ewe. Liddy Dole spent her sabbatical from the Red Cross on levity duty, insisting that she’d keep her job and keep her hands off policy decisions even if her husband actually were elected, and rode a motorcycle with Jay Leno to prove that she’s at least as wild as Tipper Gore.