As mutilated and vitiated as the First Lady is by virtue of our protest that we didn’t elect her, and as much as she is made to be female eunuch—possibly, in Hillary Clinton’s case, even minding the harem—anecdotes like the story of the gas station are meant to make us forget that we seem to want June Cleaver as First Lady.
As much as we need a First Lady, as much as this distaff appendage is necessary for the presidency—even though we need her so badly that we let her have a staff, a secretary, aides, foreign policy advisers and an office that I would guess has lots of big picture windows and a view of the Rose Garden and a rolltop desk with Mont Blanc fountain pens and an unlimited supply of Post-Its—even though we think she is worth this much trouble, we don’t give her a salary. Even Lady Bird Johnson, who long learned her place in Lyndon’s life after years in the trenches of Texas politics had the wherewithal to gripe, “The First Lady is an unpaid public servant elected by one person—her husband.” The current First Lady is in the unique position of having a degree from Yale Law School and earning even less than the undergraduate interns she employs during the summer.
The First Lady earns less than her secretary. (Sylvia Plath’s mother was probably right to insist she learn shorthand.)
The First Lady earns less than you do.
And she has thick calves.
The First Lady, be it Hillary Clinton or Mamie Eisenhower, replicates the plight of every woman writ large: not being paid to do tons of work that you could not pay most men to do. Ivana Trump, first bouffanted blonde wife of the Donald, may be silly and surgeried into midlife Barbie-dom, but she still places a premium on the fact that throughout her marriage she was a hardworking woman, helicoptering to casinos in Atlantic City, purchasing chintz to redecorate the Plaza Hotel and generally making herself useful to the Donald’s pursuit of gaming and gilding the lily. When asked to reveal Ivana’s salary for services rendered, Trump once put it at a dollar a year and all the dresses she could buy. Now, I know she lived well, and marriage makes for strange money arrangements, but Donald is effectively saying that Ivana does not need proper payment for her labors—ironically, she prided herself on the fact that she personally signed every check issued by Trump’s Castle—because she can just trust him: Let Daddy take care of it, little girl. We all know where that attitude has landed many a good woman, including Ivana, whose new motto is “Don’t get mad—get everything!” Receiving money from a man like a girlish gift is not good, nor is extracting it from him in divorce court terrifically attractive behavior. So Ivana did necessary work for exactly what she’d have received if she had only had manicures by the pool in Palm Beach all the livelong day, and without a payroll entry or job description attached to her tasks, she became a unique thing: a volunteer in the service of a capitalist venture.
Ivana tailor-made her dress-indentured servitude, but for First Ladies it is part of the rules of the game—so much so that no one even thinks to question it. In fact, when Hillary Clinton became the chair of the commission on health care, she was not being paid at all to do tons of work that most men would get paid tons to do. And furthermore, she was also accepting the role as fall gal for Bill—if health care had worked, he’d get credit; when it didn’t work, she got blame—participating in a psychodynamic where she plays unappealing policy wonk to his persuasive pol part, all in all not much appetizing in it for her in any of this, and she’s not even getting paid for it. In fact, all the while she is working on health care she is also doing all the ceremonial afternoon-tea work that is First Lady as usual. As Ginger Rogers once said of her gig with Fred Astaire: she had to do everything he had to do—only she had to do it backwards and in high heels.
Of course we will never have a woman President. What man would accept the role of First Gentleman? What man would take afternoon tea with a bunch of “woman’s page” reporters without receiving a paycheck? What man would willingly lead a Christmas-season tour of the White House and show off a gingerbread model of the family home? In fact, I would wager that, should we ever see the day when there is a female Commander-in-Chief, her husband will keep his job back home in Portland or Minneapolis or Waxahachie, and the first couple will have a commuter marriage because that’s how important his career will be to him. They’d be forced to import one of those swishy-walker types, like Jerry Zipkin or Truman Capote if they weren’t dead, anytime there was an occasion involving finger sandwiches or marzipan.
Suddenly it would be impossible not to notice that being forced to deal with the head of protocol or to take advice from Letitia Baldrige or to take a stroll through Gorky Park with Raisa Gorbachev or to restructure the entire health-care system or to work on a regular basis with Ira Magaziner is the kind of job that anyone thinking clearly would not put up with for anything less than the Intel CEO’s year-end bonus, and yet going as far back as Martha Washington (who probably had to organize sewing circles to darn the socks of local infantrymen), the American taxpayers have gotten a huge break.
But this is precisely why people are so suspicious of Hillary Clinton. She’s kind of like Banquo’s ghost lingering in the White House, this nagging presence roaming the corridors of power, trying to be useful when she should really go to her own workstation and play with her own little widgets. Between changing hairdos and hair-don’ts as if she were still in eleventh grade and displacing and misplacing documents as if she were a CIA mole, Hillary has left the American public with this quivering, queasy feeling like: Doesn’t she have anything better to do? Shouldn’t such an ostensibly qualified person have some sort of job? With all the government agencies and think tanks based inside the Beltway, wouldn’t it be nice to actually bring home a paycheck? I mean, with unemployment so low that Alan Greenspan is about to have a coronary, it seems like Hillary has a patriotic duty to get a job and help keep down inflation.
During the 1992 campaign, Americans assumed and the press tended to confirm that the Clintons saw themselves as the dynamic duo, as co-candidates. But that’s not how it works: Clinton and Gore were co-candidates. While Hillary could have run for Vice President, given that she’d never run for any elective office, never held an official position in national politics (of course, in these days of the Ross Perot/Steve Forbes/Morry Taylor lunatic fringe, perhaps simply being over thirty-five is enough), she’d have been given such a slot only because of her matrimonial status. Elizabeth Dole, married to a man who reminds us all why The Wizard of Oz could never have been set anywhere but Kansas, has actually had a career completely independent of her husband’s. She could easily succeed where he has failed—and who can say that the sort of Howard Hawkes romantic comedy quality of a Dole-Dole ticket might not have worked better than a former Buffalo Bill and a tendency to misuse the third person singular did. (It has often been noted that Republican women tend to be a more solid lot—Jeane Kirkpatrick, Wendy Gramm, etc.—which is obviously the result of no one in that party much wanting them around until recently, and without affirmative action, only the tough survived.)
At any rate, Hillary was not interested in being VP, seeing it as somehow beneath her: “I’m not interested in attending a lot of funerals around the world,” she said at a Hollywood-ladies-who-lunch-but-don’t-eat fund-raising luncheon in 1992. Somehow cabinet positions were not considered (the nepotism rule could probably be overturned), but the First Lady still proceeded as if it was her birthright to make policy decisions because she happens to be married to the boss. “No one gives George Bush a hard time when he gets advice from Jim Baker,” Hillary complained to Gail Sheehy. Well, hello, Mr. Baker could be the biggest dope on earth, but he got himself confirmed by Congress (who may be the mega-biggest dopes on earth), he basically went through what would be known as personnel procedures in any company in this country, so his job is to advise and consent.
For whatever reason, Hillary seems resistant to these standard procedures—she took on the task of health care without getting paid, rather like Ivana’s situation—and I believe it is ultimately what
has gotten her in over her head with Whitewater and its offshoots. There’s no reason for this, it’s as if she fears failure if she just agrees to play by the ordinary rules, and the result is an assertive, even aggressive woman who projects a forthright independence that is both incongruous and inappropriate coming from someone who is, after all, just some guy’s loudmouthed wife.
Now, let me ask you: Is this not precisely the kind of situation feminism came along to get rid of? People think the nagging discomfort they get about Mrs. Clinton is a consequence of her position as a nontraditional First Lady. But that’s wrong: what bothers them is that she is so utterly traditional, but she goes through life with the steely visage of one who is keeping secrets, keeping it all in that this was not what she bargained for—it is, in fact, more like what she gambled on.
The fact is that America is so frightened of a truly independent woman that someone like Hillary—who appears to be just that, even though her entire identity is derived from her marital status—gets demonized as a cautionary, warning shot, lest a woman who keeps her name, her job, her personhood ever dare to enter the White House as anything other than the President’s mistress.
If Gennifer Flowers had not existed, somebody would have invented her, but she is the only character in the drama of Bill Clinton—including the man himself—who is absolutely inevitable. The political groupie who knows nothing of politics, the erupting bimbo on every political campaign trail, the blonde in the bleachers who may even be a brunette—like Judith Exner with John Kennedy and Gloria Swanson with his father Joe—she is the only certainty of any charismatic pol’s entourage. Even Jimmy Carter, delivering his famous malaise speech in his cardigan sweater to encourage fuel conservation during the energy crisis, still admitted to Playboy that he had “lusted in [his] heart.” Richard Nixon—who knows? Even paranoids have enemies, but I don’t think that they have mistresses. (Although I have to admit, I fantasize about Nixon having a brief tryst with Karen Carpenter when she and her brother performed for him at the White House, but that’s just my creepy little perversion.) This is what politics is all about: just as skinny guys with acne scars pick up guitars and start rock bands in order to get chicks, geeky guys and policy wonks run for office for the big-haired girls.
But these women, it turns out, are often the only people who keep politicians in touch with the real people, they are ordinary as no one else in the pol’s life is—they are a retreat from a life that’s all pollsters, lobbyists, fund-raisers, all special interest groups with not especially interesting needs. She is his great escape to normal life. The backwater country girl who became Blaze Starr, the ecdysiast for enthusiasts in New Orleans’ French Quarter, stripped her way into the aging Earl Long’s ailing, populist heart and became his consort and sole source of vigor for his fading days. Somehow, the still-sweet Southerner, sobriqueted “Blaze” because of her auburn mane, became the original church-going stripper—an innocent nude back when there was still such a thing. Miss Starr was an Appalachian escapee with big-city, show-business dreams, and unsuspecting naïf who took her clothes off on her first night on a vaudeville stage—she thought she was supposed to be playing the balalaika and singing a blue Kentucky girl tune—because she just wanted to be pleasing, because it was easier than fending off the itchy, ornery men in the audience—who really were the dearest things once you got to know ’em. If we think of striptease today as a tense, titillating form of seduction, for Blaze Starr it seems to have been more a form of submission; she seems to have performed without guile. And somehow, with his electoral career becoming a past-tense affair, when Earl Long felt displaced in the state of Louisiana—the only place any of the Longs could possibly not feel displaced—Blaze Starr made Mr. Long feel right at home, an unpolitical animal once more.
This sexpot-as-girl-next-door quality seems to animate a lot of mighty men’s excitement in their mistresses: Donald Trump is not actually a politician—but don’t tell him that—and still, Maria Maples, when first revealed as Ivana’s rival, attributed her appeal to the real estate mogul as simple earthiness, as lack of socialite polish. “I’m, like, of the soil, of the country, of a solid firm belief in God,” Maria said in a Vanity Fair profile that was most notable when it ran in November 1990 for including a picture of the pretty peach standing outside the Plaza Hotel in a pink-sequined Bob Mackie gown, gobbling on a New York City street hot dog, in a decidedly suggestive oral gesture. “I would be happier living out on a farm away from everyone and not being in this concrete world.” By contrast, Maria said of the then-Mrs. Trump: “The lifestyle she has grown accustomed to is outrageous. It’s outrageous spending I can’t even conceive of”—which is definitely saying something: at the time of Maria’s famous do-you-love-your-husband confrontation with Ivana at Bonnie’s, the Aspen bôite at the bottom of the slopes, the mistress was ensconced in a $10,000-a-week penthouse triplex paid for by the Donald. Still, despite such signs of a slight spoiling, Maria’s essential claims to ingenuousness seem to stem from sincerity. “There was nothing distinguishing about her except her genuineness,” an old beau of the future Mrs. Trump said in the Vanity Fair piece. “She was a sweet girl from Georgia, all southern charm, the antithesis of high-society megabucks-type people … She invited me to her church.” In fact, Maria and Donald often rendezvoused in a pew at the Marble Collegiate Church, adding a touch of the sacred to their sinning.
And if political wives occupy an age-old role of unpaid female labor, the mistresses play the paradoxical part of fantasy and reality: he escapes to her, and yet, because he functions in the netherworld of doublespeak and agenda-mongering, where missiles that can blow up the world are called Peacekeepers and where the difference between committing a felony and fund-raising as usual is whether you use a phone in your office or one down the hall in your bedroom (as if telephones are such rare and prized commodities that we measure the legalities by what most of us consider just a matter of convenience)—given this fantasy world he lives in, his mistress’ fleshy and full-bodied existence is an escapist reality. Which is how it always is—or at least was before women were in the workforce beside men and with their mates: women were the great escape, the body as leisure. Men escape to women, not with women—they are land, home, colony, country—all states are female nouns. She is shelter: “Come in, she said, I’ll give you shelter from the storm,” Bob Dylan sang on a cut from Blood on the Tracks that was used in the movie Jerry Maguire to remind us how much the tensed-up title character really needed the sweetness of his wife to go running to. “You’re my castle, you’re my cabin and my instant pleasure dome / I need you in my house, because you’re my home,” sang Billy Joel two or three wives ago. Women are less likely to own property than men—they couldn’t legally until pretty recently—and yet their bodies are home.
On the other hand, sometimes politicians are married to women who don’t understand what they do, and they hook up with women who do. In 1996, when Secretary of Commerce Ron Brown died in a plane crash on a trip to the former Yugoslavia, he left behind an afterlife of evidence of a long-term, complicated involvement that encompassed both the professional and the personal with a Texas businesswoman named Nolanda Hill. Ms. Hill—who owned three Harley-Davidsons, drove a little red Corvette and flirted wildly—was, right down to the red hair and the three failed marriages, in all ways the characteristic caricature of the Lone Star state’s favorite female mascot (think former governor Ann Richards): a loud little lady who cuts a large swath.
“For almost ten years, Hill was Ron Brown’s business partner and his closest political adviser, and, for the last seven years of his life, she was his lover,” Peter J. Boyer wrote in The New Yorker, in a posthumous profile of the relationship. Brown remained married throughout the affair; Hill’s third marriage disintegrated toward the end. The adulterous connection seems mostly to have occupied a space separate—and not entirely in conflict with—their respective spousal unions; the pair would apparently talk on the phone for hours in front of th
eir families, who seem to have willfully ignored the passionate pitch of their conversations that most people would sense went beyond business as usual. “The political mistress is a stock Washington character, yet the relationship between Ron Brown and Nolanda Hill was a distinct nineteen-nineties variation of that arrangement by which powerful men acquire and maintain paramours,” Boyer explains. “They both were resourceful, charismatic operators who loved to make deals.” When Brown’s nomination to the Cabinet was threatened by Republican opposition, Hill was called into the war room for strategy sessions, partly because her grasp of his business dealings was stronger than his; as the owner of several television stations, Hill employed Brown’s daughter and daughter-in-law; she negotiated the divestment package for certain assets Brown had to relinquish when he became head of Commerce; and, when Hill moved her base of operations to Washington, Brown “often came to her apartment after work, and she’d make him a scrambled-egg sandwich.”
Though Boyer sees the “distinct nineteen-nineties variation” on the classic extramarital affair in the Brown-Hill bond, in fact this same setup was anticipated on a smaller scale in the 1979 movie The Seduction of Joe Tynan. As the title character (and screenwriter of the film), Alan Alda is a charming senator at just the right age with just the right appeal to make him a serious presidential prospect; he is even tapped for the precursor to all White House ambitions: the keynote address at the Democratic Convention. He is politically obsessed, seized by the vertiginous energy of Washington power plays—he’s the kind of guy who likes cutting the deal, maneuvering IOUs around the favor bank so that a vote on a bill comes out just so: He’s at that point in his senatorial career when the smoke-filled rooms are still romantic, they still bespeak an atmosphere of macho potentates duking it out until the best and fairest side wins. Senator Tynan has even come to believe that corruption works, that it is a good thing because it automatically eliminates the weakest positions that don’t have the wherewithal for a fight; it’s not that might makes right—but nothing else does either.
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