[11]
Hillary and Bill
“You know what I was thinking this afternoon?” Monica said to Linda Tripp. “Like, you know, it’s so weird that when I was younger, it was such a big deal, like losing your cherry, and who do you lose your cherry to, and my God it’s such a big deal. Blah blah blah. And now it’s like no big fucking deal.”
There was a man, the young Hillary Rodham told her parents, who unzipped himself to her and showed her his willard. There was another man who threatened her with a butcher knife as she played with her friends. There was yet another man who flung her to the ground, got on top of her, and started to kiss her until she flailed at him and he ran away.
Her parents were mystified. Park Ridge, Illinois, was a country club Chicago suburb. The white supremacist, extreme right-wing John Birch Society was strong here, in this bucolic place without Jews, Asians, Hispanics, or blacks. (Many years later, the suburb would become the district of militantly antiabortion congressman Henry Hyde, chairman of the House Judiciary Committee.) The streets were thought to be so safe that Hillary and her two brothers were allowed to walk to school. In winter, the kids ice-skated alone. Yet these things kept happening to Hillary—a willard, a butcher knife, and what sounded like near rape.
Hillary’s father, Hugh, who had worked in the Pennsylvania coal mines in his youth, then stacked boxes to put himself through college, ran a mom-and-pop custom drapery company. He was the kind of man who’d never had a credit card in his life. Everything was paid for in cash—the Georgian brick house, the new Cadillac he’d trade in every year. Hugh Rodham chewed tobacco and loved Barry Goldwater. He was gruff and confrontational. When Hillary got straight A’s, he said, “You must go to a pretty easy school.” He gave his kids no allowance: “They eat and sleep for free. We’re not going to pay them as well.” When Hillary asked him over dinner for money to see a movie, he put another potato on her plate instead. He would drive his kids through the slums sometimes to show them how lucky they were. Yet he sat at the kitchen table, helping them with their homework, and he played pinochle with them. He taught her to hit a curve ball. Her brother said she was “daddy’s girl.”
Her mother, Dorothy, called her husband “Mr. Difficult.” (He probably would have gotten along with Monica’s father, Dr. No.) Dorothy was the daughter of a fifteen-year-old mother and a seventeen-year-old father who broke up shortly after their marriage. She taught Sunday school now, but Hugh Rodham didn’t go to church. Dorothy kept to herself with Hugh and her kids, organizing backyard barbecues for the family, driving the kids to school. When Hillary kept getting beaten up by an older girl in the neighborhood, it was Dorothy who taught her to fight back. It was Dorothy who told smart little Hillary she would grow up to be the first woman member of the Supreme Court. (Monica’s ambition for herself was higher.) Neither Dorothy nor Hugh engaged in displays of affection the children could see, but Dorothy had an odd sense of humor. She would show up at one of Hillary’s birthday parties, many years later, dressed as a nun.
As Hillary grew into an older girl, she became a jock. She played tennis, soccer, softball, and Ping-Pong. She learned to canoe. She was a pool lifeguard. Hugh Rodham, who had once been a physical education teacher and had been a part of the navy’s Gene Tunney program, was pleased. When he heard that she misbehaved in school, he was always the one to spank her. Dorothy, meanwhile, never “gave her advice on clothes and makeup and how to attract boys.”
Not interested in boys, Hillary joined every activity in high school. She was a member of the prom committee, the student council, the cultural values committee, the pep club, the debating team, the National Honor Society, the organizations committee, the brotherhood society, the school paper, the spring musical. The school newspaper said she was cold to other students personally, called her “Sister Frigidaire,” and said she would become a nun (many years before her mother showed up at her birthday party in a nun’s habit). She was known as a “teacher’s pet” (as Bill Clinton, in high school, was known as a “brownnose”). She dated a boy briefly, but the relationship ended when she asked him to watch her pet rabbits and he let one of them get away. She punched him in the nose. (Bill Clinton should have taken note.)
Boys in school didn’t like her. She was “womanish,” they thought, not “girlish.” And she had a noticeable overbite. When her girlfriends organized ear-piercing parties, she didn’t go. She played Carry Nation in a school skit. Even her girlfriends thought she should “be a little cooler,” with all of her many activities. At her high school awards day, her mother said she was “embarrassed” by all the many trips Hillary made up to the stage.
Working-class kids, the few whom she met, disliked her on sight. During a high school soccer game, she said, “Boy it’s pretty cold” to the goalie of the opposite team.
“I wish people like you would freeze,” the inner-city girl told her.
“You don’t even know me,” Hillary said.
“I don’t have to know you to know I hate you,” the girl replied.
A Methodist minister was the first strong male influence in her life besides her tobacco-chewing father. Don Jones was just out of the seminary and drove a red 1959 Chevrolet Impala convertible. He introduced her to the work of Bob Dylan and François Truffaut. He gave her a copy of Catcher in the Rye. Don Jones drove Hillary and the other girls in his Bible class to the Mexican migrant-labor camps outside Chicago. The girls served cupcakes and sewed dolls for the workers’ kids.
He renamed the Bible class his “University of Life” and took Hillary and the other girls to hear Martin Luther King, Jr., speak. He took them to see legendary Chicago labor organizer Saul Alinsky, who was staging “fart-ins” at various companies’ headquarters. He took them to poor black neighborhoods, where he flashed around a Picasso print and asked the ghetto kids what it meant to them.
Hillary loved all of it. “She seemed to be on a quest for transcendence,” Pastor Jones said. But she was still urging her classmates to vote for Barry Goldwater. She also applied equal energy to her piano lessons, given at her teacher’s house, in rooms filled with the stuffed and mounted dogs that had been the teacher’s pets.
She went to college at Wellesley, a school for moneyed kids, one of the East Coast’s Seven Sisters, fifteen miles away from Boston. She was elected president of the Young Republicans her freshman year. Wearing demure dresses, she attended the afternoon teas. She buried herself in schoolwork, writing Pastor Jones, “The last two weeks of February were an orgy of decadent indulgence.” “An orgy of decadent indulgence” meant she was taking it easier and eating three meals a day. As a Young Republican, she was smitten with the movie star–handsome mayor of New York, John Lindsay.
She began dating a Harvard student, whom she would date for three years. It was a relationship he would later define as “romantic but platonic.” That meant, in the sexually crazed sixties, that Hillary Rodham was one of the few young women on a college campus not getting laid. (Remember the classmates who said she’d be a nun? Remember her mother attending her party in a nun’s habit?) In 1968, when those opposed to the war in Vietnam were flocking to the banners of Eugene McCarthy and Bobby Kennedy, she went to the Republican National Convention in Miami, not as a protester but as a participant.
But while she was still an active Republican, she was already reading things Republicans considered subversive. She neatly filed all of her copies of motive, a monthly publication featuring the essays of Carl Oglesby, a Marxist cofounder of Students for a Democratic Society. Besides terrorism and ritualistic witchcraft, the magazine also advocated lesbianism. Hillary amused herself at times by “playing hippie.” She wore tie-dyed clothes for a month and painted flowers on her arms.
“My mind exploded at Wellesley,” she would later say, but her radicalization began with a local campus issue. All the women at Wellesley signed a “vow,” promising to adhere to the student handbook of conduct. Among other things, this meant being in at midnight, wearing dresses
for dinner, and being subject to room checks. Hillary began a campus movement to do away with this honor system. She had buttons manufactured at her own cost and wore hers proudly: BREAK THE VOW! the button said. (Bill Clinton would have worn it.)
In her senior year, she was elected president of student government. She was now a chunky young woman with an overbite, and the target of the school newspaper for engaging in corrupt practices. “The habit of appointing friends and members of the in-group should be halted immediately in order that knowing people in power does not become a prerequisite for office holding,” the paper said. She was still having her platonic relationship with her Harvard friend, dancing sometimes to the Beatles or the Supremes, but spending endless hours in the dining hall discussing politics. She resigned from the Young Republicans and told her friends she was no longer a Republican. She spoke admiringly of Eleanor Roosevelt, a former First Lady, a social activist, a bisexual, a woman whose husband died in the arms of a longtime mistress.
Hillary felt an overwhelming rage when she heard of the murder of the Reverend Martin Luther King, Jr. Wellesley’s speaker on her commencement day was Massachusetts senator Edward Brooke, a black moderate and prowar Republican, for whom Hillary had campaigned only two years ago. As student government president, she was allowed to say a few words after Brooke’s speech. (“His speech was a defense of Richard Nixon,” Hillary said later.) “Part of the problem with empathy,” said the future First Lady, whose husband would be known for his empathy, “is that empathy doesn’t do anything. We’ve had lots of empathy; we’ve had lots of sympathy. We’re searching for more immediate, ecstatic, and penetrating modes of living.” (“Immediate, ecstatic, and penetrating” . . . a mother lode for Freudian interpreters.)
Life magazine quoted from her speech and photographed her unflatteringly in oversized glasses and tight striped pants. After the publicity, she was invited to a summer conference organized by the League of Women Voters, where she met a man who would be a great help to her and to her future husband through the years, the head of the NAACP’s Voter Education Project, Vernon Jordan. She debated taking a “spiritual journey” to India—the Beatles had just discovered the Maharishi Mahesh Yogi—but decided to go to law school at Yale instead. She immediately got in touch with the leaders of the antiwar movement there—one of them was Gregory Craig, who would one day defend her future husband against impeachment charges. Her dress at Yale was movement chic: an Afghan shearling coat, Levi’s bell-bottoms or Vietcong-style black pajama bottoms, sandals, peasant blouses, and wire-rimmed granny glasses. She wore black armbands so often, some people thought it was her sense of style.
Hillary arrived at Yale at a feverishly revolutionary moment. Black Panther leader Bobby Seale, the future barbecue-sauce impresario, was on trial for ordering the murder of another Panther. Movement rock stars were coming to town: Huey Newton, the future cocaine magnate, as well as Tom Hayden and Jane Fonda, who clenched her fist and pumped it into the air as Huey got off his plane. (Fonda and Hayden weren’t a couple yet; Fonda was there with Canadian antiwar activist and actor Donald Sutherland.) Fearing police brutality, Hillary organized a group of law students to monitor the protests and Bobby Seale’s trial for the ACLU.
Trouble, when it came, didn’t come from the cops. It came from the student protesters. Panther David Hilliard told a campus rally, “There ain’t nothin’ wrong with taking the life of a motherfucking pig.” Some students started to boo. Hilliard yelled, “Boo! Boo! Boo! Boo Ho Chi Minh! Boo the Koreans! Boo the African-Americans! Boo all the suffering blacks in this country!” The students’ boos got louder and Hilliard yelled, “You’re a goddamned fool if you think I’m going to stand up here and let a bunch of so-called pacifists, you violent motherfuckers, boo me without getting violent with you.” A foreign-exchange student started to go up onstage to say a few words, and Hilliard bloodily stomped his honky un-American ass.
Movement superstar Jerry Rubin, the future Beverly Hills real estate agent, appeared at another rally and said, “We know what work is—a dirty four-letter word. … Things should be free. … Fuck rationality; we’re irrational and irresponsible. I haven’t taken a bath in six months. … Arresting us for smoking dope is like arresting Jews for eating matzos. … Number one on the program is to kill your parents, who got us into this mess in the first place.”
After the movement superstars left town, Hillary became a member of the editorial board of the Yale Review. During her term, the review published a long editorial in defense of the Panthers, illustrated with sketches of policemen as pigs. One of the captions read “Seize the time!”—the Panthers’ call-to-arms slogan. In the summer of her first year at Yale Law, Hillary worked for the Children’s Defense Fund in Washington, assigned to work with Senator Walter Mondale’s staffers. (She met Mondale and his family, including his cute little girl, Eleanor, who would one day cause Monica Lewinsky to have a near-epileptic hissy fit when she found out that Eleanor, all grown up, was in the Oval Office with Hillary’s husband.)
At the beginning of her second year at Yale, Hillary was sitting in the library, when she saw a young man staring at her. He had a boyish, scraggly beard and long hair. He was more than a little pudgy, but he had the height for it. She thought he looked like a teddy bear. She had seen him in the cafeteria weeks before, talking loudly to a group of people about Arkansas watermelons. When Hillary saw him now, staring at her as he spoke to a male friend, she went up to him. “Look,” she said, “if you’re going to keep staring at me and I’m going to keep staring back, we should at least introduce ourselves.”
He told her about Arkansas, about the Toad Suck Daze Fair and the Hope Watermelon Festival and the Hot Springs Shriners Parade. As they got to know each other, she saw that he mostly subsisted on peanut butter sandwiches. He had a slow southern drawl, read voraciously, and made her laugh. He told outlandish stories, one about Lyndon Johnson on the Oval Office floor having sex with a girl who, at Johnson’s insistence, wore a peace symbol around her neck. “Come off it, Bill!” Hillary would say, and “Cut the crap, Clinton!” They got an apartment together and he visited her parents’ home, amused that Hugh and Dorothy forced him to sleep separately from Hillary, in another bedroom.
Hillary and Bill went to work for George McGovern in Texas. Bill was in Austin, working phones at party headquarters. Hillary was in San Antonio, registering Hispanic voters. They saw each other on the weekends. She didn’t know that during the week he was sleeping with other women—once, three in one week.
Bill made a campaign swing with McGovern and his wife in Arkansas while Hillary stayed in San Antonio. When McGovern gave a speech at a fund-raiser held in a contributor’s home, Bill bumped into his old girlfriend Dolly Kyle. They started kissing as McGovern spoke, then went outside when the candidate’s speech ended and had sex in the yard.
But Bill was also telling other women how strongly he felt about Hillary and how much he missed her, away from him down there in San Antonio. He started crying to a young woman one night about how much he missed Hillary, and the young woman began consoling him … and one thing led to another … and soon he was enjoying her on top of the big conference table, with the phones going off at campaign headquarters.
Hillary was getting deeper into feminism, and Bill encouraged and supported her. She was reading a book called The Female Eunuch by Germaine Greer, and he flipped through it one weekend when they were together in Austin. He didn’t tell Hillary that he had already met Germaine Greer in England. He had attended one of Greer’s lectures. Greer said that having sex with middle-class men was always overrated and unsatisfying. When she was finished, Bill Clinton got up and asked a question. “About the overrated orgasm,” he said to the future feminist icon, “in case you ever decide to give middle-class men another chance, can I give you my phone number?”
As she spent that weekend, and so many others, with him in Austin, the future First Lady of the United States was happy. Gone was her girlhood, gone the ter
rifying images of willards and butcher knives flashing at her, of men who forced her to the ground and got on top of her. For the first time in her life, finally, thankfully, after all these years of platonic dates, Hillary, the chubby young woman with the overbite, was in love.
There was a man making his way into her heart who would unzip himself and flash his willard … lots of times, to lots of other women—but not very much to her—through the course of her life.
[12]
Monica, Andy, and Butt-head
“It’s more than adequate,” Monica said. “It’s not, oh my God, like Andy’s was, but it’s—it’s sizable.”
“You said it was on the slender side,” Linda Tripp said.
“I was comparing it to Andy’s,” Monica said. “Andy’s is huge. Andy’s is humongous.”
Monica was telling one of the White House stewards, Bayani Nelvis, that she had smoked her first cigar the night before. Nel asked if she’d like one of the president’s Davidoffs from his private stash.
“Oh my God,” she said. “Cool!” Nelvis opened the door into the president’s private dining room . . . and there he was, standing right at the door, about to come out.
He handed some papers to Nel, asked him to take them to Leon’s office, and asked her to come in.
As soon as she was inside, she stuck her hand out and mock-introduced herself.
“Monica Lewinsky,” she said, “President Kiddo.”
He laughed. “I know your name.”
He told her he had tried to call her but had lost her phone number. Then he’d looked in the book, but he couldn’t find it.
“I even spelled Lewinsky right.”
“I’m unlisted.”
He gave her that slow, sexy smile and said, “Well, that explains it.”
American Rhapsody Page 13
