Timeless

by Lucinda Franks

  I found myself at Andrews Air Force Base deposited in a plane full of White House reporters. For the first three days of the trip none of us shared a word with Mrs. Clinton: she was kept away from us; from a distance, she looked embattled, her face puffy, her skin drained of color.

  Hillary’s press corps was a clubby group of reporters and photographers, mostly women, employed by the Washington media. When I introduced myself as a correspondent from the new Talk magazine, they gave me blank stares. How did some worker bee from a talk radio station get on board? I didn’t enlighten them; I wanted to keep a low profile.

  In Egypt, during a lively Bedouin feast of lamb tagine with prunes and apricots, Hillary and I were among the few who looked disheartened, who didn’t dance. But she never got near me, and I finally asked one of her press agents about seeing her privately. Not now, the agent warned, adding that I was not to tell anyone about an interview with her. This was mildly comforting; if there was a now, there was bound to be a later.

  I was known in New York for my journalism but not in parochial Washington. Candy Crowley, a star at CNN, befriended me anyway. When she became my pal, I relaxed enough to enjoy myself. I had never been to Africa, and when I could finally contact him, I told Bob about the towering ruins of Luxor and the fluid, rhythmic dancing of the natives, the exotic eating and riding on camels, and the odd, colorful cultural mores. Everywhere the First Lady went, not only was she not vilified, but she was adored; the people cheered wildly for “Hillaree, Hillaree.”

  This is just what she needed, I thought, to see the plethora of poverty-stricken women who worshipped her, the people she had helped by championing microcredit loans that allowed them to start small businesses. This was probably why she got out of Washington, out of a country where a good many blamed her for not asserting her militant imperative. Feminist that I was, I wondered what the First Lady of the nation was supposed to do—get on a platform and wave a placard demanding Bill’s head? I personally admired her for her dignity and restraint, for putting aside her pride for the sake of the president of the United States. Hillary was like Bob: she knew the right thing to do.

  I couldn’t say the same for a couple of the reporters on the plane who seemed irritated by my presence. I wondered what their fantasies about me were. Did they think I was a spy in disguise? Well, actually, in a way I was. Did they think I wanted to sneak in a one-on-one with Hillary? Well, actually, I did.

  One day, we got the news that Hillary was about to make her first trip back to the press bay. Everyone bustled to their seats. I saw someone’s leg come out but not quick enough, not before I had fallen flat on the floor. I managed to get up and settle myself into place before the First Lady appeared at the door. She strode confidently down the aisle, nodding, saying bright hellos, a queen dispensing acknowledgment to her subjects. Rubbing my knee, I pasted on a happy smile. When she got to me, she stopped. “Everything all right?” she asked, patting my hand. “Oh, fine!” I chirped, and she continued on. I don’t know which of us was the better actor.

  Her minions, meanwhile, kept me hanging. By the last stop, in Marrakech, they were giving me an enigmatic conspiratorial “shh” whenever I asked about this elusive interview. There must have been some reason I was there. Was it Hillary who was stalling? Did she have something to say but was reluctant to say it?

  For the next months I kept being invited to accompany the First Lady here and there. I certainly was collecting color, vital for any kind of story on her. Once, the two of us were in the back of a limousine, and she was talking away about social policy. She had put on a crisp beige suit, her hair styled to look windblown, and clearly, behind her chatter, she was thinking about something else. I wondered how she couldn’t have sensed my anxiety; it seemed so palpable to me. We were on drastically different wavelengths. Bill’s behavior seemed the furthest thing from her mind (or maybe it wasn’t), and I sensed if I brought it up now, I could blow it.

  The ring of her car phone startled us both. She took it from the mount on the window frame and spoke emphatically: “Do the plastic leg braces hurt? Oh, good. Well, I plan to come out to see him when all this is over.” When she hung up, I raised my eyebrows questioningly and she hesitated. Then she said an emphatic “Okay, I’ll tell you, but I don’t want you to write about it, because I don’t want him to be deluged by reporters.” Some time ago, she recounted, she made a speech to disabled children and their parents: “There was this little boy with big brown eyes looking up at me and he was just irresistible, so I picked him up. I couldn’t believe how heavy he was, and then I saw the metal braces on his legs. I didn’t want to put him down, though I thought I was going to do something worse and drop him. Which I didn’t. We became friends, and I paid for polyurethane braces and several leg operations. I go to visit him as often as I can.” Her voice was wavering.

  Because she was a probable Senate candidate, I was startled that she would wave off publicity that would contradict her image as cold and calculating. “I won’t have him deluged by reporters,” she repeated. There was a brilliant intensity in the eyes of this Wellesley grad who couldn’t be ruffled.

  Bob, as well as Tina, was astounded that I hadn’t yet nailed the interview. “Sounds like they’re playing with you,” Bob warned. “You’re going to lose the exclusive,” Tina weighed in. This had never happened to me in my decades of journalism. I was flying without a parachute, at the mercy of the Clintons. I didn’t even know the rules.

  Finally, at the very last minute, I pounced. Two months after her trip to North Africa, I was accompanying her to Northern Ireland. The woman had reinvented herself: svelte, clad in Oscar de la Renta, hair bobbed, a youthful bounce in her walk. After being praised in Belfast for helping bring peace to the province, however, she repaired to the plane and immediately took to her bed.

  Oh no you don’t, I thought; it’s showtime, Hillary. I took a deep breath, insisted to a factotum that this was my last chance to interview her, and then stood by her bedroom door until she came out. I could see rumpled bedclothes inside, but she greeted me graciously, pillow marks on her cheek, circles under her eyes. We sat down side by side across from her press people, and I turned on the tape recorder; because of the roar of the engines below us, no matter how they cocked their ears, they didn’t seem able to get a word of our conversation. I like to think she planned it that way, for if they had heard what she was telling me, they surely would have stopped her cold.

  We sipped tea in silence for a few minutes. Then I got into it slowly, telling her about my father’s addiction to alcohol. “How did you deal with that?” she asked. I told her I hadn’t, really, and elaborated on all the frustration, longing, and sense of failure. Then I asked her how she was dealing with her husband’s addiction.

  She paused and considered. “It makes me angry. It makes me really angry,” and I could see the anger in the set of her mouth. “Were you mad at your father?” she asked. I told her I was, my whole life. “Well, I don’t want to be angry all the time, but this was such a shock. I thought Bill was cured. We talked to so many professionals; we went to a psychiatrist.”

  She was controlled, and her sentences were simple and unadorned, so different from the lavish way she talked to her audiences. I asked her when she thought Bill’s sexual addiction began. Did she know about it when they married?

  She shook her head no and then became more animated as she started to talk about his mother. She sat up and looked at me with a disarming intensity. “She was a doozy. Did you ever see her?…”

  “Did she influence Bill?” I asked.

  “In ways you wouldn’t believe.”

  “What do you mean?” I replied.

  “He was abused. When a mother does what she does, it affects you forever … I am not going into it, but I’ll say that when this happens in children, it scars you … you keep looking in all the wrong places for the parent who abused you.”

  * * *

  Later, we talked about her marriage. “Will you
stay with him?” I asked.

  “Yes, there’s love between us, still. But how we’ll stay together, I don’t know. He’s responsible for his own life, and he’s going to have to live it the way he wants. I can’t be part of that anymore,” she said crisply. “He can live his life, and I’m going to live mine.”

  So this was how Hillary was going to deal with Bill’s betrayal. This was how she could accept it and put it all back together.

  This addictive act by him, it wasn’t about them, Bill and Hillary, but about this other thing outside them, this dysfunction that happened long ago and haunted him still, this calamity of which they were victims. She had spent all this time reasoning it out, and it had a certain validity. Using me, she was closing the Monica narrative in her own way, before she stepped out into the voyeuristic electorate and ran for the Senate. And after all, the last word belonged to her.

  But I knew she had told me more than she should have.

  As Hillary talked to me, her face had been a prism of competing feelings—anger, determination, compassion, even some native Midwestern naïveté. It had been assumed she knew about Monica long before the public did, but I found her look of bewilderment genuine.

  I saw her mind working, watched an idea form. What she really seemed to want to do was forgive Bill in front of the world. And at the same time, be forgiven herself; regain the respect she had lost when, in her humiliation, she did not leave him. She was finding a way to take them both off the victim list.

  Though she had strongly implied Bill’s childhood abuse, she had not given me concrete examples. Had the national mania about Bill’s adultery—fellatio in a bathroom near the Oval Office, the stain of his semen on Monica’s dress, all the intimate details no man, surely not the president of the United States, would want plastered over every newspaper in the world—run its course, I would have wanted to publish my whole interview with Hillary. But in the current climate, the impact of what the First Lady had said could be considerable. I was having doubts.

  I had hardly gotten off the plane in New York when I found out that Hillary’s people had called Harvey Weinstein, the owner of Talk and its parent company, Miramax, and pressured him to kill my story. Well connected in Washington and bound to be shunned by Bill’s friends over this article, to Harvey’s everlasting credit, he refused.

  I thought about the impact of what Hillary had said about Bill’s mother. She had declined to give me details. Moreover, abuse is a nonspecific concept that can refer to any number of behaviors, some more severe than others. In any event, it was not Bill’s memory; it was Hillary’s—and she wasn’t even there.

  So, for the article, I wrote up only part of the interview that she had given me on the plane and described the abusive atmosphere in the president’s childhood home and the constant conflict between his mother and his grandmother over him.

  * * *

  On August 3, 1999, while the family was vacationing in Paris, Bob walked to the news store, paid for his Herald Tribune, and then saw my name in the headlines of every paper on the shelf. He rushed back to our rented apartment with Der Spiegel and other magazines.

  “Talk is out,” he said, giving me copies of Der Spiegel, Izvestia, Oggi. “Your interview has been picked up everywhere.” He turned on the TV, and there was a newscaster interviewing Tina Brown about the cover article. Of course, though I had a multitude of interesting quotations from my many interviews with Hillary, the “abuse” paragraph, demurely buried in the middle of the article, was the one seized upon.

  “You better go home!” Bob exclaimed.

  I didn’t really want to go. I had been drawing cows with their swishing tails at a château; France was lovely and languorous, and I didn’t want to jump back into the hurricane that would now be my New York.

  “Go,” Bob repeated firmly. “Not tomorrow. Now!”

  So I did and was met at the airport by Good Morning America. For days, it was a constant round of congratulatory media interviews of all sorts—from national TV to college radio stations.

  The magazine sold a million copies. “Your article has put us on the map,” Tina said. “And it’s only the first issue.”

  But what happened next was inevitable; the media are kingmakers who have to bring down the king. Once the press got over their admiration for my coup, bloggers from all colors of the political rainbow started bashing me. Some liberals complained about my portraying the First Lady as an antifeminist, thereby damaging her chances in the upcoming race for senator from New York, and others thought I was a servant who had done her bidding.

  One prominent online magazine headlined its hatchet job “Will Tina Fire Lucinda?… Re: Franks Scandal.” And then came the deepest cut of all, from my journalistic home, The New York Times. The editorial page editor, Howell Raines, though presenting the highlights of the article almost admiringly, condemned it as “militantly laudatory and unanalytic.” All I focused on were those two derogatory adjectives. Then my well-meaning friend Gene Anderson, husband of Bob’s daughter Jenny, sent me a plaque with the Times editorial embedded in metal typeface. “Not many authors generate NY Times editorials,” Gene wrote, in his big generous scrawl.

  For days, I sat in my hot, empty apartment, certain that I had become a pariah in my profession.

  I knew that if my full interview had been published, which made Bill’s weakness for a certain kind of woman more understandable, Hillary’s words might have seemed less like a lame excuse for her husband and the article might have been more compelling. Still, I did not regret the judgment call we had made.

  In the end, Hillary’s press spokesperson confirmed the veracity of my story, and the president himself didn’t deny what Hillary had said. Even better, my family returned. The kids brought noise and hugs and long narratives about what I had missed in Paris. And Bob rescued me. “It’s all bullshit,” he said. “They’re jealous; they’re trying to undercut you. You got the only interview she’s given about Lewinsky. People like to shoot the messenger. They might take exception to what Hillary said, but you reported it—what you could report—accurately.”

  Still, the nasty blogs kept coming, and I was drawn to them like an insect to the jaws of a Venus flytrap. Finally, my husband lost patience.

  He stole my computer.

  For days, I was cut off from the e-mails of my supporters—and my tormentors. I heard that some of the Clinton people were whispering to reporters that I might have fabricated what Hillary had said. They wanted me strung up.

  The denouement to my little drama came several weeks after publication. It was late August, and I was walking through a heavy fog on the beach in Martha’s Vineyard. All of a sudden a chocolate-colored Labrador retriever bounded out from the miasma, and holding the leash was Hillary Clinton. We both stopped dead. Although I had talked well of her to the media, I had never heard from her about the article. Finally, she smiled at me.

  “Well, we’ve both been getting a lot of publicity, haven’t we?” she said pleasantly, and we both laughed. And then, following the pull of the Labrador, she was gone.

  23

  “Watch out!”

  “I saw the car, sweetheart.”

  “There was no indication of that,” he growled.

  * * *

  I love to drive, and you love it too because it allows you to let your secret autocrat out for air. I hold my tongue. I can’t snap back at you now. You are depressed, and I am alarmed. You almost never do depression, invested as you are in being calm and even-tempered. Seeing you sinking is like watching the Titanic going down. With me on deck. You are my strength, my anchor.

  I have been behind the wheel just an hour, traveling north out of the city, to Buttermilk Falls Inn—that is, if we can find it. We always do something special for our anniversary, and tomorrow, November 19, 2000, will be our twenty-third. We should be enjoying the cool fresh air, the mellow voice of Cat Stevens cradling us in our old blue Toyota, but the car just feels stuffy.

  The rare times
you are out of sorts, you don’t moon about as I do; you become churlish, cranky. You won’t seek comfort from me, for I am the only place where you can put your displaced feelings.

  I feel what you feel … as well as gnawing remorse. I set you off. First, there was the impassable mound of wet towels on the bathroom floor, which didn’t go unnoticed, and of course our nighttime battle over the temperature in the room.

  Me: I couldn’t sleep; I was too hot.

  You: No you weren’t.

  Me: Oh, were you inside my body?

  You: Unfortunately, no. But it was below sixty in here. You couldn’t have been hot.

  Me: I was hot, Bob.

  You: You weren’t hot.

  Me: Oh my God, whenever you want something to be true, it is true.

  After that, a weekly newspaper was delivered, and in it a journalist we didn’t know had called you “frail, slow and out of touch with the people.”

  “You are not frail,” I said. Screw that lousy reporter. “You’ve got a big chest and good biceps. I ought to know. And the violent crime you’ve reduced. How many people who would have been murdered ten years ago are living ’cause of you? Five hundred twenty-five, is it?

  “Five hundred thirty-six.”

  After that, things got even worse. Your new hearing aid went on the fritz. Now voices came through to you as if through a tunnel, the words blending together. Poor you, you asked me to repeat things twice, even three times, and I lost my temper and barked it out or enunciated extremely slowly as if I were a schoolteacher with a toddler. You winced and I felt like an asshole.

  When this kind of exchange would happen, I’d keep my vow never to react like that—until I didn’t keep it and the cycle would begin all over again. “You act like I’m purposely not hearing you,” you would say, and you’d be angry. “You think I like not being able to hear what people say?”

  What was wrong with me? I had learned to be patient with the deaf people in my family, but something about your hearing loss is different, more threatening. As though you were taking a step away from me.