The Truth About Hillary (25 page)

As always with Hillary, it was all about her.

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Where’s Waldo?

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he hardly saw Bill anymore.

The former president dismissed gossip that he and his wife were, for all intents and purposes, leading separate lives. He insisted that they usually spent three or four nights a week together—one night at their $2.85 million Georgian man- sion off Washington’s Embassy Row, and weekends at their $1.7

million New York residence in Chappaqua.

But since they were rarely seen—and almost never photo- graphed—together, no one bought Bill’s story of togetherness. Not even Hillary.

Once, during an appearance before a gay rights group, Hillary was asked what she thought of her husband’s sexy new slimmed-down look.

“The next time you see him,” she quipped, “tell him I noticed.”
1

“He’s not here [in Washington] very often,” confessed one of her aides. “
Her
scheduler stays in contact with
his
scheduler.”
2

There was talk inside Hillary’s camp that Bill was up to his

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212 THE TRUTH ABOUT HILLARY

old tricks. He certainly had plenty of opportunity. While Hil- lary was mastering the Senate, he was on the road, traveling an average of twenty-five days a month, giving speeches at up to

$300,000 a pop and plugging his book,
My Life
. For the first time since Bill’s disastrous first term as governor of Arkansas, Hillary was too busy with her own career to play housemother to her bad-boy husband.

“It’s like that game Where’s Waldo?” Hillary said when questioned about her husband’s whereabouts. “Let’s see. It’s 11:20 a.m. on a Thursday morning. You know where he is right now? He’s in Africa.”
3

In the past, the Clintons’ peculiar relationship had been charitably described as a marriage of convenience. But now it was not even that. It was more like a marriage of
inconvenience
in which the trajectories of their lives had radically diverged.

After months of following the former president around for a story in
Vanity Fair
, Robert Sam Anson reported what many peo- ple had suspected: Bill Clinton was up to no good. Wrote Anson: “He’s . . . chatted up the openly bisexual British beauty Saf- fron Burrows at the bar of the Hudson Hotel in Manhattan (she said he was amused to learn that she once fancied Hillary); lunched with model Naomi Campbell at a mountaintop restau- rant in Austria . . . ; had a late-night encounter with former New Zealand talk-show host Charlotte Dawson in Aukland . . . ; taken in the Preakness with blonde billionaire Canadian busi- nesswoman Belinda Stronach . . . ; and, according to the
Globe
, been a reputed cause for the split of Seagram heir Matthew

Bronfman from Canadian heiress Lisa Belzberg. . . .”
4

It was not only the supermarket tabloid
Globe
that linked Bill Clinton to the Bronfman split-up; so did Nigel Dempster, the gossip columnist of the London
Daily Mail
; Blair Golson in the
New York Observer
; George Rush and Joanna Molly in the
New York Daily News
; the
New York Post;
and
Newsweek
.
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Wher e’ s Waldo?
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Bill spent as much time as he could in Los Angeles, and Hillary grew concerned that he was hanging out with the wrong people in La La Land. One of his new buddies was Jason Binn, the thirty-six-year-old publisher of such glossy upscale maga- zines as
Hamptons
and
Los Angeles Confidential
. Binn always seemed to be surrounded by a fast crowd of starlets and models, including Heidi Klum. Another pal was Jeffrey Epstein, a money manager with his own custom-fitted 727, a private island off St. Thomas, and an endless supply of Victoria Secret–grade models to go around.
6

Hillary’s aides noticed that Bill seemed to grow even more reckless after his memoir,
My Life
, became a big best seller. Thanks to his record-shattering $12 million book advance plus another $10 million in speaking fees, he was rolling in money— and hubris.

Throwing caution to the wind, he started a torrid affair with a stunning divorcée in her early forties, who lived near the Clin- tons in Chappaqua. There was nothing discreet about the way he conducted this illicit relationship; he often spent the night at his lover’s home, while his Secret Service agents waited in a car parked at the end of her driveway.
7

“It’s one thing to go out to California with his wild buddies and do stuff there,” said someone with intimate knowledge of the former president’s philandering. “But being indiscreet with a woman in Chappaqua steps over the line. That’s the place Hil- lary calls home.”
8

Though it was an open secret among reporters that Bill was sexually out of control, the mainstream media stayed clear of the story. Perhaps it was Clinton Fatigue. Perhaps it was liberal bias. Whatever it was, the spotlight had shifted away from Bill to Hillary.

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The 800-Pound Gorilla

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he looked different now—more the way she did when she was a frumpy Yale Law student than when she was a glammed-up First Lady.

She stopped wearing pastel pantsuits and adopted black as her noncolor color. Her hair, which Isabelle Goetz used to tease into a mighty blonde helmet, à la Britain’s Maggie Thatcher, hung limp around her temples. She was too intent on servicing her constituents back home and too focused on fetching coffee for her male colleagues in the Senate to take time out for such frivolous matters as personal grooming.

She put in twelve- to fourteen-hour days.
1
She trudged along the broad hallways on Capitol Hill, her low-heeled shoes echoing off the hard marble floor, a cell phone stuck in her ear, a sheaf of documents tucked under her arm. She attended one interminable committee meeting after another, stifling yawns of boredom. She was willing to take on any assignment, and won the Senate’s Golden Gavel Award for presiding over that body (usually when it was nearly empty) more than one hundred hours.
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The 800-Pound Gorilla
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She was a woman in perpetual motion. All of this activity ex- acerbated her chronic lymphedema, and the swelling in her legs, ankles, and feet grew worse, and sometimes made it painful for her to walk. According to people who visited her in her office, she looked like a zombie—baggy-eyed, gray-skinned, zoned out for lack of sleep.

Her large L-shaped suite on the fourth floor of the Russell Senate Office Building had once belonged to her predecessor, Daniel Patrick Moynihan. Now, the furniture, wallpaper, carpet- ing, and curtains all reeked of Kaki Hockersmith.

One day, Pat Moynihan dropped by for a visit. He had lost more weight and looked sickly. (He would be dead by the spring of 2003.) He glanced around his old office, and remarked wryly:

“The place looks a lot more yellow.”
3

Yellow was also the dominant color scheme at White- haven, the stately brick mansion near Washington’s Embassy Row that served as Hillary’s White House in exile. For the job of decorating Whitehaven, Hillary passed over Tacky Kaki and picked the firm of Brown-Davis Interiors, which had recently renovated the British embassy.
Architectural Digest
ranked Brown- Davis as among the top one hundred interior designers and ar- chitects in America.
4

When guests arrived at Whitehaven for one of Hillary’s fund-raisers, they stepped through a red door into a foyer with stenciled floors. There, they were greeted by a battalion of neatly dressed staffers and escorted directly outdoors to a tent in the garden, where they joined other donors and white- coated waiters. No one was allowed to wander around the house; if they had, they might have noticed that, among all the silver- framed photos, there were no recent pictures of Hillary with Bill.
5

Hillary sometimes produced back-to-back fund-raisers on

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the same night. In her first twenty-two months in office, she held forty-six fund-raisers at Whitehaven, an unheard-of pace.
6

Donors who were rich enough to pony up $25,000 were treated to private little dinners with Hillary herself. Several cou- ples were ushered into Whitehaven’s large dining room, where they were seated in yellow chairs with pink backs.
7
Hillary— usually the only married person at the table without a spouse— presided from the head of the table.

These dinners reminded some old-timers of the days back in the 1980s and early 1990s when the late Pamela Harriman held court at
her
Washington mansion. Like Pamela, Hillary turned her home into the Democratic Party’s Fund-Raising Central.

Of course, she had the perfect teacher: Bill Clinton had brought political fund-raising to an art form. The excesses per- petrated by Harold Ickes in the President’s name had led to the campaign-finance scandals of the 1996 election. But Hillary kept Ickes on as her fund-raiser-in-chief.

Despite the effort she and Ickes put into fund-raising, money was really never a problem for Hillary. Thanks to an organiza- tion called Friends of Hillary, she could easily raise all the funds she needed for her own 2006 Senate reelection campaign. Hillary and Ickes spent most of their energy raising money for
other
Democrats.

“She can give $10,000 to a candidate through her multimillion- dollar leadership political action committee, HILLPAC,” noted a leading expert on the campaign-finance laws, “but if she has a fund-raiser at her home, she can raise hundreds of thousands of dollars in one night for a Democratic candidate. No one can do that as effectively as she can. Who isn’t going to show up if Hillary Clinton invites you to her home?

“That’s what makes Hillary different from other Demo- crats,” this person continued. “And that’s the key to her strategy over the next few years. She’s putting Democrats all over America

The 800-Pound Gorilla
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in her debt, building relationships, establishing a firm control over the machinery of the state parties outside New York.”
8

By 2003, Hillary had replaced Bill Clinton as her party’s most sought-after fund-raiser.
9
And she accomplished that by imitating Bill’s three-pronged approach to raising money: Holly- wood celebrities, liberal businessmen, and female activists.
10

“She’s more of a star than the other 99 of us combined,” said Senator Mark Dayton of Minnesota, a Democratic recipient of Hillary’s generosity.
11

The fine hand of Harold Ickes could be detected behind Hillary’s money-raising activities. As Eliza Newlin Carney wrote in the
National Journal
:

“The ethical problems that earned the Clintons such no- toriety at the White House may come to dog Hillary Clinton’s massive fundraising operation, particularly as it attracts more scrutiny. As a candidate in 2000 and as a senator, Clinton has moved vast sums of money around in a complicated array of in- terlocking and sometimes controversial campaign accounts— leadership PACs, nonfederal accounts, joint committees with the Democratic Senatorial Campaign Committee. . . .

“The 2002 campaign finance law has unquestionably drained the major party committees of both cash and influence. The new power centers are now outside interest groups and individual of- ficeholders, such as [Hillary] Clinton, who can motivate low- dollar donors by virtue of their ideological appeal or their celebrity. With its vast staff budget, and campaign coffers, Clin- ton’s political organization has begun to assume a quasi-party status.”
12

Thus, Hillary emerged as the
800
-pound gorilla in her party. A Quinnipiac University poll put her ahead of the en- tire field of candidates for the 2004 Democratic presidential nomination.

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“If she even let herself be talked about seriously, she’d be the one to beat among the Democrats [in 2004] and she could raise zillions of dollars,” said Quinnipiac pollster Maurice Carroll. “I can’t figure out who in the bunch of them could beat her.”
13

Bill Clinton was eager for Hillary to throw her hat into the ring, and he used all his powers of persuasion to make his wife run for the nomination in 2004. They argued about it endlessly, but Hillary decided to pass on
that
race in the belief that a) she needed more time to establish a record, and b) George W. Bush was unbeatable as a wartime president. Instead, she decided the time had come for her to move into the second stage of her Sen- ate career.

“She spent the first two years in a learning process . . . not only the rules of the Senate, but the traditions of how things should be handled here,” said Senator John Breaux of Louisiana, a moderate Democrat. “She was very careful and more re- stricted. Now she’s moving into a second stage, being more out front, more visible and more available to articulate issues.”
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“So Hillary”

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t must have been springtime, because I remember not wearing a coat when we flew down to Washington to see Hillary.”

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The speaker was a stylish New York woman in her late fifties. A lifelong do-gooder, she had brought a group of ten Latina women activists to the nation’s capital to lobby Senator Clinton on behalf of minority children.

The women expected a sympathetic hearing. After all, Hil- lary had once chaired the left-leaning Children’s Defense Fund, and she was still on friendly terms with the organization’s mili- tant founder, Marian Wright Edelman.

When the women were ushered into the senator’s private of- fice, they found her sitting there with an aide. She looked like the old Hillary. As part of her new higher-profile strategy, she had discarded her somber black pantsuit look in favor of a brighter, more telegenic color. Judging from her chic hair-do, Isabelle Goetz, the stylist from Salon Cristophe, was back on the