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The Hillary Mystique

It’s not easy being the grown-up married to a showgirl -- he’s Marilyn Monroe, high-strung, in need of constant attention, constant stroking (ahem). It was left to Hillary, for their entire relationship, to make the money in addition to being a mom and helping Bill run. That leaves little time for, say, facials and eyebrow waxing.

Not that she was ever very interested in such princessy pursuits. Dorothy Rodham tells a story that on the day before the Hill-Bill wedding, she arrived in Arkansas and asked to see her daughter’s gown. “I never got around to buying it,” she was told, so they raced to the only department store in town that was still open and bought a dress. Hillary wasn’t interested in a diamond sparkler, either. It’s enough to make a Rules girl apoplectic -- the couple didn’t plan a honeymoon, as they didn’t want to be distracted from work.

When she arrived in Arkansas in the seventies, her intellectual-hippie aesthetic was at odds with the southern-belle tendency toward Über-grooming. That, a brainy penchant for straight talk (read as emasculating and man-hating), and the fact that she was never helpless and submissive could be a few of the sexist reasons that some people (including so-called friends, like Dick Morris) have hinted that she’s a lesbian.

Her father was a demanding and authoritarian man (“You must go to an easy school,” he told her when she brought home all A’s). Her mother valued substance and discouraged interest in clothes or makeup. When Hillary was 3, an older neighborhood girl would bully her and she’d come home crying. Her mother sent her out to defend herself; she swatted the girl and was never hit again. “Now I can play with the boys!” she told her mother.

Hillary wore Coke-bottle glasses, which she hated (she apparently changed frames as constantly as she now changes hairstyles), but she didn’t switch to contacts until the early eighties. Her lightened, sprayed, glammy talking-head looks now show that politics, like beauty, knows no pain.

It’s telling, too, to compare her appearances now with the post-Super Bowl 60 Minutes interview of six years ago. Then, in her headband and metallic turtleneck, she seemed smart, young, rumpled, and natural, insisting that she was no Tammy Wynette. “And if that’s not good enough, then heck, don’t vote for him!” she said convincingly.

In contrast, last week she had her emotional hatches battened down, as she delivered a very“on message” shift of focus to the “right-wing conspiracy” trying to bring her husband down. It was almost Stepford Wives-ian, except she was serving her shared political goals, not coffee.

This is the Hillary mystique. She has made the kind of Faustian bargain that mere mortals not so in control of their ambitions and emotions just can’t fathom.

“I think they obviously love each other, and yes, I do think they still have sex,” says one New York therapist. “They fill a need for each other, and they share goals, and they care a great deal about certain issues. And probably they both lie. It’s more along a European model of a marriage. Maybe she understands that it’s not her job to control him, that this is his problem, his sickness, and it won’t change, but at the end of the day, she’s the one he comes home to.”

Even though it would seem that infidelity is a deep insult, Bill Clinton expresses his admiration of her openly, needs her, and seems to value her work. And because Hillary sees their union as part of a larger process, perhaps she really doesn’t see herself as a long-suffering wife or victim.

“Maybe it’s a kind of wifely version of Munchausen syndrome by proxy,” my friend Sallie offers. “You know, where these women make their own kids sick so that they can get attention and look like caring mothers. Hillary knows she can’t change him, but if she allows him to womanize, she knows it will get him in trouble, and then once again she will be the savior, she will be the calm in the center of the storm and prove to be the woman he can’t live without.”

Whatever her personal motivation, Hillary is the one who keeps Bill operable. It’s a highly effective strategy for now -- lashing out at the forces of the right rather than outing her husband. But what is the toll on her of all these years of living this tricky public partnership? Turning herself into the liberal Anita Bryant is a high price to pay for someone with kumbaya in her soul.