Fairy Tale Interrupted (16 page)

“If you’re so jaded, I don’t really want you at my table. It
is
a big deal to be here,” John said to the editor. “Rosie, you can take his place at my table.”

He didn’t have to say it twice. I grabbed my purse and left my empty spot at the table to the editor, as I headed off to enjoy an evening of pure magic.

Carolyn chatted with Claire Danes, who had brought her dad as her date. I sat next to Harold Ickes, and we fell in love for the night. Fascinated that I came from the Bronx, Clinton’s former deputy chief of staff wanted to hear the whole story of how I met John and wound up sitting at the White House correspondents’ dinner. And I adored him for his political genius and for listening.

Despite all the fun I was having, the night was still work.
I had to do a fair amount of the usual troubleshooting. Even though no photos were allowed and an astounding 2,700 people were in attendance, partygoers kept coming over to our table to snap pictures of John and Carolyn. I hadn’t expected it from this crowd. After permitting a few fans to take pictures, when they kept snapping away like paparazzi, I stood up and said, “That’s enough, now. We’re all trying to enjoy the evening. Can you please respect their privacy?”

It pissed them off, and a few refused to stop, but I won in the end. Sean Penn, who sat at John’s table, seemed to appreciate my tough antiphoto stance. He took a stand of his own that night. Inside the dinner, where smoking was prohibited, Sean flouted the rules by chain-smoking. At one point, a waiter came over and said, “Sir, there’s no smoking in here.” Looking lazily at the waiter, Sean said, “Well, what are you going to do? Arrest me?” And that was the end of it. He kept smoking, which meant we all got to smoke. So I thanked him by slipping another waiter a twenty to keep bringing Sean vodka tonics, despite the fact that they were serving only wine during dinner.

Toward the end of the evening, I slipped away from the table and found a pay phone in the lobby, hoping to make the historic moment real with a crucial call.

“Dad, I met the president tonight,” I said into the phone.

If I could have chosen one person to sit next to me at that dinner, it would have been my dad. A lifelong political junkie, he thought riveting TV was a congressional debate on C-SPAN. “The son of a bitch is trying to bankrupt the country,” he’d scream at the TV.

“Oh yeah, what was he doing?” My dad laughed on the other end. “What he does best—signing autographs?”

A staunch Republican, my dad particularly disliked the Democratic president, criticizing him for his arrogance and for exploiting his celebrity status. But my father did have respect for his position as leader of our country and what it meant for me to meet him.

“Marion,” he yelled to my mom. “Can you beat this? Your daughter met the president tonight.”

I could hear the pride in his voice and wanted to give him even more of a reason to be proud: “And John asked me to sit at his table during dinner.”

“Well,” my dad said, “John has good taste.”

John called me into his office one day in the early summer of 1996, and I could tell from the look on his face that he was up to something.

“Rosie, who’s the most fascinating woman in politics?” He was working on ideas for the cover of
George
’s annual 20 Most Fascinating Women in Politics issue.

“Hillary Clinton?” I said.

“Yeah, okay. But she already said no to the cover. I’ve got another idea,” he said, looking like the cat that swallowed the canary. “I think we should dress Madonna up as my mother. Wouldn’t that be a riot? We’ll have her in the pillbox hat, sitting on a stack of books.”

“That’s hilarious,” I said, turning to get back to my desk, assuming it was just another inside joke.

“Great. Will you get your pad? I’m going to write her a note.”

“Wait, you’re serious?”

“Yeah. You thought I was joking?”

I had to give it to the guy. It took balls, and a pretty wicked sense of humor, to entertain such an irreverent idea. He picked Madonna because she was the most controversial figure in pop culture—and they had a friendship. She would acknowledge the concept and be as satiric about it as he was. John stood on a remarkably fine line between understanding the power of his family and not taking it seriously. Far from oblivious, he knew exactly what he was doing in terms of the magazine. John was able to separate his mom from the political icon Jackie Onassis. I thought the idea was cool, but I also worried about the reaction of the public, which didn’t have the same ability to make that separation. Dressing Madonna as Jackie O could be the ultimate shit storm.

“Wow. Are you ready to take the heat for this?”

“If it doesn’t bother me, why should it bother anyone else?”

“Okay, but you get what this will do, right?”

“Yes, Rosie. I totally get it. It will be fodder for every media outlet and probably most of my family.”

“If you’re in, I’m in. I think it’s great because it’s coming from you.”

As it turned out, John wasn’t the only one with a sense of humor. The day after we faxed a note to Madonna with the concept, she faxed back a message I’ll never forget.

After Madonna said no, John dropped the idea (you had to do it all the way or not at all), but it became a little secret shared only with Matt Berman. We didn’t tell anyone else about the outrageous idea—not even Carolyn, who would have killed him if he had gone through with it. She had enough scrutiny on her hands as it was.

The September cover wound up being almost as provocative: Drew Barrymore re-creating the notorious image of Marilyn Monroe singing “Happy Birthday, Mr. President” (with those words as a headline in case anyone didn’t get it). Matt had
Mario Sorrenti shoot the actress and used a new color process that at the time was very arty and innovative. The strange hues were what kept Drew from looking cheesy or campy.

As expected, the media blasted John for the cover. He was skewered for being tasteless and exploiting a historical scandal to sell magazines. I could only imagine what the press would have said if Barbra Streisand, who was initially approached to pose as Monroe but turned it down, had agreed to the cover. If John couldn’t play with political symbols, then he didn’t belong in his job. He took it all in stride. Sure, he wanted to sell magazines; however, the outrage was way out of proportion.

“If
I
don’t find it tasteless, I don’t know why anyone would,” he told the press. He would have said the same to a friend or a stranger on the street, and he managed to do exactly what I couldn’t: stand up for himself without being defensive and unemotionally evaluate the true nature of the situation.

Drew was the cap to a crazy first year at
George
that was filled with constant change and conflicting demands. Everybody was riding high from the first issue, which flew off newsstands. The media faithfully talked about our magazine and kept the ride going.
George
’s notoriety grew to the point where it became difficult to concentrate on actually putting out a magazine. All the attention was a lot to manage for the editors, for me, and especially for John. He was an editor in chief who was so much more than that. His outside obligations were an added obstacle to meeting deadlines and the everyday business of publishing.

On top of all that, John was about to make another huge life change. He and Carolyn decided to get married that same September on Cumberland Island in Georgia.

By far the hardest part of the wedding process was keeping everything under wraps—that’s what kept me up at night. For example, we couldn’t send their wedding program to a printer because the risk of someone leaking the information was too high. So one night, Carolyn came to the office after hours to print her wedding programs on a copier that was far from professional grade. After a couple of mishaps involving the heavy card stock getting stuck in various maddening spots, we had to feed the printer one excruciating page at a time.

We finally finished with the programs at 11:30 p.m. Although I hadn’t eaten since three in the afternoon, I was so tired I just wanted my bed. But once I got under the covers, panic set in because I couldn’t remember if I had double-checked the printer for overlooked programs. I could just picture a
George
editor or someone from another magazine moseying down the hallway and seeing a piece of paper in the printer, reading it, and getting the biggest scoop of the year. And it would be my fault.

The most important aspect of this wedding for John and Carolyn was that it be private.

Fueled by the adrenaline that comes with fear, I threw on some clothes, ran downstairs, and flagged the sole cab driving up Third Avenue at the desolate hour of 1:30 a.m. I took the taxi back uptown to the office, my heart pounding for the entire ride. I tore out of the cab, into the building, and past security, who knew me well because I’d been to the office so often after hours. I ran directly to the copier, looked in, and to my great relief, found absolutely nothing. To put my mind fully at ease, I checked with the guard that nobody had come in after Carolyn and I left. I went home, got back in bed, and woke up after only a few hours of sleep, right back on high alert.

As John’s assistant, I already had a long list of things that gave me insomnia: the next
George
cover getting leaked; my having to track down someone John wanted to interview for an upcoming issue; the person who would be mad at me that week for having to say, “No, I’m sorry. John can’t do that.” But during the lead-up to the wedding, I lived in a constant state of fear that I would somehow let the news slip.

I never told anybody about their plans—not my parents, not Matt, not Michele, or even Frank, with whom I shared absolutely everything. This news was too big. After Carolyn and John settled on a location and date, I didn’t even let myself think about it too often. I didn’t want that information front and center in my brain, ready to come out at the wrong time to the wrong person.

Since a big part of my job was dealing with the media, I tried to imagine what their marrying would mean to the outside world. My perspective on the situation was skewed, because John and Carolyn were so familiar to me. My instinct, when I thought about them getting married, was to wonder about normal stuff, such as whether they would stay in the same apartment or what her dress would look like. Not how their wedding would play out in the press. I just couldn’t predict the impact of the news.

Certainly people—reporters, friends, media types—wanted to know if they were getting married. I was frequently asked that question. In the last couple of years of working for John, I mastered the art of being evasive. “Well, I think. Eventually,” I’d say. “But who knows?”

I had learned such nonchalant ambiguity—not the same as lying—from John, the master of putting people off without
hurt feelings or aroused suspicions. He used that strategy often with the press, who refused to stay on point when they had a chance to ask him questions. The most frequent question (besides whether he was going to get married) was whether he planned to run for office. “I’m really happy here [at
George
],” he told
USA Today
. “I’m serving a larger purpose in bringing more people to learn about politics. . . . My horizons are clear for the next five years, and after that, I’ll sort of think about what the next horizon will be.”

When it came to the media, John never got rattled, not even when he went on
Oprah
to publicize
George
shortly after the magazine’s launch.

Sitting in the studio audience in Chicago during his appearance, I was nervous for John. Ironically, although he grew up in front of cameras, he’d never done national television, except for small segments on morning shows such as
Today
to publicize specific causes. But his being on
Oprah
was a big deal. In her introduction of him, Oprah used the word
hunk
.
He’s going to hate that,
I thought.

John came out wearing a dark suit and the audience went insane. The women jumped out of their seats and screamed as if the Beatles were about to perform. He waved to the audience and they went even crazier. “John, we got new chairs for you,” Oprah said, gushing like everyone else.
Gross,
I thought. John gave the talk-show host the same little bow that he politely offered any woman he met. His manners were always impeccable, whether he was at an employee’s birthday party or on national TV.

Despite Oprah’s adoration, she went down the track well worn by every other member of the media. After flashing a huge
shot of him on-screen, coming out of the water in Hyannis, she asked how he’d respond to the charge of being an exhibitionist considering how often he was photographed shirtless.