In Praise of Messy Lives (20 page)

In a
Vanity Fair
profile of Renée Zellweger, “the look on her face is one that a grown woman gets that lets a man know that the night is now over.” Often, the sexual overtone, the very datiness of the interview, is played up by the writer. It is fawning fandom taken to its logical extreme. There is a flirtation between the interviewer and the interviewee, a play of power, an adoration mingled with hostility that resembles nothing more than a high school courtship. Here is
Vanity Fair
’s Kevin Sessums, the consummate highbrow profile writer and provocateur, with Julia Roberts: “ ‘You’re famous because you’re a good actress. You’re infamous because of the actors you’ve f—ked,’ I challenged, trying to shock a response from her. Roberts flashed her eyes at me the way she can flash them on-screen when someone has gotten her attention. Seduction lay in her un-shockable stare; she cocked her head and waited.” One can hear what he is saying to the reader: I have gotten Julia Roberts’s attention! Seduction lay in her stare! But comments like this are often laced with a sadism—a certain resentment, perhaps, of having to sit there with an important person and record every minor dietary habit you are lucky enough to observe—that makes its way into the prose.
Take the moment Sessums says to Meg Ryan, “ ‘Cocaine may harden one’s heart, but it makes one, well, less hard in other places,’ I venture. ‘If you were intimate with him—and I assume you were—how could you not know he was snorting coke?’ ”

Because fawning laced with irony somehow seems cooler and more palatable, the paradox of writers like Kevin Sessums—who has written more than thirty celebrity profiles for
Vanity Fair
alone—emerges. The tone is knowing and flirtatious and world-weary. But what is strange is how the world-weariness meshes with naïve fascination. It is, in a way, a perfect reflection of the culture—a faux-intellectual distance masquerading as the real thing. Irony that is really adoration in a new form. The complexities of the tone make celebrity worship less demeaning, giving it a kind of chic allure it would not otherwise have. These complexities allow the intelligent, critical reader to interest herself in the exact beige of the movie star’s furniture, to read about the blush and glow without shame. There is often a stunned incredulity, tinged with sexual attraction, that seems to render the writer comparatively speechless, so that the profile is dotted with banal statements of wonder that seem out of place in otherwise competent writing, as when a
Vanity Fair
reporter quotes Madonna as saying, “I wanted to be somebody,” and then adds, “And boy is she.” That “boy is she” would not have made it into a piece about Hillary Clinton or Michael Bloomberg; its wide-eyed wonderment would not have a place in any form of journalism other than that of the celebrity profile. It’s as if the presence of Madonna had dazzled and almost drugged the writer (and the reader) into a haze of inarticulateness, a baby patter of awe.

But why are we willing to put up with it, to wade through the stock phrases, to pick up the same articles on the newsstand again
and again? Especially now when the Internet offers up any “news” the long-form profile might have once yielded? When we can consume in a few seconds the photographs or gossip on an iPhone on the subway? Why do we still read a profile in
Vanity Fair
? Because, in the end, we are not interested in Angelina Jolie; we are interested in fame: its pure, bright, disembodied effervescence. And what these articles do is strip down the particulars to give us the excitement itself. They provide us with the affect of excitement, the sound and feel of it. It is a primitive thing, this form of admiration, one that paints in fuzzy lines and speaks in hackneyed terms. True mystery doesn’t interest us; the statement “she had an aura of mystery” does. The clichés are what we crave and continue to expect. What makes glamour like lights on a marquee is the repetition of the familiar sounds of adoration, the same babble of fawning irony, the same vulnerable perfect creature we don’t really want to read about.

At some point in the course of her colorful and doomed presidential campaign, I notice that I haven’t met or encountered a single woman who likes Hillary Clinton.
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They may agree with her politics, may think that she would be an effective leader, may support her candidacy for president, but they don’t like her. Most express this unfortunate state of affairs with a resigned and mildly regretful air. “Like,” of course, is a slippery and complicated word; it shields us from the responsibilities and revelations of our preferences. It allows us to hide from our own feelings: it is as mysterious and ineffable and outside of ourselves as physical attraction or love. What can we do? Would that it were otherwise! But we just don’t
like
her. We like her husband, but we don’t like her.

We don’t know her, of course, though we know people like her. To be fair, our impression of her comes from a conglomeration of newspaper clippings and television appearances and photographs in our heads, a hologram, a fantasy, a mystical conjunction, a quirky coalescence of a million tiny experiences of our own with the news. When Bill Clinton was running for president in the early 1990s, I was in school, and everywhere there were fashionable badges and buttons:
HILLARY FOR PRESIDENT
. In those days, the outlandish, sly slogan had a certain allure: the improbable, humorous point, the flashy rhetorical gesture. And yet as soon as there is a distinct possibility that Hillary could in fact
be
president, there is a marked lack of enthusiasm surrounding the prospect.

Years ago the
New York Post
ran a column entitled “Just What Is It About a Phony like Hillary Clinton That Makes My Skin Crawl?” And the word “phony” is the key to a certain strain of animosity against Hillary. It is no longer a revelation that politicians are phonies, that the perfection and refinement and deployment of phoniness is in fact politics at its best. Vast swaths of the country are entirely conversant in the language of spin, completely at home with the constant attempt to describe the mechanism of phoniness, the creation of political character that is everywhere in the news. In fact, integral to the entertainment of the political scene is watching the aides and consultants spin, and the discussion and analysis of that spin. And so: Why should it matter, why should it make our skin crawl, that Hillary Clinton in particular is a phony? Or rather, what is it about her specific brand of phoniness that irks us?

The distrust that many express toward Hillary nearly always returns to the vexed and unresolvable question of her relation to
Bill Clinton. The central manifestation of her phoniness appears to be her marriage, which many persist in viewing as an “arrangement,” a word which began cropping up as early as the Gennifer Flowers scandal. The implication is that Hillary is so interested, so pathologically invested in politics that somewhere along the line she made a “deal” that she would tolerate her husband’s infidelities. A Republican strategist once referred to the Clintons’ marriage as a “merger” and this sense of the deal, of the business transaction, of the chilly conglomeration of powers, lingers in the public imagination. When Hillary offended a country singer and her fans by saying on
60 Minutes
, after the Gennifer Flowers incident, “I’m not sitting here, some little woman standing by my man like Tammy Wynette,” she in fact offended a much broader group by the implication that she was not tolerating her husband’s affairs just because she felt the same sort of pathetic, self-effacing love other more ordinary women feel; she was tolerating them because of their
shared political goals
.

In fact, for a brief time, it seemed that her husband’s womanizing could be a perverse gift to Hillary’s public image. As the Lewinsky scandal broke, Hillary enjoyed a brief but definite surge in popularity. She appeared on the cover of
Vogue
. She was dignified, yet hurt, a stance we seem to enjoy in our first ladies. But when she started talking about the “vast right-wing conspiracy” one morning on the
Today
show, she dipped in likeability again. She was back on message. The personal was political. This seemed a jarring and unforgivable swerve away from the story that was supposed to be about intimate and recognizable things like betrayal and pain. Was politics all this woman could think about?

In the wake of the Lewinsky scandal, there was much speculation about whether Hillary was somehow complicit in her husband’s affairs. The summer after the impeachment hearings brought emergent rumors that Hillary faked being mad at the president, that she wouldn’t hold his hand on her way to a vacation on Martha’s Vineyard as part of a deliberately staged effort to appear angry. She was pretending to be hurt because she knew it would play well with the American public, that it would humanize her. While this scenario seems wildly improbable, the fantasy itself is revealing: the idea that she may not have suffered from Clinton’s infidelities was much more disturbing than the idea that she had. A widely circulated anecdote from the sensational book
State of a Union: Inside the Complex Marriage of Bill and Hillary Clinton
, by Jerry Oppenheimer, fed into similar suspicions. It described a letter she allegedly wrote to Clinton before they were married: “I know all of your little girls are around there. If that is what this is, you will outgrow this. Remember what we’ve talked about. Remember the goals we’ve set for ourselves. You keep trying to stray from the plan we’ve put together.” The lingering sense that she might have signed on for the life that she was in fact living was, for some reason, unforgivable. Did she know that he was going to cheat on her? Did she choose to marry him anyway? The possibility that she was in a marriage whose narrative was not centrally about love, or at least monogamous love, informed the image of her as cold, inhuman, a virago, a
phony
.

Indeed, the question looms over every book about Hillary: How motivated by power and ambition is she? Precisely how detached is she from what we consider the normal human emotions
Hillary herself comments wryly on this when, in
Living History
, she writes, “Some people were eager to see me in the flesh and decide for themselves whether or not I was a normal human being.” A certain hardness, an independence, an ambition in all her endeavors, has always struck observers. Her high school yearbook predicted that Hillary Rodham would become a nun called “Sister Frigidaire.” And this idea of her as mannish, cold, clung to her. One of the Hillary books,
Her Way: The Hopes and Ambitions of Hillary Rodham Clinton
, by Jeff Gerth and Don Van Natta, Jr., includes a dark, paranoid account of the “plan” in which each of the Clintons occupies the White House for eight years. And the image of the “deal” continued to shadow the discussion long after Bill Clinton left the White House. When Hillary ran for the U.S. Senate, it seemed to many as if this too might be part of the “deal.” This prospect is often cited as part of her fakery, her sham marriage, even though this sort of deal, on more minor levels, and in more subtle ways, takes place in marriage all the time.

As a thought experiment, let us say that Hillary was in fact all the things that she is accused of being, that all of the most sinister accusations against her involving “plans” and “pacts” were true. Let us say that the idea is that she is using her marriage as a vehicle for power, that she was from the beginning attracted to Bill Clinton because she knew he would bring her closer to the center of power. Let’s say she was one of those people for whom love, erotic attachment, and all of its attendant pain was secondary to her desire to run the world. Let us say that all of what she herself calls “the brittle caricatures” of her are true. Why should unnatural ambition be so alarming in a presidential candidate? Why should the single-minded pursuit of power at the cost of all personal
relations be so unlikeable? Why shouldn’t we want Sister Frigidaire for president?

Hillary’s drive, her ambition, her hard work, her deft manipulation of power, her refusal to be vulnerable, her unwillingness to allow love to get in the way of career goals, at least in her mature years, could be seen, if anything, as a sign of strength. She is in many ways the feminist dream incarnate, the opportunity made flesh. Surely if one had said to a group of women waving picket signs in the 1970s, “One day there will be a presidential candidate as ruthless, as cold, as willing to sacrifice relationships for power as any man,” they would have been heartened. And yet, even our admiration for her undeniable achievements has a chilly aspect, an abstract, pro forma quality. If Clinton is in many ways the embodiment of certain feminist ideals, then it may be that many of us don’t like feminism in its purest form.

It is interesting to note that in spite of predictions to the contrary, Hillary has a much more comfortable relation to younger, blue-collar women, a much more effortless popularity. It is, paradoxically, the women most like her, the demographic most similar in their education and achievements, that have the most difficulty with her. This is curious. It makes one wonder whether there is an element of competitiveness to the dislike, a question beneath the surface: why her and not me? Strong, accomplished women who one would think would respect her, would identify with her, may in fact resent her. Could it be that we like the idea of strong women, but we don’t actually like strong women? If we are being entirely honest, we have to admit that there is often an intolerance on the part of powerful women toward other powerful women, a cattiness, a nastiness, that is not a part of any feminist conversation I have ever heard. It is so much easier, so
much cooler, so much more appealing, to have a Hillary for President button when Hillary is not, in fact, running for president.