Long Time Leaving (58 page)

“Which is not to say that repression motivates the people who are most outraged by the president's presumed philandering. One of his most dogged prosecutors, W. Hickman Ewing, Jr., of Arkansas, was a college fraternity brother of mine, and in those days he had more fun than I did. After Joey Dee and the Starliters (remember “The Peppermint Twist”?) performed at one of our parties, Hick and a couple of other Sigma Chis formed an impromptu group, Hicky Dee and the All-Niters. Twisting till dawn. “We have not been in touch since then, we were never close, he has reportedly become more deeply religious over the years, our politics differ considerably, and the only time I have ever come anywhere near defending his current fervor was the other night after I mentioned to a New York media person that I had known him in college and the N.Y. m.p. said in a certain tone of voice, “Mm. I understand he was known to his friends as …Hick.” But I am not one who would argue that every Republican seeker of the truth about the president's affairs can be dismissed
as simply envious of the president's background in Southern womanizing.

For one thing, that term,
womanizing,
has always struck me as tendentious. There can be no womanizer without womanizees, formerly known as mantraps. It is time to discard these invidious terms.

I am willing to posit that the president has engaged in some trashy fooling around. He seems to have been more romantic about it than the Kennedys—have you ever heard of a Kennedy talking on the phone at any length to loose women, or bringing them souvenirs from Martha's Vineyard? But just as Nixon's meanness and paranoia undermined his political strengths (and Nixon without his personality would be an extraordinarily progressive Democrat by today's standards), Clinton has let down all of us who voted for him by the way he apparently behaves when his goober gets red.

The first time I ever talked to anybody who knew Clinton was during his first term as governor. “He's smart, funny, a good guy,” a reporter who had been covering him in Arkansas said. “He's bad to stay out late and chase women,” the reporter added, by no means entirely disapprovingly. (The reporter and I were out late ourselves.) Arkansans tried to warn us from the beginning that a Clinton administration tended to boil down to an astonishing exercise in the preservation of eligibility. Now that there is nothing more for him to be elected to, and he no longer entertains—surely—any hopes of undercover quasi-bachelor-type eligibility in the foreseeable future, I am tired of his personal issues. I even find myself thinking that either the presidential or the spousal role in this situation would have been handled better, somehow, by Liddy Dole.

So why is part of me, still, on his side?

The best part of the movie
Primary Colors,
Clinton's story fictionalized, is the first third or so, when Jack Stanton and his people are still young and in the running. There's a wonderful scene late at night at a black barbecue place, when Stanton and the proprietor and the character-played-by-Billy-Bob-Thornton-who-is-like-James-Carville get to drinking and talking about their mamas—get rowdy, in fact, arguing over whose mama was the most sainted. Playing the dozens in reverse—“my mama,” positively, as opposed to “yo mama,” negatively. And I appreciated Emma Thompson's portrayal of a woman who holds her own, loves her husband—with due and witty rancor—as he is, and derives credible satisfaction from something like Hillary Clinton's presumed marital lot.

The whole Kathy-Bates-as-suicidal-moral-center thing, however, is a travesty on Southern womanhood. Have you ever known a Southern woman of fiber to do away with herself?
On political principle,
yet?

And John Travolta's Stanton is a mellow mushmouth fellow with nothing of the star-quality voltage to him that all the people I know who have been around Clinton (women in particular) say he has in person.

Movies by Mike Nichols tend to lack a positive erotic charge. Anne Bancroft's Mrs. Robinson and Elizabeth Taylor in
Who's Afraid of Virginia Woolf are
scary. Jack Nicholson in
Carnal Knowledge
is a cautionary case of Don Juanism.
The Birdcage
lacks the at least semierotic fondness that makes
La Cage aux Folles
much the more winning entertainment.
The Remains of the Day
made no sense to me. Anthony Hopkins can't quite get it together to go for Emma Thompson? Why?

The closest thing to a Bill Clinton movie may be Nora Ephron's
Michael,
in which Travolta plays an overweight, messy-eating angel who is catnip to the women. Nora tells me that in directing this movie she absolutely did not have the president in mind, but she has known the Clintons for quite a while. Her college roommate was Susan Thomases, formerly a top Clinton aide. Pete Dexter wrote the original script, but Nora and her sister Delia rewrote it considerably, and Travolta's Michael is an angel whom no female would sue. The scene in which a dozen or so start dancing with him in a roadhouse, to Aretha on the jukebox singing “Chain of Fools,” is womanism in the sweetest possible light. And when the angel and the best-looking waitress whirl off to his motel room, and the next morning she emerges drowsy and happy—that must surely have struck many people, of both sexes, as the dream Southern waitress moment.

Unrealistic, no doubt. It was another Southern politico of note who shared with me, late one night, a truism of the nightlife: “You can't stay up until the barmaid goes home.” Or if you do, you're too drunk (unless you're in the band) to whirl like much of an angel.

And if you're married, of course, you ought to devote your erotic energy to phoning home. No doubt about it. Especially these days.

And yet …Breathes there a man with goober so dead that he has never, ever, been tempted to whisper deep down in his heart to Slick Willie, “You go, boy”?

One more thing. To all those commentators who have wondered aloud in the media why Clinton doesn't just
tell the truth
about his relationship with Monica Lewinsky and clear the air:

Hello?

If he didn't commit any infidelity, he has already told the truth. And if he did…

Clear the air?
“What is he going to say, “We just, uh …It didn't
mean
anything. And it wasn't right
in
the Oval Office, it was …And just once or twice, at the most. No more than a few times. And we didn't, you know, go all the way….”

The next thing he knows, he is Oscar “Wilde in the dock, only straight. Even if he didn't violate any federal laws, he is going to come off as a dog. A gentleman doesn't kiss and tell. Much less a
married
gentleman.

A Southern pro football player once told me that his wife kept asking him whether he ever carried on at all on the road. He kept denying it. She kept saying she wouldn't hold it against him, she understood the temptations that must come his way, she just wanted to know the truth, for her own peace of mind.

So, finally, he fessed up. Every once in a while …Nothing that affected his feelings for her in the least. But, okay, sometimes a woman would just throw herself at him, and, you know-She didn't know. All hell broke loose. Their marriage was over.

“Never testify,” he told me. “It breaks they heart.”

S
how me a clean breast and I'll show you a whited sepulchre. Accordingly, I was hoping that Bill Clinton might hang tough after the example of Kirby Higbe, the old Dodger pitcher, a native of South Carolina, who (according to
High Hard One,
the book he wrote with Martin Quigley) came home from golf one day to find his wife holding a letter from a woman that had been forwarded to their house by his team, the Dodgers. It was addressed to “Kirby Higbe, Brooklyn Baseball Team, Brooklyn, N.Y. Dear Kirby. I can't wait till the season starts and you come back to Cincy. You are the best I ever had.”

“Well?” demanded Mrs. Higbe.

“All I can say,” said Kirby, “is there must be some other Kirby Higbe.”

In Higbe's day, though, nobody knew about DNA. Might there have been another way for Clinton to save his dignity?

“It depends on what the meaning of the word
is
is,” he said at one point in his testimony, and all the talking heads on TV chortled.

That's because they didn't want to think about it.

There is no word in existence that anybody is justified in taking the meaning of for granted.
Is
least of all.

I used to know a man named Raiford who would respond to any assertion of fact or opinion with one of two expressions:

“Is that right?”

Or, simply, “Is?”

Modulated in various ways. For instance, you might say to Raiford, “Well, you know, it says in the Declaration of Independence, ‘We hold these truths to be self-evident; that all men are created equal; that they are endowed by their creator with certain inalienable rights; that among these are life, liberty, and the pursuit of happiness.’ ”

Raiford would allow a moment of silence to pass, to make sure you were finished good, and then he'd give a little grin-and-chuckle that was just narrowly on the good-natured side of condescension—so that you couldn't tell whether he was responding to something that was palpably untrue, or to a truism, or to something that might conceivably be true but it was the first time
he'd
heard of it—and then he would say, calmly,
perhaps
reflectively, certainly slowly: “Is thaaaat right?”

Or you might say, “Well, I got to get up from here and pack so I can catch a plane to visit my sister in Houston,” and he would blink and even sort of shake his head a little bit—as if to suggest that the notion of catching a plane was either outlandish to him or not anywhere near as impressive as he gathered you were trying to make it sound, or both— and then he would say, “Is that riiiiight?”

But if you were to make a statement whose verb was
is,
that's when Raiford was really in his element. You might say, “This is the best pie I ever tasted,” or “The square of the hypotenuse of a right triangle is equal to the sum of the squares of the other two sides,” or “Sho is hot,” and Raiford would lean back and take in what you had put forward—pausing just long enough so that you couldn't be sure whether he was really taking it in, or he was putting on a tongue-in-cheek show of having to devote some time to taking it in—and then he would respond:

“Izzzz?”

Or, “Eee-uz?”

Or, “Is. (?)”

That last variation was his best—his most irritating. It seemed for a moment to be an affirmative statement, an endorsement of what you had observed; but then, just before he quite rounded off that period (I wish there were such a punctuation mark as a semiperiod), he would double-clutch, effortlessly, and slip in that little rising intonation that
you came to realize after a moment was the bottomless question mark of either a skeptic or a moron.

Clinton has no such command of inflection. But he is
attentive
to words, as he proved when he focused in on
is.

People say, “What will be, will be.” What would be the point of that, if both of those
will be s
were the same? And if every
is
were equal, would there be such a song as “Is You Is or Is You Ain't My Baby”? Would there be such an anecdote as the one about the man who asked his friend, “Are you going to pay me that twenty dollars you owe me?” and the friend replied, “I ain't said I ain't,” and the first man replied back, “I ain't asking you is you ain't, I'm asking you ain't you is”?

Check out the verb
to be.
In the
Oxford English Dictionary
you will find that as late as the sixteenth century
is
rhymed with
kiss.
Seems a shame to have lost that connection, but the post-Renaissance pronunciation enabled Cole Porter to couple
this is
with
kisses.

In
Webster's Third
you will find, to be sure, that the first definition of
is
is “to equal in meaning: have the same connotation as (God
is
love, January
is
the first month).” But that is just definition one-a, which is followed lengthily by definitions one-b-through-j, two a-through-h, and so on. Here's one example: “to show oneself as an outstanding example of—used with main stress in spoken sentences (The doctor pleased the parents by commenting, ‘That
is
a baby’).”

Sounds like faint praise to me. Maybe a doctor has to be careful. On the other hand, maybe it's such high praise as to make all other babies within earshot wilt: “I keep delivering 'em, one after another, hand over fist, and I keep hoping to turn up an authentic one, and now, finally, here is one that I can without fear of contradiction call the sort of thing I had in mind when I first said to myself, ‘Leonard, you are going to go out into the world and deliver
babies.
’ That, there, at last,
is
a baby.”

At any rate, anybody who takes a Southern, organic approach to language knows that the proposition
“is
is
is”
is by no means always true.

It's hard to distinguish what is from what might be. How might things have gone if Bill Clinton were the sort of man who exploited the potential of language not for evasion but for affection? What if the independent counsel had discovered that Clinton had written something like the following:

Not that that would have gotten him off. But what if he had faced facts in a Song of Conjugation: