First Lady As Celebrity

0 Comments | Insight on the News, August 30, 1999 | by Suzanne Fields

We're exhausted with celebrity in politics. "Clinton fatigue" really is celebrity fatigue, and that's why Hillary stubbed her toe with her interview with glitzy new Talk magazine, sharing a cover photo with that other blonde -- the beauteous Gwyneth Paltrow.

It's vulgar packaging: Gwyneth as Barbarella, Hillary as Anna Freud.

Talk has neither taste nor savvy, though the editors did have enough smarts also to run George W. Bush on the cover in black and white, separating him from the two blondes. But Talk suffers from the George magazine disease. It mixes politics and celebrity in a way in which it's not easy to tell the difference. The editors of Talk may not know the difference.

Talk is a magazine for men and women who wear their labels to make sure the people they hang out with know they buy designer clothes. It's an odd choice for someone wanting to do an "important" major interview, since it smacks of superficial elitism and movie-star seductiveness. What woman with a brain would risk being on the cover with the sexy and elegantly sultry Gwyneth Paltrow? (No wonder Hillary is in sunglasses.)

Celebrities of stage and screen, newspapers and television, once were thrilled to be friends of the president and first lady. Bill and Hillary have reversed that. It is they who are thrilled to be friends with celluloid celebrities. That's why the president could sell out the Lincoln Bedroom. It explains why Hillary could be persuaded by Tina Brown to talk about her husband's adultery and imagine it to be good political strategy. Tina Brown, political strategist. It boggles the mind.

The new Hillary who emerged from the Talk interview is both unexpected and unpleasant. She's defensive. The costs of being first lady and second fiddle to Bill Clinton have taken their toll. The interview form used by Lucinda Franks, fashioned for a celebrity, lacks dignity, and though we long ago realized he has no understanding of dignity we thought she did.

When the interviewer softens the first lady with compliments on her looks Hillary laughs. "I never think about it as long as I'm healthy. I know I'm not Miss America." (Is she recalling Bill's backseat friend Elizabeth Ward?) And, the interviewer observes, it was Miss Arkansas who was the kind of woman Bill's mama wanted for her boy. (Meow.)

Hillary's remarks are those of a woman sitting around a kitchen table with her girlfriends, soaking up tea and sympathy and gossiping over personal affairs like a gaggle of amateur shrinks. No doubt it's difficult in the media milieu to remember that interviewer and editor are not your friends, cannot be your friends. Tina Brown has only one goal and it's to sell Talk, not Hillary.

Can anyone imagine Eleanor Roosevelt, Hillary's heroine, talking about Franklin's strong mother and how she marked him for life, driving him into the arms of Lucy Mercer? Can we picture Jackie Kennedy publicly blaming her father-in-law for Jack's bad bedding habits? Of course, those were different times with different rules.

Today taste, modesty, manners and morals are relative, not absolute, and nowhere is that more obvious than with celebrity. When the president and first lady identify with celebrities, they lose their political compass. Discretion goes flying with the wind.

Bill and Hillary, no doubt, have suffered severely as the boundaries between the personal and the public have been blurred for politicians. TV interviews are a necessity, and more-rigorous newspaper interviews sometimes can't be avoided, but they must be handled with care. No one volunteers to walk in a minefield unless there's a super payoff, which is what Hillary expected. It's not the first time she has overestimated her abilities to control circumstances.

Hillary's public image has been pampered and prodded. She was at her best on the cover of Vogue and when she traveled with her daughter in foreign countries wearing a chador or riding an elephant.

But she always has fared poorly in matters of substance. Her health-care policy was a disaster. Suspicions survive over what she did at the Rose Law Firm, her billing records for Castle Grande, her participation in Filegate, Travelgate and her extraordinary $100,000 killing in the commodities market. She thought her interview in Talk would be like something out of Vogue and it wound up like something out of the National Enquirer.

Hillary and Bill have diminished the presidency. They can blame press scrutiny, but ultimately it's their words and behavior that have degraded the White House. "People are mean," she says. "I think it's a real disservice the way we sort of strip away everybody's sense of dignity, of privacy." Particularly when we do it to ourselves.