The Ascending Star of St. Hillary

With the passing of Jacqueline Kennedy Onassis and Princess Diana and the fading of Elizabeth Taylor, the best bet for living-legend status these days is Hillary Clinton.

But which Hillary? Not the Hillary Rodham Clinton who mocked Tammy Wynette-style stand-by-your-man cookie-baking in 1992. And not the policy maven whose wonkish campaign for national health insurance collapsed in 1994. The new Hillary Clinton--Vogue conspicuously dropped the “Rodham” in its lush-and-gush cover story last month--is kinder and vaguer, more inclined to new looks than new policy crusades.

To be sure, she is a bundle of contradictions; she’s the regal first lady, but she’s also the aggrieved wife, whose don’t-touch-me body language at Yitzhak Rabin’s grave site was analyzed with Zapruder film-like thoroughness.

And in tabloid-land, too, the struggle to define her is heating up. The Jan. 5 issue of the National Enquirer blared on its cover, “Hillary Beats Up Bill: Secret Service Pulls Furious First Lady Off Prez.” Inside, the reader was told that Hillary “snapped” and hit the president “so hard she left a visible mark on his face.” Yet that same week the Globe tabloid put “Hillary’s Secret Vow” on its cover; with impressive omniscience, the tab told that Mrs. Clinton turned to Mr. Clinton and said, “I’ll fight for you to the very end.”

Yet even as she becomes a multifaceted icon, he--or as Monica Lewinsky called him, the Big He--is increasingly portrayed in the monochrome dirty brown of a mangy hound dog.

Elite media attitudes toward Bill Clinton the man have shifted dramatically in the last year. The most tectonic of those shifts came last November, when Sally Quinn, the de facto diva of the D.C. smart set, wrote a piece for the Washington Post, “Not in Their Backyard,” that effectively exiled Clinton from Georgetown society. Said Quinn of her friends and neighbors, “Even those who have to deal with him or publicly support the administration do so grudgingly.” She added: “Regardless of whether his fortunes improve, Bill Clinton has essentially lost the Washington establishment for good.”

And now comes a 15,000 word profile of the Bill-Hill marriage in the February issue of Vanity Fair. The juiciest bits of psychogossip from Gail Sheehy’s piece have been much reported: “Hillary’s addiction is Bill. He is her only rebellion, the one thing she can’t logically explain.” Indeed, the buzz is such that Sheehy is mulling over book offers, which would put her in competition with another would-be Hillary biographer, Carl Bernstein.

While Hillary is portrayed by Sheehy as talented but tormented in a “Days of Our Lives” way, Bill is simply pounded. The writer takes us back to Clinton’s very beginning, reporting on everything from his possible illegitimacy at birth to the moral swamp in which he became what he has become. Sheehy describes Hot Springs, Ark., as “a warm bath of half-truths and hypocrisy where gamblers and bookies and fugitive mobsters from New York and Chicago found a resort just right for their tastes.” And she sums up Clinton’s life with these words: “All politicians lie some of the time. But Bill Clinton has earned a reputation for prevarication surpassing even Lyndon Johnson’s and Richard Nixon’s.”

A cynic would say that the elite media feel free to clobber Clinton now that he is no longer needed to defeat a Republican at the ballot box. That same cynic would point to the mostly positive coverage of Hillary Clinton from coast to coast--”New York Giddy Over Idea of Sen. Hillary Clinton” headlined the Los Angeles Times last week--as evidence that the press sees her as the next Democratic hope.

But maybe that’s too cynical. After all, in the tabloid media, when one-half of a relationship goes up, the other half goes down. That was the story of Prince Charles and Diana, and it’s the story today of Kathie Lee Gifford, that sadder-but-wiser saint of forgiveness, and her Frank, that wayward lug of a prodigal husband.

That’s the drama-dynamic of tabloid media. But the mainstream media have been guilty of a different dynamic: not revealing the truth about liberal Democrats until after they’re safely elected and reelected. As the Clintons face their future, the time for real scrutiny is now, and the better subject is her, not him.