Bitch

by Elizabeth Wurtzel

  Barbara Harris is the senator’s wife, a throaty-voiced beauty who is starting to become what people call handsome, a successful psychologist of great grace and polish who has her own career to attend to and her own life to live, and who is simply sickened and alienated by the power-mad pursuit her husband puts himself through. Naturally, the couple grows apart, and Joe ends up in an affair with Meryl Streep, in one of the actress’ early accented roles as a Louisiana lawyer and lobbyist on Tynan’s case. The shared obsession of their pursuit of the Senate’s vote on a bill is an aphrodisiac: when they have sex, both partners seem like the Faye Dunaway character in Network, both seem to heighten their orgasmic responses with every strategic thought that comes up during coitus.

  And the situation set up in The Seduction of Joe Tynan is the paradigm for any political affair or any office romance, regardless of the specifics: nothing like working closely together to create the heat of achievement, the height of shared excitement.

  In late 1997, when Vanity Fair and other publications alleged that New York City’s hound dog of a leader, Mayor Rudolph Giuliani, had long been having an affair with his high-level, highly trusted and expeditiously promoted aide Crystine Lategano, it had the ring of truth to it that did more to confirm the veracity of this bit of gossip in public opinion than even catching the pair in flagrante delicto would have. After all—Giuliani does not seem like much of a sex machine, and a heated affair for him may well be almost the opposite of physical. No doubt what would fuel his City Hall relationship with Lategano would simply be their mutual preoccupation with the politics of the metropolis and their joint desire to conquer the world.

  Meanwhile, back at Gracie Mansion—or at a rental unit she may have moved into across the street—Donna Hanover seems a ridiculous mismatch for the bellicose, bloodthirsty, bullheaded mayor. She is so blonde and perky and pug-nosed and peachy keen, dividing her time between socialite luncheons and hanging out with Courtney Love and cooking it up on Food TV. A workaholic like Giuliani seems like a man who must be with a fellow laborer; similarly, Bruce Springsteen traded in Julianne Phillips, his beautiful, seemingly benevolent and certainly generically desirable wife, for the redheaded, rough-edged, plain but still sexy Patti Scialfa, the background singer in the E Street Band who was the only woman who could possibly be right for him: for Bruce, work and life are one and the same, and marriage to a pretty baby who makes movies with Chevy Chase is never going to be engaging and enrapturing enough.

  Men like Rudy and Bruce need women they can fuck and talk shop with: they have both—assuming the rumors about the mayor are true—basically traded in their secretaries for their wives, the adorable lovelies for the working partners. For what it’s worth, even President Clinton met Gennifer Flowers on the job, since the lobby lounge singer was then a reporter at a local TV station covering Clinton’s stint as state attorney general. It seems that the intimacy of working together might be the most bonding experience two people can have—which is also perhaps why Hillary Clinton has chosen to make her career her husband’s career.

  And then there are the extramarital affairs that are definitely of an extracurricular nature, definitely with women apart from the political hoopla, women who offer vacation from the obsession rather than a warm, loving body to share it with. These are the groupies, the girls backstage, the babes in bars, the earth mothers and sexy sisters, the comfort girls who make life on the political trail or on the road with the band a bit more bearable. And it may be good that politicians in particular get involved with these more earthy creatures—it allows them to press the flesh of the hoi polloi—but the problem is that when the relationship ends, the women have no recourse, no financial means, very little incentive not to go public if the opportunity arises. The have-not women are scandal bait for have-all men, and no one has any business judging Gennifer Flowers for selling her story to The Star or Sherry Rowlands, Dick Morris’ prostitute of choice, for doing the same. No one should dare to air their disgust when Jessica Hahn moves into the Playboy mansion, when any woman dethroned by a dangerous liaison with a man chooses to defrock and dine out on the notoriety: What else, after all, are they going to do? Who will have them—other than more men who are willing to cash in on, and in turn help the women themselves, in some marginal way, turn a small profit from this astonishing, amazing celebrity? After all, when all is said and done all these women have gained from these relationships—besides, perhaps, a broken heart or a child to raise or an abortion faced all alone—is an anecdote that’s worth somebody’s money. If the romance remained viable, the roman à clef would remain unwritten.

  Gennifer Flowers, who’d been to the big city enough to know to call herself a “shiksa” in the acknowledgments of her memoir Passion and Betrayal, wanted the world to know her side of the story. You can’t blame her for using what little public value power she had to the best of her ability. Apart from being a lounge singer, apparently not a very good one, the one bit of power accorded to her and afforded her is that she was, for twelve years, mistress to the Commander-in-Chief. So she sold and told her story, first in The Star, then in Penthouse (which gave her opportunity to display just what the President quite literally saw in and on her), and finally in her obscurely published book. Some of Flowers’ more damning, though entirely predictable, revelations included that she saw the then-governor smoke pot, and he did indeed inhale; that Bill was not very well endowed between the legs, but he made up for it in stamina and eagerness to please; that when Gennifer told Bill she’d heard rumors of Hillary’s lesbian liaisons, he shrugged it off by saying, “Honey, she’s probably eaten more pussy than I have”; that she aborted a baby by Bill; that she sometimes applied a full face of makeup to Bill; that Bill sometimes liked to be spanked. Still, with all this dirt, perhaps the most damning discovery concerns the President’s musical proclivities: “We both loved the Commodores,” Flowers admits. “ ‘I’m Easy’ and ‘Three Times a Lady’ were special favorites.”

  But the really interesting aspect of Gennifer as mistress is the juxtaposition it offers between herself and Hillary. Proper and educated vs. wild, blonde, sexy: class vs. trash. But Gennifer Flowers was not poor—she comes from a comfortable Little Rock suburb—and she isn’t stupid. And Hillary Clinton is much more the girl next door, the traditional wife, than most would think. Camille Paglia describes Flowers as “Hillary without the ice,” and in her book Flowers herself recalls being mistaken for the First Lady in a hotel sundries shop. In fact, while a woman with Hillary’s credentials ought to have been able to look at Gennifer Flowers as just some tramp, the threat that this mistress posed was probably more palpable. Hillary had a lot to lose: she had tossed everything to come live with Bill in Arkansas; Ms. Flowers, as a local yokel, had never made any substantial sacrifices for her lover. And still, though Gennifer may have had momentary fantasies of having Bill without Hill, the fact is that Flowers didn’t—and never would—stand a chance. Because she’s a mistress: she’s somebody’s chippy and nobody’s wife. With her big blonde hair—not to mention her stint as a backup vocalist for Roy Clark—Flowers’ lock on the extramarital role is a force as ordained as a Calvinist’s fate of salvation or damnation.

  The bottom line is that some women are always the mistress, other women are always the wife and others are always the groupie. Men are likewise husband material or not, but this difference is more in their control: they can choose outlaw status, they can opt for gray-flannel respectability—they can even switch back and forth between the two quite literally; but women are deemed unmarriable by others. At one time, everybody got married—even sluts settled down—because it’s what people did, but now it’s not like that, droves of those in middle age have never married or are long divorced, and strangely women seem even more split into camps based on marital status than they were before by feminism.

  Gennifer Flowers had nothing to lose and everything to gain by going public by the time Clinton ran. Her behavior in selling out her love life and privacy
isn’t dignified, but what dignity has she anyway? Women who are cast aside will do what they will and do what they must, and the rest of us are in no position to judge. The main argument against behaving like Gennifer is the dignity. But if you think about it, dignity is really a patriarchal notion—it is about being proud, about keeping a stiff upper lip, about hiding your feelings. In the aftermath of an extramarital affair, the man may want his former mistress to keep her mouth shut, and he may invoke dignity as a reason for doing so, as in: It was so undignified how Gennifer Flowers sold her story to The Star. As if the real indignity is not in the extramarital affair that he had. Silence is a good mistress.

  In a shocking pink bold-lettered endorsement on the back cover of You’ll Never Make Love in This Town Again, a book in which three Hollywood hookers-to-the-stars—and one woman who’s been around—tell all, Gloria Steinem points out, “The powerless always know the powerful better than vice-versa—which is why they’re pressured to be silent. In You’ll Never Make Love in This Town Again four women break that code and tell us what the Emperor is really like—with no clothes on.” In fairness, hookers are paid for their silence—unlike mistresses. But in Esquire, in an article about shamelessness, John Taylor scolds these call girls for their, if you will, candor—calling them out particularly on claims that they did this book in the hope of helping other young women avoid their fate, which may be so, but it is true that most of us read the book for the dirt, not for the brimstone and hellfire. Still, whatever these überwhores’ motivation, everyone should realize that none of these women have broken marriage vows or done anything wrong, their stories are their only currency because of a culture that values youth, so that a prostitute in Hollywood cannot make a living hooking beyond a certain age—but she can tell secrets anytime. The book tells the story of women who are doomed to remain nobody’s baby, the ones on the side, the supplementary babes, and it’s a grim story. If the men who were tattled on—Don Henley, Warren Beatty, Jack Nicholson, Gary Busey, Dennis Hopper—are so eager to keep these women quiet, they should take up a collection: hush money is a real concept. I bet all these women would shut up for cash.

  A few months later, John Taylor wrote a lengthy article about his own adultery and his marital collapse.

  Generally speaking, these women who get caught in the midst of political scandal don’t ever rise above it, unless it is by self-parody, like becoming a professional Jell-O wrestler or, like Jessica Hahn, moving into the Playboy mansion and getting enough plastic surgery to enter the witness protection program. Donna Rice went Christian, so she is traveling in the opposite direction from Ms. Hahn. Fawn Hall, Ollie North’s loyal steno, told Barbara Walters that she wanted to be a television interviewer, was denied backstage passes by Bruce Springsteen, finally went to LA, married Doors’ biographer Danny Sugarman, got addicted to heroin and is now writing about her junkie days. But on whole, these are women attracted to power by their own lack of it, the kind of women that in more conventional dating situations would make most men run because they give off vibes of calling sixteen times a day and stalking your ex-girlfriends and stuff like that. But powerful men, for whatever peculiar reasons, luxuriate in this neediness even if they know that should they ever let this woman down, it will be a very bad day for the family pet. One of the reasons the men in trouble (Dick Morris, Sol Wachtler) have their reputations resuscitated so readily is that the trouble that the men get into is the result of their power, whereas the trouble the women get into is the result of their powerlessness. The only thing these women usually have going is the relationship that is the cause of their sullying and their notoriety. The test case of a powerful woman being an idiot for love has not yet happened.

  On the other hand, there are the Pamela Harrimans of the world who show us how a woman can triumph over being just a mistress, or can use it to make herself powerful. But it’s hard. How it is that Pamela Harriman, a woman who even by today’s wanton standards was a complete slut, managed to become the Ambassador to France and not the Whore of Babylon is anyone’s guess. “Basically, I’m a back-room girl,” she said in an interview with reporter Michael Gross in 1992, which he made public only after her death. “I’ve always said this and I’ve always believed it. I prefer to push and shove other people. I don’t really like to be put forward myself.” At least two recent biographies have tried to make sense of the situation, and at least one possible explanation for her restored respectability may reside in her skill with a particular word beginning with “f.” It’s fund-raising, of course, and she was apparently quite good for Bill Clinton’s war chest, and who, after all, is he to judge? But of course, as to how she got to be so dexterous on the Democratic Party circuit, well, that probably comes down to class. Never mind that this is supposed to be a class-free society, everywhere on earth the highborn can behave as they wish and maintain their standing—so, sure, she had affairs with married men like Bill Paley, Edward R. Murrow and Jock Whitney—but somehow that air of breeding and blue blood made it impossible to judge her as you’d judge a two-bit slut like Paula Parkinson or Judith Exner. Even at Harvard it was like that. The girls from old Yankee families could sleep around with impunity, while the rest of us got bad reputations.

  At the same time, despite my general sympathy for downtrodden women who tell all, I would say that Paula Jones should just shut up. She has probably been given more of our attention than she deserves because she has become an avatar of all our guilt about how we don’t take these “trashy” women seriously, feminism fails them. For all the time upper-middle-class women spent in consciousness-raising groups and orgasm-improvement classes in the seventies instead of organizing pink-collar laborers into unions in rural America—and believe me, plenty of feminist leaders did do that kind of fieldwork—we are now all doing penance with Paula. But, in truth, the only person who dragged Paula Jones through the mud was she herself.

  I do find it interesting the way Paula Jones insists that this is not for the money. But if it’s not, then what is it for? I know, I know: to recover her dignity. But one has to ask if this is really a good use of our court system. In truth, the courts have the power to bestow punishment, but rarely can they offer vindication: witness the O.J. Simpson case, in which, despite a not-guilty verdict, the majority of Americans still believe he did it. It seems that we tend to assume that a defendant is guilty before the trial even begins, and not for no reason: the district attorneys are not obligated to try any cases (witness the JonBenet Ramsey situation), so they usually don’t go forward unless the evidence for prosecution is pretty strong—which is one of the reasons that when Marcia Clark says that she has won nineteen of twenty of her homicide cases, you should not see that as a sign of her courtroom brilliance: despite the impression that high-profile cases with hefty heavies for attorneys may give of the neck-and-neck race to the finish, for the most part the deck is stacked against defendants.

  Paula Jones is not filing a criminal complaint against the President, but the point still stands: people are going to think what they will, and either she walks away with some money or she doesn’t. Let’s face it, many Americans hold the jury system in questionable esteem—wondering how it is that twelve people whom you would not hire to work in your typing pool, much less have deciding matters of life and death, can be rendering a complicated verdict—so the decision of this panel of ordinary people is not likely to change anyone’s opinion.

  In the meantime, it is Paula Jones herself who is responsible for ruining her reputation, since no one knew who she was until she claimed to be the Paula mentioned in the David Brock article which appeared in The American Spectator. In fact, many of the details were botched, which shows how many women were mentioned, how little impact the report had on any one of them, how unrecognizable and random it all was. She outed herself, heaven knows why, but that’s her problem, not the court’s. If, as Ms. Jones claims, she must clear her name because her family members thought less of her when they heard about the article, I’m no
t sure how a lawsuit helps: in fact, her sister Charlotte was still telling Prime Time Live that she’s in it for the attention, so evidently with them nothing works. As for the rest of us, I think Jones’ essential trashiness is going to show through. She will still have too much hair, both on the top of her head and in the high-fluff angora sweaters she favors. (When somebody, probably Republican handler Susan Macmillan, finally convinced Ms. Jones to get a new look, her long and straightened dark hair and toucanish face combined to make her look quite a bit like Pedro Almodóvar’s star actress, and model of Mediterranean ugly beauty, Rossy de Palma.) She will still look cheap, and the elongated nose and high-gloss skin that seems desperate to take a powder will still make people say, She’s not that good-looking, why would he want her? Jones suffers by being in a situation in which none of the consequences of someone else’s abusive actions could render her a working-class heroine, a Melanie Griffith in Working Girl, a Roseanne, a Karen Silkwood or a Rosa Parks: Paula Jones’ struggles with whatever happened during and as a result of a little bit of time in a hotel room in Little Rock are not great enough to make her mere existence so admirable that she is heroic for just living to tell. Most martyrs are supposed to arrive at their heroism by accident—but like the guy who demanded the reward for inadvertently chancing upon Andrew Cunanan’s body, Paula Jones wants to be rewarded for what no one else seems to see as virtuous. So, with very little to complain about and quite a lot to irritate us with, Paula Jones would have been better off never bringing any of this up. This is not Roe v. Wade, it is not important legislation, and an unsympathetic complainant could hardly do herself any good here.