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.
