“MORE GOLDA THAN MAGGIE”“MORE GOLDA THAN MAGGIE”
[Hillary is] about as likeable as elective surgery. Every time she speaks, an angel shoots a cherub.
—Greg Gutfeld, cohost of Fox News’ The Five
Hillary was taking lessons on how to be more likeable.
She was doing it for Bill, not for herself.
It was all his idea.
One evening while they were having drinks with friends, he turned to Hillary and said, “Let’s ask Steven for help.”
Their old Hollywood buddy Steven Spielberg could supply Hillary with acting coaches to help her when she had to give a speech.
Hillary didn’t think she needed help.
“I get $250,000 to give a speech,” she said, according to one of her friends, “and these Hollywood jackasses are going to tell me how to do it!”
But Bill insisted.
“Your policies and talking points are solid,” he told her. “You can use Charlotte [Chelsea’s baby daughter] to emphasize how you’re all about women and children. Now the challenge is to repackage you in 2016 as a strong but loveable older woman—more Golda than Maggie.”
Hillary didn’t see the resemblance to Golda Meir or Margaret Thatcher, and she said, “I’m not going to pretend to be somebody I’m not.”
But she carried on with the likeability lessons anyway.
Partly to please Bill.
But mostly to shut him up.
She hired an assistant to run a video camera in the den of Whitehaven, her home in the fashionable Observatory Circle neighborhood of Northwest Washington, D.C. It was just the two of them, her and the camera guy, who had to sign a confidentiality agreement so he couldn’t blab to the press.
Later, after the recording session was over, she watched herself on the TV set. She sat in the dark, dressed in a blue muumuu that she’d recently purchased online at Amazon.com, and scrutinized her facial expressions, her hand gestures, the pitch of her voice, and her use of eye contact.
She told Bill she found the process tedious.
He said, “This could mean votes. Voters make decisions, even unconsciously, on how likeable a politician looks.”
But it wasn’t only the tedium that bothered her. She didn’t like the results she saw from the Whitehaven video sessions.
For comparison, she screened videos that had been recorded live by her people when she was on the road and gave one of her six-figure speeches.** From the collection of videos, she selected the ones she liked and sent them off to Steven Spielberg’s office, with a reminder that everyone involved in the project was sworn to secrecy.
Not that she had any reason to mistrust Steven. He’d always been more than generous to her. Spielberg let her use his corporate apartment in the Trump Tower on Manhattan’s Fifth Avenue when she ran for a Senate seat from New York in 2000. Hillary felt right at home in the lavish surroundings, and she crashed at Spielberg’s pied-à-terre more than twenty times. Accustomed as she was to being treated like royalty, she asked the management of Trump Tower to give her the exclusive use of one of its elevators. The management refused. She had to share an elevator with the skyscraper’s other millionaire peons.
When the Hollywood coaches sent back their critiques of Hillary’s video sessions, they noted that she looked irritated and bored.
Most times, after she glanced at the printout of their notes—she called them “notes from La-La Land”—she tossed them in the wastepaper basket.
There was one thing about the process that she thought was worthwhile: working on her facial expressions.
If she got the facial expressions right, she believed the rest would fall into place. But as she pointed out to friends, she could just as easily work on her facial expressions in front of the bathroom mirror without having some Hollywood schmuck tell her what she was doing right or wrong.
“Sometimes they’re helpful,” she told the friends, “but just as often they’re full of shit.”
The truth was, Hillary Clinton did not take kindly to criticism. Let alone constant criticism.
It made her defensive and angry.
Which was her default expression when she spoke in public.
Which was her problem to begin with.
* When the University of California at Los Angeles inquired whether Hillary would consider reducing her $300,000 fee, the answer came back from one of her aides: $300,000 is “the special university rate.”