#GRANDMOTHERSKNOWBEST#GRANDMOTHERSKNOWBEST
Don’t be humble . . . you’re not that great.
—Golda Meir
A couple of weeks after Hillary began her likeability lessons, she invited several women friends to Whitehaven.
It was a frigid day in the middle of January 2015. The clock was ticking down to the first caucuses of the presidential race—the snows of Iowa were just a year away—and yet here was Hillary greeting her friends at the door and looking like a woman who didn’t have a care in the world.
Her friends attributed her mellow mood to her surroundings. Whitehaven always put Hillary in a positive frame of mind.
Hillary had lived off the government teat for twenty-two years, starting with the day she and Bill moved into the governor’s mansion in Little Rock in 1979. But in recent years, the Clintons’ circumstances had radically changed. Thanks to their unconscionable speaking fees, gargantuan book advances, and shameless sweetheart deals, the Clintons were worth well in excess of $150 million—certainly rich enough to own a place of their own.
And what a place Whitehaven was.
The 5,152-square-foot neo-Georgian brick mansion had six bedrooms, a spacious ballroom, a dining room that could seat thirty people, and a backyard that was big enough for a tented party of several hundred union honchos, Hollywood bigfeet, Silicon Valley entrepreneurs, Wall Street machers, and well-fixed gentry liberals.
Whitehaven’s rooms were painted in Hillary’s favorite color (daffodil yellow) and hung with her favorite art (Haitian and Vietnamese). The living room featured a painting of Hillary and Chelsea wearing traditional Vietnamese conical hats made from bamboo and dried leaves.
Upstairs, Hillary had set aside a suite of rooms for Chelsea, whose lacerating temper made her more her mother’s daughter than her father’s.
Hillary had put her stamp on Whitehaven.
She bought the $2.85 million mansion out of the $8 million she was paid by Simon & Schuster for her memoir Living History, and she thought of the place as hers and hers alone.
It was her home.
Not Bill’s.
He was hardly ever there.
The Game Change authors, John Heilemann and Mark Halperin, called Whitehaven Hillary’s “dream house.”
The Hill’s White House correspondent, Amie Parnes, called it Hillary’s “fortress of solitude.”
Hillary’s friends gathered in the den and snuggled into overstuffed Rose Tarlow sofas. They inquired after Chelsea’s daughter, Charlotte Clinton Mezvinsky, who was four months old at the time. Hillary produced photos that showed her beaming with pleasure at her tiny granddaughter.
There was the usual chorus of oohs and ahhs.
Hillary said she planned to take Charlotte with her on the campaign trail as soon as the baby was old enough to travel. Charlotte would help her play the loveable grandmother card and win over women voters. It apparently never occurred to Hillary that she would be exploiting her daughter and the child. The Barbara Lee Family Foundation, which did research on women running for public office, urged female candidates to use personal experiences to improve their likeability, and Hillary already had an unofficial hashtag to burnish her image: #GrandmothersKnowBest.
When one of her friends noticed a video camera standing on a tripod in a corner of the room, she asked Hillary what it was for.
“Speech practice,” Hillary said, according to the recollection of one of the women. “My coaches tell me I’m supposed to pretend when I speak. Pretend that I actually like the audience. I’m supposed to force myself to keep a smile on my face. I’m supposed to think happy thoughts. To think of Chelsea or Charlotte or my [late] mother. But not about Bill, because even though I love him to death, he makes me tear my hair out.”
That got a laugh from the women.
Her friends often joked (though never to Hillary’s face) that the characters of Frank and Claire Underwood in Netflix’s Emmy Award–winning series House of Cards were a send-up of Bill and Hillary Clinton. Kevin Spacey, who plays the villainous Frank Underwood, might have been mouthing the Clintons’ maxim when he said, “In politics, you either eat the baby or you are the baby.”
Like the Underwoods, the Clintons were a perfectly matched pair: they were driven by vaulting ambition; they constantly schemed against their enemies, real and imagined; they were cold-blooded when it came to getting what they wanted; and according to one of Hillary’s closest friends, they hadn’t shared the same bed in years.
But unlike the fictional Frank and Claire, Bill and Hillary were hardly ever in the same place at the same time. They lived completely separate lives.
They spoke on the phone every day—sometimes a dozen or more times a day—but Hillary rarely knew where Bill was and what he was up to.
He didn’t tell her and she didn’t ask.
Because she didn’t want to know.