WHY MAILER'S WIFE DUMPED BILL

...Only a handful of her former friends remember that this same willowy redhead later crashed the party of a favorite professor to meet his ex-war buddy, a famous novelist from New York, then followed him to New York, where she became his sixth wife, rechristening herself Norris Church along the way...

...Being the youngest and least distinguished members of the party, we were at first flattered to receive such attention...

...I interviewed one, now an attractive forty-ish blond, who described her meeting with the governor at a charity fund-raiser at the Arkansas Arts Center back in 1980...

...As the event wound down and the other guests were exiting the building, Clinton was left behind with only a driver and a couple of state troopers for company...

...I'd almost chalked up his bright-eyed urgency on that distant afternoon to polite flirting until I read that one of Clinton's alleged gifts to Monica Lewinsky was an antique brooch...

...Overhearing the young woman remark how dull the event had been, he immediately closed in...

...But so wide is the swath cut by Clinton through the female population of the state that even a cross-section provided by a little college 80 miles from the state capital offers a colorful and impressive variety of women...

...When Bill Clinton uttered with such conviction such an obvious mendacity as "I did not have sexual relations with that woman," it seemed as if he intended to convince not merely the public but also his friends, family, and even himself...

...He seemed particularly fascinated by the antique silver brooch pinned above her breast, commenting on it warmly several times during our conversation...

...At his pouty-faced, lip-biting best, Clinton has the remarkable ability to seem a precocious but damaged child...

...Midway through the party, after the wine had been flowing freely for a while, local musician Bill Haymes was hammering out requests from Gilchrist on the grand piano while everyone sang along...

...Very well then I contradict myself, (I am large, I contain multitudes...

...Not a mutineer walks handcuff'd to jail but I am hand- cuff'd to him and walk by his side . . . Not a cholera patient lies at the last gasp but I also lie at the last gasp . . . Whitman was also one of the first writers in America to espouse modern feminism: "And I will show of male and female that either is but the equal of the other . . ." Unfortunately, this sympathy is sometimes accompanied by a bullying insistence that eerily recalls Clinton's reputed way with a maid: It is I, you women, I make my way, I am stern, acrid, large, undissuadable, but I love you, I do not hurt you any more than is necessary for you, I pour the stuff to start sons and daughters fit for these States, I press with slow rude muscle, I brace myself effectually, I listen to no entreaties, I dare not withdraw till I deposit what has so long accumulated within me...

...Coming from the biographer of Marilyn Monroe, the barb was tipped with an extra dose of insult...

...In her now infamous Today show interview, in which she attributed her husband's problems to a massive right-wing conspiracy, Hillary claimed that Bill woke her to tell her news of the Lewinsky mess with these telling words: "You're not going to believe this...

...But as time passed, I tempered my judgment after reading that Clinton collects antique brooches, sometimes giving them to Hillary as gifts...

...But the charm is wearing thin, however much his spinners may wish otherwise...

...It's no wonder Leaves of Grass serves Clinton as a kind of sacred text...

...The "possibilities" that beguiled in his youth exhaust themselves...

...After all, the boy means well...

...He hovered over her, eyes twinkling with eager expectancy, till the small talk finally flagged and the call to mingle drew him away...

...He can lie to us and be forgiven, if not quite believed, because he seems to embody the classic American naïf, Huck Finn—a sort of down-home Noble Savage...

...His charm, as often attested, is powerful...

...Whether standing behind the presidential podium or striding the boards in a staged "town hall meeting," he can project ornery defiance or teary-eyed sincerity with grace and chameleonic swiftness...

...But as the small talk stretched out, it seemed to me that the young governor was showing an inordinate interest in my beautiful young wife...

...In the years that followed, young Bill Clinton would bed another graduate of Arkansas Tech: Liz Ward (now Elizabeth Gracen), the reigning Miss America...

...Here in Russel-lville, Ark., where she graduated from college and Paul Lake is a professor of English and creative writing at Arkansas Tech...

...Encounters such as these, I suspect, are the lens through which many Arkansans and others close to the president view the rapidly unfolding Lewinsky case...

...Bill Clinton is no Huck Finn but a faux naif, his every word and movement carefully calibrated for political advantage...

...He's just a poor fatherless orphan child having a bit of naughty fun...

...But fooling the public is only half the battle...

...Leaning into her mass of blond curls, he placed his hand on her thigh and gently caressed it, whispering that she'd have a lot more fun that night if she'd go home with him...

...Or write with such empathy about feeling others' pain...

...Friends marvel at their ability to carry on with business in the midst of scandals that would drive others to distraction...

...What poet besides Whitman could speak with such élan about waffling...

...Later, when we filed past the governor and his wife on our way out, Clinton again remarked glowingly on the fabulous brooch...

...To persevere in the face of powerful contrary evidence, Clinton must believe in his own essential innocence and the absolute righteousness of his cause...

...Simply to operate day by day, both Bill and Hillary Clinton must engage in a massive campaign of hypocrisy and self-deception...

...He begins to preface everything he says with, "You're not going to believe this...

...taught high-school art, folk still refer to her by her former name, adding her married name when occasion demands to call her simply Barbara Mailer...

...Since the president is not otherwise known for his taste in serious literature, it is worth considering why he passes out copies of the book like Gideon Bibles...

...He became the nation's president because it was the way he knew how to express himself...

...Less remarked on, though perhaps more significant than his charm, are Bill Clinton's extraordinary gifts as an actor...

...Millions now—not just friends and former chiefs of staff—sense a hidden dark side...

...This dramatic self-presentation, however, necessarily involves some artful deception, which draws in not only the public, but those closest to him, perhaps his wife most of all...

...A poetry collection, Walking Backward, is forthcoming...

...He squeezes out his effusive personality onto the canvas of the radio chat, the televised town-hall meeting, photo-op, State of the Union address, and even the rope-line grip-and-grin...

...Only a handful of people in Arkansas now remember a long-stemmed local beauty named Barbara Norris, who carried on a brief amour with young Bill Clinton in the early 1970s as he made an unsuccessful run for Congress...

...Indeed, in his worst moments, Clinton recalls not the high-spirited and likable Huck, but his huckster companions, the Duke and Dauphin...

...Still relatively new to the state, my wife and I went with a writer friend who'd wangled us one of the dozen or so invitations...

...Do I contradict myself...

...His most recent book is a novel, Among the Immortals (Story Line...

...To prevent the massive cognitive dissonance that would result from an honest self-examination, Bill and Hillary Clinton have over the years perfected the art of denying unpleasant realities...

...Barely glancing at me, the solicitous young governor turned the full force of his attention on Tina, who was modestly dressed in a white silk blouse and charcoal jacket...

...His interest in jewelry, it turns out, is yet another modus operandi...

...we are not...

...WHY NORMAN MAILER'S WIFE DUMPED BILL CLINTON She Was Prescient By Paul Lake Norman Mailer has quipped that the difference between Bill Clinton's womanizing and Jack Kennedy's is that Kennedy had better taste in women...

...This is a man who has enchanted American women with his feminism and asked men to sacrifice their ambitions on the altar of affirmative action, and yet has apparently spent most of his adult life in the highest offices of his state and nation exploiting his status to seduce women, including other men's wives...

...Since the Lewinsky scandal broke, Bill Clinton has used every trick in his well-stocked arsenal to ensure that the public doesn't believe the truth either...

...Bill Clinton has made it clear that he will preserve this fiction at whatever cost to the nation and its institutions...

...Last spring, two of my wife's students described their own youthful encounters with the Clinton id...

...But it also contained an irony unnoticed by press or public...

...And they did not come to a good end, at least in Mark Twain's America...

...Reports from Hillary's friends suggest that during this latest crisis, the First Lady has decided to believe her husband's account...

...One look at Whitman's masterpiece makes it easy to see the qualities that must have impressed him...

...It's just another M.O., on a larger scale...

...One might even say that Clinton's lifelong ambition to be president grew out of a Whit-manian ambition to be as expansive as America itself...

...In their own metaphor, they simply put the offending item "in a box...

...The old lines lose their magical effect...

...And he is right...

...Isn't this how things always end for a man who goes through life with a modus operandi...

...The president may serve out the balance of his term...

...Through his hotel window in Africa, we caught a glimpse of Clinton's inner Huck pounding on a drum and smoking a cigar to celebrate the dismissal of the Paula Jones case...

...Unsurprisingly for one who strikes such a pose, Clinton is fond of the quintessentially American faux-naif classic, Leaves of Grass, which was one of his gifts to Monica Lewinsky, as well as to the young Hillary Rodham...

...But of course this is pure illusion...

...To maintain the political viability of their myth of innocence, Bill and Hillary Clinton must continue to pose as the happily married Feminist First Couple, hiding from the public what Clinton's former chief of staff Leon Panetta called his "dark side...

...In 1985, when she had no cause to flatter Clinton, Barbara Mailer told Peter Manso, her husband's biographer, "I attach myself to people who are on the move—exciting, interesting people like Bill Clinton back in Arkansas . . . who had a terrific personality, charisma, and possibilities...

...Taller and younger than we'd expected, this Clinton was not the silver-haired eminence of today's photo-ops, but the baby-faced politician writer Paul Greenberg once dubbed the state's "boy governor...

...As my wife and I rode home to Russellville that evening, we joked about the dubious nature of his intentions...

...If Clinton tells the occasional stretcher or breaks the law now and then, we simply shake our heads and smile...

...She broke it off, she would later tell friends, when she got tired of his late-night calls to come over for some evening dalliance...

...Shortly after his comic rendition of Bruce Springsteen's "Born in the U.S.A.," my wife and I looked up to see the young governor hovering over us, positively glowing with charm...

...I happened to see Clinton in action five years later, at a party thrown by the Clintons at the Governor's Mansion for Arkansas novelist Ellen Gilchrist, to celebrate her 50th birthday and her 1984 National Book Award...