Hillary Clinton: Partner as Much as Wife

By MARGARET CARLSON NEW YORK

Friends of Hillary Clinton would have you believe she is an amalgam of Betty Crocker, Mother Teresa and Oliver Wendell Holmes. She gets up before dawn, even on weekends, and before her first cup of coffee discusses educational reform. She then hops into her fuel-efficient car with her perfectly behaved daughter for a day of good works.

! Fortunately, Hillary Clinton, the latest wife to be challenged to fit perfectly into the ill-defined role of political spouse, is more interesting than that. At her home, Christmas Eve dinner for longtime friends and family was more potluck than Bon Appetit: it consisted of chili and black beans supplemented by leftovers from an official dinner. She plays pinochle and Pictionary with such vigor that friends have to remind her they're only games. She succumbs to yuppie overdoting on her daughter, 11. "There is Chelsea standing on a chair singing Angels We Have Heard on High at the top of her voice, and Hillary runs for a camera," says a friend, Diane Blair, a political science professor at the University of Arkansas.

The former Hillary Rodham grew up in Park Ridge, a Chicago suburb, where her father owned a textile company. She earned every Girl Scout badge, pulled a wagonful of sports equipment to her job at the park every summer, was elected president of her high school class and earned so many honors that her parents recall "being slightly uncomfortable at her graduation." She organized circuses and amateur sports tournaments to raise money for migrant workers. "Mothers in the neighborhood were amazed at how they couldn't get their boys to do much, but Hillary had them all running around," says her mother.

After graduating from Wellesley, Hillary went on to Yale Law School, where she first noticed Clinton holding court in the student lounge trying to convince a group of classmates that they didn't need shots to visit Arkansas. "I remember his boasting that Arkansas has 'the biggest watermelons in the world,' " Hillary says. A few months later, she ran into him again while registering for classes. "He joined me in this long line, and we talked for an hour. When we got to the front of the line, the registrar said, 'Bill, what are you doing here? You already registered.' "

They started dating but were reluctant to get serious because Hillary wanted a big-city law practice while he ached to get back to watermelon country. But soon they were doing everything together, arguing as lead attorneys in a mock trial (they lost) and working in George McGovern's campaign in Texas (they lost again). After graduation they briefly went their separate ways -- he to Arkansas to teach and run for Congress, she to Cambridge, Mass., to begin work at the Children's Defense Fund (she is now chairwoman of its board) and then to Washington to work on the Nixon impeachment inquiry.

When that job ended in 1974, she decided to see whether she could adjust to life in flyover country. Like Doc Hollywood, she discovered small-town life was O.K.: "I liked people tapping me on the shoulder at the grocery store and saying, 'Aren't you that lady professor at the law school?' " She and Clinton got married in 1975, and Hillary kept her maiden name. But Clinton lost a bid for a second term as Governor, in part because voters resented a feminist living at the Governor's mansion yet refusing to use his name. "I gave it up," she says. "It meant more to them than it did to me."

She hasn't given up much else, demonstrating that while men put together careers, women put together lives. "I am pursuing the goals I always envisioned, perhaps with more success here," she says. Twice named one of the top 100 lawyers in the U.S. by the National Law Journal, Hillary Clinton is now a top-dollar litigator at the old-line Rose Law Firm in Little Rock, earning about three times her husband's $35,000 salary. She serves on 17 civic and corporate boards, hardly ever missing a softball game or school play.

While Hillary says she is glad she "followed her heart" to Arkansas, running an official mansion that attracts 20,000 visitors a year can be wearing. Unlike her husband, who has yet to encounter a back he doesn't want to slap, she occasionally tires of the fishbowl. Blair notes that Hillary has enormous patience, "but none for people who are incompetent or behave like fools" -- which could make life in Washington an ordeal. Already she is under a microscope, with questions about everything from her hair (blondish) to her exercise program (a stationary bike). Her humor could prove a land mine. Reporters didn't start scribbling at a recent campaign stop until a fan suggested her for co-President and she demurred, joking that she nonetheless sometimes wished "she had the constitutional power to declare war on a few people."

With her marriage being held up to the light for cracks, Hillary Clinton wonders how much of her intimate life a political spouse has to offer up. "My marriage is solid, full of love and friendship," she says, "but it's too profound to talk about glibly." In recent years, political reporters have come to think themselves as qualified to analyze a marriage as they are to sort out the deficit. But of course a marriage is infinitely more complicated. "Maybe this time the candidate and the press will get it right," Hillary says. "The public can learn enough to know whether a candidate is a decent person without having to pick you apart so much that there is nothing left at the end."

With reporting by Ann Blackman/Washington