February 3, 2008
One evening in the winter of 1998, Bill and Hillary Clinton invited a small group of friends to watch a movie at the White House. Everyone gathered outside the luxurious screening room in the East Wing, grabbed some soda and popcorn and then settled themselves for a welcome respite from weeks of headlines about the president’s involvement with Monica Lewinsky, the White House intern.
The film was a three-year-old comedy, Something to Talk About, starring Julia Roberts, Dennis Quaid and Kyra Sedgwick. It began promisingly enough, with scenes of domestic bliss in a southern town, among them the bantering and early morning rituals of Grace Bichon (Roberts), her husband Eddie (Quaid) and their young daughter Caroline. But the plot took an ominous turn when Grace and Caroline drove through town and saw Eddie kissing a beautiful blonde and walking away with her, arm in arm. Observing her mother’s fury, Caroline asked: “Is Daddy in trouble?”
“Big trouble,” said Grace. “You marry a guy whose nickname in college was Hound Dog,” said Grace’s sister Emma Rae (Sedgwick). “What did you think was going to happen?”
In the inevitable confrontation the next day, Emma Rae kneed Eddie in the groin and called him a “lying sack of shit”, while Grace told him: “You don’t know how it feels to be made a big, fat fool of.”
Grace’s revenge, from a recipe invented by her eccentric aunt Rae, was a dinner of salmon with mint mustard sauce laced with emetics.
“It’s not lethal,” explained Aunt Rae. “It will, however, make him sick as the dog that he is . . . I call it homeopathic aversion therapy . . . Sometimes a little near-death experience helps them put things in perspective.”
On cue, Eddie fell violently ill, retching and screaming in agony as Grace rushed him to the hospital.
Afterwards, in the White House family theatre, “Bill and Hillary were completely silent. We all wanted to slide under our chairs”, recalled Mary Mel French, the chief of protocol. A friend of both Clintons from Arkansas, she had been through a bruising divorce several years earlier.
“Nobody said anything as we all got up to leave. I happened to be next to Hillary when we were walking out. She slipped her arm through mine and whispered to me, ‘I’ll tell you what. We should have that concoction. You should mix it up first and give me a portion.’ We burst out laughing and couldn’t stop.”
Hillary Clinton’s ability to laugh at such a moment of peril for her marriage – and her husband’s presidency – not only signalled an awareness of her husband’s philandering but showed that “she was trying to make the best of a lot of things”, French recalled. “She knew my circumstances, and I knew some of hers.”
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http://www.timesonline.co.uk/tol/news/world/us_and_americas/us_elections/article3294457.ece
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