Author: Ellen

Monica Lewinsky almost ended Bill Clinton’s political career — and started Hillary’s

Ellen

4/13/2015   Vox   by Dylan Matthews

Hillary stands by Bill as he denies inappropriate relations with White House intern Monica Lewinsky.

“On Wednesday morning, January 21 [1998], Bill woke me up early,” Hillary recalls in her memoir, Living History. “He sat on the edge of the bed and said, ‘There’s something in today’s papers you should know about.'”

There were news reports, Bill explained, that he’d had an affair with a former White House intern, Monica Lewinsky. This was hardly an unprecedented situation. Accusations of an affair with model and actress Gennifer Flowers nearly destroyed his 1992 presidential run. In early 1998, he was already embroiled in a sexual harassment lawsuit brought by Paula Jones, who alleged that then–Gov. Clinton exposed himself to her in 1991. But Bill assured Hillary — just as he assured most everyone around him — that his relationship with Lewinsky was innocent. He helped the intern with job-hunting, nothing more. “This was completely in character for Bill,” Hillary writes. “He said that she had misinterpreted his attention, which was something I had seen happen dozens of times before.”

The scandal and Bill’s impeachment helped spark Hillary’s interest in pursuing political office herself

By that summer, the story had unraveled. Lewinsky produced a dress with the president’s semen on it to Whitewater independent counsel Kenneth Starr, whose purview had expanded to include the affair. On August 17, Bill admitted in grand jury testimony, and on national television, to a relationship with Lewinsky. And because that contradicted his testimony about Lewinsky during the Jones lawsuit, it set the stage for his impeachment on perjury charges.

Hillary has said Bill only admitted the affair to her mere days before admitting it to the country. “I could hardly breathe,” she writes. “Gulping for air, I started crying and yelling at him, ‘What do you mean? What are you saying? Why did you lie to me?’ … I didn’t know whether our marriage could — or should — survive such a stinging betrayal.”

The marriage did ultimately survive — and that earned Hillary harsh criticism from the press, including accusations that refusing to divorce Bill was somehow a betrayal of feminism. In April 1999, Maureen Dowd wrote in her New York Times column that Hillary “was unmasked as a counterfeit feminist after she let her man step all over her.” But the public at large empathized, and her approval ratings soared.

Even more crucially, the scandal and Bill’s impeachment helped spark Hillary’s interest in pursuing political office herself. “Hillary had never previously felt the need to assert her own ‘legitimacy,’ separate from the single voice of her and Bill’s journey,” Bernstein writes in A Woman in Charge. “Now, with Bill having squandered so much of what was to have been their presidency, she felt differently.” As the Clintons’ longtime political adviser Harold Ickes put it, “This is a race for redemption,” to “permit her supporters to say there was a lot more here than anybody thought.”

 

http://www.vox.com/2015/4/13/8397311/hillary-clinton-monica-lewinsky?utm_medium=social&utm_source=facebook&utm_campaign=voxdotcom&utm_content=monday

Celebrities Are Wasting No Time to Endorse Hillary Clinton

Ellen

New York magazine   4/13/2015   By Jaime Fuller

Hillary Clinton has only been an official presidential candidate for a day, but Democratic politicians, donors, and celebrities have been rushing to signal their support for her. It’s almost as if they have known she was running for ages and had been thinking about what they would post on social media when she announced for an obscenely long stretch of time!

The most entertaining social-media endorsements of Clinton were brief, realizing that a “yaaas” speaks a thousand words.

For Margaret Cho, Nothing Is Too Private for a Punch Line

Ellen

4/10/2015   The New york Times   By

The comedian Margaret Cho, who recently began a nine-city comedy tour, enjoys a Sunday brunch in Chelsea after the first stop, in Manhattan.

“I can’t think of a thing that should be hidden,” Margaret Cho said on a blustery Sunday in early March.

It was the morning after her wildly kinetic performance at the Gramercy Theater, and she was feeling brash. “My sexuality or experiences I’ve had that amused me, I’m willing to share,” she said.

That she did. Bright-eyed and pink-cheeked, swaddled against the elements in a kaleidoscopically patterned scarf and a hat shaped like a cinnamon bun, she offered, as she does onstage, the embarrassing minutiae of her day-to-day life.

In life, as in the show, nothing — not her age (she is 46 and “I don’t get a period all the time,” she said), not her recent divorce, nor the tattoos that crawl serpentlike all over her frame — is too private, too sacred or too humiliating to be turned into a punch line.

That includes the public upbraiding she endured for what some saw as her racist impersonation of the North Korean strongman Kim Jong-un at the Golden Globes in January. “I’m not playing the race card. I’m playing the rice card,” she tweeted soon after that cameo. And she slyly taunted her young, racially mixed audience the other night, saying, “People want to tell Asian people how they feel about race because they’re too scared to tell black people.”

Ms. Cho admires fish displays in Chelsea Market.

She routinely targets people’s insecurities, including her own, dispatching them with well-timed zingers. But at the Dream Downtown hotel restaurant, Ms. Cho was unsmiling, even subdued, not at all like the cheeky persona she projects in her nine-city comedy tour, ending in July, or on “All About Sex,” her late-night show on TLC.

Yes, she’s a committed bisexual, with an aversion to oral sex. True, she’s looking for someone with whom to father a child, undeterred, it seems, by a recent miscarriage, a sad event she nonetheless saw fit to mine for rueful comedy.

“When I got pregnant, it was such a triumph,” she said. “I enjoyed being superior to everybody else.” After her loss, “I was even more superior: Now I was tragic.”

Between bites of what she guessed was chopped “chicken something,” she peeled away her wraps to show off the Solitaire, a jumpsuit she designed. “It’s my dream garment,” she said of the black twill utility onesie with no fewer than six pockets.

Ms. Cho, a repository of savvy fashion references, said the item put her in mind “of something a girl in a Virginia Slims ad would wear.” It was also a kind of armor, she suggested, against the unseemly ogling that plenty of women put up with.

“That scrutiny, that intense body shaming still exists,” she said, along with “all that talk about the things that we’re supposed to have — like a thigh gap.”

Who says a pair of shapely thighs need to be separated by a wedge of air? “My thighs are definitely meant to chafe,” said Ms. Cho, who freely admits to battling weight issues.

She refuses to be shamed, her chatter on “All About Sex” racy enough to tackle onetime taboos like polyamory, B.D.S.M. and sex toys. “Life is rather racy,” she said.

Her taste for the subversive extends to ABC’s “Fresh Off the Boat,” a dyspeptic sitcom about an Asian-American family. “All-American Girl,” her own similarly themed 1990s television comedy, famously bombed.

Not that she is bitter. “It was a different time,” said Ms. Cho, who advised the creator of “Fresh Off the Boat,” Eddie Huang, during the show’s production.

Even now, her Korean heritage remains a frequent target of her acid observations. Her mother seems unconcerned. Except, said Ms. Cho, “She doesn’t know how I can manage to talk that long.”

In the school lunches her mother fixed, “everything had eyes,” she said. The recollection seemed a prompt, propelling Ms. Cho to whip on her coat and head straight to the Chelsea Market across the street.

She scurried past the fashion boutiques and made a beeline for (what else) the fish market, artfully stocked with gleaming cuts of salmon, Cajun catfish and tiger prawns.

All that inventory was “a little surreal,” Ms. Cho said, “very Prada meets Schiaparelli.” Pointedly, she added: “Everything’s so fresh. The eyes are so clear.”

Surely, Mom would approve.

http://www.nytimes.com/2015/04/12/style/for-margaret-cho-nothing-is-too-private-for-a-punch-line.html?smid=nytnow-share&smprod=nytnow

Conservative groups attempting to kill prospective ABC show

Ellen

AP   4/9/2015   By DAVID BAUDER

NEW YORK (AP) — Conservative groups are trying to kill in the cradle a prospective ABC sitcom about a family upended when a teenage son comes out as gay because sex columnist and gay rights activist Dan Savage is involved in the production.

The Media Research Center and Family Research Council said their members have sent more than 21,000 postcards and made more than 4,000 telephone calls asking ABC to abandon the series, tentatively titled “The Real O’Neals.” ABC is not commenting on the effort, while Savage said it is misdirected.

The show, which features actress Martha Plimpton as the family matriarch, is one of 12 comedy pilots the network is considering. Generally, about half of those pilots — at most — will get the green light.

Savage, author of the “Savage Love” advice column, said the series evolved out of a meeting he had with ABC executives where aspects of his childhood that he has written about were discussed.

While elements of the pilot were inspired by his experiences growing up in Chicago — the father is a Chicago police officer — the show “has evolved throughout the development process and it wouldn’t be accurate to describe it as autobiographical,” said Savage, an executive producer of the series.

In some respects, the series development appears similar to the current ABC comedy “Fresh Off the Boat.” That show, about a Taiwanese family trying to adjust to life in the United States, was inspired by food personality Eddie Huang’s memoir about his childhood.

Savage’s very involvement angers the conservative groups. In a letter sent to Ben Sherwood, president of the Disney/ABC Television Group, MRC president L. Brent Bozell and Family Research Council President Tony Perkins cited Savage’s “radical hate speech” and “venomous anti-Christian bigotry.”

“They’re choosing him for his signature, which is religious bigotry and personal offensiveness, not because he’s gay,” Bozell said. “There are a thousand and one gay people they could have chosen.”

Savage wrote in 2000 about volunteering for Republican Gary Bauer’s presidential campaign and, suffering from the flu, licking doorknobs in the campaign office in an attempt to infect others. He also tried to give a definition involving a gay sex act to Republican Rick Santorum’s name on Google.

“A campaign for or against the show isn’t relevant at this point as the pilot isn’t even finished yet,” Savage said. “Again, the campaign … is misdirected, as the show isn’t by me — I’m not one of the writers — and it isn’t about me.”

Bozell said he hasn’t received any reply from ABC. The early campaign offers ABC an interesting test as it decides over the next six weeks which pilots get picked up: should the network avoid “The Real O’Neals” because of the resistance, will it make network executives more determined to air the show, or will executives being able to drown out the noise and make a judgment solely on its potential for success?

Even without Savage’s involvement, Bozell said his group would probably oppose the show.

“Would a show like this bother me?” he said. “Sure. It makes a political statement. Where is the market demand for this? You might even resign yourself that this is the way that it is, but when I heard it was Savage, I gasped in disbelief.”

Seth Adam, spokesman for GLAAD, said Savage should be commended for helping gay, lesbian and transgender young people comfortable with who they are.

“What’s clear is that inclusive shows are succeeding in the ratings and audiences not only accept LGBT characters but are beginning to expect LGBT characters,” he said.

 

http://bigstory.ap.org/article/76f7856b0793468f9c013bb63a45f245/conservative-groups-attempting-kill-prospective-abc-show

The World’s Top 10 Most Innovative Companies of 2015 In Media

Ellen

From the science of viral content to a magazine preserving the Middle East’s humanity, the media outlets changing how we communicate.

Fast Company

1. The Washington Post

For regaining its strength (with a little help from Jeff Bezos). When Amazon CEO Jeff Bezos purchased the Washington Post in 2013 for just $250 million, it wasn’t clear whether the tech maven could breathe new life into a 140-year-old print newspaper. But nearly two years later, The Post is thriving. The change has been largely driven by both an infusion of new talent (more than 100 new employees have been hired) and greater focus on the publication’s digital presence, including the announcement last fall that the Post’s app will come preloaded on Amazon products, and the hiring of 25 engineers to create eye-catching interactive web stories. Already the newspaper is seeing the positive effects: Just one year after Bezos’s purchase, unique monthly visitors to the Post’s website increased by 61%, setting an all-time traffic record for the paper.

2. BuzzFeed Video

For making viral video seem easy. For nearly 10 years now, BuzzFeed has set the standard for viral content, boasting user engagement that other web publications can only dream of. Now the site is taking that magic and applying it to video, where it connects to an under-30 audience better than anyone. When it launched in 2011, the BuzzFeed Video channel featured little more than video versions of its listicles, but in the last year, the channel has taken to producing side-splitting original videos with titles like If Disney Princesses Were Real (23.5 million views and counting) and Things You Do in Video Games That’d Be Creepy If You Did Them in Real Life. The results: 4.6 million subscribers and nearly 2 billion views for BuzzFeed’s YouTube channel alone.

3. Livestream.com

For putting live video streaming into the hands of the people. As tensions brewed in Ferguson, Missouri, late last summer following the death of unarmed black teenager Michael Brown, Livestream.com became an invaluable source for live coverage of the protests for those increasingly living without cable television. The site, which allows users to both create and watch livestreams, hosted a channel by Argus Streaming News, an on-the-ground, St. Louis-based live news program. Thousands tuned in to watch the tension boil over into all-out confrontation, and Livestream found itself functioning as a nationwide middleman. On a more day-to-day basis, the site functions as a platform for live streams from producers like Facebook, The New York Times, and TEDx, but the company is increasingly positioning itself to become the go-to platform for enterprising news hounds working in an increasingly cableless world. As a result, the company has added 67 new jobs since 2010, brought in $25.1 million in revenue in 2013, and continues to launch innovative features like live broadcasting for GoPros.

4. The Business of Fashion

For meaning business when it comes to fashion. Online fashion coverage is mostly done in photos—pretty Instagram feeds, and slide shows on Refinery29. But The Business of Fashion is telling a deeper story; it’s a news website dedicated to the less exciting, but all-important numbers side of the fashion industry. Founded by Canadian-British fashion expert Imran Amed, the site pays as much attention to Alexander Wang’s Spring/Summer collection as it does to Gucci’s years-long struggle to raise its stock prices. And the fashion world is tuning in with big names like Tory Burch and Oscar de la Renta chief executive Alex Bolen publicly citing Amed’s site as a power player in fashion industry news. In response, investors put $2.1 million into the website in 2013, allowing Amed to recently launch BoF Careers, a jobs site for those looking to break into the ever-inclusive (and highly profitable) fashion industry.

5. Public Radio Exchange

For breathing life back into radio. As Serial blossomed from a podcast into a cultural sensation last fall, radio’s future seemed to be fully defined: Although fewer Americans own an actual radio, audio programming continues to be an important part of American storytelling. That’s why, since 2003, the nonprofit Public Radio Exchange has positioned itself as a key player in the online distribution of public radio programs, curating and distributing tens of thousands of high-quality indie broadcasts to listeners throughout the U.S. In 2014, PRX celebrated its biggest coup to date when This American Life, one of the most popular public radio programs of all time, ended its 17-year relationship with Public Radio International to give distribution rights to PRX, whose business model allows producers to distribute their shows on the web on their own terms and provides a great platform for creative minds in public radio to share their work with a public increasingly interested in great storytelling.

6. Digiday

For proving that virality is a formula and not a passing fad. Digiday is to digital advertising and media what AdWeek is to television, magazines, and other traditional communication. The site has become an important resource and authority in the world of digital media, where what works and what doesn’t isn’t always clear. This includes exploring sometimes troubling new trends like Facebook’s position as the main driver of traffic to media websites, or the emergence of Snapchat as a favorite of Madison Avenue’s old guard. The publisher and platform also regularly hosts summits on the future of digital advertising for companies eager to compete on the web, bringing together innovators like Zappos and Google to share their views on the ever-changing world of web marketing.

7. Medium

For making blogging beautiful again. Ev Williams has mastered the art of blogging not once, but twice. His first popular platform, Blogger, was acquired by Google in 2003, and after a brief layover in the land of Twitter, Williams returned to the world of blogging in late 2012, creating the breathtakingly elegant Medium. The site, which functions as both a platform and publisher, democratizes online authorship, allowing users to publish their own work and share it seamlessly while Medium’s staff develops great content on their site and a series of web magazine spinoffs. The platform has become a hit among the creative crowd, earning a 2014 Webby Award for Best User Experience and Best Visual Design, and two American Society of Magazine Editors (the Oscars of magazines) nominations for its magazine Matter, in the categories of public interest and feature photography.

8. The Guardian

For letting their readers have a hand in their redesign. While most of the Guardian’s positive press in the last two years has been based on its Pulitzer Prize-winning work with NSA whistleblower Edward Snowden, more subtle and amazing changes have taken effect on the publication’s website. Over the course of nine months and with the help of 40,000 user comments, the British paper has revamped its U.S.site, carefully highlighting stories that appeal more to its overseas readerships and upping the site’s loading speeds across all devices to a new record-setting standard. All these changes further enhance the publication’s already excellent coverage, up-to-the-minute live blogs, and wonderful visually driven stories (like last year’s Techspolitation: A Graphic Novel). And the publication’s ever-growing U.S. audience is responding in kind, driving 40 percent readership growth year over year.

9. Gimlet Media

For setting the standard for great podcast content. Podcasting has undergone an explosion of quality and visibility in the past year, and newcomer Gimlet Media is neither the largest nor best-known producer of that content—but it has emerged as the podcast revolution’s spokesman. That’s largely due to its origins: Alex Blumberg (formerly of This American Life and Planet Money) launched a podcast, called Startup, to chronicle his efforts to launch his own podcasting network (which eventually became Gimlet). It became some of the most insightful, human business reporting of 2014. In the process, listeners also heard Blumberg and his eventual cofounder Matt Lieber (formerly of MTV and WNYC) raise $1.5 million in funding, $200,000 of which came from a crowdfunding campaign in record time. It soon launched a second podcast, Reply All, which is about the Internet, and will continue setting the bar for the kind of quality, highly produced narrative podcasts that are coming to define the medium.

10. Brownbook

For putting the modern Middle East in sharp perspective. News coverage of the Middle East is clouded by warfare, intolerance, and seemingly endless tragedy, which makes the U.K’s Brownbook critically important. This bimonthly magazine with a visually driven website covers the Middle East and North Africa, and selects inspiring stories (and breathtaking photography) on subjects like Niger’s Wodaabe tribe—who consider themselves the most beautiful people on the planet—and the well-dressed farmers of Iran’s Golestan region. These subjects may seem trivial, but at a time when the region’s humanity seems most at stake, Brownbook reminds readers that at the eye of the storm there is still happiness, creativity and, above all, an unshakable resilience.

http://www.fastcompany.com/3041669/most-innovative-companies-2015/the-worlds-top-10-most-innovative-companies-of-2015-in-media#9_Gimlet_Media

Eddie Huang Is Still Angry His ABC Sitcom Is an ABC Sitcom

Ellen

Vulture   4/8   By E. Alex Jung

After last night’s episode of Fresh Off the Boat aired, Eddie Huang, the restaurateur whose life and book “inspired” the ABC sitcom, sounded off against the show on Twitter. He said he didn’t watch the show, and that after the pilot (which he was ambivalent about), it veered “so far from the truth,” he didn’t recognize his own life. He sees the ABC show as a watered-down, anemic version of his raw memoir. It’s a tempting argument: Who better to judge the authenticity of this show than the person it’s supposedly based on?

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Photo: Frederick M. Brown/Getty Images

After last night’s episode of Fresh Off the Boat aired, Eddie Huang, the restaurateur whose life and book “inspired” the ABC sitcom, sounded off against the show on Twitter. He said he didn’t watch the show, and that after the pilot (which he was ambivalent about), it veered “so far from the truth,” he didn’t recognize his own life. He sees the ABC show as a watered-down, anemic version of his raw memoir. It’s a tempting argument: Who better to judge the authenticity of this show than the person it’s supposedly based on?

Throughout his career, Huang has been concerned with the idea of authenticity. Remember his conversation with Francis Lam about appropriation in cooking? Or the time he slammed Marcus Samuelsson’s Harlem restaurant Red Rooster? The ABC show is yet another instance of misappropriation — only this time, it’s a highly personal one. By scrubbing away the violence of his upbringing, ABC made his life unreal.

Indeed, few of us can imagine what it would be like to see our lives adapted to screen, but where Huang missteps is how he conflates the cannibalization of his personal life with a broader critique of the show. The tweet where he says, “I don’t think it is helping us to perpetuate an artificial representation of Asian American lives and we should address it” is telling because it suggests that there is something authentic to represent. Yes, Fresh Off the Boat is glossy and artificial, but so is every other network sitcom. This is not a problem of content so much as a problem of the medium: If you have a show on ABC, it’s going to be an ABC show.

But the fact is, we should expect more. In a New York Times Magazine profile on Huang, Wesley Yang begins by asking him, “What did you expect?” It’s a practical question, but also a jaded one. Huang’s fiery idealism dismisses existing structures and forces the question: How do we make it better, more real, more “true”? The lives of Asian-American immigrants are often marked by struggle, and the point is that we should be seeing more of that on television, not less. Yes, even on broadcast networks.

 

http://www.vulture.com/2015/04/eddie-huang-fresh-off-the-boat-twitter.html?mid=facebook_nymag

ABC Trademarks Dan Savage Comedy Series, ‘The Real O’Neals’

Ellen

Stitch Kingdom   4/8/2015

In a move that should bode well for the series currently in development, ABC and ABC Studios have applied for a trademark for ‘The Real O’Neals,’ a half-hour single-camera comedy that’s being executive produced by activist Dan Savage, creator of the ‘It Gets Better’ project. The series was formerly known under the working title of ‘Family of the Year.’ The official description for the series pilot is as follows:

Everyone admires the O’Neal Family. Eileen O’Neal (Martha Plimpton) is the quintessential wife and mother. She is always impeccably dressed, runs an idyllic household and spearheads church events with ease and flair.  Her husband, Pat O’Neal (Jay R. Ferguson) is a local cop and hero in their Chicago community.  Though he doesn’t quite have Eileen’s passion for perfection, he tries his best to keep her happy.  Each of the O’Neal children excels in their own way.  The eldest, 17-year-old Jimmy (Matthew Shively), is a handsome varsity wrestler and 14-year-old Shannon (Bebe Wood) is known for her charity work and ceaseless fundraising efforts.  And then there’s 16-year-old Kenny who is clearly Mom’s favorite, even though he doesn’t have the athleticism or altruism of his siblings.  (Let’s just say that neither of them will watch The Bachelor with her every week!)

As the picture perfect O’Neal family prepares for Eileen’s highly anticipated annual church fundraiser, a blemish appears on the façade of perfection when Kenny’s girlfriend, Mimi, tries to convince him they should have sex.  This privately awkward moment immediately becomes public when Kenny tries to flush Mimi’s condoms down the toilet and accidentally floods the house while Father Phil and women from the church are making baskets for bingo night.  Eileen is horrified and embarrassed.

The increasing pressure from Mimi, and a very unorthodox sex talk orchestrated by his father, forces Kenny to face the fact that he’s gay and he simply can’t keep it to himself any longer.  Just before the church bingo game begins, he finally finds the courage to tell his family the truth.  But before Kenny can share his news, his dad shares a confession of his own:  he and Eileen are secretly in therapy and contemplating divorce.  Desperate to get his kids to open up for the first time, he pushes them to share as well.  Jimmy reluctantly admits he’s anorexic.  Then Shannon reveals she’s been stealing from her charitable collections to buy herself a car. And Kenny finally tells his family that he’s gay.

This contagious bout of confessions shatters Eileen’s myth of their perfect family.  It’s clear that it will take time for her to adjust, but instead of destroying her family, it’s actually the beginning of a new, messier, family where everyone stops pretending to be perfect and actually starts being real.

Written by David Windsor and Casey Johnson (Galavant) and produced by best-selling author Dan Savage (It Gets Better), Stacy Traub (Trophy Wife, Glee), Brian Pines (Hypomania Content), Lorenzo di Bonaventura and Dan McDermott (DiBonaventura Pictures Television).  Todd Holland (Malcolm in the Middle) also produces and directs.

The pilot also stars Noah Galvin and Mary Hollis Inboden.

 

http://www.stitchkingdom.com/disney-abc-trademarks-dan-savage-comedy-series-the-real-oneals-74880/

Roland Emmerich’s ‘Stonewall’ Acquired By Roadside Attractions

Ellen

Deadline   3/25/2015   by Anthony D’Alessandro

Roadside Attractions has snapped up U.S. distribution rights to Roland Emmerich’s Stonewall and is planning a fall release for the drama that stars Jeremy Irvine, Jonathan Rhys Meyers, Ron Perlman and Jonny Beauchamp. Goldcrest Films is handling international rights. Emmerich’s Centropolis Entertainment produced Stonewall from a script by John Robin Baitz.

Pic is set against the 1969 Stonewall Riots when the gay community rioted against a police raid that took place at the Stonewall Inn in Greenwich Village. At the time, it was illegal for gay people to congregate, and police brutality against gays went unchecked. Irvine plays Danny Winters, who flees to Greenwich Village after being kicked out of his parents’ house. Homeless and destitute, he befriends a group of street kids who soon introduce him to the local watering hole The Stonewall Inn; however, this shady, mafia-run club is far from a safe haven. As Danny and his friends experience discrimination, endure atrocities and are repeatedly harassed by the police, a rage begins to build.

Stonewall is produced by Emmerich, Michael Fossat, Marc Frydman, and Carsten Lorenz; and EPs are Kirstin Winkler, Adam Press and Michael Roban.  Other cast members include Caleb Landry Jones, Joey King, Karl Glusman, Vlademir Alexis, Alexandre Nachi as well as veteran actor Matt Craven.

 

http://deadline.com/2015/03/roland-emmerich-stonewall-roadside-attractions-1201398502/

The Secret Lives of Hillary and Bill in the White House

Ellen

Broken lamps, shouting matches, sneaking away to the pool—and other scenes from the Clinton residence during the Lewinsky scandal.

By KATE ANDERSEN BROWER

White House Florist Ronn Payne remembers one day in 1998, after President Clinton had publicly admitted to his affair with a former White House intern, when he was coming up the service elevator with a cart to pick up old floral arrangements and saw two butlers gathered outside the West Sitting Hall listening in as the Clintons argued viciously with each other. The butlers motioned him over and put their fingers to their lips, telling him to be quiet. All of a sudden he heard the first lady bellow “goddamn bastard!” at the president—and then he heard someone throw a heavy object across the room. The rumor among the staff was that she threw a lamp. The butlers, Payne said, were told to clean up the mess. In an interview with Barbara Walters, Mrs. Clinton made light of the story, which had made its way into the gossip columns. “I have a pretty good arm,” she said. “If I’d thrown a lamp at somebody, I think you would have known about it.”

Payne wasn’t surprised at the outburst. “You heard so much foul language” in the Clinton White House, he said. “When you’re somebody’s domestic, you know what’s going on.”

As a White House reporter for Bloomberg News, I traveled around the world on Air Force One and on Air Force Two—filing reports from Mongolia, Japan, Poland, France, Portugal, China and Colombia—but the most fascinating story turned out to be right in front of me every day: the men and women who take care of the first family, who share a fierce loyalty to the institution of the American presidency.

In the more than 100 interviews with current and former White House staffers, senior advisers, and former first ladies and their children I conducted for my new book, The Residence, I had an unprecedented look at what it’s like for those who devote their lives to caring for the first family.

It wasn’t always easy to get them to open up to me; most recent and current residence workers follow a long-established code of ethics that values discretion and the protection of the first family’s privacy above all else. But after lunches and coffees, and hours spent on living room couches, these staffers eventually did share with me many of their personal memories, from small acts of kindness to episodes of anger and despair, from personal quirks and foibles to intense rivalries and unlikely friendships—painting an extraordinary portrait of what it’s like to work in the most famous, and best protected house in the United States.

***

In November 1995, Clinton began an affair with Monica Lewinsky, a 22-year-old White House intern. He had almost a dozen sexual encounters with her over the next year and a half, most of them in the Oval Office. Though the public did not learn about Monica Lewinsky until January 1998, some residence workers knew about the affair when it was still occurring. The butlers saw the president and Lewinsky in the family movie theater, and the two of them were seen together so frequently that the workers started letting one another know when they’d had a Lewinsky sighting. The butlers, who are closest to the family, zealously guard such secrets, but from time to time they share fragments of stories with their colleagues—because the information could be useful, or sometimes just to prove their access.

Bill and Hillary Clinton in the East Room of the White House in 1996. Behind the scenes, things weren’t always so rosy.

One household staffer, who asked not to be named, remembers standing in the main hallway behind the kitchen that was used by East Wing and West Wing aides. “That’s her—that’s the girlfriend,” a butler whispered, nudging her as Lewinsky walked by. “Yep, she’s the one. She was in the theater the other night.”

Hillary certainly knew, too. Nearly two decades later, many residence workers are still wary of discussing the fights they witnessed between the Clintons. But they all felt the general gloom that hung over the second and third floors as the Lewinsky saga dragged on throughout 1998.

The residence staff witnessed the fallout from the affair and the toll it took on Hillary Clinton, but West Wing aides had long suspected the kind of drama that was playing out on the second floor of the executive mansion. “She would have hit him with a frying pan if one had been handed to her,” said the first lady’s close friend and political adviser Susan Thomases in an interview with the Miller Center at the University of Virginia for their collection of oral histories documenting Bill Clinton’s presidency. “I don’t think she ever in her mind imagined leaving him or divorcing him.” (Hillary Clinton’s spokesperson did not respond to requests for comment on this article.)

Betty Finney, now 78, started as a White House maid in 1993. She spent most of her time in the family’s private quarters and remembers well how things changed in those final years. “Things were definitely more tense. You just felt bad for the entire family and what they were going through,” she says. “You could feel the sadness. There wasn’t as much laughter.”

Florist Bob Scanlan was less guarded about the atmosphere: “It was like a morgue when you’d go up to the second floor. Mrs. Clinton was nowhere to be found.”

During the height of the drama, Hillary routinely missed afternoon appointments. The details of running the executive mansion, understandably, took a backseat to saving her husband’s presidency and their marriage. For three or four months in 1998, the president slept on a sofa in a private study attached to their bedroom on the second floor. Most of the women on the residence staff thought he got what he deserved.

Even Butler James Ramsey, a self-proclaimed ladies’ man, blushed when the subject came up. He said Clinton was his “buddy, but … come on now.” As usual, during the Lewinsky scandal Ramsey said he kept his “mouth shut.”

Some on the staff have said that Hillary knew about Lewinsky long before it came out, and that what really upset her was not the affair itself but its discovery and the media feeding frenzy that followed.

The first lady’s temper was notoriously short during those difficult months. Butler James Hall remembers serving coffee and tea in the Blue Room during a reception for a foreign leader. Suddenly, the first lady approached him while he was still standing behind the bar.

“You must have been staring into space!” she upbraided him. “I had to take the prime minister’s wife’s cup. … She was finished and looking for some place to put it.” Hall was dumbfounded—other butlers were working the reception with trays collecting drinks, and his job was to serve the drinks—but he knew that defending himself would be pointless. Clinton complained to the Usher’s Office, and Hall wasn’t asked back for a month.

“Working there during the impeachment wasn’t bad,” said former storeroom manager Bill Hamilton, but he agreed that working with Mrs. Clinton in those difficult months was a challenge. “It was just so overwhelming for her and if you said something to her she’d snap,” Hamilton recalled, shaking his head. Still, he says that he loved working for the Clintons, and although he retired in 2013, he sometimes wishes he had stayed at the White House, knowing that Hillary Clinton might one day return as America’s first female president. He says he would love to work for her again, even after the tumult of her eight years in the residence.

He is entirely sympathetic toward the first lady in those darkest days. “It happened and she knew it happened and everybody was looking at her,” Hamilton said.

Pastry Chef Roland Mesnier said he wanted to help Hillary feel better in any way he could. Her favorite dessert was mocha cake, and at the height of the scandal, he recalls, “I made many, many mocha cakes. You better believe it,” he said, chuckling. In the late afternoons, Hillary would call the Pastry Shop. In a small, unassuming voice—a far cry from her usual strong, self-confident tone—she’d ask, “Roland, can I have a mocha cake tonight?”

One sunny weekend in August 1998, just before the president made his confession to the country, the first lady called Usher Worthington White with an unusual request.

“Worthington, I want to go to the pool but I don’t want to see anybody except you,” she said.

“Yes, ma’am, I understand,” he replied sympathetically.

White knew exactly what she meant. She did not want to see her Secret Service detail, she did not want to see anyone tending to the White House’s extensive grounds, and she certainly did not want to see anyone on a tour of the West Wing. “She wasn’t up for any of that,” he recalled. She just wanted a few hours of peace.

White told her he would need five minutes to clear the premises. He ran to find her lead Secret Service agent and told him they would have to work together to make it happen. And fast.

“It was a twenty-second conversation but I know what she meant. ‘If anybody sees her, or she sees anybody, I’m going to get fired, I know it,’” he told the agent. “‘And you probably will too.’”

So the Secret Service agents assigned to protect the first lady agreed to trail her, even though protocol calls for one agent to walk ahead of her and one to walk behind.

“She’s not going to turn around and look for you,” White told them. “She just doesn’t want to see your face. And she doesn’t want you looking at her face.”

He met Clinton at the elevator and escorted her to the pool with the agents walking behind them and no one else in sight. She was wearing red reading glasses and she was carrying a couple of books. She didn’t have on any makeup and her hair wasn’t done. To White, she seemed heartbroken.

They didn’t exchange a single word on the walk to the pool.

“Ma’am, do you need any butler service?” White asked her after she got settled in.

“No.”?

“You need anything at all?”?

“No, it’s just a beautiful day and I want to just sit here and enjoy some sunshine. I’ll call you when I’m ready to go back.”

“Okay, ma’am,” White replied. “It’s twelve o’clock now, and I get off at one and someone else will be in.”

Clinton looked intently at him. “I’ll call you when I’m done.”

“Yes, ma’am,” White replied, knowing that that meant he would have to stay until whenever she chose to leave. He didn’t get the call until nearly three-thirty that afternoon.

When he returned, White accompanied the first lady on another wordless walk from the pool to the second floor. Before she stepped off the elevator, the besieged first lady let him know how much his efforts meant to her.

“She grabbed me by my hands and gave them a little squeeze and looked me directly in my eyes and just said, ‘Thank you.’ ”

“It touched my heart,” White said of her gratitude. “It meant the world to me.”

A few of the household workers even found themselves dragged into the unfolding drama. At one point, Houseman Linsey Little was called to the second floor to answer questions about the affair. When he got upstairs, he was met by an intimidating federal agent, who asked him if he’d ever seen Lewinsky before. No, he answered nervously.

“They want to make you feel like they think you know something,” he said. He insists that he’d never seen anything untoward, but even if he had, he admits he would have been reluctant to risk his job and end up on the news himself. “They’d have your name up in bright lights,” he said.

Mesnier described 1998 as a “very sad time” watching two brilliant people consumed by scandal. And like so many others, he felt terrible for the Clintons’ daughter, Chelsea.

In an iconic photograph taken August 18, 1998, the day after her father’s embarrassing admission, Chelsea held both of her parents’ hands as they walked to the helicopter on the South Lawn. Mesnier shook his head at the thought of what the young woman went through. “Chelsea was absolutely the sweetest person you’ll ever meet, and then to see them going through a stupid thing like this? Stupid. There was a lot of hardship.”

***

In a house where even a minor bit of gossip could make national headlines, Bill and Hillary Clinton had a difficult time learning to trust the staff. The reason they changed the White House phone system was to ensure that no one could listen in on their private conversations—a move that frustrated the ushers, who had a trusted system in place for the purpose of directing calls.

When a call came in for a member of the first family, an operator would call the call box in the Usher’s Office. “If it was a call for the first lady, we’d put a little key in the first lady’s slot and it would ring a bell with her code so she could pick up any phone that was up there close by and the operator would connect her,” Skip Allen explained. “That went in during the Carter administration because there were so many people living at the White House at the time that everybody had their own specific ring. The president would have just the one ring, the first lady would have two rings, and Chelsea would have three short rings.”

August 18, 1998, the day after Clinton confessed to having an affair with Monica Lewinsky.

The Clintons, Allen said, decided that “too many people could listen in on them” under the old phone system, so they had all the White House phones changed over to interior circuitry so that if the first lady was in the bedroom and the president was in the study she could ring him from room to room without going through the operator. “That kind of negated the security of the phone system. Then anybody could pick up upstairs in any room,” Allen said, still exasperated by the change.

The Clintons’ preoccupation with secrecy made relations with the staff “chaotic” for their entire eight years in office, Allen said. At least one residence worker, Florist Wendy Elsasser, attributes their anxiety to parental concerns: “I think protecting Chelsea may have had a lot to do with, for lack of a better term, their standoffishness with the staff.”

But it seems clear that the Clintons had little reason to worry about the residence staff leaking any secrets. Even now, years later, most staffers keep quiet when asked about what went on behind closed doors. Discretion is built into the DNA of most of them; they know that their restraint is fundamental to the protection of the presidency—and that, without it, life in the executive mansion would be impossible to endure.

***

Usher Skip Allen admits that it was easier to serve the families he liked than it was to pretend.

“But we pretend very well,” he said.

Allen cannot hide his reservations about the Clintons. Over lunch by the pool at his large home in rural Pennsylvania, he fondly recalled how Mrs. Clinton always asked him to help her by tying bows on her outfits, something she couldn’t do herself. But he said the Clintons never fully trusted the residence staff and were particularly suspicious of the Usher’s Office. “They were about the most paranoid people I’d ever seen in my life.”

Allen isn’t the only one with bitter memories of the Clinton White House. Usher Chris Emery, who had been close with the Bushes, remembers feeling unduly scrutinized by the Clintons. In the 14 months he served them, he says, he was subjected to three drug tests and a background check that he was not due to have for several years. He says that some of the questions he was asked—including what church he belonged to—were unusually personal, so he refused to answer them. “I think they were just trying to find something to make it easier [to fire me].” He sighed. And, indeed, when Emery was fired from the White House in 1994, it was in part because of a favor he had done for former first lady Barbara Bush.

During the first Bush administration, Emery had been very helpful to Mrs. Bush. “We were very close. Chris taught me how to use a computer,” she told me. After leaving the White House, she was working on her memoir when she lost a chapter, so she called on Emery for help. Emery was happy to oblige—but the favor fueled the Clintons’ suspicion that the staff was too attached to the Bush family. When the Clintons saw the usher’s call logs, Emery said, they “came to the conclusion that I was sharing deep, dark secrets with the Bushes in Houston. Which I wasn’t.”

A short time later, Chief Usher Gary Walters called Emery into his office.

“Mrs. Clinton is not comfortable with you,” Walters told him. “What does that mean?” Emery asked, stunned.?“It means tomorrow is your last day.”?Barbara Bush admits that her phone calls to Chris “caused trouble.” Emery was scolded in public for “an amazing lack of discretion,” in the words of Hillary’s spokesman Neel Lattimore. “We believe the position that he had, as a member of the residence staff, requires the utmost respect for the first family’s privacy.”

Emery says he was devastated at the loss of his job, and his $50,000 salary. “I was out of work for a year,” he says. “They ripped the rug right out from under me. You wonder what they’d do to someone who’s really powerful.” When he made it home that night, the first call he got was from Barbara Bush’s assistant, saying that the Bushes had heard the news and wanted to help however they could. “The next call I got was from Maggie Williams’s office [she was Hillary Clinton’s chief of staff], saying that if I get any calls from the press I should direct them back to the White House. I immediately thought, ‘Well, of course, that’s what we always do.’ I hung up the phone and I said, ‘Wait a minute. They just fired me!’ ”

All these years later, Emery told me sadly, he understands why he was fired. “She was facing so many pressures,” he says of Mrs. Clinton, “and unfortunately I was a victim.”

But at least one former colleague of Emery’s disputes his claims. This person, who spoke on the condition of anonymity, said that the Clintons were right to be paranoid about the residence workers, many of whom had served Republican presidents for 12 years. According to this source, “Everybody in the Usher’s Office was upset when President Bush 41 was not reelected … and they showed it in front of the Clintons.” Emery, in particular, was a “Republican from the top of his head to the tips of his toes,” according to this source, and Emery himself says that he would have gone to California with the Reagans after they left office if they’d asked him.

Emery may not always have hidden his feelings around the Clintons. According to his colleague, as President Clinton came down from the second floor to attend an event one day, Emery said, “I can’t understand why everybody has an orgasm when he’s around.” He made these kinds of comments loudly enough for Clinton aides to hear, his colleague said.

The Clintons may also have had good reason to be concerned about their security detail. They were still reeling from claims made by Arkansas state troopers assigned to protect Governor Clinton who later told the press that they had helped facilitate Clinton’s extramarital affairs, in what came to be known as “Troopergate.”

One incident particularly worried the Clintons. Late one night in 1994, while they were at Camp David celebrating Easter, Chelsea’s former nanny and White House staff assistant, Helen Dickey, was in her third-floor room at the White House when she heard noises coming from the family’s living quarters one floor below. When she went to see what was going on, she found a group of men dressed in black carrying weapons and rummaging through the Clintons’ things.

“What are you doing? You have no right to be here,” she yelled. “We’re Secret Service doing our job. Get out,” they told her. When Hillary returned, she asked Chief Usher Gary Walters for an explanation. He apologized for forgetting to tell her that the agents were sweeping the second floor to see if there were any listening devices. She was livid.

The Clintons cherished their time alone. In a 1993 interview, Hillary Clinton said she loved the second floor of the White House because it was the only place where the Secret Service didn’t trail her family. “We can tell the full-time help that they can get off. We don’t have to have them up there,” she said. “That’s a wonderful feeling, because everywhere else we are we’ve got people around us all the time.”

By most accounts, Chelsea Clinton treated the residence staff with respect. Yet Ronn Payne believes that she had internalized some of her parents’ animosity toward the Secret Service. In the very beginning of the Clinton administration, agents were stationed on the second-floor staircase landing, right by the president’s elevator. Another Secret Service post was at the top of the Grand Staircase across from the Treaty Room on the second floor. (These posts were later moved to the State Floor at the Clintons’ request.)

One day, according to Payne, he was walking through the second-floor private kitchen when an agent walked in behind him waiting to escort Chelsea to Sidwell Friends, the private school she attended in northwest Washington. Chelsea was on the phone.

“Oh, I’ve got to go,” she told her friend. “The pigs are here.”

The agent turned “crimson,” Payne recalls. “Ms. Clinton, I want to tell you something. My job is to stand between you, your family, and a bullet. Do you understand?”

She replied: “Well, that’s what my mother and father call you.”

 

 

Kate Andersen Brower spent four years covering the Obama White House for Bloomberg News and is a former CBS News staffer and Fox News producer. This article has been adapted from her book, The Residence: Inside the Private World of the White House (Harper Collins), which is out April 7, 2015.

 

http://www.politico.com/magazine/story/2015/04/clinton-white-house-the-residence-excerpt-116706.html