Coretta and Hillary, not yet free

Feb. 10, 2006 | As Hillary Rodham Clinton took the pulpit next to her husband at Tuesday's funeral extravaganza for Coretta Scott King, I couldn't help thinking that the Clintons' bittersweet eulogies described not so much the recently departed "first lady of the U.S. civil rights movement" (Reuters) as the up-and-running former first lady herself. First there was Bill Clinton's slightly out-of-left-field reminder that Coretta King was an actual woman, "not a symbol, a real woman who lived and breathed and got angry and got hurt and had dreams and disappointments." And then Sen. Clinton took the microphone to speculate on the trepidation of a go-getting young Coretta as she embarked on marriage to a man of destiny. "'What am I getting myself into?'" the senator imagined the bride asking herself.

What hurt and anger and disappointment indeed! This hint of buried narrative was a tantalizing contrast to the somewhat hollow tributes to Coretta Scott King in the days since her death on Jan. 31. For there is an elephant in the room, acknowledged in passing if at all, and it is one that Sen. Clinton has long trained herself to ignore. Both of these women entered the public arena as wives, only to endure the sexual brinkmanship of their charismatic husbands, so brazenly compulsive that the men would not curb it even when it jeopardized their professional effectiveness and their historic missions along with their marriages. And for the two wives -- ambitious, talented women who took flak for wearing their birth names as badges of independence -- there was extra humiliation in such spectacular "failure" at a marital role that they had assumed ambivalently, subordinating their own dreams to their husbands'.

Now that Coretta Scott King has received her due props, historical honesty demands that we address the ways in which her private drama as Martin Luther King Jr.'s wife intersected with his epic trials as a world statesman -- and shaded both their legacies. When I think of the Passion of Coretta (and Coretta, like "Hillary," entered the culture on a first-name basis, having ceded the acquired last name to the bigger star), I flash not on the April night in 1968 that the call came from Memphis; I think of a day in January 1965, soon after the couple returned from collecting King's Nobel Peace Prize in Oslo, Norway, when she opened a package sent to his office and decided to play the enclosed audio reel. My guess is that she was devastated but not surprised by its contents: profane banter leading to sounds of erotic ecstasy, which an accompanying letter confirmed emanated from her husband. Because the letter further urged King to kill his "filthy, abnormal fraudulent self" to spare his race from the shame of his exposure, the mailing would go down in history as "the suicide package," and from then on King's human appetite clashed dangerously with his moral mandate. The tape, a soundtrack spliced together from King's bugged hotel stays, was the anonymous work of the Federal Bureau of Investigation, whose director, J. Edgar Hoover, hounded King with the same prurient fury that independent counsel Kenneth Starr would later turn on Hillary Clinton's husband.

Hillary had her equivalent moment of truth -- her husband's confession in 1998, after months of lying, that his relationship with Monica Lewinsky was more than the avuncular mentoring of a lost young woman. Like Coretta, Hillary made an accommodation with her marital predicament, as she had arguably done at least six years earlier, when the world first became aware that there was an alternative spelling of "Jennifer." But whereas Hillary was obliged to acknowledge her trauma -- albeit (in her autobiography) with a certain unconvincing Blondie-and-Dagwood triteness -- Coretta adopted a more aggressive form of denial, dismissing the FBI tape as incomprehensible "mumbo jumbo" and saying that she "wouldn't have burdened [King] with anything so trivial" as suspicions of infidelity, which "just didn't have a place in the very high-level relationship we enjoyed." (Taylor Branch reports in "At Canaan's Edge," his recently published third volume of his King biography, that a few months before his death King informed Coretta -- while she was recovering from a hysterectomy! -- of his long, emotionally absorbing relationship with a woman from Los Angeles.) "High level" speaks to another stigma borne by both Coretta and Hillary: intimations that the husbands strayed because of their wives' womanly deficit. And so Hillary is cast as the castrating (or more recently, "angry") man-hater, while Coretta was the withholding "ice queen."

Next page: Both women got under men's skin in a particular way