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On my flight home from Greece, going through a pile of European newspapers, I peered down the ravine that divides the French from the Americans in their attitudes toward the private (i.e., sex) lives of public figures. To my surprise, both the American public and President Clinton could learn something from their French counterparts.
The Italian press and the British tabloids are full of Jacques Chirac's alleged affair with Claudia Cardinale, complete with pictures of the French president laughing intimately with the Italian actress.
The French press is silent on the subject, as it was about the sex life of Chirac's predecessor, Francois Mitterrand. Indeed, when Paris Match broke the silence in 1994, with photographs of Mitterrand's daughter from his longtime mistress, Anne Pingeot, his wife told the press: "This is something between Francois and me."
As for Mitterrand himself, he rose to the full hauteur of his office and answered journalists' questions with a refreshing lack of equivocation: "Yes," he said, "I have a natural daughter." "Et alors?" he added, which, roughly translated, means "And so what?"
The European papers were also busy this weekend recapping Clinton's "Wifewater" problems and rehashing his sexual history. So I tried to imagine Hillary Clinton telling the press, "This is something between Bill, Gennifer, Paula, Sally, Kay, Lulu, Kiki and me," with the president adding, "And so what?"
However unsavory, wouldn't this be preferable to the madness of evasions, half-truths and outright lies into which Clinton, Gary Hart, Ted Kennedy, Bob Packwood and the rest are swept when confronted with their sexual past or present?
Clinton's "Gennifer who?" is definitely more shameless than Mitterrand's "So what?" It compounds a private deception with a public one.
If reporters had brought it up, would FDR have dared tell them that it was between Eleanor, Lucy, Missy and him? Or would Ike have ever said that it was between Mamie, Kay and him? Or LBJ that it was between Lady Bird, Alice and him?
There are three reasons why the answer is no. The first is that Americans take marriage seriously. Or at least we take serial monogamy seriously. Why else would Elizabeth Taylor have married seven times? The triumph of hope over experience is a quintessentially American characteristic.
Secondly, we lack the royal tradition of Louis XV and Madame de Pompadour, for 20 years the king's official and influential mistress. Having an official mistress requires a moral dexterity that French presidents have inherited from French kings.
The third reason is that "So what?" is easier to live with if the political Lothario is not running on a family values platform. But Americans have always looked for a bit of the preacher in our political leaders -- someone who could speak about "the better angels of our nature" or "the shining city on the hill." Pragmatists like the French don't start new nations. Only idealists do.
One thing doesn't change when you cross the Atlantic. Whether the response is "So what?" or an elaborate morality play of loyal wife, aggrieved mistress and repentant rascal, the public drama conceals the private pain. One person's pleasure is many others' misery.
Mitterrand was driven at the end of his life by a need to make reparations to his shadow family. So he legitimized his daughter, Mazarine, and instructed that she and her mother be present at his funeral by the side of his wife and their two sons.
However political wives may rationalize their feelings, the betrayals remain. Occasionally the strain shows, as when Hillary Clinton spotted Kay Arnold, a gubernatorial squeeze, in the crowd seeing them off to Washington: "Get that whore out of here," she snapped to the state troopers. And they did.
Whether in Paris or in Little Rock, the most important intersection between the private and the public man lies in the question: What else is he unfaithful to? Mitterrand's infidelities to both wife and mistress mirrored his infidelities to his political principles. "I have no strategy, only tactics," he said. Clinton, that panting Don Juan of the Ozarks, will never have the elan of a Gallic seducer, but otherwise, he could echo the French president. Such blunt pragmatism, though, would guillotine an American politician's career.
As a Frenchman, La Rochefoucauld, put it, "Hypocrisy is the homage that vice pays to virtue." Our young nation, with its idealistic aspirations to virtue, demands far too much hypocrisy to close the gap with reality. We could use a dash of the French "So what?"
But, other than that, vive la difference!
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