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>From http://www.smh.com.au/news/0201/19/spectrum/spectrum1.html
>>>Is there any evidence that Clinton's "Buddy" met the same fate as
his buddy "Vince"? A<>E<>R <<<
}}}>Begin
SPECTRUM
Led astray
Glenn Close and John Malkovich in Dangerous Liaisons.
Anne Summers explores the art of seduction from the bedroom to the
boardroom.
The death of Buddy, Bill Clinton's dog, after being struck by a car
in Chappaqua, New York, earlier this month was the final, sad note in
one of the most remarkable stories of seduction in recent history.
The then United States President acquired Buddy, you might recall, in
December 1997, at a time when he had no friends. He had lied to his
wife, to his staff and to his cabinet colleagues (as well as in a
legal deposition) about the nature of his relationship with a young
White House intern by the name of Monica Lewinksy and, as a result,
had become an object of loathing and disgust. No-one was talking to
him. In such circumstances, what was a man to do but get a canine
companion to share his dog house?
At the time, Clinton said, quoting president Truman: "If you want a
friend in Washington, you need to get a dog." For a time, the First
Dog was indeed the President's only buddy.
The world learnt with fascinated revulsion the exquisite details of
Clinton's sexual liaison with Lewinsky via The Starr Report, surely
one of the most lascivious books ever to have been produced by an arm
of government. But while our attention was focused on such
excruciating minutiae as the cigar and the semen-stained dress, the
most important element of this tawdry tale was overlooked.
This was the story of a seduction that for its brazenness and sheer gall was a worthy
rival to Cleopatra's inventiveness in having herself rolled up in a rug and delivered
to Roman emperor Julius Caesar. Because Bill Clin
ton was such a renowned pants man, it was initially assumed that it must have been he
who initiated the affair with the pretty intern. In fact, as The Starr Report reveals,
it was Lewinsky who set out to snare the world's
most powerful man. Not such a difficult job, you might think, given Clinton's
proclivities. However, as Clinton subsequently told Lewinsky, although he had had
"thousands" of affairs when he was younger, he had decided w
hen he turned 40 to try to be faithful to his marriage.
How was Lewinsky able to get to him? Not just physically which, you would think, ought
to have been difficult enough, but emotionally. How could a young girl not much older
than his daughter persuade the President of the
United States to succumb to her?
The answer is: she seduced him.
In his recent book, The Art of Seduction, the Los Angeles writer and classical scholar
Robert Greene identifies what he calls "the Lonely Leader" as one of 18 types of
people who are potentially ripe for plucking by an as
siduous seducer.
"Everyone around [the Lonely Leader] tends to be fawning and courtierlike, to have an
angle, to want something from them. This makes them suspicious and distrustful, and a
little hard around the edges, but do not mistake
the appearance for the reality: Lonely Leaders long to be seduced, to have someone
break through their isolation and overwhelm them. The problem is that most people are
too intimidated to try, or use the kind of tactics f
lattery, charm that they see through and despise. To seduce such types, it is better
to act like their equal or even their superior - the kind of treatment they never get."
Monica Lewinsky seemed to know exactly what to do. Greene advises bluntness and
risk-taking when it comes to seducing a leader such as a powerful political figure,
and that is precisely what Lewinsky did. She had already
made sure the President knew who she was. She placed herself strategically at events,
made sure they were introduced and had eye contact. When she first had the opportunity
to be alone with him for just a few moments, in
chief of staff Leon Panetta's office, she made her sensational move: she gave him an
unmistakable sexual signal by turning her back, raising her jacket and revealing to
the leader of the free world the top of her thong un
derwear. Later that evening, he contrived to run into her and invited her into his
private office. There, they had their first sexual encounter.
The rest, as they say, is history. The President was caught. He lied. He was caught
out in the lie. He was impeached by Congress but saved by one vote from being removed
from office. As his term drew to a close, his wife
Hillary engaged in one of the most creative examples of conjugal separation
imaginable. She ran for the Senate from the state of New York, an act of extraordinary
daring that necessitated acquiring a New York residence. A
fter she won election, she purchased a grand house in Washington, leaving her husband
and his dog behind in the Chappaqua, New York, home. (The Clintons had cruelly
discarded their cat, Socks, after they left the White Ho
use.) I was told by an American colleague recently that when he was not travelling the
world earning ginormous speakers' fees, Clinton and Buddy walked to the local village
each Saturday morning, where the former presiden
t would stand in the main street and wait for people to approach him.
No longer the Lonely Leader, he is now just plain lonely. And now that Buddy is gone,
he will no longer have a pretext for those Saturday morning strolls. This story does
not have a happy ending.
But then seduction stories seldom do. A seduction is by definition the forcing of
another person to surrender their will (and, usually, their body as well). A seduction
is not a case of mutual attraction. The word itself
is from the Latin seducere, meaning "to lead aside". A seducer generally has assembled
an armoury of techniques and tactics that are his or, less often, her signature
campaign tools and these are brought to play whenever
a target is selected. Duke Ellington would entice women with his good looks and
charisma, but once they were alone he would fall back on polite chat, with no hint of
anything untoward. What was never said was, apparently,
far more persuasive than any passionate whispers. Others write revealing letters,
drawing the subject into a web of confusion and complicity. Or bombard the subject
with gifts. More often, though, seduction is all talk.
It is a matter of finding the right language to reach the person you have in mind.
Seduction can be achieved using many techniques. If we take seduction to mean getting
one's way, regardless of initial opposition, then the seducer will do whatever it
takes. The seducer is a predator, but one who stops s
hort of force. He is not a rapist.
The thrill is more often than not in the chase itself, and the classic seducer will
become bored once his victim has succumbed. This was the fate of Madame de Tourvel,
the virtuous and deeply religious wife who eventually
surrendered to the notorious rake Vicomte de Valmont in the novel Dangerous Liaisons.
This is surely one of the classic texts of seduction, with various stage and screen
versions keeping it alive.
Stephen Frears's 1988 film version of this narrative of masterful sexual manoeuvring
among the jaded aristocrats in 18th-century Paris, with Glenn Close and John Malkovich
as the malevolent schemers of other people's undo
ing, is a standout example of the moral bankruptcy exemplified in the classic
seduction.
Sometimes, famous seduction ended in marriage but these unions were rarely made in
heaven. Lord Byron married Annabella Milbanke and they had a child, but domesticity
failed to tame him and, after a mere 54 weeks of marri
age, they parted. Errol Flynn married the young Nora Eddington after laying siege to
this Catholic virgin who was terrified of the Hollywood legend's reputation as a roue.
She was right to be. The marriage was said to be
stormy and was over in seven years. Mao Zedong discarded his wife for Jiang Qing, the
Shanghai actress who bewitched him with her boldness and her ostentatious femininity
while he was holed up in Yan'an in 1937.
Eventually he is supposed to have tired of her petulant mood swings and her
manipulative behaviour, but Madame Mao was not the type to go quietly. She stayed at
least formally married to the Great Helmsman until his death
, having achieved further notoriety by becoming one of the infamous Gang of Four that
wreaked havoc in the Cultural Revolution.
What is striking about all these famous tales of seduction is that most of them are so
old. Cleopatra and other famous seductresses notwithstanding, the classic seduction
was of a woman by a man (the likes of Casanova, By
ron, Flynn). It was a thoroughly patriarchal notion, predicated on the concept of
female virtue, on the need for women to remain chaste at least until marriage.
These days, when girls do at least their fair share of the chasing and no-one waits
for marriage, the concept of sexual seduction seems rather antiquated. Sexual liaisons
are - or should be - matters of mutual consent and
it is immaterial who makes the first move. That is not to say people don't plot and
scheme and fantasise about other people they would like to bed, but you have to wonder
why someone such as Robert Greene would bother to
develop a typology of seduction victims. It all seems so, well, old-fashioned.
Greene devotes almost 400 pages to The Seductive Process which he divides into four
phases: "Separation - creating interest and desire" (start by "choosing the right
victim"!); "Lead Astray - creating pleasure and confusi
on"; "The Precipice - deepening the effect through extreme measures"; and, finally,
"Moving in for the Kill".
Much of this sounds better fitted to the boardroom than the bedroom. More Donald Trump
than Errol Flynn. And, indeed, Greene does make the point that if seduction is seen as
power and if you turn out to be good at it, "wh
y stop at the conquest of a man or woman? A crowd, an election, a nation can be
brought under your sway simply by applying on a mass level the tactics that work so
well on an individual."
Yet it seems to me there is all the difference in the world between seduction and a
marketing campaign to sell, say, cars, or an election strategy to re-elect a
government. Not by any stretch of the imagination could you
say that John Howard seduced the Australian voting public. He might have frightened
them, or shamed them, or even intellectually persuaded them, but he did not seduce
them. This is not to say that the power to seduce is n
ot an asset in politics. Clinton was apparently not much of a sexual seducer (on Paula
Jones's account he demanded rather than persuaded), but his ability to engage and win
over a voter is legendary. It is said that when
Clinton locks eyes with you, you truly, deeply believe that for those few moments he
does not care about anyone else in the entire world. Bob Hawke had similar qualities,
which were amplified by a phenomenal ability to re
call the names of people he had met often years before.
The ability to seduce is also notoriously an element in the kind of journalism that
depends on interviews, on winning a subject's trust. Janet Malcolm's celebrated book
The Journalist and the Murderer argues that such jou
rnalism is all about betrayal of one's subject. Like the credulous widow who wakes up
one day to find the charming young man and all her savings gone, so the consenting
subject of a piece of non-fiction writing learns - w
hen the article or book appears - his hard lesson.
In her book, Malcolm attacked fellow journalist Joe McGinniss, whose book Fatal Vision
was the subject of a lawsuit by its subject, the convicted murderer Jeffrey MacDonald.
MacDonald had given McGinniss full access durin
g his trial in 1979 for the vicious killing of his pregnant wife and two daughters in
the confident belief that McGinniss considered him innocent. (McGinniss's letters to
MacDonald certainly encouraged this view).
When the book appeared, McGinniss depicted MacDonald as a vicious psychopath. The
story of MacDonald's suit against McGinniss, for fraud and breach of contract and
which ended in a hung jury although McGinniss later paid
MacDonald an out-of- court settlement is the subject of Malcolm's book.
The Italian journalist Oriana Fallaci was renowned in the 1970s for her revealing
interviews with powerful political figures. Many of these are reprinted in her book
Interview with History, including the two that caused h
er subjects the most discomfort: Henry Kissinger and Mohammed Reza Pahlavi (the Shah
of Iran). Both men were fully aware of her reputation when they agreed to be
interviewed, but both believed they could outwit her. Kissi
nger was arrogant enough to believe he could get information out of her about some of
her previous subjects; North Vietnam's General Giap, for instance.
Instead, Fallaci played them so skilfully that both men confided in her views and
emotions that when published caused them enormous embarrassment. Both men revealed to
her a contempt for women that was breathtaking even f
or the 1970s, while Fallaci's interview with Kissinger earned worldwide headlines for
his description of why he was so successful: "I've always acted alone. Americans like
that immensely. Americans like the cowboy who lea
ds the wagon train by riding ahead alone on his horse, the cowboy who rides all alone
into the town."
Fallaci trapped these two powerful men into these admissions by using a combination of
harshness and kindness. As Greene points out when retelling this story, the usual
techniques of flattery and charms would not have wor
ked with these two control freaks. Instead, they each proved to be strangely
susceptible to her alternate scolding and praising. Her technique triggered in each of
them a desire to please her - and the only way to please
a journalist, of course, is to tell her things.
Sometimes, we - the watching world - can only conclude from the astonishing outcome
that a seduction has occurred. The world reeled with shock when Jacqueline Kennedy
married Aristotle Onassis. "How could you, Jackie!" wa
iled the banner headline of one Boston newspaper. While the speculation ranged from
the mordant to the malevolent, no-one really knew the answer and, now that both
parties are dead, we never will. All we know for sure is
that the fat old ugly, although unbelievably rich, man got the world's most desirable
woman. He seduced her.
And what is true of the boudoir can also be found in the boardroom. How else to
explain One.Tel's Jodee Rich and Brad Keeling persuading their board to pay them each
salary packages of $7.5 million in a year when their co
mpany lost $291.1 million? A seduction must have taken place. These extraordinary
packages outranked the $7.1 million paid to Paul Anderson for achieving a total
turnaround in the finances of Australia's largest company,
BHP, as it was then known. Nor were they remotely in line with the salary paid to the
CEO of Australia's telecommunications giant, Telstra, whose boss Ziggy Switkowski
earned a comparatively paltry $1.65 million.
Similarly, former Air New Zealand CEO Gary Toomey's powers of persuasion must have
been irresistible. Not many executives could have negotiated for himself and his team
large bonus payments in the year their company had r
ecorded a loss of more than $1 billion.
We never get to learn these inside business stories except on those rare occasions
when a whistleblower emerges. With the honourable exception of Donald Trump, who loves
to brag in his books, the rare autobiographies of b
usiness leaders are invariably self-serving tomes that never tell us how they won what
they wanted. Similarly, we seldom learn from the press. Journalists do not seem to
pursue business leaders with the same zeal that is
applied to, say, politicians or even pop stars. Where is Oriana Fallaci when you need
her?
Yet the available evidence suggests that the stories would be rich ones. What did
young Jodee and Brad say to their fellow board members - John Greaves, Rodney Adler,
James Packer and Lachlan Murdoch - to persuade them to
tick those bonus arrangements? No doubt it was a rather different conversation from
the one Cleopatra had when she first met Julius Caesar, but the outcome was equally
sensational.
Seduction these days seems too often to involve moolah rather than amore. This makes
it far less fascinating. After all, money can buy a lot of things but it is hardly
interesting. Nothing to write poems, or songs, or eve
n books about. If Monica had flashed her bank balance instead of her thong, there
would have been none of the same frisson.
After all, Kenneth Starr was meant to be investigating Whitewater, a supposed
financial scam involving the Clintons and a questionable real-estate investment. His
diversion into sexual harassment and whether the President
lied was undoubtedly motivated by politics, but there is no doubt which investigation
attracted the most public interest. We are a prurient lot, we human beings, which
probably means that our fascination for successful s
eductions will never wane. It's just that they don't happen very often any more.
[go to top]
In this section
Led astray
To love a thief
By their clothes ye shall know them
Balancing act
Stepping lightly to contentment
No end of journeys
Born to be piled
Why do men have nipples?
Musical figures of speech
Crashing bores brought to earth
Into dark corners, bizarre and fantastic
Double trouble
Happy maestro of movement
A walk on the bright side
Drug's trip to tragedy and back
A funny farm short of laughs
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