Newsgathering by nature is the province of voyeurs and jacklegs. It is best practiced by grifters whose conscience seldom hinders them from separating marks from their secrets. My conscience suffered a rare flare-up last February.
In the thick of scandal season, I had trained my attention on Dolly Kyle Browning, the Dallas real-estate lawyer and high-school sweetheart of Bill Clinton who alleges a 30-year affair ending in 1992. Though Clinton denied their relationship under oath in the Paula Jones case, Dolly has detailed their respective sex addictions (she’s in recovery, he’s not) in her roman a clef, Purposes of the Heart, for sale at www.deardolly.com in hardcover leatherette. Dolly’s third husband, Doc, a prep-school athletic trainer, is her publisher, and she says the Holy Spirit is her agent (replacing Lucianne Goldberg).
My aim was to rescue Dolly’s then-sealed Paula Jones deposition from her custody. Though she resisted my entreaties, our rapport was immediate. Dolly’s a Baptist. I’m a Baptist. She has a story to tell. I tell stories. She’s a statuesque blonde. I love statuesque blondes. She describes her irises as “sea-mist green.” I enjoy water sports.
Unable to persuade Dolly to violate the court’s order, I did the unpardonable: I asked Dolly to reflect prayerfully, to seek divine guidance, and to take my Fed-Ex number in the event that Heaven prompted her to overnight me her deposition. I felt reptilian. I had prostituted my faith. I was so ashamed that, had Dolly relented by providing a copy on condition that I wash her feet in the river Jordan while singing “Beulah Land” in tongues, I’d have been on the next plane to Israel with my hip waders and a Kinko’s card.
But Dolly didn’t budge. Doc warned me that she wouldn’t: “You don’t know Dolly.” “Do any of us really know Dolly?” I sassed. Doc assured me he did, as he belted out a revamped lyric to “If You Knew Suzie”: “If you knew Dolly, like I know Dolly, oh, oh, what a . . . ” I made a mental note to refrain from knowing either of them.
That resolution lasted until they rang me a few weeks ago to join them for drinks at the Baltimore Hilton. Call Dolly what you will, she’s a lady, not a bimbo. Though she flashes purple skivvies in her see-through novel (“his fingers sought the softness beneath her clothes”), she refrains from elaborating on the ugly particulars in conversation: She is mute on whether the president’s musket aims easterly. She avoids discussing the time Clinton grew so excited during one of their romps in his Buick that he — how to put it — planted his flag before reaching the summit. She even refuses to relive her one-night tryst with Roger Clinton. (Wouldn’t you?)
Stymied, I turned to Doc. It is often rewarding to study the spouse of the one caught up in scandal — to try to read the perpetual cuckold whose identity is drawn from his wife’s interplay with the president’s executive branch. That is why, a few years ago at a Gennifer Flowers book-signing, I shadowed her husband, Finis Shelnut, who beamed with paternal pride as moist-mitted autograph hounds converged in a hormone stew around the woman who revealed that she and Clinton had pet names for each other’s privates (hers “Precious,” his “Willard”).
Everyone has his own reasons for enduring such disclosures (Finis exhibited his rather bluntly when he asked, when negotiating an interview, “Do you pay?”). Doc is actually convinced Dolly’s book is a literary masterpiece, a supple weave of Grand Themes like grace and redemption — never mind that his beloved gets diddled three ways to Sunday. Doc’s identity isn’t fashioned from reflected glory. He isn’t just the guy whose future wife scored with the future president. He’s his own man, Dolly brags. He plays the harmonica, has climbed the 46 peaks of the Adirondacks, and bakes the “world’s finest ginger cookies.” The secret ingredient, Doc tells me as I dip one in my White Russian, “is love.” More impressive, Doc once held the world record for most free throws made in a 24-hour period (16,338).
This last feat makes me forget Dolly altogether, as Doc relates his Guinness-record-setting marathon: He tore his supinator, hallucinated from fatigue, and while standing over the urinal after 22 hours, thought he’d die while enjoying “the last piss I’d ever take.” I myself have always been a middling free-throw shooter: squaring my feet, picking my spot with the limp-wristed follow-through of a backup dancer in a Peter Allen kickline. But when I displayed my form in the hotel bar, Doc told me I had elbow drift and needed to align my forearm with the basket.
I never did get a story from Dolly — and considering my sacrilege, didn’t deserve one. But Dolly’s agent is both merciful and benevolent. For the first time ever, I’m shooting 75 percent from the line.
MATT LABASH
