The Tales of Octopus Bill and Whiplash Willey

I have no idea what went down between the Big Lewinsky and the Big Creep.

(Not their real names.)

Nor do I know why they got double-crossed by America’s rat, Linda Tripp.

With an enemy like her, who needs friends?

And I am not sure if we will ever know exactly what happened in a Little Rock hotel room between Paula “I-didn’t-ask-for-room- service” Corbin Jones and a certain randy Razorback.

But I had my suspicions.

And then Kathleen E. Willey went on TV.

She was “angry,” she said, and who wouldn’t be? She was accusing the Most Powerful Man in the World of some pretty strong stuff:

He put his hand here. He put my hand there.

In short, she accused the president of the United States of being an Oval Office octopus.

Well, I said to myself, that’s that.

I believed we did now know. I believed Willey when she said that Bill Clinton tried to personally place his presidential seal on her.

In this country, part of the reason a jury convicts an accused person is if an accuser is more believable than an accusee. I listened to Willey and concluded, “This person is not making this up.”

Because if this woman was acting, we had found the next Meryl Streep.

*

Cut to the next day.

It is a Monday morning, and Americans are all atwitter. I haven’t heard so much comment about a previous night’s “60 Minutes” since the one when Andy Rooney wondered why he always had a hole in his socks.

Bill and Paula, which begat Bill and Monica, had turned into Bill and Kathleen.

“Presidential accuser” Willey, as she was now being called in print and on TV--it’s one of those popular ‘90s buzz phrases, like “presumptive nominee” and “disgruntled postal worker”--had very persuasively portrayed Mr. Clinton as being politically erect.

I sniffed impeachment proceedings in the air.

I pictured Kenneth W. Starr rubbing his palms together in glee, like a 19th century banker about to foreclose.

I imagined Bob Woodward hard at work on “All the President’s Women.”

This wasn’t the first case of White House womanizing, obviously. Warren Harding hid one in a closet. I think JFK smuggled one up a dumbwaiter.

But this was close to being caught in flagrante delicto. The woman herself was speaking up while the man was still in office.

Willey’s interview was very dramatic. What had happened to her was very traumatic.

She cut quite a sympathetic figure. A clumsy pass had been made at her, on the very day she went home to find her husband a victim of suicide. I could only imagine how shaken up she must have been.

Here’s how shaken up she was:

Two days later, she wrote to invite Bill Clinton to “call any time.”

Three weeks later, she sent him a Christmas card and a necktie.

Seven months after allegedly getting groped, she watched a speech and wrote a note declaring herself “the proudest I have been that you are our president.”

Less than a year after the incident, she expressed “my willingness to help you in any way I can.”

And nearly one year to the day, Willey wrote to remind the president that she was his “No. 1 fan.”

I suddenly didn’t feel I was watching Meryl Streep. I felt I was watching “Misery,” with Kathy Bates.

*

A friend of 20 years, Julie Hiatt Steele, has given a sworn affidavit that Willey asked her to lie.

A book publisher and a tabloid editor separately claim Willey’s representative wanted $300,000 for her tale.

A best-selling author, Patricia Cornwell, claims Willey was once so incensed about something that a “very vicious letter” was left on the novelist’s doorstep, along with a pile of Cornwell’s books.

(Now I’m not thinking Kathy Bates. I’m thinking Sean Young.)

I still don’t know what President Clinton does with his hands when he isn’t playing golf. And I still can’t understand why Whiplash Willey didn’t feel this pain for five years.

But here’s a tip:

If a man manhandles you, call a cop, call a doctor, call a lawyer, call everybody or call nobody. But please, don’t call yourself his No. 1 fan.