A White House Mess
No
Way To Treat A First Lady
About once a week, David Letterman sets up his monologue's closing joke by asking members of his studio audience if they remember President Bill Clinton. Built into whatever slightly off-color plump-intern punch line that follows, then, is the bigger but more subtle joke: as a source of comedy, the Clinton years are awfully hard to let go of.
This same thought hovers in the background of No Way to Treat a First Lady, Christopher Buckley's sendup of political sex scandals in the age of constant media. Not that the novel is based on the Clintons, of course. Buckley's protagonist may be a lawyer and a tri-namer — Elizabeth Tyler MacMann — but this first lady has an outspoken and independent streak that's ''a far cry from Hillary Clinton, who contented herself with taking care of her husband and giving the occasional tea for Congressional wives.'' Insert wink here.
As for the handsome go-getter she met in law school who went on to be president, we find him in the Lincoln Bedroom giving very vigorous and very special attention to a campaign contributor named Babette Van Anka, who also happens to be a curvy actress. When the commander in chief returns to his own bedroom down the hall, he finds an angry first lady who's not buying his line about trouble in Iraq. The argument is loud enough for the Secret Service guys in the hall to hear, but the real trouble doesn't start until the next morning, when the president, tucked into bed at his wife's side, turns out to be dead. Elizabeth Tyler MacMann is promptly charged with having assassinated him, apparently by way of a spittoon blow to the forehead.
Naturally she says she didn't do it, but this hardly matters, because one way or the other an endless ''Trial of the Millennium'' is inevitable, and this is the real subject of No Way to Treat a First Lady. It's the mother of all media circuses, O. J. and the Clinton scandals rolled into one, so there's no good reason to let the truth get in the way of all those lawyers and ''pixel pundits'' — and jokes.
To marshal her defense, the accused hires Boyce Baylor, a $1,000-an-hour trial attorney who almost never loses, and whose willingness to employ wild tactics on behalf of infamous clients is suggested by his nickname: Shameless. As it happens, Baylor is her former law school classmate. Also her former fiance -- she dumped him in favor of the Navy man and war hero Kenneth Kemble MacMann. Four ex-wives later, Boyce doesn't seem to have quite gotten over his old flame, which sets up not just a romantic subplot but certain conflicting emotions about the real aim of his defense.
The book takes the form of a legal thriller, with lots of surprise evidence, cross-examination drama and the like. But of course it's all tongue-in-cheek. Legal thrillers are about the heroic accumulation of facts; the story of Beth MacMann, like any worthwhile media-fed public narrative, is all about the perceptions that helpfully fill in the empty spaces where facts are missing — perceptions that arrive by way of opinion polls, second-guessing pundits or good old rampant speculation.
This is Buckley's subject. And as usual, he makes it look easy. There's an effortless quality to Buckley's prose that's both enviable and annoying: he sets a crisp pace and tosses off great one-liners, but you can't help believing that he's capable of something a little deeper and more enduring.
This time out, one of Buckley's more enjoyable gambits is freely mixing real media-culture stars and trappings with concocted ones. The trial is covered by the Hard Gavel host, Perri Pettengill (fake); the Hardball host, Chris Matthews (real, but possibly beyond parody); and the Objection! host, Greta Van Botox (cough). There's a cameo by George H. W. Bush's White House counsel, C. Boyden Gray, telling Pettengill that he was ''relieved that something like this hadn't happened on his watch.'' And there are virtual cameos by Catherine Zeta-Jones and Joe Eszterhas; she is reported to be desperately angling to play Beth in a movie version to be based on his script, titled Spittoon.
Baylor's most prominent second-guesser in the court of public opinion is one Alan Crudman, who was part of the legal dream team that helped J. J. Bronco escape a guilty verdict and wander off in search of ''the real killers.'' Just when you think you know what that's all about, there's an appearance by Mark Fuhrman on the subject of the ''bloody glove'' brouhaha in the O. J. Simpson case. (The most intriguing name-drop, though, might be the offhand revelation that Babette Van Anka was born Gertrude Himmelfarb — a name Washington types might be more likely to associate with the writer who is married to Irving Kristol and the mother of William Kristol.)
Buckley is generally less interested in making fun of individuals than in making fun of the whole trial-of-the-moment machinery. The highbrow press pretends to dismiss a tabloid as ''a scandal sheet for overweight proles'' while promptly recycling its stories. The publishing industry waits in the wings to dole out fat book contracts for projects like Second Cousin of Juror 14: My Story. And all members of the bar are of course beyond any redemption; one character's favorite charity is ''a home for the emotionally troubled children of divorce lawyers.''
It's often said that good satire is funny because it's true. Buckley knows how to walk this line, having lampooned the tobacco industry in Thank You for Smoking and Beltway life in The White House Mess, among other topics. And about the only thing in No Way to Treat a First Lady that couldn't possibly happen in real life is that, in the end, we all learn what in fact happened.
On the other hand, satire that doesn't somehow go the truth one better quickly loses out to the morning paper in the battle for wringing laughs from absurdity. This is why being a satirist is such a tough job these days. If you want to send up, say, reality television programming by imagining a show that pits unemployed people against one another in a battle for a decent job, or one in which contestants vie for a chance to run for political office, or maybe something that reworks The Beverly Hillbillies — well, forget it. Actual television executives have already green-lighted these absurdities. The round-the-clock scandals of the late 1990's were such great comic fodder not just because those spectacles were so outrageous, but also because there was still a little room for a satirist to come up with something even more outrageous to say. No wonder the professionally funny seem a little nostalgic
This review appeared in the October 20, 2002, edition of The New York Times Book Review.
