Details of Chelsea Clinton's wedding may be thin on the ground but one thing is certain: an invitation to the marriage of Bill's and Hillary's only child is the hottest ticket in town, writes LARA MARLOWEin Washington
CHELSEA CLINTON'S desire to keep her nuptials with Marc Mezvinsky, an investment banker, discreet has only fanned media curiosity. Gossip magazines and the internet are buzzing with rumours about the wedding plans, whose details are "harder to ferret out than the president's Afghanistan strategy", according to the New York Times.
New York Magazinecalls the wedding "this summer's ultimate status invitation" and likens the secrecy surrounding it to "a giant military operation".
Much of what is known – or rather believed to be known – about the July 31st ceremony has been reported by the Hudson Valley News,the local paper in Rhinebeck, New York, where the wedding will probably take place. "This is a small town and we have more moles here than a vegetable garden," says Jim Langan, the paper's editor.
One thing is certain: the marriage of Bill’s and Hillary’s only child will be an emotional affair. “I just hope I can keep it together [until] I walk down the aisle and do the handoff,” Bill told NBC television. Chelsea has asked her father to lose 15 pounds, so he’ll look good in the photos. The former president says he’ll feel “proud, grateful, wistful. I’ll be thinking about the day she was born, I’ll be thinking about the first day of school.”
Hillary referred to herself as MOTB (Mother Of The Bride) in State Department messages. While flying around the world extinguishing diplomatic fires, she has studied menus, flower arrangements and dresses. Her daughter’s wedding “truly is the most important thing in my life right now”, she said recently.
Chelsea met Marc 14 years ago, at a weekend retreat for young Democrats. She was 16; he was 18. The Clintons were friends with his (now divorced) parents, Edward Mezvinsky and Marjorie Margolies Mezvinsky. Young Marc reportedly worked as an intern at the Clinton White House. He and Chelsea both attended Stanford University. She had a number of boyfriends, including an Anglo-Irishman from Oughterard, Co Galway, before settling down with Mezvinsky in New York five years ago.
Bride and bridegroom both survived the public humiliation of their fathers. Perhaps the most enduring image of the 1998 Monica Lewinsky scandal was Chelsea, then 18, holding the hands of both parents, walking between them towards a helicopter on the White House lawn. According to Hillary’s memoirs, Chelsea was present when her father and advisers discussed how he should present his affair with Lewinsky to the American public.
“Chelsea is one of the few kids I could imagine understanding something like that,” says Stella O’Leary, the president of Irish-American Democrats, who has campaigned for both Clintons. “She is never melodramatic or hysterical. She has a kind of wisdom.” When the Clinton-Mezvinsky engagement was announced last November, Bill described his future son-in-law as “a great human being”. The New York Times credits him with “confidence and a teasing sense of humour”. He must have suffered when his father, a former congressman, pleaded guilty to defrauding investors of $10 million in 2002.
According to the prosecutor in Pennsylvania, Mezvinsky pèreused his friendship with the Clintons to impress prospective investors. Unknown to his son, Edward hid money in Marc's bank account. Edward completed a five-year prison sentence in 2008, and will presumably attend the wedding.
Another of the ironies swirling around next Saturday’s wedding is that Bill Clinton was involved in ending the brief political career of the mother of the groom, Marjorie Margolies Mezvinsky. In 1993, Clinton begged Margolies Mezvinsky, then a first-term Congresswoman from Pennsylvania, to vote for his tax-raising budget. She reluctantly agreed to do so, but only if hers was the 218th, deciding vote. She kept her word, to jeers of “Goodbye, Marjorie!” from Republicans, and was voted out of office the following year.
In his biography of Hillary Clinton, A Woman in Charge, Carl Bernstein recounts Hillary's difficulty in conceiving Chelsea, the baby's complicated birth by Caesarean and the couple's disappointment at not being able to have a second child.
Bill watched the delivery, and later described Chelsea’s birth as “the happiest moment of my life”. Chelsea, who was named after a Joni Mitchell song, had a miniature desk in Bill’s office as governor of Arkansas. As president, he gave her driving lessons at Camp David, and waited up for her in the White House to come home from dates.
In her book It Takes a Village, Hillary describes how the couple prepared Chelsea for public life. When their daughter was only six years old, Hillary and Bill would role-play, pretending to be politicians attacking Bill. Chelsea "gradually gained mastery over her emotions and some insights into the situations that might arise", Hillary wrote.
Chelsea wrote her undergraduate thesis at Stanford on the Northern Ireland peace process, with the president as a primary source. In 1998, Stella O’Leary accompanied the Clintons to Enniskillen, Derry and Belfast. She recalls the extraordinary closeness of parents and daughter. “She’s kind of amused, not intimidated by them,” says O’Leary. “She’s their equal. She adores them.”
At Stanford, Chelsea switched from pre-medicine to history, then completed a Master’s degree at Oxford, like her father. In an essay about the atrocities of September 11, Chelsea wrote that she felt “a new urgency to play a part in America’s future” and vowed to “somehow serve my country.” But Chelsea’s first, high-paying jobs were with a consultancy firm and a hedge fund in Manhattan. In January of this year, she received a Master’s degree from Columbia University in public health, a passion she shares with her mother.
Chelsea and Hillary do not display what one supporter calls Bill Clinton’s “effervescence”, but mother and daughter both enjoy a reputation for dutiful hard work. O’Leary describes the Clintons as “passionate do-gooders” who have “an amazing ability to bring out the best in the worst people, to get private individuals to donate money for their causes”.
Chelsea, too, has shown a talent for fundraising. In 2007, she helped persuade donors to give $20 million for her father’s foundation. In January, she raised $67,000 for Haiti by hosting an exercise class at a Manhattan gym.
Chelsea's wedding coincides with what the Washington Postcolumnist Dana Milbank calls "a Clinton restoration". A Gallup poll published on Thursday showed Bill Clinton is better liked than both his successors. Sixty-one per cent of respondents view Clinton favourably, compared with 52 per cent for Barack Obama and 45 per cent for George W Bush.
Obama is implementing “Bill Clinton’s third term”, Milbank writes, citing the dozens of Clinton-era officials who’ve been re-appointed by Obama, and Bill’s recent visit to the White House for a brainstorming session on job creation. A persistent Washington rumour says Obama will make Hillary Clinton his vice-presidential running mate in 2012, moving Joe Biden to the State Department.
In the meantime, some commentators are portraying Chelsea’s nuptials as America’s equivalent of a royal wedding.
“Chelsea is only inviting people she knows,” says a source who was an official in the Clinton White House. “This is not a political, royal wedding where you have to invite the archduke to keep peace in central Europe.”
Royal? The Clintons? “I just don’t see it,” says the same former official. “Look at their backgrounds. If it’s royalty, it’s manufactured in some way by people who want it to be that.”
The Big Day
The rumour mill
CONFIRMED
Chelsea Clinton (30) will wed Marc Mezvinsky (32), an investment banker, on July 31st. The couple met as teenagers but began dating five years ago.
BELIEVED TO BE TRUE
Location: Astor Courts, a 50-acre estate in Rhinebeck, New York, a pretty town of 4,600, two hours' drive north of Manhattan. The house is a replica of the Grand Trianon at Versailles, built between 1902 and 1904 by John Jacob Astor and now owned by Kathleen Hammer, a prominent donor to Hillary Clinton's campaigns. Chelsea Clinton and girlfriends tasted food at a local French restaurant, and secret servicemen have been shooing journalists away from the grounds.
Wedding planner: Bryan Rafanelli of Boston, who has worked for Hillary Clinton and produced inaugural balls for president Barack Obama.
Flowers: Jeff Leatham, artistic director of the George V Hotel, Paris.
Music: Co-ordinated by Jimmy Vali.
IN QUESTION
Who will officiate?Methodist pastor, rabbi or justice of the peace?
Chelsea’s dress: Oscar de la Renta or Vera Wang?
The wedding meal:horseradish- encrusted Ahi tuna with miso aioli?
Guest list:Between 400 and 500 invitees have been asked not to talk to the press.
Chelsea insists guests have a personal tie to her and the bridegroom.
The Obamas and talkshow host Oprah Winfrey were said to be invited. But the New York Times'Sheryl Gay Stolberg says the Obamas will stay away, to avoid swamping the wedding with press, and Winfrey's staff say she wasn't invited.
Director Steven Spielberg and wife Kate Capshaw, and singer Barbara Streisand are believed to be invited.
Prominent Irish-Americans include Terry McAuliffe, the former Democratic National Committee chairman and the Clintons’ money man, and Elizabeth Frawley Bagley, who was Bill’s ambassador to Portugal and now works with Hillary at the State Department.
The honeymoon: a complete mystery.
