Which comes as a surprise to no one, except Drew Barrymore.
Power hungry couple
Excerpt from the Daily Mail:
New York Times bestselling author Jerry Oppenheimer, who recently published RFK Jr.: Robert F. Kennedy, Jr. and the Dark Side of the Dream, investigated the Clintons in his book State of a Union: Inside the Complex Marriage of Bill and Hillary Clinton.
She was a pretty 21-year-old political science major, and he was a 27-year-old law school graduate embarking on his first political campaign. They instantly fell for each other. But when the other woman in his life learned of their affair, things turned frighteningly ugly.
It may sound like the story line for a juicy TV miniseries, but it was real-life. The characters in the drama were a young Bill Clinton, his then longtime girlfriend, Hillary Rodham, and a college girl by the name of Marla Crider.
Marla Crider
Before her death last year, Crider sat down for an explosive interview that revealed the perverse lengths Hillary would go to ensure that her political ambitions for herself and her husband-to-be would be realized.
The Clinton-Rodham-Crider triangle is important in the Clinton biography because it underscores and documents the first time Bill cheated on Hillary — even before they were married, but seriously involved.
Driven and ambitious, Hillary did every catty thing to break up the relationship and keep Bill for herself, based not on love, as Marla Crider perceived it back then in 1974 Arkansas, but rather on a ‘secret pact’ that Bill and Hillary had forged for their future – that they’d work together as a disciplined team so that one day he, and hopefully later she, would be elected president.
Long before the so-called Clinton ‘bimbo eruptions,’ long before the Monica Lewinsky sex scandal, Bill Clinton had, behind Hillary’s back, a serious affair with pretty Arkansas brunette Marla, who was working in his first political campaign.
In a radio interview with broadcaster Aaron Klein, Monica Lewinsky confidant Linda Tripp revealed that Bill had flings with thousands of women, including another White House Staffer and, of course, Gennifer Flowers. Bill has also had sexual assault charges leveled at him by Kathleen Willey and Paul Jones, who won an $850,000 lawsuit against him for sexual harassment.
Now the Clintons fear – and justifiably so – that Bill’s relationship with Marla, along with the other women in his life, will be used as fodder against Hillary in the race for the White House.
Slender, olive-skinned, green-eyed Marla Crider’s relationship with Bill flew under the radar until it was revealed in my New York Times bestselling book, ‘State of a Union: Inside the Complex Marriage of Bill and Hillary Clinton,’ published following Clinton’s impeachment by the House of Representatives, and acquittal by the Senate.
A native of Bill Clinton’s home state, Arkansas, Marla was a sharply intelligent college girl majoring in political science at the University of Arkansas when, in 1974, she joined charismatic, idealistic and seemingly unattached Bill Clinton’s first political campaign. The recent law school graduate was running for the state’s Third Congressional District seat against a popular Republican who had been in office seemingly forever.
Bill still a virtual “babe magnet” after all these years.
Everywhere Bill campaigned, there were women, groupies, drawn to him like ants to a picnic. Bill Clinton was a virtual babe magnet, and it was clear to his campaign manager, Paul Fray, and campaign office workers that he took advantage of the situation.
‘They’d [women] write down their names, their phone numbers, their addresses on a napkin, whatever was handy, and hand it to him,’ one campaign source recalled.And while he was getting all that action, his girlfriend Hillary was hundreds of miles away in Washington, D.C. working for the Watergate Committee.
But of all the Arkansas cuties who let Bill know they were available, he chose Marla Crider, with her intriguing looks and long dark hair. The first time they met, she later recalled in interviews for my book, it was practically love at first sight. She was so impressed with him that, ‘I told my mother that night, “Bill Clinton will someday be president.” I just instinctively felt like the sky was the limit for him.’
A number of books about the Clintons before mine had mentioned a ‘college girl’ who was romantically involved with Clinton during his first campaign, and had to be hidden whenever Hillary showed up. But no one had ever found her.
As she later noted to my researcher who tracked her down: ‘In 25 years I’ve never talked about this.’ But she finally decided to open up.
She said she knew that Hillary Rodham, then working in Washington for the Watergate committee, was Bill’s girlfriend, and had asked him ‘point-blank if he were engaged to her yet.’ Bill said no, noting, ‘If she chose to come back, I would probably pursue the relationship. But we’re not engaged.’ Marla said she believed him. She considered him hers.
But when she later asked him about Hillary she got quite a different response. ‘You and Hillary, what’s the deal? Are you in love with her?’ ‘Yeah, I am,’ he responded. ‘But I don’t know if this is right. …I don’t know if she can fit in here.’
‘What is it about her?’ Marla asked. Bill’s response surprised her. ‘She gets me started, kicks my butt, and makes me do the things I’ve got to do.’
To Marla it sounded more like Bill was discussing a tough Marine Corps drill instructor rather than a woman with whom he claimed he was in love with. ‘Are you going to build a marriage off of this?’ Marla asked dubiously.
Hillary had become aware of the romance – presumably from intelligence gathered from people she knew in the campaign. And she saw Marla as genuine threat to her future with Bill. Her claws were out and a number of a confrontations followed. Hillary made surprise visits to Bill’s campaign headquarters, in one instance causing Bill to cancel an overnight trip with Marla.
That night at headquarters Marla was drinking a glass of wine. Hillary, she recalled, ‘Strolls up to me, takes the glass of wine out of my hand, says, ‘Hmmm, wine’ – takes a drink of it, gives it back to me and says, staring me down, “I’ll have to get some of that.”
‘It was her way of letting me know – like a cat – marking its territory. Everybody in there just turned and looked, like what the hell was that all about? And Hillary just had this kind of half smirk on her face and she strolled off.‘
Read the rest of the story here.
DCG
