Linda & Harry & Bill & Hillary

When it looked as if the whole thing might die in the snowdrifts of New Hampshire, when Gennifer Flowers and the specter of the Oxford draft dodger threatened to kill him off, when he had been gripped by the flu and seemingly eaten every fast-food burger in New England while metamorphosing into an indulged doughboy, it had been Harry who had simply gone out and bought him bigger suits. It had been megamillionaire and TV emperor Harry who, working on three hours' sleep, got down on his hands and knees to lay color-coordinated carpet in a television studio for the candidate's live call-in show before New Hampshire voters. It had been Linda, ten days before the primary, who had directed the gathering of filmed testaments from Arkansans, film to be used in New Hampshire advertising in order to dispel the image of the Oxford draft dodger. It had been Linda, in July, who had written, produced and edited The Man from Hope, a moving 14-minute bio-pic on her friend, which rival Republican strategist Mary Matalin would later call "the single most important visual in turning around the preconvention image of Clinton as a pampered, spineless guy and in sending him out of Madison Square Garden in first place, when he had arrived in third."

After defeating George Bush, whom Harry and Linda had supported four years earlier, Bill Clinton emotionally acknowledged his debt to Harry at a November party for the producer on his 52nd birthday. "He was there when I got sick and I was under siege and I got so fat I could hardly walk," said the president-elect during a toast. There were hugs. Hillary Clinton and Linda led everyone in singing That's What Friends Are For.

By the following May it felt like ancient history.

Just four months after they had celebrated the first full day of their friend's new administration by sleeping in the Lincoln bedroom, the First Friends had become the headache of the week inside the White House, the latest culprits in a series of public-relations gaffes that threatened to imperil the president's image and governing ability. The charges were serious: Television producer and aircraft entrepreneur Harry Thomason, who had been the Inauguration impresario, had abused his friendship with the president by wasting his time about a matter of importance to no one but Harry Thomason and some of his friends. He had called Clinton and a White House staff member, interceding on behalf of a Cincinnati-based aviation consulting firm in which Thomason held a minority interest and which, only days earlier, had been rebuffed by the White House travel office when a partner expressed interest in bidding for a piece of the White House charter business. Within a week of Thomason's phone calls, an investigation of the travel office was launched, during which someone from the Clinton administration set in motion an FBI investigation as well. Bloodcurdling screams came from Republicans who, evoking the horrors of Watergate, charged the White House with using the FBI for personal gain and political purposes. Travelgate, as it was called, swiftly dumped Harry Thomason and his wife, 46-year-old television writer and producer Linda Bloodworth-Thomason, into the world of newspaper photographs and TV talk shows. Harry dryly indicated that he had but a trifling $25,000 interest in his partners' charter business and characterized his actions as those of a patriotic whistle-blower. "I just called to the White House's attention," he told Good Morning America, "a rather galling and outrageous practice of a government office that didn't want to consider companies that wanted to do business with them--not do business with them, but just consider them. It seemed to me that it was something I should bring to the attention of the White House, because all my friends in the charter business were saying, 'We can't talk to these people, we can't do business with them. Is that the way that government is supposed to work?' I didn't think it was. No, I didn't [stand to gain financially from this]."

For her part, a more fiery and colorful Linda expressed a newfound sympathy for Bebe Rebozo and other former First Foils. She said she would not permit "slanderous" allegations to go unanswered, blithely declaring that, as she and her husband each made a six-figure salary weekly, "setting our sights on the travel office would be the financial equivalent of us taking over somebody's lemonade stand."

Harry and Linda let it be known that they received millions to produce their sitcoms, and an unseemly portrait of an out-of-touch couple from lotusland bragging about their riches began to take shape. Republican operatives, sensing the political fallout, could hardly mask their glee. Mary Matalin, a Bush strategist who was, improbably, a friend of the Thomasons', chooses her words carefully: "I don't know if I would have advised the same approach they took, the media blitz. I know the White House is mad at them for going on shows and talking about it."

(continued on page 100)Linda & Harry & Bill & Hillary(continued from page 80)

Within the recesses of the White House, disappointment with the producers' public-relations campaign burgeoned. Aides began sniping. "We're hoping this will go away if we leave it alone," says one, "but Harry and Linda are bent on overkill. All these shows--CNN, ABC, you name it. They don't understand they're giving a longer life to this mess by putting themselves in the headlines."

Linda suspected the existence of a disgruntled faction within the White House, and she knew of nosy journalists poking around, rattling cages, hoping to prod the people into admitting that all was not well at 1600 Pennsylvania Avenue. She carefully screened print journalists, and those deemed worthy of her time were generally bound by tight strictures defining which remarks could and could not be attributed to her. Early on, Playboy was deemed unacceptable. Friends and family were told not to talk. Her brother Randy, an attorney in Poplar Bluff, Missouri, consented to talk about his sister and brother-in-law--only to telephone 48 hours before the scheduled interview to inform this reporter that the chat was off. Linda had expressed her displeasure, citing her feminist concerns. Then, late on a weekend afternoon, long past the original deadline for this story, Linda reverses her position in the name of self-interest. "You beat us down," she says over the phone in good-natured resignation. "I guess we have to talk. So what are we going to talk about?"

She had called this writer at home but, notwithstanding that initiative, she wants to be clear about what is on and off the record. And she is very cautious in her responses.

Why have she and Harry come under such attack from politicians and the Washington press?

"What do you mean, 'attack'?" she counters. She wants time to formulate a response. "The reaction of some people--," she says slowly and then pauses. "Let me see how I want to put this." She thinks it over some more. "At the center of the problem is, no--" She reworks the thought yet again. "Here it is: The attitude of some people, like the Washington press, is, 'Who do you think you are, saying all these things on television? It's not the way things are done.' There is a vocal, powerful minority out there that thinks you can [offer political comment] only on the op-ed page of The New York Times or CNN or MacNeil-Lehrer."

As she blasts the Washington press as "the fourth branch of government," she stops to ask her listener to hang on, there's a call on the other line. It's Hillary Clinton phoning from Hawaii. Linda returns, having told the first lady she'll call her back, and demands to know to where "this article is going. Is this another 'The hicks get caught up over their heads in Washington'? Is that it? 'The hicks who talk funny, blah, blah, blah'? Tell me it's not that. Tell me it's not going to be me talking funny. Tell me it's not some kind of Minnie Pearl crap. They always do that to me, don't they?"

They. For both Linda and Harry, the world is divided into two camps: Us versus Them. Arkansans versus Yankee snobs. Hollywood outsiders versus the entertainment establishment. Friends of Bill versus the D.C. power elite. Wherever they went, it often seemed to the couple that they were under siege.

The Washington press fed their fears by gnawing on them, dismissing them as a couple of shameless self-promoters. A caustic scribe in Newsweek advised them to "go home."

But when Travelgate broke, the Thomasons kept talking. It was an unwelcome posture for Harry, a man who, even when armed with clever lines from Linda's pen, was an awkward, halting speaker. But Linda came alive for journalists, suggesting that a just revenge would be in store, revealing plans for a new TV series about Washington for which the current controversy had yielded "tons of material" about opportunistic politicians and reporters.

"The Thomasons don't understand that less is more here when you deal with image problems," says the White House aide who complained about overkill. "None is sometimes more here. You ignore the other side and hope it dies, and it usually does. They're Hollywood people and maybe they don't see what they're doing to us. To them, maybe you run over people. Somebody doesn't do what they want, they cut him off at the knees. Maybe there's no such thing as excessiveness to them."

Them. Hollywood people. Had they overheard, the Thomasons might have smiled, never having been on the A-list in their adopted town. The couple chose to live in the hinterlands of the San Fernando Valley, didn't frequent trendy restaurants, seldom attended industry parties and generally were viewed as Arkansas immigrants on something of a cultural visa. Washington was even worse. When Linda was quoted as saying of herself and her husband, "We are definitely going to serve as consultants for how the White House can be effectively used," the White House aide was incredulous: "It would have been more accurate for her to say that she's just a friend who wants to help out. There are better things for her to be talking about right now than her influence or Christophe."

Christophe is the hairdresser who, introduced by Linda to Hillary Clinton, trimmed Bill Clinton's locks for $200 while Air Force One tied up traffic at Los Angeles International Airport for 45 minutes (according to media accounts). Harry had reportedly called Christophe and made all of the arrangements. Linda became swallowed up in another public-relations campaign. "Christophe has never cut our hair," she insisted. "Christophe has worked on one of our shows. The president has no idea what Christophe charges. The president would go to Haircuts R Us."

Travelgate had segued into Hair Force One. It was a double-Excedrin week for the Clinton aide, who explains: "Washington doesn't take kindly to celebrity outsiders dabbling. And that's the perception. Outsiders dabbling and maybe looking to get something for themselves. Not just Linda and Harry but all these people from the West Coast talking about health care or the environment. For them, when all this is over, they get to go back home and make television shows and movies."

Them. Linda had identified herself, upon arriving in Hollywood, as a charm soldier in a rebel battalion of Thems. She came from southern Missouri, just over the border from Arkansas--which is to say the northern edge of the Bible Belt in the Ozarks--and she had an accent that, to city folks, might have called to mind Elly May Clampett howling for Jethro. Someone less secure than Linda Bloodworth may have wondered whether, in hearing that drawl, studio chieftains would write her off as a yahoo. But characteristically, she flaunted what she had, made it all--the accent, her hyper (continued on page 170) Linda & Harry & Bill & Hillary (continued from page 100) persona and country-girl humor--work for her.

"So you're the other hick on the lot," is how she aggressively greeted burly Harry Thomason, an ex-football lineman, on the day they met at Columbia Studios in the early Eighties. Thomason, who grew up in the Arkansas town of Hampton, also knew something about overcoming the perceptions of men with more education and big-city style. Less than a decade earlier, he had been a restless, ambitious Little Rock high school football coach who, with no experience, had finessed his way into a job filming TV commercials for an Arkansas gubernatorial candidate. A few years later, after hitching a ride to California on a Federal Express plane, he managed to persuade a Hollywood producer to buy the film rights to a story he owned about a terminally ill athlete. He quickly went into a hundred key Rolodexes, one of those men who made their livings in Hollywood moving from production jobs on one TV series to the next. There were disappointments, but he prospered. He had come to recognize, among other things, tenacity and grit, and in the young woman from just across his state's border he sensed a kindred spirit.

Friends say he saw much the same thing when his brother Danny introduced him to Bill Clinton, a young Arkansan with a personal career plan so lofty that a less driven soul than Harry Thomason might have viewed it as foolhardy conceit. But Thomason was drawn to those with bold ambitions. Over time, he became a confidant, ally and the closest of friends with Clinton. He relied on instinct when it came to choosing his friends and causes alike. As a 16-year-old, Thomason had been ready to travel to Cuba and fight alongside Castro's guerrillas against Batista, until his mom said no. "Harry has a lot of Jimmy Stewart in him," his wife would later reflect. "He doesn't calculate, looking only for the safe way, the winning way."

In 1983, recently divorced from his first wife, he married Linda Bloodworth, whom he frequently squired to the Arkansas Governor's Mansion. It was a place Linda had come to know well, having formed a close bond with the lady of the house, Hillary Rodham Clinton.

Them. Both women knew what it felt like to be lumped into a group either underestimated or ignored--and Linda had staked her career on writing about Them. Them would come to include neglected and abused women, social lepers (particularly victims of racism and AIDS), anyone deprived of equal opportunity. An artist carrying the burdens of a Bible Belt accent and her gender understood this last tenet as well as anyone, but for a stranger to grasp it, maybe a trip to Little Rock, Arkansas is required. Arkansas is the place where Linda's grandfather, a muckraking newspaper editor, was shot by the Klan. It is a place where the first thing former gubernatorial candidate Frank Whitbeck tells you is that his city's self-image has never gotten over being stigmatized by the school desegregation struggle some 35 years ago.

If you are over 45 and living in Little Rock, chances are you have spent a fair portion of your life wondering whether outsiders consider you and your neighbors to be a pack of undereducated, straw-chewing, racist Li'l Abners. In trying to portray Bill Clinton as the administrator of a sorry state, George Bush's campaign played hard to this image and ran TV ads of vultures sitting on withered Arkansas fences. This only served to rip away at over three decades of scar tissue in Little Rock, reminding the middle-aged and elderly there that even the glamour of a presidential favorite son couldn't erase their poor-folk, redneck, outsider status. To Northerners, they'd always be Them.

"What Linda and Harry are pushing, as far as they're concerned, are tolerance and opportunity, equity and education," says one longtime Little Rock friend. "It's all intertwined and it all stems from their experiences. Harry likes to say that the difference between success and failure for him was razor-thin. It could just as easily not have happened, because there weren't a lot of people getting behind a guy from Arkansas. Same for Linda. There have been a lot of themes in their shows, especially on Designing Women, about AIDS, gays, things you don't see on other shows. They're not talkers but doers. They get their hands dirty, they get something done."

It is another way of saying that neither has ever been a limousine liberal, like so many are in Hollywood. Tom Hoover, today a high school teacher in Linda's hometown of Poplar Bluff, Missouri, remembers humid July mornings in 1968, when he, Bloodworth and a couple other friends piled into Hoover's beat-up Pontiac at five A.M. to make an 80-mile trek across the border to attend summer school classes at Arkansas State, in Jonesboro. "Most of us were thinking of getting credits and moving on," Hoover remembers. "Moving on meant getting a job somewhere around Poplar Bluff. But not Linda. She said she wanted to go to an inner-city school and teach English. And she said she wanted to work in Hollywood. That was strange in these parts. Few people branched out."

After graduating from the University of Missouri, Linda drove to Los Angeles and taught English at an impoverished school in Watts, where another English teacher had been raped a year earlier. In the next two years, a counselor was beaten nearly to death, a couple of her students were shot dead in the streets and Linda Bloodworth evolved from a bleeding-heart liberal to a "brokenhearted one." It was at this time that she began writing scripts with actress Mary Kay Place. A free-lance M*A*S*H script catapulted Bloodworth into the business. After enduring the disappointments of a few short-lived series, Linda struck pay dirt with Designing Women, her comic exploration of the travails faced by a group of freewheeling women interior designers in Atlanta looking to, among other things, redefine their roles in a world dominated by men. The creator later declared, "I wanted to take the 'victim' out of woman and show the kinds of strong persons I knew from my childhood," an allusion mostly to her mother, who contracted AIDS from a blood transfusion during heart surgery and died during the series' first season. "The people I knew never complained, always kept going and always maintained a sense of humor. You don't forget that."

Designing Women afforded Linda Bloodworth-Thomason the opportunity to write about what she knows best--Southern eccentricities and social inequities. Skillful enough to entertain while trumpeting her social agenda, an emboldened Bloodworth-Thomason was not only rewarded with two new series, Hearts Afire and Evening Shade, but used the latter years of Designing Women to touch on everything from sexual bondage to gun control.

Closest to her heart, in and out of Hollywood, however, were women's issues. Spending millions of dollars of her own money in Poplar Bluff and Little Rock, she created an educational foundation, the Claudia Company. In addition to administering literacy and cultural programs, the foundation now puts more than 50 needy Ozark women through college each year. Never did she try hiding her desire to use her shows to advance her political and social viewpoint. "Every writer has an agenda, and if he says he doesn't, he's lying or stupid," asserts Norma Vela, a former executive producer of Designing Women. "Every script has a message. The difference is, Linda knows what her message is and directs it consciously."

While preaching evenhandedness and urging her writers to present both sides of any inflammatory issue, Bloodworth-Thomason's yearning for objectivity generally succumbed to a passion for seeing her viewpoint prevail. "Just be sure our side looks a little better,'" Vela remembers Bloodworth-Thomason instructing. Supporters of the National Rifle Association's opposition to gun control, for instance, would have their position articulated through the crude, inchoate thoughts of intransigent, thick-as-mud Suzanne. "Having Suzanne with a gun in her hand was a wonderful message," remembers Vela. "She would talk about how wonderful guns were. The only problem with that position naturally would be, 'Do you want this kind of woman to have a gun?'"

Few episodes during the show's seven-season run were devoid of sociopolitical messages. Subtlety seldom counted on Designing Women. The strength of the show came from bold, in-your-face humor and enraged soliloquies: When one character died of AIDS, for example, an irate Julia confronted a homophobic client while Mary Jo fought for a sex-education program in a local school. At some point, every character stood for a noble or asinine social proposition. Julia challenged leering construction workers with a swaggering oration that turned the tables on the hard hats and became a comic teach-in on sexual harassment. Stubborn Suzanne wore fur and incited a riot among animal-rights advocates. Charlene promptly lost her faith in a favorite church minister when he refused to allow women into the ministry--an episode that, interestingly, was never again aired by CBS. Silly Suzanne drooled over the prospect of being admitted into an elite Atlanta country club, while the other women criticized the hidden code of discrimination in the club's bylaws. Anthony, the women's witty black friend and assistant, ultimately rejected an offer to join the club after perceiving the gesture to be nothing more than tokenism.

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Before Designing Women was canceled, one of its most loyal staff members suggested that the show's objectivity had occasionally threatened to buckle beneath Linda's dogmatic passion. After all, Linda had promoted her friend Bill subtly on the show. Her characters on Designing Women more than once said that they had had a conversation with Governor Clinton, who in real life was attempting to become a player on the national scene, positioning himself for a run at the presidency.

In 1988, however, Clinton remained part of Them, another safe and placid Southern politician who, as a gesture of thanks for his vigorous support of Michael Dukakis, had been tapped to place the name of the Massachusetts governor in nomination at the Democratic National Convention in Atlanta. What followed was an unmitigated disaster, a platitudinous, numbing oration that went on for 20 minutes too long as the television networks panned to shots of delegates giving Clinton the cut sign across their throats.

When Clinton finally finished, a relieved cheer rose from the floor. The moment intended to have been the favorite son's introduction to the country and a launching pad for his 1992 presidential aspirations suddenly looked as if it were an act of self-immolation.

But then Harry Thomason appeared with a reprieve: After meeting much resistance, he had persuaded Fred De Cordova, producer of The Tonight Show, to invite Clinton to appear on the show. Before Clinton could say no, Harry promised the producer that the young governor would play his saxophone--a trick he'd repeat four years later with Arsenio Hall.

Clinton proved to be unflappable on The Tonight Show that night in 1988, smiling at Johnny Carson's jokes, poking fun at himself. "It was not my best hour," he admitted of the speech. "It was not even my best hour and a half." The audience and Carson chuckled. Clinton played his sax. It marked the beginning of his first national comeback in a string of resurrections to follow.

Good friends return favors, and Clinton did. At the end of the 1990--1991 television season, when executives at Columbia Pictures sent signals of backing Delta Burke, a star of Designing Women who was locked in a power struggle with the Thomasons, Clinton telephoned top executives at Columbia and CBS who, according to rumors, had already hired a replacement for the Thomasons. In the end, Burke lost, for reasons quite apart from Clinton's involvement. But the bond between the governor and his TV friends grew closer still. Hillary suggested to Linda the title for her new show Evening Shade, inspired by a town of the same name in northeastern Arkansas.

And when Clinton's 1992 presidential campaign threatened to unravel, the Thomasons once more intervened. Linda called down to Little Rock for filmmaker Joe Glass--who frequently filmed exterior footage of Arkansas for Designing Women--and commissioned him to shoot interviews with Arkansas veterans and Clinton supporters to be used in commercials during the primary. "It was no more than ten days before the New Hampshire primary, and maybe as close as five days," Glass remembers. "I was sending raw interview footage to Linda in Los Angeles, who was there doing her shows and simultaneously editing the film. She bought satellite time to send the footage to Harry. Mind you, this wasn't Clinton campaign money she was spending. This was her own money and Harry's. These were their commercials."

Harry maneuvered himself into strategy sessions. "The campaign was falling like a rock," recounts David Matthews, a lawyer and former Arkansas state legislator who stumped with Clinton. "Harry indicated that he was available to produce some live call-in television programs for Bill. A live show was a risk, but we needed something dramatic. Harry did everything, even laid carpet. We did two shows. They helped us enormously."

Clinton came out of New Hampshire with a second-place finish, dubbing himself the Comeback Kid and acquiring new life. After he steamrollered Paul Tsongas in the South, the inevitability of his nomination became tainted by the belief in many Democratic quarters that he could not overcome the character issue. On the eve of the Democratic Convention, with polls showing the candidate running third behind George Bush and Ross Perot, Harry turned to David Matthews and expressed his frustration with Clinton campaign operatives. "Conventions are boring, and these guys all know politics, but they don't know TV," he said. "We need something different on television for this convention, a new idea."

Linda had already expressed an idea to Harry from her office in Los Angeles, while Designing Women producer Norma Vela and others listened. "Let's bring him into the convention hall on Wednesday [the night the roll call would be read and Clinton officially nominated] like John Kennedy did in 1960," she said. "Send him into the hall for a few minutes and then he comes back the next night for the acceptance speech."

Harry orchestrated the event, which came to be known as the Walk, a stroll from a restaurant in Macy's into Madison Square Garden, where Clinton hugged his mother, waved to delirious delegates and paraphrased the words that Linda had written for him only minutes earlier: "Tradition prevents me from accepting the nomination tonight, but I want you to know that tomorrow night the Comeback Kid is coming back one more time."

The next evening, moments prior to Clinton's acceptance speech, came Linda's film. With it, Mary Matalin remembers, came "the breakthrough for the Clinton campaign. She had helped transform his image from that of a rich, bratty Yale punk into an Everyman populist. I was on the other side, but I respect those kinds of abilities."

Months later, outsiders were so impressed with Harry's orchestration of Inauguration festivities that rumors began circulating about the Atlanta Olympic Games organizers' interest in having Thomason run their extravaganza. While those close to the couple see Harry's ambitions as sweeping, they believe Linda already has what she wants. "She'll always write," her childhood friend Nancy Garrett says emphatically. "She's an artist first, a writer who can write like lightning. I think she knows that is where her talent lies."

"Linda will never be an ideologue," says attorney Phil Kaplan. "What's liberal, what's conservative--that isn't what she watches. She's moved by things she sees and hears. I could see her and Harry saying to the president and Hillary, 'I'm tired of hearing about sick, hungry kids in Bosnia.' [But] they're not the type to get into the particulars of policy."

Few of even Clinton's most partisan critics would suggest that Harry Thomason is looking to profit directly off his bonds to the White House. "Harry is as honest as they come," acknowledges Mary Matalin. "I'm sure he believed he was acting on Clinton's behalf in the whole travel office thing, and maybe, at the same time, giving a hand to a friend who he thought was getting a raw deal. Friendship means a lot to Harry."

In Little Rock, a small, clannish city where the measure of a man's worth is as much reflected in his clout as in his bank account, this kind of friendship counts a great deal. It is not called cronyism there. It is called helping your friends. It is not in every case altogether altruistic or benign, but sometimes it's an exercise of power intended to aggrandize the donor. For Harry Thomason, being a buddy of Bill Clinton's might present many more opportunities to play helper, to build his reputation among the people whose opinions matter most to him.

Concerned Arkansas loyalists with ties to both the Clintons and Thomasons hope to see a new discretion from the producers. "Harry and Linda were indispensable during the campaign," observes former gubernatorial candidate Whitbeck, a Clinton supporter. "But now is the time for them to go from being visible to behind the scenes."

The Thomasons have never shown much inclination to ignore or finesse a controversy. They have instead displayed an inclination for scorched-earth campaigns. In 1990 the couple publicly skewered Delta Burke with a letter to the press that derided Burke's work habits. Reportedly, they have not spoken in years to a much-respected television producer and executive, Barbara Corday, whom they once suspected of trying to wrest a show from them. When Chicago Tribune columnist Mike Royko, who has needled the Thomasons for being "tenants of the White House," charged them with patterning their Hearts Afire character Georgie Ann Lahti after a colleague of Royko's, Georgie Ann Geyer, Harry called Royko senile. The couple's Los Angeles attorney sent Royko a letter that, according to the columnist, threatened a lawsuit. "We don't need any more of this," says the White House aide. "Ignore, ignore: That's what some people have gently told them. Apparently, they are not wired to ignore. They seem to keep tabs."

And play by their own set of rules. Months earlier, while refusing to cooperate with any story by Playboy, Linda indicated, through an assistant, that her problem with the magazine could be solved if it agreed to her terms: "'If Playboy had any guts,'" the assistant, Allen Crowe, quoted Linda as saying, "'it'd let me do the Playboy Interview.'" Crowe added that Linda wanted the story told of the first letter she claims to have ever written, an angry note dashed off by a precocious eight-year-old to Hugh Hefner, in which she purportedly asked the publisher how he would feel to be photographed naked, with his legs spread, on a bearskin rug.

Of course, Linda is accustomed to playing journalists like a country fiddler plucks strings. In declining interview requests, she will claim, through a representative, to be "overexposed, a victim of a vicious and petty press," only by the next morning to be talking live on television before 20 million viewers. In early July she happily solicited interviews in order to tell the press corps that she and Delta Burke, her old punching bag and mortal foe, had made up: Delta, said Linda, may well be starring as the congresswoman in the Thomasons' new series about Washington, D.C. The Hollywood trade papers splashed the news over their front pages: The disclosure carried, if nothing else, great promotional value for a fledgling television project to which, as of that moment, CBS had not yet officially committed. And later, when Burke said she wasn't interested, no one seemed to notice.

In the following weeks, an assistant repeated that Linda regrets she cannot accept any new interview requests. Then came the late-Saturday-afternoon phone call and Linda's friendly concession to a chat.

First impressions can be arresting. Her accent is mild, suggesting that years of living in California have taken their toll. Still, the entire subject of her accent irritates her: She wants it understood that she never sounded like a cousin of the Beverly Hillbillies'. "But I have a lisp," she confesses. "It's bad. Don't you hear it? Can't you hear it?"

She is asked about the White House aide's criticism of her high-profile public-relations offensive. "PR offensive? Listen, Harry and I took only 40 minutes to respond," she says, and then pauses to establish ground rules for the rest of the interview: She wants to speak largely off the record. On-the-record quotations will be carefully rationed. She labors to compose an on-the-record response to the assertion that she and Harry may have temporarily damaged the political standing of their close friend. "We didn't keep the travel-office issue going, the Washington press did. Cynicism is confused with sophistication in Washington. Washington is a place where you're considered flamboyant if you don't wear support hose. My husband and I had the right to defend ourselves against scurrilous charges. Do I have to weigh strategy in order to do that? I'm not interested in doing things only because they're strategically correct. I'm a Harry Truman fan and I think you have to do what you think is right, whether it is strategically correct or not.

"We come from a part of the country," continues Linda, "where people take time to respond to scurrilous things. You never look particularly good defending yourselves, but Harry and I have only two choices. We can either be lying sleazeballs from Hollywood if we don't respond or, if we do respond, we're rank amateurs from Dogpatch."

She digests a question about the Clintons' reaction to her much-publicized television appearances. No, she says firmly. There will be no answers to any questions on such a subject. Nice try.

Those who know best insist that the bonds among the four friends remained close during Harry and Linda's time of trial. Clinton, goes the story, privately feels sympathy for his pals. He knows that a president might have a dreadful Monday, but his ceaseless command of the national stage guarantees him the chance to turn public opinion around by Wednesday. Mortals don't have the same chance to get out of the morass. When Clinton read that Linda had hyperbolically declared, "You'd think the president was friends with the Buttafuocos," he let loose with a raucous stream of un-presidential guffaws.

Back in Los Angeles, Linda cannot share in the merriment. She decides to go ahead with a small oration that she's been ambivalent about uttering for the past half hour. "Arkansas, Hollywood, sitcom--these three things are not good symbols as far as the press is concerned," she declares. "'You are not correct, not right for this' is their attitude. I'm offended by it. It's sad that people in Washington wake up with nothing on their minds other than whether David Broder and Bill Safire think they're OK. Is that what good government should be about?"

She groans when asked whether she is seeking to advance a particular sociopolitical agenda. There will be no discussion of the subject for attribution, but it hardly matters: The topic seems genuinely to bore her. She and Harry had the opportunity to work in the new administration and both turned their backs on the chance. For her part, she sees herself as a writer who simply wants a medium to make her funny points about the foibles and injustices of the world. "We don't think of ourselves as political advisors," she mumbles, perhaps realizing that anything she says will reflect on her famous friends. Declining to comment on sensitive matters serves everyone's interests best. "The episodes will speak for themselves," she says cryptically when asked how her new television series will treat the Washington press corps and the Republican congressional leadership.

She has warmer feelings about Hollywood than she does about Washington. "There's more reality here. In Washington, everything is perception. Hollywood is a much less hysterical and pretentious town. But I chose not to play the Hollywood game. I didn't have a Rolodex. I didn't know all the names."

Now that she is speaking in a rush, some of her Southern twang is coming back. "I probably was impeded [in Hollywood], but maybe I was too dumb to know it. There may have been some resistance to my always bringing my heritage into my work. Maybe I was too naive to know it."

It is time to get off: It's now past seven on a Saturday night and, after calling Hillary back, she will be into the wee hours of the weekend writing a script and, yes, she must go, but not before a last jab. What are you going to say about my accent? She presses once, twice and, getting nowhere, says goodnight.

Elsewhere, her friends voice concern. "A lot of people are worried about any story on Harry and Linda," admits Joe Glass in Arkansas. "This is Little Rock. People are always wondering what you guys are going to say about us and folks down here."

It is a hot, humid, overcast day off the Arkansas River, with thunderstorms forecast. The sky is as monochromatically gray as the mood, and Glass, an amiable and intelligent man, frowns in his effort to make you understand the psychology of the place and, possibly, its most famous residents.

The Thems, he says, just want respect: Linda Bloodworth-Thomason makes an ungodly living writing about Them, while keeping an eye out for the well-being of two Arkansans laboring in the biggest fishbowl anywhere on the planet. "People who aren't from a place like this don't understand the feelings people from here have toward one another," Glass says. "You've always felt on the outside of things. Only now somebody says, 'Here's your chance.' Maybe what people like that want more than anything is to show that they can do it. We've been made fun of so much, people get paranoid, start having doubts. But any success tends to take away some of that. Bill and Hillary, Harry and Linda, they're those kinds of folks. I get the feeling Linda and Harry just want to keep it going."

"For Linda and Harry, the world is divided into two camps: Us vs. Them. Arkansans vs. Yankee snobs."