My life

On October 11, 1975, we were married in the big living room of the little house at 930 California Drive, which had been replastered under the watchful eye of Marynm Bassett, a fine decorator who knew our budget was limited. For example, she helped us pick out bright yellow wallpaper for the breakfast room, but we put it on ourselves, an experience that reaffirmed my limitations as a manual laborer. Hillary wore an old-fashioned Victorian lace dress that I loved, and the Reverend Vic Nixon married us in the presence of Hillary’s parents and brothers, Mother, Roger (who served as best man), and a few close friends: Hillary’s closest friend from Park Ridge, Betsy Johnson Ebeling, and her husband, Tom; her Wellesley classmate Johanna Branson; my young cousin Marie Clinton; my campaign treasurer, F. H. Martin, and his wife, Myrna; our best friends on the law faculty, Dick Atkinson and Elizabeth Osenbaugh; and my childhood friend and tireless campaign worker Patty Howe. Hugh Rodham never thought he’d be giving his midwestern Methodist daughter to a Southern Baptist in the Arkansas Ozarks, but he did it. By then I had been working on him and the rest of the Rodhams for four years. I hoped I had won them over. They certainly had captured me.

After the ceremony, a couple hundred of our friends gathered at Morriss and Ann Henry’s house for a reception, and that evening we danced the night away at Billie Schneider’s place in the Downtown Motor Inn. At about 4 a.m., after Hillary and I had gone to bed, I got a call from my younger brother-inlaw, Tony, who was at the Washington County jail. While he was driving one of the guests home after the party, he was pulled over by a state trooper, not because he was speeding or weaving on the road, but because his tipsy rider was dangling her feet out of the car’s back window. After he stopped Tony, the deputy could see he had been drinking, so he hauled him in. When I got down to the jail to bail him out, Tony was shivering. The jailer told me that our sheriff, Herb Marshall, a Republican whom I liked, kept the jail real cold at night to keep the drunks from throwing up. As we were leaving, Tony asked me if I would get another man released who was in town making a movie with Peter Fonda. I did. He was shaking worse than Tony, so badly that when he got in his car to drive away, he rammed right into Hillary’s little yellow Fiat. Even though I bailed him out, the guy never paid me for the costs of the car repair. On the other hand, at least he didn’t leave his dinner on the floor of the county jail. So ended my first night as a married man.

For the longest time I’d never thought I’d get married. Now that I was, it felt right, but I wasn’t sure where it would lead us.

Probably more has been written or said about our marriage than about any other in America. I’ve always been amazed at the people who felt free to analyze, criticize, and pontificate about it. After being married for nearly thirty years and observing my friends’ experiences with separations, reconciliations, and divorces, I’ve learned that marriage, with all its magic and misery, its contentments and disappointments, remains a mystery, not easy for those in it to understand and largely inaccessible to outsiders. On October 11, 1975, I didn’t know any of that. All I knew then was that I loved Hillary, the life, work, and friends we now had in common, and the promise of what we could do together. I was proud of her, too, and thrilled to be in a relationship that might not ever be perfect, but would certainly never be boring.

After our sleepless wedding night, we went back to work. We were in the middle of a school term, and I had black-lung hearings to attend. Two months later, we finally had a honeymoon in Acapulco, an unusual one, with Hillary’s whole family and the girlfriend of one of her brothers along. We all spent a week together in a beautiful penthouse suite, walking on the beach, enjoying the restaurants. I know it was different, but we had a great time. I adored Hillary’s mother, Dorothy, and enjoyed spending time with her father and brothers, playing pinochle and swapping stories. Like me, they were storytellers, and all of them could spin a good yarn.

I read one book in Acapulco, Ernest Becker’s The Denial of Death— heavy reading for a honeymoon, but I was only a year older than my father was when he died, and I had just taken a big step. It seemed like a good time to keep exploring the meaning of life.