Force of Nature

Susan Carpenter-McMillan is thinking about a football game, a contest played 23 years ago at the Coliseum. It is Nov. 30, 1974, and her beloved USC Trojans are being pummeled by Notre Dame, 24-6. The newly minted wife and USC dropout, who left college to put her husband through law school, is so glum she can barely watch. She ponders the unthinkable: an early departure.

Suddenly, “Anthony Davis just ran this long touchdown, just ran the field,” she recalls. It is merely the first of several plays that will earn the game a berth in the annals of USC football. “I can remember watching him and thinking, yes, it’s going to be all right. We were so behind, but we won that game. They never scored another touchdown. A.D. turned around and did one touchdown, another touchdown, and Notre Dame was just standing there like ‘What happened?’ ”

Carpenter-McMillan is sitting on the terrace behind her house, overlooking a staggering slope of verdant grounds. Cut into the opulent hillside is a two-story concrete staircase, punctuated every few steps by miniature pools with fountains. The yard rivals not so much a football field as a meticulously landscaped Italian palazzo. Nonetheless, these grounds are her playing field, the venue from which she holds news conferences and denounces sitting presidents, rapists, sexual molesters and any other victimizers--accused or convicted--she has chosen to battle.

Only the day before, Carpenter-McMillan held court in front of her house in role as spokesperson for Paula Jones, the seemingly shy, publicly awkward Arkansas woman whose sexual-harassment suit against William Jefferson Clinton, with its reference to the “distinguishing characteristics” of his genitalia, has dogged the president for more than three years.

Carpenter-McMillan leans forward in her chair. In her mind, she has recast the game: USC is the unprepossessing Paula Jones. The Fighting Irish are led by all the president’s men, ranging from his lawyer, Robert S. Bennett, to constant defenders, consultant James Carville and presidential aide Paul Begala.

And, in the role of Anthony Davis, the quick-acting football savior of the day . . . it’s Susan Carpenter-McMillan.

“That game is so inspirational to me. When I go, ‘OK, Begala! OK, Carville, I’m here!’ Boomp, boomp, boomp!” She snaps her acrylic-nail-tipped fingers. “And I can guarantee we’re going to win.” She’s as cocky as a run-for-daylight tailback and expects her team to administer a very public whipping. It may be a settlement of money and an apology to Jones or a guilty verdict by a jury if the case goes to trial, as it is now scheduled to do next May in an Arkansas federal court.

Her critics say she’s made a nasty public battle even nastier, but Carpenter-McMillan has another interpretation. She believes her appearance on the scene was a turning point in the public’s perception of Paula Jones--from a hesitant, maligned pawn of the right to a righteously indignant, hard-working woman whose reputation was besmirched by a sleazeball.

Carpenter-McMillan’s task has not been made any easier by the Little Rock federal judge who slapped a gag order on participants in the case. Jones has gone from speaking softly into microphones to being practically invisible. No matter. She still has Susan Carpenter-McMillan--who is never invisible. Whatever else she has done for Paula Jones--who has always been something of an enigma--Carpenter-McMillan has been an effective lightning rod for the media. Not only does she have anecdotes (though limited in number) about Paula, but she offers her own life story, which is, frankly, more interesting.

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She is not a lawyer or a social worker--though she’s fond of referring to her causes as “cases” and people she helps as “clients.” She’s not a seasoned publicist or a reporter--though she says she missed her calling as an investigative journalist. She’s been called a professional political celebrity and a media hound. (Off the record, she’s been called worse). Critics and admirers alike say she is a continual sound bite waiting to happen.

Carpenter-McMillan has been described as Jones’ Svengali--changing the Arkansas woman’s look. (“I’ve made some suggestions to her,” Carpenter-McMillan says carefully. “Are you asking me if she’s going to have a nose job? She would like one. She can’t afford it. I think she’s beautiful the way she is.”) She has hovered protectively, chaperoning Jones at a press conference, baby-sitting her children during depositions in Little Rock in November.

She is never paid for her advocacy work and takes no money from Jones.

So what does she gets in return?

“Television, television, television,” says law professor Susan Estrich, an occasional talk-show sparring partner. “She loves it. It’s not a crime. Who doesn’t like it?”

Carpenter-McMillan has acknowledged that publicity might very well help her other causes, but there’s no personal benefit. “What do I get out of it? Great satisfaction that I’ve done something to make a difference. But monetarily, fiscally, nothing.”

A self-styled “conservative feminist,” Carpenter-McMillan has cut a wide swath across the issues of the day. She launched her public career as an anti-abortion activist in 1977, becoming a familiar fixture on California talk shows. In a 1990 article in The Times, she admitted that she’d had an abortion in 1970 while unmarried and in college (before she met her future husband) and vowed to continue her work as an anti-abortion activist. “This movement is my life,” she said at the time.

But by 1991, she had left that movement, having been asked by KABC-TV to replace Bruce Herschensohn as a paid conservative political commentator. “I could not remain single-issue,” she says. Besides, “it was really time. I had seen a lot of men taking over a movement that was really a woman’s.”

Her Channel 7 job ended in 1995 when the station abolished all regular political commentators. Since then, she has channeled her energies into getting stiffer penalties for child molesters and sex offenders. She helped create the state’s chemical castration bill, the first of its kind in the nation, and lobbied strenuously for its passage. The bill passed in 1996 and mandates the castration procedure for twice-convicted sex offenders.

Subtlety is not part of her arsenal. When convicted rapist Reginald Muldrew--who put pillowcases over the heads of his victims--was released from prison, she held a rally at which three pillowcases were held up in a row. On one was drawn the number 2; the second bore a zero and the third another zero. Together they represented 200, the number of rape cases in which Muldrew was a suspect. Later, Carpenter-McMillan got a telephone call from one of Muldrew’s victims, who called the exhibit offensive. Carpenter-McMillan apologized.

When she took Paula Jones as a “case,” she decried the feminist movement for ignoring the president’s accuser. She told one newspaper reporter that Clinton was a “slimeball” and frequently referred to Jones as “a modern day Joan of Arc.” She now admits that “slimeball” was not one of her “better phrases.” “But do I think he’s a slimeball? Yeah, I do.”

“Suzie’s a force of nature,” says Teri Reisser, one of Carpenter-McMillan’s best friends, who is also a family therapist in Thousand Oaks and a member of the board of the Women’s Coalition, a small activist organization co-founded by Carpenter-McMillan and funded by her husband. (The board--there are no members other than the board--consists of Carpenter-McMillan and her mother, Emma Carpenter, plus Reisser and three others.)

On television and in print, Carpenter-McMillan can be moralistic, outrageous, indignant and irreverent.

Talk shows love her.

After a recent taping of the raucous “Politically Incorrect,” on which she is a frequent guest, she introduced her two daughters to host Bill Maher. “Your mother is a very funny woman,” Maher noted, chuckling, “and I say that as a comedian with 18 years in the business.”

Carpenter-McMillan can be downright bawdy. During a leisurely dinner, she shared, among other things, that she can pee standing up. Waiting to go on the air during a CNN talk show to debate the Paula Jones issue, she and fellow guest Estrich launched into a discussion of oral sex. “I was laughing my head off,” Estrich says. “She’s a self-styled social conservative who’s not the least bit socially conservative.”

Carville, political consultant and longtime Clinton defender, is among Carpenter-McMillan’s adversaries on the talk show circuit. “She’s one of the more likable of the Clinton haters, if you can believe that,” he says.

Bill Press, now co-host of CNN’s “Crossfire,” and Carpenter-McMillan were dueling television commentators in Los Angeles in the early ‘90s. “I do respect and admire her abilities,” Press admits. “At the same time I shudder at some of the things I hear her say. She’s got a real trigger mouth. I think she’s the best thing that ever happened to Bill Clinton. The case and the person of Paula Jones have lost credibility because of Susan’s mouth.”

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At 49, Carpenter-McMillan is size-4 slender, perfectly manicured and made up. During one interview, she wears a cream-colored blouse and narrow beige slacks with a gold belt. On her arm is a gold Cartier panther watch with emeralds on its face. On one finger is a four-carat diamond ring--one carat for each of the four years she helped put her husband through law school. (He went to night school.) She readily admits to plastic surgery on her eyes--along with some work on her ski-slope perfect nose. Her poufy blond hair has become a signature. (“Paula doesn’t have big hair. I have big hair.”)

The wife of handsome, wealthy Pasadena personal-injury attorney William McMillan, 49, she lives on a San Marino estate decorated with faux classical flourishes and landscaped with sculpted bushes. She shows champion bichon frise dogs (like racehorses, the dogs are boarded and trained elsewhere), and she’s even had portraits painted of one. The dog, in a frock coat in several pictures, peers down from the walls of her foyer.

Two of the fluffy white bichons, retired from the show circuit, are in residence, sharing the house with a languid Himalayan cat and the McMillan daughters--Cameo, 19, and Tara, 13--plus a stream of visitors and reporters. Carpenter-McMillan has made the lush, quiet San Marino cul de sac arguably the most media-visited neighborhood this side of Brentwood. “Sometimes it becomes a bit burdensome,” says Bill McMillan ruefully. When he’s home, he retreats to his study. “I just close the door and smoke my cigars and let the world go by.”

When Paula Jones’ original lawyers, Joseph Cammarata and Gilbert K. Davis, left the case, McMillan negotiated with Bennett on Jones’ behalf and checked out the legal track record of her new attorneys. But in general, he stays on the sidelines. “Suzie is very passionate about a lot of things,” he says of his wife of 25 years. “There’s never a dull moment.”

Predictably, she’s been barraged by criticism that she is using Paula Jones to ratchet up her national profile; indeed, it’s the Jones case that has promoted Carpenter-McMillan from local celebrity to national talk-show regular. But Carpenter-McMillan and her friends say she has truly bonded with Paula Jones.

In the past half year, Carpenter-McMillan has gone from being Jones’ friend to her official spokesperson and advisor, back to friend and unofficial advisor. When Judge Susan W. Wright recently slapped all the participants with a gag order, Carpenter-McMillan asked to be relieved of her official duties as spokesperson. “I was only the official spokesperson for a month,” she says now.

“There was a time when there was a need for that,” says Wes Holmes, one of the six attorneys from Rader, Campbell, Fisher & Pyke, a Dallas firm with conservative ties that has been engaged to represent Jones. “It seemed like Bob Bennett was on TV every week, if not every day, saying things that we thought weren’t true, and Suzie felt, from a public relations perspective, she needed somebody out there telling Paula’s story. The case hasn’t needed that in a while.”

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Aside from her abortion, only one thing seems to fill Carpenter-McMillan with self-loathing. She recently succumbed to a habit she discarded 20 years ago--smoking.

“I absolutely, under no circumstance, want you saying anything about my smoking.” She says this despite the fact that she lights up shortly after I arrive. “I am livid that I smoke. Hopefully, by the time this comes out, I won’t be smoking.”

Several weeks later, Carpenter-McMillan is still smoking. “It’s the tensions of the case,” she announces. Besides, she has a partner in crime. “Paula smokes.”

There’s no question that Jones is, on the face of it, the kind of person to whom Carpenter-McMillan is drawn. “I go for the needy,” she announced the first time we spoke on the phone.

Now Carpenter-McMillan insists she wasn’t talking about Paula Jones.

“Needy is kind of a pathetic person, and that is not Paula Jones. Paula Jones is a very strong, strong, strong person.” She pauses for a minute. “Underdogs always appeal to me. And Paula’s definitely been an underdog.”

Jones was thrust into the public arena when an article in the January 1994 issue of the conservative journal, The American Spectator, stated that Clinton had met in a hotel room with a woman named “Paula” who was “available to be Clinton’s regular girlfriend.” In May 1994, she slapped both Clinton and State Trooper Danny Ferguson--the source of the anecdote in the magazine--with lawsuits for sexual harassment (against Clinton) and defamation of character (against Clinton and Ferguson). The defamation part of the suit against Clinton has since been dismissed by a judge. Clinton has denied the charges.

Jones claimed in her suit that Clinton dropped his pants in front of her in the hotel room and asked her to “kiss it.”

Meanwhile, Paula and her husband, Stephen, had just moved to Long Beach with their toddler son. Stephen was working as a ticket agent at LAX and nursing a dream of pursuing an acting career.

Conservative radio commentator Jane Chastain met Paula Jones after broadcasting favorable editorials on her case. Someone (“I think in her lawyer’s office”) wanted Chastain to accompany Jones to a press conference “to keep her from being scared to death.” In the end, Chastain just baby-sat for her son. But it occurred to Chastain--who had shared a radio program with Carpenter-McMillan in the late ‘80s--that Jones needed an ally.

Paula, meet Susan.

“Once I heard her story and got to know her, there was just no doubt in my mind.”

But Carpenter-McMillan says she was frustrated by the low-key public demeanor of Jones’ lawyers at the time and the spirited defense of Clinton’s allies. Eventually, Carpenter-McMillan decided to take herself off the bench and enter the game full blast.

“I watched all these spin doctors and called Joe [Cammarata] on the phone, and I said, ‘Why aren’t you doing something about this?’ And he’d say, ‘Oh, well, we don’t want to alienate them,’ blah, blah.”

As the other side continued to hammer away at Jones, Carpenter-McMillan says, Paula begged her to get publicly involved. “She’s crying and she says, ‘Look what they’re doing to me.’ And I said, ‘Oh, no, it’s your lawyers allowing this to happen to you.’ So she said, ‘Will you come on, now?’ And I said, ‘Move aside, you’re not going to stop me.’ And I called up [the lawyers] and said, ‘I’m on board. You don’t have to like it, you don’t have to approve of it. I’m here, I’m going to defend her.’

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Carpenter-McMillan’s friends say the cases she takes are her way of grappling with her demons. She admits she was sexually harassed on the job. “I was guest-hosting at a radio station in L.A. I remember one of the bosses said, ‘Is that a new blouse?’ And I said, ‘Yeah! You like it?’ And he said, ‘I’d like it a lot better on the floor’ and closed the door. And I said, ‘I’m sure you would, but you’re never going to see it, jerk!’ and walked out.”

(Now why couldn’t Paula have said that to Clinton? “She’s not me,” Carpenter-McMillan says coolly.)

And there is something else, from an earlier part of her life. “I’m a survivor,” she says quietly.

Her father, a well-to-do Glendale land developer who often volunteered his time to help the homeless, was asked to let a teenager about to join a gang live with the Carpenter family in hopes of keeping him off the streets. Carpenter-McMillan says that for the next year and a half, the young man repeatedly sexually molested her, threatening her and her family if she ever told. “I can tell you smells, colors, I can describe to you rust spots in the garage floor. It would remind me of being bent over, forced to keep my mouth shut as I turned that ink spot on the floor into a pony ride or a merry-go-round.” She was 6 at the time.

Though she long ago told her husband, children and closest friends, she never told her father--who died 10 years ago--and only told her mother in the last year. She has no idea where the man is or if he is even alive.

She’s never undergone psychotherapy. “My therapy is helping victims,” she says. “People say, ‘You’ll know what’s happened to Suzie by the causes she’s drawn to.’ ”

*

The limo to take Carpenter-McMillan to a taping of “Politically Incorrect” is late. When it finally arrives, she and her posse--her daughters, their friends and a reporter--squeeze themselves in.

She pulls out the briefing sheet to read about her fellow guests on the free-for-all talk show. Her admirers say she’s always prepared, but on this day she knows nothing about the three other panelists.

“Who’s Deepak Sho . . . Sho . . . Sho-par?” she stumbles over spiritual guru Deepak Chopra’s name. “Cam!” she says to her daughter above the chatter and the hip-hop music they’re playing in the back of the limo. “Who’s Joey Lawrence?” She is clueless about the list of guests with whom she will soon spar.

I give her the barest thumbnail sketches of Chopra, Lawrence and the other guest, film director and actor Ben Stiller. The limo arrives at the studio, and she is swept into the Green Room without a minute to spare. The first topic is the Promise Keepers’ controversial Washington march. “I feel like they’re getting a bum rap from a bunch of jealous feminists,” she says, hopping into the fray.

“There’s an element of fanaticism,” Chopra says.

Carpenter-McMillan and Chopra seem instantly to dislike each other. Among other things, she accuses him of hypocrisy. An hour ago, she couldn’t pronounce his name.

*

So what will Paula Jones get out of this relationship? Jones reportedly nixed a legal settlement in the works last summer that would have given her $700,000 and a vaguely worded statement from Clinton saying she was a person of good character. She has indicated she would rather settle for an outright apology than a huge sum of money. Carpenter-McMillan believes a high settlement and no apology would do just fine.

“We argue about it. I’ll say, ‘Take the money,’ ” says Carpenter-McMillan, who then imitates Jones’ Arkansas drawl. “She’ll go, ‘Soo-zay! You know this is not about the mun-ey.”’

And what’s it all about for Carpenter-McMillan?

“Five or six years ago, I could have told you what her ambitions were,” friend Teri Reisser muses. “I think she’d have loved to have had a national show, TV or radio. A political talk show. I honestly don’t know what she wants now.”

Carpenter-McMillan insists that she’s not in the game for the television contract. “I have everything I want. I don’t need any more money. I don’t want to do a national television show. Then I go on and talk about what other people are doing. It’s a whole lot more interesting to me to see that a president pays for sexual harassment, or a rapist becomes a celebrity so he can’t rape again. I don’t want to be on CNN and say, ‘Tonight’s topic is foreign trade.’ I love going on to fight for what I believe in.”