It’s Separate Tables for Jones, Clinton at Gala Dinner

In Long Beach, she is a shy stay-at-home mom with few friends and an unemployed husband who wants to be an actor.

But at the White House Correspondents’ Dinner in Washington on Saturday night, Paula Corbin Jones was the trophy guest.

Jones’ sexual harassment suit against President Clinton has been dismissed by an Arkansas judge. But to Washington journalists attending their annual ritual of self-congratulation, Paula Jones is anything but a woman legally scorned.

Rather, she is the woman whose charges have dished up a year’s worth of bread and butter, the woman whose case brought the American newspaper reader Monica S. Lewinsky and Kathleen Willey and former Miss America Elizabeth Ward Gracen. The woman who made oral sex a subject fit to print.

And at an event that has relied on Hollywood star power for its sizzle in recent years, Jones’ presence restored the political charge to this quintessentially inside-the-Beltway gala. Even President Clinton, seldom at a loss for words, acknowledged he was tongue-tied at the prospect of sitting within hailing distance of Jones and her husband, Steve, who came as guests of the conservative magazine Insight.

Asked Friday how he would feel being in the same room with Jones, Clinton demurred, blushing and feigning befuddlement. “You know, we practiced all kinds of answers to this question. And most of them, I think, I’ll have to give Saturday night.”

Jones arrived wearing a beaded, full-length dress in midnight blue, showing much cleavage and refusing to talk to reporters. When asked questions, Jones placed her index finger silently to her lips and pushed on through the crowd. As she entered to both boos and yells of support, one onlooker yelled, “Go back to the trailer park!”

Paul Rodriguez, the editor of Insight who shepherded the Joneses through several pre-prandial receptions and sat next to Jones at dinner, told The Times that the couple accepted his news organization’s invitation about three weeks ago.

With 2,600 journalists and guests attending, Jones is the evening’s most-talked-about attendee. And even in a year in which political scandal has created its own stars, there were still plenty of Hollywood emissaries. Among those invited to hobnob with journalists, generals, lawmakers and Cabinet officials were Sharon Stone, Jon Bon Jovi, Michael Douglas and Warren Beatty.

But President Clinton and First Lady Hillary Rodham Clinton were the association’s putative guests of honor. Seated on a raised dais next to White House Correspondents’ Assn. President Laurence McQuillan, Clinton dined on spicy greens, smoked duck breast and sesame noodles.

Jones has said she finds it difficult to watch the president on television because it reminds her of the day in 1991 when, she claims, then-Gov. Clinton dropped his pants and asked her to perform oral sex.

But on Saturday night, Jones, who was seated near the back of the cavernous hotel banquet hall, got to see Clinton in person for the first time since she sat across from him during a lengthy deposition at a private law office near the White House. Clinton has denied Jones’ charges, and he did so on that occasion.

If he was unnerved by Jones’ presence Saturday night, Clinton did not show it as he delivered a speech full of self-effacing one-liners and reporter-roasting ribaldry.

Thanking the association for inviting him, Clinton told the Washington journalists that he had a special affection for this yearly event. “I get to poke fun at you. That’s my definition of executive privilege.” He added that he had stopped reading newspapers in recent months. “Mostly, I just skim the retractions,” he jibed.

Rodriguez called the competition for celebrity guests “silly” and insisted it would be hypocritical for other journalists to suggest that Insight’s hosting of Jones conveyed any disrespect for Clinton or the office of the presidency.

Indeed, although the tradition is now well-established, the scramble to host the famous and infamous is a relatively new practice for journalists attending the dinner.

By most accounts, it began in 1987, when a political reporter for the Baltimore Sun squired Fawn Hall to the annual dinner. At the time, the Reagan administration was locked in an imbroglio for secretly selling arms to Iran to try to gain freedom for hostages in Lebanon and to generate money for rebels in Nicaragua.

Hall played a bit part in the drama. The low-level White House official with a cascade of blond hair told lawmakers she had smuggled classified documents out of the executive mansion in her underwear.

Last year, Kim Basinger, Robert DeNiro, Ellen DeGeneres, Tom Selleck and George Clooney furnished the evening’s star power.

Former White House intern Lewinsky, who has told friends she carried on a lengthy sexual affair with the president, was also invited to Saturday night’s event. But Lewinsky, whose every foray outside is chronicled by local news and tabloid television shows, declined to attend. Her lawyer, the omnipresent William Ginsburg, said it would be “tasteless” for her to go.