JUICY GOSSIP

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NY Post Online, 12/4/2000

"FOR SALE" SIGN AT CHAPPAQUA?

The gossip among political insiders at last night's Kennedy Center Honors gala and at the White House reception beforehand was that Bill and Hillary Clinton are putting their "home" in Chappaqua on the market less than a year after their much-ballyhooed arrival in the leafy Westchester environs.

I hear that the Clintons never even got around to having "hard-wired" security installed because they wouldn't be there long. If all this is true (and remember, this is a GOSSIP column - I can only tell you what people are whispering behind their hands) then it will be an act of incredible cynicism, even for a couple as calculating as are these two.

You buy a suburban mansion for $1.9 million so that senatorial candidate Hillary can establish that she does, indeed, intend to be a REAL New Yorker, a friend to the soccer moms, as opposed to being a stateless opportunist squatting in some anonymous Manhattan apartment.

Then you get elected, find a place in D.C. and shake the dust of Chappaqua off your sensible flatshoes. And, as a bonus, one of your well-heeled pals buys the mansion at a huge premium, giving you a fat profit. (Even a stranger would pay a bonus to boast that he lives in a house once - albeit briefly - occupied by the first family.)

Some of us have said all along that Bill would never be happy playing house husband in the 'burbs when he leaves the White House. Manhattan is where the action, money and power reside, which is why (as I was the first to tell you) he and Hillary have been hunting for an apartment here.

I read where Bill says he couldn't afford to be mayor here. The windfall if the Clintons do sell Chappaqua would help ease their debts, and his first book of memoirs, with a floor price of $7 million, would have them out of the financial woods.

(I'm now told the book deal is being brokered by Bob Barnett, of the powerful Washington legal firm Williams & Connolly. This is the same guy who made Bob Woodward the richest working journalist in the land and handled the memoirs of ex-White House flack Marlon Fitzwater.)

-- (Paracelsus@Pb.Au), December 04, 2000