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Clinton that the story, for all the agita around it, turned out to be a blessing in disguise. For as long as anyone could remember, Carson thought, reporters had been dying to peek inside the couple’s bedroom. The Clinton people warned them not to do it—there’s a big mean dog in there, they suggested, ready to chew your face off. Now the Times had ventured in and come out bleeding. From that point on, for two solid years, not a single reporter approached Clintonworld in pursuit of a similar story.
    Yet the Clinton victory, in the moment, was a pyrrhic one. In Washington, the fact that the Times —the prudish, starchy, self-important Gray Lady—had been willing to go there, however awkwardly, merely turned up the flame on the burning speculation about Bill’s putative priapism. What had been a slow simmer in 2005 became a roiling boil in the summer and fall of 2006, as the chattering classes theorized about whether and why the Times had pulled its punches. Worse, Clintonworld was hearing that a gusher of gossip was flowing from members of the couple’s own inner circle—and in particular from Steve Ricchetti, the longtime consigliere to Bill who had been so keen on Hillary running for president in 2004.
    Since his departure from the White House, Bill Clinton had not exactly erred on the side of caution when it came to his personal comportment. Within days of settling into the Clintons’ new house in Chappaqua in 2001, he could be found at Lange’s deli, chatting up the stay-at-home mothers who trundled in after yoga, startling his aides that he already knew all the women by name. He gallivanted around the world with his business partner Ron Burkle, the supermarket magnate and notorious playboy, whose custom-converted Boeing 757 was referred to by Burkle’s young aides as “Air Fuck One.” Clinton’s regular trips to that carnal triptych of Los Angeles, Miami, and Las Vegas struck many of his friends as a recipe, if not for trouble, then at least for undue temptation and embarrassment. But Bill seemed not to care. He was going to do what he wanted to do, appearances be damned.
    And yet Bill was ripshit when Carson and Terry McAuliffe informed him of the extent to which tongues were wagging in Washington. Those goddamn people in D.C., Clinton fumed. They don’t have anything better to do than talk about my sex life? Goddamn that city! This is why I hated it from the beginning down there. Everybody’s got boring lives so they just sit around and talk about someone else’s.
    All the murmurings about Bill were starting to get back to Hillaryland as well. When Solis Doyle made the rounds of senior party players—members of Congress, major donors, former Cabinet secretaries—to chat about Hillary’s prospective presidential run, she was encountering a troubling pattern. Almost uniformly, the Democratic grandees professed their affection and respect for Senator Clinton. She’s terrific, they said; she’d be a good candidate and make a great president. But then would come the inevitable addendum: What are you going to do about Bill?
    What Solis Doyle invariably would say was “We’ve got that under control.” It was a clever answer she had come up with herself, and it seemed to pacify her listeners.
    But Patti was rattled by the specificity of the chatter she was hearing. One rumor was that Bill Clinton was having an affair with a dishy Canadian member of parliament, Belinda Stronach; another involved a wealthy divorcee, Julie Tauber McMahon, who lived in Chappaqua; another revolved around the Hollywood actress Gina Gershon; and the list went on.
    Solis Doyle was equally unnerved by the caliber of the people indulging in the speculation. One day she paid a visit to Ricchetti, who mentioned without blinking that he’d recently been on a conference call with a handful of big-name Clinton stalwarts, including former treasury secretary Robert Rubin, which devolved into a prolonged discussion of Bill’s supposed