Chelsea Clinton's Life In A Fishbowl Is Surprisingly Private

Let's get real. This is supposed to be, like, a normal so-called life?

Dorky Secret Service agents lurk around on your dates, cyber-dweebs talk about your long legs and short skirts on the Internet and, gross, your mom writes this book that tells the whole world how you used to spit up through your nose, when you were a baby.

OK, so maybe it's hip to have your own fan club and news groups and make Mr. Blackwell's best-dressed list, but you have to sort of cringe when your very own actual father gets creamed night after night on David Letterman for his, you know, indiscretions, and these authoritative types keep saying your mom may get indicted.

I mean, you don't get to have any family secrets! Not even little ones! All your friends know your Uncle Roger used to be a doper and your grandma practically lived at the racetrack (and also wore these tacky earrings made of dice) and how you keep your cat on, how weird, a leash.

Except that stuff like getting escorted by John F. Kennedy Jr. kind of makes up for it all. And you got to go sailing that time with Jackie O. And now you go on these hot trips to, I kid you not, the Taj Mahal (the one in India). In Moscow you get to practice with, wow, the Bolshoi Ballet. And it's sort of cool to go to Beverly Hills - Oscar winners like Whoopi Goldberg and Mary Steenburgen are friends of your parents - and Kerri Strug, the Olympic gymnast, comes to your house and asks you, like, how do you handle all this attention? And you tell her it's simple: "All you do is smile."

But then Kerri goes and tells her agent, who blabs it all to reporters. Imagine having to edit practically every word you say, in case somebody might repeat it, just because you're the president's daughter, and it might come out, you know, wrong.

The parents of Chelsea Victoria Clinton famously pleaded that they wanted their only child to have a "normal" life, as far out of the spotlight as possible. These are hardly the hallmarks of such an upbringing, but Chelsea nonetheless seems to be one of those rare teenagers who sail through adolescence without a single pierced body part.

Water, not wine

At 17, she has shown nary a public pout or hint of impropriety, except, perhaps, for those too-short skirts and the suggestion she once drank a glass of wine at a Northampton, Mass., restaurant. (The Massachusetts Alcoholic Beverages Control Commission investigated, concluding the first daughter had drunk water, as reported in news accounts.)

At 17, Alice Roosevelt was flouncing up to the White House roof to smoke in an in-your-face defiance of her father, Teddy, who had forbidden her to smoke under his roof. (A thoroughly exasperated Roosevelt once said he could be president of the United States or he could control Alice. But not both.)

In contrast, it's about as hard to imagine the church-going Chelsea sneaking an illegal smoke as it is to imagine her mother starting her day with a thorough reading of Women's Wear Daily. As a character notes in "Doonesbury," the Garry Trudeau comic strip, Chelsea is a kind of model teen, "a national treasure."

Chelsea celebrated her 17th birthday Feb. 27 with a trip to New York the following weekend, staying with her parents and several friends at the Waldorf-Astoria, seeing the hit plays "Rent" and "Bring in 'Da Noise, Bring in 'Da Funk" and finishing the night with a late-night dinner at 21, where the Clinton entourage was joined by U.S. Sens. Edward M. Kennedy, D-Mass., and Joseph Biden, D-Del.

Virtually born into the role of first daughter, the national treasure has been in the public eye in either the Arkansas governor's mansion or the White House for all but two of her 17 years. She still stares at her father with unadulterated, Julie Nixonesque adoration, and she gamely plays up to expectations: When Al Gore was named Clinton's running mate, he interrupted his comments in Little Rock, Ark., to recognize Chelsea, then 12, for serving as such a terrific hostess to his daughters. More recently, Chicago Mercantile Exchange employees erupted into chants of "Chel-sea! Chel-sea!" when the first daughter draped her arm around Jack Sandner, exchange chairman, for a photo op.

Feted on the cover of People as one of the magazine's 25 most intriguing people of 1996, Chelsea is a National Merit semifinalist who is said to have been accepted by Harvard. She was smart enough to skip third grade and at times, according to news accounts, she's been helped along by some high-toned tutors. When her father, himself a high school math whiz, couldn't help her untangle a math problem, he consulted Alan Blinder, his economic adviser and former vice chairman of the Federal Reserve Board.

This is . . . normal?

"No, it's not possible to have a normal childhood in the White House," says Letitia Baldridge, Jackie Kennedy's chief of staff in the Kennedy White House. To be the child of a sitting president, Baldridge goes on, "is thrilling and exciting and marvelous but also terrible, because you have no privacy.

"It's a study in contrasts."

Away from the cameras

In her book "It Takes a Village" (Simon & Schuster), Hillary Rodham Clinton recounts how she sought advice from Jacqueline Kennedy Onassis on the rearing of White House children. Protecting them from public exposure, Onassis advised, was critical. Thus, like the Kennedy kids, Chelsea Clinton was "not put in front of the cameras all the time," notes Baldridge, author of the recently published "More Than Manners: Raising Today's Kids to Have Kind Manners and Good Hearts" (Rawson Associates).

"Like all Americans, I'm very interested in her," Baldridge says of Chelsea. "Her parents are doing everything right. She's a good student, and she asked intelligent questions" on a recent trip to southern Asia with her mother.

"There's an obvious affection for one another in that family," Baldridge says. "You can't put that on."

Says Charles Figley, Ph.D., a Florida State University psychologist who studies the children of politicians and celebrities, "What may be odd and weird is that she's so normal under these fishbowl conditions.

"From my observations, it appears she's a normal, intelligent, fun-loving young woman," Figley says, thanks in part to her parents' decision to send her to Sidwell Friends, an elite Quaker private school in Washington, D.C., whose tuition tops $13,020 a year.

Spurning public education "set a bad tone and sent the wrong signal," Figley goes on. "But while it may have been a bad political decision, it was a good parenting decision. It's a much more defendable, protective environment."

Much of the protection, of course, has been from the prying and often catty eyes of the East Coast media cabal, which published regular accounts of Susan Ford's dates when her father, Gerald, was president.

Remarkably, the media complied with the Clintons' hands-off policy toward Chelsea, even though the children of several Washington journalists also are enrolled at Sidwell Friends.

"I think it's extraordinary and very unusual to back off and follow the wishes of the first family," Figley says. "The press doesn't get enough credit for this."

Some of the early motivation for such restraint, he theorizes, may have been the mean-spirited humor directed at Chelsea shortly after her father's 1992 election. Unflattering "Saturday Night Live" references wound up being excised for reruns. Conservative commentator Rush Limbaugh was roundly censured for referring, on his television show, to the White House dog - and then flashing a picture of the first daughter.

Hillary Clinton says the point of shielding Chelsea from the limelight is that it isn't fair to let a child be defined by the media before she has a chance to define herself.

Over the years, however, the chrysalis has developed a few harmless transparencies. Her donation to a school fund raiser was baby sitting; two families are said to have paid several hundred dollars for the privilege, complete with the bonus of Secret Service protection.

A serious ballet student who began classes at age 4, Chelsea reprised the role of "favorite aunt" in last year's Washington Ballet production of "The Nutcracker," also having danced the role in 1993. She's also danced in the corps de ballet in "Waltz of the Flowers." Chelsea has studied at the Washington School of Ballet since 1993. During a visit to Moscow, she joined the Bolshoi Ballet for a practice session.

Foreign travel is one of the big perks of a White House life; Chelsea is traveling with her mother this month on a six-nation goodwill trip to Africa that includes a stop in the Serengeti, one of Tanzania's famed wild animal parks. On her father's whistle-stop campaign, there were signs along the route that said, "Chelsea in 2016." Her mother - so much for privacy - announced two years ago on "Live With Regis and Kathie Lee" that her daughter had begun to date, and "It Takes a Village" is peppered with Chelsea anecdotes.

Now a `babe'

On the Internet, one Chelsea watcher opines that "Chelsea has turned into a babe." Pete Clipsham, 18, who is in his last year of high school in Ontario, started an "unofficial" Chelsea fan club with seven friends.

The club's Web site runs Chelsea pictures and imparts gossipy Chelsea factoids. According to the fan club, she's a vegetarian, she plays cards (hearts and pinochle), she attended German language camp, she got driving lessons from her dad at Camp David, she likes alternative ska music and Boyz II Men.

The club attracted the attention of the U.S. Secret Service.

"Recently I was called down to the Royal Canadian Mounted Police to answer some questions, because the Secret Service started asking questions about the fan club," Clipsham says. "Since (the Secret Service) didn't have any authority in Canada, the RCMP was forced to do the dirty work. Everything was cool."

In Washington, her mother has said, the first daughter has had "basically a very positive experience."

Concludes former presidential strategist Dick Morris, writing in "Behind the Oval Office" (Random House), his recently published memoirs, "There is no trace of conceit, arrogance or class consciousness about her. She knows that her status is temporary and that it is based on her parents' achievements, not hers.

"She knows that she'll have to make her own way in the world when this is all over."