In 2003 I took a taxi with Hillary Clinton from The Ritz to the BBC and she proved to be a very friendly, interesting lady, who told me confidentially that she would never run for President  –

HEADLINE: THE SECRET HILLARY
SUBHEAD: Facelifts, HRT, Bill's 'bimbo eruptions' and why she would have loved more children... a very surprising Mrs Clinton talks to the Mail
BYLINE: JANE KELLY
TITLE: Daily Mail
DATE: 10/07/2003
EDITION: 1ST

AT THE Ritz, in London, in a pink-and-gold suite, a nervous makeup lady has set out a table with about 50 lipsticks and is pacing under the scrutiny of a security man with a head like a bull terrier.

We might be waiting for Marie Antoinette rather than Hillary Clinton, 55, spouse of Disgraced president Bill, a wife more powerful and ambitious than the poor French Queen could ever have imagined any woman could be.

While Hillary has her makeup applied, I have to wait in the foyer. Then, suddenly, I see her coming down the grand staircase towards me - gum-chewing security women in front of her, unfeasibly large men behind her.

But it is only Hillary you notice, radiant in a coral-coloured suit, her hair more gold than it has ever been before. Then, we are out on the pavement and I am shoved into a large car next to her.

'It is a linen-mix suit,' she confides, as if we were already friends. 'I couldn't wear full linen, oh no, not with all that ironing!' Her round face, with its rather
wide, flat nose, is extraordinarily bright and sunny.

There are no traces of plastic surgery, but I ask her anyway. She laughs and her face wrinkles up freely. 'No plastic surgery here,' she says facing me full on, so it feels like staring at the blazing sun. 'And I never take HRT. Women should stop using it. What we are reading about it is scary.' No subject, it seems, is too personal for my new friend. 'The menopause is no trouble to me at all,' she says gaily, as I feel a slight tremor of embarrassment run through the beefy security  men squashed on the back seat.

Mere hormones wouldn't dare to impinge on  Hillary Rodham Clinton.

NOW a U.S. Senator, she seems unstoppable. She has just produced her second autobiography, Living History, a tome of 600 worthy pages, for which she received an advance of £5 million. 

She is not new to writing about herself, in fact she began quite early, writing  her first autobiography in 1959 at the age of 12 for a school project. 

This new one, about her eight years in the White House as First Lady, is slightly more interesting than the first - but only just.

'I wrote it because I wanted to write about the White House,' she purrs, 'like every other First Lady has done.'
In fact, very few other First Ladies have put pen to paper, certainly not Jackie Kennedy, nor 'Ladybird Johnson, surely  the two most interesting of the longsuffering  presidential wives.

'Their insights were so informative and enlightening that I realised I had to write about my time there,' she says sounding entirely disingenuous.

Hillary famously took no interest in being a traditional First Lady at all, refusing even to take an interest in the traditional White House Easter egg hunt. 

Her book lays out her stall as a suitable senator and, perhaps, even a future U.S. President.  I ask her about her ambitions to run for the top job and she suddenly howls like a coyote on heat:

'I've no intention of running for president,' she says, though few believe her. 'I know far too much about that. It's the hardest job in the world and it gets more difficult every year. All that pressure put onto one person, it's absurd and we are the only nation that does that.

'We say to one person: "Here, have at it." But then it is so difficult to run that gauntlet.'

But Hillary can surely 'have at it' as good as anyone. In her book, she describes how, as a teenager, she ran for student government president at her high school near Chicago, but writes crossly that one of her opponents told her she was 'really stupid if I thought a girl could be elected president'. She has obviously never got over that.

The book reveals a background that might well produce the kind of complex, ruthless person who might be quite suited to the job of U.S. President.

Her mother, Dorothy, was badly abused as a child.

'Very neglected,' says Hillary. 'What she went through - the cruelty had a great impact on me.'

It made Hillary identify with the underdog and early on take up the cudgels for women. 'She gave me high standards and a great desire for self-improvement,' she says.

This included telling Hillary, when she was four and being bullied by a girl named Suzy, to 'get back out there, and if Suzy hits you, you have my permission to go hit her back'.

She did as she was told - and was very glad to be able to tell her mother: 'I can play with the boys now.'

Although she denies that she wants to make the big move into the White House, Hillary has been eager to 'play with the boys' ever since.

'My mother always carried the misery of her past with her,' she says, 'but I saw how she never let it stop her doing anything.'

Her grandmother, Della, who had been such a bad mother to her own offspring, also had a great impact on Hillary.  'A weak, irresponsible, self-indulgent woman wrapped up in TV soap operas,' she says. 'I never wanted to be that sort of woman.'

Hillary's father, Hugh E. Rodham, descended from Welsh coal miners, was a devout Methodist. 'He was old-fashioned,'she says, 'strict, very orderly with a rigid daily routine.'

He also taught her to use a gun and to release volleys of political argument at the dinner table. 'I got my gene of politics from him,' she says with a satisfied grin.

Many women grow up to marry men who resemble their fathers and I couldn’t help wondering  if there was a resemblance between her father and her  husband.

'No,' she says flatly, sounding a bit shocked.  'Bill is not like my father. He is not really like anyone.'

She says this in the kind of tone some women use for a particularly pesky pet dog. She is obviously  still very fond of the man who became more famous for having sex with Monica Lewinsky than for his role as leader of the western world.

He is her wildcard, the one person who just cannot be controlled. He is also, one suspects, always behind her somewhere, and probably loyal to her, in his own particular fashion.

'He was brought up by a widow, the son of a working woman,' she says affectionately. “He suffered domestic violence.'

This unexpectedly lifts the veil just a fraction on her husband, but she won't twitch it any further as he also has a large book coming out and she won't spill any of his lucrative beans.

As I ask about the state of her marriage, there is a screech of brakes and we come to a dead halt in the road,  a fitting metaphor for their relationship. 

Rumours say that the Clintons are now living apart. They have homes in New York and Washington. But she speaks of him as if he is still the most fascinating man in her world. 

'My parents adored him,' she croons. 'He is so interested in other people. That is a great gift.'

Some of those 'other people' have ended up making a mockery of the
Clinton's marriage and integrity. When Bill first began his meteoric rise, Hillary - a successful lawyer in her own right - was always  there on the hustings supporting her man.

'Vote for one and get two,' as he put it, when he became Attorney General of Arkansas in 1976.

A year later, he began an affair with nightclub singer Gennifer Flowers.

She was the first known but by no means the last of what Hillary termed Bill's 'bimbo eruptions'.

Despite all this,  in her book Hillary claims that when the truth came out about Lewinsky she was shocked and surprised. She writes that she told a trusted White House aide at the height of the Lewinsky rumours: 'Look, Bob, my husband may have his faults, but he has never lied to me.'

It transpired that  he had lied to her for years. But for Hillary the unstoppable, the role of wronged wife is much more useful and appealing than that of a political opportunist who was willing to turn a blind eye to her husband's indiscretions. 

The couple's daughter, Chelsea, grew up with the lurid details rumbling away in the background. But Hillary tells me their daughter has 'had a wonderful father, two loving, responsible parents and a very protected childhood'.

'Of course, I would have loved more children,” she says, briskly, “but it didn't happen.' She won't elaborate on the reasons why, other than saying that their hectic work schedules were not to blame, again she sounds so disingenuous that I almost laugh.

This picture of a happy family also doesn't quite tie in with Hillary's own report in the book of how Chelsea retreated from her parents to stay with their friends after the Lewinsky affair became public.

Our car ride is over. Hillary arrives at the BBC to be greeted like a visiting monarch.  Later, she is off to see Chelsea, who has just finished an MA in international relations at Oxford.

There was a rumour that Chelsea was nursing a broken heart after splitting up with her boyfriend, Ian Klaus. But if Chelsea is anything like her mother - who would never admit to such weakness - she would have pulled herself together, staunched her tears and changed her story so that everything sounded perfect by the time her mother arrived.

If not, Hillary will want to know the reason why.

LIVING HISTORY, by Hillary Rodham Clinton, is published by Headline £20.