Personal Aspect of a Public Trial

So many are the marquee names and celebrity misdeeds that have passed through the Santa Monica courthouse that TV stations--which do not see fit to keep a shop in the state Capitol in Sacramento--have all but set up camp here.

The Twilight Zone trial. Christian Brando and his emoting father. Groucho Marx in his tragic dotage. The fatally attractive Billionaire Boys Club. Erik and Lyle.

Because fame lies thick on the ground here, it surprised me not at all to find three-legged clusters of TV cameras. What did surprise me is that we were in search of different glitterati--they, an attorney in the O.J. Simpson civil case, and I, the defendant one courtroom over: Susan McDougal, once a Friend of Bill, now a felon in a matter called Whitewater that has a U.S. senator all ready to hang the White House on his watch fob like a trophy.

Who among the celeb-spotters would have recognized her? Susan who? Is she with ICM?

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This courthouse opened in 1964, the year the Beatles knocked the Beach Boys off the top of the charts. In the 1980s, I was here covering one of the Beach Boys’ endless, pathos-ridden court wrangles over money and retainers.

That was my first brush with the California monde of personal assistants, the top-notch professional organizers as well as the hangers-on who constitute celebrity camp followers, a grown-up version of “I’m with the band.”

PAs can be hired on a resume, a recommendation, a “good feeling,” or sometimes little more than a handshake and a hunch. One longtime PA got the job because she and her boss were into transcendental meditation.

The job rates higher in perks than paychecks--first-class travel and comforts and the vicarious rubbing of noted elbows. (And perhaps more: Robin Williams married his PA, George C. Scott’s is suing him for sexual harassment, and Tejano star Selena’s PA murdered her.)

The famous and their PAs are bound together by a delicate honor system of intimacy and trust. To keep life and career in running order, PAs may handle house keys, checkbooks, bank codes, medical records. Sometimes they know more about the Famous One than any spouse does.

Enter Susan McDougal.

In her native Arkansas, where she was convicted last week with her ex-husband in an S&L; fraud case featuring the president testifying on videotape, she was a poor girl who made good.

In the 1980s, the McDougals pumped life and cash into a flaccid little savings and loan named Madison Guaranty. They went partners with their friends Bill and Hillary in a resort development called Whitewater. In hot pants and astride a white horse, Susan made TV spots for another McDougal real estate venture. In Little Rock’s smallish pond, she was a star.

In 1988, after both bank and marriage went belly-up, she came west. A cross-country trip is easy, but the landing must have been hard: from a bank officer with a Jag to a secretary at Armand Hammer’s Occidental Petroleum.

In 1989, her boyfriend, on his way to law school, thought his employers, Nancy and Zubin Mehta, the renowned conductor, might hire Susan to take his place as their PA. Besides, Armand Hammer and the Mehtas were friends; they attended his 91st birthday party that year, and McDougal’s months at Hammer’s firm furthered her suit.

As a Los Angeles police detective would say in court, “Mrs. Mehta relied totally on Susan McDougal to take care of everything and anything arising in the financial part of the household”--no small chore for a man whose work took him around the world.

Moreover, they were fond of her. She was funny, a pleasure to be around. She handled the Mehta affairs so well that in time she took over the bookkeeping, too.

Over three years on the job, it is said, even her voice on the telephone came to sound like Nancy Mehta’s.

Court papers detail the seven felony embezzlement charges and where some of the allegedly missing $140,353.86 went:

To a San Fernando Valley storage locker registered in her brother’s name.

To the Mehtas’ dentist for work on McDougal’s mother’s teeth.

For thousands of dollars in Delta flights to Arkansas and environs.

For clothes the Mehtas didn’t wear, meals they didn’t eat, hotels where they never stayed.

The end came serendipitously in 1992. A bank called Mrs. Mehta about raising the limit on a MasterCard she didn’t even know she had.

In December 1993, about the time the Clintons agreed to turn over their Whitewater records, Susan McDougal was arraigned.

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It has always been McDougal’s claim that the money was either spent for the Mehtas’ benefit or received as an agreed-upon “in-kind” reimbursement for those many extra hours as their accountant. What prosecutors believe is that she spent much of it on herself and, for the rest, fabricated those hours spent at the books in order to make the expenditures match up.

June 27 is the date set for determining Susan McDougal’s next trial. This time, it is likely that the cameras at the Santa Monica courthouse will be for her.