Chelsea Clinton looks fantastic. That's right, the once-gawky kid with buck teeth, bedspring hair, and her father's bulbous nose is suddenly a sleek-tressed, lip-glossed looker.
At 24, the daughter of former President Bill and current U.S. Sen. Hillary Clinton is turning heads and fueling rumors. Did she or didn't she? Is her new smile anchored by a chin implant? Has the tip of her nose been trimmed?
At least two supermarket tabloids, the Globe and the Star, couldn't resist publishing before-and-after photos of the former first daughter this week with headlines posing the question. MIRACLE MAKEOVERS! shouts the Star, calling Clinton "the Real Life Swan." CHELSEA PLASTIC SURGERY RIDDLE, screams the Globe, quoting an anonymous "inside source," speculating: "It suddenly seems as if all her facial features - eyes, ears and nose - are all perfectly proportioned."
In one photograph she's ruddy-faced and weak-chinned, and in the other, buffed and polished.
One Dr. Paul Parker, a Paramus, N.J., plastic surgeon who has not treated Clinton, says in the Globe that Clinton looks as if she may have gotten a chin implant, a nose job and maybe even an eye lift.
Nobody in the Clinton clan is talking. Calls to Chelsea's Manhattan job site, the consulting firm of McKinsey & Co. where she's reportedly earning a six-figure salary, were funneled directly into voice mail. E-mail messages and phone calls to her father's office in Harlem and her mother's office in Washington were not returned.
This is not the first time Chelsea has gone glam and set tongues wagging. In 2002, she stunned photographers by showing up at a fashion show in Paris with a sleek bob haircut, a Versace pantsuit, and celebrity pals Madonna and Gwyneth Paltrow at her side. Now, she's a college grad sporting honey blond hair, slender cheeks, and an expert makeup job.
But, says Dr. Algird R. Mameniskis of the Rittenhouse Plastic Surgery center, she probably has not had plastic surgery. "Judging from these pictures, I'd say it's mostly a result of weight loss," he said after studying the magazine spreads.
"I don't see anything around the eyes, and I'd have to see other pictures to be definite about the chin," he added. "But in a woman her age, the skin is taut enough that weight loss could change her look."
EVERY day, a worker climbs to the roof of the Clinton Presidential Center here and hoists three seven-foot-high numbers onto a steel frame. The numbers tell drivers on Interstate 30, just west of the site, how many days remain until Nov. 18, when Bill Clinton is expected to open the $175 million project that embodies his postpresidential ambitions.
Millions of people pass by that sign every year, Skip Rutherford said. And as president of the nonprofit William J. Clinton Foundation, which is overseeing the construction, Mr. Rutherford figures that at least 300,000 of them will want to visit the 11th, and by far most expensive, of the nation's presidential libraries each year. The runner-up, the library built for the first President Bush in College Station, Tex., cost about half as much to construct.
The Clinton center, at 152,000 square feet, far exceeds the 70,000-square-foot guideline included in a 1986 law on presidential libraries. But that "one size fits all" approach did not anticipate the fact that Mr. Clinton, who served two terms in the age of computerization, has a far larger collection of documents — 90 million — than any president before him. Nor could it have accounted for the fact that Mr. Clinton, the youngest ex-president since Theodore Roosevelt, is determined to make a splash.
Polshek Partnership Architects of New York designed the museum in the shape of a bridge [in the shape of a mobile home]. The center will also include a park, archives and a public policy school named for Mr. Clinton. If the exhibits (including Hillary Rodham Clinton's inaugural gowns and a description of the Monica Lewinsky affair) aren't enough, the possibility of seeing the 42nd president might be: Mr. Rutherford said Mr. Clinton expects to spend 7 to 10 days a month in a glass-walled penthouse. [Wow, like reality TV, almost. MTV could call it "Real World Little Rock"] Its floor-to-ceiling windows will be visible not only from the grounds of the museum but from downtown Little Rock (and from the condo of two Friends of Bill, Ted Danson and Mary Steenburgen, across the freeway).
"I fully expect that when the president is here, he'll be going downstairs and giving tours to a little old lady from Des Moines," Mr. Rutherford said. With Mr. Clinton's memoir, "My Life," due from Knopf on June 22, Mr. Rutherford expects the former president to resume active fund-raising for the library, which began early in his second term.
"I'm starting to see a light at the end of the tunnel, and it's not a freight train," he said of his seven-year fund-raising effort.
But the tunnel keeps getting longer. Mr. Rutherford's latest estimate of the overall cost is $175 million (about half of it in building costs), up from $125 million in 1999. He will have to deliver a $7.2 million endowment to help pay the federal government's cost of upkeep. The presidential libraries are built with private money but, except for the Nixon library, they are run by the National Archives and Records Administration. That agency estimates that it will cost over $4 million to operate the Clinton library in its first year.
After rejecting several sites that would have been easier to build on, Mr. Clinton chose a 28-acre abandoned warehouse area across the freeway from downtown, with the aim of creating a vast urban renewal project. Already, according to Little Rock's city manager, Bruce Moore, the Clinton library has brought almost $1 billion in private investment to the area around it. Barry Travis, chief executive of the Little Rock Convention and Visitors Bureau, said a study commissioned by the bureau found that "if the library attracted 150,000 to 300,000 visitors a year, we calculated there would be from $8.6 million to $17.5 million in direct tourism expenditures, and that doesn't include any other types of economic development that the library might spawn." The 11 existing presidential libraries, counting the Nixon library, average about 150,000 visitors a year each. ...
But, says Dr. Algird R. Mameniskis of the Rittenhouse Plastic Surgery center, she probably has not had plastic surgery. "Judging from these pictures, I'd say it's mostly a result of weight loss," he said after studying the magazine spreads.
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Dude, get yourself some cheaters.