On Hollywood and Vineyard

By MARGARET CARLSON/EDGARTOWN

Finally, on the afternoon of his 47th birthday, seven months after he took the oath of office, the President came to rest on a New England island so small it has no traffic lights. Martha's Vineyard, a 100-sq.-mi. haven of quaint shingled houses, quiet country gardens, yacht-studded harbors and stunning beaches, has many attributes to recommend it, not the least of which is that its inhabitants are sufficiently celebrity-trained so that no one stares into opera diva Beverly Sills' grocery cart at Cronig's or gawks at Jackie Onassis riding her bike near her house in Gay Head. A President -- no big deal.

A live-and-let-live attitude toward the famous is one reason Martha's Vineyard won out over a number of other possibilities, like Jackson Hole, Wyoming (too isolated); Florida, where Hillary's brother Hugh lives (too hot); California (too shallow, although Hillary and Chelsea vacationed in Santa Barbara for a few days on the way back from the Tokyo summit); and Telluride, Colorado (too small). Not that the decision came easily, or could have been carried out if seven-day-advance-purchase airline tickets were a factor. Unlike most Presidents, Clinton is a man without a country house -- no + Kennebunkport or Gettysburg farm, no Pedernales or California ranch. Moreover, like most Democrats, he doesn't seem to kick back as well as Republicans. Richard Nixon had no trouble repairing to San Clemente for 31 days in one sitting, and Ronald Reagan clocked 200 days at his spread by the first year of his second term.

Clinton doesn't even take off weekends, and he delayed making holiday plans as if he were putting off minor surgery. Some people wondered if a man who had not got away for four years on a regulation vacation would make it five, and if the dreaded word "working" would be appended to "vacation" even before one began.

Enter Vernon Jordan, a man determined to have fun, as press secretary Dee Dee Myers put it. Jordan had vacationed on Martha's Vineyard for 20 years, and he pointed out that it met all the First Family's requirements: it has beaches (Massachusetts is one of the few states that permit private ones), a golf course (18 golf carts were shipped in for the Secret Service), a good price (former Defense Secretary Robert McNamara donated his house), populism (the Clintons could eschew the main residence for the guesthouse), and enough celebrities to be interesting without being rarefied.

But while the Vineyard might be perfect for the Clintons, there was some apprehension that the First Vacationers would not be perfect for a tiny community already stuffed to the gills with artists, writers, journalists, psychiatrists and academics so set in their reverse-chic ways that no newcomer could hope to adapt. These are people who congratulate themselves for not choosing to vacation among the canape-consuming classes in the Hamptons but use summer as a verb. Hunting, fishing or networking without a license is punishable by a $300 fine and deportation to the mainland.

But something happened last week. All predictions that the natives would be put out or blase vanished. Jordan, who gave the first and most important party for the President's birthday, never knew he had so many friends. So many potential invitees -- the population rises from 15,000 to 80,000 in high season -- and so little room on the Jordans' screened porch, which holds only four tables, gave every invitation the potential to cement one's social bona fides into the next generation. Even Jackie Onassis, who seldom goes out, accepted immediately and sat on one side of the President, with Chelsea on the other. Washington Post chairwoman Katharine Graham, Clinton's media adviser Mandy Grunwald and her father Henry Grunwald, Manhattan prosecutor and author Linda Fairstein, National Endowment for the Humanities chief Sheldon Hackney, PBS correspondent Charlayne Hunter-Gault and author William Styron were among the chosen. Jordan rose like Lawrence Welk to lead the group in Happy Birthday. Later, around the piano, they sang tunes of Cole Porter, George Gershwin and others. The President joined in on Georgia on My Mind.

It was such a jolly, casual evening, according to one guest, that the ordinarily shy Chelsea felt comfortable enough to toast "a wonderful father." Hillary toasted him as well, remarking on the incredible year gone by since he turned 46, their new life in Washington and saying how wonderful it was to celebrate Bill's first birthday in the White House with old friends. She ended by looking across the room to her husband's table, raising her glass and saying, "I love you, Mr. President." The party didn't break up until 1 a.m., unheard of on Martha's Vineyard, where, as Beverly Sills puts it, "10 p.m. is midnight."

While Jordan's party may have been the first, it would not be the last. By Thursday afternoon, as hope began to fade for birthday invitations, attention shifted to Friday night, when Katharine Graham would be having a previously scheduled dinner to which the President had been added. There was much grousing that Graham's Republican houseguests, Henry and Nancy Kissinger and Larry and Marlene Eagleburger, were eating up valuable table space, while certified liberals like Walter Cronkite, Carly Simon and Jules Feiffer were going begging. (The most enterprising call of the week came from the high bidder at a Vineyard's celebrity auction last year for a visit with Graham. The winner decided that Friday would be an excellent time to cash in.) Debate swirled over the question of whether cadging an offer to stop by for coffee at Kay Graham's after her dinner for the President was better than popcorn at the cineplex. When columnist Art Buchwald had netted no invitations by Thursday afternoon, he decided to be satisfied with "having dinner at the house of someone who is invited to have dinner with the President."

Buchwald, who has had a house in Vineyard Haven for 40 years, won the island sweepstakes for the most pre-arrival interviews, managing a network trifecta without ever putting on a tie. "We are a simple people," Buchwald says on his back porch, trying to explain the native customs to another visitor. "We catch bear and roast it over the fire and sprinkle salt on it." Every policeman, store owner, T-shirt maker and fisherman was waylaid by about as many reporters as covered the Tokyo summit. Most showed remarkable sense and patience. One of Edgartown's fire chiefs being interviewed for the umpteenth time was asked what he would do if there were a fire during the President's visit: "We'll put it out."

By week's end Buchwald had been invited to the Saturday-night lawn party being thrown by Sheldon Hackney and his wife Lucy, Hillary's friend from the Children's Defense Fund. The humorist, however, was already happily committed to a previous engagement -- dinner at Sills' house with the ubiquitous Kissingers, Eagleburgers and Sills' houseguest, Barbara Walters. "Barbara outranks the President, doesn't she?" asks Buchwald.

Due to popular demand, Graham decided she would have a second party on Monday for the President, becoming the envy of every hostess from Southampton to Bar Harbor. Only Jackie Onassis was doing better in the invitation derby. She was expected to play hostess to the Clintons at a private sail on Tuesday.

The desire to dine with the President was matched by the desire to see him. At the tiny airport where he arrived on Thursday, Clinton got the kind of spontaneous, homespun outpouring of enthusiasm not seen since his campaign bus tours a year earlier. Hundreds of people waited for the President's plane to touch down, waving miniature flags, holding makeshift signs (one read come for pie), drinking lemonade and eating picnic lunches. The President was serenaded with Happy Birthday by members of the Boys and Girls Club, who were allowed onto the tarmac. Earlier, his family and staff surprised him on Air Force One, as he did the New York Times crossword puzzle, with a cake and singing.

Clinton has visited Martha's Vineyard two times before, in 1969 for a reunion of Eugene McCarthy campaign workers and in 1986 for the wedding of Lani Guinier, whose nomination to a post at Justice proved so controversial that Clinton dumped her in June. By coincidence, she is vacationing there too.

While the President's vacation wasn't Chevy Chase taking the family to Wally's World in a station wagon, the scaled-down size of everything (landing on a runway not much bigger than a football field, the Chevy Suburban instead of a limo, junior staff) made it seem as if the President might actually get away from it all.

And, indeed, the next day something unprecedented happened. The President canceled his 9 a.m. tee-off at the Farm Neck Golf Club to sleep in, read the papers and stroll around Oyster Pond, where specially outfitted gardeners had cleared away thickets of poison ivy. The McNamara house is spectacularly situated, at the end of a three-mile private road marked by red, white and blue balloons. Inside, there are bookcases and blond-wood furniture. The nearest neighbors are Mrs. Thornton Bradshaw, the widow of the RCA chairman, and Agnes Gund, president of Manhattan's Museum of Modern Art. A visitor to the house said it has had an air of neglect since McNamara's wife Margaret died in 1981. McNamara, who won't be back at the house until the fall, told the Cape Cod Times that his visits include "running down to the beach and having a little swim in the nude in the morning."

In between sailing with Jackie and dining with the Kissingers, Clinton has dozens of other invitations to sort through. The Vineyard chapter of the N.A.A.C.P. has asked him to speak, the Oak Bluffs selectmen want to present him with a medal, and the Wampanoag tribe has invited him to a powwow. The Edgartown city fathers may have had the best idea. Knowing the President's weakness for town meetings, they have invited him to one scheduled for Aug. 25.

So far, the President seems content to sit still for a while, and the country should be grateful for whatever it is in the Edgartown air that will make Bill Clinton unwind. Everyone needs to be beyond the phone and the mailman, to go to a place where NAFTA, if mentioned at all, is thought to be a new kind of pasta, and health care means taking the waters off South Beach. He can no longer harp about soaking the rich in a place where the rich are soaking.

It takes a quiet place to digest the past nine months -- learning the biggest job in the world, coping with a hostile Congress and a hostile press, dealing with the suicide of a close friend and the loss of his father-in-law. Before coming to the Vineyard, the Clintons went to visit Jim and Diane Blair at Beaver Lake, close to their roots in Fayetteville, Arkansas, where they got married, taught at the university and had their first home. It was 14 years ago on another visit to the Blairs' that Hillary found out she was finally pregnant. It was the day after she went water skiing, and Jim Blair remembers how worried she got that the spills she had taken might have done something to harm the baby -- the one she took skiing last week.

All's well on the Vineyard. The President and his family are at rest.

With reporting by James Carney/Edgartown