Up from little Lonoke, Ark., Paula Jones always had her eyes on a better life by Lynn Rosellini, Greg Ferguson ______________________________________ Above all else, she wanted to get out. Paula Corbin Jones had no use for the rusty trailers and decaying storefronts of Lonoke, Ark., for her Bible toting mother or the snotty rich kids at the high school or the endless procession of admiring farm boys whose life ambition was a hitch in the Army and a job at the Conoco station off Interstate 40. Even as a teenager, Jones shunned the nearby Wal-Mart for the upscale Dillard's department store and preferred name labels like Nike and Calvin Klein. In time, she fell in love with a man who bought her a Gucci bag and a Mercedes. Yet by filing a lawsuit last month against President Clinton for sexual harassment, Jones ended up destroying many of the things she wanted most in life. Instead of considering her classy, educated and well dressed, friends and relatives now publicly call her a flirt, a ditz, a jezebel. Her own sister labels her a money-grubber, and the national media portray her as a white- trash bimbo. The story of Paula Jones is a curious distortion of the American dream, a tale that might have interested the Southern writer Flannery O'Connor at about the time she wrote her famous short story "A Circle in the Fire." Like O'Connor's story, Jones's tale unfolds in a world that is both unpredictable and menacing. Like O'Connor's protagonist, Jones's parents wrapped themselves in Christianity. And like the denouement of O'Connor's story -- the fire the heroine has always feared engulfs her woods -- the tragedies Paula and her family fought against ultimately befell them. Jones, now living in Long Beach, Calif., is giving no interviews for at least a few more weeks as she awaits Clinton's response to her unprecedented lawsuit. The president has denied even knowing Jones, and his attorneys are expected to file a claim of presidential immunity in coming weeks. In the meantime, friends and family of the woman who has charged Clinton with making unwanted sexual advances in a hotel room provide a sharp-edged portrait of her. She is a woman, they say, who always knew what she wanted. Ominous terrain. Imagine Lonoke, for that is where the story really begins. A gray cluster of grain elevators, visible long before you reach the town, rise up against the vacant blue sky like sentries on patrol of the endless fields of wheat and soybeans. Nearby, a haphazard sprawl of dilapidated buildings simmers in the hot, hazy sun. Pickup trucks rumble across the old Rock Island railroad tracks. Although Lonoke is just 25 miles from Little Rock, in many ways it is an alien world. This is the land of big hair and tight jeans and girls whose dreams soar no further than a stint at hairdressers school, an early marriage and a baby named Brittany or Tiffany or Brooke. The trailer houses, with their broken toys and burned-out stumps, hint of hopelessness, and the harsh landscape suggests that something bad could happen any minute -- which in fact it often does. Lonoke County lies directly in tornado alley, and dark funnel clouds roar across the terrain at times, uprooting trees, smashing stores and maiming and killing the unfortunate. Other catastrophes just seem to happen. Houses burn to the ground, and until the railroad went bankrupt, grisly train deaths were not uncommon. Trappings that middle America takes for granted -- routine health and dental care, for instance -- are unknown to many in a county where the per capita income is just $10,273 -- more than $4,000 below the national average. A sudden smile from a local often reveals missing teeth. It is perhaps not surprising, then, that although the population numbers just 4,022, there are 19 churches in town -- a hedge, perhaps, against an ominous world. And although county residents like to think of themselves as egalitarian, local kids are class conscious, with the sons and daughters of wealthy farmers and business owners often occupying the positions of cheerleaders, class officers and top athletes. The poorer kids quietly snicker at the "preps" and stick together, and it was to this latter class that young Paula Corbin belonged. In the dark of the midnight, Have I oft hid my face, While the storm howls above me, And there's no hiding place. Bobby Gene Corbin, Paula's father, loved this hymn and would belt it out while pounding the piano in the cluttered house on Front Street. A custodian at a shirt factory, Corbin was also a traveling evangelist for the Bible Missionary Church, whose adherents don't dance, listen to popular music, drink liquor or watch TV -- admonitions that governed every second of the family's life. The old house was a monument of peeling paint and tattered screens, jammed with furniture, cartons and bolts of cloth, for Delmer Corbin, Paula's mother, hoarded her possessions. The family was so poor that on one occasion, Mrs. Corbin lacked even the money to make a plum pudding -- a neighbor paid for the ingredients. On camping trips, all five Corbins slept in the family Oldsmobile Bobby Gene in the trunk. But the defining influence of the Corbin home -- even more than the poverty -- was the Bible that always lay on the round oak table in the kitchen. The three girls were forbidden to visit other children's homes or even to leave the yard, which was bounded by a Sears chain-link fence. If they disobeyed, according to Paula's sister Charlotte Brown, their mother whipped them with a branch cut from a wild cherry tree in the back yard. Not many days went by, Brown says, without a whipping. Yet the most painful rule, the one that made other kids laugh and point, was the girls' dress code. Church law forbade women to cut their hair or wear pants; dresses had to cover the knees and elbows. "We were always outcasts in school," says Charlotte Brown. "Kids would make fun, call us names." Even on days when temperatures hovered above 100 degrees, the Corbin girls, long hair pulled back in ponytails, wore their long dresses. Even in the wading pool. Tragedy strikes. In the end, the very forces that the Corbins built their bulwarks against attacked them from behind. Bobby Corbin, who tried to teach his children to love music and kept no fewer than four pianos and organs in the home, died suddenly of a heart attack while playing the piano. Delmer, who refused to throw anything out, saw almost everything she owned destroyed when a fire engulfed the house in 1986 (the clutter made it more difficult for firemen to fight the blaze). And although both parents diligently policed the family, two of the three Corbin daughters turned out to be among the most free-wheeling girls in Lonoke. "She'd lay out in back and sun in a bikini." This comes from the Corbins' next-door neighbor, Shirley Bates, who liked Delmer Corbin but had little use for her youngest daughter, Paula, whom she remembers as "wild" and "a disgrace." Especially after Bobby Gene's death, a certain chaos descended on the house on Front Street. Lights burned into the early morning hours, and often Paula and Lydia remained out long after their mother had retired. In the room the girls shared, pints of forbidden wine and Brass Monkey liquor appeared in hiding places between the mattress and the wall. Paula took to wearing short, tight skirts to school, and more makeup than other girls in Lonoke -- eyeliner, shadow, rouge, red lipstick and lip gloss. Asked what Paula liked to do best as a teen, Mike Busick, her boyfriend at the time, recalled: "Have money spent on her. Go. Do. Buy." In time, both of the older girls dropped out of high school, married and settled in trailers in nearby Cabot, raising babies. But Paula seemed to want more. A mediocre student, she nonetheless was determined to graduate from high school, even though it meant transferring to another school with less strict requirements in the next town. By now, Paula had shed her prim upbringing completely and was on her way to becoming a bubbly woman whose big eyes, wild hair and provocative clothes drew the attention she craved. But in the years following graduation, nothing quite clicked for her. She briefly attended secretarial school, then held a succession of short-lived jobs, working as a department store clerk, a rental-car agent and a secretary for a pest-control company. It wasn't until Paula reached her early 20s that two influences came together that must have made her think she had finally left Lonoke behind. The first was Steve Jones, a tall, good-looking would-be actor who had a responsible job with Northwest Airlines with free travel and the money to buy Paula the things she loved: the Gucci bag, an amethyst ring, a leather jacket, the Mercedes. In 1991, they married at the lofty Thorncrown Chapel in northern Arkansas, and settled -- not in a trailer but in a two-bedroom, two-story house near Vilonia, Ark. Paula's second turning point was a job with the Arkansas Industrial Development Commission, where her duties delivering documents brought her into daily contact with the state's political muckety-mucks, including then Gov. Bill Clinton. She was barely two months into the job when, as she would later say, Clinton invited her to his hotel room. Thinking the meeting might lead to a job promotion, according to her account, she went. Instead, she said, Clinton attempted to fondle her and then dropped his pants and asked her for oral sex, which she refused. She recounted the story later the same day to two close friends, who have described her as shaken and hurt by the experience. She also told her sister Charlotte, who denies that Paula was upset. "She was laughing," says Charlotte. Whatever the truth, Paula never filed a complaint. When she quit her job in 1993, according to a source close to her, it was because Steve had the chance to transfer to California, not because of conditions at work. But that is not the story she would tell the nation's media. Danny Traylor is a skinny, chain-smoking lawyer who runs a solo "street practice" in Little Rock -- some divorce law, a little real-estate and criminal work and a bit of almost everything else. His most notorious client before Paula Jones was a local slumlord accused by tenants of shutting off the electricity. Jones told Traylor that she had read an American Spectator story suggesting she had been one of Bill Clinton's girlfriends. It wasn't true, she said, and she related her version of the hotel room encounter with Clinton. She wanted to get a retraction from the magazine to clear her name. Traylor, however, saw other possibilities: a legal claim, with money in it. Though Paula would later deny it, the money must have been attractive, since the Joneses, according to those who know them, were in debt, their credit cards "maxed out." Paula agreed to Traylor's plan, and the aftermath is history: how she lost much of her credibility for what might be a justifiable claim after Traylor asked for money from a Clinton friend; how he and Paula held a press conference with the assistance of Clinton's nemesis, Cliff Jackson, leading to allegations that she was politically motivated; how Jones filed charges asking for $700,000 in damages -- and then, after publicity portrayed her as a money hungry bimbo, said she planned to give the money to charity. And that is where the story comes to an abrupt, unsettling halt. With Jones mum, it is left to her eclectic relations, some of whom are every bit as eccentric as writer O'Connor's righteous characters, to clear up a trail of unanswered questions. Paula's mother, Delmer, answered the door of her Cabot apartment the other day wearing a long dress, her white hair pulled back in a severe bun, and said pleasantly that she wouldn't say anything about her daughter because "I have a good relation with the Lord and I want to keep it that way." Paula's sister Lydia jerked open her trailer door, screamed, "I'm sick of all you people!" and slammed it again. Across town, Paula's other sister, Charlotte, stood on her trailer porch and spoke of her continuing religious devotion -- she is now a Baptist -- then let loose a stream of vitriol, calling sister Lydia "mean" and Paula greedy. Her bearded and tattooed husband, Mark, an unpredictable and often angry man who not long ago cursed out the mayor of Cabot at a City Council meeting, meanwhile muttered ago cursed out the mayor of Cabot at a City Council meeting, meanwhile muttered epithets in the background. As for Paula herself, she has become a poster girl of sorts for the conservative activists who are paying her legal costs. In her most far-fetched teen dreams, the girl from Lonoke couldn't have imagined the thrill of being on the cover of People last month -- or the humiliation of the article inside that raised doubts about her story. One can't help wondering if the grown Paula is lying on a beach in California somewhere, wishing she had never come forward, wondering how so much promise could turn so sour.