Up from little Lonoke, Ark., Paula Jones always had her eyes on a better life
by Lynn Rosellini, Greg Ferguson
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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 bu
