Even Lonesome Rhodes, I mean director Steven Spielberg, couldn't make Hillary Clinton's image more likeable. According to a New York Post excerpt of Edward Klein's book, "Unlikeable," Spielberg acting as Hillary's "consigli di immagine," tried but failed in this difficult endeavor. When you see the video clip below of Lonesome Rhodes in the movie "A Face In the Crowd" giving similar advice to make Senator Worthington Fuller more likeable you will see why I used Italian terminology for "image adviser." But first let us read of Spielberg acting as Lonesome Rhodes giving advice to his Senator Fuller, Hillary Clinton:
Hillary was taking lessons on how to be more likeable.
She was doing it for Bill, not for herself. It was all his idea.
One evening while they were having drinks with friends, he turned to Hillary and said, “Let’s ask Steven for help.” Their old Hollywood buddy Steven Spielberg could supply Hillary with acting coaches to help her when she had to give a speech.
Hillary didn’t think she needed help.
“I get $250,000 to give a speech,” she said, according to one of her friends, “and these Hollywood jackasses are going to tell me how to do it!”
But Bill insisted.
...She hired an assistant to run a video camera in the den of Whitehaven, her home in the fashionable Observatory Circle neighborhood of northwest Washington, DC. It was just the two of them, her and the camera guy, who had to sign a confidentiality agreement so he couldn’t blab to the press.
Later, after the recording session was over, she watched herself on the TV set. She sat in the dark, dressed in a blue muumuu that she’d recently purchased online at Amazon.com, and scrutinized her facial expressions, her hand gestures, the pitch of her voice, and her use of eye contact.
She told Bill she found the process tedious.
He said, “This could mean votes. Voters make decisions, even unconsciously, on how likeable a politician looks.”
But it wasn’t only the tedium that bothered her. She didn’t like the results she saw from the Whitehaven video sessions.
...When the Hollywood coaches sent back their critiques of Hillary’s video sessions, they noted that she looked irritated and bored.
Most times, after she glanced at the printout of their notes — she called them “notes from La-La Land” — she tossed them in the wastepaper basket.
There was one thing about the process that she thought was worthwhile: working on her facial expressions.
If she got the facial expressions right, she believed the rest would fall into place. But as she pointed out to friends, she could just as easily work on her facial expressions in front of the bathroom mirror without having some Hollywood schmuck tell her what she was doing right or wrong.
...When Hillary spoke in public, she still had trouble making eye contact with her audience. Her eyes wandered from the text of her speech or her talking points to some unfocused spot on the ceiling and back again. Her voice was flat and uninflected.
In exasperation, Hillary quit taking the likeability lessons.
So would Hillary have had more successful results if her image adviser had been Lonesome Rhodes? Check the video below of Lonesome Rhodes also advising Senator Fuller on how to be more likeable. When your humble correspondent searched for this clip, the only one he could find was in Italian. Oddly enough, even though it is in a foreign language, one can still understand the advice Rhodes gives to Fuller as his "consigli di immagine" by ruffling up his hair and teaching him how to smile. Since his advice is in Italian, it serves to give the clip an added degree of humor.
