WASHINGTON -- In the final moment of the first act of "Eleanor: An American Love Story," we see Franklin Roosevelt embracing Lucy Mercer, the young assistant who was not specifically his wife.

As everybody knows, such things happen. If Lucy Mercer wasn't exactly the Monica Lewinsky of her day -- for one thing, the country mercifully lacked a Kenneth Starr to out her -- her theatrical image at least helps us sense the family pain when Franklin found affection outside the marital bedroom, and shows how fortunate their timing was to live in a less vulgar era when the public's biggest concern was only an occasional world war.

"Eleanor" is playing at Ford's Theatre, famous as the place where Abraham Lincoln was assassinated. At intermission, still flush with seeing Roosevelt's romantic embrace of Mercer, you can walk across busy 10th Street to the actual bedroom where Lincoln breathed his last.

Or you can walk two doors up from there, to the P & D Souvenir Shop, where a different kind of assassination takes place, the character assassination which is an art form practiced in the great American marketplace.

In the souvenir shop, amid the little statuettes of Lincoln and Roosevelt and others, you can buy postcards with Bill and Hillary Clinton's faces. The faces are artfully superimposed on other people's figures. The figures are wearing leather bondage outfits.

In one, Hillary's leading the president around by a chain on his neck. In another, Bill's in a leather biker boy outfit with Al Gore. In a third, there's Hillary, whip in hand, bedecked in black leather, and -- well, it's a family newspaper, so let's leave it at that.

Fifty years from our own coarse era, maybe some playwright will describe the problems of Bill and Hillary Clinton with the kind of sensitivity now given the Roosevelts' long-ago emotional conflicts in "Eleanor."

Certainly, there are parallels in the lives of these two families even beyond the business of Lucy Mercer and Monica Lewinsky. Bill Clinton's a callow rube with a roving eye, but the Franklin Roosevelt seen on stage is a rather shallow socialite who discovered a political conscience through his wife.

It's the dawning of America's Gilded Age when we first see Eleanor and Franklin. Maybe the stock market wouldn't hit 10,000 for another 95 years or so, but the fabulously rich were leading lives of dazzling, flashy emptiness not unlike some of today's nouveau glitterati.

Except for Eleanor. "I want to work in a slum," she says. The distance between that era's rich and poor isn't quite today's breathtaking mathematical gap, but it'll do. She finds work teaching immigrant children on New York's lower east side. She wants to teach them workable English. Her supervisors -- such was their own sensitivity to the needs of the poor -- want her to teach them fancy dancing.

The nation would have had Hillary Clinton baking cookies. She wanted to talk about universal health care. The nation took comfort when she simply stood by her man like Tammy Wynette.

It's a short trip backward to the anger and uneasiness many felt when Eleanor Roosevelt decided to talk about those citizens on the nation's fringes, those who were poor and malnourished, and those ostracized for their ethnic differences, instead of spending her life as a silent prop.

On stage the young Eleanor gives up her slum work to marry Franklin -- with "a proper six-month honeymoon," the bride is informed by her domineering socialite mother-in-law, who then delivers the facts of political life, in song:

(BEGIN ITALS) "Your husband comes first

Empires have toppled

When the order is reversed."

(END ITALS)

When you return from the play's intermission, and you've seen those postcard images across 10th Street, you find Franklin sitting with his mother and his political adviser Louis Howe, trying to figure the electoral implications of a runaway sexual appetite. Eleanor has been reduced to mere political arithmetic.

"No one's gonna vote for a guy who leaves his wife," Howe says.

The scene evokes memories of Gennifer Flowers, and Hillary Clinton holding hands with her husband for the television cameras in that first run for the White House. There's a price to be paid for every political step.

On stage, Eleanor finds herself accommodating everyone around her, and losing an already-fragile sense of herself. By night's end, though, she's become not only Franklin's roving ambassador when he's struck down by polio, but his conscience.

Perhaps, 50 years from now, historians will treat Hillary Clinton and her disgraced husband more kindly than their contemporaries do. Their lives must count for more than the sum of Bill's sexual dalliances. In their time, Eleanor and Franklin had their image problems, but the country wasn't so coarse as to imagine them in bondage outfits.

Pub Date: 3/25/99