Linda Bloodworth-Thomason and Harry Thomason: Just a Couple of Hicks With 40 Million Viewers

HARRY THOMASON KNEW THAT LIFE had changed forever when he fell off a motor bike he was riding with his nephew on the driveway on New Year’s weekend. Just minutes after 911 was dialed, the sheriff, highway patrol, fire department and rescue unit streaked to his new house near Santa Barbara. As his head was being immobilized on the stretcher one of the paramedics said, “Do you think you could get these Clinton T shirts signed for me?” Thomason replied, “If I live.”

Back in his office in Washington, where he chairs the Inauguration Committee with his wife, Linda Bloodworth-Thomason, he has sent off the shirts to be inscribed by his close friend from Arkansas. He also has two fractured ribs, a broken hand and deep wounds on his face. But he is exhibiting the show-must- go-on mentality that has made him and Linda a force in Hollywood. Together they have created, written, directed and produced three network shows to current prime-time success: Designing Women, Evening Shade and Hearts Afire.

Everywhere Thomason turns, there is a camera (the Today show, Good Morning America and C-SPAN are all filming) and a meeting waiting to happen. Someone reports that 34% of this year’s Grammy nominees will be performing (gratis, of course, as is everyone) and that Michael Jackson needs a call. Thomason is still twisting the arms of CBS, Time Warner and Disney to find out what they will pay to telecast the events, including gala performances by Barbra Streisand, Aretha Franklin, Bill Cosby, a reunited Fleetwood Mac, a vast parade with two Elvis impersonators and a lawn-chair precision drill team. How did Thomason end up here? “Obviously, I was out of the room when Bill decided,” he jokes wearily, pressing his bandaged hand to his bandaged forehead.

Harry met the President-elect when his brother Danny, an optometrist in Little Rock who has known Clinton since they were college students, introduced them in the late 1960s. After Harry met Linda — she had walked up to him at Columbia studios and said, “So you’re the other hick on the lot” — he went over with her to the Governor’s mansion one morning for coffee and strawberries. The four didn’t stop talking until many hours later. As a granddaughter of a muckraking Arkansas newspaper editor (he was shot by the Ku Klux Klan) and the daughter of a lawyer, Linda says, “you were sent to your room if you didn’t have an opinion.” She says she and Hillary are much alike, as they pursue their careers and work together on a foundation Linda established to send Ozark women to college. Linda talks to Hillary almost daily, but sometimes the friend she has grown to love in private does not resemble the person the public sees. “Hillary has a raucous sense of humor but has to be more reserved than me. Would you risk being humorous in a foxhole?” she asks.

The Thomasons keep a house in Little Rock, so the two couples see a lot of each other — boating on the Arkansas River, sitting around the Clinton kitchen playing Trivial Pursuit, and taking vacations together. But Thanksgiving weekend at the Thomasons’ new house in California turned into a media event, complete with helicopters overhead and boats bearing paparazzi.

After Harry introduced Clinton at his presidential-campaign kick-off, the Thomasons thought they would be rooting the Clintons on from a sound stage in Burbank. But when the Governor went into free fall before the first primary, Thomason took off for New Hampshire. He quickly put together two TV shows that introduced local voters to the candidate via a phone-in format, which at the time made some political aides incredulous. “You’re gonna put this candidate on live television and actually let people call in?”

The Thomasons made themselves invaluable again during the Democratic Convention, when they came up with the idea — and the choreography — of the dramatic walk from Macy’s basement to Madison Square Garden. Hillary asked Linda to produce a film for the convention that would reintroduce the family to the country. The Man from Hope, a 14-min. documentary interspersing home movies and interviews with the Clintons, created an image of small-town life as warm and engaging as that of Evening Shade.

At a surprise party for Harry’s 52nd birthday last November, the President- elect gave the toast with the caveat that he did not think anyone could possibly know what the Thomasons meant to him unless they had been through as many ups and downs with him as they had in the campaign. “Harry was there when I got sick and I was under siege and I got so fat I could hardly walk. Everyone else was making fun of me, but Harry just went out and bought me bigger suits.” Late at night, when she was too weary to do anything else, Hillary would always find time to call Linda, cradling a phone, laughing and hatching plans for when they would be back in Little Rock.

Harry, the former high school football coach who had made a string of B pictures not quite bad enough to attract a cult following, got his break with a TV tearjerker about a dying athlete and the mini-series The Blue and the Gray. Linda attributes her success in network television, one of the last remaining outposts of prefeminist thinking, “to the Bic pen and nothing else.” She wrote 35 straight episodes of Designing Women, an indoor record in Hollywood. But after 150 episodes, the top-rated show about four intelligent women had won only one Emmy — for hairdressing. So she wasn’t surprised by Hillary’s national reception. “That’s how women are thought of. Of all the things Hillary has done, the No. 1 question I was asked was about her headband.”

Friendships that last through failure sometimes founder on success, unless it is mutual. For the Thomasons and Clintons, there is little left to want from each other except each other. “I am suspicious of friendships in Hollywood,” says Jay Kriegel, a senior vice president of CBS, “but I’m not suspicious of theirs.” There are few jobs as influential as the one the Thomasons already have, reaching 40 million people a week, but there is one thing that Linda asked for: to spend a night in the White House. On Jan. 21, the hicks from Arkansas will sleep in the Lincoln Bedroom.