"They took the idols and smashed them."

"The Fairbankses, the Gilberts, the Valentinos!
And who've we got now?
Some nobodies!"

From "Sunset Boulevard":

MAX
...That is my job.
It has been for a long time. You
must understand I discovered her
when she was eighteen. I made her
a star. I cannot let her be destroyed.

GILLIS
You made her a star?

MAX
I directed all her early pictures.
There were three young directors
who showed promise in those days:
D.W. Grirrith, C.B. deMille, and
Max von Mayerling.

GILLIS
And she's turned you into a
servant.

MAX
It was I who asked to come back,
humiliating as it may seem. I
could have gone on with my career,
only I found everything unendur-
able after she divorced me.

You see, I was her first husband.

Things do not end well for Joe Gillis when he chooses to give up his career and ideals to become Norma Desmond's clever, kept man.

Because in Norma's house, Max pulls all the important strings. Max -- this other man who was both her director and her husband -- runs the estate and Norma's affairs from the shadows.

The analogy is flawed of course; in the Clinton house, it has always been Bill who was both star and director. Who believed that the light of distant suns had traveled millions of light years just to fall on him.

And the transformation from the leader of the Free World to Hillary's dutiful ward heeler has been anything but smooth. In fact, as Ryan Lizza writes in "The New Yorker" here:

...
Now the constant fear is that he [Bill Clinton] will embarrass her. When he makes news, it is rarely a good day for his spouse. Whether he was publicly comparing Barack Obama’s primary victory in South Carolina to Jesse Jackson’s campaigns in the eighties or privately, and apoplectically, complaining that Bill Richardson broke his word by endorsing Obama, every story has seemed to reinforce an image of Clinton as a sort of ill-tempered coot driven a little mad by Obama’s success. “I think this campaign has enraged him,” the adviser told me. “He doesn’t like Obama.” In private conversations, he has been dismissive of his wife’s rival. James Clyburn, an African-American congressman from South Carolina, told me that Clinton called him in the middle of the night after Obama won that state’s primary and raged at him for fifty minutes. “It’s pretty widespread now that African-Americans have lost a whole lot of respect for Bill Clinton,” Clyburn said.
...

it has clearly been a wrenching and unnatural Brundlefly-like mutation.

Some days it's gotta feel to the Big Dog like he was unfairly and prematurely booted out of Xanadu, then forced to take up residence in a glorified refrigerator box on Lower Wacker Drive. And on those days the impulse to stand up and remind everyone that they are fucking well addressing the once upon a time King of the Universe is obviously overwhelming.

So this comes by way of a warning to anyone who thinks that a Clinton White House will be an inclusive place that warmly welcomes, embraces and offers any real power to anyone who ever stood athwart their plans: In Norma's huge house, there is really only room for the gargantuan egos of the Star and her Director.

In Norma's house, everyone else is an adornment.

A disposable adornment.