WONDERLAND • The Ultimate Wonder Woman Site

Thomas-the woman is expected to look demure, dignified, and sympathetic (occasionally a smile or a tear is permitted), and under no circumstances to open her mouth.

But we're discussing "Wonder Woman," who, when she was doing her network television series in the 1970s, could stop a speeding bullet with the flick of one of her bracelets, and also wielded a terrific left hook. In other words, a bona fide feminist superhero, albeit an amply endowed feminist superhero who wore a skimpy spangled corselet.

So Carter, trying to revive her show-business career after a four-year hiatus, during which she settled in the suburbs and had two children, recently told her husband, Washington lawyer Robert Altman, that she was keeping quiet no longer.

"I said, `Well, honey, the silence is broken,' " Carter says, recounting their conversation. "He says, `Oh, no! What did you do?' And I said, `Well, it's done. There's nothing you can do about it. So there.' "

Thus she's started fighting back, talking about the Bank of Credit and Commerce International, a.k.a. "the Bank of Crooks and Criminals"-which was shut down in most countries last July-and the byzantine business dealings that have drawn Altman and his law partner, the erstwhile wise man Clark Clifford, into one of the biggest Washington scandals in years. And not just talking: she's apt to send you away with an inch-thick legal brief and a stack of manila folders containing transcripts of congressional testimony.

Washington is a great city," Carter says, presiding over her 20,000-square-foot Georgian house on six lusciously landscaped acres in Potomac, Maryland-complete with pool, tennis court, and decorative waterfall-which she and her husband may end up having to sell. "It's immensely intriguing and interesting, and the people are interesting. But I think it's a vicious city. I think they have a voracious appetite for blood. I think that if they see a weakness in anyone, that they go for the throat and they go in to kill."

At forty, she has not aged much since her Wonder Woman days, still fetching and hard-bodied in a sleek gray suit and a bright Nicole Miller tie. She's sitting, shoeless, on a leather sofa in her library, a vaulting two-story room paneled from floor to ceiling in hand-tooled mahogany and filled with a haphazard collection in which The House of Saud, The Superlawyers, and Mein Kampf are interspersed among paper. "But don't just take the man down," Carter adds, her voice trembling in indignation. "Take his wife, take his family, take his home, take his... "

She trails off, suddenly alone with her confusion and fury. "But is L.A. any less vicious?" I ask her, invoking her previous residence. "In L.A.," Carter says, "they may be secretly happy if you fail. `Did you see the ratings on her show?' Or `Did you this?' Or `Did you that?' But they don't set out to destroy your life. Here they set out to destroy your life and demean your wife, you know. I'm surprised they haven't attacked my children."

In that morning's Washington Post-a newspaper Carter holds in about the same affection as Pat Nixon must have during Watergate-there's a story disclosing the imminent breakup of Clifford & Warnke, the small, elite law firm founded by the former secretary of defense and "counsel to the president," the title of Clifford's recently published memoirs. The firm's sudden death, scuttling four thriving decades of practicing law in Washington for Clifford, is another consequence of the spreading scandal and the accompanying drumbeat of negative publicity; which has included speculation about the number of bathrooms in the Altmans' mansion (there are fifteen), reports that their servants habitually wear white gloves (they don't), references to B.C.C.I. founder Agha Hasan Abedi's wedding present to Carter (a four-door Jaguar XJ6 sedan), descriptions of their "spectacular" Christmas parties (they are pretty spectacular), and gossip that their marriage is on the rocks (it isn't).

"What an asshole," Carter says of a Washington Post reporter who referred to her in print as a "starlet," a label she doesn't accept gracefully after more than twenty years in show business, which she entered as a singer in a Tempe, Arizona, nightclub at age seventeen. "Calling me a starlet, just as a dig, just a little knife in the back, instead of an actress." Carter, though, is quick to add, "I apologize for that remark"-meaning her lapse into vulgarity. "I shouldn't have said it. It just got my dander up." Yet she eagerly goes on to brand the offending scribe "despicable," "jealous," "meanspirited," and "a jerk."

Bitchy press, however, is the least of her worries. In August, her husband of seven years and Clark Clifford abruptly resigned as president and chairman, respectively, of First American Bankshares, Washington's largest bank holding company, amid revelations that it was secretly and illegally controlled by B.C.C.I. through a consortium of oil-rich Arabs. B.C.C.I., until recently a prized client of Clifford & Warnke-the law firm helped assemble B.C.C.I's defense team to fight federal money-laundering charges, to which the London-headquartered bank ultimately pleaded guilty in January 1990-has been accused of all manner of nefarious activities, even of committing murder via a clandestine global intelligence operation known as "the black network."

As with previous Washington scandals, the question being asked of Clifford and Altman is: What did they know, and when did they know it? Government investigators claim that bank documents suggest the lawyers were aware of B.C.C.I' hidden interest, but the two say they were deceived by "the World's Sleaziest Bank," as B.C.C.I. was dubbed by Time magazine, and point to recent congressional testimony by Federal Reserve officials that there has been no evidence of wrongdoing at First American. In the past year, Clifford and Altman have spent days on end being questioned under oath by prosecutors and bank regulators and testifying in New York and Washington. Their personal legal bills have been said to approach a million dollars a month.

The buzz around town is that an indictment for bank fraud may be forthcoming from Manhattan district attorney Robert Morgenthau, the most aggressive prosecutor in the case until the U.S. Justice Department became fully engaged. According to conventional wisdom, Clifford, who turned eighty-five in December, is too old to be indicted. But his protégé's fate is another matter. "Whither Robert Altman? The same thing as Mike Milken," a government investigator speculated. "It'll be a minimum-security setting, very comfortable, and when he gets out he won't be in for that long-he'll go on with his life."

"To tell you the truth, I know my husband has done nothing," says Carter. "I know that he is a strong and brilliant guy, a loving husband, a great father, a wonderful friend, and we love each other and are going forward. And to hell with them!"

"Them" is a varied multitude of cads and bounders who make up official Washington. It's the press, of course, which has sought "to portray me as a social-climbing bimbette," Carter complains, "when all I have ever done in this town is to try to be supportive of people's charities, knowing that they will be able to raise more money if my name is on their invitation." It's a host of prosecutors whom Carter imagines rubbing their hands together and gloating, "Oh, goody. This will really make my career. If I can put the scalps of Clark Clifford and Robert Altman on my belt. . . that can be my claim to fame." And it's "run-amok" members of Congress who are "scapegoating these private citizens," she says, "my husband and his best friend, his most beloved friend," for base political advantage.

Carter is still steamed over the performance last September of Representative Maxine Waters, Democrat of Los Angeles, at a House Banking Committee hearing at which the two lawyers attempted to explain themselves.

"I am thoroughly disgusted with the high and mighty, with the privileged," Waters raged in her opening statement. "I come from a district where people are poor, where people are struggling, where people go to jail when they steal a loaf of bread. They're shot by cops if they dare to make a wrong move... The mighty and the rich are getting away with unusual criminal activity, and I'm anxious to be involved in these hearings. I do not intend to be nice to anybody."

"And then she threw down her paper and she sat there scowling at the camera," recounts Carter. "And then, as soon as the camera was off of her, she got up and walked out and she never returned for the testimony or the questioning."

"I'm sure she feels the need to try and protect her husband," Waters responds coolly, acknowledging that she left the hearing room and didn't come back. "But if she knows anything about me at all, she knows I don't back up for rich people, movie stars, or anybody else. And while she has a right to her opinion, she may not want to get too far out there. She may not have a limb to crawl back on."

Wonder Woman, of course, would have coldcocked the congresswoman but not Lynda Carter. "I'd rather do it in a different way than that-like mentioning her name to you."

Robert Altman's phone manner is stolid and unflappable-the voice of respectability.

"Lynda is a very strong individual," he says in a careful, lawyerly cadence, "and she also has extensive experience in dealing with the press, albeit in a rather different context. Not necessarily in a rather different context," he revises. "The tabloid mentality she has dealt with for years. It gives her a greater understanding of the way that these things operate.

"I think she handles an unhappy situation exceedingly well," he continues, returning to his theme. "As I said, I don't comment on what is transpiring except when I give my appearances. I don't think it is appropriate for me."

The only time Altman loosens up is when he recites a favorable TV Guide review of his wife's performance in Posing, a TV movie about baring it all for Playboy that aired in November on CBS. At one point he actually laughs-at a reference in the review to the way Carter fills out a negligee.

They met over dinner in Memphis in the summer of 1982. He was there visiting the headquarters of Maybelline, a subsidiary of the Schering-Plough Corporation, one of Clifford & Warnke's blue-chip clients. She was there as the spokesmodel for the cosmetics company, touching down in the midst of a singing tour and recovering from her recently ended, horrific first marriage, to her manager, Ron Samuels.

According to several of Carter's friends, Samuels, who met her in 1976, shortly after she snagged the Wonder Woman role, and married her five months later, was a jealous, volatile man who isolated her from everyone but her immediate family and took complete control of her life. One friend of Carter's, former Hollywood Reporter columnist Sue Cameron, says that had she known that Samuels was going to visit Carter's trailer and introduce himself, "I would have waited on the roof with an anvil, and dropped it on his head."

"I was married a little over four years," Carter says, "and then I realized that the guy didn't really even love me, that it was all about money. And he went out on me all the time and he was horribly indiscreet and everything. He slept with everyone, I found out. I mean, like I say, he was indiscriminate.

"I wish him well now," Carter continues. "It took me a while to get over it." In fact, she is not yet over it: a discussion of her ex-husband quickly reduces her to sobs. "You know, I was young," she goes on. "I had no experience in love. I had directed all of my energies towards my work, and was very successful at that, and had not understood or paid any attention to my heart. I loved this person without question. I was like the faithful dog."

"You've got the wrong guy," Samuels says when reached at his Beverly Hills entertainment company. "She must be talking about someone else. I have a clear conscience... I don't know what she's talking about."

"He really did well with Lynda," says tennis legend Chris Evert, who somehow has managed to stay friendly with both, "and he did well before he met Lynda... But that was a little awkward, trying not to take sides. I think, in his defense, that whenever a marriage breaks up, both parties are at fault."

It was during her first marriage that Carter became known for being "difficult" on the set, a lingering reputation that made several producers wary as she began beating the bushes recently for television work.

"It wasn't just on the set; she was difficult everywhere," says Doug Cramer, executive producer of Wonder Woman, who cast her in the original ABC series and kept her when it moved to CBS two years later, because she had "a fantastic body, the greatest blue eyes in the world, and an incredible ability to be enormously seductive while at the same time prim and proper.

"The difficulty grew out of several things: one was her insecurity," Cramer continues. "She was fresh out of nowhere and overnight a star, on magazine covers, in great demand as a guest star, and everybody wanted her in her Wonder Woman outfit, which was humiliating for her. It was Wonder Woman with her body in it, rather than Lynda Carter." Another factor was the sheer exhaustion of starring in an hour-long series, which eventually ran thirty-two episodes a year and required a seven-day shoot for each episode, while being prodded by Samuels to sing and spend her nights cutting albums in a recording studio.

Cramer says he found a changed woman-and a better actress-when he cast Carter last May in Danielle Steel's Daddy, which, when aired in October, was NBC's top-rated movie of 1991. "In recent years, she has really studied her craft, and spent a lot of time working with a coach in New York, and improved enormously," Cramer says. "Everyone in the company loved her. She knew all her lines and she was always on the set before she had to be."

Her relationship with Robert Altman deserves some of the credit. Robert Altman's career as Clark Clifford's fair-haired boy began long ago. "He came in as a clerk... and finished his law training and passed the bar," recalls the man whom Altman persists in calling "Mr. Clifford" despite the latter's desire to be addressed simply as "Clark." "And he's been with us twenty years," Clifford continues. "I have found him exceedingly bright and a real workaholic. I like workaholics in law firms."

Clifford saw young Altman as the son he never had, Lynda Carter theorizes, and picked him for a series of choice assignments, which Altman fulfilled with distinction. In September 1977, when President Jimmy Carter asked Clifford to defend his embattled budget director, Bert Lance, against a host of government and congressional investigators looking into dubious doings at Lance's bank in Georgia, it was Altman who counseled Lance to go on the attack against Congress, a strategy that nearly worked. When Lance was finally forced out of the Carter administration, and Clifford & Warnke defended him in the ensuing welter of litigation, Altman "rose substantially in my estimation," Clifford told Washingtonian magazine.

By the early 1980s, Altman had become the Establishment sage's most trusted aide, playing, a key role in the complex legal battles and negotiations that made Clifford chairman and Altman president of the Arab-owned First American Bank shares-and eventually thrust them, stage center, into the current controversy. In a deal that they would ultimately have cause to regret, but that cemented their bond even further, Altman and Clifford turned a $9.8 million pre-tax profit by borrowing $14.9 million from B.C.C.I. to buy stock in First American, which they then sold at allegedly inflated prices to an accommodating super-rich Arab eighteen months later. Further tangling the web, the two men continued to provide legal counsel to both B.C.C.I. and First American, while directing the affairs of the latter a situation seemingly rife with conflict of interest.

Altman has been cast by some as the villain of the piece-portrayed in press accounts as "a cross between Ivan Boesky and Gordon Gekko," Lynda Carter complains. One investigative journalist told Washingtonian magazine, "Clark Clifford sold his soul to the devil. Bob Altman was the broker."

Altman is, by all accounts, a sharp lawyer and a tough businessman, whose instincts were honed while growing up in a family that celebrated the spirit of competitiveness. The son of Ivy League trained Washington attorneys-his mother, Sophie, one of very few women in her day to attend Yale Law School, went on to produce award-winning public affairs television shows-Altman was a varsity swimmer at the University of Wisconsin in the 1960s, an editor of the law review at George Washington University, and plays tennis for keeps on his private court in Potomac. Yet he is also known as a warm and loyal friend-who didn't drop his old Washington buddies when he and his glamorous new wife started moving in more rarefied social circles-as well as a supportive husband and a doting father. Carter likes to tell the story-as do several of her friends-of how one evening last summer, in the midst of the blossoming B.C.C.I. scandal, Altman interrupted a conference call with his high-priced lawyers in order to minister to their sobbing three-year-old son.

He and Carter were wed in Pacific Palisades eighteen months after they met. Among the guests were Loni Anderson, with whom Carter was soon to star in a short-lived series for NBC; Ed McMahon; Barbara Mandrell; and Agha Hasan Abedi, who was indicted on bank-fraud and racketeering charges by a federal grand jury last November. Clark Clifford was best man.

"I was greatly struck when she and Bob got to know each other and became engaged," says Clifford, whose own phone manner is mellifluous and chatty. "I took them out and the three of us all had a drink together. And while he stepped away to take phone calls, she told me that she had had an interesting career in television up to that time. `But,' she said, `I'm now prepared to change my career from actress to that of wife and mother. That's what I want very much to become.' I was really quite impressed by it. She was completely sincere. "

During their honeymoon on the ski slopes of Deer Valley, Utah, Carter was rescued by Blaine Trump after falling down the mountain. "Lynda is the type of person who has always worked hard to get where she is," says Trump, a close friend since that chance meeting. "She has very solid beliefs and commitments to her family and her life, and I think that commitment has gotten her through just about every situation she has faced in life. She's not a quitter. And she's not afraid to take chances."

"I think she's a corker!" Clark Clifford says.

With her cleavage-revealing Bob Mackie gowns and skintight leather pantsuits-to say nothing of her Hollywood, albeit television, celebrity-Carter was an immediate Washington sensation. The invitations poured in and kept on coming-to attend state dinners at the White House and the Congressional Club's luncheons for the First Lady, dinner parties with Cabinet members and the Speaker of the House, even to sing "The Star-Spangled Banner" at the Democratic National Convention. In short order she threw herself into such sterling causes as the American Ballet Theatre, the American Red Cross, and Marilyn Quayle's favorite charity event, Race for the Cure, a fund-raiser to combat breast cancer. The last involvement-in which Carter's role was to snag celebrity runners for race day-brought her fast friendships with the vice president's wife and a host of other prominent women.

"She delivered the celebrities," says race organizer and Hallmark Cards Inc. lobbyist Rae Evans, "and, more importantly, she delivered her own body which was getting bigger by the month with child. [The Altmans eventually produced Jamie Clifford, now four, and fifteen-month-old Jessica Carter.] For virtually every event I asked her to do, she would wake up, throw up, and show up."

In the grand Washington tradition of "showing the flag," in which public figures under fire demonstrate that they have nothing, but nothing, to be ashamed of, Evans hosted an extremely visible lunch for Carter last October at the Occidental restaurant, attended by Marilyn Quayle and other women, whose names were purposely given to The Washington Post. Carter says the wife of the frequently harpooned vice president has been especially supportive, phoning occasionally to empathize and to tease Carter about her addiction to bee pollen, sugar blockers, and other health fads.

"Lynda's just Washington's little darling-our own little show pony," says Mark Robertson, a vice president of the public-relations firm Hill and Knowlton, and a keen observer of capital life. "It's There is nothing that I aspire to in this town, I assure you," Lynda Carter says, comfortably ensconced in her library. "I have always been a working person. I come from humble beginnings. I don't care about it," she says, speaking of fame and social standing. "I've had it, I've done it. I don't need it. It holds no cachet for me."

So she's hoping to land a TV series, and maybe even a big-screen movie. She has already been told by a producer, while attending a party on one of her visits to L.A., "God, I'm so glad, you're so hot now."

"And I hadn't done anything," she marvels. "No movies had aired. `I think you're just doing great,' he says. `Your name is everywhere. I'm hearing your name all the time.' And I turned to one of my closest friends and I said, `Only in Hollywood-only in Hollywood do they think any publicity is good publicity.' "

And if she ends up making a lot of money, so much the better-even though, she hastens to add, "my husband is a man of substance. He certainly doesn't rely upon me.

"Robert will continue to practice with Clifford as long as Clifford is realistically able," Carter says, even in the face of her husband's possible indictment. "This is a terrible time. This is not a walk in the park. But in my mind I couldn't care less about anything in life that is material... I can't buy another ball gown. I've got enough clothes to last me, enough jewelry. We don't need to consume and we don't need to spend money. That's not something that holds a great fascination for me. I assume we'll be able to feed and house our children, and clothe them. If we have to do whatever, I don't care."

And, typically, Carter sees a bright side to the catastrophe that has befallen her. "I sort of like the whole idea of the nineties and restraint anyway, especially after the eighties. "

"There's not much I can do except to say, `We care about you,' " says Carter's friend Jack Valenti, a former aide to Lyndon Johnson who is now president of the Motion Picture Association of America. "As L.B.J. would say, just hunker down like a jackass in a hailstorm and let the, wild winds blow for a while, and everything will be O. K."

	Lynda Carter thought Hollywood was a bitch of a town -until she moved to Washington, where the Beltway grapevine has been buzzing over her spectacular social rise and the fall of her husband, Clark Clifford protégé Robert Altman, who faces possible indictment in the B.C.C.I. mess. Her star quality may now be his most valuable asset, but can Wonder Woman polish up her man's P.R.? Lloyd Grove reports.

	For the first eight months of the budding scandal, Lynda Carter played at being the consummate Washington Wife.

	It's a cameo role, requiring the woman in question not so much to stand by her man as to sit behind him, usually in some light-bathed Capitol Hill hearing room where various members of Congress hurl abuse at the embattled witness-i.e., her husband-while cameras roll and the press takes notes. According to the traditions of the political theater-which have been observed by every wife from Maureen Dean to Betsy North to, at least until the battle was over, Virginia