The worst way for a famous person to retain her privacy is to demand it. A celebrated recluse will never be left alone in a celebrity culture; her silence is an irresistible challenge and her secrets will eventually be prized from her. Is it any coincidence that J. D. Salinger has attracted two of the most loquacious memoirists in decades? No, the business of being a public private person is subtle and tricky. Retreat and refusal are not enough. Bargains must be struck.

In recent years, no one has understood this better than Chelsea Clinton and her parents. From the beginning, Bill and Hillary Clinton made it clear that they wanted their only child to enjoy as normal an upbringing as possible. And to an extraordinary degree, journalists and the general public conformed with their wishes. Campaigning at her mother's side this fall, Chelsea Clinton proved to be an enormous political asset -- beaming, besieged with autograph seekers, neat and polished in her charcoal-gray sweaters and well-cut skirts, her wild curls at last brought to heel. Nothing sullen or fidgety in her demeanor suggested that she would rather be dropping Ecstasy with her pals or even reading a book at Starbucks. She has mastered a certain college-girl chic -- muted, dark colors; a wardrobe of fashion-forward but unflashy suits; minimal makeup; lots of sunglasses. (You seldom see her in the the power red favored by female executives or the ingratiating pastels worn by would-be first ladies.) Unlike most teenagers, she seems never to have slouched; her ramrod posture would put your average finishing-school graduate to shame.

She shakes hand after hand at rope lines; she waves with royal aplomb; she poses graciously and hugs her parents often. What she does not do, in public, is talk. She does not give speeches and has never done an interview. With rare exceptions, she does not answer even the most anodyne questions shouted out by journalists. (When a reporter at the Sydney Olympics asked what Chelsea thought of the city's famous opera house, she smiled and demurred. Donna Shalala, her temporary chaperon, stepped in with the answer, "I think we all love the opera house.") For everything we know about her parents, we know next to nothing about her. At 20, she is a cipher, but an intensely familiar one. She is a secret we are all keeping.

For years, this peculiar arrangement made sense. When her father took office, Chelsea was 12 years old, frizzy-haired, freckled and with a mouthful of braces. She looked vulnerable and was treated accordingly. Nobody wanted to see her covered as insensitively as Amy Carter, the last child to have lived in the White House. At 9 years old, newly transplanted from Georgia, Amy had been sent off, very publicly, to public school. "There are notes in the Carter Library pleading with reporters not to follow her to school," says Gil Troy, a historian of first families. "And I think one of the most tasteless things I've ever seen written about a presidential child was written about her -- a piece in The Washington Star, calling attention to her 'beginning of a bosom, a hint of a waist.' "

With Chelsea, nearly everyone but Rush Limbaugh was more circumspect. When reporters requested interviews with her, or even information about her, says Neel Lattimore, the first lady's former press secretary, "I had the feeling they were kind of sheepish about it, kind of apologetic, like, 'My editor asked me to do this, and I know the answer is no.' "(Which it always was.) Indeed, so solid was the consensus on leaving Chelsea alone that when People magazine published a highly complimentary cover article about how gracefully she seemed to be weathering the impeachment scandal, Geraldo Rivera was among the chorus of indignant voices. "I'm glad it's their story," he harrumphed, "not mine."

The consensus on Chelsea has held for both virtuous and less virtuous reasons. After all, nearly everybody who has kept her secrets found some sort of pride or self-satisfaction in doing so. Washington reporters, for example, are still patting themselves on the back for shielding Chelsea. But they have done so not only out of a decent inclination to protect a young person who never asked to be famous but also out of the sense that self-restraint might earn them something: access to her parents, perhaps. And if they got very little in the way of information about Chelsea, journalists did get pictures. The Clintons weren't stingy with those. From the 1992 campaign, when Bill and Hillary posed for People magazine snuggling with Chelsea in a backyard hammock (they were worried at the time that voters perceived them as a childless power couple) to the Monica crisis, when cameras showed Chelsea walking between her parents, lightly touching each of them, images of Chelsea have softened the image of her parents, while satisfying just enough curiosity about her.

At Stanford, where leaks about Chelsea's life have been rare, the official attitude seems to be it's no big deal having the president's daughter here -- and if you act like it is, you're blowing our rep big time. When a student named Jesse Oxfeld wrote a column for The Stanford Daily about press coverage of Chelsea, his editor fired him for violating the paper's rather precious policy of not commenting on Chelsea unless "she involves herself in a newsworthy event at Stanford." University press officers labored mightily to make her sound like just another student at a place where, of course, all students are special. They liked to remind reporters that famous people didn't ruffle them a bit, that Tiger Woods went there -- and Fred Savage, too. (You mean the Fred Savage? The guy from "The Wonder Years"? No wonder Chelsea has been ignored!) And students picked up on the message that calling too much attention to Chelsea would mark them as potential losers. "She's bright and talented, just like the rest of the incoming class," as an editorial in The Daily put it. "Her claim to fame is that her dad's got a cool job. But many other incoming students will have their own, also quite significant, claims to fame."

Then, too, many of the reporters covering Clinton were baby-boomer parents themselves, and when it came to rearing children, they were inclined to sympathize with protective, even cossetting, impulses. In the upper middle classes, the 70's notion that kids were tougher than we thought -- tough enough to withstand messy divorces, to hear the unvarnished truth about nearly everything -- has given way to an anxious sense of children as delicate vessels. All of this made the mission to insulate the first daughter much easier to accomplish than it was in the Carters' time. "Chelsea was the representative child for the protective 90's, when the goal was not just to buff your children for success but also to make sure they were buffered from a corrupting culture," says Ann Hulbert, who is writing a book on the history of child-rearing advice in America.

And until now, all this protectiveness toward Chelsea has been justified. While she lived in the White House, she was a child, after all, and any curiosity Americans might have had about her prom date or her grades or her braces didn't deserve satisfaction. Even if her parents did sometimes bend their own rules, trotting out references to Chelsea when it might be politically convenient, there was no decent reason to push them further.

Now, though, the seen-and-not-heard routine is beginning to seem a little bizarre -- less protective than infantilizing. Chelsea is nearly 21, presumably an intelligent young woman, probably the most widely traveled presidential child in history. Judging by her popularity with crowds during her mother's Senate campaign, she's a political force in her own right. She accompanied her father to negotiations on the Middle East at Camp David last year and helped represent the United States government at the Olympics. If she is not yet a wholly public figure, she is certainly not a private citizen either. Increasingly, she seems a fair journalistic subject.

Besides, on the rare occasions when she has spoken publicly, she has risen to the task with no evident nerves. In 1997, on a trip to Tanzania with her mother, Mrs. Clinton surprised her by suggesting that Chelsea handle questions from village teenagers about youth in America. She jumped in with an earnest, articulate reply about problems with drugs, violence and "hopelessness." And from the dribs and drabs of information we've got about her interests, it seems that she is setting aside her earlier ambition to be a pediatric cardiologist and moving in a more political direction. When someone in the crowd at one of her mother's campaign rallies asked what she was planning to do after college, she responded in staccato, "Oxford, economics."

If only she'd say a little more. There's something odd about seeing her in all these places and still being told that she has no official schedule, that only the most basic information will be handed out about her, that reporters must be extremely careful about quoting any spontaneous remark of hers, no matter how harmless or brief. It makes it seem that she is being used in some icky, insidious way -- that she has been set forth as a paragon of normality, a child who has never rebelled despite her father's exquisitely embarrassing travails. For that reason alone, I hope that her new role as Senator Hillary Clinton's child won't be a silent one. I hope that someday soon, Chelsea will break free from the carapace of the dutiful daughter. It wouldn't take much. She wouldn't have to wreck a car or light up a joint or vote for a Republican. She could just stop waving and start talking -- preferably in full sentences.