American Rhapsody

by Joe Eszterhas

  Hustler’s selection of Jerry Falwell as “Asshole of the Month” . . . J. Edgar Hoover and sixteen-year-old boys . . . LBJ picking women out of crowds, his aides pimping for him . . . Jimmy Carter’s poems . . . LBJ stealing furniture from the White House and flying it to his ranch . . . Eddie Murphy and the transvestite . . . George Bush saying, “Read my lips—no new taxes” . . . Dick Morris and Sherry Rowlands . . . JFK using Judith Exner as his bagman to the mob . . . LBJ staggering drunk and cussing up a storm in the White House . . . Jack Kemp’s time-shared Lake Tahoe apartment . . . Joan Kennedy’s life . . . Eugene McCarthy’s poems . . . Geraldo and Marion Javits . . . Ike and Kay Summersby . . . Vince Foster’s suicide note . . . JFK and Marilyn in that loft above the attorney general’s office . . . LBJ lifting his dogs up by the ears . . . George Bush examining a price scanner at a grocery store . . .

  Barney Frank and Steve Gobie . . . Ruth Carter Stapleton and Larry Flynt . . . Paula Jones’s nose . . . Bobby and Marilyn . . . Dustin Hoffman saying about Carl Bernstein, “I understand why Carl did so well on Watergate. Carl is essentially a fuckup and he has to fail, and Nixon is a fuckup and he has to fail, so Carl could always understand Nixon” . . . the videotape of Peter Jennings blowing his nose onto the ground . . . Jimmy Carter picking his nose in that photograph . . . Iowa senator Tom Harkin blowing his nose without a handkerchief on C-SPAN . . . Pat Buchanan saying, “Congress is Israeli-occupied territory” . . . Texas gubernatorial candidate Clayton Williams comparing bad weather and rape: “If it’s inevitable, relax and enjoy it” . . . Bob Kerrey telling Bill Clinton that joke on C-SPAN: “Jerry Brown walks into a bar and sees two hot women. A guy in the bar says to him, ‘Don’t waste your time, Governor; they’re dykes.’ Brown says, ‘How do you know?’ The guy says, ‘They like going down on each other.’ Brown says, ‘I like that, too. Does that make me a dyke?’ ” . . .

  LBJ ordering Marine Corps helicopters to herd the peacocks on his ranch . . . JFK doing three hookers at a time in his hotel suites . . . LBJ saying, “I don’t trust a man until I have his pecker in my pocket” . . . Spiro Agnew saying, “If you’ve seen one city slum, you’ve seen them all” . . . Ronald Reagan saying, “If you’ve seen one redwood, you’ve seen them all” . . . the picture of Gary Hart and Donna Rice . . . Barry Goldwater saying, “This country would be better off if we could saw off the Eastern Seaboard and let it float out to sea” . . . Dole falling off the stage . . . Ford drunk on Air Force One on the way back from Russia . . . Ford saying, “There is no Soviet domination of Eastern Europe,” while Russian forces were stationed there . . .

  Wayne Hayes and Elizabeth Ray . . . Houston mayoral candidate Louie Welch saying the way to control AIDS was to “shoot the queers” . . . LBJ explaining to reporters why we were in Vietnam by unzipping himself, taking out his willard, and saying, “This is why” . . . Roseanne’s crotch grab after singing the national anthem . . . George Bush, with a guitar emblazoned THE PREZ, jamming on stage at his inaugural ball . . . Ted Danson in blackface at Whoopi’s roast . . . Gerry Ford, after a long martini lunch, skipping several dozen pages of a speech . . . A Nancy Reagan aide, refusing to schedule a meeting between the First Lady and a child with muscular dystrophy, saying, “Absolutely not. The First Lady doesn’t want her picture taken with some drooly kid on a respirator.” . . .

  What Sally Field did to Burt Reynolds in Playboy . . . George Hamilton and Lynda Bird Johnson . . . Roger Mudd’s interview with Ted Kennedy . . . Reagan saying, “Keeping up with my opponent’s promises is like reading Playboy magazine while your wife turns the pages” . . . Dole on TV with his Exercycle, wearing shorts, a dress shirt, and French cuffs . . . Betty Ford, drunk, being carried off Air Force One . . . Nixon and Kissinger kneeling together, praying . . . Melissa Etheridge, Julie Cypher, and David Crosby’s sperm . . . LBJ turning to the side and taking a whiz at an outdoor press conference . . . LBJ telling a tailor, “I need some more goddamn ball room in these pants” . . . Nixon walking on the beach with his wing-tip cordovans . . . Reagan falling asleep during cabinet meetings.

  Gerry Ford’s flatulence . . . Pat Buchanan saying, “Women are less equipped psychologically to stay the course in the brawling arenas of business, commerce, industry, and the professions” . . . Gary Hart telling the media, “Follow me—I don’t care if anybody wants to put a tail on me. Go ahead. They’d be bored” . . . LBJ displaying his gallbladder and kidney-stone surgery scars for the cameras . . . Jimmy Carter holding Joan Kennedy’s hand as Rosalynn kept her eye on his . . . LBJ’s three Texan secretaries, none of whom knew how to type . . . Quayle using the spelling “potatoe” and “beakon” . . . Carter using the White House stairs as his jogging track . . . LBJ smoking cigarettes with the presidential seal on them . . . Michael Jackson and his chimp . . . Roxanne Pulitzer and her trumpet . . . Alfred Bloomingdale and Vicki Morgan . . .

  Wilbur Mills and Fanne Fox . . . Dan Rather saying, “Courage” . . . Haldeman and Ehrlichman . . . David Geffen and Keanu Reeves . . . Ford examining the change cup at McDonald’s . . . LBJ’s nickname, “Bull Nuts” . . . Pat Nixon’s four martinis for lunch . . . Howard Stern’s ass on prime-time television . . . LBJ buck naked on Air Force One with his wife, his daughters, and his secretaries . . . Jimmy Swaggart and the hooker . . . LBJ watching a crowd and saying, “You dumb sons of bitches, I piss on all of you” . . . Jimmy Swaggart’s apology . . . Dan Rather and “What’s the frequency, Kenneth?” . . . LBJ discussing the Civil Rights Act: “I’ll have them niggers voting Democratic for two hundred years” . . . Tricia Nixon wearing a cape and broad-brim hat when she went into the water to go swimming . . .

  LBJ talking about Vietnam: “We’re going to liberate those poor little boogers and I’ll be known as the Great Emancipator” . . . Woody Allen and Soon-Yi . . . Hubert Humphrey in a cowboy hat . . . Luci Baines Johnson looking for an assistant: “You go find my nigger! Right now! Find my nigger” . . . Jesse Jackson talking about New York City as “Hymietown” . . . Kitty Dukakis drinking her husband’s aftershave . . . Ted Kennedy’s testimony at the William Kennedy Smith trial . . . Reagan wearing a USC Trojan helmet . . . LBJ ordering Air Force One to land somewhere and buy some root beer . . . JFK doing that blonde who could have been a Communist secret agent . . . LBJ doing the same blonde who could have been a Communist secret agent . . . Kissinger shoving vegetables off his plate onto the floor of Air Force One . . . Bruce Lindsey saying to the press, “You all have been asses ever since we started” . . . LBJ stealing an electric bed from Walter Reed Army Hospital and flying it to his ranch . . . Richard Gere and the gerbil . . . Showgirls.

  The Comeback Kid knew this would be more painful than . . .

  Almost getting drafted . . . the 60 Minutes interview . . . meeting Monica’s parents at his radio address . . . being interviewed by Woodward . . . golf without mulligans . . . a Sam Donaldson prediction . . . sitting on a dais with Don Imus . . . Hillary throwing things at him . . . the way Monica’s father looked at him . . . watching Nixon on TV with his arms held high . . . being breathed on by Yeltsin . . .

  The way Monica’s mother smiled at him . . . Hillary yelling, “You stupid fuck” . . . Bob Dole’s jokes . . . shaking hands with Nixon . . . watching Al Gore dance . . . watching Roger sing . . . Hillary yelling, “You dumb shit” . . . Harold Ickes bursting into the Oval Office . . . Hillary yelling, “You fucking bastard” . . . Monica going “Da-da-da-da-da” . . . Hillary saying, “Get that whore away from me” at the Little Rock airport . . . the way Hillary’s mother looked at him . . . a Helen Thomas birthday party . . . making a speech at the Vietnam Memorial . . . hearing Monica making those Yoko Ono noises . . .

  Hillary asking “How’s Gennifer?” . . . Joe Klein writing a sequel . . . Monica wearing boots identical to Chelsea’s . . . Chelsea’s spaniel, Zeke, getting hit by a car . . . Hillary with her legs unshaven . . . that condescending look on Blumenthal’s face . . . Hillary moving away from his kiss at the inauguration . . . Vince holding Hillary’s
butt in public . . . Monica having her period that day . . . the way Betty Currie didn’t look at him . . .

  Reading William Safire . . . watching Al Gore campaign . . . dinner with George and Mari Will . . . talking to Monica about Hillary . . . watching Tipper from the rear . . . the broiled chicken breasts Hillary wanted him to eat . . . Hillary saying, “Get your dick down! You can’t fuck her here” . . . trying to find poor Web Hubbell some work . . . meeting William Safire . . . sitting on Nancy Hernreich’s couch in a meeting . . . dinner with Hillary’s brothers . . . reading about Chelsea in the tabloids . . . seeing Hillary naked.

  [4]

  America Gags, Hollywood Swallows

  “Hey, there’s a Barbara Walters interview with Barbra Streisand and James Brolin tonight,” Linda Tripp said.

  “Oy,” Monica said. “I hate her! She’s so annoying!”

  “She gets prettier as she gets older.”

  “Yeah. What do you think that’s from?” Monica said. “Plastic surgery. She’s probably had everything done but her nose.”

  The only place where I’d ever seen a cigar inserted in related fashion was in grandly decadent movie producer Robert Evans’s mink-rugged bedroom. And even in Bob’s inner chamber of horrifying pleasure, it wasn’t in real life; it was in a photograph up on the wall: a voluptuous young woman, one of Bob’s collectible queen bees, stark naked, on her hands and knees, an English bowler on her head and a lighted cigar sticking out of her magnificent upraised behind. I had no idea whether Evans, or the photographer, Helmut Newton, finished smoking the cigar after the picture was taken, or if the young woman finished smoking it in her own special way.

  I did know that as far as the Clinton-inserted cigar was concerned—now the most famous cigar in world history, more famous than JFK’s, more famous than all of Winston’s—I’d heard no one raise the basic policy-wonk questions: Was it a Cuban cigar and therefore an Oval Office violation of the president’s own Cuban embargo? Was it good battle judgment for the president to have a cigar in the Oval Office even as the big guns were blazing in America’s war on big tobacco? No one wanted to know about the cigar, and the truth was, there were reasons to pretend it didn’t exist, reasons that went deeper than parental need to avoid Pay-Per-View, Howard Stern dialogue at the dinner table.

  We were the free-speech generation of the sixties, the generation of free love and communal sex, of one-night stands and no guilt, of bedroom experimentation and athletics, of laughing condescendingly at our poor parents, copulating away once a week, doing the old in-out, in-out, in the same boring missionary position. Dad grunted a few times and came too fast; mom lay there staring at the ceiling, doing her duty and thinking about tomorrow’s discount on pork chops at the A&P; and foreplay consisted of a few sticky kisses and a dab of the K-Y jelly that was kept in the nightstand (mom applied it).

  All that was true . . . many years ago. But now we were moms and dads ourselves and it scared the freaking bejesus out of us that our kids would act the same wild and crazy way we had acted in bed. We were shaping a better America, and our definition didn’t include the things we had done in our youth: Wesson oil parties and body painting and stunt sex and drugs. We had gotten off in a thousand kinky ways, rubbing our privates red-raw, and we didn’t want our kids acting like that in a better America. We loved our kids and wanted the best for them: We wanted them to be not like us, but like our parents, like grandpa and grandma sitting watching the sunset after fifty years of mostly monogamous marriage, talking about that long-ago, misty senior prom as they sipped their warming his and hers mugs of tea and honey.

  We had read Bukowski and Kerouac and Henry Miller when we were our kids’ age, but now we wanted them to read Tom Clancy and Tom Brokaw, or if they really wanted to go out there, then maybe Stephen King. Nothing too graphic, nothing too sexual, nothing that would jangle our kids’ ganglia and innards so they’d wind up like some of us, on Prozac and hostage to shrinks.

  We had seen movies like A Clockwork Orange and El Topo and Mean Streets, movies that had purposely diddled with our heads, and we sure didn’t want our kids’ heads diddled with like that. Some of our generation, who became our most important movie critics, like Janet Maslin of the New York Times and Kenneth Turan of the Los Angeles Times, crusaded against movies with foul language, movies that were “vulgar” and “dispiriting,” campaigning for Jane Austen and Dickens and Shakespeare and Merchant and Ivory. (Some filmmakers were angry about what they called “the New Puritanism.” “Sometimes I have an overwhelming temptation to grab one of those critics by the throat, head-butt them, and leave them bleeding in the corner,” said English director Mike Figgis.) When we weren’t creating our own personal, unfilmed porn movies in the sixties, we were watching the Mitchell brothers or Linda Lovelace or Marilyn Chambers or Ralph Bakshi, but we were terrified now about what our kids were watching as they surfed the Net.

  And now, suddenly, to have all this hedonistic sixties stuff, the cigar, the blow jobs, the whacking, plopped down on the kitchen table at dinner—by the man we’d voted for, by the man who shared our vision of a better America—we didn’t want any part of it. We didn’t want to hear it; we didn’t want to see it. Period! We were not nostalgic, at least not publicly, about those good old days of excess. Many of us, now Little League coaches and soccer moms, were downright ashamed. How could we possibly have acted like such little pigs and little sluts? Well, our kids—Dylan and Caitlin and Sky and Montana—weren’t going to act that way. We’d make good and damn sure of that, even if it meant blocking out what our president was very publicly teaching our kids.

  Perhaps the masturbation part wasn’t that bad, if you had pubescents. We weren’t like mom and dad, who told us that if we did it, hair would grow on our palms and we’d go blind. We told our kids that masturbation was just fine, dear, that everybody did it, even mom and dad. Now we could expand and strengthen the argument. Everybody did it, dear, even the president. See? He didn’t have any hair on his palms. So there was something nearly positive there, something almost role model–like in what Bill Clinton did. His habit might ease our kids’ guilts. Though, hopefully, none of our kids would ask, “Am I still going to be doing it, Mom, when I’m as old as the president?” Or “How old are you, Dad? Do you still do it?”

  Another reason why America didn’t want to deal with these black billows of toxic smoke from this historic cigar was because—of all the bizarre, cockamamy things you could ever imagine—Gloria Steinem and Jerry Falwell had climbed into bed together! The oddest mating, certainly, since Mick and David Bowie, since Portnoy and his piece of liver, since Marilyn Manson removed his rib to mate with himself. Gloria, always the hotchacha of the women’s movement, classy and iconlike, and the Reverend Jerry Falwell, with his triple spare tires, his oleaginous smile, and his lechery for our Lord and Savior. But they were joined together on one issue: what they viewed as porn. As far as Steinem was concerned, it demeaned women. As far as Falwell was concerned, it was a sin and we’d burn in hell.

  The Left and the Right had intertwined and the combined force of their moral fervor, their propagandists, and their media fellow travelers had already had a palpable, chilling effect on the motion picture and television industries. Those writers and directors who liked pushing the sexual envelope and who enjoyed being in battle with the Reverend Jerry Falwell and the Reverend Donald Wildmon and the army of Reverend Others found themselves coldcocked, not by the Right, but by the Left, by liberal editorialists of their own generation, who called them not free-speech warriors pitted against the armies of narrowness and night, but sleaze meisters and pornographers exploiting women for financial gain. In other words, sinners just like the Reverend Jerry Falwell said, but not sinners who would go to hell and burn.

  Sinners whose movies would be picketed by angry women at the box office. The Reverend Donald Wildmon didn’t even have to go out there with his placards. He could rest up at home, preparing next Sunday’s fire-and-brimstone serving, while all t
hose liberal, posthippie women did his job for him.

  The climate for graphic and even not-so-graphic sex was so frosty—at the exact moment America caught its first suspicious sniffs of the Oval Office cigar—that Hollywood actors who’d become stars by playing sexpot parts—Sharon Stone in Basic Instinct, Julia Roberts in Mystic Pizza, Annette Bening in The Grifters—were now putting “no nudity” clauses in their contracts, cutting their hair, dressing like Russian apparatchiks, and making themselves look as sexually unappetizing as they possibly could on-screen, thereby flooding the market with an awful lot of box-office clinkers. Stone even took it a step further: She told the world she’d found Jesus at Cecil Williams’s Glide Memorial Church in San Francisco. But it was possible Stone had good reason to take it further and find Jesus. Of the three, only Stone had showed the world her pubic hair.

  Refusing to smell the smoke from Bill Clinton’s cigar was symptomatic of something else, too. There seemed to be a tendency among many in our generation to want to sanitize, cosmeticize, and pasteurize life, to put a rosy spin on daily existence, to pretend some things didn’t exist or happen. The attitude smacked of the kind of narrowness we were victims of in the sixties, when we were accused of un-Americanism. AMERICA, the bumper stickers said back then, LOVE IT OR LEAVE IT.

  I thought I heard echoes of that from the former victims, who were now crucifying Kenneth W. Starr for his report, who were now objecting to vulgar language and sex and violence on the big and little screens. Never mind that tens of millions of Americans often used vulgar language or that violence was rampant or that folks were having sex—some people in our generation didn’t want to hear about that any more than they wanted to hear Public Enemy or Snoop Doggy Dogg. They wanted to hear Yanni or music made by mating whales or the Beatles Anthology. They wanted to see movies that were touchy-feely and gauze-lit. They wanted to see Spielberg, not Spike Lee, and they absolutely did not want to hear that Hillary used the word fuck more times in one paragraph during meetings with the White House policy wonks than any president, including LBJ (who should have had the word, his favorite, on his tombstone).