As I watched Richard Nixon in the dining room of the Ritz-Carlton in 1993, so many years later, he looked feeble, beaten, and old. I was wearing a sport coat and a T-shirt and tight black women’s leotards stuck into my cowboy boots. Jeans were outlawed in the dining room and I had no other pants to wear, so my wife had lent me one of her leotards. As Nixon passed us on the way out, I got up and shook his hand and wished him well. Maybe it was my way of making personal peace with the Night Creature as he approached his final and unnegotiable grave. But Nixon just kept staring at my wife’s tight black leotards on my burly frame and made the kind of empty pleasantries he’s probably still making in hell.
After Nixon left, I reflected that maybe that’s why I’d really gotten up to shake his hand . . . a final act of protest for his weary eyes: Yeah! Dig it, Dick! This is what happened to your America . . . . It’s a place where men wear cowboy boots and leotards.
[7]
The President Shrieks and Shouts
“You know,” Linda Tripp said, “I wouldn’t mind seeing him have to admit in public that he has a problem.”
“My God, I’d die,” Monica said.
There was a chancre growing on the presidency, growing daily. Gone was—sure as hell!—any hope for an eternal flame. Gone were the William Jefferson Clinton postage stamp and his beet red mug on future ten-dollar bills. Gone were the USS Clinton and the Clinton F-54 bomber and Clinton freeways and boulevards, national airports, promenades and malls. Gone were the William Jefferson Clinton Pavilion in LA and the Clinton Memorial Tower in New York. Gone was the Nobel Peace Prize, although, thanks to Jann Wenner, he probably still had a shot at the Rock and Roll Hall of Fame in Cleveland.
His contributions to America would be overshadowed now by his contributions to the English language: “to Clinton”—to parse and lie skillfully; “to get a Clinton”—to receive fellatio. His finger-pointing television denial would be as famous as the Zapruder film. Hugging Monica in her beret would get as many laughs as the Tonya Harding and Jeff Gillooly honeymoon video.
It was an extraordinarily painful way for a man to step on his own willard. He’d been the Comeback Kid since the day in high school when, forgetting about a science project due that morning, he’d bought a hot dog and a piece of tin and put them out in the sun. Presto! A solar hot dog cooker. But what could the Comeback Kid do now to get out of this one? Could he . . .
Stonewall? Make a Checkers speech? Claim it was executive privilege? Borrow Ted Kennedy’s Chappaquiddick neck brace? Hide behind Betty Currie the way Nixon hid behind Rose Mary Woods? Crawl into a bottle like Joe McCarthy? Get electroshock like Thomas Eagleton? Decompose like Ed Muskie? Blame it on Addison’s disease? Boo-hoo like Jimmy Swaggart? Impregnate Hillary? Go down on Patricia Ireland? Dahmer Linda Tripp? Kopechne Paula Jones? Ned Beatty Kenneth W. Starr? Defenestrate Helen Thomas? Horsewhip Maureen Dowd? Deep-six his copy of Vox? Move to Paraguay? Move to Malibu? Stop hanging out with Sharon, Barbra, and Eleanor? Put a sweater on and try a fireside chat? Flagellate himself in Times Square? Cut it off?
If all that wasn’t bad enough, that dumb, miserable Paula Jones, turned out now by the right-wingers covering her legal costs, said she could describe “distinguishing characteristics” about Willard.
He’d be out there raising money to build a better America, gushing charisma, and he’d see people looking at him . . . funny. He knew they were thinking about Willard. Was Willard too small, like Hitler’s? A pencil? A knockwurst? A thimble? A mushroom? A horseradish? An olive? It wasn’t fair! He was giving his constituents words and policies they could rock on and they were looking at his willard! (It was as though his fly had been permanently unzipped by the headlines. Would he, for the rest of his life, be permanently looking down, checking it?) Lyndon Johnson had scrotal skin hanging halfway to his knees and no one knew about that! No one was looking at LBJ’s willard.
His own lawyer, Bob Bennett, that self-righteous prig Bill’s brother, started talking to his Hot Springs buddies, his oldest friends, guys he’d been in high school gyms with, asking them about Willard, saying if Jones really knew something known only to those who’d been healed, blessed, ministered to . . . Bennett almost went into a rest room with him once but chickened out at the last minute. Well, at least Bennett didn’t go to Hillary to ask if she faintly remembered anything that was . . .
No, Bennett went to his doctors, former and present, and they swore out affidavits that Willard was just fine, thank you. Bennett told him he had to see the Obi-Wan Kenobi of willards, the urologist who’d studied Reagan’s and Bush’s privates, and he had to sit there as this “unbiased Republican expert” poked and pulled and squeezed. But even that wasn’t enough! Jones’s lawyers said what if . . . what if . . . whatever Jones saw appeared only when Willard was erect? There was talk he’d have to sit there in front of Obi-Wan Kenobi teasing Willard until he stood up to his full, proud, and hungry height. But at least Bennett, aware of what he called “the ugh factor” here, finally didn’t allow that. Bill Clinton remembered Al Gore’s words: “A moral compass should always point north,” and knew that was a good part of his problem. Willard had always pointed north, north of the North Pole.
It was a sixties problem once again, a problem the men of my generation had struggled with now for thirty years. We were always so . . . into . . . our willards. For many years, before women saw through our self-obsessed, preening nonsense—it was more than thirty years before John Wayne Bobbitt’s was sliced off by his wife—we acted like we were saving the world with our willards. But instead of saving the world, we got into a lot of trouble. Women got tired of hearing about how many women the Kielbasa Man—Wilt Chamberlain (twenty thousand)—or Warren Beatty or JFK or Mick had used . . . and they got justifiably pissed off.
Truth was, we just had to give our willard room, dangle it out there, and stick it into something. Maybe we were suffering from Clara Bow syndrome, the inability to say no in any sexual situation (Clara couldn’t say no to the USC football team). Maybe it was erotomania or some form of priapism. It got hard. It made us uncomfortable. It had to be softened . . . by anybody and everybody. Some of us, even those of us with high public profiles, had had a difficult time with our . . . condition. Geraldo Rivera’s description of himself fit many of us: “a grunting, voracious pig in heat.”
I saw Michael Douglas, whom I’d previously met, in the bar of the Westwood Marquis, shit-faced, sitting next to, and all over, a sultry, nymphet-like sex bomb. I finally went up to Michael from across the bar and said, “Hey, Michael, man, get a room!” And he laughed and did. A few years later, Michael’s wife walked in on him at the Regent Beverly Wilshire, while Michael was in frenzied flagrante delicto with his wife’s best friend, and his wife left him. Michael checked himself into an addiction clinic in Arizona and got up in front of the group and said, “I am a sexaholic” and confessed everything—all the way back to admiring Kirk, one of the greatest swordsmen of all time. (One of his fellow addicts taped the confession and sold it to the tabloids.)
I saw Jeff Bridges, the compleat sixties guy, on the Jagged Edge set, begging to do the first scene of the movie himself, the scene where a naked woman is tied to the bed and murdered by a ski-masked figure. “Jeff,” the director told him. “You’re in a ski mask. You don’t have to do this scene yourself; your stand-in can do it.” But Jeff did it himself, six times, over and over, insisting on doing it “till we get it right.”
And I saw the penultimate sixties marriage blow up, the countercultural royal couple in Splitsville, over that damn zipper. Jane Fonda was a ballsy and stunningly beautiful woman, and Tom Hayden was a ballsy, if geeky-looking, man, the former head of Students for a Democratic Society, author of the Port Huron Statement, our generation’s call to arms, one of the Chicago Eight, our Magnificent Seven. And Hayden, the putz, the pimply-faced shanty Irish putz, with Jane Fonda in his bed, still couldn’t keep it zipped. It was like cheating on the holy grail of female sexuality, grabbing for the br
ass ass when you were already king of the world. But he grabbed anyway, and Jane left him, forced by California’s divorce laws to pay tens of millions of dollars to this idiot who’d wronged her.
As we headed toward the millennium, sixties men had been made to feel like the pigs we often were. The truth was that in the battle between the sexes, many of us were war criminals. Cocksman became a pejorative word, though a lot of men were still playing the same old self-centered, sexually abusive game. They weren’t talking anymore, though, about banging their brains out and moving on to the next piece of tail. They were wiser now, and more one-on-one sensitivity-savvy. They were talking about “failure to communicate” . . . “lack of commitment” . . . “emotional fatigue” . . . before they moved on to the next piece of tail. They kept cutesy stuffed animals in their bedrooms to demonstrate their own nonmacho and cuddly natures . . . and to disarm suspicious, liberated soon-to-be victims.
Bill Clinton had learned that new language, too. Even while he was still using Monica as a sex toy—not her lips anymore, but her voice, in two-hour marathon phone sex—he bought her gifts: a stuffed animal, joke sunglasses, a small box of chocolates. He even let her play with his new puppy, Buddy, now that she wasn’t playing directly with him, only indirectly over the phone. He wasn’t one of those abusive sixties men anymore. He didn’t just tell Monica to get down on her knees. She meant something to him—at least a small box of chocolates. And then, naturally, when he got bored with her, when he started entertaining thoughts of Eleanor Mondale maybe—the daughter of the former vice president was certainly safer and prettier than Monica, whom Vernon Jordan, a man with a keen eye for horse flesh, dismissed as “flaky and chubby”—the breakup with Monica would be in civilized nineties terms—in this case, using the world’s oldest June/December dismissal: I’m too old for you, sweetheart, I’ll be peeing twenty times a day and you’ll still be beautiful. (What could he say—flaky and chubby?)
The end of another tragic romance in the nineties, weepy and touchy-feely, as the non-cocksman gives her one last “Christmas kiss” in the cramped porn-cubicle that was the hallway between the Oval Office and his private one. Goodbye, Monica, we had fun, I’ll think about you forever, and one night maybe at two fifteen (with Willard) I’ll call you, kiddo (wink wink, oink oink).
Everything, Bill Clinton was old enough to know, had a silver lining. Nineteen sixty-eight, for example, was the worst year—Martin and Bobby and Nixon’s election, but still . . . it was the year McDonald’s put the Big Mac on its menu. But where was the damn silver lining here?
What he felt like doing, he told his chief of staff, Leon Panetta, was punching Kenneth W. Starr in the gut. The preacher’s son had turned on an evil, roving spotlight and it had gotten stuck right on his willard. If Reagan was Teflon, then Willard was Velcro.
Bill Clinton was over-the-top enraged about what he aptly called the “drip, drip, drip” from all of this. He wanted to take a swing at somebody the way he’d almost swung at Dick Morris after tackling and knocking him down during the governor’s race in Arkansas. He found himself smashing the sides of his chairs while talking to aides, shouting, screaming, shrieking (an aide’s description). Goddamn these son of a bitch, right-wing motherfuckers, grouped around the windows of the Texas School Book Depository!
What about Ronald Reagan? Why didn’t anybody talk about his damn sexual habits? The father of family values? Reagan told his biographer, Edmund Morris, about all those groupies when he was an actor: “They tore at his clothes, beat on his hotel room door.” He admitted to Morris that when he was an actor, he slept with so many women that one morning he woke up and didn’t know who was lying next to him. He didn’t tell Morris that even as a young man, he could sometimes have used some of Bob Dole’s Viagra. Starlet Jacqueline Parks said, “He really couldn’t perform sexually.” Former girlfriend Doris Lilly said, “Intimately, he was nothing memorable.” Ex-wife Jane Wyman put it bluntly: “He was lousy in bed.” The problem seemingly was an old one. Army buddies remembered how Reagan liked to tell gross, embarrassing X-rated jokes in front of women, prompting one woman to tell him finally, “What’s the problem, Ronnie? Don’t you fuck too good?”
There was even a lot of talk about Nancy Reagan. Had she really gotten her movie parts by sleeping with the head of casting at MGM? Was it possible that in her youth the Ice Queen was a Hollywood bimbo? Did she really entertain the dirtiest old man, Frank Sinatra, who liked to eat eggs sunny-side up off of hookers’ breasts, in the White House? During three-hour, do-not-disturb “lunches”? Spencer Tracy, who knew her as an actress, didn’t think so. “She projected all the passion of a Good Humor ice cream,” Tracy said. “Frozen, on a stick, and vanilla.”
What about the Reagan administration? All those hypocritical, pharisee Republicans seemed to have forgotten their own dirty, juicy sex scandal! Never mind the blow jobs and the cigar and the whacking, this one involved genuinely Republican kinks. Beating women with belts, riding them bareback, and drooling. All done by Alfred Bloomingdale, Reagan’s close friend and adviser and heir to the department store fortune. Vicki Morgan was seventeen years old when she first catered to Alfred’s needs. Alfred was fifty-seven. “There were two women who were nude,” she said, “and I was told to take my clothes off and Alfred was already taking his off. He asked one of the girls to get the equipment, which was Alfred’s belt, the ties he wore around his neck and, excuse me, a dildo. He then proceeded to have everyone line up against the wall and beat them with his belt . . . . He’d have these girls crawl on the floor and he would sit on their backs . . . and drool, okay? I mean, he’d drool!” These hypocritical, pharisee Republicans! Even Dan Quayle was alleged to have had sex with a lobbyist. His wife, Marilyn, defended him by saying, “Dan would rather play golf than have sex any day.”
Jesse Helms, that evil, poisonous troglodyte, was behind it all! The three-judge panel that had appointed Starr was headed by Judge David Sentelle, whose “rabbi” (a word Helms didn’t prefer) was Helms. Bill Clinton felt like biting someone’s lip off! His mood was even transmitted to the public by his press secretary, Mike McCurry, who, after columnist William Safire called Hillary a “congenital liar,” said that if Bill Clinton weren’t president, he’d make a comment “to the bridge of Safire’s nose” . . . invoking badly needed positive images of good old nonphilandering, all-American Harry Truman, who’d once threatened to punch out a reporter for criticizing the quality of his daughter’s piano playing.
Even as Bill Clinton raged and shrieked and smashed his chair arms, there were other new allegations: A White House makeup person didn’t like the way she said he “flirted” with her . . . . One of the stews on the campaign plane said he’d folded his arms and wiggled his finger across her nipple while Hillary was only a few feet away, napping.
It seemed he’d continue to have, in his aide’s phrase, more “personal exposure” on this issue, and in his frustration and rage, screaming and shrieking, Bill Clinton wished he could be more like one of his aides, Harold Ickes, who had said to the White House counsel, “You better get this fucking straight and listen up! You better keep your fucking nose out of this! And if you don’t like it, you can just go fuck yourself!” God, Bill Clinton thought, how he’d love to say that to Kenneth W. Starr! God, the president of the United States thought, how he’d love to make that speech live, prime-time: “Good evening, my fellow Americans. Listen up! Keep your fucking nose out of this! If you don’t like it, go fuck yourself!”
It was no fun being around the White House. Imagine: The preacher’s son, that sanctimonious wimp, was talking about sending over a search warrant . . . a search warrant! As if the White House were some kind of crystal meth lab! . . . Looking for Hillary’s Rose Law Firm billing records. Then the FBI had come over to fingerprint first Hillary and then himself, the president of the United States . . . the whole deal you see on NYPD Blue . . . a full roll of every finger, then the palm and the side of the hand. White House staffers were wearing ru
bber gloves, looking at files they were afraid Starr might want. And all this time, that evil roving spotlight was fixed on the center of his private gravity, the place where he’d led so many hands. He scheduled another trip to L.A . . . . to raise some more cash to better America . . . to play some more golf . . . to smoke his cigar in his golf cart.
Time flew fast in L.A., the place where real life was only a few reels long. Nobody in Hollywood cared anymore about Mike DeLuca’s blow job, or Farrah Fawcett’s defecation, either. Everybody was talking now about the size of Mötley Crüe drummer Tommy Lee’s willard, exposed in a video with Pamela Anderson Lee that was being messengered all over the studios. I got mine by messenger from an executive at Disney in the same package with The Lion King and Beauty and the Beast.
The women in Fox’s publicity office weren’t impressed, though. They had something called the P-file—a collection of stills taken from the outtakes of movies. Plenty of big male stars. All full-frontal nude. Forget Tommy Lee, the women said. Check out Willem Dafoe. Hurray for Hollywood! The president of the United States found solace in the only place in America, maybe on earth, where people were talking about other willards.
[8]
The War on Acid Reflux
“I didn’t kiss a boy for four years,” Monica said.
American Rhapsody Page 9