American Rhapsody

by Joe Eszterhas

  Hollywood had an umbilical connection—its own “action faction”—to the movement in the sixties and seventies. When the Weatherpeople went underground, the actor Jon Voight supported them. Producer Burt Schneider and director Bob Rafelson financed Huey Newton’s ritzy lakeshore apartment in Oakland. Even while the Weatherpeople were on the run, director Emile De Antonio and Oscar-winning cinematographer Haskell Wexler shot a documentary glamorizing them, unconcerned that the latest Weather Underground book was dedicated to Sirhan Sirhan or that Bernardine Dohrn was trying to rally her army in defense of Charles Manson, referring to the people the Manson family murdered as “the Tate Eight,” saying, “Dig it. First they killed these pigs, then they ate dinner in the same room with them, they even shoved a fork into a victim’s stomach! Wild!” If some people in town liked the Weatherpeople, the Weatherpeople liked Hollywood, too. Sam Peckinpah’s Wild Bunch was their cinematic bible. Bernardine’s storm troopers watched the movie’s slow-motion violence over and over again, finding inspiration in the druggie, drunken Peckinpah’s fixation on blood.

  But no Hollywood figure had a closer tie to the sixties than Jane Fonda . . . even before she met her New Lefty ideologue from the Midwest, Tom Hayden. I met Fonda first when she was busted in Cleveland for bringing a tiny bit of weed over the Canadian border. (Her mug shot went on most of the office walls at the police headquarters on Payne Avenue.) We got to be friends after she read and liked my book about the shootings at Kent State. When I started writing screenplays, we tried and failed to sell MGM a movie about Karen Silkwood, the antinuclear activist. I liked Fonda—her intelligence, her commitment to better society—and the subtle, low-key brilliance of her acting style. But she was getting older—a staggeringly beautiful woman still in a town that discarded actresses (“leftover beef Wellington,” a producer said to me) as they approached forty.

  I had an idea for a screenplay, which would become the movie Music Box, and asked Jane if she was interested in playing the lead. I knew she wasn’t getting as many scripts as she’d gotten before. She committed to star before I wrote the script. When she read it, she was overjoyed. “It’s a great role,” she said; “it’s going to be a great movie.” The director, Costa-Gavras, was a friend of Jane’s and had even stayed at her home. When he got the script, Costa decided Jane was too old for the part. The producer, Irwin Winkler, and I tried to change Costa’s mind, but he wouldn’t budge. Jane went on a campaign to convince Costa she could play the part. She redid her hair, she put on a sexy dress, and she did an audition tape. Winkler and I thought she was brilliant in the audition tape (no stars ever did audition tapes), but Costa wasn’t swayed. He wanted Jessica Lange.

  Jane was heartbroken. She had already signed her contract to do the film and the studio was forced to pay over a million dollars to get her out of the movie. Not much later, she decided to leave Hollywood. I didn’t blame her. It was 1987 . . . a long way away from the sixties. She wrote me a note, thanking me for my efforts to put her into Music Box. It was signed, “Power to the People!”

  Part of Hollywood’s fervently militant liberalism came, too, from media-fueled guilt about the blacklist—a time forty years ago, when a group of screenwriters, directors, actors, and producers were prevented from making a living because of alleged Communist affiliations and their refusal to testify about them before a House congressional committee.

  Horrifyingly unjust, the blacklist had been hyped by the mid-nineties to become Hollywood’s own holocaust. The Writers Guild, with its own present-day creative issues to fight, seemed to think it was safer and nobler to dwell on the blacklist of the past than fight studios for writers’ rights in the present. The Writers Guild was conducting an endless series of seminars and testimonials about the martyrs of forty years ago.

  When Elia Kazan, who testified and snitched at the same time the martyred screenwriters didn’t, was finally given the Oscar he deserved, the reception he got was as frosty as though he were Leni Riefenstahl, maker of Nazi propaganda films. The iciness of his reception came, interestingly, not just from those few aging producers and directors who were Kazan’s peers but also from younger actors like Ed Harris, who wore his liberal social conscience on his tuxedo sleeves.

  There were a few people in Hollywood so far out on the radical Left that they smiled when Ronald Reagan was shot. Reagan was shot by the nutcase John Hinckley, who had become obsessed with Jodie Foster in the movie Taxi Driver. The screenplay for Taxi Driver was written by Paul Schrader, who used the diary of Arthur Bremer as the basis for his script. Bremer was the nutcase who had shot George Wallace. “Two right-wing birds,” these twisted Hollywood zealots said—Reagan and Wallace—“with one stone”—Bremer, with an assist from Hollywood in the form of screenwriter Schrader.

  Some people in town were professional liberals, singing the political torch songs they knew studio heads (and many critics), upstanding socially committed sixties folks, liked to hear. Oliver Stone was the most successful example. A man of too many personal excesses, Stone seemed as often stoned as he was not. (I once saw him grab a woman by her hair and pull her out of a bar.) Originally the writer of grippingly violent, sometimes farcical, four-letter-word melodramas—Midnight Express, Scarface, The Hand—he became a liberal holy man with his two powerful Vietnam dramas—Platoon and Born on the Fourth of July. Both were antiwar visions, our sixties protester’s sensibility blown graphically onto the big screen.

  But he outdid himself with JFK and Nixon. Both movies were utter and absolute lies. Worse, both movies, as far as future generations were concerned, pretended to tell the truth. Yet Stone didn’t call himself a liberal propagandist; he called himself “a filmmaker depicting documented reality.”

  Two different studios made the two different movies, knowing they were whopping, lollapalooza lies that would infect the brains of tomorrow’s voters. I knew, though, that the movies were made not because liberal sixties folks ran the studios and believed Stone’s lies. They were made because the studio heads believed Stone’s lies would make money (JFK did; Nixon didn’t).

  I knew, too, from experience that in a head-on collision between shared liberal beliefs and making money, money always won in Hollywood. In 1998, at a time when the energized liberal town was banding around Bill Clinton, I wrote a script for Paramount called Land of the Free, about the resurgence of right-wing militias across the country. The studio hoped Mel Gibson would play the militia leader I’d created, a charismatic, falsely appealing man who was, at his core, a racist and anti-Semitic moral monster. Gibson turned the script down and said he didn’t want to play “such a bad guy.” The studio came to me and asked me to rewrite it so my lead character “wouldn’t be such a bad guy.” “But these guys are bad guys,” I told the studio. “They’re awful guys. I don’t want to do an apologia for the militias.” The studio said, “But we really want Mel to do it.” I refused to rewrite it; the studio put the project up on the shelf.

  I had found myself in the same position in 1987, with Music Box. My script ended with the revelation that a benign old grandpa was a Nazi war criminal. Universal, offered a chance to make the movie, said it would be happy to—if I changed the ending and grandpa was shown to be innocent of all war-criminal charges. “It’s going to be an apologia for the war criminals being prosecuted by governments all over the world,” I said. “It’ll wind up being an attack on those agencies prosecuting these people.” The studio executive said, “Yeah, but this way we won’t sell any tickets.” Luckily, producer Irwin Winkler and director Costa-Gavras and I found a studio who made the script as originally written. (We didn’t sell any tickets.)

  Some people flew in under the political radar and stayed there if they were successful. Who cared if producer-mogul Andy Vajna made enough money to get to Hollywood by being a Hong Kong wig merchant who’d made a deal with the Communist Chinese government to buy the hair that had been shorn off dissidents? Who cared if Mel Gibson made the most awful homophobic comments, until his PR people zi
pped his lip? Who cared if the guy who directed that Disney movie was a convicted child molester? Who cared if Marlon Brando made anti-Semitic remarks on Larry King Live—he was Marlon Brando, and Larry King, who was Jewish, kissed him, didn’t he? Who cared if Bruce Willis said, “If I were black, I’d be with Farrakhan, too”? Or: “FDR knew Pearl Harbor was going to be attacked and let it happen anyway”? Bruce Willis was big box office, wasn’t he? As opposed to Charlton Heston, who was dead, buried, and mummified at the box office and was also, incidentally, the head of the National Rifle Association.

  Hollywood’s belief in civil liberties, even sexual privacy, also occasionally broke down. In 1983, when I was writing the movie Jagged Edge, my producer was the venerable wild rhino of the business, Martin Ransohoff, tough, smart, no one to trifle with. The studio executive in charge of the project was Craig Baumgarten, who had produced and starred in a porn movie in the seventies. When Ransohoff had a disagreement with Baumgarten and felt Baumgarten wasn’t treating him with enough respect, he asked me to intervene and warn Baumgarten that he knew about the porn movie. I warned him, but Baumgarten, young and brash, disregarded my warning. A tape of the porn movie soon made its way to one of the members of the board of Columbia Pictures. Fired days later, Baumgarten sobbed in shocked disbelief.

  The studio that fired Baumgarten was then owned by the Coca-Cola company, whose presence in three of America’s greatest scandals would be noted by observers: Fatty Arbuckle used a Coca-Cola bottle to bludgeon his young victim internally; Judge Clarence Thomas, Anita Hill would claim, abused her by saying there was pubic hair on his can of diet Coke; Bill Clinton would alibi walking Monica from his Oval Office into his private study by telling his secretary he was going back there “to get her a diet Coke.” Coca-Cola, historians also noted, was the cola company of liberal Democrats. Pepsi mostly supported Republicans, especially Richard Nixon, who, true to his deceitful nature, privately drank diet Coke.

  While there were occasionally ugly and decidedly unliberal actions, such as Baumgarten’s firing, the town followed Hillary’s lead and got deeply into New Age psychobabble. Even Hillary’s maharishi, Michael Lerner, was invited to a few studio seminars. “Facilitators” became regulars at industry retreats, summoning positive energy like rainmakers.

  Superagent Arnold Rifkin was hanging out with walk-on-fiery-coals guru Tony Robbins. Producers Jon Peters and Peter Guber, breaking up their partnership, let it be known they were going to counseling together. (I was going through a divorce at the time. “Go to counseling with your ex,” Peters told me. “It won’t do any good, but she’ll think you care. It’ll save you at least a million bucks.”)

  The touchy-feely mood soon found its way to the screen, and when Forrest Gump turned into a smash, all the studios were suddenly looking for “spiritual” or “religious” stories. Sylvester Stallone strutted around my living room one afternoon, trying to talk me into writing a “deeply spiritual” script for him. For years, he said, he had wanted to make a book into a movie in which he’d play Jesus Christ. Now he had a better idea. He wanted to play a televangelist, a modern-day healer who performed miracles. We had a meeting with a roomful of executives at Universal. Sly stalked around the room, waving his arms, pretending to preach the words of the Lord. An executive said, “Guys, listen. Sly, you’re a muscle star. Joe, you’ve just written Showgirls. Don’t you think this is too harsh a transition for both of you?”

  As more and more men on-screen were undergoing sensitivity training, more and more men in Hollywood offices were becoming the targets of sexual harassment suits. The wealthier and more powerful either went to court or made hasty midnight settlements. But some, including mid-level studio executives, were fired. A producer of my acquaintance was not only fired but also, fearing publicity, blackmailed to give up his points in upcoming movies.

  Most heterosexual men quickly opted to hire only male assistants. A woman studio executive married to a director had seen so many sexual harassment suits and settlements that she forbid her husband to hire any women on his crew. It was a strategy spreading all over town. Even as that was happening, renowned feminists were spending time in Hollywood trying to make screenwriting or producing deals. Gloria Steinem and I spent a pleasant evening in my home discussing a movie about the young Marilyn Monroe.

  As David Geffen watched the House Judiciary Committee hearings, there were deeply underground rumbles at Spago that Warren Beatty, the Mark McGwire of swordsmen, was considering a run for the presidency.

  It was a numbing rumor. Here was Clinton, almost out of office for not even having intercourse, and here was Warren, the Hall of Famer, the sleepy-eyed human sex machine, with his eyes on the bestained Oval Office. Rumor was that Gary Hart—Oh glory, glory hallelujah!—was advising him. Rumor was that Pat Cadell, wanna-be screenwriter, was unofficially back in the polling business.

  I could just hear the dialogue in Robert Evans’s screening room, with the fireplace blazing and the Polaroids of naked women on the table . . . preening Warren and bitter Gary and addled Evans in his Bush White House baseball cap and grizzled Pat . . . and the redhead with the cigar in her butt bringing them Perriers as they discussed the ins and outs of seducing the body politic.

  Not long after I saw David Geffen, he told reporters he was making House Judiciary Committee member James Rogan of California, a staunch pro-impeachment Republican, his “target number one” in the 2000 elections. David, I knew, had more money than God and was wilier than Satan, and I thought James Rogan would be well advised to beg David’s forgiveness . . . on his knees.

  [3]

  Ross Perot on Drugs

  Monica said, “I’m like—‘I have a mental block on who you really are.’ ”

  “You never ever realized whose dick you were sucking,” Linda Tripp said.

  “No. I know,” Monica said.

  The calls for Bill Clinton’s impeachment wouldn’t cease, the rabid twin gorgons of Scandal and Ruin were running amok . . . and Ross Perot, who had twice come to his aid and made his minority presidency possible, came running in anger to help again. Perot, America’s Tin Soldier, accused the president of the United States of doing drugs in the White House.

  The charge helped move all of the other charges into the realm of the absurd. The cigar was surreal enough, the twenty-four-hour blow job television fiesta was bizarre enough . . . but drugs in the White House? Bill Clinton was now, it seemed, Tony Montana with his head in a silver platter of cocaine. Perot argued that the only way to explain Bill Clinton’s recklessness, irresponsibility, and mendacity was to assume that he was on drugs. Perot’s was the voice of Carry Nation come pip-squeaking back. Demon alcohol replaced by demon drugs.

  We chuckled at the Tin Soldier’s argument, but, at the same time, those of us who had truly experienced the sixties knew in our secret hearts that the comic book Tin Soldier probably had a tangential point . . . but it was a point most of us thought irrelevant. Marijuana and cocaine, our drugs of choice, didn’t make you lie to the nation or make you unzip and say, “Kiss it” . . . though both drugs made the kissing part more enjoyable. Perot kept calling for the president to release his medical records—something other presidents had done—but we knew the reason why Bill Clinton refused. Many of us had damaged our septums through the years.

  We knew about the rumors that Bill Clinton, while running for office in Arkansas, had been rushed to an emergency room one night OD’d on coke. Why release records that could be personally embarrassing (George Bush, no surprise, had hemorrhoids), or worse? (JFK, treated for gonorrhea, suffered his whole life from acute postgonococcal urethritis, an inflammation of the genitals that caused a burning sensation when urinating.)

  We knew Bill Clinton had done the things we’d done. At Oxford as a student, he’d hung around smoky, pillow-strewn parlors, sipping tea and sherry with the young foxes, smoking hash and dope, trying to learn, as one of those foxes put it, to “inhale.” Old girlfriend Sally Perdue described him, as govern
or in 1983, offering her joints from a cigarette case and coke from a plastic bag. Gennifer described him offering her coke at her apartment before they climbed onto the black satin sheets on her king-size bed. At one of his Arkansas parties for his staff, an aide offered partygoers grass, hash, coke, pills, and syringes. It was a life many of us had learned to live all too well: candles, incense, black satin sheets, zebra drapes, grass, coke, and sex.

  In the early eighties, Bubba was on a tear, as were many of us. He was tearing up Little Rock’s bars, staying till late, watching the girls dance, never with Hillary, but often with Roger, his little half brother. Roger was snorting coke sixteen times a day and had a four-gram-a-day habit.

  Roger was the kind of guy who lit up his own farts. His mother taught him to read from her Racing Form. Roger was a sulky loafer who’d grown up doing nothing much more than practicing his guitar, watching his hair grow in the mirror, psychedelic posters all around, and singing “Red Roses for a Blue Lady” to his mother.

  Roger loved the man he always called “Big Brother,” and he was once videotaped snorting coke and saying, “He was like a father to me growing up, all my life, so that’s why we’ve always been so close.” Roger and Big Brother were hanging out in the early eighties while Big Brother was governor, and Roger was living in his “Party Shack,” the guest house at the governor’s mansion, and invading the mansion’s kitchen late at night when he got the munchies.

  He and Big Brother were often seen partying together: A waitress at a club called the Bistro later told a grand jury that she sold coke to Roger Clinton, who’d then hand the coke to Big Brother. She said she saw Bill Clinton snort cocaine “often” and described the night when the governor of Arkansas got so trashed that he slid down a wall and propped himself against a . . . trash can. The manager of an apartment house where Roger lived briefly said she overheard Roger and Big Brother discuss the quality of the cocaine they were doing. A hidden video camera picked Roger up one night as he was trying to score some coke. “Got to get some for my brother,” Roger said. “He’s got a nose like a vacuum cleaner.”