American Rhapsody

by Joe Eszterhas

  Speaker Newt Gingrich, twenty years earlier, had let a campaign worker go down on him but not have intercourse with him, so he could say, “I never slept with you.” Virginia senator Chuck Robb had allowed mistresses to massage him and go down on him but not sleep with him, so he could issue a statement that said, “I haven’t done anything that I regard as being unfaithful to my wife.” Even Sammy Davis, Jr., had allowed Linda Lovelace to go down on him but not sleep with him.

  The 1994 movie Clerks featured a character who’d had three lovers but had gone down on thirty-seven men. “Oral sex isn’t really sex,” she’d said. A 1996 Playboy survey of young men and women at twelve colleges showed approximately 50 percent of the students didn’t believe oral sex was “real sex.” Three-fourths of those surveyed said they hadn’t included in their list of partners those with whom they’d had only oral sex. Oral sex, it seemed, at least among the young and hip, had become just a friendly step beyond a kiss on both cheeks or a handshake, a kind of “good pals,” very personal . . . manicure. Women like Liz Phair and Alanis Morissette were good-naturedly singing, “I want to be your blow job queen” and “Would she go down on you in a theater?”

  There was more bad news for the Messrs. Wildmon, Dobson, Will, and Barr in the rest of that Playboy survey. Almost half of the students surveyed had masturbated in front of one another, more than two-thirds had performed phone sex, a third had tried bondage, one in five had used a blindfold during sex, four in ten women had had sex in front of others, and the vast majority had watched X-rated videos with a partner.

  While the reverends and their cohorts fulminated about masturbation, Americans had spent $8 billion in 1996 alone for hard-core videos and live sex acts and sex devices; the fans at a Cincinnati Reds baseball game cheered when they heard their museum director had been found not guilty of indecency for showing Robert Mapplethorpe’s photos; and Howard Stern was on the radio, not only talking about how much he wanted to have sex with Lamb Chop but also featuring one guest who put his willard into a mousetrap and another who played the piano with it.

  In Los Angeles, Hugh Hefner claimed the president for himself, too. Not only was Bill Clinton the first rock and roll president (Jann Wenner), the first black president (Toni Morrison); Hefner said he was “the first Playboy president.” Hefner, as most men of his generation in L.A., had discovered the wonders of Viagra, gotten divorced, and, as his magazine said, “restored the rep of the Playboy Mansion as party central.” A well-known movie producer, not so lucky, discovered Viagra and promptly suffered two strokes. Viagra, as Playboy said, “offered a return to phallic-centered sex, the great god Cock.”

  For some fundamentalists and their allies, waving their crosses like brooms to “Clean up America,” it was just too much. Blow jobs, masturbation, the cigar, and anilingus . . . Mapplethorpe, Viagra, and now the great god Cock.

  Most Americans shrugged, maybe grinned a little, and went off to buy or rent their X-rated videos. Judiciary chairman Henry Hyde sounded frightened: “I wonder if after this culture war is over, an America will survive that’s worth fighting to defend.”

  Firebrand Paul Weyrich, president of the conservative Free Congress Foundation, threw the towel in: “I no longer believe there’s a moral majority. I do not believe that a majority of Americans actually shares our values. The culture we are living in becomes an even wider sewer. In truth, I think we are caught up in a cultural collapse of historic proportions, a collapse so great that it simply overwhelms politics.”

  Who could blame the president of the United States if, on occasion, even in his time of crisis, even as we all approached the promised biblical Armageddon, he displayed for the cameras . . . a great big Christ-kissed, solosexual, rapturous, red-faced (and possibly shit-eating) grin?

  [10]

  Better Than a Lava Lamp

  “I don’t know, you know?” Monica said. “I can understand that there’s the issue of truth, you know. We’re all God’s children, God is synonymous with good, truth and kindness and happiness and all sorts of good things.”

  “I don’t care about all that right now,” Linda Tripp said.

  A week before he and Monica tried his cigar, Bill Clinton sat on the dais with Hillary at the National Radio and Television Correspondents Dinner and glared stone-faced as Don Imus, a bad-boy gunslinger from the Old West, made jokes about his philandering. “Remember the AstroTurf in the back of the pickup truck?” Imus said, looking right at him, leering.

  When Bill and Hillary got home to the White House, there waiting to comfort them was Hillary’s guru, Jean Houston, the self-styled secular spiritualist and the reincarnation of the goddess Athena. The president drifted away to watch the Arkansas Razorbacks on television, but Jeanie stayed with Hillary to make her feel better. Hillary liked and trusted her. Jean Houston had arranged Hillary’s chats with Mahatma Gandhi and Jesus Christ and, most important, with Hillary’s role model, Eleanor Roosevelt, whose oil portrait hung above Hillary’s desk in her office.

  The First Lady’s relationship with Jean Houston was an outgrowth of Hillary’s desire when she graduated from Wellesley to take the summer off and tour the holy places of India. She had always been spiritual—drawn to Rod McKuen’s verse and Jonathan Livingston Seagull; for a while she even wore a mood ring and lighted her dorm room with a lava lamp. She wanted to get into the swami thing a lot of sixties people, led by the Beatles’ discovery of the Maharishi Mahesh Yogi, were doing. A touch of acid or hash, a swim in the sacred Ganges, some soulful empathy with the beggars, and the discovery of God in a land full of gods and shrines and horseflies.

  Hillary opted not to do that, opted to work for a Black Panther lawyer in Berkeley instead, but the urge was there, as it was there for many of us in the sixties who went to places like Esalen in Big Sur and smeared chicken gravy over our faces as we ate roast chicken, the better to communicate with the bird we were eating.

  Then, in the seventies and eighties, as we grew older, our spirituality found more convenient forms of expression than trekking halfway around the world to catch amebic dysentery. We started carrying chunks of crystal embedded in sterling silver, using our sacred objects as magic wands. We made treks to more hygienic spiritual places like the Vortex on Kauai, with a McDonald’s just down the road. We started listening to Yanni and John Tesh and, at Christmas, Mannheim Steamroller. Tony Robbins and Marianne Williamson and Jean Houston, daughter of a Hollywood gag writer, became our secular gurus and worldly theologians, the Pat Robertsons and Jerry Falwells and Jimmy Swaggarts of the posthippie, New Age Left.

  Hillary arrived at Jean Houston through her brief dalliance with Michael Lerner, author of “The Politics of Meaning” and editor of tikkun magazine, the kind of obscure journal that Hillary, who had neatly filed Carl Oglesby’s articles in her student days, liked to discover. What Lerner had to say, viewed especially as a mirror-image description of her husband, the president of the United States, must have struck her heart.

  “If our world needs to be healed,” Lerner wrote, “it will be done by wounded healers; people who themselves are in need of healing. Once we realize this, we have every right to insist that the media stop caring about the personal inadequacies of political figures and refocus on the content of their ideas . . . . The insistence in American politics that our leaders be on a higher moral plain than anyone else has not led to a new level of morality in politics. Instead it has ensured that our leaders are liars, since they are forced to pretend that they have magically avoided the seductions and distortions that have helped morally flaw the rest of us.”

  Even the Night Creature, flawed and distorted as he was, saw something significant in the dalliance between Hillary and Lerner. While sometimes dismissing it as “gushy shit,” “Hillary’s way-out sappy sentimentality,” and “Hillary gassing around about the Michael Lerner crap—the politics of meaning or whatever the hell it is,” Nixon also said, “Hillary’s on to something. There is a spiritual vacuum out there.”

&nb
sp; “Wounded healers” must have been the phrase that especially got Hillary’s attention, not just because of her husband but also because of herself . . . wounded by the health-care crusade, which had so ruthlessly been defeated . . . wounded by the polls, which showed her approval rating at an all-time low (pre-Monica) . . . wounded by Whitewater and the endless slew of stories that implied she was a crook . . . wounded by ever-present and continuing allegations that her husband was and had been betraying her with anything that jiggled from the time they were engaged.

  If Bill Clinton was a wounded healer, so was Mrs. President Clinton, and she sought help from the Genie who specialized in healing the wounded, Jeanie Houston, who, in her youth, had once been offered a seven-year Hollywood deal as an actress. And what was wrong with that? Could anyone really say that Jimmy Swaggart, for example, couldn’t act?

  It wasn’t the first time that a First Lady had gone to a guru for help. “Mommy,” which was what Ronald Reagan called Nancy, had gone to San Francisco astrologer Joan Quigley, who had achieved fame on The Merv Griffin Show. (To Republicans of a previous generation, who used Billy Graham for photo-op counseling, turning to an astrologer made as much sense as turning to a secular healer did for posthippies.)

  Merv introduced Mommy to Joan Quigley, and for seven years, Joan Quigley ran Ronald Reagan’s life. If Mommy was Ronnie’s president, then Quigley was Mommy’s. “If Ronnie was going someplace,” Joan Quigley said, “I’d have to look at all the location charts—the chart of the country, the chart of the premier of the country. I had to look at Ronnie’s charts. I did more than fifty or sixty charts for him every year. I was not only ahead of my time in possession of knowledge of when Ronnie would do things, but I was actually setting the times for those movements. There were very few things that were restricted—I could do anything that I wanted.”

  Quigley analyzed Gorbachev’s charts and told Mommy he and Reagan “would share a vision.” Quigley told Mommy when the president shouldn’t be making public statements and when he shouldn’t be in crowds. Quigley picked the time of the presidential debates and claimed Reagan’s election was her accomplishment. “I take the credit for the fact that Carter lost. What I did was pick a time when Carter would get careless and misspeak himself.” Quigley planned the trips to Bitburg and Bergen-Belsen, making sure that the Bergen-Belsen trip would be “most prominent.” Quigley decided Reagan shouldn’t go out on a speaking tour defending Iran-Contra.

  “I gave a great deal of advice on the relationship between the super powers,” Quigley said, saying she thought she’d even be able to keep Ronald Reagan safe from assassination. “The assassination had to do with the Jupiter star in conjunction. It’s called the great mutation. At the time Reagan was elected, it fell on Libra. While I felt it was dangerous . . . I thought I could do it, that if I really concentrated, I could keep him safe.”

  Mommy went to Quigley for a solution to another problem, too, the same problem with which Hillary would turn to the born-again goddess Athena. Mommy had been wounded, too. She was having trouble with her image. Her approval ratings were down. “I knew exactly what to do,” Quigley said. “Nancy was the most glamorous woman since Jackie to occupy the position of First Lady. She expected to be treated like a fashion symbol—as Jackie had been—but the situation in the United States was very different from what it had been when the Kennedys were in office. At that time, people had wanted royalty figures; by the time the Reagans had come to Washington, we had double-digit inflation . . . things like getting extra china, though it was being donated privately, seemed extravagant, and her social connections, her playing that up, was not sympathetic to the average person. Also, being a fashion plate wasn’t appropriate at the time. So I said to Nancy, ‘No fashion magazines. You can go to parties if you want to, but the only things that should be talked about should be official functions. In order to be more sympathetic, you must play up children in trouble, and small people.’ ”

  “Children in trouble, and small people”: It would seem, years later, that Hillary Clinton had overheard Quigley’s advice. Interestingly, the book she called It Takes a Village was unofficially cowritten by her own guru, Jean Houston.

  Jean Houston claims as her ancestors Sam Houston, Robert E. Lee, Thomas Jefferson, and the Todados of Sicily. She was born in L.A. as her dad, the joke meister, was creating this joke in the hallway: “What do you get when you cross a melon, a collie, and a baby? A melancholy baby.” She was named after the baptizing priest’s favorite actress, Janet Gaynor, but her parents decided they liked “Jeanie” better. Her father wrote jokes and gags for Ed Wynn, Eddie Cantor, Henny Youngman, Jack Benny, and George Burns. She was traumatized as a little girl by an actor who fell in love with her puppy dog, Chickie, and finally offered to buy it for $450. Her dad, always broke, badly wanted to sell the puppy for such a high price, but her mom prevented this and told the nasty actor off. (It was Ronald Reagan. No wonder she and Hillary would become friends.)

  The little girl saw the secular Lord in the shape of the wooden dummy Charlie McCarthy when she was eight years old. She was with her dad, who was delivering jokes for Edgar Bergen, and they walked into a room where Edgar Bergen had his back to them. Edgar was talking to Charlie, conversing with the dummy the way you’d converse with people. Charlie was offering his own opinions. She got goose bumps and “an electric hand” seemed to touch her. Jean Houston had a realization that human beings “contain so much more than we think we do.”

  She was a terrible student, and when she wanted to go to college, her SAT scores were disastrous. A teacher noted she “wasn’t suited for intellectual work.” She somehow got into Columbia University and, a striking-looking, tall young woman with jet black hair, she was soon in the drama department. She was a talented actress, playing opposite Peter Falk in a play, winning Off-Broadway awards, asked by a Hollywood studio to audition for a part in Jane Eyre.

  After miraculously recovering from what should have been a near-fatal bout of typhoid fever, she began to study religion. She met some psychiatrists doing a study of LSD and they asked her to help them with their research. One of the few people in New York with a legal supply of acid, she took acid only three times herself, but she became a “psychedelic guide” to more than three hundred people who took acid trips. “I would open a door into the glorious cathedral within a green pepper or I would surround my subjects with a cornucopia of fruits and vegetables and ask then to enter into a friendly relationship with them. I would slowly peel back the husks of an ear of corn and my subjects would know that they had witnessed a mystery.”

  Done with acid, she moved on to studies involving a sensory-deprivation chamber, an audiovisual-overload chamber, and something called “the witch’s broomstick,” a metal swing on which subjects stood, wearing blindfold goggles. Thanks to a pendant her Sicilian mother gave her, she realized that Athena was her “archetype,” made trips to the Acropolis, and never took the pendant off. “Like Athena,” she wrote, “I seek to reweave the world, bringing technology, culture, knowledge, and spirit into a more beautiful pattern and a more possible society. I am always rescuing people who have been cast aside, the deviants, the mavericks, the wounded and the unseen.” She described herself as “a hierophant of innerspace” and a “traveler in outward spaces.”

  While Genie claimed Athena as her archetype, others saw something positively Christ-like in her behavior. She claimed to have performed miracles, ridding herself of an orange-sized breast tumor in four days, “gifting” those who couldn’t have children with babies. She miraculously saved herself from gangrene brought on by the bite of jellyfish. “I seem to show up in many peoples’ dreams,” she wrote. She often spoke about the time in India when some little boys had seen her with her long hair at a shrine and pointed to her and yelled, “Jesus Christ! Jesus Christ!” “I feel that I can embrace and therefore help redress the pain of others and, because of my own diminished ego, be able to appreciate not only the pain they are feeling, but also the
deep inner truth, the absolute worth of their lives”—which sounded to some like Bill Clinton saying, “I can feel your pain” or Jesus of Nazareth saying, “Rise and ye shall walk.”

  Her description of her mother sounded as if she was describing a supernatural being: “My mother has always been fey, an inhabitant of several worlds, a woman who sees angels, is prescient about the future, intuits deeply, and operates on many levels simultaneously.” Her Nights of Gifting sounded like Jesus performing miracles. Genie would bless 180 people in a single night. They’d walk up to her and she’d hold their hands. They’d meet in a “circle of communion,” with Bach blasting in the background, and Jean Houston would “gift” them with whatever they wanted.

  People were paying big bucks for the gifting and for Jean Houston’s books and videos, since secular religion is not a nonprofit vocation. They were hearing her say such things as “Most nights when I am home, I turn on my computer and modem and tune in to the world. Through the Internet and several other networks, I am wired through the music of frequency to the planetary mind.” The goddess Athena in cyberspace? The miracle worker named after Janet Gaynor and traumatized by Ronald Reagan . . . surfing the Net?

  “All systems, both personal and social, are in transition. Whenever psychological energy no longer binds to social forces, many people and institutions embark on quests for the green world within to help re-seed the wasteland without.”

  “The green world within”? But wasn’t there a green world without that Genie was tapping hungrily into?

  “The patterns in the weather, the turbulence in the winds, the rhythm pounded out by an African drummer, the rituals performed by queens and shamans and celebrants of the new year, the courtship habits of peacocks and prairie dogs, the landscapes of nature and the inscapes of dreams—all embody fractal phenomena.”