Huh? Say what? “Fractal”? “The courtship habits of peacocks and prairie dogs”? Who was she talking about? The Donald and Bill Clinton? What had that idiot savant dummy in the tuxedo, Charlie McCarthy, done to her at the age of eight? She had written, “I can speak of the most abstruse intellectual subjects and make them sound like a hopped-up tent-meeting sermon.” She had described a vision of her dead father. By her own account, the old joke meister told her to visit some comedy clubs and “then you can quit this scam you’re into.”
The first time Jean Houston met Hillary was in the company of competing gurus like Tony Robbins, “the Firewalker,” and Marianne Williamson, “the Love Guru to Hollywood Stars.” It was at a Camp David get-together.
Jean Houston told Hillary that, as a woman, Hillary was on the front line of the battle for women’s equality. Maybe getting just a tad carried away, just a centimeter too theatrical, Jean Houston also told Hillary that she was, at the same time, Joan of Arc, Mozart with his hands cut off, and a female Christ crucified.
Hillary liked her insight. Genie told Hillary about her theory of wounding, a theory that fit oh so perfectly with the pillorying Hillary felt she was suffering in the media. “The wounding of our lives can cause the withdrawal of our substance, the leaching of our spirits. Or we can choose to see them as the slings and arrows that fortune provides to gouge us sufficiently full of holes that we may yet become holy.”
Jean Houston also put the thought a different way: “I continually joke that Christ must have his crucifixion—otherwise there’s no upsy-daisy.” And, just to make sure that Hillary understood she was dealing with a serious, soulful, and herself wounded healer here: “When they go through the dark night of the soul that precedes transformation, I find myself experiencing it with them, sharing their pain and grief as if it were my own. My hypersensitive availability to others’ wounding makes for a constancy of inner pain that belies the outer merry face that I present to the world.”
The two women had some things in common. While Hillary had carried on a three-year platonic relationship with a man in college, Jean Houston had once carried on a nine-year platonic relationship with a man who was having “romantic entanglements” with other women. Like Hillary, Jean Houston was the extracurricular queen in school, a member of the student senate, the president of as many clubs as she could join, “the girl in class that everyone hated.” And they both shared a reverence for Eleanor Roosevelt, pioneer for children’s rights and social progress and the first bisexual First Lady in the White House.
When she was a young girl, Jeanie had actually met Eleanor through her dad, the joke meister. Her father had once posed as a waiter at Mrs. Roosevelt’s favorite restaurant and had squirted her with ice cream as a publicity stunt. He had later written jokes for some of FDR’s speeches. Hillary had long admired Eleanor and had even spoken publicly, shortly after Bill Clinton’s election, about “talking to her sometimes and asking for help,” the way that other women in the past had spoken to Saint Teresa of Avila or the Little Flower or the Blessed Virgin Mary.
When Hillary and Genie next met, they spoke right away about Eleanor Roosevelt. Jean Houston was certain that Eleanor was Hillary’s “archetype.” She had a technique she called “docking with your angel,” a kind of actor’s exercise where the actor improvises both sides of a dialogue to get a better fix on his or her “character.” Jean Houston encouraged her subjects to chat with their spiritual soul mates, their “angels,” improvising both sides of the dialogue.
Jeanie proposed that Hillary develop her relationship with the long-departed First Lady, and they went up to the solarium perched atop the White House. Some of Hillary’s aides joined them. Somebody ordered popcorn, pretzels, and fruit.
Pretty soon, with Jean Houston’s encouragement, Hillary started docking away with Eleanor, asking her how she’d overcome her own wounding. Hillary talked to Eleanor about how lonely she felt. Then Hillary became Eleanor and spoke to herself in her Eleanor voice. “You have to do what you think is right,” Hillary as Eleanor told herself.
Genie told Hillary that she had to understand that Eleanor had been badly wounded, too, but had worked through it. Hillary had to dock with her archetype and keep on docking until she could call upon Eleanor’s strength to work through her own wounding.
Then Jeanie suggested that Hillary speak to Gandhi, and Hillary did, telling the little man how very much she admired him. Then Genie suggested Hillary speak to Jesus Christ. The others in the room kept munching their popcorn. Hillary, drained after her discussions with Eleanor and the Mahatma, demurred about speaking to Jesus Christ. She said this was too personal and she had to check on Chelsea, who had a tummy ache.
In subsequent sessions, Jean Houston told Hillary that “as baby-making occurs through the wounding of the ovum by the sperm, so soul-making occurs through the wounding of the psyche.” She spoke to Hillary about food and drink that would help heal her wounding: macadamia nuts, “so possessed of their macadamiality”; sun-dried tomatoes, “memory and desire, earthbound, sun-kissed, crossed into something ethereal”; caviar—“You do not chew, but press it on the roof of your mouth like a holy word”; and truffles—“This is no mere ecstasy; it is love that exceeds all human understanding.”
As Jeanie worked on the book that she had originally suggested that Hillary write, she noticed that Bill Clinton did not seem comfortable when she was in the room. She asked Hillary about it, and Hillary said, “My husband is a very conservative man.” Well, maybe, as far as docking with archetypes or truffles being the love that exceeds all human understanding was concerned, Bill Clinton was a conservative man, who’d rather sit down and watch the Razorbacks lose, eat a burger, and grumble about the trash that stone-crazy Imus had said than listen to Jean Houston’s blissed-out way-outitudes. Or maybe Slick Willy just knew a scam when he saw one.
But with a fine half-chewed Davidoff cigar in his hand, Bill Clinton was capable of doing radical, creatively unconservative things no hierophant would ever be able to archetype. And as far as his own wounding was concerned—those red scratches and bruises that showed up on his face sometimes after a shouting match in the family quarters—Bill Clinton knew he’d always be able to find someone whose silky, soothing breasts, pressed hotly against his wounded, handsome face, would heal him.
[11]
Bubba in Pig Heaven
TO: Bubba
FR: Joe
RE: Hooray for Hollywood!
Dear Bubba,
The producer Rob Fried told me that he was playing golf with you one day at Burning Tree and on the way back to the White House in the limo you started bitching about Paula Jones. Her lawsuit had just been filed and you said, “Jesus Christ, one of these days someone’s gonna accuse me of fucking a cow.” This was before Monica.
And Rob said to you, “Mr. President, Joe Eszterhas has already written a script about that.” He was referring to a screenplay I’d written in 1989 called Sacred Cows, about a fictional president who, nostalgic about his farm-boy adolescence, does just that. Rob got back out here and sent you my script, but he never heard a word from you about it.
The only indirect response I got was from Steven Spielberg, who was going to produce Sacred Cows but suddenly dropped out, telling a roomful of executives at United Artists that he didn’t feel “comfortable” producing it anymore because of his new “friendship” with you.
Well, that’s okay, Bubba. I lost Steven Spielberg because of you, but I guess I know why. What the hell, it’s only a movie, and Basic Instinct, Showgirls, Sliver, Jade, Flashdance, Jagged Edge … I know you’ve seen all of those. I know you’re a fan. Not just from what Dick Morris said about Basic, but from what Gennifer said, too. If I have a core audience for those movies, I know you’re hard-on hard-core, Bubba.
This is what Gennifer said: “One night Bill asked me to put on a short skirt with no underwear, then sit in a chair and cross and uncross my legs while he watched. He became so aroused just
watching me, it was a thrill. He said he read about that move in a magazine, long before Sharon Stone wowed audiences with it in Basic Instinct. His fantasy was to have that scenario actually take place in a meeting someday.”
Of course you liked that movie, Bubba. It’s about you and Gennifer, isn’t it? Some of it is a direct homage to your relationship. You had Gennifer tie you to the bedpost with silk scarves—the opening scene of my movie. “Bill loved to talk dirty,” Gennifer said, and so does Michael Douglas in Basic. Come to think of it, Monica could have been describing Michael in Basic when she described you: “That raw, intense sexuality that I saw a few times—watching your mouth on my breast or looking in your eyes while you explored the depth of my sex.” That business about dripping ice on Gennifer took place after Gennifer broke up the ice with an ice pick. The mad urgency of wanting to have sex with Pookie—in a phone booth, a men’s room, on a desktop, a bed in the window of a furniture store—that drive to “fuck like minks” is the urgency that drives every scene of Basic.
Gennifer describing her relationship with you is Gennifer describing the subtext of not only Basic but also Sliver and Jade: “All I could think about was our sex games! What we had done to each other the night before and what we might do the next day. I spent my days in a trance, pretending to work and function like a normal person, but all the while being obsessed with what we were doing. In looking back, I believe we were addicted to the sexual excitement. It was almost like being addicted to a drug. As the addiction increased, we craved more and more sex at a higher intensity.”
You’ve got to move out here, Bubba. You don’t belong in Washington or Little Rock or Chappaquiddick: Hollywood is the place for you. “Addicted to the sexual excitement. … more and more sex at a higher intensity.” This place reeks sex from its celluloid pores.
Everybody uses Altoids here and all the women carry breath mints in their Chanel and Prada bags. Show business people use Gold Bond medicated powder for that tingling sensation and Fiesta glow-in-the-dark condoms for comic relief. And the women here, Bubba! “Jell-O on springs,” to use Billy Wilder’s words.
A townful of nuts and sluts on the make, wanna-be stars, willard-friendly and experimental, bored with ham and egg, Al Gore orgasms. Hooked on crush videos, facial aerobics, and Kegel exercises. Women with just the right amount of saliva and sculpted flesh.
They do everything to stay in shape. They swallow tapeworms. They make trips to Costa Rica to drink the local water and pick up the chicest intestinal bug. They gobble Ritalin and Dexedrine. They drink lemon juice with cayenne pepper. They eat cotton balls soaked in orange juice for breakfast.
Ripe-peach women with ba-ba-booms and jungle drums … “I think the whole obsession with the size of a girl’s breasts is a perversion,” Jane Fonda said, and then went and got implants.
There are no pizza butts in Hollywood, Bubba, and you don’t have to have a Jurassic willard to make it here, either. Everybody appreciates a knowledgeable and sensitive willard that is not dysfunctionally enormous, especially at a time when a lot of the young studs are getting theirs pierced. You can become a human paranometer here, Bubba, measuring the tightness of vaginal walls.
Remember that card Monica sent you? The one that said, “Nothing would make me happier than seeing you again, except to see you naked with a lottery ticket in one hand and a can of whipped cream in the other”? Forget seeing her again, Bubba, but move out here. That’s what Hollywood would mean to you: being naked, with a lottery ticket in one hand and whipped cream in the other.
I know you’ve spent your whole life in politics, not show business, but Reagan became president only after he’d learned about politics here. Hollywood was his training ground to make it in Washington. Washington will have been your training ground to make it in Hollywood. As you’ll see, there’s little difference between the two. Maybe I can convince you to move out here. Maybe, if I take you behind the scenes …
Sexual Harassment
It’s an old Hollywood joke, Bubba: “Did you hear about the Polish starlet who slept with the screenwriter to try to get the part?” When I sold the script of Basic Instinct for a record amount of money, newspapers across the country ran the story on the front page. The Hollywood trades ran banner headlines.
I noticed something different after the sale. Every time I went down to L.A., the hotel concierge handed me a stack of envelopes. They were filled with glossy photographs of starlets, their home numbers enclosed. Some had handwritten and scented notes. I’ll bet Monica scented her notes. Some of the women in the photographs were topless. Some were naked. One envelope contained a pair of strawberry-scented black panties. Gennifer?
And I’m just a schmuck with a manual typewriter, Bubba. Imagine what would happen to you, the former president of the United States?
Role Models
At the time that I was rewriting screenwriter Tom Hedley’s original screenplay, Flashdance, the director, Adrian Lyne, kept carrying on … and on … and on about Last Tango in Paris.
It was one of his favorite movies, Adrian said, and he wanted to give Flashdance a Last Tango kind of edge.
“The trouble with that, Adrian,” I said, “is that this movie is a fairy tale, a piece of cotton candy, about a young dancer and a group of kids trying to make it.”
In other words, I was saying to Adrian that there was no place for the stick of butter in this movie. Gennifer said you love butter.
But Adrian kept fretting and fretting, and shortly before the shoot was to begin, he asked for a story meeting—at Caesar’s Palace in Las Vegas, of all places. The story meeting would be combined with a casting call. You’d love those, Bubba. We would also audition hundreds of the most beautiful young nubile dancers in Vegas. When I checked in, I found myself in a bordello red suite. Even the ceiling was red. Even the glowing neon outside the window was red. No zebra stripes, though.
Don Simpson, one of the producers, had a suite with a Jacuzzi in the middle of the living room— Beats Camp David, doesn’t it?—and this is where most of the creative action took place. Simpson was in the Jacuzzi, a cigar in his mouth, a bottle of Tanqueray at the side, and a tray with lines of white powder on the floor. The rest of us sat in chairs on the side.
After a busy casting day, Simpson decided to throw a party for the dancers we’d auditioned in his suite. There were a hundred gorgeous women and four of us men—Don, his coproducer Jerry Bruckheimer, Adrian, and me. This is turning you on, isn’t it?
The party went late, we were all exhausted, and I wanted to say good night to Don. “He’s in there,” Jerry said, jerking his thumb at a bedroom. I opened the door and saw Simpson, in the buff, holding a young woman up against a wall. He was inside her. I said, “Good night, Don,” and he waved, without interrupting his movements or turning, and said, “Eight-thirty tomorrow, okay?” I’m glad Betty Currie never saw anything like that.
At 8:30 the next morning, Don was back in the Jacuzzi, and we continued the story meeting. Adrian chose this bleary-eyed moment to go back to Last Tango in Paris.
“I’ve got it figured out,” he said. He took out some scrawled penciled notes. “This is what we do.” He paused for dramatic effect. “At the age of eight, our girl, Alex, is raped by her father.”
Jerry Bruckheimer, good at being inscrutable, said nothing. Simpson looked at me from the Jacuzzi, an impish grin on his grayish face.
I said, “Adrian, are you out of your mind! Have you lost your marbles! You’re going to have our girl … raped … by her dad? In this little fairy-tale, feel-good movie? You’re going to put in your stick of butter? That’s it for me! I’m out of here! I’m gone!”
I stormed out, threw my stuff in a bag, grabbed a cab, and flew home.
Adrian went looking for me, realized I’d checked out, and went back to Don’s suite, apoplectic.
“He’s gone!” he said. “Can you believe the bloody bastard’s gone?”
But he changed his
mind. When Flashdance was released, there was no stick of butter in it, no incest, no rape.
When we were working on Jade, director Billy Friedkin had a similar fixation on Belle de Jour.
“This isn’t Belle de Jour, Billy,” I kept saying. Billy kept saying, “You’re right, you’re right.”
But when I saw the rough cut, there was a lengthy sex scene (later shortened) involving dark shenanigans— I’ll send it to you, Bubba —with a woman wearing a nylon mask and stiletto-heel shoes, who, some people mistakenly thought, looked like Billy’s wife, studio head Sherry Lansing. No nylon masks for Hillary, right? The scene wasn’t in the script.
“What’s all that?” I said to Billy. “What’s it doing there? What does it do for us?”
Billy smiled. “Just a little bit of Belle de Jour,” he said. How many times have you seen that movie?
Kiss It!
Richard Gere had something he wanted to pitch me, my agents told me. I met him in midafternoon in his suite at the Chateau Marmont. He welcomed me warmly and asked me to sit down. He sat across from me in a chair. He was wearing jeans and a blue work shirt. Your sense of style, Bubba.
What he had in mind, he said, was a movie about the blues scene in Chicago in the fifties. Muddy Waters, Howlin’ Wolf—
“Jimmy Reed,” I said.
“You know it?” he said.
I talked to him about Memphis Minnie and Mance Lipscomb and we both talked a lot about Robert Johnson.
“Excuse me,” he said suddenly. “I’ve got a photo shoot. You don’t mind if I change, do you?”
I said, “Of course not.” He disappeared into a bedroom. I sat there, thinking about doing a movie about the blues. It sounded like fun.
American Rhapsody Page 26