American Rhapsody

by Joe Eszterhas

  Maybe most importantly, like Hillary, Eleanor was in a marriage that was not the usual marriage. “We never saw Eleanor and Franklin Roosevelt in the same room alone together,” wrote White House chief usher J. B. West in Upstairs at the White House. “They had the most separate relationship I’ve ever seen between man and wife and the most equal.” Like Hillary, Eleanor was married to a charismatic, charming man who cheated on her. Like Hillary’s husband, Eleanor’s husband saw his mistresses when she was out of town. Like Hillary, Eleanor had her own Vince Foster, Joe Lash, a future historian, who lived in a room near her at the White House. Like Hillary, Eleanor had close friendships with other women . . . like the fan dancer, Mayris Chaney, her frequent White House visitor . . . and Lorena Hickok, her mannish former-reporter lover.

  Hillary understood Eleanor’s loneliness and pain. Franklin was off with Lucy Mercer, formerly Eleanor’s social secretary, and with his own secretary, Missy LeHand, and Eleanor, before she found her beloved Hick, threw herself into her public activities and into raising her kids. Hillary envied the joy Eleanor must have felt when she finally found Hick, driving through the New England countryside with Hick, giving her lacy underwear, writing Hick love letters: “I love you deeply and tenderly. My arms feel very empty. I love you beyond words and long for you . . . it was a lovely weekend, I shall have to think about it for a long, long time. Each time we have together that way—brings us closer, doesn’t it?” Hick was pensive, explosive, a big, skittish cat—“I wonder what is happening with you tonight. I feel restless, unable to settle down to anything.” Eleanor to Hick: “Oh how I wanted to put my arms around you in reality instead of in spirit. I went and kissed your photograph instead and there were tears in my eyes . . . . Darling, I feel very happy because every day brings you nearer.” Hick wrote to Eleanor: “I’ve been trying today to bring back your face—to remember just how you look. Funny how even the dearest face will fade away in time. Most clearly I remember your eyes, with a kind of teasing smile in them, and the feeling of that soft spot northeast of the corner of your mouth against my lips . . . . I want to put my arms around you and kiss you at the corner of your mouth. And in a little more than a week now, I shall.”

  Even as Hillary contemplated the sadness of what happened at the end to Franklin and Eleanor—he died with Lucy Mercer at his bedside, summoned there by Eleanor’s daughter, Anna—Hillary Rodham Clinton knew how much she had grown to love Eleanor Roosevelt—her voice shrill and falsetto, her hair back in a bun . . . Eleanor in jodhpurs and boots and with a riding crop . . . Eleanor moist, sweaty, smelling of horse.

  Some people thought Hillary’s love for Eleanor was tied to her love of Chelsea—gawky and tall like Eleanor, a child cruel classmates teased about her looks. Hillary was proud of Chelsea. She knew she had been away from her maybe too much—“Mommy went to give a peach,” the little girl told friends—helping Chelsea with her homework by fax, maybe not the best way to do it. And she knew that her husband wasn’t all that focused sometimes on Chelsea when she wasn’t there. She’d heard Gennifer’s story of Bill interrupting phone sex because Chelsea had fallen out of her bed.

  Hillary was proud of Chelsea. She wasn’t a brat like Amy Carter, breaking crackers on Air Force One so she could watch the help pick the pieces up. She wasn’t smoking dope with the marines at Camp David like Chip Carter had. No Secret Service agent had accused her, as they’d accused Michael Reagan, of shoplifting. Chelsea wasn’t catting around Georgetown bars with a fake ID or sneaking around the parking lot with Secret Service agents like Susan Ford had.

  When they got to the White House, Hillary knew what the deal would be. Her husband had gotten them there with all of his glitzy, glib, seductive, telegenic talents. Now it was time to buckle down to the serious business of governing. Vote for one, get two! It was going to be no different from the way it had been in Arkansas. As John Robert Starr, the editor of the Arkansas Gazette put it, “The indications are that she was Bill Clinton’s number one advisor throughout the time he was governor. He kept saying, ‘Well, Hillary thinks . . .’ ”

  Her husband’s first order of business was to change the White House phone system so he wouldn’t have to go through the operator to make a personal (top secret) phone call. Hillary’s first order of business was to provide Americans with a decent health plan. Hillary told a reporter, “I suppose I could have stayed home, baked cookies and had teas, but what I decided was to fulfill my profession, which I entered before my husband was in public life.”

  All White House employees had to be approved by Hillary. She wanted all incoming and outgoing mail from the office of his chief of staff routed through her office. She oversaw his schedule. She hand-picked Zoe Baird, Kimba Wood, and finally Janet Reno—whose specialty was child abuse—as attorney general. She hired Donna Shalala as secretary of Health and Human Services. She hired her former Watergate boss, Bernie Nussbaum, as White House counsel. She hired her Rose Law Firm senior partner, Vince Foster, as deputy White House counsel. She made her personal aide in Little Rock, Carol Rasco, chief domestic policy adviser. She made Maggie Williams, her chief of staff, also a special assistant to the president—a post that would ensure that Williams (and Rasco) would attend all high-level meetings and see key memos.

  She attended White House staff meetings and acted as the summarizer of all positions. She said her Health Care Task Force would cost $100,000—and it wound up costing $13.4 million. She had an affirmative-action agenda that guaranteed the hiring of as many minority and lesbian women and minority and gay men as possible. She made sure that her portrait and not Al Gore’s went up all over the White House.

  Those who’d worked with her in Arkansas or on the campaign trail weren’t surprised by how the First Lady took charge. She had always handled the family finances. She had turned to George Stephanopoulos during a bimbo eruption and said, “We’ve got to destroy her.” Her husband, meanwhile, had gotten the phone system redesigned and was busily dialing away without any operator possibly overhearing any phone sex. (It was the biggest White House telephone crisis since Caroline Kennedy had wanted to call Santa Claus directly.)

  In the year of Bill Clinton’s impeachment crisis, many Americans—especially women—had come to the conclusion that Hillary was ventriloquist Edgar Bergen and her asshole husband the smiling wooden dummy Charlie McCarthy . . . the same wooden dummy who had changed Jean Houston’s life.

  Some men, in their impotent frustration, set up a Web site showing pictures of the occasional cuts and bruises on Bill Clinton’s handsome face. Her asshole husband, these men claimed, was Hillary’s battered wife.

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  The Sorceress from Hell

  “Just because you wear a red sweater does not mean you have to wear red lipstick,” Linda Tripp said.

  “I understand that,” Monica said. “I would never wear red lipstick to see him.”

  She had made a cynical deal with a sexually troubled man, those who loathed her said. She knew what their marriage would be like but married him anyway. What she was really interested in was power, not sex. She was smart, articulate, and politically involved, a star already in college, a fierce debater, an intellectual. She had depth and lofty spiritual inclinations, even suffering the media’s arrows when it was revealed she was devoted to a New Age guru. She was tough and resilient, and knew how to play political hardball. She knew how to play personal hardball, too. When the decision was finally made between them to divorce . . . she told those close to her husband . . . that he was . . . gay.

  As I watched Arianna Huffington trash Bill Clinton during his impeachment crisis, I was certain she was the unwanted result of a thirty-second coupling between Joe McCarthy and Zsa Zsa Gabor. She was everywhere, in print and on the air, dagger in hand, carving him up with her nasal Mediterranean accent, looking elegant in her Carolina Herrera suits and fiery auburn hair. She was “dizzy and nauseated,” she said, by Bill Clinton’s actions. “His DNA has been spilled in more places than Sta
rbucks coffee . . . . Leave office he must—prolonging the nation’s nightmare is the worst possible thing for the nation . . . . Clinton first vulgarized political leadership and then made the vulgarization respectable . . . . He emptied American politics of all principle and, with the help of his wife and his minions, refined the art of scapegoating . . . . Like a drowning man grabbing on to his rescuer, the president is willing to take the nation down with him. We must not let him . . . . There is nothing wrong with this poor soul [Clinton] that cannot be cured by standing him upside down and shaking him gently until whatever is inside his head—all the bloodless, calculating, truth-twisting equivocations that have worked for him in the past—fall out.”

  She set up a Web site called Resignation.com and said, “Take responsibility, Mr. President, for what you have done to your party, your office, and your country.” Arianna made jokes, too: “If Hillary is indicted, can Al Gore become First Lady?” and “Taft kept cows on the White House lawn. Clinton considered having cows there, but Hillary vetoed it. She was afraid Bill would eat them.” Arianna drew up a Christmas gift list for the first family: for Bill, AstroTurf for “the Rumpus Room” at the Clinton library; for Hillary, a Deana Carter CD—“Did I Shave My Legs for This?”; for Chelsea, “Her freshman face book from her father, who has had it since Parents Weekend at Stanford.”

  Arianna Huffington? I pondered. Arianna Huffington was saying these morally outraged, judgmental things? The same Arianna Huffington who’d hired private eyes to research Maureen Orth, about to do a magazine profile of her? The same Arianna Huffington who’d offered to find campaign manager Ed Rollins “companionship” if things weren’t right between him and his wife?

  This was the same Arianna Huffington who, through the years, had been called “craven and beyond contempt”; “a dangerous Greek Rasputin determined to ride her husband’s wealth to political glory at any cost”; “one of the most unprincipled political creatures I’ve ever encountered”; “a spectacularly dedicated and shameless social climber”; “scheming, indefatigably ruthless”; the most upwardly mobile Greek since Icarus”; “the Sir Edmund Hillary of social climbers.” Ed Rollins, the warhorse Republican campaign manager said, “She was the most ruthless, unscrupulous, and ambitious person I’d met in thirty years in national politics—not to mention that she sometimes seemed truly pathological. Her allure and style were only a veneer: The soul of a wily sorceress lurked beneath.”

  The Sorceress was born Arianna Stassinopoulos in 1950 in Athens, Greece, the daughter of the publisher of a financial newspaper. She was born into the Greek Orthodox faith and was praying to the Virgin Mary at the age of three. Her parents divorced. At sixteen, she went to Shantaniketah University outside Calcutta to study comparative religion. At seventeen, she moved with her mother to England to prepare for English university exams. They had little money. She got into Cambridge and distinguished herself quickly. She became president of the Cambridge Union, the university’s debating society. She was the first foreigner and the third woman to head the university’s internationally known debating team. She was brilliant and beautiful—her build was statuesque and her hair fiery red. In her farewell debate, she attacked late seventies feminism for ignoring “a woman’s special needs for children and family.” The debate was televised and, with her own quick wit and sexy looks, Arianna became a celebrity in England. George Weidenfeld, her new publisher, gave her some advice: “Don’t bother with the men. You’ll only make the wives jealous. Concentrate on the key women, and if you play your cards right, you’ll be a success.” Her new friend Werner Erhard, the founder of est, also gave her advice: “If you say it, you are it.”

  Arianna wrote her first book, The Female Woman, an answer to Germaine Greer’s The Female Eunuch, and went out on her first book tour. “Everything went wrong one day. I was on my own. I got to the hotel and there was a line of two hundred GIs checking in, so I had to wait. Then I got into my room, and it was the tiniest little room, a postage stamp that smelled of cigarette smoke, and there I was. I had nothing to do that night, and I had to leave at five in the morning to go on an early morning talk show.” The Sorceress didn’t like being alone. The Sorceress didn’t like waiting in line to check in. The Sorceress didn’t like tiny rooms or cigarette smoke. She didn’t like having nothing to do at night or having to get up at five in the morning. The Sorceress was “depressed and in despair,” so she went back to England and went on a water fast. “I wanted to touch the spirit, to be filled by it, that anything that was not spirit or about spirit was an encumbrance.” When she finally stopped fasting, “I could tell the difference between sips full of the various brands of bottled water I had in my flat,” she said.

  Taking Weidenfeld’s advice, she sought out the company of socially prominent English women and became known for sending flowers after a first meeting. She began a relationship with an elderly columnist for the London Times. They went to the opera a lot. She did a BBC television talk show, Saturday Night at the Mill, which quickly failed. She explained the failure by saying, “Britain is too conscious of accents.” She was, meanwhile, working on another book—this one about Greek opera diva Maria Callas.

  When she went to New York to promote her Callas book, the Sorceress “felt right at home.” The book made a little money—Ari Onassis, she wrote, considered Jackie “cold-hearted and shallow” and was about to divorce her before he died—but she was sued for plagiarism and her publisher had to pay a five-figure amount to settle it. She met and befriended society figures like Barbara Walters and Lucky Roosevelt, President Reagan’s chief of protocol. Through Weidenfeld, she met San Francisco social queen Ann Getty. She dated real estate tycoon Mort Zuckerman. She was the Sorceress—charming, smart, witty, beautiful, and sexy. “She’s a great, great flatterer and we’ve all been seduced by it,” Bob Colocello would write in Vanity Fair. He also said she was “relentless . . . with the discipline of a religious zealot.” She met Kathleen Brown, the California governor’s sister, and did a brief lecture tour with her. She did a piece on Jerry Brown for People magazine and then started dating him. The Sorceress who didn’t have any money was a socialite. “They gave me the sobriquet of socialite and I earned it,” she would say later.

  Arianna was also a minister by then in MSIA, known on the West Coast, where it was centered, as “the Cadillac of cults.” She had met John-Roger, its Christ figure, in 1973 in London. John-Roger, who had once been a night orderly at a psychiatric hospital in Salt Lake City, was inhabited by a spirit named John the Beloved while in a coma after surgery for a kidney stone in 1963. John-Roger said that John the Beloved told him that John-Roger was “the Mystical Traveler Consciousness,” which inhabited the earth once every 25,000 years. The Sorceress liked John-Roger and believed in the Mystical Traveler Consciousness. “He dealt in the only thing that I was really interested in,” she wrote in Interview. “Helping people wake up to the spirit inside themselves, to their natural knowing and inner wisdom. I bought his books, I subscribed to his monthly discourses, I went to meditation retreats.” She also tried to help John-Roger find new disciples among her celebrity friends. “I had him thrust upon me by her,” columnist Liz Smith said. “He really sort of gave me the creeps. He wanted to lay hands on me because I had a headache and it was very dismaying and embarrassing to me. And I also thought he was a fake.”

  Partly to be closer to John-Roger and partly to be closer to Ann Getty, the Sorceress moved to Beverly Hills in 1984. She was planning another book by then, too, on Pablo Picasso, and Picasso’s longtime mistress, Françoise Gilot, now the wife of Jonas Salk, who lived part-time in Southern California. Her friend Ann Getty, meanwhile, wanted to find a husband for her. She even drew up a list of possibilities. In Tokyo one day at a meeting of the Aspen Institute, a nonpartisan think tank, Ann Getty met a man who said to her, “You’re so wonderful, do you have any daughters?” And Ann said to him, “I don’t have any daughters, but I have a great friend.”

  Ann called the Sorceress
from Tokyo and told her she’d found the perfect husband for her. His name was Michael Huffington. He was the son of one of the wealthiest men in America. The Sorceress smiled.

  Big Roy Huffington was Michael’s dad, oilman, wildcatter, hard-drinking, hard-living, larger than life, as Texas as they come, big, macho, cussing up a storm: John Wayne magnified! And Michael was his only son, his one eye so bad, he had to wear a patch over it when he was a kid, scrawny, packing none of the beef that Big Roy had in excess. When Michael was seven years old and Big Roy caught him playing with matches, he took Michael out into the backyard and made him light matches until he’d burned both of his hands. Big Roy did it to him with cigarettes and alcohol, too. You want to smoke a cigarette, kid? Here you go, partner . . . . Until Michael was green . . . until Michael threw up from all the booze. By the time he was fourteen, all he did much of the time was watch TV with his mother, Phyllis, once a beauty queen, now stoking herself constantly with nicotine. Phyllis was such a die-hard Republican, she’d rant and rave at the set if any of those goddamn Commie-loving liberal turkeys said something biased, East Coast, and critical.

  Big Roy sent Michael to the Culver Military Academy in Indiana that year, and he was pleased about how Michael did: near the top of his class, a marksman, letters in crew and swimming. The other cadets hated him. He was in charge of busting them for reading Playboy and for being late to their barracks. “I even turned in my roommate for being five minutes late to our room. Two days later, he moved out on me. But the point is, I was abiding by the rules.”