American Rhapsody

by Joe Eszterhas

  “Kenneth W. Starr,” James snarled, “is obsessed with getting the president. This is a slimy and scuzzy investigation. This man is not out to get the truth, he’s out to get Bill Clinton. . . . I am going to have a war against Ken Starr. You can strap it up! Here we go! Let ‘er rip, boy! . . . This guy is serving a master other than the truth. . . . What he ought to do is just crawl under the same rock—tobacco-money rock—that he crawled out from under. Let him go into oblivion as one of the truly sad, tragic, despicable characters of the last twenty years of this century. And thank God this poor man is going to go back to representing cigarette companies, exploding gas tanks or whatever he did for a living before this. . . . I don’t like Ken Starr. I don’t like one damn thing about him. I don’t like his politics, I don’t like his sanctimony, I don’t like his self-pity, I don’t like the people he runs with. I don’t like his suck-up, spit-down view of the world, how he kisses up to the powerful and abuses the life out of regular people. . . . I’m like a clown. If you watch the rodeo and the bull riding, and you get thrown from the bull, it’s the clown’s job to get between the bull and the cowboy. Starr’s the bull and the president’s the cowboy. . . . Ken Starr can go jump in a lake. He is a citizen of the United States, just like anybody else he can be subject to criticism. If he wants by some kind of fiat to declare himself above the Constitution, I’m not going to pay attention to it. He’s a public figure, the people who work for him are public figures. . . . I’m not going to shut up, Mr. Starr, you can tell your hit men over there, I’m not going to shut up. If the Holy See and the United Nations ask me, I’m not going to shut up!”

  Snarling . . . hissing . . . crouching . . . kneecapping . . . Mack-trucking . . . T-boning . . . lunging . . . sumo-wrestling … Deliverancing . . . on all the talk shows, morning, noon, and night, on the TV shows he called “the hot-air circuit,” foaming at the mouth, gouging eyes, spilling blood, going for the throat, saying, “I’d rather be a constipated, mangy, flea-bitten dog that howls at the moon than be disloyal to Bill Clinton,” threatening to put TV ads on the air against Starr, offering to raise money for campaign ads against Gingrich.

  Starr was only one front of his bayou jihad. “Cueball Carville will be rolling into battle against Newt Gingrich,” he announced, “because this entire thing has been under the orchestration, supervision, and direction of Newt Gingrich.” He went for the jugular, “reminding everyone” that Gingrich had left his first wife and two teenage children, that his first wife had had to take him to court because he refused to provide adequate child support, that Gingrich’s church had had to take up a collection to help his kids, that Gingrich had tried to reach a divorce settlement with his wife in her hospital room as she was battling cancer. He reminded people that Gingrich had been fined $300,000 by the House for ethics violations and that Bob Dole, Nixon’s soul brother, had loaned him the money.

  “Newt Gingrich is making every decision about this investigation,” James said. “I’ve tried to work up some human feelings for him. I’ve really tried. And then I remembered him saying that I—and the people who believe as I do—caused convicted murderer Susan Smith to push her children into the lake when, in fact, she had been living with a Republican official who was a member of the Christian Coalition and who was molesting her. And if that weren’t enough, Gingrich then said that this horrible case in Chicago where somebody ripped the unborn child out of a woman happened because of people like me and my friends and those I work for. . . . And then he talks about family responsibility—hell, his own church had to take up a collection for his kids! No Democrat ever blamed a Republican because someone drove her kids into a lake or ripped a fetus out of somebody. I mean, it was a Republican in Kentucky who had the First Lady hung in effigy at a rally. It was a Republican who said the president better have a bodyguard to come to North Carolina for his personal safety—Senator Jesse Helms. . . . The Republican party is dead. The Congressional Republican Party is dead. Those guys don’t even know whether to wind their ears or scratch their watches. . . . They’re a school bully yard. That’s what those congressional Republicans are. They bully everybody. They bully anybody and then somebody comes up and they take one hit and they run. They’re crying. And right now they’re all under their mama’s skirt. This is a school-lunch-cutting, government-closing, right-wing-worshipping, sex-obsessed, president-hating party.”

  Cueball Carville’s crusade was hitting the bull’s-eye. Kenneth W. Starr’s approval ratings were tumbling. Republican pollsters issued warnings to their candidates about the upcoming November elections. It was as though James, this creepy-looking, nontelegenic freak were tapping into the American public’s central nervous system and mainlining it full of outrage. Conservatives like Bill Bennett asked, “Where is the outrage?” And the answer was in front of their held-high noses. Right there. Directed at them!

  Thanks to a great extent to Corporal Cueball. The long knives knew they were in trouble. Congressman Bob Barr talked about subpoenaing James to testify in front of the House Judiciary Committee. Sam Dash, ethical adviser to the Starr investigation, said James “seems bent on influencing potential witnesses and grand jurors in pending cases” and was “skating close to charges of obstruction of justice.” James responded by saying he had “subpoena envy” and vowed, “I ain’t gonna shut up! Even if the Vatican and the World Court ask me, I ain’t gonna shut up!” Commentator Chris Matthews called what James was doing “road rage, not politics.” Defrocked Clinton adviser Dick Morris said James was becoming “a demented fringe advocate, a laughingstock.”

  He didn’t care what they said. He didn’t shut up. James turned up the volume. “Henry Hyde,” he said, “is a captive of the right wing and has decided to succumb to the will of Jerry Falwell.” James issued new reminders: that Senator Phil Gramm had once invested in a porn movie, that right-wing billionaire Richard Mellon Scaife was going to fund Starr’s professorial chair at Pepperdine University. Republican minority whip Tom DeLay, James said, was “a fool. This guy has led them down one disaster after another. He’s been sniffing too much of his hair spray. He just breathed in too much hair spray.” Representative Dan Burton, James said, was “a kook. Let’s just call a guy what he is. He’s a plain out and out kook. Wasn’t me that shot a watermelon up in my back yard. It was Dan Burton.”

  A month after Corporal Cueball declared his war, only 34 percent of Americans said Starr was impartial. As James kept at it, Starr’s approval rating sunk to 11 percent and the Republicans found themselves decimated in the November elections. James characteristically hailed his seeming victory. “The real Nixonian character in here—and people understand that—is Ken Starr. And by the way, Ken Starr is more unpopular now with the American people than Richard Nixon was when he left office.”

  Then they got him back. The story was out all over the Internet, flying through the E-mails. James Carville had brutally beaten up his wife, Mary Matalin, Rockville, Virginia, police lieutenant Bobby Masters was quoted as saying. The story first broke in the Montgomery County Ledger.

  It was a hoax. The whole thing was a hoax. Character assassination designed to befoul what James Carville held most sacred in the world: his relationship with Mary. It never happened. There was no Rockville policeman named Bobby Masters. There was no Montgomery County Ledger. But the phony story was aired in twenty-five states by American Family Radio, which was owned by the American Family Association, which was headed by the Reverend Donald Wildmon, Christian antiporn advocate and good friend to the Reverend Jerry Falwell.

  James decided it was time to go up to Woody Creek to see his bastard big brother. He needed some help here. The fate of the republic was at stake. He realized he hadn’t won anything yet. These slime wouldn’t quit unless they were liquefied. They were like the Terminator. A million-footed rabble of Bible-spouting robots.

  Hunter was an old and wizened warrior who had been fighting them his entire life. Hunter knew what James was dealing with. That’s why he had booby traps
around his place. That’s why he had so many guns. That’s why he had so much ammunition in his house. Doc wasn’t afraid of facing stark reality . . . nor of acting starkly.

  They needed some apocalyptic firepower, the bastard and his crazy big brother knew. Something megaton to blast the slimy maggots and the shit-smeared rodents into the Kingdom Come for which the vermin incessantly begged the Lord. At this most fateful moment, the two bald warriors needed their own version of Nixon’s “Plumbers,” their own Bebe Rebozo who had the cash to buy the incendiary power they so badly needed.

  But who had money big enough to buy a nuke? To buy an explosion hellacious enough to send the maggots and the rodents, in flecks and furry bits and pieces . . . heaven-bound?

  Well, Hunter had a friend, Jim Mitchell of the infamous Mitchell Brothers, who had made millions . . . from porn.

  Porn? These two babbling renegades were going to use porn money to save the republic? Porn money to clear the air of the sticky scent of oral sodomy, masturbation, and nonhygienic, tooth-decaying anilingus? Oh, such a perfectly sweet sixties revenge!

  But wait, James had a friend, too, whom he’d met on a movie set. His friend had even more money than Jim Mitchell. His friend wasn’t just a porn mogul, the Mike Todd or Joel Silver of porn. His friend was the assassinated Abe Lincoln of porn!

  The maggots and the rodents were doomed. The Judgment Day which Pastor Pat Robertson kept urging upon them was finally here. Nuked! Exterminated! Sent to Kingdom Come! By the Abe Lincoln of porn.

  [4]

  Larry Flynt Saves the Day

  “I’m a dick person,” Monica said to Linda Tripp. “I’m like hot to trot for the Big Creep.”

  Blacks were adamant, women were angry, but removal from office was still a possibility until Larry Flynt rolled his wheelchair alongside White House counsel Charles Ruff’s in defense of Bill Clinton. Ruff was eloquent; Flynt was prurient. Ruff was inspiring; Flynt was dispiriting. Ruff was logical; Flynt was irrational. But in the end, it was Larry Flynt and not Charles Ruff who blackjacked and blackmailed Republicans into finally . . . finally giving it up.

  The pornographer saved the president by threatening to reveal other acts of pornography committed by—this time Republican—politicians. Larry Flynt was a hero, a self-appointed, self-financed Kenneth W. Starr. It was Flynt’s moment of epiphany: revenge upon the forces that had harassed him, jailed him, and then shot him. He saved the presidency by an act of indecency: extortion. They had forced him to put a pump into his willard and he had come back to cut their nuts off.

  His weapon was an ad in the Washington Post that offered $1 million for information, photographs, and videotapes pertaining to the sexual indiscretions of Republican congressmen or senators. It was like hurling a lighted match into the tank of a gasoline truck. The blast was heard in every cubicle, office, cloakroom, and restaurant on the Beltway. Shrieks of outrage and alarm were heard on the Sunday-morning talk shows.

  Salon magazine had already exposed Henry Hyde’s extramarital affair. An announced Vanity Fair piece had revealed Dan Burton’s illegitimate son. An Idaho newspaper had headlined the militia-defending Helen Chenoweth’s six-year extramarital affair. The Bible thumpers were already taking a beating. And now here was Flynt, offering a fortune for dirt on people whose Christian Coalition supporters couldn’t . . . wouldn’t . . . tolerate much dirt. Flynt was turning the Christian Fundamentalists on their own swords. The pornographer would find the dirt, but it would be the fundamentalists who’d be unable to tolerate, let alone support, a man cheating on his wife or being at the center of a sexual threesome.

  What frightened Republicans in Washington most was Flynt himself, the Caliban from the Ohio River Valley, a hillbilly shit-kicker who knew all about coldcocking someone with a roll of nickels or the butt end of a gun, a man who’d been fighting Republicans his whole sinful, miscreant life, a man angry, wealthy, and shrewd.

  He was born in a hollow in Licksville, Kentucky, in Magoffin County, always one of the poorest in America. It was an area so rural that when one of its residents saw the first airplane, she said, “Oh, Lord, I knew you was comin’, but I didn’t know it was goin’ to be so soon.” When he was seven, little Larry Flynt said to his dad, “Betcha can’t guess what I did. I just fucked Imogene!”—one of his first girlfriends. At nine, he had sex with a chicken, told by his friends that “its egg bag was as hot as a girl’s pussy” and that “chickens wiggle around a lot more.”

  As a teenager, he was assaulted by a policeman who was a pedophile. At fifteen, he joined the army. His army tour complete at seventeen, he joined the navy. He ran whiskey and sold Bibles in his off-duty hours. Assigned to the carrier Enterprise, he was in the room when JFK was there on a visit. He wanted to shake the president’s hand. So, to get his attention, in a metaphorical moment that would resonate through his entire life, Larry Flynt stepped on JFK’s toe.

  He started reading self-help books by Napoleon Hill, such as Think and Grow Rich. At a French whorehouse, he picked all twenty of the girls, had them strip naked and bend over to their ankles . . . and went down the line until his back went into spasms. He started taking amphetamines by the handful and drinking bourbon by the gallon. He married a young woman, and, discovering she was unfaithful to him, he fired a gun at her. He divorced her. He was sent to a state psychiatric hospital. He was given extensive electroshock therapy. He was eighteen years old.

  He went into the bar business in Dayton, Ohio, and bought an old place called the Kiwi. He changed its name to Hillbilly Haven, put Hank Williams and Johnny Cash on the jukebox, and constructed a horseshoe pit in the backyard. It was the kind of place where at the end of the evening the floor was covered in beer and blood.

  He prospered and bought other bars in the Dayton area. He almost killed a man when he brought the butt of his gun down between the man’s eyes and the gun went off. He almost killed another man when he kicked him over and over again in the groin, the ribs, the stomach, and the face. He hit a man so hard once that the trigger guard of his gun bent and crushed his finger, taking a chunk of flesh out of it.

  He set up a bar in Dayton called the Hustler Club, which featured topless go-go dancers. “I’m selling pussy by the glass and my customers don’t care about the price of drinks,” he said. He was making a lot of money and started other Hustler clubs around Ohio. He was doing so much speed, he’d go for four days without sleep. Sometimes he’d have sex with a different woman every four or five hours. “Have I fucked her yet?” he asked his brother once about a woman who looked familiar. His secretary kept count one week and told him he’d had sex with eighteen women. When Larry Flynt felt tired or stressed, he’d say, “I gotta go fuck somebody.”

  Bored with bars, he went into the magazine business. His idea was: “If you get models to spread their legs a little wider, you’ll sell more magazines.” He called his new magazine Hustler. “Anybody can be a playboy and have a penthouse, but it takes a man to be a hustler.” He made some noise when he displayed a model in his new magazine with red-white-and-blue pubic hair. He made more noise with the magazine’s first “pink shot.” “Her vagina was open like a flowering rose, fragile and pink.” He shook the whole country up in August 1975, when he published high-quality color photographs of Jackie Onassis nude. Even the governor of Ohio was caught buying a copy.

  He fell in love with a young woman, Althea Leasure, a dancer at one of his clubs. Her father had killed her entire family. She grew up in orphanages, “where the nuns used to push my face into their crotch.” At seventeen, Althea was already shooting heroin. Larry Flynt married her. Their arrangement was that he could have sex with any other woman but he couldn’t kiss any other woman. Althea could have sex with any woman—she preferred women—but no other men. “We were happy,” he said. “I slept with a lot of women. She slept with a lot of women.” Althea loved him so much that she told him if he ever fell on hard times, she’d go out on the street and whore for him. Larry Flynt loved her so mu
ch that he made her the number-two person at Hustler magazine.

  They moved to Columbus, the capitol of Ohio, and moved into a mansion once owned by a former governor. They put bulletproof glass on all the windows. In the basement, Larry had a three-foot replica of the chicken he’d had sex with as a child. In July 1976, in Cincinnati, he was charged with “pandering, obscenity, and organized crime”—all for publishing Hustler. “As far as I know,” Flynt said of the prosecutor, “he couldn’t tell a clitoris from a rutabaga.” He called Ohio “the place where the dumb come to die.” One friend, the novelist Harold Robbins, said that the prosecutor “reminds me of a marine drill sergeant, but he reminds me of the kind who, after kicking the shit out of some young recruit, would try to fuck him while making up.”

  The prosecutor did wear marine combat boots to court. He accused Flynt of “depicting Santa Claus in a lewd and shameful manner” in a cartoon that showed Santa with a monstrous erection. (The caption said, “Ho! Ho! Ho!”) The prosecutor said Hustler was “the nightmare of a degenerate.” Flynt was sentenced to twenty-five years in prison (later reversed by an appellate court). “Are we really living in a free country?” Larry Flynt asked as deputies hustled him off to jail.

  Jimmy Carter’s evangelist sister, Ruth Carter Stapleton, called Larry Flynt to talk to him about Jesus. She told him she even had fantasies about having sex with Jesus. He and Althea went to see her in their new “pussy pink” jet. They liked each other. On another flight in the pink jet—with Ruth but without Althea—Larry Flynt saw God. God was in a white robe and sandals and with him was the apostle Paul. A little guy with a beard, Lenny Bruce, was there with God, too. Larry saw somebody in a wheelchair and realized he was seeing himself in his vision. He freaked. Ruth stayed with him that night and held his hand, but Larry didn’t strip her and tell her to bend over to her ankles. He told Althea about seeing God and Althea said, “The Lord may have entered your life, but twenty million dollars a year just walked out the door. Does this mean you’ll be pushing dildos and crucifixes?”