American Rhapsody

by Joe Eszterhas

  In March 1978, Larry had to go to a small town in Georgia, Lawrenceville, where another obscenity indictment had been filed against Hustler. He was walking toward the courthouse with his lawyers when he heard gunshots. He felt like “a hot poker had been pushed” through his stomach. Then he was struck by a second bullet in the back. Eleven surgeries had to be performed to stop his bleeding. But he couldn’t move his legs. A bullet had passed through the clump of nerves at the base of his spine.

  For the rest of his life, he would be in the wheelchair he had seen in his vision. He was in excruciating pain. “No one could get an erection while suspended in a vat of boiling water.” He went from one hospital to another, seeking relief for his pain. “I had been disemboweled and hung on a meat hook in my grandpa’s smokehouse. I cried, screamed, and begged for relief.”

  He and Althea moved to Los Angeles and bought a house in Bel Air that had been owned by Errol Flynn, then Robert Stack, then Tony Curtis, then Sonny and Cher. Althea was running the magazine. Larry was eating Dilaudid, Valium, Percocet, Librium, Demerol, morphine, and drinking the morphine-cocaine compound for the terminally ill, the Brompton’s cocktail. He overdosed regularly. He was rushed to the emergency room by ambulance six times. Twice, his heart stopped.

  He was sued by Bob Guccione, publisher of Penthouse, and his girlfriend Kathy Keeton. Larry had run a cartoon of Guccione that suggested he was gay. He’d run another cartoon, this one of Keeton, suggesting she’d gotten syphilis from Guccione. Neither Guccione nor Keeton got the joke. Keeton’s case wound up in front of the Supreme Court. Larry wanted to represent himself, but he wasn’t allowed to by the Court. He sat in the audience and yelled, “You’re nothing but eight assholes and a token cunt!” Chief Justice Warren Burger pointed to him and said, “Arrest that man!” They arrested him. Larry Flynt took his custom dress shirt off, and underneath it was a T-shirt that said FUCK THIS COURT! He had a limo outside with American flags all over the fenders.

  At another court date, he wore an American flag as a diaper. He was, of course, always in his wheelchair and almost always dangerously loaded on drugs. He was arrested for desecrating the flag. At his hearing, he spat at the judge. The judge had him gagged. When Larry promised to behave, the bailiff took his gag off.

  As soon as it was off, Larry told the judge, “Go fuck yourself!” The judge yelled, “I’m sentencing you to six months in a federal psychiatric prison! Get out of my courtroom!” Larry screamed, “Give me more, you chickenshit son of a bitch! Is that the best you can do?” The judge yelled, “Twelve months!” Larry screamed, “Give me more, motherfucker! Is that all you can give me, you chickenshit cocksucker!” The judge yelled, “Fifteen months!” Larry screamed, “Give me life without parole! You dumb motherfucker! Fuck you in your ass!”

  Larry Flynt went to federal prison medical centers in Missouri and North Carolina. He threw his own feces into the face of a prison psychiatrist and screamed, “You motherfucker, you took everything away from me, but you can’t take my heart!” He announced from his psychiatric prison that he was running for president and, describing Ronald Reagan, wrote, “Never has this planet ever had such a dumb, fascist, bigoted motherfucker as a world leader.” Upon his release from government custody, he announced that all congressmen, senators, and Supreme Court justices would receive free copies of Hustler.

  In November 1983, he published a satire of Campari’s “First Time” advertising campaign. Behind the picture of the Reverend Jerry Falwell were a bottle of Campari and a glass of Campari on the rocks. The headline said JERRY FALWELL TALKS ABOUT HIS FIRST TIME. The text was a fake interview with Falwell.

  “Falwell: My first time was in an outhouse outside Lynchburg, Virginia. Interviewer: Wasn’t it a little cramped? Falwell: Not after I kicked the goat out. Interviewer: I see. You must tell me all about it. Falwell: I never really expected to make it with mom, but then after she showed all the other guys in town such a good time, I figured, ‘What the hell!’ Interviewer: But your mom? Isn’t that a bit odd? Falwell: I don’t think so. Looks don’t mean that much to me in a woman. Interviewer: Go on. Falwell: Well, we were drunk off our God-fearing asses on Campari, ginger ale and soda—that’s called a Fire and Brimstone—at the time. And mom looked better than a Baptist whore with a $100 donation. Interviewer: Campari in the crapper with mom . . . how interesting. Well, how was it? Falwell: The Campari was great, but mom passed out before I could come. Interviewer: Did you ever try it again? Falwell: Sure . . . lots of times. But not in the outhouse. Between mom and the shit, the flies were too much to bear. Interviewer: I meant the Campari. Falwell: Oh, yeah. I always get sloshed before I go out to the pulpit. You don’t think I could lay down all that bullshit sober, do you?”

  Falwell filed a $45 million libel suit and was represented in court, bizarrely, by Penthouse’s attorney, a man who had once referred to the reverend as “Foulwell.” His case went all the way to the Supreme Court, and the justices voted, shockingly, eight to zero in favor of Larry Flynt. It should have been the greatest moment of his life, but it was almost an anticlimax. Althea died on June 27, 1987, of AIDS, contracted from either a heroin needle or a blood transfusion. She died in the bathroom next to Larry’s bed. He had alerted the nurses that she was in there too long. He couldn’t do anything to help her. His wheelchair wasn’t next to his bed.

  . . .

  This was Larry Flynt, the man who announced now, in the year of Bill Clinton’s impeachment, a $1 million reward for information about Republicans’ sexual indiscretions. Conservative Republicans knew how Larry Flynt felt about conservative Republicans, sometimes even just plain Republicans. They remembered the Hustler cartoon showing Gerry Ford and Nelson Rockefeller and Henry Kissinger gang-banging the Statue of Liberty. They remembered the Hustler phone-sex ad for Jesse Helms—“Jesse Helms—Phone Sex—Blacks Preferred”—which included Senator Helms’s office and home telephone numbers. They remembered the other cartoons of Jerry Falwell. One showed an old lady living in a dump, rats all around her, a can of dog food next to her, writing a letter: “Dear Jerry Falwell, I want to thank you for the inspiration and comfort your television broadcasts give me. I am enclosing the remainder of my Social Security money to help you keep up your fine work, as I know you need it.” The other cartoon showed Satan sitting in a high-rise office, barking into a speaker phone, “Send Falwell in here. I want to see the look on the fucker’s face.” They knew that Larry Flynt knew—finally, after so many years—that the man who’d shot him was a white supremacist angered by an interracial photo spread.

  Those in Congress knew how vulnerable they could be if someone was out there offering a million dollars for the sort of information Flynt was looking for. Congress really was, in Bob Dole’s words, “Animal House.” Rita Jenrette had even described having sex with her husband on the Capitol steps. There were hundreds of offices hidden away in the Capitol Building with crystal chandeliers and comfortable couches and mirrors, fireplaces, and decorated ceilings, rooms simply ideal for an intimate, hands-on chat with a young staffer.

  And Speaker Newt Gingrich, God bless him, had restored an old, banned custom. Congressmen could sleep overnight once again in their offices, free to do whatever in-depth research on whichever subject was at hand. They were politicians, for Pete’s sake, not saints. Who anywhere could withstand a million dollars’ worth of this kind of scrutiny?

  Not Newt, certainly, who was once caught bare-assed on top of his desk, conferring with an aide . . . who, it was even now being said, was too chummy with a young legislative aide, Callista Bisek, and allegedly with Arianna Huffington. Not Dick Armey, who was thrice accused of sexual harassment while he was an economics teacher in college. Not Tom DeLay, who’d bounced $5,300 worth of checks on the House bank.

  And there was such a history of human behavior in Congress, too. Representative Dan Crane, caught having an affair with a Senate page . . . Representative Gerry Studds, caught trying to force pages into having sex with him . . . Representa
tive Ken Calvert, a Christian Coalition favorite, caught half-naked in his car, getting a blow job from a heroin-junkie hooker . . . Representative Martin Hoke, caught on television saying, “She has big breasts!” about a television producer . . . Representative J. C. Watts, the Republicans’ black poster child, exposed as the father of two illegitimate children.

  Flynt, those who felt themselves vulnerable soon learned, wasn’t fooling around. He was no Nixon-type operative, like the Night Creature’s porcine bagman, the private eye Tony Ulasciewicz, who made so many raspy-voiced phone calls from public phone booths that he had to carry a bus conductor’s coin belt on his belly. No phone booths for Larry Flynt! Larry King was his Ma Bell. “I have eight investigations going on,” Flynt told King. “If they materialize, the Republican party is going to be in shambles.”

  He’d brought in a crack investigative reporter, Dan Moldea, who’d exposed Ronald Reagan’s questionably close ties to Hollywood mogul Lew Wasserman and Teamster money, to run his million-dollar project. Also there to counsel Flynt was Rudy Maxa, a former Washington Post gossip columnist, who’d heard all the scuttlebutt through the years. There were rumors, too, which Flynt denied, that he was getting help trying to dig up Republican dirt from Terry Lenzner and Jack Palladino, private eyes who’d been employed by the Clinton campaign to do “opposition research.”

  Crazy man Flynt was being politically astute about all this, too. He said he was zeroing in especially on those Republicans who were calling for Bill Clinton’s removal from office but had sexual skeletons in their own closets. Back off, Larry Flynt was saying. If you’re dirty and you’re calling for Bill Clinton’s removal, I’ll get you. It was extortion. What made it scary was that no one knew what Flynt had, what he could come up with, or what a million dollars would buy. It was like the best of thrillers, where the scares come from your imagination and not from what you see up on-screen.

  The first development that struck people as odd was Newt Gingrich’s resignation. Had it really been caused by the beating the Republicans took in the midterm elections? Or did Newt want to put himself out of the line of fire of any Flynt missiles? (His divorce months later and references to his affair with Callista Bisek would reignite speculation that it was Larry Flynt who’d toppled Newt Gingrich.)

  The next development was a bombshell. There was no doubt this time. The incoming speaker, Bob Livingston, who liked to take Cajun knives into congressional meetings, resigned because he had been informed that Larry Flynt had information about him that he was going to publish. Livingston admitted to extramarital affairs, but he wouldn’t directly respond to reports in Los Angeles that Flynt had videotapes of him in a threesome. Livingston’s wife, Bonnie, called Flynt and begged him not to release the details of her husband’s philandering. Flynt agreed. “The guy’s resigned, you know?” he said. “What’s the point?”

  Bob Barr was next. The smug, self-righteous “prosecutor from hell,” another Christian Coalition darling, denied that he had talked his ex-wife into aborting their child and had paid for it. But Larry Flynt had affidavits from Barr’s ex-wife swearing to it. One of the staunchest abortion foes in America . . . caught urging the abortion of his own child.

  As impeachment went from the House to the Senate, and as Flynt and his team kept digging, there was a noticeable shift on the part of some senators and other Republicans, who suddenly wanted to censure but not remove Bill Clinton. Commentators said the midterm elections had caused the shift, or the Gerald Ford–Jimmy Carter op-ed piece in the New York Times, but the more cynical wondered what effect Larry Flynt was having on the Senate trial.

  Why would Pat Robertson suddenly do an about-face and come out for censure instead of removal? Why would Trent Lott suddenly work with Tom Daschle to limit the House prosecutors’ efforts? Why would a senator like Richard Shelby of Alabama, who loathed Bill Clinton, suddenly start acting like the moderate he wasn’t? Perhaps the real question was, What did Larry Flynt know and what would he do with it?

  There was little need for anyone to point out how prone senators had always been to unsenatorial behavior. There was Senator John Tower, drunk, chasing his aides around his desk, his fly unzipped . . . Senator Joseph Montoya, who had a special secretary, whose only duty was to give him a blow job every afternoon . . . Senator Orrin Hatch, who’d had a former porn star named Missy Manners on his staff . . . Senator Chuck Robb, doing coke and having sex at the Pierre with twenty-one-year-old beauty queen Tai Collins (well, he was married to Linda Bird Johnson) . . . Senator Strom Thurmond, still known, at age ninety-six, around the Senate as “the Sperminator” . . . Senator Daniel Inouye, reprimanded by the Senate for unwanted sexual advances to aides . . . .

  When it was all over and Bill Clinton stayed in office, nobody thanked Larry Flynt, the hillbilly kid from Licksville, Kentucky, for saving the presidency of the hillbilly kid from Hope, Arkansas. Groups like the National Organization for Women, who so desperately wanted Bill Clinton to stay in office, didn’t say thank you to the man some feminists described as “every bit as dangerous as Hitler.” The media patted members of the Senate on the back for their temperance and moderation.

  Only one person acknowledged what Larry Flynt had done, and he did it with his action and not his words. John F. Kennedy, Jr., invited him as his guest to the very public National Correspondents Association dinner in Washington. The son of the woman whom Larry Flynt displayed nude in Hustler sat next to the man in the wheelchair, who’d built his empire on Jackie’s naked flesh. There had to be an overwhelming moral imperative for JFK, Jr., to be sitting there next to America’s immoral pornographer.

  [5]

  The Ace of Spades

  “I have a crush on Vernon Jordan I think,” Monica said.

  “Oh, that’s not at all surprising,” Linda Tripp said. “He’s very crushable.”

  “I’m going to tell the Big Creep,” Monica said. “That would make him jealous.”

  Another centimeter and Vernon Jordan would have had to pull his own wheelchair alongside those of Larry Flynt and Charles Ruff to defend Bill Clinton. Like Larry Flynt, Vernon Jordan had taken a .30-06 bullet in his body, too, and for the same reason as Flynt: racial prejudice.

  But that was a long time ago and it had nothing to do with what Kenneth W. Starr was doing to Vernon Jordan now, targeting him in his investigation, thinking in his Mad Hatter folly that Vernon Jordan would compromise or implicate the president of the United States. Or did it? Was Starr taking a shot at Vernon Jordan the same way the Klansman, that American Nazi party member, had taken a shot at him in Fort Wayne, Indiana, in 1980?

  Starr didn’t have a prayer. Even if he were right, even if Vernon Jordan and Bill Clinton had conspired to obstruct justice, to convince Monica to lie in the Paula Jones case, there was not a flicker of possibility that Vernon Jordan would cop to it. He was a man who had taken a bullet for what he believed in, and he and Bill Clinton believed in the same things. He was a man who’d walk down the darkest alley to help a good friend and do what had to be done. He was a man who could not only handle himself on the street and in the boardroom and in the locker room and at the dining table; he was a man who took charge, who, by the sheer power of his presence, overcame. “We’re just buddies,” he said about his friend Bill Clinton. “I eat in his kitchen, he eats in mine. If Hillary is in town, she comes to dinner. If he’s in town, he comes to breakfast.” And Bill Clinton said about his friend Vernon Jordan, “The last thing he’d ever do is betray a friendship. It’s good to have a friend like that.” Vernon Jordan said, “I always knew he was going to be president.” And Bill Clinton said, “What attracted me to Vernon was that he was a very large person, larger than life.”

  That he was. Standing six foot four in his Brooks Brothers suits, Turnbull & Asser shirts, a Churchillian Davidoff cigar in his hand, Vernon Jordan was a charismatic black man whose oratorical flourishes were as powerful as Martin Luther King, Jr.’s. He could be a macho man in the company of other macho men and h
e could be dazzlingly, effortlessly seductive in the company of women. He could quote the Bible, slap a back, or tickle a funny bone. He could also fold his arms in front of him and fix his steely gaze on someone and say, “You don’t know what the fuck you’re talking about!” He could be smiling, carefree, loose, and then freeze the room with his scowl. He was a student of people and knew what made each one of them tick. He was a man never to be messed with and a man who never forgot. He was Sidney Poitier mixed with Richard Burton. He was who Denzel Washington wanted to be. He was what his white boardroom friends called him. Vernon Jordan was the Ace of Spades!

  In 1997, sixty-two-year-old Vernon Jordan (or his second wife, Ann, a former assistant professor at the University of Chigago’s School of Social Work) was on the board of directors at American Express, Xerox, JCPenney, Dow Jones, Sara Lee, Revlon, Bankers Trust, RJR Nabisco, Union Carbide, and Ryder. He was a director of the Ford Foundation and the Brookings Institution. He had received a fellowship to Harvard’s Institute of Politics and an honorary degree from Brandeis. He was one of three executive partners in the most powerful political law firm in Washington, a firm whose clients included the People’s Republic of China, the Chilean Exporter’s Association, the government of Colombia, the Korean Foreign Trade Association, and varied Japanese multinationals.

  He counted among his friends former president George Bush and former secretaries of state Cyrus Vance and James Baker. “Vernon knows more corporate leaders, more labor heads, more foreign heads of state than anyone I know,” said William T. Coleman, Gerald Ford’s transportation secretary. His Washington power breakfasts were the stuff of legend, as was the fact that Vernon Jordan chatted with the waiters and the waitresses as much as with his powerful guests. He and Ann were picked as one of America’s “Power Couples” by Forbes magazine. Most people in Washington, including Linda Tripp, felt he was the most powerful lawyer in town, making well over a million dollars a year. Yet he never walked into a courtroom or wrote a legal brief. He was a power broker, a problem solver, a fixer.