American Rhapsody

by Joe Eszterhas

  How about the time she was doing a photo shoot in Malibu and Ginsburg showed up, took one look at the blue chiffon dress they had her wearing, and said, “The president is going to cream his pants when he sees this.” A nice classy photo shoot with Herb Ritts on a sunny private Malibu beach and her own lawyer has to ruin it for her. Cream his pants like he’d creamed them before. Or cream the blue dress maybe. Her own lawyer! Who was supposed to protect her from the gang bang.

  But who was getting a hard-on instead, maybe, watching, wanting more intimate details, thinking about her inner thighs, her pulkes, her dark pubic hair, her lips, creaming his pants, in line at the gang bang . . . .

  She thought about all the other women who had been, for a while, America’s whores, the world’s whores, famous for no other reason except that they had somehow been caught with or without their panties down, kneeling down or lying down, with famous men. They were all over the channels and the Internet now . . . thanks to her.

  They thought they had finally resumed anonymous lives, and now they were being yanked back naked onstage for the world to remember once again for their whoring. Just when they thought their ravaging fifteen minutes of gang bang were over, their now-aging bodies were dragged out to be scrutinized, mocked, poked, and violated again . . . thanks to her.

  They were bit players now in a drama in which she was starring. They had starred briefly themselves, but in much smaller and dingier venues. Going down on a congressman was not going down on the president of the United States. Being Wayne Hayes’s whore was not being Hitler’s whore.

  She wondered, watching these women on Hard Copy or Montel Williams or Geraldo if this was what was going to happen to her, too. Back on the tube for a few bucks ten or twenty years later, reminiscing about the blow jobs the same way old ballplayers talked about getting the hit in the bottom of the ninth that won the World Series. Signing autographs in red ink with a happy face and a smeared pair of rubber lips. Smiling until your facial muscles hurt, in order to prove that the long-ago gang bang didn’t hurt anymore.

  She knew that the women she was watching or reading about now, the women who were being violated again—thanks to her—didn’t have much to smile about. Was Meredith Roberts, Bob Dole’s old mistress, smiling as she lived alone with her cats, saying, “Life is very hard. I wish it would just end”? How about Elizabeth Ray, that fat old congressman’s mistress, who lived alone with her dog? Or Fawn Hall, who hid Iran-Contra papers in her panties for Oliver North—out in L.A., battling heroin addiction and crack, saying, “Ollie treated me like a piece of Kleenex”? Or Vanessa Pernach—bitten by Marv Albert—who said, “I have an A stamped on my forehead. A for Albert. No one’s going to want to date me now.” Or Jessica Hahn, saying jokingly to Gennifer, “If you fix me up with Bill Clinton, I’ll fix you up with Jim Bakker.” And Gennifer’s response: “No offense, but I wouldn’t fuck him on a bad day.” Celebrity whores. Superstar whores. And she was the biggest whore.

  It could have been worse. Really. Really? Yeah, really. She thought about Megan Marshack, who was twenty-one when she met the vice president of the United States, Nelson Rockefeller, who was married and almost seventy. Monica thought she could almost sort of recognize Megan, a Valley Girl from L.A. who grew up in a house at the foot of the Hollywood sign. Megan was big-boned, attractive, tall, smart, ambitious. A history and journalism major. Megan went down to San Clemente as a college journalist, got on the Nixon press bus, met the hotshot Washington journalists. Megan had an affair with one of them. He helped her get a job in Washington as a radio reporter for the Associated Press. Megan went to interview Vice President Rockefeller. She knew how much Rocky liked Oreo cookies. So she bought a box, took all the cookies out, wrapped each cookie separately, and gave him the cookies.

  Rocky liked the cookies, liked Megan. Rocky hired Megan to work for him for sixty thousand dollars. He put her in an office right next to his with a private entrance. Rocky took her to New York as an art adviser, loaned her $45,000, bought her a big raccoon coat, a nice Gucci bag.

  Then, one night when they were together at a hideaway town house, Rocky had a heart attack and died inside her. Megan Marshack was the femme fatale of all time. Well, thank God the Creep didn’t do that to me, Monica thought. The killer blow job. The blow job to end all blow jobs. The orgasmic assassination of William Jefferson Clinton. Willard rigid in rigor mortis. Hillary’s Ultimate Humiliation.

  She felt an overwhelming sadness as she heard and heard again about these women. She felt, too, that she didn’t even belong among them, let alone be the star of their sad dinner-theater circuit. God, poor pathetic Elizabeth Ray, who got her start as a beauty queen from North Carolina by popping the pageant judges. Elizabeth’s dream was to be Marilyn Monroe. The fat old congressman paid her to be his mistress and put her on his staff. “I can’t type, I can’t file, I can’t even answer the phone,” Elizabeth Ray said. The fat old congressman married another staffer. Elizabeth Ray wasn’t invited to the wedding. Humped and dumped.

  She got angry and stormed into the congressman’s office. The congressman had the Capitol Police escort her out. She went to the Washington Post and spilled the beans. “I always pick ’em,” she said. “My problem is that I always choose the bad guys. For one or two days they treat you right, but then . . .” She moved to New York and hooked up with a gambler, then a stage producer. Humped and dumped. Humped and dumped again.

  “Playboys, gamblers, and politicians,” Elizabeth Ray said. “I always go for them. I’m spoiled. I’m used to staying in top hotel suites, having limos pick me up and flying to Atlantic City and having a Rolls-Royce pick me up. But I really pay for it.” She wrote a book about the fat old congressman, called The Washington Fringe Benefit. She took acting lessons from Lee Strasberg and Stella Adler. She appeared for one week as a singer in a bar in McKeesport, Pennsylvania. She got a role in a Chicago dinner-theater production and a job covering the Democratic National Convention for a men’s magazine. She posed naked for the magazine, too. She saw her shrink often. “The day that there’s no hope, he said he’d tell me.” Elizabeth Ray had a nude portrait of herself stretched out on a white sheet holding a rose, like Marilyn. And she lived alone with her dog.

  Then there was Fanne Fox. A stripper called “the Argentinean Firecracker.” With another fat old congressman. Pulled over by the park police in Washington with the congressman and two others. Everybody drunk. Fanne, panicked, jumped out of the congressman’s car and dived into the Tidal Basin. A camera crew scanning police radios was there when she got out. She said she was in love with her fat old congressman. He ran for cover, his career over. “I learned not to drink with foreigners,” he said. Humped and dumped.

  She tried stripping under a new name—“the Tidal Basin Bombshell.” She wrote a book called The Stripper and the Congressman. She did “promotional work” for a men’s magazine and posed in the nude for it. She tried to kill herself. She spent time in a psychiatric ward. She made a sex movie called Posse from Heaven, which was a double entendre the producers thought would be a gold mine. “What happened happened,” she said. “So that can not be repaired completely. But some things can be mended enough to allow you to live comfortably and not be completely ashamed of yourself.”

  Was this going to be Monica’s future? Acting lessons? A week at a bar in McKeesport? A book? Posing nude? A sex movie? Seeking hope from a shrink? Suicide attempts? Time in a psychiatric ward? Humped and dumped and humped and dumped over and over again in individual mocking replays of the gang bang that initially violated and ravaged her? Endless sorrow? Not being completely ashamed? Tragedy? And talk shows?

  Endless self-exposing talk shows? She remembered something Gennifer had said: “I was doing a talk show over the phone at home. I had to go to the bathroom so bad I couldn’t wait. But the show was only half-finished and I could hardly excuse myself right in the middle of it to go use the potty. Desperate for relief, I looked around the kitchen and got the brilliant idea to us
e a bowl. So as I continued to answer questions about Bill Clinton and me, I proceeded to tinkle into the bowl. Luckily it wasn’t stainless steel, and so it didn’t make any noise.” Tinkling into a bowl while doing a talk show?

  Only Donna Rice gave her hope. Donna Rice was a party girl when she met Gary Hart, who met her through Don Henley of the Eagles. Donna had even had a blind date with Prince Albert of Monaco. And then Donna Rice did those tacky blue jeans commercials, before Marla Maples, where she said, “I have no excuses. I only wear them.”

  But Donna Rice didn’t write a book. Donna Rice didn’t pose nude. She didn’t take acting lessons. She didn’t do any cheap movies. She didn’t even do the talk shows. Donna Rice got married. She found God. She was the head of an organization called Enough Is Enough, which battled pornography on the Internet. No Atlantic City, no limos, no humped and dumped. A life. Donna Rice had a life and was doing something she believed in.

  It’s so unfair, Monica thought, as she switched her channels. Wait! Oh my God! Oh my God! There she was! On the Fox News channel! The other Monica, Nixon’s Monica, Crowley. Holy shit! The host was introducing her as “Monica Lewinsky,” and the other Monica was saying, “Talk about a Freudian slip!”

  It’s so unfair, she thought. Here she was, cooped up in her prison of an apartment, and here Nixon’s Monica was, trashing her and trashing the Creep and saying, “Nixon would have counseled Clinton to avoid stonewalling and make good on his promise to provide more information rather than less, sooner rather than later.”

  Nixon! Nixon’s Monica was saying that Nixon, the total liar, would have told the Creep, the almost-total liar, to stop lying? How could they believe her? Or when she said that Nixon “was like a grandfather to me.” Yeah, right. When she’d already told the world that she got “moral support” to write her books from that guy Roger Stone, the freak who advertised with his wife in the swingers’ magazines. “Moral support” and Grandpa Dick, yeah right! It was s-o-o-o unfair.

  She switched the channels and felt herself beginning to obsess again—Oh God! Oh God! Oh God!—about all these whores, these other whores . . . speaking to her, getting inside her. No! That was it right there. That’s where she made her mistake. They were not whores any more than she was a whore or Monica Crowley was a whore. It didn’t matter what people thought! It didn’t matter if that’s what the media insinuated! They were women who had either fallen in love with or been used by cynical, deceitful men. Just like her. She had fallen in love with and she had been used by a cynical, deceitful man. They were women who had made a mistake just like she had made a mistake. They were human just like she was. They were her sisters.

  She felt better now. She felt so much better, she turned off the set and called downstairs to the Watergate Bakery and ordered up another chocolate mousse cake. She remembered the happy endings that some of her sisters, some of her fellow gang-bang victims, experienced.

  Vanessa Williams, of Miss America fame, was singing with Pavarotti . . . . Jessica Hahn, of Jim Bakker fame, had her nose, teeth, and breasts redone . . . . Gennifer Flowers was lecturing in colleges . . . . Connie Hamzy, the groupie from Little Rock, was running for Congress and campaigning in a thong bikini . . . . Tai Collins, of Senator Chuck Robb fame, was writing Baywatch episodes in L.A . . . . Koo Stark, of Prince Andrew fame, hosted a London TV show . . . . Rita Jenrette, who made love on the Capitol steps, lived in a million-dollar penthouse and sold commercial real estate . . . . Fawn Hall was beating her addiction to heroin and crack . . . . And Fanne Fox, at the age of forty-five, was happily married and had given birth. There was life after the gang bang! As Rita Jenrette said, “Succeeding is the best revenge.” As Judy Exner of JFK fame said, “I was twenty-five years old and in love. Was I supposed to have better sense than the president of the United States?”

  Monica was s-o-o-o happy she wasn’t a whore, s-o-o-o happy she wasn’t Hitler’s whore, a nice Jewish girl like her. She was s-o-o-o happy that she’d discovered her sisters. Her doorbell rang. Her chocolate mousse was here. As she sliced into her cake, she saw her future: Everything would be just fine.

  Monica would dump her schmucky lawyer and make a deal with Starr. The baseball hat she wore would become a fashion item. People would applaud her as she went into a restaurant. A Gallup poll would find her among the most admired women in the world, tied with Queen Elizabeth.

  She would pose in Vanity Fair with the stars and stripes. The Creep would say nice things about her. Andy Bleiler would dump his wife, regret what he’d said in his press conference, and try to come crawling back. She’d lose a lot of weight and maybe she’d let him. And if, after Hillary dumped the Creep, sometime down the line, and if she was still skinny, and if the Creep was in town one night . . .

  [8]

  The Ugliest Story Ever Told

  “I think he even horrifies himself in his rational moments,” Linda Tripp said to Monica. “Like ‘Holy shit, what am I doing? If they think that one’s bad, what would they ever do to me with this one?’ ”

  After the midterm November election of 1998, when Republicans had their political future handed to them on a feminine ebony platter, it looked like the impeachment of Bill Clinton by the House of Representatives was as likely as Hillary doing a porn movie.

  Yet it was a porn movie in the form of a hard-core FBI interview that was responsible for Bill Clinton’s impeachment by the House of Representatives six weeks later. Without this raw FBI file, seen by more than forty Republican congressmen in the high-security evidence room of the Gerald R. Ford Building, moderate Republicans would have voted against impeachment. At the end, Bill Clinton was impeached not for what he was charged with: perjury and obstruction of justice. He was impeached for an alleged rape.

  The FBI interview of Juanita Broaddrick, known as Jane Doe #5 in the Starr Report, had been sent to the House Judiciary Committee as a supplement by Kenneth W. Starr. It was never made public. The FBI had been sent to interview Broaddrick because Starr was looking for evidence of obstruction of justice. Starr found none, but he sent the interview itself to the Judiciary Committee, which placed it in the guarded room. Not one Democrat went to read it. But, at majority whip Tom DeLay’s encouragement, forty Republicans, most of them wavering moderates, did. They described themselves to their colleagues as “horrified” and “nauseous” after they read it.

  Few of them asked what the FBI interview was doing there. If Kenneth W. Starr found no evidence of obstruction of justice pertaining to Jane Doe #5, then why was the interview with her even sent to the House? How was it relevant?

  It was the hot, rancid potato that Kenneth W. Starr tossed to Tom DeLay, who tossed it to the congressmen who seemed like they might vote against impeachment. It was a Hail Mary pass that scored a Republican touchdown and got Bill Clinton impeached before Larry Flynt saved him from removal.

  The story the congressmen read was ugly: In 1978, Juanita Broaddrick, attractive and well built, was thirty-five years old. She’d graduated from a nursing school and now owned a nursing home of her own in Arkansas. Bill Clinton, running for governor, then the attorney general, visited her nursing home during his campaign. Broaddrick was married to her first husband. Clinton asked her to drop by and see him at his campaign headquarters in Little Rock. She told him she was due there at a nursing seminar the following week. When she got to Little Rock, she called Clinton’s office and was told to call him at his apartment. She did, and they agreed to meet for coffee in her hotel’s coffee shop. When he got there, Clinton called her from the lobby and said it was too noisy. There were too many reporters there. He asked if he could go up and have coffee in her room. He went upstairs.

  He’d been in the room less than five minutes when he moved close to her as they looked out the hotel window at the Arkansas River. He put his arms around her. She tried to resist him. He forced her onto the bed, holding her down. He bit her upper lip and kept her lip in his teeth as he ripped her panty hose open. He raped her. She was crying. She
felt paralyzed.

  Finished, he got off the bed and put his pants back on. She was in shock, sobbing. He went to the door. He put his sunglasses on. He turned back and looked at her. “You better put some ice on that,” he said, and was gone.

  A friend found her on the bed an hour later. She was in shock. Her lips had swollen to double their size. Her mouth was badly bruised. Her panty hose were torn open at her crotch. “I can’t believe what happened,” she kept sobbing to her friend.

  . . .

  After Bill Clinton’s impeachment by the House, Tom DeLay tried it again with the Senate. “You never know how those senators are going to vote if they go down to the evidence room,” he said. By then the Internet was full of gossip about Juanita Broaddrick and the story she told.

  Bill Clinton was not the first president of the United States to be accused of rape. Selena Walters, a young, hot-looking Hollywood starlet, was sitting in a Hollywood nightclub with her date one night in the early fifties. A strikingly good-looking man hit on her. She knew who he was. “I’d like to call you,” he told her. “How can I get in touch with you?” She gave him her address. Her date took her home and she went to bed.

  At three o’clock in the morning, she heard someone beating on her door. It was the good-looking man she’d met at the club. She opened the door.

  “He pushed his way inside and said he just had to see me. He forced me on the couch and said, ‘Let’s just get to know each other.’ Then it was the battle of the couch. It was the most pitched battle I’ve ever had. I was fighting him. I didn’t want him to make love to me. He’s a very big man and he just had his way.”

  Ronald Reagan was asked about Selena Walters’s account in 1991 as he was on his way into church. He didn’t deny it. What he said was, “I don’t think a church would be the proper place to use the word I would have to use in discussing that.”