American Rhapsody

For Naomi, Sunlight

Love is like a cigar. Once it goes out, you can't light it again. It's never the same.

—RICHARD M. NIXON

Contents

Title Page

Dedication

Author's Note

Act One  HEARTBREAK HOTEL

1 The Whole World Is Watching

2 Monica, Andy, and Handsome

3 The Uproar Is Deafening

4 America Gags, Hollywood Swallows

5 Hillary Lives, Tammy Wynette Dies

6 Hillary, Barry, and Nixon

7 The President Shrieks and Shouts

8 The War on Acid Reflux

9 Kenneth W. Starr Confesses

10 Sharon and Bill

11 Hillary and Bill

12 Monica, Andy, and Butt-head

13 Monica Feels His Pain

14 Kathleen and the Ratwoman

15 Nixon Impregnates Monica

Act Two  MYSTERY TRAIN

1 The Ratwoman and the Bag Lady of Sleaze

2 David Geffen Is Angry

3 Ross Perot on Drugs

4 Bubba and the Burrheads

5 Mark Fuhrman and the Navy Blue Dress

6 Jay Leno and the Cigar

7 Billy Can't Help It

8 Bob Dole's Johnhenry

9 Billy Likes Doing It

10 Better Than a Lava Lamp

11 Bubba in Pig Heaven

12 The President's Piece of Cake

13 Bob Packwood's Reptile Tongue

14 The Scavenger from Cyberspace

15 Hillary Loves Eleanor

16 The Sorceress from Hell

Act Three  SUSPICIOUS MINDS

1 The President Is Black

2 Al Gore and I Want to Be Black

3 James Carville Kicks Ass

4 Larry Flynt Saves the Day

5 The Ace of Spades

6 Al Gorf Loves Tipper Galore

7 Hitler's Whore

8 The Ugliest Story Ever Told

9 John Wayne McCain Chickens Out

10 The Man with the Golden Willard

11 George W. Bush Defines Himself

12 Billy Comes Out to Play

13 Hillary Bares All

14 Willard Comes Clean

15 The Comeback Kid's Last Comeback

Thank you to ...

Acclaim for Joe Eszterhas's

About The Author

Copyright

Author's Note

Nearly three years ago, afraid that my public persona as a screenwriter was overwhelming my creative life, I went to the island of Maui with my wife and our three children, shut my phone down, stopped doing interviews, and pretended I wasn't a public man.

I played with my wife and played with my kids, let the sun beat me up, and thought about things. About values and success. About the sixties. About my past relationship with the women I'd used and my present relationship with the wife I adored. Somehow or other, those thoughts about my life inevitably led me to Bill Clinton.

I thought I recognized and knew Bill Clinton and what made him tick. I understood the ambition, the success, the political duplicity, the Hollywood charm. I understood the mad priapic obsession that had always fuel-driven his life . . . because it had driven mine until I met Naomi. I understood the fierce boom-box rhythms of his inner life the same way I understood and loved the demons shrieking in the darkness inside the Stones, the Doors, the artist now known again as Prince, and Dr. Dre.

I started reading everything ever written about Bill Clinton when we finally came back to Malibu, our phone still shut down, living a near-reclusive life now, not even calling agents, lawyers, and friends back, still refusing all interview requests. I was lost in a mirrored sea of my own creation, in snorkeling pursuit of myself and Clinton, swimming through his past in search of my own soul.

As the impeachment psychodrama began, I watched every minisecond of it, bleary-eyed, haggard, and grizzled, maniacally flicking channels, indulging gluttonously in the national bacchanal of information and bulimia of rumor. I read everything, I saw everything, digested whatever I could, and learned a lot . . . about myself and Bill Clinton and about America, the country I love as only an immigrant who grew up in the ethnic ghettos of Cleveland can love her.

I wasn't just thinking of Bill Clinton anymore, but about a generation,
my
generation, which, in some ways, even though it was entrenched in power, creeping up on sixty, was still struggling to find itself. I was thinking about the state of the union and the state of our hearts and privates as we tried not to stumble and slide on the treacherous Internet ice of the new millennium.

The book you are holding in your hand is filled with everything I thought about and learned. Ah, yes, except it's not that simple. If only it were . . . but it never is.

I am loath to confess that I have had a writing partner who has cursed my career from the time I was in the sixth grade at Saint Emeric's School and published a class newspaper, thanks to the toy printing set that I had received as a Christmas gift. I wrote some of the stories in the
Saint Emeric's Herald
and my writing partner wrote others. I wrote childish investigative reports about the river in the valley below the school, in the smoky part of the city known as the Flats, a river so polluted with industrial chemicals that it burned your eyes as you watched it from the bluffs above. (Many years later, the river literally burst afire!) My writing partner wrote sensational exposés about which girls in our class were kissing which boys. (Hot off the press! A
Herald
exclusive! Frances Madar and Robert Zak!)

By the time I got to Hollywood, I knew my partner well enough to acknowledge him condescendingly in interviews as “the twisted little man inside me.” We wrote about different things, you see, but it all came out under my name. I wrote
Music Box, Telling Lies in America, F.I.S.T.,
and
Betrayed.
He wrote
Basic Instinct, Showgirls, Sliver,
and
Jade—
although sometimes he even intruded his back-alley homunculus self into
my
work: Why, after all, was there a need for lengthy, sexually graphic courtroom descriptives in a movie as aesthetically ambitious and as morally lofty as
Music Box
?

And as I wrote this book—about a cultural shadow war that resulted in the figurative assassination of a president (Bill Clinton)—I realized that the Twisted Little Man was writing feverishly, too. And hallucinating. Daydreaming. Wet-dreaming. Projecting. About Kenneth W. Starr's secret lust. About George W. Bush and Tricia Nixon. About Hillary and her forlorn, intimate relationship with Eleanor Roosevelt. About Al Gore's heartbreaking, cuckolded fears. About Bob Dole and his electable missing shoulder. About “John Wayne” McCain's painful broken promise and his love of identical Long Tall Sallies. About Monica and her spoiled-princess extortion of the president of the United States. About Bill Clinton and his eternal true love, his Willard.

Are the things the little lowlife wrote about true? Well, as a matter of fact, no. But that's also not so simple. Because in the little scuzzball's cockeyed, fun-house view, they are. He uses facts wickedly to shape his outrageous fictional perspective. He is a contortionist and a juggler of the historical record. No mere imposter, he is an abysmal, excrescent python who swallows his subjects, spits them back out, and spews
his
venom from
their
mouths. Is this little vermin a liar? Well, you know, in Bill Clinton's mind, oral sex isn't sex. Is the little slime, as Mark Twain defined himself, “a professional liar,” making up fictions to reveal truths? Well, he is certainly supporting himself in Hollywood by professionally dressing up his tawdry, realistic lies.

I have decided, finally, after all these years of living with him as my writing partner, that it is time to distinguish what is his and what is mine.

If you are reading this typeface, the writing is mine, sometimes interpretive but based on well-researched facts.

If you are reading this typeface, the writing is fictional and his, starting with well-researched facts but blasted through and transformed by his hallucinatory dreams.

I'll put it another way, too. If you get angry while you're reading this brazen book, blame it on the crude, insulting little prick—Lord knows, he's gotten too many people terribly angry through the years. If you find things in this reflective book that frighten you, or if you find yourself laughing against your determined will, blame it on a little boy endlessly watching a sun-kissed river that makes him cry.

Writing my book about Bill Clinton, his political peers, and our national ethos has had a pronounced personal effect upon me. Now I want to play with my wife and children
all the time!
I want to pretend permanently that I am not a public man. Our phones, while not shut down, have gatekeepers with disembodied voices to safeguard our family's bliss. Me, my wife, our boys, the massive pinheaded bulldog we call Rep. “Mud” Nadler, the anti-impeachment Democrat from New York . . . and the Twisted Little Man.

The little devil and I had a nerve-racking, maddening, revolting, hilarious, and climactic time writing this book. We hope that your time reading it will be similar.

Joe Eszterhas

Point Dume, California

[ Act One ]

HEARTBREAK HOTEL

From my own voice resonant, singing the phallus . . .

The President with pale face asking secretly to himself,
   What will the people say at last?

—
WALT WHITMAN
, Leaves of Grass

[1]

The Whole World Is Watching

“We gotta get you laid,” Monica said.

“Oh, God,” Linda Tripp said, “wouldn't that be something different? New and different. I don't know. After seven years, do you really think that there's a possibility I'd remember how?”

“Of course you would.”

“No,” Linda Tripp said.

M
y friend Jann Wenner, the editor and publisher of
Rolling Stone
, the rock and roll bible, called me excitedly the day after Bill Clinton was nominated for the presidency. He had spent the previous night at a party, celebrating with Clinton. “He's one of us,” Jann said. “He'll be the first rock and roll president in American history.”

I had come to the same conclusion. He was one of us. Even if, on occasion, he tried to deny it.
Of course
he had dodged the draft, just another white Rhodes Scholar nigger who agreed with Muhammad Ali and had no quarrel with them Vietcong.
Of course
he had smoked dope, inhaling deeply, holding it in, bogarting that joint.

Bill Clinton, Jann told me, had always read
Rolling Stone
, so I smiled when, shortly after the election, he was photographed jogging in a
Rolling Stone
T-shirt, the same T-shirt I had worn to my son's Little League games. Well, this really was a cosmic giggle:
Good Lord, we had taken the White House!
After all the locust years—after Bebe Rebozo's boyfriend, after the hearing-impaired Marlboro Man, after that uppity preppy always looking at his watch—
America was ours!
In the sixties, we'd been worried about staying out of jail. Now the jails were ours to run as we saw fit.

Carter had given us false hope for a while, but Bill Clinton was the real deal: undiluted, uncut rock and roll. Carter, we had discovered, wasn't one of us. Oh, sure, Jimmah allowed his record-mogul pal Phil Walden and Willie Nelson to smoke dope on the White House roof, and he had told
Playboy
he had “committed adultery in my heart many times,” but the unfortunate, terminally well-intentioned dip was such a cheesy rube, definitely not rock and roll, with his beer-gutted Libyan-agent brother, his schoolmarm wife, and the Bible-spouting sister who was secretly having sudsy, lederhosen romps with married German chancellor Willy Brandt. No, definitely not rock and roll, proven forever when he fell on his face jogging, claiming breathlessly that a bunny rabbit had jumped in front of him, falling on his face while wearing
black socks
.

His Secret Service agents nicknamed Bill Clinton “Elvis,” but we knew better. Elvis had been Sgt. Barry Sadler's ideological sidekick, a slobby puppet on a carny barker's strings, in love with his nark badges, informing on the Beatles, toadying up to Nixon, The Night Creature. Those wet panties hurled onstage at his concerts were size 16 and skid-marked. Bill Clinton wasn't Elvis. With his shades on and his sax gleaming, Bill Clinton looked like a pouchier Bobby Keyes playing backup for the Stones. No, that wasn't quite right, either. Not Bobby Keyes, but a pop-gutted Jumpin' Jack Flash and graying Street Fightin' Man . . . Bill Clinton was Mick on cheeseburgers and milk shakes, Taco Bell, and Chef Boyardee spaghetti.

Rolling Stone
called his inauguration “the coming of a new age in American politics.” Fleetwood Mac was playing “Don't Stop.” That
was
Fleetwood Mac up there, not Pearl Bailey or Sammy Davis, Jr., or Sinatra or Guy Lombardo or Fred Waring and the Pennsylvanians. That was rock and roll we were hearing, not the Sousa Muzak the big band–era pols in the smoky back rooms had forced on us for so long. Dylan, our messiah, was there. And that was Jack Nicholson at the Lincoln Memorial, Abe's words brought to life by our lawyerly Easy Rider. Bill Clinton's White House was rock and roll, too, full of young people, full of women, blacks, gays, Hispanics; a White House, as Newt Gingrich's guru, Alvin Toffler, said, “more familiar with Madonna than with Metternich.” That was just fine with us. It looked like Bill Clinton was continuing what he had begun in Arkansas, where he'd been criticized for having a staff of “long-haired, bearded hippies” who came to the office in cutoffs and patched jeans. The boss himself had been seen in the governor's mansion barefoot, in jeans and a T-shirt.

He had a Yippie-like zaniness about him we could identify with. Out on the golf course in Arkansas, one of his partners noticed that he could see Bill Clinton's underwear through his pants. “They weren't bikinis he had on,” the partner said, “but it was some kind of wild underwear.” Bill Clinton's favorite joke was one he had told over and over on the Arkansas campaign trail, a joke closer in spirit to Monty Python than to the Vegas lounge meisters favored by so many other presidents: “There was a farmer who had a three-legged pig with a wooden leg. And he bragged on this pig to everybody who came to visit. The farmer would tell how this pig had saved him from a fire. People would be amazed! And he'd say, ‘Well, that's not all; this pig saved my farm from going bankrupt.' And the folks would be amazed. And the farmer would say, ‘That's not all; this pig saved the entire town once when the dam broke.' Then somebody said to the farmer, ‘Well, gosh, it's pretty amazing that you have this pig, but you never did explain why it only has three legs.' And the farmer said, ‘Well, hell, you wouldn't want to eat a pig this special all in one sitting!' ”

He certainly was a rock and roller. The light blue eyes, the lazy, sexy smile. The lips that were called “pussy lips” in Arkansas. Girls loved him. At age twelve, a classmate said, “Little girls were screaming, ‘Billy, Billy, Billy, throw me the football.' All the girls had crushes on him. He was the center of their attention.” A reporter covering one of his Arkansas campaigns said, “You could see the effect that he had on people in the eyes of the teenage girls who came to see him. Their eyes would light up. You would think that a rock star had just come into the Wal-Mart.” He had rock and roll habits, too. Gennifer Flowers remembered the time he told her, “I really got fucked up on cocaine last night.” There was even a Jagger-like androgyny he allowed some of his women friends to see. He put on girlfriend Sally Perdue's dress one night, high on grass, and played Elvis on his sax. He asked Gennifer to meet him at a bar dressed as a man, and he liked her putting eyeliner, blush, and mascara on his face. Underneath it was a rock and roll restlessness, what Gennifer called his feeling that he was “bullet-proof,” which allowed him at times to flaunt his relationship with her.

There was no doubt he loved the music. Janis's “Pearl” . . . the Seekers' “I'll Never Find Another You” . . . Peter and Gordon's “A World Without Love” . . . “Here You Come Again” (which reminded him of Gennifer) . . . Steely Dan . . . Kenny Loggins . . . the Commodores' ”Easy” and “Three Times a Lady” . . . Joe Cocker . . . Jerry Lee Lewis . . . anything by Elvis. He had his own band when he was a kid, called The Three Kings, which the other kids called Three Blind Mice because they all wore shades. A high school friend said, “I remember driving down this road and Bill singing Elvis songs at the top of his voice. He loved to sing. He just liked music and he was always playing music. I think that was one of the reasons he went to church so much as a kid. To hear the music.”

One of the things that attracted him to Gennifer was that she was a rock singer with her own band—Gennifer Flowers and Easy Living—at about the same time that his little brother, Roger, had his band—Roger Clinton and Dealer's Choice. Roger was like Chris Jagger to Mick: He wanted to be a rock star, but he wasn't very good. Roger's taste leaned to Grand Funk Railroad, REO Speedwagon, and Alice Cooper. But Roger shared his love of the music. Bill Clinton's memory of his first appearance on
The Tonight Show
was that Joe Cocker was there. “He was telling me about the show,”
Arkansas Democrat
columnist Phillip Martin said. “He was telling me about Joe Cocker's band. He said ‘Man, they were bad; they were just a kick-ass band, man!' You know, he really wanted to play with Joe Cocker rather than going out there and playing ‘Summertime' on his sax. But he was afraid to ask. He was really in awe.” And when Stephen Stills asked Roger up onstage once, he said, “I was so excited, I thought I would pee my pants.”

He was one of us, it became apparent, in another special way, too, the classic sixties child in love with, addicted to, the pleasures provided him by his penis, which he called “Willard.” There was even a cartoon flyer circulated around Arkansas early in his political career that showed Bill Clinton looking down and saying, “Dick, you kept me from being the President of the United States.”

He was a
southern
rock and roller, a hillbilly cat like Elvis and Jerry Lee, growing up in Hot Springs, Arkansas, a neon-lit haven of gamblers and whores, once patronized by Al Capone, Bugsy Siegel, and Lucky Luciano. Bill Clinton may have been born in Hope, but he grew up in Sin City, with a mama who painted her eyebrows, pasted on false eyelashes, loved the racetrack, and helled around in her convertible, drink in hand, from the Vapors to the Pines to the Southern Club, with or without her husband. A ripe peach of a woman, there to be tasted.

He developed a lifelong yen for those ripe peaches, for rock and roll, and for convertibles. It all came together in August 1977, the perfectly realized, transcendent Bill Clinton rock and roll moment, when he was already a married man, the attorney general of Arkansas. Dolly Kyle, a ripe-peach girlfriend he hadn't seen for a while, now also married, came to see him in his office. He introduced her around the office as an old and good friend and then walked her out to her car and he . . . just flipped out! It was a brand-spanking-new turquoise Cadillac El Dorado convertible, 500-horsepower, nineteen feet long, eight-track tape player, AM/FM radio. It was the ultimate hepcat thing, a chrome-plated, poke-your-eye-out, southern gothic Elvismobile, hotter even than the Caddy convertible Chance Wayne (and Paul Newman) drove in
Sweet Bird of Youth
.

He asked if he could drive it, and Dolly said sure, so Bill Clinton got behind the wheel and took her out on the freeway and juiced her up over a hundred, veering, skidding a little, laughing like a kid. He took his foot off the pedal then and let her drift, just gliding along, grinning. Elvis was singing on the eight-track and he sang along . . . “Treat me right, treat me good, treat me like you really should.”

Bill Clinton pulled off into a field, with no houses nearby, and got out and popped the hood open and looked at her motor. Then he looked into her trunk and found some blankets and got back in the front seat and started kissing Dolly. He put the blanket over the front seat and pulled the convertible's top down and told Dolly to take her dress off. He took off every stitch of his clothing, including his cuff links, and put his clothes neatly into the backseat. The sun was shining . . . it was a radiant, warm day . . . the Cadillac was gleaming . . . and they got it on. He put his finger into the sweat inside her belly button and he licked his finger. He reached into the backseat, put his pants back on, and walked back to the trunk for some water. He drank, offered her some, and took his pants off again. He moved her hand to Willard and said, “Touch it.” They got it on again. They got dressed and started driving back to his office. He put the Elvis eight-track back on and he started humming along to the song.

“Today's my wedding anniversary,” she told him.

“Are you happy?” he asked.

“Are you?” she said.

He said nothing until they got to his office.

“Good-bye, pretty girl,” he said, and walked away. She got behind the wheel and popped the tape out to put in another one and she heard the disc jockey on the radio say that Elvis Presley was dead in Memphis. She started to cry and drove away, the tears streaming down her face.

The transcendent rock and roll moment . . . and it ended with a crash and a burn. Roaring down the highway in a brand-new Cadillac, rock and roll blasting, the sun shining, a beautiful girl with her legs up on the dash, a little water to slake your thirst, getting it on again, and then . . .
death
.

A slice of life at Altamont, only four months after Woodstock, love and peace and beads splattered by blood, the beauty of naked bodies at Woodstock obliterated forever by an obscenely naked fat man with a knife plunged into his mottled, greasy flesh. Oyez, oyez, darkness once again at the heart of rock and roll. Darkness and danger and sex. Knives and guns and Cadillacs careening into the pitch-black night. Forget the Beatles and their “good day sunshine.” Rock and roll was about sex, not about love. It was about excess, not about romance. Bill Clinton understood that. It was exactly why he loved it. Bill Clinton was a rock and roll hog.

So was I. I knew it, too, having seen it, even tasted it, firsthand. As a writer for
Rolling Stone
, I had helicoptered into a crowd of 100,000 drunken, naked kids in Darlington, North Carolina, with Alice Cooper and Three Dog Night and watched as Alice guillotined chickens onstage, spraying blood over these sunburned and sweaty, naked kids, who'd rub the blood into one another's privates. I'd sat, afterward, around the pool of a Holiday Inn with the bands and a hundred local groupies as everyone got naked and the night blazed into a chlorine-smelling human blur of contorted wet bodies.

As a screenwriter, I'd waited in the living room of a Denver hotel suite at eight one morning for Bob Dylan to emerge from his bedroom. A half-full quart of Jim Beam stood on the living room cocktail table, along with three or four broken lines of coke. A pair of black silver-toed cowboy boots was under the table. One girl came out of Bob's bedroom, then another, then another. They looked tired and sleepy and were scantily and hastily dressed. They said hi in a shy and embarrassed way and then they left. Five minutes later, Bob came out, bare-chested and barefoot, wearing jeans, his hair an airborne jungle, his complexion graveyard gray. He sat down at the cocktail table, took a long slug of the Jim Beam, did a line of coke, smiled, and said, “Howya doin?”