American Rhapsody

by Joe Eszterhas

  He stopped her and she looked up at him.

  “I’m in love with you,” she told him. It was the first time she had said it.

  “That means a lot to me,” he said.

  “Mr. President!” Harold Ickes, one of his aides, yelled in the Oval Office.

  “Shit! Goddamn it!” Handsome said.

  He jumped up, put his pants back on, and went running out into the Oval Office.

  She put herself together quickly and went out the back through the dining room. She cried all the way home. She had lost the job she loved. The man she loved had made her feel like a whore. But she loved him still. She loved him s-o-o-o much. She didn’t know as she drove home that she wouldn’t see this man she loved for nearly a full year.

  On the following Monday, April 15, 1996, the first day she stepped into the Pentagon, she knew she’d hate it. The place looked shabby. There were all these uniforms around. Everybody was terminally unhip. In her new job, she mostly transcribed tapes or typed up releases. She’d gone from heaven to hell.

  Her world turned to darkness. She’d sit by the phone and wait for him to call. For a while, she didn’t even go out, for fear she’d miss a call. He called rarely, telling her once, “Don’t worry, I’m going to take care of you. You’ll be okay.”

  Mostly, when he did call, he wanted phone sex—more active now himself, talking dirty as much as she did. He woke her up early one morning when he was at the Olympics in Atlanta and, after he’d climaxed, he said, “Good morning!” And then he said, “What a way to start the day!” From June until October of 1996, he called her eight times for phone sex.

  She was having an affair by then with Ted, an older man she’d met at the Pentagon, but she was still telling all of her friends and her mother and Aunt Debra how much she was in love with the president of the United States. She was also going to a weight clinic again and making trips to the White House to take Betty Currie gifts for him: another Zegna tie, a T-shirt.

  She attended government and public events, where she’d briefly glimpse him, even as she continued her affair with Ted. She waited on the sidewalk as he and Hillary were driven to church; he saw her and waved at her. She flew to New York to attend a public function at Radio City Music Hall celebrating his fiftieth birthday. She wore a red dress, and as he hurried through a mob of people, campaigning, pressing the flesh, she put her hand on Willard and pressed Willard’s flesh.

  She positioned herself on the sidewalk outside his hotel the next day so he could see her waving at him. She went to a fund-raiser and saw him hugging another woman at about the same time that she saw him on TV jogging with Eleanor Mondale in L.A. She went to another fund-raiser and he pointed to her as he left the room, and she thought he mouthed I miss you. When she wasn’t with Ted, and there were no public functions to attend where she could see him, she was at home listening to Billie Holiday singing “I’ll Be Seeing You.”

  During one of his sex calls, she told him how much she missed him and begged to see him. He said he was too busy. During another sex call, she asked him to serenade her with his saxophone over the phone on her birthday. He promised he’d call her on her birthday, but he didn’t. During another sex call, she asked him when they would have intercourse.

  “Never,” he said.

  When she asked him why not, he said, “You’ll know when you’re older.”

  She got angry at him and he said, “If you don’t want me to call you anymore, just say so.”

  In late September, she broke up with Ted. She had discovered that Ted was sleeping with other women while telling her how much he adored her. In early October, she discovered that she was pregnant. Ted didn’t even want to share the abortion cost with her. He didn’t even go with her that day. She went alone, using money she’d borrowed from Aunt Debra.

  On the day after Handsome was reelected, she went down to the South Lawn to join the crowd that greeted him. She wore her beret. He saw her and gave her what she considered to be a “meaningful” look.

  After she saw him on the lawn, she waited for his call. Hadn’t he promised that if he won the election, he’d bring her back to the White House—just like that? She even got her hair cut, sure that he’d make good now on his promise. She waited by the phone for days. He didn’t call. She found herself crying uncontrollably.

  She was scheduled to leave for a friend’s wedding in Hawaii on December 2, but she postponed her departure for a day when she read that, for the first time since the election, Hillary would be out of town. It will be Handsome’s last chance, she said to herself, but she wasn’t always calling him Handsome now. Sometimes she called him “the Creep.” Sometimes she called him “the Big Creep.” Sometimes she called him “Butt-head.” If he didn’t phone her now, she’d change her phone number. She remembered what Gennifer had called him: “a flat, two-dimensional piece of hardened paper, empty of all feelings.”

  He called her around 9:30 p.m. It had been six weeks since she’d even heard his voice on the phone.

  “Hi,” he said. “It’s Bill; I’ve got laryngitis.”

  He said, “I wish I were there and could put my arms around you.” He told her he missed her and asked her to come to see him at the White House the next day. She told him she couldn’t—she had to go to her friend’s wedding in Hawaii and her ticket wasn’t refundable.

  He started having phone sex and told her he wanted her to do the talking. She used her Marilyn Monroe voice. She heard a strange noise on the other end. At first, she thought he was climaxing, but then she realized it wasn’t that sound. She listened. He was snoring.

  She went to her friend’s wedding, got a great tan, and then flew to Portland to see Andy Bleiler. Andy sneaked away from Kate and they shared a day in her motel room. Andy told her that he’d been cheating on his wife with another woman for more than a year.

  She’d been worried about pain during intercourse since her abortion two months before and wanted to try sex first with a familiar lover. Her day at the motel with Andy proved to her that she was healed, and she flew back to Washington.

  She thought about her relationship with the president of the United States. Interrupted in the hallway and the bathroom by phone calls. Interrupted by aides. Interrupted by knocks on the door. He couldn’t go down on her because she was having her period. She couldn’t see him because he was out campaigning. She couldn’t see him because Hillary was in town. She couldn’t see him because Eleanor Mondale was in there. She couldn’t see him because her Hawaii ticket wasn’t refundable. Then his back hurt. Then he had intestinal flu. Then he broke his leg and was on crutches. Lloyd Bentsen was waiting outside. Asshole Arafat was waiting outside. She couldn’t even do him with Altoids. She came in chewing them and they kissed, but he didn’t have time. President Zedillo was waiting for dinner.

  Some relationship, she thought, “foreplay to the foreplay.” The Creep. The Big Creep. Butt-head. She remembered how he’d left Gennifer a T-shirt to hold through the night, after he’d gone hurrying home to Hillary. Monica didn’t even have anything to hold. All she had was his photograph on her nightstand.

  She was depressed, but she looked forward to seeing the new friend she’d made at the Pentagon. She was sure this was going to be a lifelong friendship. She was convinced her new friend cared about her. Her name was Linda Tripp.

  [13]

  Monica Feels His Pain

  “I would have believed it about any president,” Monica said.

  “Well, I wouldn’t have believed it of George Bush,” Linda Tripp said. “He was like a grandfather.”

  “He had a girlfriend.”

  “He did not!”

  “He did too!”

  “Oh, I don’t believe that,” Linda said. “He was such a—a—old fellow.”

  The former First Lady was gone and he lived alone in the big house near New York City that they had bought together. He felt himself to be an old man, peeing so many times each day, staring out the living room window sometimes a
t the snow, with only Monica for company. Who would have thought that at his age he would be spending much of his time with her … with Monica, still so young, still in school trying to get her doctorate in … foreign affairs. She even summarized the Sunday-morning talk shows for him.

  Monica didn’t live at the house—he’d had enough of scandal—but she lived close by and came up to the house all the time. Once he even went over to her apartment, and the former president of the United States sat down at the piano with Monica and they sang “Happy Days Are Here Again” together. Sometimes they just talked. He sat in his chair in his study, his foot up on the ottoman, grapefruit juice or white grape juice at his side, pointing his eyeglasses at her or twirling them, biting his pen or clutching his fist to make a point, using the old-time phrases he knew she thought were outdated, things like “Right on” or “Not my bag.”

  He talked a lot about his mother. “She sacrificed everything for us,” he told Monica. “She worked like a dog through pain and tears.” He served Monica drinks sometimes—the “Asian martini” he’d first tasted in Singapore, the Chinese mai tai, “so strong it can kill you.”

  “You’re giving me something that can kill me?” Monica laughed.

  “You’re young,” he told her. “You can take it.” She knew how consumed he was with the difference in their ages.

  “I look damn old,” he said to her. “I see how young you are and I—well … I see some of my contemporaries and they look so bad.”

  He told her, “You have your whole life ahead of you. Mine is all past, behind me.”

  On another occasion he said, “Monica, you need something to live for. Everybody does: countries do, people do. And everyone should maintain a youthful spirit. Sometimes it’s hard to do, but, Monica, you must. Otherwise aging will just get you down and defeat you.”

  Sometimes, when he was in a mood like this, she was able to make him laugh. “I’m in pretty good shape,” he admitted to her once. “I don’t drink. I don’t smoke. I don’t play cards anymore. What do I do?”

  “Nothing fun,” Monica said.

  When he was presented with a fortune cookie on an airline flight, he handed it to her and asked her to open it and read it to him. He smiled when she read, “ ‘Your mentality is alert and analytical.’ ”

  She knew, though, that when she wasn’t with him, he was mostly alone, cooking up cans of chili for himself, nibbling his sesame-seed bread sticks, toasting hot dog buns so he could feel himself there at the ballpark as he watched a game on TV. When she joined him for chili, he laid out the fine china himself. He spent most of his days writing his books, worried that he’d been discredited by the scandal, wondering if people still had any respect for him. “I can write op-ed pieces until I’m blue in the face,” he told her. When he wasn’t working on his books, she helped him. He’d always listened to her ideas; he was reading. Not as much about politics—“It’s a dirty and cynical business, always has been and always will be”—as about philosophy.

  “I can’t find my book!” he said to her once, upset. “I can’t believe I’m missing my Nietzsche!” He told her, “Most of the time, I can’t make out a goddamn thing in this stuff.” He philosophized to her, as well: “I believe that man is both good and bad, light and dark. The evil, though, overrides the good in certain situations because although man has the potential to be good, his inherent evil tends to overwhelm him at times.” And: “I think we have to wait until we die to know the answers. I really do. Peace comes with death.” She didn’t like it when he talked to her like that. “There are so many books left to read,” he told her. “My time is running out. You have a lot of time left. I don’t.” She liked it better when he told her, chuckling, about the philosophers themselves: Rousseau had all kinds of bastard kids; Marx was a drunk who fell down in the gutters. The older he got, Monica noted, he, who’d masterfully worked so many rooms, wanted to have less to do with people. “Why bullshit with people?” he said. “It takes time away from the great books.”

  Monica loved traveling with him, sitting there and watching him with the leaders of the new world, staying in guest houses and luxury suites provided by the host governments, sleeping just down the hall but always available for his call. When she went to his suite on their trips abroad, he would invariably point to the ceiling and put a finger over his mouth, warning her that they could be listening to or watching them. The two of them occasionally ran into bumps during their travels. The new president of Israel had looked at her suspiciously and said, “Can we trust her?” and the president of Latvia had stood him up for a meeting, and she saw once again her ex-president’s old fire-burst of temper. “Goddamn!” he said to her. “I did not come all the way out here to be stood up or to see second-tier people! I am not staying another minute! Let’s go! Now!”

  But he still had his soft and romantic side, as well. Walking at night in Anchorage together, he stopped and said, “Look how the lights sparkle out here. The colors … are just spectacular. Everything up here is either light green or blue. I know people love New York, but after seeing this, we’ve got to wonder why we go back to the goddamn place.” In Moscow, he stooped down and threw a snowball at her. Then he let her decide whether they were going to Prague or Budapest next. She picked Prague, and he said, “It’s magical, you’ll be overwhelmed.” In Saint Petersburg, the mayor asked why Monica wasn’t wearing a scarf in the bitter chill. The former president of the United States answered for her: “She’s one of those indestructible types.” At the Guangzhou market in China, he tapped her on the nose and said, “Be careful of these people approaching you and trying to sell you things. Not everyone out there is nice.” And in Tokyo, he told her, “Monica, you must never get tired of these places, even if you come back a thousand times. This is your first time here, so it’s all new and exciting. But when you return, you must look at these places as if you were looking at them for the first time.”

  There was a moment with him in Beijing that Monica would never forget. As soon as they saw him in the street, the crowds were all over him, tugging at him, touching him, adoring him. Watching him basking in it, glorying in it, taking what he later called a “people bath,” Monica thought, Just knowing somewhere in the world he is revered absolutely gives him a sense of gratification and vindication. They went from the streets into a teahouse and he swayed to the music. He picked up a tambourine near the stage and started playing it. The former president of the United States, disgraced because of his lies … and here he was so many years later, loved by the crowds, with Monica near him, Monica there to share this moment of epiphany.

  Sometimes on their trips, it seemed that he just needed to see her. He called her to his suite at midnight, and when she got there, his room was dark except for a small desk lamp. He was in pajamas and a robe. “Oh, hi,” he said. “I couldn’t sleep.” On a plane ride back home, he whispered, “Monica?”

  She said, “What’s wrong?”

  He said, “Oh, nothing. Were you sleeping?”

  When she couldn’t accompany him on a Moscow trip because of her grad school finals, he called her excitedly, even twice a day. “Monica?” he said. “I can’t believe that I got through to you! I just punched in your number and hoped for the best! Well, it’s five a.m. here, but I’ve got insomnia, so I thought I’d call and fill you in.” In another call, he said, “I know how much you love this city. I wish you weren’t in school. The stopover in London was well worth it. It was beautiful. They are further along in spring than we are. The crocuses and forsythias are out, blooming like mad.” He called her, too, when he fell down in the Moscow streets. “I scraped my knee and hit my rib,” he said. “It hurts when I breathe. I don’t know what happened. I just sort of lost my balance and slipped. … I guess the stars just weren’t with me this time around.”

  Back home, she was with him at Halloween, his favorite holiday. She watched as he went out into the yard of the big house, handing candy out and talking to the neighborhood kids, masked ther
e, waiting for him. A father wearing a mask in the likeness of the former president’s face came up to him, and he laughed and said to the father, “Well, Mr. President, it’s nice to meet you.” The father’s son got a good laugh out of it, and Monica saw that he was having as much fun being out here with the kids as all the trick-or-treaters.

  Monica was with him at Radio City Music Hall for the annual Christmas show. She watched him watch the reenactment of the birth of Christ. The narrator said that Christ died at the hands of His enemies, but every human being had been affected by that “one solitary life.” As Monica watched him, she saw that he, who had had so many enemies, whose life had affected hundreds of millions of others, was crying.

  Three weeks before he died, he spent the day in New York with the daughter he loved so much. People everywhere were stopping him and asking him for autographs, but what meant so much, he told Monica, was that his daughter was there to see it.

  “It was just nice … knowing that she was right there to see it all and …”

  “Share it with you,” Monica said.

  “That meant a lot,” Richard Nixon, eighty years old, told his twenty-two-year-old research and foreign relations assistant, Monica Crowley.

  [14]

  Kathleen and the Ratwoman

  “I said something about Marsha Scott,” Monica said. “He said—‘She was my girlfriend in like 1968’ or something like that, just a stupid thing like that.”

  “Oh, yes,” Linda Tripp said, “he banged her on the canal or something.”

  “Yeah.”

  “Oh, how gross!”

  Up onstage already were Monica and Paula Jones and Gennifer . . . and now, out of the darkened wings, came not trailer trash or Beverly Hills bimbo but a classy, intelligent, and attractive socialite, Kathleen Willey, doing a “pity me” monologue about yet another unwanted groping in that bordello hallway between the Oval Office and the private study.