American Rhapsody

by Joe Eszterhas

  The Night Creature was even further dejected by the knowledge that he had no credentials to speak of moral decline. “Watergate took away any chance I have of talking about that stuff credibly. Our critics will say, ‘Who is Nixon to talk about this? He contributed to it! He’s the Watergate guy, the Vietnam guy. He resigned in disgrace.’ ”

  The Night Creature kept going back to where he felt it had all gone wrong for him—not Watergate, but our protests in the streets in the sixties and seventies. “It was a miserable goddamned time,” he told his Monica. “I was the one who had to face down those hippie hoodlums who opposed the war . . . those goddamned protesters . . . my God, I wasn’t just from another generation from these people; it was like I was from a different planet . . . . The pressure of waging the war in Vietnam broke Johnson, but I was damned if it was going to break me. Johnson left a broken man. Me, as President, I always knew that we had a responsibility to leadership no two-bit protesters were going to destroy. I couldn’t stop them from destroying our values and our culture, but I could stop them from telling us that we weren’t fit to lead.” The Night Creature acknowledged that the killing of four student protesters at Kent State in 1970 “wasn’t right,” and then he added, “Those kids were Communists.”

  What? What, I reflected, was this filth the Night Creature was spewing? Communists? They were Communists? The kids at Kent State? I was transfixed by the enormity, the horror of his lie, though it was the very same lie he’d built his entire career on. He’d branded Jerry Voorhis and Helen Gahagan Douglas as Communists when he’d run against them in the beginning in California. And now, the four kids shot to death at Kent State by National Guard kids who were stoned on Nixon’s toxic and hateful rhetoric were Communists, too. Bill Schroeder, the apple-cheeked all-American ROTC student . . . a Communist! Allison Krause, the daughter of a Westinghouse executive . . . a Communist! Sandy Sheuer, the pacifist daughter of a Holocaust survivor . . . a Communist! Jeff Miller, with flowers painted everywhere around his apartment . . . a Communist!

  He was slandering and violating the dead, whom he’d put into their graves. The only word that possibly applied was the word Congressman Dan Burton was calling Bill Clinton now during Bill Clinton’s impeachment travail, “Scumbag!”

  And when I saw that his Monica—no, no, his Elvira!—didn’t even question him, didn’t say, Communists, sir? These kids? I erased all that soft-focus prattle from my mind about the snowball fight they’d had in Moscow and the lights twinkling in Anchorage. His Monica let him do the same thing to her that the other Monica had allowed Bill Clinton to do. Richard Nixon had put words into his Monica’s mouth, seeds designed to impregnate the minds of future generations with hate.

  Monica Crowley’s sin, I decided, was much deadlier than Monica Lewinsky’s. What each man had put into his Monica’s mouth defined the difference between Bill Clinton and Richard Nixon, between liberals and conservatives, between us and them.

  [ Act Two ]

  MYSTERY TRAIN

  Newts, crawling things in slime and mud, poisons,

  The barren soil, the evil men, the slag and hideous rot . . .

  Do you hear that mocking and laughter?

  Do you hear the ironical echoes?

  —WALT WHITMAN, Leaves of Grass

  [1]

  The Ratwoman and the Bag Lady of Sleaze

  “It was just that he was scared and I enjoyed that,” Monica said to Linda Tripp. “Isn’t that disgusting? I enjoyed it. I lapped it up that he was so scared. I could just tell in his voice.”

  Gnawing away on Monica’s juicy innards, stripping her down to the bone over the phone and in person, the Ratwoman found an ally: a whisky-voiced, chain-smoking, self-styled literary agent to the unseemly likes of Mark Fuhrman, the racist Dirty Harry of O.J. fame, and Gary Aldrich, former FBI man and author of the specious and malevolent anti-Clinton tract, Unlimited Access.

  Lucianne Goldberg was Linda Tripp’s perfect mate. Already handling Dolly Kyle’s lubricious account of sex with young Billy Clinton, she was herself the author of soft-porn novels like Madam Cleo’s Girls. She was in her sixties, tied closely to right-wingers like Al Regnery, the book publisher, and Tony Snow, former Bush speechwriter and now one of Rupert Murdoch’s hired guns.

  As a literary agent, Goldberg was perhaps best known for representing Judy Chavez, a hooker who specialized in sadism. Chavez became infamous for revealing that Soviet defector Arkady Shevchenko paid her ten thousand dollars a month for five nights of company with money provided by the CIA. Goldberg sold her handcuffs-and-whips account to a publisher and reflected later, “The last time I saw Judy, she was wearing snake from head to toe. How many pythons it took to make that outfit with her five-inch heels, she might as well have had a whip in her hand. With that beautiful white skin and dark hair, what she telegraphs very subtly is pain. ‘I’m going to hurt you, tongue-lash you, and cause you pain.’ ”

  To those in Washington who learned of the tight connection between Linda Tripp and Lucianne Goldberg, it made perfect sense, the two of them part of the same sleazy photo: the Ratwoman gnawing on her bone in her bunting-filled gutter and, feeding next to her, the noxious Bag Lady of Sleaze, cigarettes drooping from both their bloodred lips.

  Linda Tripp turned to Lucianne Goldberg “for advice and protection” first in the days after she’d been banished from the counsel’s office in the White House. She decided, in those first months of rage, that she was going to write an insider’s account of the sexual shenanigans at the White House, including Kathleen Willey’s magical adventures in the fairy-tale hallway. She called the commentator Tony Snow again, whom she’d met in the Bush White House, and Snow, who would call Bill Clinton “the Caligula of the Ozarks,” sent her to the Bag Lady of Sleaze.

  Goldberg, naturally, loved Tripp’s idea: politics and sex together, her main interests, a book even better maybe than the one she had written called Purr, Baby, Purr. Tripp’s book was going to be called Behind Closed Doors and she was going to write it as “Joan Dean,” a cute and barbed reference to John Dean, whose testimony had brought down the Nixon White House. Tripp would bring Bill Clinton down and Joan Dean would be in-joke revenge. Goldberg sent Tripp to an editor at Regnery, a publish-ing house long devoted to the character assassination of liberals and/or Democrats.

  At the last moment, Tripp chickened out, afraid that she just might lose her job at the Defense Department if she wrote the book. “Bubelah,” Lucianne Goldberg had said to her, “if you blow the whistle on the big kahuna, you ain’t gonna be working for the government.” Joan Dean was dead.

  Years later, while stripping down Monica, the Ratwoman slipped and told Monica that if she ever lost her government job, she’d write a “tell-all book” about everything she knew. Monica shrugged it off, unaware that her new caring, mothering friend was already at work trying to sell the book. Tony Snow had called the Bag Lady for her and now Goldberg was calling Linda Tripp, who didn’t know that Goldberg, no political virgin, was tape-recording their conversation.

  They talked about the best way to profit off of what the Ratwoman knew. Yes, she could get a book contract, but the best way to maximize both of their profits would be to leak the story first, or to leak “snippets,” and while the snippets made their infectious way through the airwaves, walk into a publisher’s office with the whole story and walk out with millions of dollars. They had to “titillate” the public first, and they picked out Newsweek reporter Michael Isikoff to leak the snippets to. They also talked about passing Tripp’s slimy knowledge on to Paula Jones’s attorneys and blowing the story of the intern and the president wide open through the courts.

  Tripp couched her greed in self-righteous tones, saying she was “appalled by” Bill Clinton’s behavior. “It’s so sickening!” she said. “He has to get his come-uppance.” She also portrayed herself as the caring protector of the young woman whose innards she was gnawing. “Enough already. Personally, my opinion is it’s time for her . . . she ha
s got to move on. She’s right now going through emotional hell . . . . I would very much like to see her leave and just get on with her life.”

  “Well, have you talked to her about going public with this?” Goldberg asked.

  “She refuses.”

  “Then what can you do with it?”

  Tripp told her that she had kept dates and records of meetings, phone calls, and gifts between the intern and Bill Clinton.

  “Yeah,” Goldberg said, “but you realize the press will destroy her. I mean, I love the idea. I would run with it in a second, but do you want to be the instrument of this kid, um—”

  “She’s not a kid,” Tripp said. “She comes from a very privileged Beverly Hills background. I mean, she’s definitely sophisticated . . . she wasn’t a victim. When this began, she was every bit a player.”

  “You have to be ready to lose her as a friend,” Goldberg said.

  “Oh,” Tripp said loftily, “I’ve already made that decision.”

  A week later, in their second telephone conversation, allegedly not taped by either of them, Goldberg told Tripp to tape her phone conversations with her young friend, the former White House intern. “You need evidence, you need proof, you need tapes.”

  Tripp, frightened, said taping her friend would be “unfriendly.” Goldberg said, “Well, Bubelah, if you’re going to go after the big kahuna, you better kill him.”

  Tripp started taping Monica and telling Goldberg what she was getting from Monica on her tapes. Monica thought Bill was on drugs because he kept “zoning out.” Monica had dates of the phone sex she and Bill were having. Bill had cold sores that Goldberg thought sounded suspiciously like herpes.

  They kept trying to figure out how to get the snippets out there to titillate the public. Tripp received an invitation to spend a weekend in Greenwich, Connecticut, from a wealthy woman named Norma Asness, who was known to be a good friend to Hillary Clinton. Tripp had spent time with Asness before, at a Chanukah party at Asness’s Georgetown house and also on a civilian tour of the Pentagon, which Tripp had arranged for her.

  The invitation from Asness, the former Delta Force associate was certain, was a covert, black-bag op on the part of the White House. She called Goldberg, who agreed with her.

  “You’re being set up,” Goldberg said.

  “You don’t think they’re going to poison me, do you?” Tripp asked.

  “Uh, no. They’re going to co-opt you. They’re going to love-bomb you, show you this is the way you could be living if you stay loyal . . . .”

  “All right,” Tripp said. “Well, then, I won’t worry about it. I just thought, oh good, so they’re going to kill me when I’m there or something . . . .”

  “No, they’re not going to kill you.”

  They were stewing now in their own witch’s brew, furtive, trusting no one except each other (although Goldberg was still secretly taping Tripp’s phone calls, just as Tripp was secretly taping Monica’s). They decided together that Tripp couldn’t trust her lawyer because he sometimes played golf with a lower-level White House attorney, and Tripp fired him. They decided they couldn’t trust the Newsweek reporter, Isikoff, to whom they were planning to leak their snippets, because he might write a book himself.

  They decided to turn, finally, to the one person they felt would be simpatico to Linda Tripp’s story about Bill Clinton and Monica Lewinsky, the one person who shared their loathing of Bill Clinton: Kenneth W. Starr. They would use Ken Starr to get them their millions of dollars from the publishers. Tripp would spill him the beans and the preacher’s son would scarf them up and disgorge them into the headlines.

  Yikes, Lucianne Goldberg just loved it! She hadn’t had so much fun since the good old days, back in 1972, when she’d been making a thousand dollars a week as a spy on George McGovern’s campaign plane, writing memos that were rushed right into the White House, for the eyes only of Richard Nixon, the man who had hired her. The Bag Lady of Sleaze still thought fondly of Nixon, her dark, political guardian angel.

  Through the chain-smoking Goldberg and her friend, the chain-smoking Tripp, the Night Creature was loose in the world again, out of the grave again, smearing, clawing, drawing blood . . . making Bill Clinton pay . . . for sending black Vernon Jordan to the funeral of Pale Pat, his cancer-ravaged wife . . . for the sixties, for the protests, for Watergate, for his resignation, for his disgrace.

  [2]

  David Geffen Is Angry

  “I read,” Linda Tripp said, “that he spent the night at Steven Spielberg’s partner’s house. Castlebaum or Castleman or something.”

  “Oh, really?” Monica said.

  “In LA.”

  “Huh.”

  “I don’t know,” Linda Tripp said. “I don’t know who that is. I don’t know anything about him.”

  David Geffen sat alone in the den of his Malibu estate as I walked in. He was watching the House Judiciary Committee’s impeachment hearings, although, I noted, watching wasn’t the right word. He was scowling, glowering, glaring at the set. He looked as if he was ready to kill someone. “Can you believe what these motherfuckers are doing?” he said. “Can you believe these motherfuckers actually think they can get away with this?”

  A few days later, actor Alec Baldwin appeared on NBC’s Late Night with Conan O’Brien and called for the murder of Judiciary Committee Chairman Henry Hyde and his family. Hollywood, I feared, was tweaking (as, seemingly, was Alec Baldwin).

  It felt odd because Bill Clinton was never Hollywood’s first choice to sit in the Oval Office. First, there was war hero Bob Kerrey, the all-American liberal from Nebraska, who’d shared the statehouse in Lincoln with Hollywood’s own Debra Winger. Then there was Bill Bradley. When trial balloons floated that Bill Bradley, boring and Ichabod-like, would run for the presidency in 1992, director Sydney Pollack and Robert Redford offered to give the baggy-eyed former basketball star media lessons.

  It wasn’t until Michael Ovitz invited the already-elected Bill Clinton to his I. M. Pei CAA fortress—souvenir mugs were contemplated with Ovitz’s likeness on one side and Bill Clinton’s on the other—that the town gave Bill Clinton its blessing. Clinton reciprocated by turning the Lincoln Bedroom into Hollywood’s Washington commissary.

  The Lincoln Bedroom was a place that other presidents had held sacred, only for the use of a czar like Universal potentate Lew Wasserman (invited there by both JFK and Reagan). But now even directors and out-of-favor funnymen like Chevy Chase were enjoying overnight historical dalliances with their wives there. Chevy, who’d become famous by mimicking Gerry Ford, was overnighting at the White House thanks to Bill Clinton, just another wild and funny twist of American politics.

  Everyone in town knew that one of Bill Clinton’s closest advisers was the TV producer Harry Thomason, who even had his own office in the White House. But anyone who mattered knew that Harry didn’t matter—at least not in this town. He was a TV producer in a town that liked and gladly accepted TV money—but still viewed it pretty much like the minor leagues, a place to work if you were still trying to make it in movies or had busted out.

  The town had a long-standing and self-righteous liberal tradition. Jack Valenti, head of the Motion Picture Association of America, the entertainment industry’s official Washington lobbying group, was a former LBJ White House aide, who’d begun his career by briefing the cornpone president as he sat on the throne each morning and handing him the presidential toilet paper. Norman Lear, the creator of All in the Family, was the founder of People for the American Way, a 250,000-member organization designed to use the medium of television to fight for liberal issues and causes. Warren Beatty and Barbra Streisand and Marlon Brando, among many others, had devoted time, money, and actorly eloquence on behalf of candidates and causes. Esteemed older directors like John Frankenheimer and Norman Jewison had been involved as advisers to Bobby Kennedy’s tragically doomed campaign. Most of the studio heads or VPs were sixties graduates with strong liberal leanings.

&nbs
p; I’d found it easy, for example, to get a movie made about neo-Nazi right-wingers (Betrayed) and the studio was overjoyed when Pat Buchanan attacked it as “un-American.” If Buchanan felt that way, we all thought, we must have done something right. The studio’s choice to direct it was Costa-Gavras, who’d never even visited the American Midwest but who, thanks to the electrifyingly brilliant Z, was a hero to liberals everywhere.

  We were partly united within our liberalism by a belief in free speech. We were convinced that the Nixons and Gingriches of the world, blathering on about the societal impact of screen violence, had their own agenda. First, they disagreed with our politics and were trying to stir the public up to boycott or stay away from our movies and, second, they knew damn well real guns caused violence and not guns on-screen, but they were using the issue of screen violence as a bogeyman so they could keep on getting their contributions from the gun lobby. When I wrote a column for daily Variety, pointing out the graphic, over-the-top violence in a Newt Gingrich novel, I received congratulatory notes from many producers in town.

  We also shared a loathing for the forces of right-wing repression. Richard Dreyfuss, all these years later, was still trying to get Sinclair Lewis’s antifascist tome, It Can’t Happen Here, made into a movie. There weren’t a lot of conservatives in town: David Horowitz, once a New Lefty now a conservative ideologue; screenwriter Lionel Chetwynd (The Hanoi Hilton); fallen-star Tom Selleck; the NRA’s Charlton Heston; and Arnold Schwarzenegger (he didn’t count—he was a Kennedy). While the few conservatives sometimes objected publicly to what they termed “liberal propaganda” on-screen, they couldn’t do anything about it. They were having enough problems getting employed. Not that they were completely wrong: The director Betty Thomas succinctly defined nineties comedies to me as “funny moments with liberal inserts.”