American Rhapsody

by Joe Eszterhas

  Even more humiliating to the president of the United States were the jokes about the First Lady: “What would happen if Hillary got shot? Bill Clinton would become president.” . . . “Hillary is the only woman to stand by her man. All the rest had to kneel.” . . . “How did Bill and Hillary meet? They were dating the same girl in high school.” . . . “Why does Chelsea look so ugly? Heredity.” . . . “What kind of jewelry does Hillary look best in? Handcuffs.” . . . “When will there be a woman in the White House? As soon as Hillary leaves.” . . . “What happened when Bill Clinton was given a shot of testosterone? He turned into Hillary.” . . . “Why are female White House staff annoyed with Hillary? She keeps leaving the toilet seat up.” . . . “What’s Hillary’s new nickname? Oldielocks.” . . . “Why does Hillary wear turtleneck sweaters? So we can’t see her Adam’s apple move when Bill talks.” . . . “Why doesn’t Hillary wear short skirts in the White House? She doesn’t want people to see her balls.” . . . “What’s the difference between Hillary and the West Texas oil fields? The oil fields get drilled once in a while.”

  As if the proliferation of the jokes, windblown pollen, wasn’t bad enough, graffiti was found scrawled into the Executive Office Building’s toilet stalls: MUTE NEWT . . . KEN STARR DOES IT IN HIS UNDERWEAR . . . CLINTON IS A POTATOE HEAD . . . BUDDY SNIFFS BUTTS. And bumper stickers were flooding the land: HILLARY HAPPENS . . . FIRST HILLARY, THEN GENNIFER, NOW US . . . THE JOKE’S OVER, BRING BACK BUSH . . . IF SHE DIDN’T SPIT, YOU MUST ACQUIT . . . HEY, HILLARY, SHUT UP AND FUMIGATE . . . THE SEX EDUCATION PRESIDENT . . . ABORT CLINTON . . . I VOTED FOR BUSH IN THE LAST ELECTION . . . WHERE THE HELL IS LEE HARVEY OSWALD WHEN WE NEED HIM? . . . I FEEL YOUR TONSILS . . . I LIKE A JUICY CIGAR.

  His cigar! His beloved cigar! The cigar he’d always enjoyed so much and which he couldn’t have anymore. Hillary was bad enough, with her hardheaded declaration that the White House was a no-smoking zone, but now Dick Morris was telling him, “Do not be seen with a cigar again! Ever! Not in your hand! Not in your mouth!” Bill Clinton knew well enough the reasons why. He knew Dick Morris, as always, was right, but he had enjoyed his cigars so much and he and Monica had had so much fun . . . just talking about cigars. She had even given him a standing antique sterling silver cigar holder. He even had two books about cigars in his private study—The Ultimate Cigar Book by Richard Carlton Hacker and The Cigar Companion by Anwar Bati and Simon Chase—right next to a book Monica had given him—Oy Vey! The Things They Say!—and Wally Piper’s The Little Engine That Could.

  No more cigars. Gone, along with Monica. Her oral fixation wound up robbing him of his. He felt like one of those Arabs, the subjects of that sultan from the Middle Ages, who were in danger of having their noses lopped off if they were caught with a cigar. A cigar was “a lone man’s companion, a bachelor’s friend, a hungry man’s food, a sad man’s cordial, a wakeful man’s sleep, a chilly man’s fire.” There were two things a man never forgot: “his first love and his first cigar.” A cigar “numbed sorrow and filled the solitary hours with a million gracious images.”

  Was that cigar with Monica in the private study the best cigar Bill Clinton had ever had? Well, in some ways, maybe. Was that the worst cigar Bill Clinton had ever had? Well, in some ways, maybe. It angered him, though, that he couldn’t smoke them anymore, couldn’t even put them into his mouth anymore. JFK had enjoyed his cigars; Churchill had enjoyed a quarter million of them in his ninety-one years.

  All this national soul-searching over a wet, half-chewed Davidoff, and what none of the learned historical whizzes on television pointed out was that a cigar was a patriotic object, as all-American as apple pie. Benjamin Franklin paid for the Continental Congress by getting a loan on tobacco futures. With the money he got for “the royal leaf” for cigars, Franklin financed the American Revolution. And the Union won the Civil War thanks to three cigars. Two Union soldiers found the three cigars with some papers wrapped around them. The papers were discovered to be Robert E. Lee’s battle plans.

  No, it just wasn’t right, Bill Clinton thought, all these scumbags calling him names, all these jokesters humiliating him, all these damn bumper stickers and people decking themselves in cigar costumes, as if the whole country was celebrating an impromptu, unscheduled Halloween. And he couldn’t even have a damn cigar. He sat alone in the dark on Nancy Hernreich’s couch, nostalgically contemplating his lost royal leaves, their meat, their structural stability, their lack of protruding veins, their seedlings . . . and the careful, hands-on tending his royal leaves needed.

  As he settled back comfortably on Nancy Hernreich’s couch, the tending of his royal leaves still foremost in his mind, he thought unexpectedly, in this period of jokes, of a joke Monica had told him. “Why do Jewish men like to watch porno films backward? So that they can see the hooker give back the money.” Bill Clinton thought, too, of the joke he had told her. “What do you get when you cross a Jewish American Princess with an Apple? A computer that won’t go down on you.”

  Bill Clinton remembered sadly how they’d laughed. He closed his eyes in the dark room . . . on his way to a few moments of sweet solitary solace during this nightmarish time . . . and he unzipped his . . .

  [7]

  Billy Can’t Help It

  “I brought my mom and my aunt to an arrival ceremony,” Monica said. “The Big Creep said, ‘I saw them. They’re cute.’ And I said, ‘Shut up.’ Not that cute, not cuter than me.”

  “I wonder what he was thinking?” Linda Tripp said.

  “How he could do them too.”

  In an America increasingly in search of repressed memories and primal traumas and childhood violations, there was one other way to defend Bill Clinton’s actions. The commander in chief was the victim in chief, and the real culprit was that hoary bugaboo from the sixties: society. Or, in this case, the family. Specifically, Bill Clinton’s “dysfunctional” family.

  Pro-Clinton teams of shrinks swept down on the talk shows to put the blame for the pickle the president was in on his mother, his father, his stepfather, his grandmother, and his grandfather. It seemed like a familial scorched-earth plan. The president stood by without comment as the shrinks euphemistically told us mom was a slut; dad a slut and a drunk; stepdad a slut, a drunk, and a wife-beater; grandma a slut and a grandpa-beater; and poor old doddering grandpa a plain old-fashioned drunk. It was a family depiction worse than any Erskine Caldwell could have drawn.

  Bill Clinton, the shrinks said, had even recently, after many years of child abuse and a lifetime of abandonment, been cruelly abandoned by three important figures in his life. His beloved mother, Virginia, died in 1994. His important “father figure,” Israeli prime minister Yitzhak Rabin, died in 1995. His close friend, Commerce Secretary Ron Brown, died in 1996.

  In discussing these recent personal “traumas,” the shrinks did not say that two days after Ron Brown’s death, Bill Clinton invited Monica into the Oval Office for a blow job; nor did they say that the videotape of the president going into Ron Brown’s funeral had caught him laughing and joking with a friend.

  They did say that Ron Brown’s plane crash probably reminded Bill Clinton of the car crash that killed his father when he was still in the womb. They talked about how Bill Clinton had nearly lost his composure at Rabin’s funeral, but they did not say that public display was probably good for a few million Jewish votes in the 1996 election. (As Hillary prepared a few years later to run for the Senate in New York, she suddenly uncovered “Jewish relatives” deep within the Methodist foliage of her family tree.)

  We were to believe that Bill Clinton’s problems all began with the drunken father who died in that car crash, Bill Blythe, and with his mother, Virginia. The shrinks described Virginia as flamboyant, flirty, extroverted, a “lady about town,” who wore a skunk stripe in her dark hair and heavy makeup with thick, sweeping, painted-on eyebrows. Bill Blythe, they said, was a “womanizer” who “lived a life of lies.”

  When Bill Clinton was a year old, his
mother left him with her mother and father so that she could work out of town. Virginia’s mother, Edith, was like her daughter: a high-energy, razzmatazz, “let it all hang out” kind of flirty woman. She, too, wore painted, thick, sweeping eyebrows. She, too, had dark hair with a skunk stripe in it. Edith threw temper tantrums and kitchen utensils and beat her husband, who stuck increasingly close to his bottle.

  The little boy called Edith “Mamaw” and the shrinks said Mamaw was a “rage-aholic,” while “Papaw” was an alcoholic. Mamaw enabled his drinking, they said, and Papaw enabled her rages. (The shrinks also said both Bill’s mother and grandmother looked like a skunk-stripeless Monica.) As an infant, little Billy watched Mamaw beat on the hapless Papaw, and the shrinks said this caused Billy to “bury his fear” of women deep inside himself.

  Billy’s mother came back from out of town when he was three years old, and the family was reunited, but the shrinks didn’t see this as good news at all. This is where they thought Billy’s problems had really begun. Both his mother and grandmother loved him very much, but this wasn’t good. This was bad, because it meant there was a “highly pathological” struggle over him by the two flirty, skunk-striped women.

  Some shrinks thought that since Mamaw had a no-account helpless drunk for a husband, she was in love with little Billy. No fool, Billy realized he had two “overtly sexual” painted women fighting for his attention. The shrinks said he learned to be “exploitative” and “manipulative,” explaining something that he said to a friend many years later at the governor’s mansion in Little Rock: “What am I supposed to do about these women who throw themselves at me?”

  Although there was no evidence the infant Billy was the victim of incest or sexual abuse, the shrinks said the home he lived in was “sexually charged” and inhabited by two women with “flashy lifestyles.” Both the home conditions and the nature of the two women meant there was “a certain amount of emotional incest” in his childhood. These sensual women were “overly seductive,” even though they only touched Billy with affection, never sexually.

  Nothing had happened, but the shrinks said something bad had happened—because he was adored and worshiped by his mother and grandmother. It didn’t mean he was just another little boy badly spoiled by an adoring mom and grandma; it meant he was “traumatized” and “abused.” They violated poor little Billy as surely as if they had violated him. Poor little Billy was the victim of nonincest incest.

  Mom and grandma were unwitting pedophiles who inappropriately exposed poor little Billy to “prematurely associate sex with excitement and intense arousal,” which explained why he went gaga trying to find a room with rock groupie Connie Hamzy at the Hilton in Little Rock many years later. Nothing really happened sexually in poor little Billy’s infanthood, the shrinks emphasized, but that didn’t mean a lot of lifelong sexual damage hadn’t been done.

  Onto the scene when Billy was four years old came his stepfather, Roger Clinton, a womanizer like Bill Blythe, sharp dresser, high-stepper, and a drunk like him, too. Billy’s mother, Virginia, the shrinks said, went for the same kind of man, or for a male counterpart of herself, and Virginia was a “flirt” (substitute the unshrunk word slut).

  Roger was a Buick dealer, and he beat his new wife because he thought she was cheating on him. Or because he was cheating on her and figured if he was cheating, then she had to be, too. Roger Clinton was, the shrinks said, an “alcoholic rage-aholic.”

  Virginia, who took his beatings and ignored his drinking, was now enabling him the way Papaw was enabling Mamaw and Mamaw was enabling (and still beating) Papaw. The shrinks said Virginia didn’t leave Roger because she had seen Mamaw beat Papaw so much, the violence felt like home to her. It was “normal.” Little boy Billy saw Roger beat his mother, but it felt normal to him, too, since he had seen Mamaw beat Papaw and had seen his mother and Mamaw yelling at each other all the time (over him).

  Roger Clinton then moved his wife and stepson from Hope to Hot Springs, Arkansas, and the shrinks had a lot of fun with this one. He was a drunk cheating on her and she was a slut cheating on him, and now they moved to Sin City, the Vegas of the Ozarks, where they both started to gamble heavily, too.

  Hot Springs was a round-the-clock whorehouse and the shrinks saw three things wrong with the move for little Billy: First, the smell of sex was in the air and the little boy caught rushlike whiffs of it. The smell would stay inside the tissue linings of his nostrils for the rest of his life. Second, Hot Springs was a place of hypocrisy, where everyone denied the shenanigans going on and the little boy learned to deny and lie for the rest of his life. And third, the racetrack and the casinos were the centerpiece of the place, and while the little boy certainly didn’t gamble, he caught a subconscious dose of gambling fever from his parents. He’d get aroused, take risks, and try to beat the odds (of discovery, in his case) for the rest of his life.

  Other shrinks saw other imports and parallels: Virginia and Mamaw and Roger Clinton were all “sensation seekers,” and little Billy was always around them . . . . Bill Blythe and Virginia and Mamaw formed little Billy’s “neurological composition,” to which Roger Clinton contributed only indirectly, which sounded like a fancy way for the shrinks to make a hodgepodge of the theories of nature and nurture.

  Hot Springs certainly turned up the heat underneath little Billy’s abuse levels. Now Virginia and Roger were yelling at each other all the time, drinking more than ever, cheating more than ever. Billy, meanwhile, was pretending to the outside world that everything was fine at home. He was learning that lying was necessary to preserve his family’s reputation.

  He was lying for them, in their interest, a twofold explanation of why he’d jab his finger at us years later and lie into our faces. First, to preserve the reputation of his family, of Hillary and Chelsea; second, to preserve our reputation, of America in the community of nations, so our country wouldn’t be embarrassed around the world.

  Little Billy Clinton was learning, right there in Hot Springs, thanks to Roger and Virginia’s mutual abuse, to lie for us as he was lying for them. His lies were protecting Roger and Virginia’s respectability as his lies would one day protect Hillary and Chelsea’s . . . as well as ours. Little Billy Clinton, even back then, was a heroic liar.

  As Roger’s drinking worsened—he even took a shot at Virginia while the boy was looking on—Billy tried to counteract Roger’s abuse of his mother by ignoring his own abuse and trying to please his mother. She praised Billy and told him he could be anything he wanted in life. He didn’t want to let her down. He became ambitious and worked hard to realize her dreams for him.

  But the shrinks said trying to inspire her beloved son to be something in life wasn’t good. It was as damaging as the affection she’d showered on him when he was smaller. Virginia was violating Billy again. He was trying to be a hero for her and that made him feel “terminally unique.”

  I am special, Bill Clinton may have been saying to himself as he began accomplishing the success his mother so awfully much wanted for him. But he would have been better off as a loser. Because by being a loser, the shrinks said, he would have been recognizing his common lot with most of humanity. He wouldn’t be weighed down by all the stress his hard work and ambition were placing on him.

  Virginia’s attempt to inspire her son was further abuse. Winning and trying to win was losing. Losing and not trying anything was winning. By trying so awfully hard to please his mother, by trying to make something out of himself, Bill Clinton was letting his mother violate him again. To be unviolated meant not being her hero, not being the rescuer of her (and his) self-esteem.

  When Billy was sixteen, after twelve years of yelling, screaming, drinking, cheating, and gambling, Virginia divorced Roger. Billy even testified against his stepfather in court, against the man he called “Daddy,” the man whose last name he had legally taken. Then, after the divorce, after Billy had gathered all his gumption and spoken ill of his stepfather in court, Virginia decided to marry Rog
er again.

  Talk about abandoned, the shrinks tsk-tsked. Oh, Sigmund! Oh, Carl! Oh, Art Janov, screaming his shrink soul out somewhere in the Malibu hills! Billy had stood up for her in court and she turned her back on him and went back to her worthless Good Time Charlie . . . as the betrayed and abandoned teenage boy watched. It was the best explanation, the shrinks said, for why Bill Clinton had “problems” with women. Why he carried within him a “hidden hostility” that caused him to treat women for the rest of his life as objects to penetrate or observe as they knelt in front of him. He was getting back at his mother for the way she’d betrayed him with his stepfather.

  After she remarried him, Roger Clinton, impotent, his liver the size of a cantaloupe, sank deeper than ever into the black lagoon of his alcoholism. He stayed in his room much of the time, his bottle between his legs. And now Bill Clinton, nearly a young man, became, the shrinks said, “husband” to his mother, the painted, skunk-striped, flirty woman who had had nonincestuous incest with him in his infancy, the woman who had so recently betrayed him by remarrying the semicomatose, semihuman, boozy sponge lying down in the other room.

  Husband to the wife who was his mother . . . and in gratitude for his love, his forgiveness of her betrayal, Virginia built Bill a shrine in their home of all his high school trophies. As he went off to college, the shrinks said, and began the penetration and rug burning of one woman after another, all Bill Clinton was trying to do was to “reconnect” with his mother, a husband in search of his unfaithful wife, not certain what would happen if he found her. Would he want to love her or kill her? Make love to her or sodomize her? Please her or humiliate her? Nurture her or rape her?