American Rhapsody

by Joe Eszterhas

  . . .

  When Isikoff had first spoken to Linda Tripp about Kathleen Willey, Tripp had told him that Bill Clinton was having an affair with a White House intern she wouldn’t identify. Now, after Isikoff’s story on Willey had run thanks to Drudge, Tripp invited Isikoff to a rendezvous to discuss the young intern.

  When Isikoff showed up, Lucianne Goldberg was there as well, along with her son, who worked for a video production company. What Isikoff didn’t know was that the Bag Lady and the Ratwoman had decided to set him up again. It had worked beautifully the first time—the Willey stuff was out there—why couldn’t it work the same way again? With a much bigger story?

  They told Isikoff the intern’s name and told him that Linda had secretly taped her. Isikoff wrote all the details down and went to his editors at Newsweek. The editors decided that the magazine didn’t want to run this kind of salacious story about the president’s private life. Not much later, Isikoff got a tip—he never revealed the source—telling him that Linda Tripp had gone to Kenneth W. Starr and that Starr was investigating the relationship between Monica and Bill Clinton. Isikoff went to his editors again. He thought this was a huge story: The special prosecutor was investigating the president’s private sex life. After a lot of hand-wringing, Newsweek editors decided once again not to run the story. “There are times it’s just not worth being first,” an editor told Isikoff. “Sometimes it’s just not the right thing to do.”

  Lucianne Goldberg was by now literally bursting with the news of Bill Clinton and Monica. For months, she had been telling her novelist friend Dominick Dunne the skinny, referring to Linda Tripp as “the woman who served Vince Foster his last hamburger.” Dominick Dunne knew all about it before Kenneth W. Starr did. He even knew Tripp was taping Monica. “I never picked up on the seriousness of what I was hearing,” Dunne would say later. He even saw Vernon Jordan, an old friend, at a dinner and thought about warning him. “I’ve known Vernon for a long time and like him very much,” Dunne would say. “As I was leaving, he came over to my table to say hello. I was going to say to him there’s a kid in the Oval Office who’s being taped. I knew all that stuff—the stained dress, the oral sex. That’s what I was going to say to him, but it seemed so absurd, a made-up thing. Instead I said to him ‘Give my love to the President.’ I blew it.”

  When Isikoff told the Bag Lady that Newsweek wasn’t running the story, she called Matt Drudge. The siren went off at his Web site: NEWSWEEK KILLS STORY ON WHITE HOUSE INTERN—BLOCKBUSTER REPORT: 23-YEAR-OLD, FORMER WHITE HOUSE INTERN, SEX RELATIONSHIP WITH PRESIDENT—*WORLD EXCLUSIVE—*MUST CREDIT THE DRUDGE REPORT. His story said, “At the last minute, at six p.m. on Saturday evening, Newsweek killed a story that was destined to shake official Washington to its foundation: A White House intern carried on a sexual affair with the President of the United States! The Drudge Report has learned that reporter Michael Isikoff developed the story of his career, only to have it spiked by top Newsweek suits hours before publication. A young woman, 23, sexually involved with the love of her life, the President of the United States, since she was a 21-year-old intern at the White House. She was a frequent visitor to a small study just off the Oval Office where she claims to have indulged the President’s sexual preference. Reports of the relations spread in White House quarters and she was moved to a job at the Pentagon, where she worked until last month . . . . The Drudge Report has learned that tapes of intimate phone conversations exist . . . . Newsweek and Isikoff were planning to name the woman . . . .” Within days, the Washington Post published its own bannered front-page account. And within days, Newsweek ran Isikoff’s story—not in the magazine, but on Drudge’s turf, the Internet.

  Lucianne Goldberg’s ploy had worked perfectly again in precisely the same way. Isikoff had been screwed again. He had been turned loose, Newsweek had refused to publish his story, and Drudge had written a story about Newsweek’s refusal. Then Newsweek followed Drudge’s story with its own account . . . which had been stolen by Drudge. It was the story that rocked the world and the presidency, and the Scavenger, thanks to the Bag Lady and the Ratwoman, had gotten it.

  First Willey and then Lewinsky, and as fevered weeks went by, Drudge exclusively ran new details, ones that only Linda Tripp and Kenneth W. Starr’s prosecutors knew. Drudge’s siren sounded about the blow jobs, the semen-stained dress, and the cigar. All of America was checking out the Drudge Report now. A million clicks a day—as many scrollers as the New York Times had readers.

  Thanks to Drudge, Goldberg and Tripp hadn’t just forced the media into running their toxic brew; they had taken the media over. The media was following their hungry Scavenger, covering him. Matt Drudge was an event. There was an additional benefit Goldberg and Tripp hadn’t expected. Jay Leno and Don Imus were taking Drudge’s most salacious items . . . and joking about the blow jobs, the cigar, and the blue dress day after day. Goldberg and Tripp were reaching not just a million Internet scrollers but also tens of millions of television viewers. They were doing what Victor Lasky had tried and failed to do with JFK: going for Bill Clinton’s jugular.

  The Scavenger, once dismissed as a sleazeball, was being hailed as “the town crier for a new age.” He did a Playboy interview. He became a regular on Politically Incorrect. Time picked him as one of the most intriguing people of 1998. Drudge was on magazine covers. Drudge was a highly sought-after lecturer. Drudge did a radio show on New York’s WABC. Drudge got a complimentary suite from Washington’s Mayflower Hotel. And certainly most painfully for Michael Isikoff, Drudge was picked by Newsweek—Newsweek!—as one of the magazine’s “new media stars.”

  One after another, meanwhile, the stories he kept breaking on his siren-blasting Web site were proved to be bogus. Drudge said Hillary would be imminently indicted. Drudge said Paula Jones saw an American eagle tattooed on Willard. Drudge said Kenneth W. Starr had seventy-five compromising photos of Bill and Monica. Drudge broke three straight false items about NBC political reporter Tim Russert. Drudge said Clinton aide Sidney Blumenthal was a wife-beater. Then Drudge pulled the item. Then Drudge apologized. Blumenthal sued him for $30 million anyway.

  His biggest goof—the rock on the playground that came back and hit him in the face—was, ironically, also a tip from the Bag Lady of Sleaze. One of Lucianne Goldberg’s few admirers was the Star tabloid’s political pooper-scooper Richard Gooding, who thought Lucianne “a delightful person.” When the Star financed a DNA hunt, led by Gooding, trying to match Bill Clinton’s DNA with that of a black teenager named Danny Williams, who was allegedly his illegitimate child, Drudge was all over it. WHITE HOUSE HIT WITH DNA TERROR; TEEN TESTED FOR CLINTON PATERNITY.

  At a conservative conference in Arizona, filling in as a late substitute for Henry Hyde, Drudge said, “It’s a huge story if it comes together. It’s a story of worldwide impact. People have been moved into safe houses today awaiting medical results. Stay tuned to the Drudge Report.” Rupert Murdoch’s newspapers in America and abroad splashed the story all over front pages, quoting Drudge, who then quoted their stories about him in his Internet follow-ups. When the rock hit him in the face—when the DNA didn’t match—all the Scavenger said was that it had been “a cruel hoax” perpetrated by the boy’s mother.

  By then even tabloid journalists were criticizing him as “an informational sucker fish on the body of journalism,” claiming that Drudge had somehow acquired passwords that got him access into computerized files, where he scavenged for stories they were still working on. Steve Coz, the editor of the National Enquirer, said, “He rips off our advances! He’s so quick he can have things up in five minutes.” Many journalists said he was a plain and simple thief, gathering headlines from what they were still in the process of writing or researching . . . stealing as surely as the Bag Lady of Sleaze had stolen Kitty Kelley’s foreign advances.

  It didn’t seem to matter, though, somehow. Drudge was quite the celebrity seen about Washington, where he was described as “the man with the Dickensia
n name.” There was talk that he was about to market his own T-shirt line, that Wall Street investors said an Internet public company featuring Drudge would be valued at $4.5 billion. Dustin Hoffman, professional liberal, went up to him at a party and said he’d like to play him in a movie. Drudge took Paula Jones to a dinner for White House correspondents. He was seen with chic conservative writer Ann Coulter, who described him as “larger than life and sort of childish. It’s hard to find anyone who knows the whole Matt, there may not be one.” Coulter described Drudge driving around in his battered Geo, which he now called the “Drudgemobile,” and listening to tapes of himself on his radio talk show. Drudge, she said, laughed uproariously as he listened. He was now making $400,000 a year, handing Coulter hundred-dollar bills “for the cab” and telling her to keep the change.

  The Scavenger was a TV star, “the mod muckraker, the citizen journalist,” speaking in a Joe Friday voice, fedora on his head, Fox Television’s biggest Saturday draw, reaching over 250,000 households a show. At the same time, he was photographed in an alley near his Hollywood apartment, wearing boxer shorts, his pants down around his ankles, holding a laptop. He was quoted as saying things like “Those Supreme Journalism types seem to think the news has to be terribly boring. I don’t.” And declaring, “I got the president of the United States saying on videotape in front of the grand jury that I gave him anxiety. Me! Five times!”

  One of the frequent guests on his new TV show was Lucianne Goldberg, who sat there smoking, cackling, and sipping vodka. She called herself a “facilitator” in the investigation now. “I wanted to keep the Beast alive,” she said. She was critical of the fact that the Ratwoman had taken her tapes to Kenneth W. Starr. “ ‘Here’s the deal,’ I said to her. I had offers of sixty million dollars—up!—for those tapes. I could have sold them. But Linda would have gone to jail for about three months for illegal taping and contempt. ‘Okay,’ I told her. ‘Sixty million for three months! Do it!’ It wouldn’t be so bad. With that kind of money, she could buy off any lesbian who made an advance, could order in food from the best restaurant in town. What’s the problem? But she didn’t have the strength for it.” Goldberg said she’d been spat on in the street on Manhattan’s Upper West Side, cursed, and manhandled. “Actually,” she said, “both times I was pushed by gay guys and I flipped them over and left them on the floor.” She cackled when she said it. She thought it was funny.

  As Lucianne Goldberg cackled away, planning her own radio talk show, Michael Isikoff wrote a book and described how he felt. “As a general rule, we don’t give our sources moral litmus tests—nor should we. Sometimes the best stuff comes from the most unpleasant people.”

  The Scavenger enjoyed the increased exposure that his new TV show was giving him. His boss was Roger Ailes, the head of Fox News, who had once masterminded Richard Nixon’s campaigns. And when a camera crew tried to shoot into his apartment from across the street, Matt Drudge put on . . . a Nixon mask.

  [15]

  Hillary Loves Eleanor

  Why couldn’t her asshole husband pay more attention to her that way—more than twice a year?

  Even the Trumans, Ma and Pa Kettle in the White House, had broken the slats of their White House bed. Even JFK, busy with so many other women, including his nympho secretaries, Fiddle and Faddle, had visited Jackie every afternoon in her boudoir while the kids were napping. Jackie had even had leopard-skin rugs in her bedroom, like Gennifer’s zebra-skin bedspread, but Hillary knew that wasn’t her style. Her style was to eat fried chicken in the backseat of the limo with Bill when he was governor and to leave the chewed bones on the limo floor.

  All she could do was yell at him when she heard about somebody new. “Come back here, you asshole!” she yelled, so loudly the Secret Service heard her. “Where the fuck do you think you’re going?”

  Hillary knew his behavior was not uncommon for a president in the White House. She knew there was no intimate relationship between Franklin and Eleanor or Nixon and Pat or LBJ and Lady Bird . . . . She knew Nixon once walked a nine-hole golf course with Pale Pat and his daughters without saying one word to them, knew that LBJ would lock himself into his stateroom on Air Force One with a nearly illiterate secretary while Lady Bird sat outside. But that didn’t make Hillary feel any better. She got so angry at her asshole husband, she threw a briefing book at him—not a lamp, as the press reported it—a briefing book, the policy wonk’s weapon. Her old friend Brooke Shearer, who’d been a private eye before joining her staff, filled her in on what Hillary occasionally didn’t know.

  And Hillary knew most everything. She knew her husband had his own White House staffers for his own intimate use, in addition to celebrity guests like Markie Post, photographed bouncing up and down on Lincoln’s bed; Eleanor Mondale, such a good and loyal Democrat; or Barbra, with her libidinous social conscience, so committed, with her hundreds of millions, to talking to Bill about improving the lives of the poor.

  Hillary was the First Lady of the United States, but she didn’t see herself that way. Hillary ran her husband’s life for him is what she did . . . what she had always done . . . and if he happened to be the president of the United States and if she told him what to do, that meant Hillary was . . . “Vote for one, you get two,” he had said in New Hampshire, but Hillary wondered sometimes where he got “two” from. He knew how to smile—she’d give him that. He was sensational at a fund-raiser.

  She hated it, trapped here in this place Truman had called a “jail” and FDR had said was “a goldfish bowl made out of magnifying glass.” Eleanor Roosevelt had called the White House “a splendid prison” and her own asshole husband had said it was “the crown jewel of the federal prison system.” The only time she really had fun, Hillary sometimes thought, was on Saturday, when she stayed in bed until noon with Earth, Wind, and Fire blasting.

  She felt her privacy violated on the most intimate level: One of the maids told her that while she and her husband were out of town, butlers and staff aides sneaked their girlfriends into the family quarters and had sex on the floor and in their beds, then went downstairs to the mess to swill champagne and gobble caviar.

  She understood now what Eleanor Roosevelt had meant when she said that the Secret Service had looked at her as if she “was about to hatch anarchists.” They hated her, Hillary felt, because she was an intelligent and independent woman, unlike any First Lady they had ever seen.

  What did the staff expect her to do? Introduce them to heads of state like Bess Truman had? Bring them back jade from China like Pale Pat had? She wasn’t like them, wasn’t like other First Ladies . . . not like Ida McKinley, whose husband would put a handkerchief over her face at state dinners because she’d nodded off and was snoring loudly; nor Nancy Reagan, shopping Rodeo Drive and staying in the Steve McQueen suite at the Beverly Wilshire; nor Margaret Taylor, wife of Zachary, who rarely left the second floor and smoked a pipe; nor Barbara Bush, cooking her own spaghetti and serving it on paper plates.

  Some staff members, Hillary knew, compared her to Nancy, who once told an usher, “Don’t you ever point your finger at my dog!” after the dog had bitten him. But they were wrong, as were those sarcastic guttersnipes who pointed out that Martha Washington had liked to be called “the Presidentess” or “Lady President.” Hillary wasn’t like Jackie Kennedy, either, although she had the greatest respect for her and although their husbands had some obvious things in common. All Jackie had done was to redecorate the White House—a wifely, wifey function—but Hillary did agree with Jackie’s feeling that “the only thing I do not want to be called is First Lady. It sounds like a saddle horse.”

  The First Lady whose example Hillary loathed, whom she ridiculed when she was with her friends, was Mamie Eisenhower, who did nothing much except lie around in bed smoking and playing the organ in duet with her mother, who played the harmonica. Mamie dressed in pink and decorated as much of the White House as she could in pink—pink headboards and pink curtains and a king-size pink bedspread
and upholstered pink chairs. She spent much of the day smoking and watching As The World Turns and other soaps as she sat on a pink couch. She bragged that the only exercise she needed was her daily massage, and she always wore a jingly gold charm bracelet with “Ike charms” on it—a tank, five stars, a map of Africa, and a helmet.

  Hillary’s role model was Eleanor Roosevelt, a First Lady of many firsts—first to drive her own car, first to board a plane, first to make official trips by herself, first to hold press conferences. Eleanor had been shy as a child, “always afraid of something . . . an ugly duckling,” whose mother told her, “You have no looks, so see to it that you have manners.” As an adult, Eleanor was tall, gawky, and athletic. Martha Gellhorn, a strong, independent woman herself, who had the brains to dump Ernest Hemingway, said, “Eleanor gave off light. I cannot describe it better.”

  Eleanor Roosevelt was an inspiration for Hillary Rodham Clinton, who thought that they had many things in common. Like Hillary, Eleanor was militantly outspoken in her efforts to better the lot of the poor, the disadvantaged, and the black. Like Hillary, Eleanor did not shy from controversy. When the army wanted to paint the White House black during the war, it was Eleanor who stopped it. When Winston Churchill paraded around naked in the White House residence, it was Eleanor who told him to put something on.

  Like Hillary, Eleanor was a campaign trooper—as Will Rogers described her, “out at every stop, standing for photographers by the hour, being interviewed, talking over the radio, no sleep. And yet they say she shows no sign of weakness or annoyance of any kind.” Like Hillary, Eleanor wrote a newspaper column. Like Hillary, Eleanor had a close black educator friend, Mary McLeod Bethune. Like Hillary, Eleanor disliked the Secret Service and sometimes refused its protection. Like Hillary, Eleanor drove off by herself sometimes without the Secret Service knowing.