On election night, James sobbed again . . . and then got into his vicious barroom brawl with Hunter, who’d come down from Woody Creek to see his little brother. And the two comrades and brothers got off the grimy, beer-coated sawdust floor and went their separate ways. (Well, shit, every revolution ate its own.)
James didn’t become a cabinet member or a spokesperson. “I wouldn’t want to be part of a government that would have me in it,” he said. He moved on to other campaigns, but he stayed personally close to Bill Clinton. “I can’t think of anybody who has been better to me, nicer to me, or has given me more of a chance to be at the top of the world than President Clinton and I hope I don’t let him down,” James said.
He didn’t seem to change much at his moment of greatest triumph. “I didn’t go into the lobbying business,” he said. “I didn’t show up at the Georgetown dinner parties. I didn’t get a new circle of friends.” At times, he seemed overwhelmed by his fame. “I was in New York up on this dais. I don’t know if it was everybody who was anybody in New York, but it was everybody I ever heard of. For forty-five minutes I’m sitting in front of all these people and all I’m thinking is—Is my fly open?” He still wore the jeans people expected him to wear. “When I started campaigning,” he said, “I’d always wear jeans and a T-shirt. Then I bought a suit to go out and speak in. People come up and say ‘Well, that’s it! You elect a president and you got a nice expensive suit now. You’ve changed!’ I get requests—‘Tell him to wear his jeans!’ In Georgia, I went out and wore khakis. People were very disappointed. People said, ‘Where are your jeans, man?’ ”
A part of him expected his glory to end. “It’s the splat ceremony,” he said. “They run you up the flagpole and then you fall and everyone goes, ‘Gee, what a shame!’ There seems to be a cycle. You get built up and you crash.” James had no great ambitions. He wanted to keep doing what he liked doing. “They used to say about Ted Williams that all he looked forward to was the next time at bat. All I look forward to is the next campaign. I’m a campaign guy. I like the smell of headquarters.”
He bought himself a cabin in the Blue Ridge Mountains. James sat on the porch in his underwear and took potshots at rabbits. His friend Burt Reynolds visited him there, as Johnny Depp and John Cusack visited his big brother on his mountains, and said, “Man, I’m having a Deliverance flashback.” James just smiled his spooky smile, scratched the nuts he scratched so often, and kept blasting away.
That the draft-dodging Bill Clinton’s most lethal defender was born at Fort Benning and spent two years in the Marine Corps was the kind of kingfish irony that James loved.
James grew up in Carville, population 1,020, deep in inbred Louisiana, where creatures who resembled him slithered horizontally through the ooze, where the stop signs looked like Swiss cheese, thanks to shotguns. His father and grandmother both served as postmasters, so the town was named after them. “I was a mama’s boy,” James said. His mother, whom he called “Miss Nippy,” meant everything to him. “I had a very happy childhood,” he said. “I just assumed everybody else did, too. I cannot remember an unhappy moment as a child. I was lucky. I had a horse when I was six years old. My grandparents lived down the road. I could stay with them if I wanted to. I was loved and never wanting for anything. When my daddy broke it to me that there was no Santa Claus, it was nothing compared with the glee of being the one who knew something that my younger brothers and sisters didn’t know. Plus, I got to help my father put the stuff under the tree.”
His most cathartic moments as a child occurred when his mother taught him about politics and when Harper Lee taught him about racism. His mother taught him about politics by taking him along as she sold the World Book Encyclopedia. James was six. “She was a great salesman, the best. We would look for any yard that had bicycles. Prime suspect. Any yard that had a bicycle and a bass boat was 100 percent. She would go in and pitch educational materials for children. And, inevitably, the man of the house would say, ‘I can’t afford it.’ And she would make the point that he was able to afford a bass boat for himself, but it struck her as odd that he can’t afford educational materials for his children. It was the guilt approach. The deal was done by then.”
He was sixteen when he read To Kill a Mockingbird. “I had never really thought about things like race. I mean, you had white folks and you had black folks. And white folks got things and black folks didn’t. Thus it was, thus it is, thus it shall be. And I didn’t question it—it was sort of a benign world I lived in. I didn’t pay attention to the fact that some people are robbed of their dignity. But then I read Mockingbird and what happened to Tom Robinson and I knew instinctively that—A. It happened to a lot of other people, and B. It probably happened to people right around where I grew up. And that it would happen again. And that caused me to question what I’d always accepted. It started a process that changed my view of the world.”
James played football, ran track, and rode horses. He went to college at LSU. “I drank, chased a lot of coeds, and got into a lot of fights. I made John Belushi look like a scholar.” He was thrown out of school and spent two years in the Marine Corps as a regimental food-supply corporal. He went back to LSU, graduated, got a law degree, and put out his shingle. “He was the worst lawyer in the world,” his mother said.
A nearby car dealer was running for the state legislature and he asked James to help him. The car dealer campaigned by stretching his arms wide and imitating Elvis: “I want you, I need you, I love you!” The car dealer lost; Elvis lost; James Carville lost.
It was his first losing political campaign, though he had taken his first political action many years earlier. When he was seventeen, still in high school, James went around town tearing down the campaign posters of a local politician he didn’t like.
If James was the Ragin’ Cajun, then his wife, Mary Matalin, was the Ragin’ Croatian, a woman who worked in a steel mill and a beauty parlor before she got into politics, a striking Debra Winger look-alike who described herself as a “chick,” who cussed like James and wore blue jeans like James, but who also sported the kind of bloodred nails that James didn’t dare to wear in public.
Her voice was deep and raspy and she used it to call Bill Clinton a “philandering, pot-smoking draft dodger” who suffered from what she termed, what she first defined, as “bimbo eruptions.” Mary Matalin was, unbelievably as far as James was concerned, not only a Republican but the head of the Republican National Committee when they met. She ran George Bush’s campaign while he ran Bill Clinton’s. Their marriage was Marilyn Chambers mating with Pat Robertson, Warren Beatty with Phyllis Schlafly, Barney Frank with Pat Buchanan.
An unlikely mating, too, because James had the same problem with his willard as Bill Clinton had with his. And few who knew James thought he could be faithful, even though he was always saying that Mary was “very cute” and “real sassy” and looked at her on a stage once and said, “My God, honey, you got a great figure!” James was the man who said, “Whoo boy! You think Gary Hart had a problem?” . . . Who admitted, “I think the double standard, I act the double standard, I live the double standard.” A friend said, “James littered the American landscape with broken hearts,” adding, “I met fifteen Marys before I saw James with Mary.” And James denied that during the 1992 campaign he’d shown his willard to a female campaign worker and said, “Hey, lookee here!” prompting her to say, “Gee, I’ve never seen one that old.” James said he had unzipped himself, yeah, okay, so what, but it was only his shirttail that was peeking out of there.
James didn’t care what anybody said about his willard; he knew that he adored Mary, convincing even her friends, one of whom said, “If Marilyn Monroe was reincarnated and walked through the room naked, he wouldn’t notice now.” Mary just said, “He excites me beyond compare—his brain does and other things do too,” although he teased her, saying, “Marrying a Republican means getting used to celibacy most of the time.”
Mary knew her man, though. “I do
n’t care if you wear it in your nose,” she said, “but I want you to wear a wedding ring.” The ultimate political junkies, politics itself was sex to them, too. As James defined it, “A political campaign builds itself up, explodes, and then ends. That’s the aphrodisiac of it.”
James knew how sharp she was, and while he said, “The only thing I do with Republicans is beat ’em and date ’em,” what got him were her brains, her balls, and her irreverence.
In some ways, Mary Matalin was James not as a slithering bayou creature but as a normal human being. She was smart enough to have been part of the team (led by the wicked Lee Atwater, her mentor) that transformed George Bush from an East Coast preppy into a country music–loving, pork rind–eating Texan who went down to JCPenney to buy himself socks.
That, James knew better than anyone else, was no small feat. Mary was irreverent enough to talk about how while Bush was campaigning in Ohio on a train, an entire family bent over and mooned him. She called George W. Bush “Joooooooonior,” said Bush White House Chief of Staff John Sununu had “the political acumen of a doorknob,” and allowed that Pat Buchanan was a gnat—“Let’s just take out the fly swatter and squash him.”
Mary had the balls to tell James to his face and publicly what she thought of him: “He’s learning-disabled and his mind works like a Ping-Pong ball. . . . He takes it as a point of honor that everyone thinks he’s a wack job. . . . The guy is a nutcake. James could get on and beat Ross Perot. . . . Is James a sensitive man? He’s sensitive to pain. . . . He looks to have been sired from a love scene in Deliverance.”
She liked him right away. “He is, simply, unequivocally, the most brilliant political strategist, the most brilliant man, period. He scares me. . . . We agreed on practically nothing but we had a good time barking at each other. It didn’t take long before we were fighting. We’d known each other for a half hour and we were screaming at each other in public. . . . When I met him, he owned one thing—a Schwinn. It wasn’t even a ten-speed. And when someone broke into his apartment, they stole a bottle of Wild Turkey ’cause that was the only thing worth stealing. . . . The first thing I loved about him is that he loves his mama. He reveres his mama.”
She proposed for him. “We were at a stock car race sitting on the hood of a pickup truck,” she said. “And he admitted that he didn’t know how to propose. So I said, ‘Repeat after me.’ And I did the proposal, then I said yes.” They got married in New Orleans, their wedding attended by his friends, people like Al Hirt and Timothy Hutton and hers, people like Sonny Bono and Rush Limbaugh. “It started with a cocktail party,” James said. “Then when it was time to get married we just opened the doors and people carried their drinks into where the ceremony was. After the wedding we had a parade—we had a brass band and everybody just kind of marched down Bourbon Street. People were throwing things and jazz music was playing.” After the wedding, James said, “I was destined to be a wussy male. The three most important women in my life are Mary, Hillary Clinton, and Miss Nippy.”
As the long knives came for Bill Clinton, James and Mary Matalin had two beautiful baby girls and were spending a lot of time out in the country playing what James called “air golf,” shooting juice bottles with air rifles. They were happy. Mary talked about opening a mom-and-pop restaurant sometime in the future. “I’d call it I-55 for the interstate that runs through Illinois. He’d cook. I’d be the bartender.” James’s vision of the future was less roseate: “When this era of our life is over and we’re flat on our backs, we’ll stand on a street corner with a sign that says—‘Will Bicker for Food.’ ”
They were already bickering about the long knives. Mary told James he was “obsessive-compulsive” about Kenneth W. Starr and that when he criticized him, James was “projecting.” Mary said, “It is not political. Ken Starr is not political. He doesn’t want to put Bill Clinton out of office. You see the world in such stark terms, James.”
“Such stark terms” . . . yes indeed, James could see the stark, squalid ugliness of it . . . all of it, including what Mary’s fellow Republicans were whispering behind their backs, besmirching the love they felt for each other. James thought of his brother up there in Woody Creek, watching the world like a fiery-eyed hawk on his big-screen TV. Hunter would see the stark foulness of this. Doc would know how to deal with it.
Mary’s Republicans were saying that the only reason Mary Matalin loved James Carville was because he reminded her of Lee Atwater, her one, good, true, and dead love.
That Mary Matalin had been deeply devoted to Lee Atwater, her political mentor, who died in 1991 of a brain tumor at the age of forty, was true. She had a copy of a blues CD on her wall that Lee, who played a mean blues guitar, had made with Isaac Hayes. It was inscribed “Dear Mary, You have gotten me through many storms. I deeply love you.” It was also true that Mary spoke of Lee’s political savvy the way she spoke of James Carville’s. “Lee was a genius. He had an understanding of human nature and cultural trends.”
And there were obvious similarities between the two men. They both loved reruns of The Andy Griffith Show. They both loved their mountain cabins. Lee was from the South, too, from South Carolina, and had the same irrepressible, foot-tapping, twitchy energy as James. The same aggressive political attitude. “Republicans in the South could not win elections by talking about issues,” Lee had said. “You had to make the case that the other guy, the other candidate, is a bad guy.” Even in his rhetoric, Lee sounded like James. Running against Dukakis, Lee had said, “I’m going to strip the bark off the little bastard . . . I’m going to make Willie Horton his running mate,” and he had devised a vicious ad that forever tied Dukakis in white voters’ eyes to black crime.
Lee, too, was a master of the deadly leak. When black ministers came to him asking to support Ronald Reagan and asking for voter registration money, Lee told them the Reagan campaign was broke and suggested they go to John Connally, who was running against Reagan. Then he leaked to the Bush campaign, also running against Reagan, that “Connally was buying the black vote.” Bush then attacked Connally and Connally fired back at Bush. And the two campaigns badly wounded each other—while Lee’s Reagan campaign kept rolling along. It was the kind of shrewdness Mary had loved about Lee and the kind of shrewdness Mary loved about James, and it led her to conclude that “they would have loved each other. Lee would have loved James.”
But the whisperers were whispering about something much more. Married and with children, Lee had had a reputation as a notorious womanizer and Mary had worked closely with him, so the whisperers were assuming that they had been lovers. And then Ed Rollins, the Republican campaign wizard who’d beaten James in New Jersey with Christine Todd Whitman over James Florio, had come right out and said it: “I always thought part of Mary’s attraction to Carville had something to do with Lee. For the last year of his life, she ran the Republican National Committee in his absence, saw him every day, and directed much of his medical care. In many ways, she was as much of a wife as Sally at the end. I wasn’t the only one of her friends to believe that Carville was Lee’s surrogate in Mary’s eyes.” It was a revolting thing to say. James was nothing but Lee’s surrogate? The reason she loved and slept with James was because she couldn’t have a dead man?
The particular, cruel horror of it was that Lee had behaved bizarrely in his final year . . . but he had a tumor the size of a hen’s egg growing in his brain. Lee was with another woman for much of his final year—Mary’s friend Brooke Vosburgh—in the same house with his pregnant wife, Sally, and their kids, and they lay on Lee’s bed and held hands. Lee was dying and losing his mind at the same time. Brooke was there with Sally’s permission, both women trying to give comfort to a man who was in excruciating pain, who was having visions, who imagined himself with Brooke as Napoléon and Josephine, who found Jesus, who insisted on detailing all of his affairs to Sally in a plea for forgiveness, who became so paranoid that he had all his visitors frisked and his food tasted for fear of poison, who was
suicidal near the end, begging his mother to kill him.
Lee “married” Brooke in a mock ceremony in which they used paper clips for rings. Lee tried massages and Tibetans and holistic healers. He tried hand-squeezed watermelon juice. And at the end, Lee concluded that he couldn’t beat his nightmarish ailment. “Cancer is not a Democrat,” Lee said. He died with Sally holding his hand.
Mary knew that what Ed Rollins was saying and what the others were whispering was meant to hurt James, to belittle him, to make him look like he was being cuckolded not only by a dead man but also by the dead king of modern political campaign managers, Atwater beating Carville even from the grave in a battle of the big swinging willards, with Mary as the prize. A showdown on the most macho and the most political levels. And Mary also knew that she was being belittled and denigrated, too, as a groupie whose love for Elvis had made her marry an Elvis impersonator. But what struck her the most about what Rollins was saying and the hall mice whispering was the obscene way in which Sally Atwater was being humiliated. Her husband was dead and Sally had to hear from his own Republican colleagues about yet one more possible betrayal.
James didn’t say much in response to Ed Rollins or the whispers. He knew his chick loved him. He sat on the porch, squinting at the sun with his reptilian eyes. Mary Matalin knew her husband well. The long knives would be in for the fight of their lives.
He took it to Kenneth W. Starr and Newt Gingrich and Henry Hyde and Tom DeLay and Dick Armey and Bob Barr and Ed Rollins and all the other chickenshit, stuck-up, tight-ass, nose-high, pork-belly Republicans . . . like that other coonass took it to Ned Beatty in Deliverance. James was screaming “Sooey! Sooey!” at the top of his lungs and riding their pampered, powdered, mottled selves into their own excrement. It seemed as if he was waging an airwave filibuster, outshouting, outscowling, out-finger-pointing the editorialists and commentators calling for Bill Clinton’s resignation or impeachment. His bearing suggested a possessed man who was witnessing a biblical obscenity and had been touched by the Holy Spirit to defoliate it off the face of the earth.
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