American Rhapsody

by Joe Eszterhas

  I knew how different we were. We were jogging in Little Rock before the convention and he said, “Ooh, lookit that ass!” as we jogged by some high school girls. He liked to tease, too. When Perot dropped out, he called me and said, “I’m pickin’ a new VP. You were my choice in a three-man race, but now we’re down to two and I’m goin’ with Bob Kerrey.”

  Tipper and I did a bus tour all over the Midwest with Bill and Hillary, and that’s when I saw, for the first time, how much Tipper liked him. He made such a huge deal out of the fact that he and Tipper shared the same birthday. He was touching her all the time—casual little touches on the arm or the elbow, holding her blue eyes with his, telling her how much of an “asset” she was going to be to the campaign.

  She told him about her mother’s hospitalization for depression, and right away he told her he was going to make her the head of a White House mental health program. We were supposed to leave two days into the tour, but Tipper was having so much fun, she said, meeting the crowds, she said, that she wanted to stay another two days.

  Watching Bill with her, watching Bill with other women on the campaign, I felt that what somebody had said in the paper was right: Tipper and I were about to become national chaperones while the country was going off on a blind date with its first rock and roll president.

  I hoped I was right about Tipper being a chaperone right along with me—because some of the papers had already picked up on her “friendship” with Bill. She and Bill, one magazine said, shared “a certain fun-loving spirit,” and the same publication said that, personalitywise, Hillary and I were more alike. And maybe there was some truth in that, too. On that bus tour once, I told Hillary she looked “cute” up on the stump, and she laughed right in my face.

  I wondered on that tour, too, whether Bill was still smoking some dope. He was so cobwebbed in the morning, he could hardly talk. He started hitting his stride around noon. “Allergies,” Bill told me.

  We were Butch and Sundance, the press said, but I remembered the movie and I thought, What about Katharine Ross? Wasn’t she with both guys, both Newman and Redford, one after the other?

  Was Tipper Katherine Ross?

  I couldn’t remember the darn ending: Which one did she wind up with?

  . . .

  Tipper, I saw, as we dove full bore into the campaign, was more energized than I’d seen her in a long time, sticking her tongue into my ear on the plane, shooting water guns at the media, more energized intimately with me, too, than she’d been in a while.

  I wondered about that, too. Was that me? Or was it Bill’s presence? The effect he seemed to have on almost every woman, the effect Al Gorf had never had and never would. Tipper even called me on Larry King Live, disguising her voice, and came on to me.

  Nervous about her, I got a little energized myself. On the campaign plane, I’d yell, “I f-e-e-e-l good!” like James Brown, and I’d use a food tray as a snowboard and surf down the aisle during takeoffs.

  Sure enough, when we won the White House, Bill named Tipper the head of the Mental Health Task Force, gave her an office in the EOB, right next to the White House, as well as a small staff. So she went to the White House each day, and I knew she saw him sometimes . . . to discuss mental health?

  She was acting like a much younger Tipper, I thought, or was it that I was getting old and she wasn’t? She jumped on the back of a White House staffer’s motorcycle one day and they went tearing around town, with Tipper lifting her arms high sometimes, like she used to do with me. And a friend of mine told me he’d run into her at Reagan National Airport—“completely grubbed out”—in jeans, no makeup, sitting at the bar in a baseball cap and sipping a beer. She dove into Lake Michigan with all her clothes on. She started Rollerblading.

  I heard that Bill liked me, too. “What does Al think?” I heard he’d ask when I wasn’t there at a meeting. And James Carville, I heard, felt that I had “unbelievable message discipline.”

  I tried to be as supportive of Bill personally as possible. When we played miniature golf, I threw the game. When we jogged together, I slowed down, and Bill said afterward once, “I want to thank Al for not running me into the ground.” I sat down at my own computer and did a last-second rewrite of a speech he was making.

  I could make him laugh. He was ranting and raving about how the congressional Democrats never had anything good to say about him, and I said, “I’ll speak to them!” And Bill laughed so hard, he had a sneezing fit.

  He was supportive, too. After a tough press conference where the media roasted me, he came out of the Oval Office, put his arm around me, and said, “Fuck ’em! You did great!”

  He always had that twinkle, though, just a slice of rock and roll: He came into a meeting once and stood by the door, his face frozen, arms stiffly at his side. “Hi,” he said, “I’m Al.” I laughed.

  And as I was heading out on a fund-raiser, he said, “Hey, Al, don’t forget to shake hands at the rope lines!”

  I was the vice president of the United States—“I did a better job on him than on my husband,” Mother unfortunately told the press—in an office eighteen feet from the president’s, wondering if the love of my life was in there with Bill.

  I knew that Bill had told someone, “I really like Al; he’s real smart. But Al’s always seeing something when there’s nothing.” And I thought to myself, He’s talking about policy and politics, isn’t he? And not Tipper, right?

  I thought back, too, to the whole business with Prince, that near obsession Tipper had had with him, to all the talk about whips and kink. Was that, too, an indication of some kind of unrealized yearning on Tipper’s part? I knew Bill had those yearnings, too. I had heard the Gennifer Flowers tapes, the same ones where he said, “Al Bore is the boringest man I’ve ever met.”

  Tipper Gore, Tipper Galore, Tipi Tipi Tin, Tipi Tipi Tan, I’ve always loved you the best that I can.

  I was so paranoid, I bought an astrology book to see what Tipper and Bill had in common. It said:

  Brilliant and capable, you can do anything you set your mind to. Be careful who you let into your life. When it comes to relationships, people expect you to have few faults. Surprise—you are not perfect, and you know it. However, this may be difficult for others to accept.

  Accept? Tipper and Bill? Never!

  I looked up my own date, March 31. It said:

  You distrust everything people tell you. Try to dwell less on things that go wrong in your love life. An unconventional marriage may alleviate this.

  An unconventional marriage? Tipper and Bill? Or Tipper and Bill and me? Or Tipper and Bill and Hillary and me?

  Never!

  . . .

  And then, when the Starr Report came out, I realized and was convinced that it was all in my head. That I had put it there. Because I loved her so much and because I was getting older and because Bill, on that silly alpha male level, is a better man than I am, Charlie Brown.

  On the day he was impeached, I sat in his office with him and watched him cry. I cried with him. I held his hand.

  Tipper said about the House managers: “It’s going to be an interesting day when the American people truly get intimate with the minds of those people. I’m on the edge of my seat.”

  So Naomi Wolf, who is a brilliant and beautiful young woman, is trying to make me into an alpha male. It can’t be easy for her, if you believe what they say about me.

  I’m the man who lives behind a Plexiglas shield, tone-deaf to his own flat notes, humorless, stiff, wooden, a father reading to his toddlers when he speaks. I’ve got a Boy Scout manner, look like a soap opera doctor, and wear pants that are too short. I clap like a marionette and the sleeves of my dark blue suit are lined with flagpoles.

  I’m a mannequin; when I turn, my whole upper body turns with me. I’m as graceful as someone skating on a wooden floor. My arms dangle lifelessly from my shoulders and I seem to have no joints above the waist. I’m a self-important goody-goody who looks as if he were born i
n a coat and tie.

  I’m Cyborg Gore, the Computer Geek in Chief, Robo Veep, and Kaw-Liga the Wooden Indian. I’m the fat boy in the school yard you just love to torment. Al Gorf!

  But that’s okay.

  Tipper Gore loves me.

  Tipper Galore loves Al Gorf!

  Somebody asked her what books I keep on the nightstand, and Tipper Gore said, “Are you kidding? He’s living with me. You think he’s going to read a book at night?” I call her when I leave the office because I know she wants time to comb her hair and put her lipstick on. When I get home and she’s jamming in the backyard with the kids, playing the drums, I grab my harmonica and join in because she has told me that I have a “sweet and pretty” voice. We have a dress-up Halloween party; last year, Tipper and I were mummies.

  We still go to the movies, sit in the balcony with our baseball caps, and hold hands. She gave me a bumper sticker yesterday that said NIXON IN 2000. HE’S STILL NOT AS STIFF AS GORE.

  . . .

  When Paul McCartney’s wife, Linda, died, I held Tipper Gore as tightly as I could all night.

  Naomi Wolf used to be an adviser to Bill before she became alpha male adviser to me. She’s married to a White House speechwriter.

  There was a book called Face Time out about a year ago. It’s about the wife of a White House speechwriter, and she has an affair with the president of the United States.

  Do you remember how when Primary Colors came out, everybody said it was fact and not fiction? I wonder—what if Face Time isn’t fiction, either? Do you think Naomi and Bill . . .

  Oh, heck, don’t even think about it.

  There I go again, Mr. President!

  I’m just being . . . me.

  When I was a little boy wandering around inside the Fairfax Hotel, there was an old man who had an apartment there. He was very tall and he had a cane, and whenever I saw him by the elevator, he’d make a terrible face at me and then laugh as I ran away. His name was Senator Prescott Bush. And come November, I’m going to kick the living shit out of his smirking grandson.

  Is that alpha male enough for you?

  [7]

  Hitler’s Whore

  Monica was obsessing. Trying desperately to take her mind off of It. Off herself. She was sewing again, making bags and scarves for her family and friends. But she found herself blanking, zoning out, agape at the set, which showed her to herself, twenty-four hours a day, in the most unflattering light.

  She couldn’t escape from the image of herself going down on him. She felt violated, raped, as though anyone who saw her saw her only on her knees. She felt she was a whore, “Hitler’s whore,” she told her girlfriends. So she obsessed. She trembled. She cried. She sobbed. She was hysterical.

  Andy Bleiler was the final betrayal. Her first real boyfriend, her first true love, the man who’d taken her virginity, and he was live on all the networks, standing in front of his house in Portland with his wife, holding a press conference! And calling her a liar and a whore. Andy and Kate and a lawyer, trashing her, stripping her naked and showing her to the world in the merciless glare of TV lights, saying she “had a pattern of twisting facts, especially to enhance her version of her own self-image,” saying, “She spoke of sex a lot; she’s fairly obsessed with that,” telling the world about her abortion even, making it seem as though she’d purposely gone to the White House to seduce the president. Kate called her “a Fatal Attraction type” and said that she’d said, “I’m going to the White House to get my presidential knee pads.” They made her sound like a pathetic mess, revealing that she’d called them as much as five times a day from Washington. She watched Andy, and all she could do was cry and take the pills her shrink had given her. Whore! Fat whore! Now even Andy was saying it.

  Every day was a nightmare. Trying and being unable to sew. Taking her pills. Eating more and more. Getting fatter. Unable to go out. Unable even to step outside on the balcony of her apartment because there were cameras on the street aimed up there. Trapped with the TV and the Internet, switching channels and surfing, watching the fat whore through their eyes, watching and reading each new account. Yesterday it was Andy and today it was her very first so-called boyfriend, Adam Dave, whom she had only kissed, saying that they’d had sex and that she liked to be handcuffed to the bed. Fat, kinky whore!

  She switched the channels and saw a film clip of Bayani Nelvis, her friend the White House steward, on his way to the grand jury. Seeing him hurt almost as much as seeing Andy Bleiler and Adam Dave. Nel was wearing one of her ties. One of the ties she had given the Creep, which said to her that the Creep had thought so little of her gift that he’d given it to his steward. But of course! Why would any man keep a present from a fat whore?

  She’d even gotten a letter yesterday, which she’d sent on to her lawyer, from a woman in New York who said that Starr was after her, too; who admitted she’d had affairs with lots of famous married men but not with the Creep. The woman didn’t know what to do. A whore turning to another whore for advice! She switched channels again and watched Dr. Joyce Brothers. “Can you imagine,” Dr. Brothers said, “a young man bringing Monica Lewinsky home to his parents and saying ‘I’m going to marry Monica Lewinsky’?”

  When they weren’t talking about her, they were talking about her mother. Her poor violated mother. It reminded her of that old movie she’d seen with Sophia Loren where mother and daughter are raped, gang-banged, right next to each other. Raped first by Starr, then by the media. Her mother had almost collapsed in the grand jury room. A wheelchair and a nurse had to be called for her. Her attorney took her to the bathroom, where she fell to the floor, hysterical. When she came home that night, her mother curled up in the fetal position on the kitchen floor, sobbing. Her shrink had to come to the apartment in the middle of the night.

  The White House had called it Starr’s “Throw Mama in Front of the Train” strategy. Her father had said, “To pit a mother against a daughter, to coerce her to talk, to me it’s reminiscent of the McCarthy era, of the Inquisition, and even, you know, you could stretch it to the Hitler era.” Her mother had said, “What a better way to force someone to do what they don’t want than to threaten those they love? My own family saw that technique used very effectively by Joseph Stalin, which is why they left Russia.”

  All this imagery piling up—McCarthy, the Inquisition, Hitler, Stalin—but the media didn’t want to hear any of it. They were implying that her mother had encouraged her in her pursuit of the president. They were implying that her mother had pursued Peter Strauss for his money the same way that Monica had pursued the president. They were almost saying that her mother had staged her collapse in front of the grand jury in an orchestrated PR effort to make Starr look like Savonarola. They didn’t care that her mother now was as hysterical as she was, taking her pills, seeing her shrink. Who cared about a whore? A fat whore? A fat, kinky whore? Hitler’s whore?

  She switched channels, and there was Linda Tripp. Her! She wished her kids would die! She wished her stupid dog Cleo would die! She had called her hairdresser the other day and Ishmael had said Linda was going to him now! Linda had taken her life, her dignity, her privacy from her. Now she was taking her hairdresser, too!

  And every time she saw her on the tube, she was wearing something that Monica had given her—that old coat, the fake Chanel bag she’d brought back from Korea. Like Linda was taunting her through the media—See, you got me all this cheap shit, Monica; now it’s payback time! You’re Hitler’s whore because you didn’t get me a real Chanel bag!

  She felt so alone. Sure, her mother was there for her, but her mother was a train wreck, too. Could a train wreck help rebuild a train wreck? What could they do—share their pills and exchange prescriptions? Have conference calls with both shrinks? Reassure each other with old stories about how the Spellings unintentionally forgot to invite her to Tory’s birthday party when she was a little girl? Compare intimate notes about the affair her mother didn’t have with Pavarotti and the a
ffair she had with the president?

  She had no one to go to who was strong enough to give her a helping hand. Her lawyer? Ginsburg? She had to laugh. Even feeling suicidal . . . she had to laugh. What was she doing with this putz? How had her dear father albatrossed her with this flaming, unmitigated schmuck? This medical-malpractice lawyer who was on the tube every time she switched the channel. Such a rube!

  He thought he was so slick. She told him to stop doing all these shows, and he said, “If you don’t feed the bear, it’ll eat you because it’s hungry. If you feed the bear too much, it’ll crap all over you. But if you feed the bear just enough, he’ll leave you alone.” Oh, sure, just enough. That’s why the media was leaving her alone, right? Where the fuck did he get off? She read what he’d said to Time magazine. He’d called her mother “aggressive” and said Monica was “a caged dog with her 24-year-old libido.” Her own lawyer. “Caged dog,” meaning bitch in heat. Whore!

  He told the press that he’d kissed her inner thighs when she was six days old and said, “Look at those little pulkes.” Inner thighs? Her own lawyer giving the public an image of her inner thighs? Her pulkes? He had to say that when the world already saw her as a whore? He had to give them her inner thighs?

  Ginsburg gave her the creeps. Asking her all the time for more intimate details of what had happened in the hallway. Sitting at dinner at her house with her family and saying it was his understanding that the president liked only women with dark pubic hair. At the dining room table! She was the whore of the Western world and she obviously had dark pubic hair, and Ginsburg . . . at the dinner table! . . . Her step-mother had to leave the room. Writing that essay for California Lawyer that was going to say, “Now, Mr. Starr, thanks to you, we will know if another’s lips aside from the First Lady’s have kissed the president’s penis.” Aside from the First Lady’s? Uncool, inappropriate, and gross!