American Rhapsody

by Joe Eszterhas

  They were trying to dirty me so badly that those who believed I was something new and clean in the dirty world of politics wouldn’t come out to vote. They were trying to kill the magic. They were trying to disillusion those who, for the first time in a long time, believed in someone. They didn’t want new voters; they wanted only their corrupt friends and allies to vote. They wanted to depress America and make her more cynical. They didn’t want excitement; they wanted boredom. They wanted to kill hope. They didn’t want anything to change. They were the cancerous sphincter muscles of the status quo, their reek undisguised by the perfume of holy water.

  When a woman at a rally told me about how her fourteen-year-old son broke down in tears after getting a push-poll call telling him I was a liar and a cheat, I told Murphy we weren’t running any more negative ads.

  “They’re killing us,” Murphy said. “We’ve got to run them. People say they don’t like negative ads, but negative information is an important part of their decision making. It works.”

  “I don’t care,” I said. “I don’t want to wake up after a victory and feel dirty. I’m not going to take the low road to the White House.”

  I thought about the Crown Prince and remembered him boyishly hugging me at the first debate in New Hampshire. It was all this “I love ya, man! You’re my buddy! I’m proud of ya!” Then I’m suddenly this awful guy and the only thing that has changed is that I beat him like a drum in New Hampshire.

  Our campaign was never the same after South Carolina. Chris Matthews was on the mark again. He called what George W. Bush did a “scorched-earth campaign . . . close to the allied bombing of Dresden.”

  I’d put it a little differently. It was Adolf Hitler’s rampaging goons celebrating Kristallnacht.

  We won Michigan, killing off Engler’s footstool dreams forever, and the Crown Prince never even called to congratulate me, but I didn’t give a shit about that by then. I was still angry. No, I was horrified by what I’d seen in South Carolina. South Carolina took me back to Hanoi: rats scuttling in the cell, open, seeping sores, a turd floating in a well.

  I’d started talking about it in Michigan already, about “the Christian Right, the Extreme Right,” about “the bunch of idiots who run Bob Jones University.” I said, “My friends, my party has lost its way. I think a lot of Americans feel that the Republican party doesn’t represent them anymore and that we have too narrow a focus. I believe we have to make sure that everyone is on the playing field, that there is an equal opportunity for everybody, that we will not favor one group over another, particularly as a result of financial contributions.”

  And then I flew my Skyhawk into Virginia Beach, Virginia, Pat Robertson’s home, and I targeted Robertson and his smarmy Axis ally, Jerry Falwell, personally: “We are the party of Ronald Reagan, not Pat Robertson,” I said. “The political tactics of division and slander are not our values. They are corrupting influences on religion and politics . . . . Neither party should be defined by pandering to the outer reaches of American politics and the agents of intolerance, whether they be Al Sharpton or Louis Farrakhan on the Left or Jerry Falwell or Pat Robertson on the Right.”

  The next day, on the bus, I called Robertson and Falwell “agents of intolerance” and an “evil influence” over the Republican party. “To stand up and take on the forces of evil,” I said, “that’s my job. You’re supposed to tolerate evil in your party in the name of party unity? That’s not what the party is all about.”

  Murphy told the scrums, “The speech was right. The speech is why he’s running.”

  “It’s a home run,” Murphy said to me.

  But I knew my wing had been shot off. I knew my Skyhawk was crashing and I was going down with her. There was no ejection mechanism in a presidential campaign. “John McCain is dead politically,” said Lyn Nofziger, who I always thought was Ronald Reagan’s smartest political adviser. I had done pretty much what John Anderson, another Republican, had done in 1980, when he opened fire on the National Rifle Association.

  . . .

  Maybe I just should have called them nutbags and phonies.

  Pat Robertson keeps predicting the end of the world as casually and as often as weathermen in Arizona predict thunderstorms.

  Jerry Falwell thinks Tinky Winky is gay because he’s purple and carries a purse and has a triangle on his head.

  Pat Robertson rails against premarital sex but adjusted his wedding date to hide the fact the child was conceived out of wedlock.

  Jerry Falwell said he asked Jimmy Carter, “Sir, why do you have known practicing homosexuals on your senior staff in the White House?” He also said The Antichrist will be “a Jewish man who is alive today.” (Warren Rudman probably.)

  Pat Robertson was taped at a Businessmen’s Fellowship event, saying, “Satan begone . . . a hernia has been healed. If you’re wearing a truss, you can take it off. It’s gone! Several people are being healed of hemorrhoids and varicose veins!”

  Jerry Falwell, discussing welfare recipients, said, “That crowd ought to be left to starve until they decide that a job is a good deal.”

  Pat Robertson called himself an expert in tax law on his résumé although he had failed the bar exam in New York State and never practiced.

  Jerry Falwell sold a videotape on his TV show that accused Bill Clinton of being a murderer.

  Pat Robertson said, “A Supreme Court ruling is not the law,” and that Congress should “ignore a Supreme Court ruling if it so chooses.”

  Jerry Falwell demanded a federal task force to consider quarantine or imprisonment for gay people who have sex after they’ve been diagnosed with AIDS.

  On second thought, I’m proud of myself. Evil was exactly the right word.

  A lot of the rest of it is a blur. They put on more lying ads in New York and California, and the Crown Prince appeared everywhere with Catholic priests sticking out from under his robes. Governor Pataki’s rubber face rigidified into a permanent ass kiss.

  Murphy showed me some “soft negative” ads he wanted to run in response to their new slanders, and I said no.

  I scurried like a red-eyed, white-haired specter up and down the country, saying, “Tell Governor Bush and his cronies to stop destroying the American political system!” and “Governor Bush and his buddies are stealing this election!” and “No young American will ever vote again!”

  I did the California debate on the video screen because I was afraid that if I was in the same room with the Crown Prince I’d either kill him or be dragged away in a strait-jacket, or both. I remember getting ready for that debate in a studio in St. Louis and suddenly drawing a blank and Murphy leaning down and saying to me, “It’s okay. It’s okay.” And I remember saying to him, “Murphy, he may be a dishonest candidate running a vicious campaign, but in the end, nobody gives a shit.”

  The day before Super Tuesday, my Murphistopheles and I had a chilled vodka together and he told me he thought that, as a result of what we’d done, his career with the Republican party was over.

  Murphy said, “John, we made you the most popular politician in America, but they won’t nominate you.”

  I said, “Murphy, they’d rather lose the election than nominate me.”

  I ended it on a bright and crisp day at my house in Sedona after Super Tuesday. Long Tall Sally stood there holding my hand. It ended not with “Hail to the Chief” but with the instrumental version of the theme song from Rocky, not with my hero Teddy Roosevelt but with Sylvester Stallone.

  I said Long Tall Sally and I were going to Bora Bora. I said I expected to support the Republican nominee.

  Murphistopheles cried and I choked up.

  I’ll tell you what I think of the nominee I will support for president, the Crown Prince, George W. Bush.

  David Letterman is right when he says he is “the next Dan Quayle” and that his slogan should be “a dumb guy with connections.”

  But the real Crown Prince revealed himself to David Letterman weeks after the man had ha
d quintuple bypass surgery.

  Dave asked, “What does it mean that you’re a uniter, not a divider?”

  And George W. Bush said, “That means when it comes time to sew up your chest, we use stitches instead of opening it up, is what that means.”

  What it really means is that he’s not just dumb. He’s dumb and mean.

  When I was a POW, we’d tell each other the stories and scenes of movies we’d seen. My favorite was One-Eyed Jacks. My favorite scene was Marlon Brando calling Slim Pickens a “scum-sucking pig.”

  The Crown Prince, the Republican nominee I will support for president, is a scum-sucking pig.

  . . .

  Long Tall Sally and I went to Bora Bora. We sat in the sun. We listened to my spiritual adviser, Chuck Berry. It wasn’t easy to go cold turkey. I tried to make believe and I kept using the phone to talk to my staff for temporary fixes to help me with my withdrawal.

  Jesse Ventura kept calling me, telling me about polls that showed me only three or four points behind in a three-way race.

  Bob Dole kept calling me. I love Bob Dole. He’s one of my oldest friends. I traveled with him on the campaign trail in 1996 to try to keep him smiling. (It wasn’t easy.) He’d almost picked me as his vice president.

  Party unity, Bob Dole said to me. He kept beating me with it. Party unity, John, party unity, party unity! This party has been good to you, John. You’re a lifelong Republican, John. Your mother is a Republican. Your mother attended every day of the Alger Hiss / Whittaker Chambers hearings and she rooted for Chambers. You love your mother, John! You’re not a Hiss man, John! Bob Dole beat me like a drum.

  In the end, I told Jesse I couldn’t do it. I am a lifelong Republican. I do love my mother. I’m not a Hiss man. Jesse and I made a date to meet in a shark cage sometime somewhere. I don’t know, maybe navy SEALs do have more balls than navy fliers. He wears his feather boa more often than I wear mine.

  I went back to the Senate, and Trent Lott called me “one of our brothers,” although he also said, “We’re not going to hold a parade or anything for him.” I did an interview with Dan Rather and he said, “The leaders of your own party, left to their own devices, would cut your heart out and throw your liver to the dogs.”

  I read some articles that had piled up in the office during the campaign. Frank Gamboa, my roommate at Annapolis, said, “He’d push the limits at Annapolis, he’d push the edge, but John never went over the edge.” My numbnuts brother Joe McKmart said, “John was always a guy who pushed the boundary, but he always knew what the boundary was.” And David Broder of the Washington Post wrote, “John McCain is the chairman of the Senate Commerce Committee by sufferance of the Senate Republican Conference and that is a very important incentive for him to stay and be a loyal Republican.”

  “I failed myself. I failed my fellow Americans. I failed my family, and I failed my country.”

  Those were the words I used to describe how I felt about signing a confession after Vietcong torture.

  . . .

  Chris Matthews said to me, “You were a rock star, but it’s more important than music. It’s the country you had in your hands.”

  Goddamn it, Murphistopheles, I told you I was a flawed human being. Goddamn it, Murphy. Goddamn it! We had fun, didn’t we?

  [10]

  The Man with the Golden Willard

  “He must, like, belong to the CD of the month club or something,” Monica said to Linda Tripp. “Well, I looked at his CDs. It’s really weird. Like he has these CDs that are really weird. Like sax for lovers and stuff. Uch!”

  Warren Beatty for president? Oh my! Warren Beatty? In this cigar-choked, willard-gagging climate? The Man with the Golden Willard? In the White House? Even for Hollywood, a town noted more for mind-numbing plot twists than logic, it was mind-numbing news. God how I loved Hollywood! Even after a quarter century of contributing mind-numbing plot twists of my own, I still didn’t understand it.

  Warren for president made about as much sense to me as the marriage between Barbra and James Brolin. Barbra is about as fervently Jewish as Golda Meir, and here she had married a redneck cowboy who had called me one Sunday afternoon in the late eighties and yelled at me about the attorneys I was using in a negotiation to buy his house. “You and your goddamn Jewboy attorneys!” Barbra’s future husband had said. Ohhkay. Now Warren Beatty was going to be president. His biggest previous political accomplishment had been getting Paul Simon and Art Garfunkel to reunite for a McGovern fund-raiser.

  When I heard that his candidacy had been first floated by Arianna Huffington—“We need someone who can pull the nation around the fire and draw us together”—I figured that it was a treacherous plot hatched by the opportunistically right-wing Sorceress, a secret plan to embarrass liberals further. Let the liberals huzzah around Warren, let the public fall in love, and then expose the man’s satyriasis, his praying mantis need for woman flesh, his narcissism, his megalomania.

  Forget blow jobs and masturbation as fireside dinner table talk; now we’d be discussing priapism and male nymphomania, although, in a line that made the whole town roar, the Los Angeles Times referred to Warren as a “political virgin.”

  I wondered how the poor battered feminists would react to the Man with the Golden Willard . . . who had bedded at least three generations of movie stars; whose conquests included Leslie Caron, Julie Christie, Madonna, Natalie Wood, Joan Collins, Diane Keaton, Isabelle Adjani, Mary Tyler Moore, Michelle Phillips, Britt Eklund, Joni Mitchell, Liv Ullmann, Carly Simon, Diane Ladd, Rona Barrett, Jessica Savitch, Jane Fonda, Vivien Leigh, and Annette Bening; whose favorite introductory line to women had for so long been, “What’s new, pussycat?”; whose own sister, Shirley MacLaine, said, “I’d like to do a love scene with him just to see what all the yelling is about.”

  There were obvious and special Clintonian parallels. “Three, four, five times a day, every day, was not unusual for Warren,” former fiancée Joan Collins said. “And he was able to accept phone calls at the same time.” A friend said, “Warren wants the entire world to go to bed with him.” Rona Barrett, an old friend, said, “I love Warren, but I think he’s a whore.”

  Warren admitted, “Sometimes I wake up about four a.m. and I’m scared for a minute because I wonder where the hell I am,” and allowed that “if I tried to keep up with what is said about me sexually, I would be speaking to you from a jar at the University of Chicago Medical Center.” Woody Allen said, perhaps euphemistically, that if reincarnated, “I’d like to be Warren’s fingertips.”

  In other ways, Warren was strikingly un-Clintonian. One of Hollywood’s most esteemed liberals, Warren was not, personally as opposed to ideologically, a great egalitarian. One movie crew disliked him so much that they locked him into the jail cell in which he’d been shooting a scene. (Warren said, “All right, so I’m not buddy-buddy with the crews. I don’t get paid to be friends with them and they don’t get paid to be friends with me. Making pals of grips and electricians is not an actor’s most important job on the set.”) Told by Jack Warner to go to the White House to meet JFK if he wanted to play him in PT 109, Warren said, “If the President wants me to play him, tell him to come here and soak up some of my atmosphere.” And when a reporter asked about a batch of unpaid bills on the floor of the car Warren was driving, Warren said, “I can’t be bothered with things like this. I keep telling those people to send their bills to my business managers if they want to get paid.”

  Hollywood, though, always looking for a new kick, was in high dither. Robert Evans’s magnificent candle-glowing whorehouse was a smoke-filled room where not box-office grosses but platform planks were being discussed. This was Warren’s second home, a place he’d spent so many nights in stimulating company, plotting moves to fulfill nubile voters’ needs and desires, staying forever young, plugged into the current social fabric. Warren even had his own seat in Bob’s screening room—right next to Jack’s—Warren maybe taking oh so cool peripheral glances in the darkness at t
he masses of faceless but well-rounded voters who had to sit on the floor.

  Bob himself was so excited. Warren’s candidacy or noncandidacy or potential candidacy or near candidacy . . . was an absolute tonic to the effect of his strokes, and he could almost see himself as President Beatty’s Kissinger or Dave Powers or Bobby Baker or Vernon Jordan. This was so much more fun than writing his letters to stamp out Alzheimer’s or humming around the house wearing the George Bush White House baseball cap that Marlin Fitzwater had given him. More fun even than the parties back in the grand old days before he was broke. President Beatty would guarantee “the kid would stay in the picture forever,” drowning out the whispers about the cocaine conviction and that body found out in the desert.

  Pat Cadell was back in business, too, rejuvenated like Evans, but looking a little gray around the edges, looking, indeed, almost unrecognizably different from the way he did in the Jimmah and Governor Moonbeam days, looking like he’d been withered by defeat and time, that old liberal spark dimmed by trying to write TV shows around commercial breaks. And it was whispered that Gary Hart hovered in the background, too, Svengali to his former Svengali, just as he’d once been Svengali to McGovern, one of the greatest electoral bust-outs in American history . . . Gary Hart, whose act of cowardice in withdrawing from the 1988 race sealed his fate forever as yet another gutless political wonder.

  What a curious crew, I thought, Warren and the Sorceress and Evans and Cadell and Hart. It was a scam, I felt. It had to be. Warren was such a navel-contemplative control freak, such a self-involved snob that he would never expose himself (sorry) to the hoi polloi. Not to the general mass of the hoi polloi, as opposed to individual, well-structured ones. Not politically, as opposed to sexually.