And look at my own star, Sally Field, who became a national laughing stock after “You like me, you really, really like me!” and she’s on TV now doing an ad in which she says “You like me, you really, really like me!” Sally’s making a fortune on the biggest gaffe of her life. I’m not saying that we can ever redeem “I did not have sex with that woman, Miss Lewinsky!” in a similar manner, but would you believe that my star Sharon Stone was offered a teleplay in which she would have played the Blessed Virgin Mary?
Here’s the plan—short-, mid-, and long-term to make Bill Clinton an intergalactic star.
I. Short Term: Risky Business
Don’t worry about the masturbation issue. This is cutting edge, hip stuff, like Angelina Jolie’s fixation on her brother. If Jolie can take the specter of incest public, somebody sooner or later will make masturbation a sexual liberation issue. If Gloria Stuart would have become a star earlier, she already would have done it.
In his remaining months in office, send Bill Clinton on as many foreign trips as possible. It doesn’t matter where, as long as there are crowds cheering him. Try to arrange film of him being cheered somewhere, anywhere, on the nightly news at least once a week.
Considering the skyrocketing Hispanic vote in the United States, the more South and Latin American trips the better. (This ties into my long-range plan, as you’ll see below.) If you can’t book Hispanic Third World crowds, then book Asian ones.
I’d like to see him interacting with Third World poverty—touching kids, hugging mothers (not too young or svelte.) Imagine if Tom and not Patrick Swayze would have played in City Of Joy and have Bill Clinton play it that way. A healer. A peacemaker. The pain he feels should well in his blue eyes. (Tom in Rain Man.)
If this is possible and if he’s willing, nothing would be better than if he were wounded on one of these foreign trips. I don’t mean anything serious, just a flesh wound in the shoulder or the arm. The Heroic President Who Almost Gave His Life For His Country. (Think Tom at the end of Days of Thunder.) The bloody shirt of near-assassination is ultimately the best way to blot out the crusted stain of near-removal from office.
If he’s wounded, he needs to have some lines like Reagan’s “Honey, I forgot to duck.” I can get a studio to commission a script that will never be made about a heroic president who gets shot and Bill Goldman can come up with some emergency room Butch and Sundance lines.
Before you dismiss near-assassination as too radical, I have to tell you I discussed this idea with Dick Morris when Whitewater first reared its head and Dick loved it. He initially argued that getting shot didn’t do John Connally any political good, but I convinced him the problem was casting. Of course it didn’t do Connally any good, JFK upstaged him the way Sharon upstaged Michael in Basic Instinct. (Tom passed before Michael took the part.)
Dick told me that Reagan realized how much the shooting helped him because he made that crack about “Maybe I should get myself shot again” when his ratings were down.
If a near-assassination isn’t possible, then you should leak some stories while he is abroad about threats against him. A Courageous President Defying His Own Security Advisors, Risking His Life For What He Believes In. (Tom clenching his jaw in The Firm.) A few highly-publicized arrests in these countries (with quiet releases when he’s back home) would help.
Hillary’s in New York, Chelsea’s with her boyfriend in L.A., Buddy’s back in doggie discipline. He’s all alone. There’s a sadness in his body language, a wistfulness in his eyes. He rambles on at press conferences, as if he’s happy to talk to those vultures. He talks to Ebert about movies he loves, Costas about football players he admires—as though he has no one else to BS with.
On an LA fund-raiser, arrange for Bill Clinton and Chelsea to have dinner with Elizabeth Taylor. I don’t know what it is about Elizabeth, but her presence has been therapeutic for people with image disease before—Michael Jackson (boys), Malcolm Forbes (boys), Adnan Khashoggi (girls and guns).
Elizabeth is almost becoming Hollywood’s blowzy version of Mother Theresa—the public adores her and she is famous for her charities and her fame. (I am trying to gently prod Sharon in this win-win direction.)
I can set up this dinner for Bill Clinton easily, but I suggest you or another friend make a trip to Harry Winston’s on Rodeo Drive first. Diamonds are this girl’s best friends. Elizabeth will know what we’re up to, naturally. The last time she performed this kind of benediction was after poor Dodi died, when she did all those interviews praising him.
I don’t have to point out to you that very rarely do stars have this kind of metaphysical power. Elvis was another one, but his wasn’t benign. After he died and the media revealed that he used to shoot the television set whenever he saw Robert Goulet, Goulet’s career was over, known for posterity not for Camelot but as the man Elvis Presley shot.
He should visit Christopher Reeve as well. Chris is an American hero, the best we’ve had since John Wayne did the Oscars with one lung (wearing a wetsuit underneath his tuxedo to make himself look bigger), or since Harold Russell flashed his hook in The Best Years Of Our Lives. Don’t forget about Tom in the chair in Born On The Fourth Of July, either. Maybe Bill Clinton and Chris talk about football or movies easily guy stuff, anything but blowjobs or horses. Chris talks about courage, about coming back after the fall. As we see Bill Clinton listening to him, sadness weighing his eyes, we see that he, too, knows about coming back after a fall. By having a camera crew there, we transfuse Chris’s heroism into Bill Clinton. We enlarge Chris’s halo so it fits both heads.
Arrange for Bill Clinton to spend some time with Billy Graham. I know he spends time with Jesse Jackson. I love Jesse Jackson, but Jesse just isn’t Billy, who is as close to an American Pope as we’ve got.
Why should only Republicans be blessed by America’s Pope? Dick Morris would call this triangulating religion, wouldn’t he?
Arrange for Bill Clinton to visit Nancy Reagan and President Ford. If there is any way for him to visit President Reagan, with photos of him with his arm around Reagan, it would almost be as good as Bill Clinton’s near- assassination. But if not, Nancy will have to do. (Think Tom cast with Paul Newman and Dustin Hoffman.)
Is there any famous journalist as loyal to him as Ben Bradlee and James Reston and Hugh Sidey were to JFK? I’m thinking of a piece in Vanity Fair or Talk in which Bill Clinton shares what’s in his heart. Those guys used to drink and carouse with JFK, and Bradlee’s sister-in-law even had an affair with him. That’s the kind of priority-minded journalist we need to write this piece.
Are there any? I have plenty of movie profile writers in my stable, but I’m not sure any of them turn their tricks with Bradlee’s gravitas.
Movie profile writers, incidentally, are the best example of what we will someday be able to do to political writers. Movie profile writers literally can’t make a living without access to stars. If they write an unflattering profile of one of my stars, I forever deny them access to any of my others. The result is that all of my stars get flattering profiles. Movie profile writers have to go down on everybody or I stop paying them easily that is, I stop giving them access.
Bill Clinton should rediscover his brother. He should visit Roger and be seen playing with Roger’s baby. They should watch Teletubbies together. Big hugs all around and Annie Leibovitz snapping some beautiful color shots of them making Tubby Toast.
On the day George W. is inaugurated, we should see tears welling in Bill Clinton’s eyes as he has his arm around Chelsea. As the new president is being sworn in, we should see him kissing Hillary’s hand and whispering “Thank you.” (Tom and Nicole in Eyes Wide Shut.)
After the inauguration, is there any way Roger can be convinced to start doing cocaine again? Bill Clinton could take him, his arm around him, to Betty Ford. “I love my brother,” he should tell the press, and say not a word more.
The divorce should take place only after we’re certain the Special Prosecutor won’t
indict him. If he’s indicted, there should be no divorce until the end of the trial. (Remember how badly Robert Downey, Jr.’s and Charlie Sheen’s box offices have plummeted.)
Two weeks after the divorce is filed, he should do Barbara Walters. The whole galaxy will be watching. It will be the most important interview he’s ever done. He should cry. I don’t mean eyes welling or hands rubbing at his eyes on CNN like the day he was impeached. I mean tears flowing, rivering, flooding down his cheeks.
But we need something else, too, at this crucial, cathartic, and shameless moment. When the world sees him humbled and vulnerable. When he’s got the world by the heart. How many times has Bill Clinton had the world by the heart and not by something else? Never. This is our drive-by moment to blast through our smudged window of opportunity!
This is the first nanosecond of the creation of Bill Clinton not as President but as intergalactic star. So we need something else. Something heartbreaking, something melodramatic. Something beyond the by-now-routine violins playing Johann Strauss pizzicatos about babies born with birth defects or brothers dying of AIDS, waltzes danced a week before the new movie’s release.
Two ideas: His mother was an anesthesiologist. Was she a junkie too? Did he see her shooting up? Did she ask him to tie her off when he was a little boy? His adopted father, Roger, catted around. Did he have syphilis? Did the infant Bill Clinton see his father curing himself the way they used to in those days? With a long needle stuck into . . . I’ll leave it to you, Harry, you’re the one with a lifetime in TV. Please, you guys invented Disease Of The Week!
After the divorce, the questions are: What’s he going to do? Where is he going to live? We float a story saying he’s going to go to medical school and become a doctor. Albert Schweitzer in the Hispanic Third World, Robin Williams as a grungy, mosquito-bitten Patch Adams. (Tom passed on it.)
We float another story that he spoke to Billy Graham about going to divinity school. The public remembers his epiphany of tears on Barbara Walters and how tortuously he spoke about that long needle (or whatever you concoct). The public wants to believe him.
He disappears. The Secret Service says he sneaked away from them at a restaurant in Little Rock. Nobody knows where he is. Not Chelsea, not Carville, not you, Harry. Hillary doesn’t know or care. Buddy’s gone, too.
Bill Clinton and Buddy—Vanished! The world press screams for information. Where are Bill Clinton and his dog? Gone. Gone like Elvis. Gone like Robert Goulet. Gone like Tom’s first wife, Mimi Rogers, who told that filthy lie about Tom wanting to be celibate “to maintain the purity of his instrument.”
II. Mid Term: Far and Away
All of the rest of this depends on you, Harry. He cannot gain weight! Not one pound! He has to get as lean and wiry as Tom in Mission Impossible. No cigars, either! Not even unlighted ones! Ever!
He is sighted like the resurrected Elvis by ordinary Americans who describe a tanned, soft-spoken man, his gray-white hair down to his shoulders on a motorcycle, his puppydog, Buddy, huddled against him. The motorcycle is an antique green Indian.
He is seen at a diner outside Cheyenne, eating only vegetables . . . in the stands at a Little League game in Sonoma, California . . . at a county fair in Twin Falls, Idaho . . . at a log rolling contest in upstate Oregon. Tourists in Joshua Tree National Park hear the sweet sound of a lonely saxophone playing “Summertime” in the moonlight, follow the sound to a campfire, and find Bill Clinton and Buddy.
He is friendly to the ordinary Americans he meets, even signs autographs, and tells them he’s “rediscovering America and myself” and writing the book he’s always wanted to write since college.
He is seen in smalltown churches of various denominations and, one night in Bakersfield, he plays his sax with a bar band. A tourist at Yosemite takes a blurred picture of him with Chelsea and Buddy. He spends a couple days privately with Jesse Ventura and Billy Graham and shows up to help Jimmy Carter pound some nails at an old age home. He stops at Chris Reeve’s house for a week and helps him with his nursing care, although we don’t know about it until he’s long gone.
He’s seen praying at JFK’s grave and touching the names on the Vietnam Memorial. The press is going crazy trying to find him, but all they find is an occasional motel register impishly signed “T. Lott” or “N. Gingrich” or “R. Nixon.” Bill Clinton as the resurrected, elusive Elvis is the biggest story in the world.
We hire impostors to show up on the bike with Buddy at various places and get him off the road. We take him to the L. Ron Hubbard Scientology Center on Florida’s Gulf Coast. Scientologists like him anyway because of the tax-free status he granted them.
We trim ten more pounds off of him and pump him up. We give him cosmetic surgery that accentuates his cheekbones and sculpts his jawline. We permanently tint his facial coloring so the world will never see that humiliated red face again. We teach him to speak fluent Spanish. We get rid of his Southern drawl and replace it with a Western twang. We get him surgery to lower his voice. We sit him down with Deepak Chopra and Rain Man Oscar winner Ron Bass and they start writing his book.
We convince him to become a secret, card-carrying Scientologist. He doesn’t need the charisma lessons Tom found so useful, but he sorely needs the psychosexual balancing and alignment so many stars are such fans of. He undergoes the balancing and alignment with painful effort. We are not convinced Bill Clinton will ever be celibate, ever maintain the purity of his instrument, but we are relatively certain he won’t go flashing that damn thing around.
Out on the road, more Americans report sightings of him, but with a twist now. He stars in random acts of heroism. A woman whose car has broken down on the freeway, about to give birth . . . here he comes on his Indian with Buddy. He delivers the baby. A drunken man in a bar with a gun . . . he talks the man into giving it to him. A fire in an apartment complex . . . he rushes in and saves a toddler hiding in a closet clutching Tinky Winky. (Think of all those heroic stories we planted about Tom saving lives in the month before Mission Impossible was released.) The press is salivating now. Bill Clinton as Elvis as the heroic Christopher Reeve as Superman holding Tinky Winky in his arms.
Monica Lewinsky receives a handwritten, heartfelt two-page letter of apology, which is leaked to the press. We get Robert James Waller—The Bridges Of Madison County—to write it, with a rewrite by Rod McKuen and a polish by Jewel.
Chelsea goes to medical school and will study epidemiology. She tells Oprah she will spend her life fighting plague-like diseases in Third World countries.
A year has gone by now. He is as big as Elvis, bigger than Christopher Reeve, almost as big as Tom and Tinky Winky. Now we’re ready for the galaxy.
III. Long Term: Mission Impossible
The press will do anything, agree to anything, to get an interview with him. Her editors force Maureen Dowd to agree to let us edit her precious prose! Sam Donaldson will agree to not even be seen on camera during the interview! Jann Wenner will agree to do a later cover of Dodi Fayed if he gets the Bill Clinton exclusive! Sir David Frost will agree to an hour with Sharon Stone if he gets it!
But no, not yet. We let Maureen and Jann and Sam and Sir David and the others grovel and grub.
We publish his book first—Travels With Buddy—by Bill Clinton. The world is stunned when it sees the man on the cover. Thin, tanned, cheekbones popping, intense, eyes a piercing blue, hair full, longish, and snow white. Is that really Bill Clinton? Wow! The book itself is poetry—a love story between a man and the country he loves. (A Steinbeck scholar at Stanford did a polish after Leo Buscaglia rewrote Deepak and Bass at the last minute.)
The book isn’t about politics. It is about the people he met and the places he saw on his Indian with Buddy.
Now we’re ready for the press, whose representatives are literally prostituting themselves to have access to Bill Clinton as Elvis as Christopher Reeve as Superman holding Tinky Winky. Barbara gets the first interview—a campsite somewhere out West. Coyotes howl, f
ireflies glitter, cacti rustle or do whatever else cacti do. He talks to her over a campfire in the moonlight, Buddy at his feet, the fire crackling. He’s wearing denim—(we don’t want to overdo the jeans thing because of Carter and Carville and Jesse Ventura, but maybe Tom Ford at Gucci can come up with a variation).
He will devote himself to helping the poor, Bill Clinton tells Barbara. Not just here but in Mexico and around the world.
Then we allow Maureen and Sam and some of the others to speak with him—after they’ve signed their consent agreements. No questions about cigars, blowjobs, masturbation, Lewinsky, Gennifer Flowers, Willey, Broaddrick, Hillary, Eleanor, etc., etc. No questions about the past. Life begins with Buddy on the Indian.
I edit their copy, I see their tapes. Jann puts Dodi on the cover of Rolling Stone. Sir David gives Sharon a full hour. Andy Rooney interviews Buddy. Bill Moyers does a PBS Special about the Indian motorcycle as the modern-day Pegasus.
Since we grant Bill Clinton exclusives in most nations of the world, Dodi Fayed appears on covers almost everywhere in the world as part of the deal. Dodi action figures appear in toy stores and Tom announces he is developing a project with Oliver Stone about Dodi as a CIA operative.
The world is in love with Bill Clinton, this tanned, rangy, athletic figure with the Western twang. The red-faced Bill Clinton with the whine in his voice is but a faint repressed memory. The parsings and Grand Jury appearance have been purged from the sociocultural record. Bill as Elvis as Christopher Reeve as Superman holding Tinky Winky . . . speaks softly, with a deep voice, in simple, unparsed, red-blooded sentences. (We don’t want a change as extreme as Madonna’s British accent.)
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