A goodness emanates from him. A spirituality. Love. Compassion. Acceptance. Understanding. Forgiveness. Maturity. Wisdom. Harmony. Clarity. Peace. He has been Rumi-ed, Yanni-ed, and John Tesh-ed. He is The Serenity Prayer, John Denver singing “Annie’s Song,” The Three Tenors doing “Ommmmmmm.”
He announces the formation of LTN—Love Thy Neighbor—a private, international volunteer effort to help the poor. Donations and volunteers overwhelm him. He picks out target cities, many of them Spanish speaking, and goes into these cities with thousands of young, committed, idealistic volunteers.
Now he is Bill Clinton as Elvis as Christopher Reeve as Superman holding Tinky Winky as Bobby Kennedy and Martin Luther King. We control all access to him. No interviews without our usual, by now universally-accepted (except for the rabid Maureen Dowd) conditions.
He marries a young, beautiful, intelligent Hispanic woman Scientology has picked out for him. She has Nicole’s class and Kelly’s perkiness. They appear together, with Buddy, on Barbara, mixing fluent Spanish with matching Western twangs. She charms America. It is evident they are very much in love. (Think Tom and Nicole, John and Kelly, Warren and Annette, and, of course, Dodi and Di.)
He targets Mexico City for a month-long program. Twenty thousand volunteers follow him there. Then Ho Chi Minh City—“My own private war”—he says. Then Bombay and Moscow.
He wins the Nobel Peace Prize.
There is a massive “Clinton For President” movement in 2004. He denies all interest in running for president. We continue controlling all access to him. I edit all the stories. I preview all the tapes.
He and his wife have two beautiful babies. LTN continues its anti-poverty crusade around the world. Chelsea is often at his side now, with Buddy, his Hispanic wife, and the two little brown ones.
As the election of 2008 approaches, a draft Clinton For President avalanche has begun. The Hispanic vote is the majority now in many parts of America and it’s all his. Hopefully, the economy is screwed up. George W.’s continuous out-of-the-closet boozing has made him a national joke. Bill Clinton is a shoe-in for the presidency. He’s only sixty-one.
But he is caught cheating on his wife with a twenty-nine-year-old implanted waitress who once spent a night with Axl Rose. His brother-in-law gives him a black eye. His Hispanic wife sues him for divorce.
Chelsea drops out of medical school and becomes a Hollywood starlet. Buddy is hit by a car. Scientology disavows him. The press won’t sign my consent agreements. He gets fat. His facial tint turns bright red. I fire him.
Gone are his wife, his kids, Elvis, Christopher Reeve, Superman, Tinky Winky, Bobby Kennedy, Martin Luther King, Chelsea, Deepak, L. Ron Hubbard, Buddy, and the Indian motorcycle. Bill Clinton is back as Bill Clinton, his instrument impure.
The Democratic nominee for President in 2008 is the senator from New York, Hillary Rodham, her face a plastic surgeon’s blurry vision of a younger Sharon Stone.
Oh, Harry, Harry, Harry! I’m sorry. I don’t want to represent Bill Clinton. He’ll never be Tom Cruise. When he lost the Oscar for Magnolia, Tom went to a party, made an L on his forehead, and said, “I’m a loser. Where’s the bar?”
Tom Cruise isn’t a loser. But Bill Clinton is. He’s history with the Andrew Johnson asterisk, the blockbuster that tanked and almost brought down the studio.
Oh, Harry, poor Harry, you’ve been so loyal to him. You did your best. Forget him, Harry! Where’s the bar?
Thank you to:
Ed Victor
Sonny Mehta
Michael Viner
Peter Gethers
Paul Bogaards
Tina Brown
Acclaim for Joe Eszterhas’s
American Rhapsody
“The best book I have read in ten years, maybe even longer . . . America has been lucky in that each decade has produced a writer who has been able to put his finger on the nation’s pulse. This time it is Joe Eszterhas.”
—BookPage
“I love this book and I’m not afraid to brag about it. I haven’t read anything like this since the early Mailer or Tom Wolfe.”
—Chris Matthews, Hardball
“The dust jacket compares Eszterhas to Mailer and Wolfe. It shouldn’t. The book stands on its own and is about the best and most compelling account of modern U.S. politics I’ve read.”
—Anne Robinson, The Times (London)
“The best book I read all summer . . . a satiric commentary . . . an extremely cogent political explanation why attempts to drive Clinton from office failed.”
—Milwaukee Journal Sentinel
“A loud belch . . . . Eszterhas knows how to write. His prose sizzles and spits across these hot pages . . . . Outrageously funny . . . it’s as if every drop of bile and brain fluid sloshing through Eszterhas has dripped into this book—a manic, mouthy, self-indulgent, impossible to ignore lament for America.”
—Publishers Weekly
“It is the only interesting thing that’s been written about politics in years.”
—Michael Wolff, New York
“A ribald/poetic narrative of the Clinton years.”
—William F. Buckley, Jr., United Press Syndicate
“American Rhapsody is Eszterhas’s commentary on our country’s rich cultural life. And, like any cultural commentary, it lovingly describes the sagging scrotum skin of one Lyndon B. Johnson.” —Comedy Central
“A comic masterpiece.” —Lewis Grossberger, Mediaweek
“Unapologetic raunchiness . . . audacious . . . bitchily fun . . . . Rhapsody does merit an adjective few have attached to Eszterhas’s projects: moral.”
—Time
“At once fascinating, shocking, repellent . . . the Starr Report on acid.”
—People
“The Showgirls of political journalism . . . you simply cannot turn away . . . undeniably readable.”
—Entertainment Weekly
“Mondo Bizarro . . . fun, gonzo invective . . . . Eszterhas does a good job of demolishing exculpatory psychiatric cant.”
—Newsweek
“Wild, gossipy, oddly autobiographical and thoroughly entertaining . . . . Mr. Eszterhas tries ultimately to present a moral sermon.”
—Clarence Page, Chicago Tribune
“A pyrotechnic read . . . it does for Monicagate what Madonna did for voguing . . . . Angry, heartfelt and mostly hilarious . . . . Miraculously veers from any hint of cynicism.”
—Vibe
“A fervid, florid, right-on, right-off, crystal clear, hopelessly muddied, brilliantly offensive, down to the bone, truthful melange of fact, fiction, and Eszterhas perceptions . . . . Corrosively scathing . . . . Compulsively readable . . . . Eszterhas is a kind of modern American Dante . . . . He has written America’s history as it (mostly) happened. A lot of people will hate him for it.”
—Liz Smith, New York Daily News
“A gleeful act of outrage . . . . Evel Knievel-like leaps of free association and mad brio . . . . A heady mix of showbiz gossip, personal essay, and Lester Bangs–style prose mania.”
—Amazon.com
“A sarcastic screed . . . inflated with macho posturing and defused by gleeful self contempt . . . a funny, fulsome, fickle writer . . . a jazzy primeval riff . . . even-handed, spewing aspersions on Republicans and Democrats alike.”
—Insight
“Perceptive observation and leering voyeurism . . . preaches and rants . . . entertaining, profane, scatological . . . hysterical, rarely boring.”
—CNN.com
“A racy sort of pulp fiction . . . . Lenny Bruce more than Hunter Thompson . . . . Eszterhas is a Walter Winchell wannabe, a pre-Drudge-dot-dot-commie, as if leaked on at the Stork Club by that matched pair of sinister bookends, J. Edgar Hoover and Lucky Luciano, after which, fingering a snub-nosed .38 and surfing the police bands, he trolls the pre-dawn streets.”
—John Leonard, The Nation
“It’s so brilliant, so rude, so crude, so sexy, so revealing, so ex
citing that I can’t understand how this guy created the idea and then dared deliver it.”
—Cindy Adams, New York Post
“A farcical waist-level panorama of the Clinton years . . . the offspring of the mating of The Joy of Sex and Portnoy’s Complaint . . . . Side-splitting and frequently poignant.”
—Library Journal
“An unapologetic cry of rage . . . an attempt to put the event into some sort of cultural context. Eszterhas obviously has done his homework and more. He has managed to connect some dots, filling in details that could explain things that even to the most forgiving voyeurs remain inexplicable.”
—Houston Chronicle
“Imagine if Edmund Morris, Tom Wolfe and Jackie Collins had a threesome in a cheap motel . . . history as it was meant to be—right from the gutter, with mock pinwheels spinning in your eyes and poison in your soul.”
—Detroit Metro Times
“Excitedly profane . . . a sharp ear for dialogue . . . something about this presidential scandal has rekindled the counter-cultural energy in Mr. Eszterhas . . . . The author’s fierce longing for a lost sixties idealism comes through . . . mercifully free of cynicism.”
—The New York Times
“Dutch crossed with the Starr Report crossed with The Executioner’s Song . . . but Mr. Eszterhas is no mere gossip—he is also a political pundit, capable of speculating, dazzlingly, on the extent to which greater honesty from the President could have liberated a nation of guilty closet masturbators.”
—The New York Observer
“Quite a read . . . a huge rollicking book that has something to say . . . vast, nonsensical fun, yet also telling. In the tradition of demented American journalism that finds a voice between hardcovers, it ranks.”
—New York Daily News
“A ticket to Babylon . . . a veritable Reader’s Digest of Clinton ribaldry . . . . Eszterhas genuinely seems to care for Hillary Clinton.”
—San Francisco Chronicle
“It’s nice to see Eszterhas hasn’t lost his journalistic fastball . . . . He’s Ted Koppel crossed with Ted Nugent . . . hilarious . . . profane.”
—The Boston Sunday Globe
“More than a Hollywood Babylon–style tell-all, this is a big, messy, ambitious book . . . . Eszterhas’s muscular, straightforward prose is engaging, his fictional inventions often hilarious, and beneath the book’s never-ending supply of seamy trashy exploits lies an undercurrent of great melancholy.”
—The Miami Herald
“An entertaining but thoroughly salacious read . . . likely to rile a lot of important people and their fans . . . . The book provides equal opportunities to rile readers of every political persuasion.”
—Austin American-Statesman
“Tantalizing, like a sordid movie script that unexpectedly ends with a moral.”
—The Commercial Appeal
“Eszterhas is not a Clinton hater; he is a hypocrisy hater, and he digs up dozens of dead bodies, from FDR to Fatty Arbuckle, to make his point that debauchery pretty well comes with power.”
—Knight-Ridder Newspapers
“A monument to modern rock ‘n’ roll pop culture in all its grease and glory . . . a salacious, gleeful romp . . . nothing short of hilarious . . . like a jacked-up muscle car, it never slows down.”
—The Buffalo News
“What sort of animal makes music like this? . . . Pat Robertson on acid . . . an exploration of the underbelly of our national sexual psychosis.”
—Los Angeles Times
“To say the book is about President Bill Clinton and White House politics is like saying strip joints are about dance.”
—Lexington Herald-Leader
“It makes the Starr Report seem like a McGuffey Reader for the second grade.”
—Flint Journal
“Read this at your own risk!”
—Arizona Republic
“American Rhapsody will entertain you . . . an engrossing and hilarious read . . . . Eszterhas knows the pacing of rock and roll and uses it to set the book up for his climax . . . it should crack you up and scare the shit out of you.”
—Buffalo Beat
“A long, slow pull on a gossipy blunt, a full-bore hog ramble from D.C. to Dreamland, a fact and fiction timetrip down Highway 61, an acid-drenched rumination by a footsoldier of the Leary decade.”
—Cleveland Free Times
“Guilty pleasure is the very best kind. It’s been many years since reading a book made me so thrillingly ashamed.”
—Diane White, The Boston Globe
“One can think of no more appropriate chronicler of the squalor of the Clinton White House than a writer made famous by the money shot of Sharon Stone crossing her legs in Basic Instinct.”
—Lucianne Goldberg, The National Review
“I wouldn’t blame Sharon Stone for putting a contract out on him.”
—Toronto Globe and Mail
“I think it’s hilarious. I knew Joe was funny, but I didn’t think he could write comedy.”
—Sharon Stone
JOE ESZTERHAS
American Rhapsody
Joe Eszterhas was born in Hungary, spent his first six years in Austrian refugee camps, and came to the United States in 1950. He lives in Point Dume, California, with his wife, Naomi, and their four children. He has two grown children from his first marriage.
He has been awarded the Emanuel Foundation’s Lifetime Achievement Award for work dedicated to the memory of the holocaust in Hungary. He has also won awards for attending every one of his son’s Little League games and for writing Showgirls (the Hollywood Women’s Press Association’s Sour Apple Award).
FIRST VINTAGE BOOKS EDITION, FEBRUARY 2001
Copyright © 2000, 2001 by Barbarian, LTD.
All rights reserved under International and Pan-American Copyright Conventions. Published in the United States by Vintage Books, a division of Random House, Inc., New York. Originally published in hardcover in slightly different form in the United States by Alfred A. Knopf, a division of Random House, Inc., New York, in 2000.
Vintage and colophon are registered trademarks of Random House, Inc.
The Library of Congress has cataloged the Knopf edition as follows:
Eszterhas, Joe
American rhapsody / Joe Eszterhas.
p. cm.
1. Clinton, Bill, 1946—. 2. Clinton, Bill, 1946—Friends and associates. 3. Eszterhas, Joe— Political and social views. 4. Political culture—United States—History—20th century. 5. Political corruption—United States—History—20th century. 6. Politicians—United States—Biography. 7. Celebrities— United States—Biography. 8. National characteristics, American. 9. United States—Politics and government—1993—. 10. United States—Moral conditions—20th century.
E886.2.E89 2000
973.929—dc21
00-106190
CIP
www.vintagebooks.com
eISBN: 978-0-375-41252-3
v3.0
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