American Rhapsody (10 page)

We wore jeans so tight, they cut the circulation off, and we stuffed Kleenex or Kotex or a beanbag
down there
. Eldridge Cleaver, former minister of information for the Black Panthers, commercialized that idea by manufacturing “Cleavers”—pants with codpieces. (The Panthers, in love with guns, were always willard-focused.) We celebrated the Age of Aquarius by attending be-ins where, within minutes or hours, we usually
were
in, though we often didn't know each other's names. We put our sexual show on the road in comfy Volkswagen campers, which freed us from backseat immobility and leg cramps. We discovered water beds and Slip'N Slide, a twenty-five-foot plastic sheet that we'd wet down and use for intertwined skinny-dipping on summer nights in the backyard. We found more intimate uses for our new electric toothbrushes. We yelled “No!” in chorus when, on-screen, Dustin Hoffman said to Mrs. Robinson, “Do you think we could say a few words to each other first this time?” The Noxzema commercial was our ad—“Take it off! Take it all off!”—the way “Lay Lady Lay” was our song. We made Burt Reynolds a star after he showed a little pubic hair in
Cosmopolitan
.

The emblematic sixties moment may not have been Woodstock or the Summer of Love, but a scene at a Village club in New York. Hendrix was up onstage, playing his guitar. Morrison and his date, Janis, were in the audience. Jimi was stoned and Morrison and Janis were stoned and drunk. Morrison got up, went to the front of the stage, unzipped Jimi, and put his willard into his mouth. Jimi kept playing. Joplin ran to the stage, tackled Morrison, and the two of them swung at each other. Jimi zipped himself up and kept playing.

When we weren't flaunting our genitals, we were getting high. Marijuana was as important to us as catsup and cottage cheese were to Nixon. We fired up our doobies with Smile lighters. When we ran out of grass, we smoked dried banana-skin scrapings, oregano, corn husk, and pine needles. Marijuana scented America's air. Even some of the older folks got into the zeitgeist of it. The socialites Alfred and Betsy Bloomingdale hosted a party—their guests: the Jack Bennys, the George Burnses, and the governor of California, Ronald Reagan and his wife, Nancy. According to his former executive assistant, Alfred, always a live wire, lit up a joint and passed it around. The governor and Nancy and Jack and George all took a couple of hits, inhaled, and then said, not surprisingly, that they didn't feel a thing. (The same Ronald Reagan who at the same time was ordering his National Guardsmen to use the same skin-stinging powder against us in the streets that was being used against the Vietcong in the jungle.) It seemed like everybody was getting high somehow: Even the astronauts smuggled minibottles of brandy onto
Apollo
.

Sex, drugs, and rock and roll defined our politics, as well. John Lennon's words were a manifesto: “Christianity will go. It will vanish and shrink. I needn't argue about that. I'm right and I will be proved right. We're more popular than Jesus now. I don't know which will go first—rock and roll or Christianity.” We burned bras, draft cards, and American flags, burning bridges, we naïvely thought, to the values our parents had taught us. We attended teach-ins, wearing our most serious faces and our tightest jeans, looking for someone to share a joint with and in-depth exploration of our bodies and the body count so gratifyingly far away in Vietnam. Moratorium Day was our callow response to Memorial Day and the Fourth of July. One hundred thousand of us, longhaired and unwashed, streaming past the White House, candles in our hands, as Nixon Peeping-Tommed us from behind his tacky gold-flecked White House drapes. In our juvenile, messianic arrogance, we didn't care that while we were having fun protesting, getting high, getting laid, our black and farm boy brothers in Vietnam were writing things on their helmets like
WE ARE THE UNWILLING, LED BY THE UNQUALIFIED, DOING THE UNNECESSARY, FOR THE UNGRATEFUL
.

We were feverishly proud of being part of a political movement—The Movement—but even our politics were intertwined with sex. “The sexual and the political are one,” Bernardine Dohrn, one of the leaders of the Weatherpeople said, and her words came from the horse's mouth. Because while the media vamped Jane Fonda as the sex symbol of our revolution, we knew that was crap. Jane was a movie star, a movement public-relations commando. Our pinup girl, our real babe in bandoliers, was Bernardine, leading her troops in what she called “Wargasms.” As another Weatherpeople guerrilla, Mark Rudd, said, “Power doesn't flow out of the barrel of a gun; power flows out of Bernardine's cunt.”

She was twenty-six years old, tall, long-legged, tanned, brown-eyed, voluptuous. She was pouty, in-your-face sensuous. All the men I knew in the sixties and early seventies dreamed of “getting it on” with Bernardine. She appeared on protest stages in front of tie-dyed seas wearing a brown minijumpsuit with thigh-high Florentine leather boots; barefoot in a tight miniskirt, her shirt open to her navel; in a purple skirt with a tight orange sweater with buttons that said
CUNNILINGUS IS COOL, FELLATIO IS FUN
; in hip-hugging jeans and a sheer low-cut top, her hair dyed the color of Ho Chi Minh's flag; in a black motorcycle helmet and tear-gas gloves, playing with a steel pipe the way Mick played with his mike. She staged formal Weatherpeople orgies we were all
dying
to be invited to. She was our clenched-fist, red-hot Fidelista, who took a breast out one day as a man was looking at it and said, “You like this tit? Take it.” Bernardine was our own sweet thing, our own pink shot, the sex bomb who called herself “a crazy motherfucker” and said she wanted to “scare the shit out of honky America.”

We were a counterculture, an America within Amerika, arrogant, self-righteous, even jingoistic about our values, heroes, and music. “I Can't Get No Satisfaction” was our “Battle Hymn of the Republic”; “Sympathy for the Devil” our “Star-Spangled Banner”; Woodstock our D day; Altamont our Pearl Harbor; Dylan our Elvis; Tim Leary our Einstein; Che Guevara our Patrick Henry.

We did not have “our” Richard Nixon. It was a shared faith among us that our generation, committed to letting it all hang out, to the truth setting us free, would never produce a Richard Nixon, a president who would look us in the eye, jab his finger in our faces, and lie.

Yeah, there were a lot of us—
a whole lot of us
—and the Night Creature knew we were a lot of trouble and turned his worm-encrusted ghouls loose on us . . . Ulasciewicz and Segretti and Liddy and Hunt and Haldeman and Ehrlichman . . . and the cross-dressing, sanctimonious pedophile, J. Edgar Hoover. The Night Creature gave frenzied, polarizing speeches (written by Pat Buchanan and William Safire), whetting the living dead's appetite for blood—
our
blood—shed by police batons and billy clubs and National Guardsmen, until they finally shot and killed four of us at Kent State. But it was all starting to come apart by then; Nixon had lived and been resurrected, thanks to his lies, and he was about to die (once again) as a result of them.

Hillary, God bless her, was in the front lines, working for the House Impeachment Committee, working endless hours, helping put together the case that would drive him from office. The Night Creature's own tapes drove the stake through his heart. Not only did they confirm his role in the Watergate cover-up but they showed America that the Oval Office had become the Night Creature's rat's nest—a place of filth and dead fingernails and foul-smelling wetness. It was Barry Goldwater, in poetic justice, who pushed the stake the final inch into the Night Creature's black heart by telling him he'd be impeached if he didn't resign and by saying he was going to vote for impeachment himself. (By the nineties, Barry was firmly on our side, saying, “Jesse Helms is off his rocker,” referring to Ronald Reagan as “just an actor,” and warning, “The Religious Right scares the hell out of me.” In 1994, he was named “Civil Libertarian of the Year” by the Arizona ACLU for his support of the constitutional rights of gays and lesbians and his commitment to the reproductive rights of women.)

Driving a stake through the Night Creature's heart was such sweet revenge! They had taken JFK from us and then Martin and Bobby . . . and the Night Creature had come out of his darkness and now we'd cast him back there where he belonged. Thanks to the efforts of Hillary and Barry and millions of us who'd united to throw this “four-square liar” out of office. At the moment of his resignation, I had sat in an office at
Rolling Stone
, with the entire staff there, undrugged for once, watching the Night Creature on TV flipping us his final V-for-victory fingers. Across from me sat a young intern who'd bought champagne for everyone. Bobby Shriver was JFK's nephew, and as he watched the set, he had tears streaming down his face. I started to cry, too, as I watched Bobby.

I saw Richard Nixon in 1993, months before he died, in the dining room of the Ritz-Carlton hotel in Laguna Niguel, California. He was dining with friends at a table not far from us and I watched him as he ate.

I had met him once before, as a young reporter covering a campaign stop he was making in the lily white Cleveland suburb of Fairview Park in 1968. He was on remote control that day at a press conference, his eyes dead, until I asked him if he knew that Denny McLain of the Detroit Tigers had just won his thirtieth game. Nixon came briefly alive, asking about the score and the number of McLain's strikeouts, the frozen smile replaced by something faintly human. “I'm a big Denny McLain fan,” he said. Neither of us knew that day in 1968 that McLain would wind up in jail for pimping and gambling and that Nixon would escape jail only thanks to Gerry Ford's kamikaze pardon. The day his pardon was announced, I was waiting for Evel Knievel, yet another goon, to rocket across the Snake River in Idaho . . . and when word of the Night Creature's pardon worked its way through the unwashed, longhaired, outlaw crowd, a bit of the old ultraviolence infected the boys: Windows were broken, bonfires lit, teeth smashed out, and women stripped and held high at the edge of the abyss-fronting cliffs so they could watch Knievel fly. Evil was in the air the day Evel crashed.

As I watched Richard Nixon in the dining room of the Ritz-Carlton in 1993, so many years later, he looked feeble, beaten, and old. I was wearing a sport coat and a T-shirt and tight black women's leotards stuck into my cowboy boots. Jeans were outlawed in the dining room and I had no other pants to wear, so my wife had lent me one of her leotards. As Nixon passed us on the way out, I got up and shook his hand and wished him well. Maybe it was my way of making personal peace with the Night Creature as he approached his final and unnegotiable grave. But Nixon just kept staring at my wife's tight black leotards on my burly frame and made the kind of empty pleasantries he's probably still making in hell.

After Nixon left, I reflected that maybe that's why I'd
really
gotten up to shake his hand . . . a final act of protest for his weary eyes:
Yeah! Dig it, Dick! This is what happened to your America . . . . It's a place where men wear cowboy boots and leotards.

[7]

The President Shrieks and Shouts

“You know,” Linda Tripp said, “I wouldn't mind seeing him have to admit in public that he has a problem.”

“My God, I'd die,” Monica said.

T
here was a chancre growing on the presidency, growing daily. Gone was—sure as hell!—any hope for an eternal flame. Gone were the William Jefferson Clinton postage stamp and his beet red mug on future ten-dollar bills. Gone were the USS
Clinton
and the Clinton F-54 bomber and Clinton freeways and boulevards, national airports, promenades and malls. Gone were the William Jefferson Clinton Pavilion in LA and the Clinton Memorial Tower in New York. Gone was the Nobel Peace Prize, although, thanks to Jann Wenner, he probably still had a shot at the Rock and Roll Hall of Fame in Cleveland.

His contributions to America would be overshadowed now by his contributions to the English language: “to Clinton”—to parse and lie skillfully; “to get a Clinton”—to receive fellatio. His finger-pointing television denial would be as famous as the Zapruder film. Hugging Monica in her beret would get as many laughs as the Tonya Harding and Jeff Gillooly honeymoon video.

It was an extraordinarily painful way for a man to step on his own willard. He'd been the Comeback Kid since the day in high school when, forgetting about a science project due that morning, he'd bought a hot dog and a piece of tin and put them out in the sun. Presto! A solar hot dog cooker. But what could the Comeback Kid do now to get out of this one? Could he . . .

Stonewall? Make a Checkers speech? Claim it was executive privilege? Borrow Ted Kennedy's Chappaquiddick neck brace? Hide behind Betty Currie the way Nixon hid behind Rose Mary Woods? Crawl into a bottle like Joe McCarthy? Get electroshock like Thomas Eagleton? Decompose like Ed Muskie? Blame it on Addison's disease? Boo-hoo like Jimmy Swaggart? Impregnate Hillary? Go down on Patricia Ireland? Dahmer Linda Tripp? Kopechne Paula Jones? Ned Beatty Kenneth W. Starr? Defenestrate Helen Thomas? Horsewhip Maureen Dowd? Deep-six his copy of Vox? Move to Paraguay? Move to Malibu? Stop hanging out with Sharon, Barbra, and Eleanor? Put a sweater on and try a fireside chat? Flagellate himself in Times Square?
Cut it off
?

If all that wasn't bad enough, that dumb, miserable Paula Jones, turned out now by the right-wingers covering her legal costs, said she could describe “distinguishing characteristics” about Willard.

He'd be out there raising money to build a better America, gushing charisma, and he'd see people looking at him . . .
funny
. He knew they were thinking about Willard. Was Willard too small, like Hitler's? A pencil? A knockwurst? A thimble? A mushroom? A horseradish? An olive? It wasn't fair! He was giving his constituents words and policies they could rock on and they were looking at his willard! (It was as though his fly had been permanently unzipped by the headlines. Would he, for the rest of his life, be permanently looking down, checking it?) Lyndon Johnson had scrotal skin hanging halfway to his knees and no one knew about
that!
No one was looking at LBJ's willard.

His own lawyer, Bob Bennett, that self-righteous prig Bill's brother, started talking to his Hot Springs buddies, his oldest friends, guys he'd been in high school gyms with, asking them about Willard, saying if Jones really knew something known only to those who'd been healed, blessed, ministered to . . . Bennett almost went into a rest room with him once but chickened out at the last minute. Well, at least Bennett didn't go to Hillary to ask if she faintly remembered anything that was . . .

No, Bennett went to his doctors, former and present, and they swore out affidavits that Willard was just fine, thank you. Bennett told him he had to see the Obi-Wan Kenobi of willards, the urologist who'd studied Reagan's and Bush's privates, and he had to sit there as this “unbiased Republican expert” poked and pulled and squeezed. But even
that
wasn't enough! Jones's lawyers said what if . . . what if . . . whatever Jones saw appeared only when Willard was erect? There was talk he'd have to sit there in front of Obi-Wan Kenobi teasing Willard until he stood up to his full, proud, and hungry height. But at least Bennett, aware of what he called “the ugh factor” here, finally didn't allow that. Bill Clinton remembered Al Gore's words: “A moral compass should always point north,” and knew that was a good part of his problem. Willard had always pointed north, north of the North Pole.

It was a sixties problem once again, a problem the men of my generation had struggled with now for thirty years. We were always so . . . into . . . our willards. For many years, before women saw through our self-obsessed, preening nonsense—it was more than thirty years before John Wayne Bobbitt's was sliced off by his wife—we acted like we were saving the world with our willards. But instead of saving the world, we got into a lot of trouble. Women got tired of hearing about how many women the Kielbasa Man—Wilt Chamberlain (twenty thousand)—or Warren Beatty or JFK or Mick had used . . . and they got justifiably pissed off.

Truth was, we just
had
to give our willard room, dangle it out there, and stick it into
something
. Maybe we were suffering from Clara Bow syndrome, the inability to say no in any sexual situation (Clara couldn't say no to the USC football team). Maybe it was erotomania or some form of priapism. It got hard. It made us uncomfortable. It had to be softened . . . by anybody and everybody. Some of us, even those of us with high public profiles, had had a difficult time with our . . .
condition
. Geraldo Rivera's description of himself fit many of us: “a grunting, voracious pig in heat.”

I saw Michael Douglas, whom I'd previously met, in the bar of the Westwood Marquis, shit-faced, sitting next to, and all
over
, a sultry, nymphet-like sex bomb. I finally went up to Michael from across the bar and said, “Hey, Michael, man, get a room!” And he laughed and did. A few years later, Michael's wife walked in on him at the Regent Beverly Wilshire, while Michael was in frenzied flagrante delicto with his wife's best friend, and his wife left him. Michael checked himself into an addiction clinic in Arizona and got up in front of the group and said, “I am a sexaholic” and confessed everything—all the way back to admiring Kirk, one of the greatest swordsmen of all time. (One of his fellow addicts taped the confession and sold it to the tabloids.)

I saw Jeff Bridges, the compleat sixties guy, on the
Jagged Edge
set, begging to do the first scene of the movie himself, the scene where a naked woman is tied to the bed and murdered by a ski-masked figure. “Jeff,” the director told him. “You're in a ski mask. You don't have to do this scene yourself; your stand-in can do it.” But Jeff did it himself, six times, over and over, insisting on doing it “till we get it right.”

And I saw the penultimate sixties marriage blow up, the countercultural royal couple in Splitsville, over that damn zipper. Jane Fonda was a ballsy and stunningly beautiful woman, and Tom Hayden was a ballsy, if geeky-looking, man, the former head of Students for a Democratic Society, author of the Port Huron Statement, our generation's call to arms, one of the Chicago Eight, our Magnificent Seven. And Hayden, the putz, the pimply-faced shanty Irish putz, with Jane Fonda in his bed, still couldn't keep it zipped. It was like cheating on the holy grail of female sexuality, grabbing for the brass ass when you were already king of the world. But he grabbed anyway, and Jane left him, forced by California's divorce laws to pay tens of millions of dollars to this idiot who'd wronged her.

As we headed toward the millennium, sixties men had been made to feel like the pigs we often were. The truth was that in the battle between the sexes, many of us were war criminals.
Cocksman
became a pejorative word, though a lot of men were still playing the same old self-centered, sexually abusive game. They weren't talking anymore, though, about banging their brains out and moving on to the next piece of tail. They were wiser now, and more one-on-one sensitivity-savvy. They were talking about “failure to communicate” . . . “lack of commitment” . . . “emotional fatigue” . . . before they moved on to the next piece of tail. They kept cutesy stuffed animals in their bedrooms to demonstrate their own nonmacho and cuddly natures . . . and to disarm suspicious, liberated soon-to-be victims.

Bill Clinton had learned that new language, too. Even while he was still using Monica as a sex toy—not her lips anymore, but her voice, in two-hour marathon phone sex—he bought her gifts: a stuffed animal, joke sunglasses, a small box of chocolates. He even let her play with his new puppy, Buddy, now that she wasn't playing directly with him, only indirectly over the phone. He wasn't one of those abusive sixties men anymore. He didn't just tell Monica to get down on her knees. She meant something to him—at least a small box of chocolates. And then, naturally, when he got bored with her, when he started entertaining thoughts of Eleanor Mondale maybe—the daughter of the former vice president was certainly safer and prettier than Monica, whom Vernon Jordan, a man with a keen eye for horse flesh, dismissed as “flaky and chubby”—the breakup with Monica would be in civilized nineties terms—in this case, using the world's oldest June/December dismissal: I'm too old for you, sweetheart, I'll be peeing twenty times a day and you'll still be beautiful. (What could he say—
flaky and chubby
?)

The end of another tragic romance in the nineties, weepy and touchy-feely, as the non-cocksman gives her one last “Christmas kiss” in the cramped porn-cubicle that was the hallway between the Oval Office and his private one. Goodbye, Monica, we had fun, I'll think about you forever, and one night maybe at two fifteen (with Willard) I'll call you, kiddo (wink wink, oink oink).

Everything, Bill Clinton was old enough to know, had a silver lining. Nineteen sixty-eight, for example, was the worst year—Martin and Bobby and Nixon's election, but still . . . it was the year McDonald's put the Big Mac on its menu.
But where was the damn silver lining here
?

What he felt like doing, he told his chief of staff, Leon Panetta, was punching Kenneth W. Starr in the gut. The preacher's son had turned on an evil, roving spotlight and it had gotten stuck right on his willard. If Reagan was Teflon, then Willard was Velcro.

Bill Clinton was over-the-top enraged about what he aptly called the “drip, drip, drip” from all of this. He wanted to take a swing at somebody the way he'd almost swung at Dick Morris after tackling and knocking him down during the governor's race in Arkansas. He found himself smashing the sides of his chairs while talking to aides, shouting, screaming, shrieking (an aide's description).
Goddamn these son of a bitch, right-wing motherfuckers, grouped around the windows of the Texas School Book Depository!

What about Ronald Reagan? Why didn't anybody talk about
his
damn sexual habits? The father of family values? Reagan told his biographer, Edmund Morris, about all those groupies when he was an actor: “They tore at his clothes, beat on his hotel room door.” He admitted to Morris that when he was an actor, he slept with so many women that one morning he woke up and didn't know who was lying next to him. He didn't tell Morris that even as a young man, he could sometimes have used some of Bob Dole's Viagra. Starlet Jacqueline Parks said, “He really couldn't perform sexually.” Former girlfriend Doris Lilly said, “Intimately, he was nothing memorable.” Ex-wife Jane Wyman put it bluntly: “He was lousy in bed.” The problem seemingly was an old one. Army buddies remembered how Reagan liked to tell gross, embarrassing X-rated jokes in front of women, prompting one woman to tell him finally, “What's the problem, Ronnie? Don't you fuck too good?”

There was even a lot of talk about Nancy Reagan. Had she really gotten her movie parts by sleeping with the head of casting at MGM? Was it possible that in her youth the Ice Queen was a Hollywood bimbo? Did she really entertain the dirtiest old man, Frank Sinatra, who liked to eat eggs sunny-side up off of hookers' breasts, in the White House? During three-hour, do-not-disturb “lunches”? Spencer Tracy, who knew her as an actress, didn't think so. “She projected all the passion of a Good Humor ice cream,” Tracy said. “Frozen, on a stick, and vanilla.”

What about the Reagan
administration
? All those hypocritical, pharisee Republicans seemed to have forgotten their own dirty, juicy sex scandal! Never mind the blow jobs and the cigar and the whacking, this one involved genuinely Republican kinks. Beating women with belts, riding them bareback, and drooling. All done by Alfred Bloomingdale, Reagan's close friend and adviser and heir to the department store fortune. Vicki Morgan was seventeen years old when she first catered to Alfred's needs. Alfred was fifty-seven. “There were two women who were nude,” she said, “and I was told to take my clothes off and Alfred was already taking his off. He asked one of the girls to get the equipment, which was Alfred's belt, the ties he wore around his neck and, excuse me, a dildo. He then proceeded to have everyone line up against the wall and beat them with his belt . . . . He'd have these girls crawl on the floor and he would sit on their backs . . . and drool, okay? I mean, he'd drool!”
These hypocritical, pharisee Republicans!
Even Dan Quayle was alleged to have had sex with a lobbyist. His wife, Marilyn, defended him by saying, “Dan would rather play golf than have sex any day.”

Jesse Helms, that evil, poisonous troglodyte, was behind it all! The three-judge panel that had appointed Starr was headed by Judge David Sentelle, whose “rabbi” (a word Helms didn't prefer) was Helms. Bill Clinton felt like biting someone's lip off! His mood was even transmitted to the public by his press secretary, Mike McCurry, who, after columnist William Safire called Hillary a “congenital liar,” said that if Bill Clinton weren't president, he'd make a comment “to the bridge of Safire's nose” . . . invoking badly needed positive images of good old nonphilandering, all-American Harry Truman, who'd once threatened to punch out a reporter for criticizing the quality of his daughter's piano playing.