American Rhapsody (6 page)

[4]

America Gags, Hollywood Swallows

“Hey, there's a Barbara Walters interview with Barbra Streisand and James Brolin tonight,” Linda Tripp said.

“Oy,” Monica said. “I hate her! She's so annoying!”

“She gets prettier as she gets older.”

“Yeah. What do you think that's from?” Monica said. “Plastic surgery. She's probably had everything done but her nose.”

T
he only place where I'd ever seen a cigar inserted in related fashion was in grandly decadent movie producer Robert Evans's mink-rugged bedroom. And even in Bob's inner chamber of horrifying pleasure, it wasn't in real life; it was in a photograph up on the wall: a voluptuous young woman, one of Bob's collectible queen bees, stark naked, on her hands and knees, an English bowler on her head and a lighted cigar sticking out of her magnificent upraised behind. I had no idea whether Evans, or the photographer, Helmut Newton, finished smoking the cigar after the picture was taken, or if the young woman finished smoking it in her own special way.

I did know that as far as the Clinton-inserted cigar was concerned—now the most famous cigar in world history, more famous than JFK's, more famous than all of Winston's—I'd heard no one raise the basic policy-wonk questions: Was it a Cuban cigar and therefore an Oval Office violation of the president's own Cuban embargo? Was it good battle judgment for the president to have a cigar in the Oval Office even as the big guns were blazing in America's war on big tobacco? No one wanted to know about the cigar, and the truth was, there were reasons to pretend it didn't exist, reasons that went deeper than parental need to avoid Pay-Per-View, Howard Stern dialogue at the dinner table.

We were the free-speech generation of the sixties, the generation of free love and communal sex, of one-night stands and no guilt, of bedroom experimentation and athletics, of laughing condescendingly at our poor parents, copulating away once a week, doing the old in-out, in-out, in the same boring missionary position. Dad grunted a few times and came too fast; mom lay there staring at the ceiling, doing her duty and thinking about tomorrow's discount on pork chops at the A&P; and foreplay consisted of a few sticky kisses and a dab of the K-Y jelly that was kept in the nightstand (mom applied it).

All that was true . . . many years ago. But now we were moms and dads ourselves and it scared the freaking bejesus out of us that our kids would act the same wild and crazy way we had acted in bed. We were shaping a better America, and our definition didn't include the things we had done in our youth: Wesson oil parties and body painting and stunt sex and drugs. We had gotten off in a thousand kinky ways, rubbing our privates red-raw, and we didn't want our kids acting like that in a better America. We loved our kids and wanted the best for them: We wanted them to be not like us, but like our parents, like grandpa and grandma sitting watching the sunset after fifty years of mostly monogamous marriage, talking about that long-ago, misty senior prom as they sipped their warming his and hers mugs of tea and honey.

We had read Bukowski and Kerouac and Henry Miller when we were our kids' age, but now we wanted them to read Tom Clancy and Tom Brokaw, or if they really wanted to go out there, then maybe Stephen King. Nothing too graphic, nothing too sexual, nothing that would jangle our kids' ganglia and innards so they'd wind up like some of us, on Prozac and hostage to shrinks.

We had seen movies like
A Clockwork Orange
and
El Topo
and
Mean Streets
, movies that had purposely diddled with our heads, and we sure didn't want our kids' heads diddled with like that. Some of our generation, who became our most important movie critics, like Janet Maslin of the
New York Times
and Kenneth Turan of the
Los Angeles Times
,
crusaded
against movies with foul language, movies that were “vulgar” and “dispiriting,” campaigning for Jane Austen and Dickens and Shakespeare and Merchant and Ivory. (Some filmmakers were angry about what they called “the New Puritanism.” “Sometimes I have an overwhelming temptation to grab one of those critics by the throat, head-butt them, and leave them bleeding in the corner,” said English director Mike Figgis.) When we weren't creating our own personal, unfilmed porn movies in the sixties, we were watching the Mitchell brothers or Linda Lovelace or Marilyn Chambers or Ralph Bakshi, but we were terrified now about what our kids were watching as they surfed the Net.

And now, suddenly, to have all this hedonistic sixties stuff, the cigar, the blow jobs, the whacking, plopped down on the kitchen table at dinner—by the man we'd voted for, by the man who shared our vision of a better America—we didn't want any part of it. We didn't want to hear it; we didn't want to see it. Period! We were not nostalgic, at least not publicly, about those good old days of excess. Many of us, now Little League coaches and soccer moms, were downright ashamed. How could we possibly have acted like such little pigs and little sluts? Well, our kids—Dylan and Caitlin and Sky and Montana—weren't going to act that way. We'd make good and damn sure of that, even if it meant blocking out what our president was very publicly teaching our kids.

Perhaps the masturbation part wasn't that bad, if you had pubescents. We weren't like mom and dad, who told us that if we did it, hair would grow on our palms and we'd go blind. We told our kids that masturbation was just fine, dear, that everybody did it, even mom and dad. Now we could expand and strengthen the argument. Everybody did it, dear, even the president. See? He didn't have any hair on his palms. So there was something nearly positive there, something almost role model–like in what Bill Clinton did. His habit might ease our kids' guilts. Though, hopefully, none of our kids would ask, “Am I still going to be doing it, Mom, when I'm as old as the president?” Or “How old are you, Dad? Do you still do it?”

Another reason why America didn't want to deal with these black billows of toxic smoke from this historic cigar was because—of all the bizarre, cockamamy things you could ever imagine—Gloria Steinem and Jerry Falwell had climbed into bed together! The oddest mating, certainly, since Mick and David Bowie, since Portnoy and his piece of liver, since Marilyn Manson removed his rib to mate with himself. Gloria, always the hotchacha of the women's movement, classy and iconlike, and the Reverend Jerry Falwell, with his triple spare tires, his oleaginous smile, and his lechery for our Lord and Savior. But they were joined together on one issue: what they viewed as porn. As far as Steinem was concerned, it demeaned women. As far as Falwell was concerned, it was a sin and we'd burn in hell.

The Left and the Right had intertwined and the combined force of their moral fervor, their propagandists, and their media fellow travelers had already had a palpable, chilling effect on the motion picture and television industries. Those writers and directors who liked pushing the sexual envelope and who enjoyed being in battle with the Reverend Jerry Falwell and the Reverend Donald Wildmon and the army of Reverend Others found themselves coldcocked, not by the Right, but by the Left, by liberal editorialists of their own generation, who called them not free-speech warriors pitted against the armies of narrowness and night, but sleaze meisters and pornographers exploiting women for financial gain. In other words, sinners just like the Reverend Jerry Falwell said, but not sinners who would go to hell and burn.

Sinners whose movies would be picketed by angry women at the box office. The Reverend Donald Wildmon didn't even have to go out there with his placards. He could rest up at home, preparing next Sunday's fire-and-brimstone serving, while all those liberal, posthippie women did his job for him.

The climate for graphic and even not-so-graphic sex was so frosty—at the exact moment America caught its first suspicious sniffs of the Oval Office cigar—that Hollywood actors who'd become stars by playing sexpot parts—Sharon Stone in
Basic Instinct
, Julia Roberts in
Mystic Pizza
, Annette Bening in
The Grifters
—were now putting “no nudity” clauses in their contracts, cutting their hair, dressing like Russian apparatchiks, and making themselves look as sexually unappetizing as they possibly could on-screen, thereby flooding the market with an awful lot of box-office clinkers. Stone even took it a step further: She told the world she'd found Jesus at Cecil Williams's Glide Memorial Church in San Francisco. But it was possible Stone had good reason to take it further and find Jesus. Of the three, only Stone had showed the world her pubic hair.

Refusing to smell the smoke from Bill Clinton's cigar was symptomatic of something else, too. There seemed to be a tendency among many in our generation to want to sanitize, cosmeticize, and pasteurize life, to put a rosy spin on daily existence, to pretend some things didn't exist or happen. The attitude smacked of the kind of narrowness we were victims of in the sixties, when we were accused of un-Americanism.
AMERICA
, the bumper stickers said back then,
LOVE IT OR LEAVE IT
.

I thought I heard echoes of that from the former victims, who were now crucifying Kenneth W. Starr for his report, who were now objecting to vulgar language and sex and violence on the big and little screens. Never mind that tens of millions of Americans often used vulgar language or that violence was rampant or that folks were having sex—some people in our generation didn't want to hear about that any more than they wanted to hear Public Enemy or Snoop Doggy Dogg. They wanted to hear Yanni or music made by mating whales or the
Beatles Anthology
. They wanted to see movies that were touchy-feely and gauze-lit. They wanted to see Spielberg, not Spike Lee, and they absolutely did not want to hear that Hillary used the word
fuck
more times in one paragraph during meetings with the White House policy wonks than any president, including LBJ (who should have had the word, his favorite, on his tombstone).

And they absolutely
did not, did not, did not
want to hear about the cigar. Smoking was too sore a subject anyway—the only thing some of us liked about Kevin Costner's woefully awful
Waterworld
was that the scuzzball, low-life bad guys were called “the Smokers.” Releasing the
Starr Report
in this climate was like reading parts of Henry Miller, Terry Southern, Iceberg Slim, and Luther Campbell to the residents of a nunnery.

While the rest of America didn't want to sniff the cigar, Hollywood, it seemed, wanted to sniff it, lick it, inhale it, ingest it, digest it, and take a stool sample. This was the biggest Hollywood news (although no one said anything publicly, of course, of course, of course) since Ovitz left CAA . . . since they almost killed Lew Wasserman at Cedars . . . since Hugh Grant and Eddie Murphy got in trouble with
their
blow jobs.

While it was the greatest dish, Hollywood wasn't
shocked
by any of it. Hollywood, as someone said, had always been a big beautiful blonde with soiled underwear. I had heard most of the stories during a quarter century of screenwriting, told with the kind of booster's pride you might find at a place like the City Club in Kansas City. But these stories weren't Kansas City stuff; they were the windswept legendary grime that had encrusted in the cracks of the gleaming marble stars along Hollywood Boulevard.

Hollywood was the kind of place that appreciated the honesty of Bugsy Siegel's mistress, Virginia Hill, who said, “Hey, I'm the best damn fuck in town and I've got the diamonds to prove it.” Bill Clinton's excesses were
bupkes
compared with those of Marlon Brando, who decorated walls with his old girlfriends' Tampax and collected stool samples from his visitors while living on his private Fijian island . . . Robert Mitchum, who defecated on Harry Cohn's white rug during a contract dispute and bent over and passed gas into the face of a passenger who asked him not to smoke on an airplane . . . Errol Flynn, who unzipped his willard at parties and played the piano with it, who walked over to the house of his next-door neighbor, gossip columnist Hedda Hopper, and masturbated on it.

A blow job in the White House from a Beverly Hills airhead who looked and talked like a Valley Girl—oh, mama, the whole thing was s-o-o-o Hollywood!
Hollywood was Blow Job City, an industry historically identified with this particular act. What did Marilyn Monroe tell the press when she signed her first studio contract? She said, “This means I'll never have to suck another cock in this town again.”

Way back in the pioneer days, the old guys, Cohn and Goldwyn and Zanuck and Thalberg, the founding fathers—all those cigar smokers—they'd have a nice lunch at the Brown Derby or Musso's or, later, Scandia . . . and maybe they'd take a little steam after . . . and they'd go back to the office and light up a cigar while they got their . . .
manicure
. A nice little after-lunch, after-steam, during-cigar . . . manicure. The manicure girls knew what they were doing. They knew how to do it so it didn't have to take too long. Beautiful young girls from the Valley (the best manicure girls were always from the Valley and always in demand), down there under the desk, so if the secretary or the wife walked in, she didn't even see her.

It was the perfect activity, this manicure—not too much exertion after a rich meal and all that hot steam; the ticker wouldn't stress. It was the perfect position, too, for a man of power, a titan, a founding father to enjoy. Down on her knees, her skirt hiked up, panties pulled down, taking it happily in her mouth, the same kind of well-kept mouth with which their PMSing, high-maintenance wives had driven them nuts for years. There was something satisfying, too, to the titans in the gagging and the swallowing. The highest paid Valley Girls always swallowed. Then they left and the titans finished their cigars and closed some important, boffo deals.