American Rhapsody (13 page)

Then that woeful pig-nosed woman came to us with her tapes. It was the final straw personally. First Packwood's diary, then Pookie's file, then Pookie's photographs, and now all this splendid new dreck! The ice-cold showers didn't work anymore. Alice didn't want to read Scripture anymore; she wanted to … I was now forced to contemplate the horror that took place in the Oval Office hallway and bathroom. Now I had to hear about fellatio and masturbation and that other heinous sin I can't even bring myself to discuss. On top of blindfolds, ropes, food, and ice. And that hideous netherworld cigar. I will never touch a cigar, let alone put it into my mouth, as long as I live.

I was overjoyed and in torment. I knew I had stumbled, thanks to this obscene pig-nosed woman, upon the means to slay POTUS. But at what price to myself? Could I download all this new imagery into my brain and survive—without, minimally, exhausting Alice unto death? I resolved to sacrifice myself and Alice. I would stay within my usual innocent demeanor—my smarminess, my baseball cap, my glasses, my Starbucks mug—while I destroyed him! Even if it meant my dreams and thoughts would be filled with French postcard orgies of sin. No one would know what I had sentenced myself to. No one would know the sacrifice I had made. No one would know that this once-decorous figure of judiciousness and responsibility had become as flesh-obsessed as POTUS.

No one knew, but some became suspicious after I issued my
Report
. Why was it filled with all those many explicit descriptions of sexual debauchery? Because POTUS was engaged in sexual debauchery, that's why. It had nothing to do with
me
. I was merely telling the truth, the whole truth, and nothing but the truth, so help me God. I didn't do those fiendish things;
he
did! I wasn't the degenerate;
he
was! I wasn't the pervert;
he
was! It was true, wasn't it? I didn't have any of those dreams or thoughts until Packwood and Pookie and POTUS forced their disgusting cigars inside me.

I stripped him naked, my Lord, and millions turned their faces away from him in disgust. Not as many millions as I'd hoped, but the idolaters of cool rallied to his side. We knew who'd come to his defense, didn't we? The Jews, the black rabble, and the Kennedys … the Ellen Degenerates, the Barney Fags. Never mind, it won't do him much good. POTUS will be impeached anyway—perhaps even removed—if I have to go to Congress and get it done myself. For all practical political purposes, I have accomplished what I set out to do. POTUS is naked and dead, my Lord. I have proven to myself that I am better than he. I am the nerd triumphant! The Church of Christ victorious over the Church of Cool!

I beg Your forgiveness for my thoughts and my dreams. I beg that I be cleansed. I loathe myself for sitting here at my computer in my basement watching the newest naked photographs of Pookie some sinner has posted on the Internet. I sit here rigidly,
but I have not abused myself! I have never cheated on my wife, Lord!

I hear Alice whimpering upstairs and I regret terribly that she saw me like this. But Alice will get over it. I'll beseech her forgiveness, I'll read from Your Scripture, and Alice and I will celebrate Your presence in our hearts and loins … as in my thoughts I recklessly explore Pookie's sinful flesh.

[10]

Sharon and Bill

“The You Know What of the You Know What found you awfully attractive,” Linda Tripp said.

“Big fucking deal!” Monica said. “He finds anybody attractive. I guarantee you that given the opportunity with anyone he'd let anyone suck his dick.”

C
atherine Tramell may have been the bang of the century in
Basic Instinct,
but that didn't mean Sharon Stone was. Or Bill Clinton, for that matter. Maybe that's why Sharon was so blasé about his presence when the president of the United States walked up behind her at that party. They knew each other already. He had rearranged
his
schedule so he could meet her in San Francisco. “He was really, really hot for her,” Dick Morris had said. “He has it bad for her.” The president of the United States talked to his golf course buddies a lot about his favorite Sharon Stone scene. Yup, it was
that
scene!
You
know! The one Sharon was now claiming she'd been tricked into doing. The one I'd written.

I felt a kind of bemused proprietary interest when I heard about the friendship between Sharon and Bill. I had created her. I had voted for him. Her career had gone nowhere until my screenplay made her a global star. Her accountants had fired her; even her agents had fired her. A producer who'd seen her at the Deauville Film Festival years before
Basic
told me, “She came knocking on my door at midnight. There's no way I'd let her in.” One of her former agents said, “We used to have a saying among us at the agency. Put Sharon in the room alone with the director and she'll close the deal.” She was so unpopular on movie sets that the crew of one of the clinkers she'd done before
Basic
urinated in a bathtub she was supposed to bathe in. Then she'd read my screenplay, fought to get the part, and the rest was Hollywood history. The greatest American sex symbol since Marilyn Monroe. Proof positive that Frank Capra was dead wrong when he said, “A nude girl is a nude girl, and that's that—and there is no way you can make a star out of a nude girl.”

She was Bill Clinton's ideal woman, the ripest of ripe peaches, apotheosis of the curvy beauty pageant blondes he's always favored—the same physical type as Dolly Kyle, his longtime mistress; as Cathy Cornelius, the young aide who accompanied him on so many government trips; as Kristy Zercher, the flight attendant he'd groped on the campaign plane; as Gennifer and Eleanor Mondale. And Sharon had a lot of Hillary in her, too. She was smart and direct, but not as crude. Those of us who knew Sharon could never imagine her saying, “I need to get fucked more than twice a year, Bill.” (It was also true that those of us who knew Sharon couldn't ever imagine her needing to say that.)

And then there was the JFK connection, too. Before he was governor or president or Handsome or the Creep or Butt-head—when he was still Bubba, the fat boy from Arkansas—Bill Clinton had shaken JFK's hand at the White House, and it had changed his life. He emulated JFK to the point where, like JFK, he never carried any money . . . where, like JFK, he changed his shirts three times a day . . . where, like JFK, he had a willard with a zany, serendipitous life of its own. (On the wall in his private office, above the spot where he liked Monica to kneel, was a portrait of JFK.) It was fitting, therefore, maybe even preordained, that if JFK, while he was the president of the United States, had been “really, really, hot” for Marilyn Monroe, the sex goddess of the New Frontier, then Bill Clinton would “have it bad” for Sharon, the sex goddess of the millennium.

Some people who knew her felt that Sharon was as much a politician as he. As many in Hollywood know, a star's career is a lifelong political campaign. Each new movie is an election. Stars have to be as image-conscious as politicians, one of the reasons stars choose heroic (noncomplex) roles, trying to swirl their character's heroism with their own persona, dressing themselves in their character's nobility and goodness. Sharon was especially challenged, since she'd ascended atop her star on the strength of her privates, but she'd handled the challenge well.

Thanks to some advice from Hollywood PR doyen Pat Kingsley,
her
Dick Morris, she'd outgrown her pubes. To begin with, Sharon said she didn't know what the director was doing when he'd gotten
that
shot, that she'd been “tricked”—forgetting that the shot had to be lighted, that the hair and makeup people were between her legs most of that morning. It was Sharon's way of saying that she didn't inhale. Then she hit the charity circuit, becoming a spokesperson for AIDS, reenacting the all-American tradition: Babe Ruth visiting sick kids, getting his picture taken. Then she stopped taking her clothes off on-camera, the result not only of image making but also of age. (“My ass hangs halfway down to my knees,” she told me during the making of
Sliver.
) Then she finally found Jesus, though I worried that it was like one of Jimmy Swaggart's sightings of the ever-fleeting Lord.

She tried to ignore, in the glorious zenith of her stardom, that she'd had only one hit movie—like Bill Clinton, who didn't dwell on the fact that he'd twice been elected as a minority president. There were those of Sharon's friends in Hollywood who worried that she'd wind up as one of those blowzy, loud, has-beens on
Hollywood Squares,
a professional celebrity like Zsa Zsa Gabor, looking a lot like Petula Clark. But then there were also Friends of Bill's who worried he'd wind up getting Steven's decaf each morning.

I remembered something Sharon had said to me late one night, both of us blitzed on Thai hash: “I crawled the hill of broken glass and I sucked and I sucked until I sucked the air right out of my life.” Perfect, I thought. Bill Clinton would like her—both for the ineffable Whitmanesque sadness of the thought and for the enticing promise of the action.

She'd like
him,
too, I knew. When we were casting
Sliver
and the studio wanted Billy Baldwin, she said, “He's a boy. Give me a man. Give me Alec. I'd let Alec throw me over a table anytime.” She'd be just right for Bill Clinton . . . slam-bang action . . . roaring down the road in Dolly Kyle's turquoise El Dorado convertible, swerving from lane to lane at a hundred miles an hour . . . or going for a walk with Dolly, tripping over a chaise longue on somebody's front lawn, pulling her onto the grass and stripping her with his teeth . . . or running into that groupie, Connie Hamzy, while he was the governor, the one who'd been with Mick Fleetwood and Huey Lewis and Keith Moon and Don Henley.
Hail, hail, rock and roll! Rock and roll is here to stay!

Such an unadulterated, glorious sixties moment (in 1984). He saw the groupie out by the pool from a hallway at the Little Rock Hilton. She was wearing a bikini. He sent one of his troopers to bring her inside. No small talk, no chitchat.
Alec Baldwin right over the table!
“I'd love to get with you,” he said. “Where can we go? Do you have a room here?” She had no room; she was just using the pool. He took her by the hand. He went up and down the hall, opening meeting room doors.
Damn! Goddamn!
Goddamn all these people!
All these people in all these meeting rooms!

He wanted to get with her so
bad.
“Where can we go?” he said to her. “Where can we go? Are any of the rooms open?
Where can we go
?” She told him to get an aide to book them a room. “I don't have time for that!” he said. He charged down another hallway, holding her hand, nuzzling her, feeling her breasts, sticking his hand inside her bikini, almost stumbling down the hallways now, trying doors in a vascular frenzy. A door opened! A laundry room . . .
there were more people in it! Damn! Damn!
She kissed him. He squeezed her breasts.
Damn!
He had a meeting!
Damn! Damn! Damn!
He said, “How can I get in touch with you?” She said, “I'm in the book.” He started to walk away down the hallway, turned back. She saw the bulge in his pants. “How long you gonna be by the pool?” he asked. She said, “All afternoon.” He was gone.

A wild man. Created for Sharon, I thought, who had a boulevard streak of craziness herself. Not long after
Basic
's release, we went out. I picked her up at her house off of Mulholland, overlooking the Valley. We smoked some of her Thai. She brought out two bottles of Cristal, and we wound up on the rug, crawling around her dollhouse. We got hungry and got into the limo and went to a chic Hollywood place to eat, stoned out of our minds. She had scampi sauce dripping down her chin. She looked at the other diners and said, “Who are those fuckers?” They were studio heads and producers and agents, all staring at us. We drank some more Cristal and got back in the limo and smoked some more Thai. We needed music.

Rock and roll!
We stopped at Virgin Records and she went running up the steps for James Brown, and then she was running down the steps, her arms wide, playing the diva, saying, “Where
were
you?” very loudly as everyone stared at these two ripped loonies. We paid and tried to leave. A security guard informed us we were trying to leave through the front plate-glass window. He led us to a door.

On the way back to her house, she said, “I wore these brown suede pants just for you. I knew you'd put your hand there.” We went back inside her house and watched the twinkling lights. We drank more Cristal and wound up on the rug next to the dollhouse again . . . and then I went back to my hotel, happy that I'd created her.

Right out of
Basic,
that dollhouse scene, I thought as I contemplated Sharon and Bill Clinton. He was a character from that movie, too. He was as jaded, and he even spoke like my Nick Curran: “I stuck it up their ass” (about Republicans) and “He's so stupid, he couldn't get a whore across the bridge” (about Ted Kennedy) and “You know why people go into politics, don't you? Because of their unsatisfied sexual desire” (about himself?) and “She can suck a tennis ball through a garden hose” (about Gennifer). (Hillary, on the other hand, seemed to belong not in
Basic
but in one of my later movies,
Showgirls.
“Where's the goddamn fucking flag?” she said to one of the state troopers in Arkansas. “Put the goddamn fucking flag up!”)

Unlike Hillary, I thought, whom he was calling “Hilla the Hun” and “the Warden” and “the Sarge,” Sharon would understand his kinks. If he wanted to get
down
at night, smoke a little dope, put her lace nightie on, and play Elvis on his sax, Sharon would be
down
with that. She'd also have her own Thai.

Thinking of kinks, I realized maybe Sharon and Hillary had more in common than being smart blondes. The director Wes Craven told me that Sharon had seduced his wife, Mimi, still one of Sharon's “best friends,” and stolen Mimi away from him. When Mimi's divorce from Wes was granted, Sharon had sent Wes a dozen dead roses. Those dead roses, I knew, symbolized Bill Clinton's greatest danger as far as any “meaningful relationship” with Sharon was concerned. Maybe she was his ideal woman, but Sharon was nobody to mess with, or mess around on.

Yes, she had a back rubs and herbal remedies, touchy-feely, warm and fuzzy side, but . . . she
was
the girl who went into the room and
closed the deal.
Paul Verhoeven, the director of
Basic,
said she
was
Catherine Tramell, the devil herself. This was a woman who, when she broke up with Dwight Yoakam, called him “a dirt sandwich,” who, when she broke up with producer Bill Macdonald, sent him his mother's heirloom engagement ring back by Federal Express.

She knew at least as much about power as Hillary, but Sharon's knowledge didn't come from committee meetings and 1930s agitprop primers. Sharon's knowledge of power was elemental, primal, learned in modeling sessions (at nineteen) and casting couches and in the back rooms of shadowy black-lighted discos in Milan and Buenos Aires. If Hillary was good with a scalpel and a lethal tongue in a boardroom, Sharon was good with an ice pick and a soft tongue on a couch. Sharon usually got what she wanted on a personal level. Hillary usually got what she wanted on a political level but, at least as far as Bill Clinton was concerned, turned into “Hilla the Hun” and “the Warden” and “the Sarge” on a personal one.

 . . .

I saw Sharon in action with the director Phillip Noyce as we were about to shoot
Sliver.
She thought Noyce was a disastrous choice to direct it. “He's a big goon,” she said. “He doesn't know anything about sex.” Phillip was a lumbering, talented Aussie who, exactly then, was trying to break a five-pack-a-day smoking habit.

As we approached the shoot, she zeroed in on a scene in the script and said it had to be changed. The scene described a woman masturbating in a tub while gazing at a Calvin Klein magazine ad. Sharon said a woman wouldn't masturbate that way. I'd written the scene, but I wasn't going to fight about it. “Fine,” I said to Sharon, “masturbate the way you want.” But Phillip decided to draw the line. He wanted her to masturbate as I'd written. He was
the director.
That was the point.

Sharon threatened to walk off the movie and forced a meeting with Noyce in my suite at the Four Seasons. She and I sat next to each other on the couch. Phillip sat on a chair facing us. Sweat streamed down his face and from under his armpits. He was wearing a boxy suit with a black T-shirt. He was pasty-faced, his nerve endings jangling from nicotine withdrawal.

Sharon wore a flimsy, classy white dress. I wore shorts and a tank top. Phillip started talking about the “visual importance” of including the Calvin Klein ad in the masturbation scene. “You don't know what you're talking about,” Sharon told Noyce. “It's a male fantasy; women don't do it that way.” Phillip kept insisting.