American Rhapsody (21 page)

Hollywood's belief in civil liberties, even sexual privacy, also occasionally broke down. In 1983, when I was writing the movie
Jagged Edge,
my producer was the venerable wild rhino of the business, Martin Ransohoff, tough, smart, no one to trifle with. The studio executive in charge of the project was Craig Baumgarten, who had produced and starred in a porn movie in the seventies. When Ransohoff had a disagreement with Baumgarten and felt Baumgarten wasn't treating him with enough respect, he asked me to intervene and warn Baumgarten that he knew about the porn movie. I warned him, but Baumgarten, young and brash, disregarded my warning. A tape of the porn movie soon made its way to one of the members of the board of Columbia Pictures. Fired days later, Baumgarten sobbed in shocked disbelief.

The studio that fired Baumgarten was then owned by the Coca-Cola company, whose presence in three of America's greatest scandals would be noted by observers: Fatty Arbuckle used a Coca-Cola bottle to bludgeon his young victim internally; Judge Clarence Thomas, Anita Hill would claim, abused her by saying there was pubic hair on his can of diet Coke; Bill Clinton would alibi walking Monica from his Oval Office into his private study by telling his secretary he was going back there “to get her a diet Coke.” Coca-Cola, historians also noted, was the cola company of liberal Democrats. Pepsi mostly supported Republicans, especially Richard Nixon, who, true to his deceitful nature, privately drank diet Coke.

While there were occasionally ugly and decidedly unliberal actions, such as Baumgarten's firing, the town followed Hillary's lead and got deeply into New Age psychobabble. Even Hillary's maharishi, Michael Lerner, was invited to a few studio seminars. “Facilitators” became regulars at industry retreats, summoning positive energy like rainmakers.

Superagent Arnold Rifkin was hanging out with walk-on-fiery-coals guru Tony Robbins. Producers Jon Peters and Peter Guber, breaking up their partnership, let it be known they were going to counseling
together.
(I was going through a divorce at the time. “Go to counseling with your ex,” Peters told me. “It won't do any good, but she'll think you care. It'll save you at least a million bucks.”)

The touchy-feely mood soon found its way to the screen, and when
Forrest Gump
turned into a smash, all the studios were suddenly looking for “spiritual” or “religious” stories. Sylvester Stallone strutted around my living room one afternoon, trying to talk me into writing a “deeply spiritual” script for him. For years, he said, he had wanted to make a book into a movie in which he'd play Jesus Christ. Now he had a better idea. He wanted to play a televangelist, a modern-day healer who performed miracles. We had a meeting with a roomful of executives at Universal. Sly stalked around the room, waving his arms, pretending to preach the words of the Lord. An executive said, “Guys, listen. Sly, you're a muscle star. Joe, you've just written
Showgirls.
Don't you think this is too harsh a transition for both of you?”

As more and more men on-screen were undergoing sensitivity training, more and more men in Hollywood offices were becoming the targets of sexual harassment suits. The wealthier and more powerful either went to court or made hasty midnight settlements. But some, including mid-level studio executives, were fired. A producer of my acquaintance was not only fired but also, fearing publicity, blackmailed to give up his points in upcoming movies.

Most heterosexual men quickly opted to hire only male assistants. A woman studio executive married to a director had seen so many sexual harassment suits and settlements that she forbid her husband to hire any women on his crew. It was a strategy spreading all over town. Even as that was happening, renowned feminists were spending time in Hollywood trying to make screenwriting or producing deals. Gloria Steinem and I spent a pleasant evening in my home discussing a movie about the young Marilyn Monroe.

As David Geffen watched the House Judiciary Committee hearings, there were deeply underground rumbles at Spago that Warren Beatty, the Mark McGwire of swordsmen, was considering a run for the presidency.

It was a numbing rumor. Here was Clinton, almost out of office for not even having intercourse, and here was Warren, the Hall of Famer, the sleepy-eyed human sex machine, with his eyes on the bestained Oval Office. Rumor was that Gary Hart
—Oh glory, glory hallelujah!—
was advising him. Rumor was that Pat Cadell, wanna-be screenwriter, was unofficially back in the polling business.

I could just hear the dialogue in Robert Evans's screening room, with the fireplace blazing and the Polaroids of naked women on the table . . . preening Warren and bitter Gary and addled Evans in his Bush White House baseball cap and grizzled Pat . . . and the redhead with the cigar in her butt bringing them Perriers as they discussed the ins and outs of seducing the body politic.

Not long after I saw David Geffen, he told reporters he was making House Judiciary Committee member James Rogan of California, a staunch pro-impeachment Republican, his “target number one” in the 2000 elections. David, I knew, had more money than God and was wilier than Satan, and I thought James Rogan would be well advised to beg David's forgiveness . . .
on his knees.

[3]

Ross Perot on Drugs

Monica said, “I'm like—‘I have a mental block on who you really are.' ”

“You never ever realized whose dick you were sucking,” Linda Tripp said.

“No. I know,” Monica said.

T
he calls for Bill Clinton's impeachment wouldn't cease, the rabid twin gorgons of Scandal and Ruin were running amok . . . and Ross Perot, who had twice come to his aid and made his minority presidency possible, came running in anger to help again. Perot, America's Tin Soldier, accused the president of the United States of doing drugs in the White House.

The charge helped move all of the other charges into the realm of the absurd. The cigar was surreal enough, the twenty-four-hour blow job television fiesta was bizarre enough . . . but
drugs in the White House
? Bill Clinton was now, it seemed, Tony Montana with his head in a silver platter of cocaine. Perot argued that the only way to explain Bill Clinton's recklessness, irresponsibility, and mendacity was to assume that he was on drugs. Perot's was the voice of Carry Nation come pip-squeaking back. Demon alcohol replaced by demon drugs.

We chuckled at the Tin Soldier's argument, but, at the same time, those of us who had truly
experienced
the sixties knew in our secret hearts that the comic book Tin Soldier probably had a tangential point . . . but it was a point most of us thought irrelevant. Marijuana and cocaine, our drugs of choice, didn't make you lie to the nation or make you unzip and say, “Kiss it” . . . though both drugs made the kissing part more enjoyable. Perot kept calling for the president to release his medical records—something other presidents had done—but we knew the reason why Bill Clinton refused. Many of us had damaged our septums through the years.

We knew about the rumors that Bill Clinton, while running for office in Arkansas, had been rushed to an emergency room one night OD'd on coke. Why release records that could be personally embarrassing (George Bush, no surprise, had hemorrhoids), or worse? (JFK, treated for gonorrhea, suffered his whole life from acute postgonococcal urethritis, an inflammation of the genitals that caused a burning sensation when urinating.)

We knew Bill Clinton had done the things we'd done. At Oxford as a student, he'd hung around smoky, pillow-strewn parlors, sipping tea and sherry with the young foxes, smoking hash and dope, trying to learn, as one of those foxes put it, to “inhale.” Old girlfriend Sally Perdue described him, as governor in 1983, offering her joints from a cigarette case and coke from a plastic bag. Gennifer described him offering her coke at her apartment before they climbed onto the black satin sheets on her king-size bed. At one of his Arkansas parties for his staff, an aide offered partygoers grass, hash, coke, pills, and syringes. It was a life many of us had learned to live all too well: candles, incense, black satin sheets, zebra drapes, grass, coke, and sex.

In the early eighties, Bubba was on a tear, as were many of us. He was tearing up Little Rock's bars, staying till late, watching the girls dance, never with Hillary, but often with Roger, his little half brother. Roger was snorting coke sixteen times a day and had a four-gram-a-day habit.

Roger was the kind of guy who lit up his own farts. His mother taught him to read from her
Racing Form.
Roger was a sulky loafer who'd grown up doing nothing much more than practicing his guitar, watching his hair grow in the mirror, psychedelic posters all around, and singing “Red Roses for a Blue Lady” to his mother.

Roger loved the man he always called “Big Brother,” and he was once videotaped snorting coke and saying, “He was like a father to me growing up, all my life, so that's why we've always been so close.” Roger and Big Brother were hanging out in the early eighties while Big Brother was governor, and Roger was living in his “Party Shack,” the guest house at the governor's mansion, and invading the mansion's kitchen late at night when he got the munchies.

He and Big Brother were often seen partying together: A waitress at a club called the Bistro later told a grand jury that she sold coke to Roger Clinton, who'd then hand the coke to Big Brother. She said she saw Bill Clinton snort cocaine “often” and described the night when the governor of Arkansas got so trashed that he slid down a wall and propped himself against a . . . trash can. The manager of an apartment house where Roger lived briefly said she overheard Roger and Big Brother discuss the quality of the cocaine they were doing. A hidden video camera picked Roger up one night as he was trying to score some coke. “Got to get some for my brother,” Roger said. “He's got a nose like a vacuum cleaner.”

But four grams of coke a day is a lot, a whole lot, a hellacious lot, and Roger's hunger started making him take big risks. He was a dealer now . . . at the same time that Bill Clinton's friends saw a strange listlessness, an unexplainable anomie ravage the governor, who was spending much of his time in the mansion's basement, playing his pinball machine.

Roger was flying up to New York with cocaine strapped to his body, accompanied on one trip by an allegedly unaware Big Brother. Roger was dealing coke on consignment from big-muthah dealers, and his convertible got ripped off one night with the coke inside. His suppliers wanted twenty grand pronto and threatened to kill him.

A later FBI investigation showed that Big Brother went to a business associate, himself later convicted of drug trafficking, and asked him to stash Roger for a while at his Florida farm. The feds were onto Roger by then, though, and he got two years at a federal prison in Texas (prosecuted by a man named Asa Hutchison, who would turn up many years later as a firebrand member of the House Judiciary Committee, calling for Big Brother's impeachment).

Big Brother sat in the courtroom as his little brother was sentenced, his nose red and a little runny. Afterward, on the courthouse steps, the governor of Arkansas, still emotional, said, “I feel more deeply committed than ever before to do everything I can to fight illegal drugs in our state.”

Well . . . okay . . . what the hell . . . so what? He wasn't doing smack, was he? He wasn't using a needle, was he? He wasn't nodding out down in the filth of some crack house, was he? (Although that business about sliding down a wall and propping himself against the trash can
was
a little disturbing.)

Cocaine that was snorted wasn't a slum drug; it was definitely white-collar, and maybe even still chic, the drug of choice for the hip and for Hollywood elite, the fabled drug of Sigmund Freud and Sherlock Holmes. Cocaine was our drug, the baby-boomer drug. (The Xers could keep Ecstasy, which put some of us, getting older, into the hospital.)

.  .  .  

As I listened to Ross Perot rant on, I remembered my own fling with cocaine in the seventies, while I was at
Rolling Stone,
which was a buzzing little beehive of cocaine activity. Whenever the dealers in town liked a story in the magazine, especially the stories I wrote exposing corrupt narcotics agents, they showed their appreciation by dropping off a few grams in the office.

I loved the freeing exhilaration cocaine provided, the unself-conscious babbling, and I found it to be the only effective aphrodisiac I'd ever tried. JFK's priapism was allegedly partly caused by the cortisone used to treat his Addison's disease (Bill Clinton took cortisone, too, for his sinuses and knees), but as far as I was concerned, cocaine was the greatest gift to men since the condom. My sexual partners mostly felt the same way—it caused the kind of fireworks that went on explosively and orgasmically for eight hours.

I discovered, though, that not everyone was affected this way. Hunter Thompson, whose breakfast those days consisted of two Bloody Marys, four lines of coke, and half a pack of cigarettes, told me it made him want to write. Jann Wenner told me cocaine made him able to edit Hunter's prose. I concluded that it seemed to energize us for whatever we most liked doing: David Felton, another editor at
Rolling Stone,
liked to talk . . . Hunter liked to write . . . Jann liked to edit . . . and I liked to have sex.

No doubt cocaine was dangerous: It could really mess you up. I watched another of our editors, Grover Lewis, in a bar one night, trying for fifteen minutes to get cigarettes out of a jukebox. Out one night with one of the
Rolling Stone
sweetmeats in a motel, I found myself unable to speak. I could form thoughts, I could perform sexually, but I couldn't form words for about ten hours (a doctor told me later that I'd suffered, at age twenty-eight, a ministroke).

Over the years, most of us who'd abused ourselves with coke stopped doing it. In my case, I was ministroked into it. In other cases, the daily toll of aging did it. But in most cases, the reason was our kids. We didn't want our kids to risk their own health and lives the way we'd risked ours. Some of us adopted Nancy Reagan's “Just Say No!” Others, perhaps knowing more realistically that the apple doesn't fall far from the tree, gave our kids, as they became teenagers, the benefit of our experience: Grass is okay; just make sure it isn't laced with anything, especially angel dust. Coke will burn your sinuses out and put you on Claritin forever. Smack is the monkey you'll never get off your back. Crack is as bad as smack; you'll wind up dead or in jail. Speed kills. Ecstasy can stop your heart. One tab of acid can lobotomize you forever.

And now here was Ross Perot telling us that the president of the United States, whose sinuses were screwed up and who was on Claritin, had a drug problem . . . in addition to his others. Bill Clinton, I was sure, was now as drug-free as I was, and I was immaculate (excepting, like Clinton, nicotine).

But as I listened to the Tin Soldier constantly hammer away at Bill Clinton as “our commander in chief,” I thought I knew what was
really
up Perot's craw: It wasn't the blow job or the cigar or the lying. It was the damned draft. Bill Clinton (and I) had successfully and sneakily dodged the damned draft. To the Tin Soldier, that was a hanging offense!