American Rhapsody (31 page)

At the end, the Night Creature, whose electoral loins spawned Packwood, was one of the few still defending him. “Packwood must be scared shitless,” Richard Nixon said, also describing Packwood as someone who could be “mean.” “If they force Packwood to resign, they should force Teddy Kennedy and everyone else with a problem to resign, which means we'll have almost no Senate left! I know those people! How many women has Teddy chased around desks? And Clinton? Oh, my God, more than you know! And what about the other Democrats guilty of the same thing? There are so many of them down there that do this sort of thing—and have for years—that you wouldn't believe it!”

Bob Packwood tried to put the blame on alcohol, but it didn't get him off the hook. He checked himself into the Hazelden Clinic in Minnesota. He told interviewers his father was an alcoholic who drank potent vanilla extract during Prohibition. Sympathetic journalists—William Safire was one, his son an intern in Packwood's office—recounted how Packwood had always ordered two drinks at a time. “I drink immense quantities of liquid,” Packwood said. “It doesn't matter what it is. I will, on occasion, drink a gallon of milk at dinner, or two or three pitchers of water, and when I drank alcohol I would go through beer and wine the same way.” The more malicious wondered if Packwood was suffering from Minamata disease, whose symptoms include loss of muscular control, slurred speech, and brain damage.

Packwood tried apologizing, but that didn't work, either. He called his actions toward women “unwelcome and insensitive.” He said, “My past actions were not just inappropriate. What I did was not just stupid or boorish. My actions were just plain wrong.” He talked, finally, in his banishment from the Senate, about the Book of Job. “Although I'm not a particularly religious man, I take solace from time to time in reading the Book of Job. Some people think they've got problems. That poor devil
really
had problems.”

A few years after Packwood's banishment, as Bill Clinton contemplated the expansive and humiliating apology the media wanted him to make, Packwood's fate gave him food for thought. Packwood, the feminist Galahad, had apologized fully and wide-rangingly.

Packwood hadn't seized the word
inappropriate
as his fraying lifeline. Packwood had foolishly swum past it into shark-infested waters, and the op-ed sharks and the feminists had eaten him alive.

And all Packwood had done was play a lot of grab-ass and dumb-ass kissy face. Packwood hadn't serially undraped the gross enormity or the enormous grossness of
his
willard to anyone. Packwood's mortal sins had the texture of acne and the smell of starched, callow pubescence. Packwood's excesses
were
those of the nerd with thick glasses who wanted to be a mechanical engineer.

Packwood's willard may have been out of control, but his reptile tongue and his soft white hands were acting it out. Unlike Bill Clinton, who'd always let Willard do the talking. No public blow jobs for Packwood, no juicy cigar. And still the feminists and their shock troops, the soccer moms and the PTA activists, had turned on him.

As he thought about Packwood, Bill Clinton knew he had a huge and sharp edge: Hillary. He had Hillary to help him, unlike the demented Packwood, who'd divorced his un-Hillary-like, Camp Fire girl wife. Would the feminists really go after Bill Clinton, knowing that going after him would damage their own icon, who just happened to be his wife? They'd gone after their icon Packwood, but Packwood was a man (sort of). Would the women really go after Saint Hillary, the first woman copresident of the United States?

Bill Clinton didn't think so. He smiled to himself about the righteous and wicked ironies of his life. Bob Packwood, seeing the Lewinsky headlines and hearing the new Jay Leno jokes, smiled, too. He announced in Portland that he was considering running for the Senate again.

[14]

The Scavenger from Cyberspace

“The last time I saw the Creep,” Monica said to Linda Tripp, “he said, ‘I have an empty life except for my work and my work is a fucking obsession.' ”

A
s Linda Tripp and Lucianne Goldberg plotted . . . first about Kathleen Willey and now about Monica . . . they knew they had to convince the Beast to trumpet their stories to the world. They didn't trust the Beast's hypocritical, self-righteous posturing. They hoped that the Beast's greed for a big moneymaking story would overcome its liberal biases and Tourette's-like seizures of sanctimony.

They sucked
Newsweek
reporter Michael Isikoff, known as an uncompromising investigative reporter, into their web. But they still felt themselves on shaky ground. What if Isikoff couldn't convince his editors to run the story? How could the Ratwoman and the Bag Lady of Sleaze
force
the media to headline the ingredients of their witch's brew? And then they found an ally even more helpful than Mark Fuhrman. He, too, was a Californian, working out of a dingy apartment above the seedy Hollywood Boulevard strip . . . the Scavenger from Cyberspace, Matt Drudge.

While manipulating Monica was Linda Tripp's unholy gig, manipulating the media was Goldberg's. She who had spied on the media at the Night Creature's behest had learned Nixon's lessons about the media well. “Seventy-five percent of the media voted for McGovern,” Nixon had said. “They protected Kennedy and sometimes they pimped for him.” And about those reporters covering Clinton: “They're draft dodgers just like he was. They share his immorality and lack of values. They take care of their own.” Goldberg didn't have to be convinced. She was a woman who had been good friends with Nixon's notorious Red-baiting hatchet man, Murray Chotiner, and with Victor Lasky, a right-wing backalley slasher who had bloodied JFK in several scurrilous volumes.

Isikoff, Lucianne Goldberg thought, was probably just like those other liberal reporters Nixon had talked about. The Reverend Pat Robertson had called Isikoff “one of the most vicious, anti-Christian bigots in the entire world. He is absolutely unbalanced and he is, uh, emotionally in my opinion, uh, uh, stunted.” But Isikoff was also a steel-nosed reporter; he had once called an editor at the
Washington Post
a “fucking asshole” for not running a detailed, lengthy account of Paula Jones's claims. He had been suspended from the
Post,
then joined
Newsweek
shortly afterward.

Goldberg's experience working for Nixon had prepared her well for what she was doing with the Ratwoman now. “The Nixon people were looking for really dirty stuff,” she said. “Who was sleeping with whom, what the Secret Servicemen were doing with the stewardesses, who was smoking pot on the plane—that kind of thing.” The Bag Lady of Sleaze knew all about “the dirty stuff.” One of her novels,
People Will Talk,
focused on a gossip columnist who “can unzip a fly with her toes.” In another novel,
Purr, Baby, Purr,
she suggested that women should view themselves as “a switchboard with all sorts of lovely buttons and plug-ins for lighting up and making connections.”

She had made connections when she came to Washington as a young woman by sleeping with a lot of men. “Lucy would claim that her entire social life took place Monday through Friday because she only went out with married men,” a friend said. Another friend said, “She had those tight skirts, kind of bouncy blouses, and blond hair piled on top of her head. She'd clack across the room in her high heels.” Goldberg practiced an English accent, had herself paged in fancy restaurants, and had pictures taken with politicians like Hubert Humphrey by pretending she was “an old friend from the past.”

She had told other lies through the years, too. One book jacket claimed “she started her journalistic career at the
Washington Post
” (she was a clerk). Another book jacket said she “was appointed to the White House staff” after JFK was sworn in. (There is no record of her employment at the Kennedy White House.) As a literary agent, she had been sued by author client Kitty Kelley for stealing her foreign royalties, and the court awarded Kelley sixty thousand dollars.

Now, at sixty-two, as she loaded her gold Dunhill holder with a cigarette and took yet another sip of vodka, the Bag Lady of Sleaze knew that the sordid nature of her experience in Washington would be a great help to her in putting this sordid story out there.

She had to laugh. Here Monica was telling Linda about using Altoids before she went down on Bill Clinton, and right there in one of Lucianne Goldberg's novels
—Madam Cleo's Girls—
was the same scene, not with Altoids but with Life Savers. The Bag Lady knew what she was talking about and, more importantly, whom she was dealing with.

Michael Isikoff got a tip one day about the Oval Office encounter between Kathleen Willey and Bill Clinton from one of Paula Jones's lawyers who had been tipped off by Linda Tripp. Isikoff tracked Willey down and she told him off the record what had happened. She pointed to Linda Tripp as a witness—the first person Willey had spoken to when she left the Oval Office. Isikoff tracked the Ratwoman down and told her he was working on the story. Tripp confirmed that something had happened, but she told him that Willey hadn't seemed unhappy about it. Isikoff couldn't run the story until Willey went on the record and until he straightened out the conflicts in the Willey and Tripp accounts. But now Tripp and Goldberg knew that
Newsweek
had it and, as weeks went by, that
Newsweek
was sitting on it.

Enter then at this moment, from cyberspace, the Scavenger, Matt Drudge, whom Lucianne Goldberg would call “a fellow spirit.” Drudge was the thirty-year-old author of the
Drudge Report,
a Web site gossip sheet that he had started in 1994, devoted, in the beginning, mostly to Hollywood items. He had reported correctly that Jerry Seinfeld was demanding $1 million per episode and that there were money-costing problems during the shoot of
Titanic.
His biggest political exclusive was that Jack Kemp would be Bob Dole's running mate. When he started running gossip about the Clintons, Rush Limbaugh knighted him as “the Rush Limbaugh of the Internet.”

Lucianne Goldberg was impressed with Rush's endorsement and didn't care that some people saw Drudge as a “slanderer” and “king of the junk media.” She liked, too, Drudge's view of himself: “All truths begin as hearsay . . . . I'm not a journalist, I'm a kangaroo . . . . I've got a gotcha sheet in a town where nobody's playing gotcha . . . . I go where the stink is.” She especially liked “There are no filters and editors between me and the media.” It meant that if Drudge wanted to post an item on his Web site, no one could stop him, and hundreds of thousands, even millions, would see it, never mind whether it was true or not. Drudge had no staff, no fact-checkers, no suspicious liberal-leaning editors. Drudge had none of the drawbacks Isikoff had.

While Drudge didn't have
Newsweek
behind him to give him credibility, the Bag Lady of Sleaze knew that the Scavenger could get it out there. She also knew that, besides sharing her political philosophy, Drudge was hungry. He had gotten a tiny taste of minifame with his items about Seinfeld and Jack Kemp, but he was broke, making hardly anything from America Online. His Web site itself was tacky, featuring a red police siren that wailed when Drudge's “word of mouse” informants and “E-mail tipsters” provided him with breaking news.

That the Scavenger was a queer creature, no one could deny. He drove a dented Geo and lived with his cat in his ninth-floor Hollywood apartment near Musso and Frank's, once one of L.A.'s premiere show business hangouts, now a place frequented by more hookers and chicken hawks than agents or writers.

The son of “liberal hippie parents,” Drudge had grown up in the Washington, D.C., suburb of Takoma Park. His mother had undergone treatment for schizophrenia. His parents were now divorced—his father a social worker, his mother a lawyer. In grade school, Drudge was diagnosed with an attention-span disorder, cut classes, sneaked off to art museums, and threw rocks at the other kids. In high school, he was a poor student (
D
in current events) who listened for long hours to talk radio in his room, then pretended with a tape recorder that he was conducting his own show. He recited the Pledge of Allegiance over the school loudspeaker every morning. When he graduated—“I barely got out of high school”—he left a “Last Will and Testament” for his classmates: “To my only true friend Ms. Thing, Vicky B, I leave a night in Paris, a bottle of Chaps cologne and hope you find a school with original people. And to everyone else who has helped and hindred [
sic
] whether it be staff or students, I leave a penny for each days [
sic
] I've been here and cried here. A penny rich in worthless memories, for worthless memories is what I have endured.”

Drudge went to Europe for a month after he graduated, lived in New York for a year working in a grocery store, then went back home to Takoma Park. He became a night manager for 7-Eleven stores in other Washington suburbs. He moved to L.A. and got a job as a grunt at the CBS gift shop in Studio City. He folded T-shirts, cleaned shelves, and stacked boxes. He did that for
seven years.
He also gossiped with the technicians who filmed TV shows in the same complex. He put the technicians' gossip he heard onto a home page he had created with a computer his father bought him. He E-mailed the gift shop gossip to friends, who passed the word to others. He started scavenging the trash of studio executives at CBS and other places and put what he found in the garbage on his Web site, too. Word spread. The Scavenger had taken his first baby steps on the way to becoming a cyberstar.

As Lucianne Goldberg waited for Isikoff's editors to run the story about Bill Clinton and Kathleen Willey, she seethed. What was taking
Newsweek
so long? Would this story be deep-sixed by the liberal Washington media, like all the JFK stories her friend Victor Lasky had told her about? Would
Newsweek,
owned by the liberal
Washington Post,
really publish this story? She knew that Vernon Jordan, Bill Clinton's close friend, was a frequent dinner guest at
Post
grande dame Katharine Graham's house. She knew that Ben Bradlee, the former
Post
editor, was one of those journalists who'd partied with JFK, instead of exposing him. And she knew all the problems Isikoff had had trying to publish his Paula Jones story with the
Post.
Enough already! It was time for the Bag Lady of Sleaze to take matters into her own hands. She called Matt Drudge.

The Scavenger put it right out there. His headline read
WILLEY'S DECISION: WHITE HOUSE EMPLOYEE TELLS REPORTER THAT PRESIDENT MADE SEX PASS. WORLD EXCLUSIVE!
Drudge's item ended: “Isikoff has held back on the exclusive story because the woman has refused to go on the record with her allegation. Nevertheless, the events surrounding Willey have become the talk of the Washington underground and threatened to undermine President Clinton's defense in the ongoing Paula Jones sexual harassment case.” Isikoff was furious, but the Bag Lady realized that going to the Scavenger was a double whammy. Because
Newsweek
decided
after Drudge's item
that since the story was already out there, the magazine would also run its account. It was as though Drudge had freed
Newsweek.
Now the story was really out there, with
Newsweek
's credibility behind it. Drudge was delighted, too. The Scavenger had
scooped Newsweek.
And
Newsweek
's story strengthened
the Scavenger's
credibility. The number of hits on Drudge's Web site shot up like a Fourth of July rocket.

.  .  .  

When Isikoff had first spoken to Linda Tripp about Kathleen Willey, Tripp had told him that Bill Clinton was having an affair with a White House intern she wouldn't identify. Now, after Isikoff's story on Willey had run thanks to Drudge, Tripp invited Isikoff to a rendezvous to discuss the young intern.

When Isikoff showed up, Lucianne Goldberg was there as well, along with her son, who worked for a video production company. What Isikoff didn't know was that the Bag Lady and the Ratwoman had decided to set him up again. It had worked beautifully the first time—the Willey stuff was out there—why couldn't it work the same way again? With a much bigger story?

They told Isikoff the intern's name and told him that Linda had secretly taped her. Isikoff wrote all the details down and went to his editors at
Newsweek.
The editors decided that the magazine didn't want to run this kind of salacious story about the president's private life. Not much later, Isikoff got a tip—he never revealed the source—telling him that Linda Tripp had gone to Kenneth W. Starr and that Starr was investigating the relationship between Monica and Bill Clinton. Isikoff went to his editors again. He thought this was a huge story: The special prosecutor was investigating the president's private sex life. After a lot of hand-wringing,
Newsweek
editors decided once again not to run the story. “There are times it's just not worth being first,” an editor told Isikoff. “Sometimes it's just not the right thing to do.”

Lucianne Goldberg was by now literally bursting with the news of Bill Clinton and Monica. For months, she had been telling her novelist friend Dominick Dunne the skinny, referring to Linda Tripp as “the woman who served Vince Foster his last hamburger.” Dominick Dunne knew all about it before Kenneth W. Starr did. He even knew Tripp was taping Monica. “I never picked up on the seriousness of what I was hearing,” Dunne would say later. He even saw Vernon Jordan, an old friend, at a dinner and thought about warning him. “I've known Vernon for a long time and like him very much,” Dunne would say. “As I was leaving, he came over to my table to say hello. I was going to say to him there's a kid in the Oval Office who's being taped. I knew all that stuff—the stained dress, the oral sex. That's what I was going to say to him, but it seemed so absurd, a made-up thing. Instead I said to him ‘Give my love to the President.' I blew it.”