American Rhapsody (39 page)

She proposed for him. “We were at a stock car race sitting on the hood of a pickup truck,” she said. “And he admitted that he didn't know how to propose. So I said, ‘Repeat after me.' And I did the proposal, then I said yes.” They got married in New Orleans, their wedding attended by his friends, people like Al Hirt and Timothy Hutton and hers, people like Sonny Bono and Rush Limbaugh. “It started with a cocktail party,” James said. “Then when it was time to get married we just opened the doors and people carried their drinks into where the ceremony was. After the wedding we had a parade—we had a brass band and everybody just kind of marched down Bourbon Street. People were throwing things and jazz music was playing.” After the wedding, James said, “I was destined to be a wussy male. The three most important women in my life are Mary, Hillary Clinton, and Miss Nippy.”

As the long knives came for Bill Clinton, James and Mary Matalin had two beautiful baby girls and were spending a lot of time out in the country playing what James called “air golf,” shooting juice bottles with air rifles. They were happy. Mary talked about opening a mom-and-pop restaurant sometime in the future. “I'd call it I-55 for the interstate that runs through Illinois. He'd cook. I'd be the bartender.” James's vision of the future was less roseate: “When this era of our life is over and we're flat on our backs, we'll stand on a street corner with a sign that says—‘Will Bicker for Food.' ”

They were already bickering about the long knives. Mary told James he was “obsessive-compulsive” about Kenneth W. Starr and that when he criticized him, James was “projecting.” Mary said, “It is not political. Ken Starr is not political. He doesn't want to put Bill Clinton out of office. You see the world in such stark terms, James.”

“Such stark terms” . . . yes indeed, James could see the stark, squalid ugliness of it . . . all of it, including what Mary's fellow Republicans were whispering behind their backs, besmirching the love they felt for each other. James thought of his brother up there in Woody Creek, watching the world like a fiery-eyed hawk on his big-screen TV. Hunter would see the stark foulness of this. Doc would know how to deal with it.

Mary's Republicans were saying that the only reason Mary Matalin loved James Carville was because he reminded her of Lee Atwater, her one, good, true, and dead love.

That Mary Matalin had been deeply devoted to Lee Atwater, her political mentor, who died in 1991 of a brain tumor at the age of forty, was true. She had a copy of a blues CD on her wall that Lee, who played a mean blues guitar, had made with Isaac Hayes. It was inscribed “Dear Mary, You have gotten me through many storms. I deeply love you.” It was also true that Mary spoke of Lee's political savvy the way she spoke of James Carville's. “Lee was a genius. He had an understanding of human nature and cultural trends.”

And there were obvious similarities between the two men. They both loved reruns of
The Andy Griffith Show.
They both loved their mountain cabins. Lee was from the South, too, from South Carolina, and had the same irrepressible, foot-tapping, twitchy energy as James. The same aggressive political attitude. “Republicans in the South could not win elections by talking about issues,” Lee had said. “You had to make the case that the other guy, the other candidate, is a bad guy.” Even in his rhetoric, Lee sounded like James. Running against Dukakis, Lee had said, “I'm going to strip the bark off the little bastard . . . I'm going to make Willie Horton his running mate,” and he had devised a vicious ad that forever tied Dukakis in white voters' eyes to black crime.

Lee, too, was a master of the deadly leak. When black ministers came to him asking to support Ronald Reagan and asking for voter registration money, Lee told them the Reagan campaign was broke and suggested they go to John Connally, who was running against Reagan. Then he leaked to the Bush campaign, also running against Reagan, that “Connally was buying the black vote.” Bush then attacked Connally and Connally fired back at Bush. And the two campaigns badly wounded each other—while Lee's Reagan campaign kept rolling along. It was the kind of shrewdness Mary had loved about Lee and the kind of shrewdness Mary loved about James, and it led her to conclude that “they would have loved each other. Lee would have loved James.”

But the whisperers were whispering about something much more. Married and with children, Lee had had a reputation as a notorious womanizer and Mary had worked closely with him, so the whisperers were assuming that they had been lovers. And then Ed Rollins, the Republican campaign wizard who'd beaten James in New Jersey with Christine Todd Whitman over James Florio, had come right out and said it: “I always thought part of Mary's attraction to Carville had something to do with Lee. For the last year of his life, she ran the Republican National Committee in his absence, saw him every day, and directed much of his medical care. In many ways, she was
as much of a wife
as Sally at the end. I wasn't the only one of her friends to believe that Carville was Lee's surrogate in Mary's eyes.” It was a revolting thing to say. James was nothing but Lee's surrogate? The reason she loved and slept with James was because she couldn't have a dead man?

The particular, cruel horror of it was that Lee had behaved bizarrely in his final year . . . but he had a tumor the size of a hen's egg growing in his brain. Lee
was
with another woman for much of his final year—Mary's friend Brooke Vosburgh—in the same house with his pregnant wife, Sally, and their kids, and they lay on Lee's bed and held hands. Lee was dying and losing his mind at the same time. Brooke was there with Sally's permission, both women trying to give comfort to a man who was in excruciating pain, who was having visions, who imagined himself with Brooke as Napoléon and Josephine, who found Jesus, who insisted on detailing all of his affairs to Sally in a plea for forgiveness, who became so paranoid that he had all his visitors frisked and his food tasted for fear of poison, who was suicidal near the end, begging his mother to kill him.

Lee “married” Brooke in a mock ceremony in which they used paper clips for rings. Lee tried massages and Tibetans and holistic healers. He tried hand-squeezed watermelon juice. And at the end, Lee concluded that he couldn't beat his nightmarish ailment. “Cancer is not a Democrat,” Lee said. He died with Sally holding his hand.

Mary knew that what Ed Rollins was saying and what the others were whispering was meant to hurt James, to belittle him, to make him look like he was being cuckolded not only by a dead man but also by the dead king of modern political campaign managers, Atwater beating Carville even from the grave in a battle of the big swinging willards, with Mary as the prize. A showdown on the most macho and the most political levels. And Mary also knew that she was being belittled and denigrated, too, as a groupie whose love for Elvis had made her marry an Elvis impersonator. But what struck her the most about what Rollins was saying and the hall mice whispering was the obscene way in which Sally Atwater was being humiliated. Her husband was dead and Sally had to hear from his own Republican colleagues about yet one more possible betrayal.

James didn't say much in response to Ed Rollins or the whispers. He knew his chick loved him. He sat on the porch, squinting at the sun with his reptilian eyes. Mary Matalin knew her husband well. The long knives would be in for the fight of their lives.

He took it to Kenneth W. Starr and Newt Gingrich and Henry Hyde and Tom DeLay and Dick Armey and Bob Barr and Ed Rollins and all the other chickenshit, stuck-up, tight-ass, nose-high, pork-belly Republicans . . . like that other coonass took it to Ned Beatty in
Deliverance.
James was screaming “Sooey! Sooey!” at the top of his lungs and riding their pampered, powdered, mottled selves into their own excrement. It seemed as if he was waging an airwave filibuster, outshouting, outscowling, out-finger-pointing the editorialists and commentators calling for Bill Clinton's resignation or impeachment. His bearing suggested a possessed man who was witnessing a biblical obscenity and had been touched by the Holy Spirit to defoliate it off the face of the earth.

“Kenneth W. Starr,” James snarled, “is obsessed with getting the president. This is a slimy and scuzzy investigation. This man is not out to get the truth, he's out to get Bill Clinton. . . . I am going to have a war against Ken Starr. You can strap it up! Here we go! Let ‘er rip, boy! . . . This guy is serving a master other than the truth. . . . What he ought to do is just crawl under the same rock—tobacco-money rock—that he crawled out from under. Let him go into oblivion as one of the truly sad, tragic, despicable characters of the last twenty years of this century. And thank God this poor man is going to go back to representing cigarette companies, exploding gas tanks or whatever he did for a living before this. . . . I don't like Ken Starr. I don't like one damn thing about him. I don't like his politics, I don't like his sanctimony, I don't like his self-pity, I don't like the people he runs with. I don't like his suck-up, spit-down view of the world, how he kisses up to the powerful and abuses the life out of regular people. . . . I'm like a clown. If you watch the rodeo and the bull riding, and you get thrown from the bull, it's the clown's job to get between the bull and the cowboy. Starr's the bull and the president's the cowboy. . . . Ken Starr can go jump in a lake. He is a citizen of the United States, just like anybody else he can be subject to criticism. If he wants by some kind of fiat to declare himself above the Constitution, I'm not going to pay attention to it. He's a public figure, the people who work for him are public figures. . . . I'm not going to shut up, Mr. Starr, you can tell your hit men over there, I'm not going to shut up. If the Holy See and the United Nations ask me, I'm not going to shut up!”

Snarling . . . hissing . . . crouching . . . kneecapping . . . Mack-trucking . . . T-boning . . . lunging . . . sumo-wrestling 
… Deliverancing . . .
on all the talk shows, morning, noon, and night, on the TV shows he called “the hot-air circuit,” foaming at the mouth, gouging eyes, spilling blood, going for the throat, saying, “I'd rather be a constipated, mangy, flea-bitten dog that howls at the moon than be disloyal to Bill Clinton,” threatening to put TV ads on the air against Starr, offering to raise money for campaign ads against Gingrich.

Starr was only one front of his bayou jihad. “Cueball Carville will be rolling into battle against Newt Gingrich,” he announced, “because this entire thing has been under the orchestration, supervision, and direction of Newt Gingrich.” He went for the jugular, “reminding everyone” that Gingrich had left his first wife and two teenage children, that his first wife had had to take him to court because he refused to provide adequate child support, that Gingrich's church had had to take up a collection to help his kids, that Gingrich had tried to reach a divorce settlement with his wife in her hospital room as she was battling cancer. He reminded people that Gingrich had been fined $300,000 by the House for ethics violations and that Bob Dole, Nixon's soul brother, had loaned him the money.

“Newt Gingrich is making every decision about this investigation,” James said. “I've tried to work up some human feelings for him. I've really tried. And then I remembered him saying that I—and the people who believe as I do—caused convicted murderer Susan Smith to push her children into the lake when, in fact, she had been living with a Republican official who was a member of the Christian Coalition and who was molesting her. And if that weren't enough, Gingrich then said that this horrible case in Chicago where somebody ripped the unborn child out of a woman happened because of people like me and my friends and those I work for. . . . And then he talks about family responsibility—hell, his own church had to take up a collection for his kids! No Democrat ever blamed a Republican because someone drove her kids into a lake or ripped a fetus out of somebody. I mean, it was a Republican in Kentucky who had the First Lady hung in effigy at a rally. It was a Republican who said the president better have a bodyguard to come to North Carolina for his personal safety—Senator Jesse Helms. . . . The Republican party is dead. The Congressional Republican Party is dead. Those guys don't even know whether to wind their ears or scratch their watches. . . . They're a school bully yard. That's what those congressional Republicans are. They bully everybody. They bully anybody and then somebody comes up and they take one hit and they run. They're crying. And right now they're all under their mama's skirt. This is a school-lunch-cutting, government-closing, right-wing-worshipping, sex-obsessed, president-hating party.”

Cueball Carville's crusade was hitting the bull's-eye. Kenneth W. Starr's approval ratings were tumbling. Republican pollsters issued warnings to their candidates about the upcoming November elections. It was as though James, this creepy-looking, nontelegenic freak were tapping into the American public's central nervous system and mainlining it full of outrage. Conservatives like Bill Bennett asked, “Where is the outrage?” And the answer was in front of their held-high noses. Right there. Directed at
them!

Thanks to a great extent to Corporal Cueball. The long knives knew they were in trouble. Congressman Bob Barr talked about subpoenaing James to testify in front of the House Judiciary Committee. Sam Dash, ethical adviser to the Starr investigation, said James “seems bent on influencing potential witnesses and grand jurors in pending cases” and was “skating close to charges of obstruction of justice.” James responded by saying he had “subpoena envy” and vowed, “I ain't gonna shut up! Even if the Vatican and the World Court ask me, I ain't gonna shut up!” Commentator Chris Matthews called what James was doing “road rage, not politics.” Defrocked Clinton adviser Dick Morris said James was becoming “a demented fringe advocate, a laughingstock.”