American Rhapsody (41 page)

Falwell filed a $45 million libel suit and was represented in court, bizarrely, by
Penthouse
's attorney, a man who had once referred to the reverend as “Foulwell.” His case went all the way to the Supreme Court, and the justices voted, shockingly, eight to zero in favor of Larry Flynt. It should have been the greatest moment of his life, but it was almost an anticlimax. Althea died on June 27, 1987, of AIDS, contracted from either a heroin needle or a blood transfusion. She died in the bathroom next to Larry's bed. He had alerted the nurses that she was in there too long. He couldn't do anything to help her. His wheelchair wasn't next to his bed.

.  .  .  

This was Larry Flynt, the man who announced now, in the year of Bill Clinton's impeachment, a $1 million reward for information about Republicans' sexual indiscretions. Conservative Republicans knew how Larry Flynt felt about conservative Republicans, sometimes even just plain Republicans. They remembered the
Hustler
cartoon showing Gerry Ford and Nelson Rockefeller and Henry Kissinger gang-banging the Statue of Liberty. They remembered the
Hustler
phone-sex ad for Jesse Helms—“Jesse Helms—Phone Sex—Blacks Preferred”—which included Senator Helms's office and home telephone numbers. They remembered the other cartoons of Jerry Falwell. One showed an old lady living in a dump, rats all around her, a can of dog food next to her, writing a letter: “Dear Jerry Falwell, I want to thank you for the inspiration and comfort your television broadcasts give me. I am enclosing the remainder of my Social Security money to help you keep up your fine work, as I know you need it.” The other cartoon showed Satan sitting in a high-rise office, barking into a speaker phone, “Send Falwell in here. I want to see the look on the fucker's face.” They knew that Larry Flynt knew—finally, after so many years—that the man who'd shot him was a white supremacist angered by an interracial photo spread.

Those in Congress knew how vulnerable they could be if someone was out there offering a million dollars for the sort of information Flynt was looking for. Congress really was, in Bob Dole's words, “Animal House.” Rita Jenrette had even described having sex with her husband on the Capitol steps. There were hundreds of offices hidden away in the Capitol Building with crystal chandeliers and comfortable couches and mirrors, fireplaces, and decorated ceilings, rooms simply ideal for an intimate, hands-on chat with a young staffer.

And Speaker Newt Gingrich, God bless him, had restored an old, banned custom. Congressmen could sleep overnight once again in their offices, free to do whatever in-depth research on whichever subject was at hand. They were politicians, for Pete's sake, not saints. Who anywhere could withstand a million dollars' worth of this kind of scrutiny?

Not Newt, certainly, who was once caught bare-assed on top of his desk, conferring with an aide . . . who, it was even now being said, was too chummy with a young legislative aide, Callista Bisek, and allegedly with Arianna Huffington. Not Dick Armey, who was thrice accused of sexual harassment while he was an economics teacher in college. Not Tom DeLay, who'd bounced $5,300 worth of checks on the House bank.

And there was such a
history
of
human
behavior in Congress, too. Representative Dan Crane, caught having an affair with a Senate page . . . Representative Gerry Studds, caught trying to force pages into having sex with him . . . Representative Ken Calvert, a Christian Coalition favorite, caught half-naked in his car, getting a blow job from a heroin-junkie hooker . . . Representative Martin Hoke, caught on television saying, “She has
big
breasts!” about a television producer . . . Representative J. C. Watts, the Republicans' black poster child, exposed as the father of two illegitimate children.

Flynt, those who felt themselves vulnerable soon learned, wasn't fooling around. He was no Nixon-type operative, like the Night Creature's porcine bagman, the private eye Tony Ulasciewicz, who made so many raspy-voiced phone calls from public phone booths that he had to carry a bus conductor's coin belt on his belly. No phone booths for Larry Flynt! Larry King was his Ma Bell. “I have eight investigations going on,” Flynt told King. “If they materialize, the Republican party is going to be in shambles.”

He'd brought in a crack investigative reporter, Dan Moldea, who'd exposed Ronald Reagan's questionably close ties to Hollywood mogul Lew Wasserman and Teamster money, to run his million-dollar project. Also there to counsel Flynt was Rudy Maxa, a former
Washington Post
gossip columnist, who'd heard all the scuttlebutt through the years. There were rumors, too, which Flynt denied, that he was getting help trying to dig up Republican dirt from Terry Lenzner and Jack Palladino, private eyes who'd been employed by the Clinton campaign to do “opposition research.”

Crazy man Flynt was being politically astute about all this, too. He said he was zeroing in especially on those Republicans who were calling for Bill Clinton's removal from office but had sexual skeletons in their own closets. Back off, Larry Flynt was saying. If you're dirty and you're calling for Bill Clinton's removal, I'll get you. It was extortion. What made it scary was that no one knew what Flynt had, what he could come up with, or what a million dollars would buy. It was like the best of thrillers, where the scares come from your imagination and not from what you see up on-screen.

The first development that struck people as odd was Newt Gingrich's resignation. Had it really been caused by the beating the Republicans took in the midterm elections? Or did Newt want to put himself out of the line of fire of any Flynt missiles? (His divorce months later and references to his affair with Callista Bisek would reignite speculation that it was Larry Flynt who'd toppled Newt Gingrich.)

The next development was a bombshell. There was no doubt this time. The incoming speaker, Bob Livingston, who liked to take Cajun knives into congressional meetings, resigned because he had been informed that Larry Flynt had information about him that he was going to publish. Livingston admitted to extramarital affairs, but he wouldn't directly respond to reports in Los Angeles that Flynt had videotapes of him in a threesome. Livingston's wife, Bonnie, called Flynt and begged him not to release the details of her husband's philandering. Flynt agreed. “The guy's resigned, you know?” he said. “What's the point?”

Bob Barr was next. The smug, self-righteous “prosecutor from hell,” another Christian Coalition darling, denied that he had talked his ex-wife into aborting their child and had paid for it. But Larry Flynt had affidavits from Barr's ex-wife swearing to it. One of the staunchest abortion foes in America . . . caught urging the abortion of his own child.

As impeachment went from the House to the Senate, and as Flynt and his team kept digging, there was a noticeable shift on the part of some senators and other Republicans, who suddenly wanted to censure but not remove Bill Clinton. Commentators said the midterm elections had caused the shift, or the Gerald Ford–Jimmy Carter op-ed piece in the
New York Times,
but the more cynical wondered what effect Larry Flynt was having on the Senate trial.

Why would Pat Robertson suddenly do an about-face and come out for censure instead of removal? Why would Trent Lott suddenly work with Tom Daschle to limit the House prosecutors' efforts? Why would a senator like Richard Shelby of Alabama, who loathed Bill Clinton, suddenly start acting like the moderate he wasn't? Perhaps the real question was, What did Larry Flynt know and what would he do with it?

There was little need for anyone to point out how prone senators had always been to unsenatorial behavior. There was Senator John Tower, drunk, chasing his aides around his desk, his fly unzipped . . . Senator Joseph Montoya, who had a special secretary, whose only duty was to give him a blow job every afternoon . . . Senator Orrin Hatch, who'd had a former porn star named Missy Manners on his staff . . . Senator Chuck Robb, doing coke and having sex at the Pierre with twenty-one-year-old beauty queen Tai Collins (well, he
was
married to Linda Bird Johnson) . . . Senator Strom Thurmond, still known, at age ninety-six, around the Senate as “the Sperminator” . . . Senator Daniel Inouye, reprimanded by the Senate for unwanted sexual advances to aides . . . .

When it was all over and Bill Clinton stayed in office, nobody thanked Larry Flynt, the hillbilly kid from Licksville, Kentucky, for saving the presidency of the hillbilly kid from Hope, Arkansas. Groups like the National Organization for Women, who so desperately wanted Bill Clinton to stay in office, didn't say thank you to the man some feminists described as “every bit as dangerous as Hitler.” The media patted members of the Senate on the back for their temperance and moderation.

Only one person acknowledged what Larry Flynt had done, and he did it with his action and not his words. John F. Kennedy, Jr., invited him as his guest to the very public National Correspondents Association dinner in Washington. The son of the woman whom Larry Flynt displayed nude in
Hustler
sat next to the man in the wheelchair, who'd built his empire on Jackie's naked flesh. There had to be an overwhelming moral imperative for JFK, Jr., to be sitting there next to America's immoral pornographer.

[5]

The Ace of Spades

“I have a crush on Vernon Jordan I think,” Monica said.

“Oh, that's not at all surprising,” Linda Tripp said. “He's very crushable.”

“I'm going to tell the Big Creep,” Monica said. “That would make him jealous.”

A
nother centimeter and Vernon Jordan would have had to pull his own wheelchair alongside those of Larry Flynt and Charles Ruff to defend Bill Clinton. Like Larry Flynt, Vernon Jordan had taken a .30-06 bullet in his body, too, and for the same reason as Flynt: racial prejudice.

But that was a long time ago and it
had nothing to do
with what Kenneth W. Starr was doing to Vernon Jordan now, targeting him in his investigation, thinking in his Mad Hatter folly that Vernon Jordan would compromise or implicate the president of the United States.
Or did it
? Was Starr taking a shot at Vernon Jordan the same way the Klansman, that American Nazi party member, had taken a shot at him in Fort Wayne, Indiana, in 1980?

Starr didn't have a prayer. Even if he were right, even if Vernon Jordan and Bill Clinton had conspired to obstruct justice, to convince Monica to lie in the Paula Jones case, there was not a flicker of possibility that Vernon Jordan would cop to it. He was a man who had
taken a bullet
for what he believed in, and he and Bill Clinton believed in the same things. He was a man who'd walk down the darkest alley to help a good friend and
do
what had to be done. He was a man who could not only handle himself on the street and in the boardroom and in the locker room and at the dining table; he was a man who took charge, who, by the sheer power of his presence,
overcame.
“We're just buddies,” he said about his friend Bill Clinton. “I eat in his kitchen, he eats in mine. If Hillary is in town, she comes to dinner. If he's in town, he comes to breakfast.” And Bill Clinton said about his friend Vernon Jordan, “The last thing he'd ever do is betray a friendship. It's good to have a friend like that.” Vernon Jordan said, “I always knew he was going to be president.” And Bill Clinton said, “What attracted me to Vernon was that he was a very large person, larger than life.”

That he was. Standing six foot four in his Brooks Brothers suits, Turnbull & Asser shirts, a Churchillian Davidoff cigar in his hand, Vernon Jordan was a charismatic black man whose oratorical flourishes were as powerful as Martin Luther King, Jr.'s. He could be a macho man in the company of other macho men and he could be dazzlingly, effortlessly seductive in the company of women. He could quote the Bible, slap a back, or tickle a funny bone. He could also fold his arms in front of him and fix his steely gaze on someone and say, “You don't know what the
fuck
you're talking about!” He could be smiling, carefree,
loose,
and then freeze the room with his scowl. He was a student of people and knew what made each one of them tick. He was a man never to be messed with and a man who never forgot. He was Sidney Poitier mixed with Richard Burton. He was who Denzel Washington wanted to be. He
was
what his white boardroom friends called him. Vernon Jordan was the Ace of Spades!

In 1997, sixty-two-year-old Vernon Jordan (or his second wife, Ann, a former assistant professor at the University of Chigago's School of Social Work) was on the board of directors at American Express, Xerox, JCPenney, Dow Jones, Sara Lee, Revlon, Bankers Trust, RJR Nabisco, Union Carbide, and Ryder. He was a director of the Ford Foundation and the Brookings Institution. He had received a fellowship to Harvard's Institute of Politics and an honorary degree from Brandeis. He was one of three executive partners in the most powerful political law firm in Washington, a firm whose clients included the People's Republic of China, the Chilean Exporter's Association, the government of Colombia, the Korean Foreign Trade Association, and varied Japanese multinationals.

He counted among his friends former president George Bush and former secretaries of state Cyrus Vance and James Baker. “Vernon knows more corporate leaders, more labor heads, more foreign heads of state than anyone I know,” said William T. Coleman, Gerald Ford's transportation secretary. His Washington power breakfasts were the stuff of legend, as was the fact that Vernon Jordan chatted with the waiters and the waitresses as much as with his powerful guests. He and Ann were picked as one of America's “Power Couples” by
Forbes
magazine. Most people in Washington, including Linda Tripp, felt he was the most powerful lawyer in town, making well over a million dollars a year. Yet he never walked into a courtroom or wrote a legal brief. He was a power broker, a problem solver, a fixer.

Rarely seen in the spotlight, the Ace of Spades was always observing . . . whispering . . . backstage. He didn't much like the glare of the spotlight, turning down Bill Clinton's offer to be the first black attorney general of the United States, turning down a seat on the Foreign Intelligence Committee, turning down being commissioner of the National Football League. When IBM needed a new CEO, they went to Vernon Jordan—to tell them whom to hire.

He was comfortable in the offstage tabernacles of the powerful and the wealthy, like the Century Club in New York or the Bohemian Grove in northern California, though he had a wicked sense of humor, which he displayed at these moneyed
white
places. The first time he ate at the long-segregated Century Club, he ordered watermelon. Asked to give the headliner Lakeside Talk at the Bohemian Grove, he titled his speech “The Coming Revolution”: “I figured that would interest people or scare them enough to boost attendance. There was always the possibility that some people might think I would show up wearing bandoliers and carrying grenades. But I was with the Urban League, not the Black Panthers.” He was the Ace of Spades, hobnobbing with the powerful and the privileged but letting them know that he knew that
white
boys were the ones he was dealing with.

With the possible exception of deputy White House counsel Bruce Lindsey, Vernon Jordan was Bill Clinton's best friend. As former White House counsel Lloyd Cutler put it, “Presidents need to have someone they can relax with. He is a good, loyal friend.” William Coleman said, “He is as close to the president as anyone I know since Bobby Kennedy was so close to his brother.”

Their friendship went all the way back to the seventies, when Vernon Jordan traveled around Arkansas as the head of the National Urban League and met Bill Clinton at a fund-raiser. After his election, Bill Clinton's first dinner in Washington was at Vernon Jordan's home. The Clintons and the Jordans had Christmas Eve dinner every year there, as well. The Ace of Spades and the president golfed together all the time, chatted twice a day. Vernon and Ann and Hillary and Bill even vacationed together. Vernon ran Bill's 1992 transition team and Ann was cochairman of Bill's 1996 inauguration.

It was the Ace of Spades to whom the president turned when he wanted to find out if Colin Powell was interested in being his secretary of state . . . when he needed a representative to attend the inauguration of Taiwan's first democratically elected president . . . when the way had to be smoothed for Les Aspen's resignation as secretary of defense . . . when Lloyd Cutler had to be approached to replace Bernie Nussbaum as White House counsel . . . when Web Hubbell, about to resign as associate attorney general to face criminal charges, needed a job. When Vince Foster committed suicide and Bill Clinton went down to his widow's house, it was Vernon Jordan who went with him and who then stayed with him in the White House until two o'clock in the morning.

Even White House staffers knew how much clout the Ace of Spades packed. When George Stephanopoulos wanted an office in the White House closer to the president's, directly within the Oval Office suite, he didn't ask Bill Clinton; he asked Vernon Jordan, and Vernon Jordan got the office for him. (Stephanopoulos called him “our wise man.”) Perhaps the closeness between Vernon Jordan and Bill Clinton—the
brotherhood
between them—was most vividly portrayed in the photograph of the two of them that Vernon Jordan often showed friends. They were standing shoulder-to-shoulder, singing “Lift Every Voice and Sing,” often called “the black national anthem,” and Bill Clinton had inscribed it: “From the only WASP who knows the lyrics.”

Vernon Jordan and Bill Clinton were also best friends on a male level. “What we talk about mostly is pussy” was Vernon Jordan's response to a reporter who asked him what he and the president talked about on the golf course. He was as sexual a man as Bill Clinton; long known as a “lady-killer,” who was sometimes overheard at banquets mock-whispering about some young woman's finer points. He could be heard at those same dinners chortling over titillating gossip or letting his voice soar in the telling of a bawdy tale.

He didn't seem all that concerned about his reputation: “I like people. I've always liked people. I like all kinds of people and I'm not going to stop liking people. The interpretation of people's thoughts about that has absolutely nothing to do with my professional responsibilities.” Arms folded and scowling, he had another response, too: “I know who I am. I am the custodian of my morality and ethics. I am, on that, answerable to myself.” His wife didn't seem to mind his reputation, either: “I'm sure women find him attractive.
I
do.”

Sometimes Vernon Jordan just laughed about his reputation and said, “Nothing wrong with a little locker room talk.” His reputation extended to his interest in finding work for young people, especially young women. “Much is required of those to whom much is given,” Vernon Jordan said about his job-placement efforts.

A young woman for whom he'd gotten a job said, “When you're a woman, an attractive woman, and Vernon does something for you, there is an expectation that there will be some extracurricular activities.” Another young woman said, “He's flirtatious. That's just his style. I don't remember anybody hostile saying, ‘Vernon hit on me.' I just can't think of a time people were angry about it. People roll their eyes and say, ‘Oh, that's Vernon.' ” Even Monica felt his sexual power. “Give him a hug for me,” she told Jordan, talking about the president. “I don't hug men,” Vernon Jordan told her.

For Washington insiders, there was one public moment that was all-revealing about the intimacy of the relationship between the president of the United States and the Ace of Spades. It happened at a state dinner in 1995. The president was sitting next to a hot young blonde, and sitting next to her was Vernon Jordan. The president observed the Ace of Spades flirting with her and said, “I saw her first, Vernon!” And Vernon Jordan and Bill Clinton laughed and laughed.

“Vernon knows a lot of stuff about the president and his personal life,” former White House press secretary Dee Dee Myers said. “But he'll never trade on it. Vernon understands how power works better than anyone I know. He talks to the president about everything, I think, but it would diminish his power if he talked about it. He protects the president, his friend.” Mary Frances Berry of the U.S. Commission on Civil Rights said, “Vernon is an old hand. He knows the issues. He knows what the political problems are. He knows where the bodies are buried.”

This
was the extraordinary man . . . Bill Clinton's brilliant, battle-scarred, distinguished, hard-nosed, sexual, loving black brother . . . whom Kenneth W. Starr was counting on to finger the president of the United States for obstruction of justice.

He was named for George Washington's Mount Vernon home . . . lucky that he wasn't named, like one of his brothers, for Warren Harding. He grew up in Atlanta's segregated projects—his father was a mail clerk for the army. His mother ran Mary Jordan's Catering Service for the wealthy whites of Atlanta. He was his mother's son. “If you got some money,” she told him, “you can do most anything you want . . . . Never forget your base, never forget where you came from. But even if you were born in the projects, always carry your smile, and that smile will carry you a long way.” When Vernon Jordan came back from someplace, his mother would ask him, “What did you see? What did you hear? What did you learn?”

As a little boy, he stayed close to the projects. “You knew there was colored water and there was white water,” he would say later. “You knew you sat upstairs in the theater and it was a way of life. You understood that. It never meant you accepted it.” When he was ten, he saw the white world. Vernon Jordan went with his mother to the homes of the prominent wealthy, where she catered parties. He either bartended or helped her in the kitchen. He would sneak out of the kitchen sometimes to watch the wealthy white people. Watching a group of lawyers at Atlanta's white Lawyers' Club made a lifelong impression on him. “I liked the way they dressed. I liked their manners. I admired their bearing, the way they articulated the issues, if not the substance of their positions.”

The schools he attended were as segregated as the bathrooms, the streetcars, and the lunch counters. Vernon Jordan studied hard, got excellent grades, and played basketball. He was accepted at DePauw University in Greencastle, Indiana. He was the only black in his class, one of five in the school. He appeared in the school play and even wrote a play about white racism. He continued playing basketball. He was vice president of the school's Democratic Club. He was a political science major, with a minor in history and speech. He won first prize for oratory in a state contest. He graduated with distinction. He wanted to go to law school but didn't have the money. He went to Chicago and became a bus driver, working sixteen hours a day, and got into Howard University.

Graduating with honors from Howard, he got job offers from many of the big East Coast white law firms. He turned them all down. He went back to Atlanta. He hurled his formidable intelligence and energy into being a part of the civil rights movement. He became a clerk in the law office of distinguished civil rights attorney Donald Hollowell. His personal hero was another Atlanta black civil rights attorney, A. T. Walden, who for years had argued doomed cases in front of white racist judges. “I can remember him standing erect and tall. To see him was to want to walk like him and talk like him.”