American Rhapsody (43 page)

Bang! A single bullet fired from a grassy knoll! Vernon Jordan had won a Purple Heart in what he considered his war for social progress. He had been decorated with the medal of honor by black people, many white people, by presidents, by corporations. And Kenneth W. Starr and his white-bread congressmen thought they were going to beat up on him
?

In October 1998, Joseph Paul Franklin told an Ohio judge, “You are just a representative of the satanic system and you'll be judged by Jesus Christ.”

“I won't have twenty notches on my gun when I am,” the judge responded.

Joseph Paul Franklin had by then admitted one more shooting: the March 1978 wounding of
Hustler
publisher Larry Flynt in Lawrenceville, Georgia. He had seen a pornographic interracial photo spread in
Hustler,
Franklin said, and he “just happened to be” in Lawrenceville when Flynt's trial began.
In the right place at the right time . . .
It wasn't the porn that had bothered him; it was the interracial couple.

Within the context of Bill Clinton's impeachment, it was a heart-stopping coincidence. Bill Clinton was saved from removal from office to a great extent through the efforts of two men—the Ace of Spades, who stuck by him, and the pornographer, who scared the bejesus out of all of Washington.
And the same man had shot both of them!
What if he had been a better shot? What would have happened to Bill Clinton then? What if Jesse Jackson had been in Chicago when Franklin went looking for him? What if Franklin hadn't been busted by the time President Carter got to Lakeland?

Joseph Paul Franklin represented everything my generation loathed and had tried to change in American society: racism, anti-Semitism, the cowboy myth, the love of guns, the sexism, the wife battering. He was a twisted, demonic foot soldier who didn't like blacks and interracial couples any more than did the Night Creature, the Ratwoman, the Bag Lady of Sleaze, or Führer Man.

Hillary spoke of a “vast right-wing conspiracy,” and many of us were sure she had used the phrase opportunistically, pragmatically, mendaciously to save her husband and their presidency. But were we really supposed to believe that the man who named himself for Goebbels “just happened to be” in Fort Wayne, Indiana, and Lawrenceville, Georgia, when Vernon Jordan and Larry Flynt were there? This wasn't some factoid Oliver Stone had conjured to con us into buying a ticket. Or a piece of gonzo Hunter Thompson had emitted from his fevered brain.
This was real.

And if it was all part of a great, unseen, and continuing shadow war for the heart and soul of America, what commentators euphemistically referred to as “the culture war,” then where would it end? JFK went down and so did Bobby and so did Martin and so did Medgar and so did Vernon Jordan and Larry Flynt. And Bill Clinton almost went down just as surely, but in a different way, saved by men who had already taken bullets. From one grassy knoll to another . . . where would the next grassy knoll be?

[6]

Al Gorf Loves Tipper Galore

T
he day the
Starr Report
was released was one of the saddest and happiest days of my life.

I knew that the president I'd served and admired would be left with a legacy most accurately characterized by the kind of rock and roll lyrics that had so outraged Tipper. And I knew that, finally and forever, I could rid myself of the awful paranoia that in 1993 Bill had victimized Tipper in ways analogous to the manner in which he had abused Monica Lewinsky.

I knew that if anything had happened between them, Ken Starr and his zealous army of investigators would have discovered it. He could have destroyed both Bill
and
me with one report about a vice president cuckolded by his commander in chief. He would have destroyed a love story even greater than the one Erich Segal wrote about us.

The Rock of Gibraltar of my life has been my love for my wife of nearly thirty-three years, the mother of my four children, the woman I first called Tipper Galore after we saw a James Bond movie together when we were in college.

My mother didn't like her at first. “She has no credentials,” Mother said, wanting me to date “sophisticated” women from around Boston. But then she didn't like Bill, either. “Bill Clinton is not a nice person; don't associate too closely with him,” she said. “He grew up in a very
provincial
atmosphere.”

I love my dear old mother, but she's a professional snob and she's often—well, I'll put this in the kind of alpha male terms my new media adviser, Naomi Wolf, wants me to use.

Mother is often full of shit.

 . . .

Mother was “Mrs. Senator Ma'am” and my dad was “Mr. Senator Sir” to the help as I was growing up on the eighth floor of the Fairfax Hotel in Washington, D.C. My father was Albert Gore, the distinguished liberal populist senator from Tennessee, and my mother, Pauline, was his smartest campaign adviser.

Dad, who'd once played the fiddle with the Carter Family on the radio, now decked himself out in English tweeds and divinity school blue suits. Mother, who'd been a waitress when they met, was now the president of the Congressional Wives Forum and the president of the Women's Speakers Bureau of the Democratic National Committee.

They were gone much of the time and I was mostly alone in the apartment with my black nanny, Ocie Bell, who'd put the food out on the table and make it look “pretty” for me. When they were in town, we went for sunset strolls, parading up and down in front of the embassies on Embassy Row, or I was up on the Roof Garden of the Fairfax with them, drinking milk while they had their highballs.

My dad called me “honey” and took me with him to committee meetings at the Senate. He let me float my toy submarine in the Senate pool. He introduced me to Vice President Nixon and the vice president rocked me on his knee. He took me to Saturday-afternoon dance lessons and showed me how to do the waltz. He accompanied me to violin lessons, too, but Mother made him stop. “Future world leaders do not play the violin,” Mother said.

Sometimes, when I was bored and they were out of town, I sneaked up to the Roof Garden and dropped water-balloon bombs on the limousines waiting at the curb. I met President Kennedy—first at a party at our apartment and then on the phone. My dad let me listen in as the president called some people “sons of bitches.” My dad even sneaked me into President Kennedy's private office when he was out of town. I sat in his rocking chair.

My parents enrolled me when I was in the fourth grade at St. Albans, a private school near our apartment, where a great many Kennedys and Roosevelts had gone. St. Albans, to use a Naomi Wolf word, sucked. The other kids called me “Al Gorf.”

I was a good kid, though, just like I'd been a good little boy. I had a teacher who said to me many years later, “You were so mature and advanced, I had almost to look at you to see if you were a child or a man.” I was a bored child.

The only good news was that the Jockey Club, the city's fanciest restaurant, had opened on the first floor of the Fairfax Hotel and I could sashay into the kitchen any time and eat whatever I wanted. Dad started sending me in the summers to the small town in Tennessee named Carthage, where he was from and where we had a farm. I had to do farm work every day with some of Dad's acquaintances. Clean the hog parlors for a summer, then back to the Jockey Club and St. Albans.

It was that same routine for a lot of years—St. Albans, my parents gone, and the farm in the summer, my parents rarely there. I didn't have any close friends.

I played football and basketball and I listened to the radio all the time: Jackie Wilson, Sam Cooke, Chuck Berry. A black doorman at the hotel liked me and sometimes he took me into the alley behind the Jockey Club and we tossed a football back and forth.

In school, Al Gorf learned how to balance a broomstick on his nose for a half hour. And in Carthage, Al Gorf saw a girl sitting in a car listening to Ray Charles and went up to her.

I was thirteen and she was sixteen—
Donna
Armistead—the Ritchie Valens song was out about then and I was in love with it—and I asked Donna to go out with me. We went to a drive-in with some of her friends, and the next day I asked her to go steady. She agreed.

And they called it puppy love, but I had a girlfriend now when I went back to St. Albans. I wrote her twice a day and I called her every Saturday night at 7:30. In my junior year at St. Albans, Mother and Dad were gone so much that I moved into the dorm. I slept as long as I could each morning before chapel, using a clip-on tie and cutting the back out of my shirts so I could just put them over me like a T-shirt under my jacket. Or I'd wake up at three in the morning sometimes and get dressed for the next day and go back to bed.

In Carthage, Donna and I would kiss a lot and make out and pet, but we'd never go all the way. We were the Ken and Barbie of the Tennessee hills. Once, when Donna and I were in the basement of my parents' house in Carthage, Mother was in town and she came running downstairs. We were on the couch, rubbing hard against each other, and Mother broke us up and told me to take a cold shower. I did. Another time, Donna and I were parked in a lover's lane and headlights were suddenly behind us. I jumped out of the car so fast, I was wearing her shoes. My dad was standing there. He said, “What do you think you're doing? Don't you think it's time we were getting on home?” We got on home.

In my senior year at St. Albans, I was on the varsity football and basketball teams. We sucked. We won one and lost seven at football; we won two and lost fourteen at basketball. When the school yearbook came out, it said, under my picture, “People who have no weaknesses are terrible.”

I went to a couple of the school debutante dances, moving Al Gorf around to Johnny Mathis, but I still wrote Donna twice a day. I went down to see the Beatles at Washington Stadium with three classmates. They all loved John; Paul was my favorite. I celebrated graduation by driving around town in my father's Chrysler Imperial, alone, and tossing cherry bombs out the window. One of them bounced back into my lap and almost ended Al Gorf's sex life, which had hardly begun.

I was probably closer to Powell, the doorman at the hotel, than to any of my classmates. Powell and I had Jackie Wilson in common and I knew so much about music that we never ran out of something to talk about. I knew that Lefty Frizzell was in jail in Roswell, New Mexico, the night the flying saucers landed . . . that Jerry Lee Lewis almost killed Paul Anka on an Australian tour . . . that Ray Charles was a bigger stud than Elvis . . . that Brenda Lee was a thirteen-year-old midget.

I asked Powell if he'd take me down to the Howard Theater, a fabled R&B house, to see James Brown, and he did. James Brown knocked me out and I swear I almost had an orgasm watching that business he did with his cape at the end of the show.

I met her at my graduation dance. She was with somebody else. I saw her across the room; a vision of wispy blondness, long hair, angelic face, mirror-bright blue eyes. Marianne Faithfull with a dazzling cinematic smile. Oh, pretty woman!

We talked a little bit. Her name was Tipper Aitcheson. Her mother had nicknamed her after a thirties big-band hit called “Tipi Tipi Tin.” I couldn't take my eyes off of her. A case, Tipper said later, of pure animal magnetism.

I called her the next day and asked her to another graduation dance that same night. We danced and danced. Everything and everyone else melted away. It was the first time Johnny Mathis ever sounded really good to me.

She liked me. I couldn't believe that I was with the most beautiful girl I'd ever seen and that she liked Al Gorf. She said she thought I was funny and fun. She was sixteen, a junior at St. Agnes, an Episcopal girls school in Arlington, Virginia.

Tipper was crazy about the Stones, especially Mick. She played drums in a girl garage band called the Wildcats. She adored the naughtiness of “I can't get no girly action” in “Satisfaction.” She drove an ice blue Mustang. She had dated one of my classmates, one of the fast and cool guys, and had given him a 45 of “Get Off of My Cloud,” writing “Rolling Stones Forever!” on the record in French. She had also dated another classmate, another fast and cool guy, and had inscribed his yearbook, “Have all the fun you want, but someday I'm going to marry you!”

She lived in her grandparents' house in Arlington, where she'd grown up. Her parents had divorced when she was an infant. Her father had beaten her mother, who'd twice been hospitalized for depression. She'd been teased by the other kids in school for “not having a father.”

She had an off-color, sometimes bawdy sense of humor. Definitely not Paul McCartney. I took her out all the time, but they were definitely not Stones-type dates. I'd put my suit and tie on and we'd go to fancy restaurants and then to the theater. We had chateaubriand a lot, even downstairs, at the Jockey Club, where I introduced her to my friend Powell, the doorman.

I was hopelessly, desperately, madly, gloriously in love with her. It wasn't just love, either. I realized quickly that she was my friend, the best friend I'd ever had. I called Donna in Carthage and told her the truth. Donna burned all the love letters I'd sent her.

I felt awful. All those years with Donna, and I'd never once asked her up to Washington. She was a part of my summer experience, along with cleaning the hog parlors. A farm girl down in the hills for a senator's son to use until he met his debutante. Is that what Donna was? Is that what I had done? I hoped not. I truly, remorsefully hoped not.

I kept Tipper's picture on my desk my first year at Harvard. She was in her senior year at St. Agnes. I was tossin' and turnin', turnin' and tossin', tossin' and turnin' all night. I was in pain without her. I went back to see her whenever I could.

I bought a motorcycle, and there was no better feeling in the world than Tipper snuggled into me, her arms wrapped around me, and that roaring between my legs. I drove it back and forth to Harvard.

I got myself elected freshman council president. Our big issues were clean rooms, the Princeton mixer, and the quality of the turkey salad and the meat loaf. I won a couple of beer-chugging contests, able to down a sixteen-ouncer in three seconds. I went for lonely midnight rides on my motorcycle around Memorial Drive. I even sort of participated in the annual spring riot, hundreds of guys blocking Memorial Drive by pretending, on their hands and knees, that they were looking for their contact lenses. I made the freshman basketball team, but I sat on the bench most of the time.

Gentle on my mind was Tipper. I took her down to meet my parents. Mother was cold, but Dad liked her. He told me she had “lovely, beautiful, sparkling eyes.” He said she was “pleasant” and “shapely,” about as far as my dad would go in that area. He was even more impressed with her when she came down to breakfast the next morning. “She had every eyelash in place! She was dressed for an evening ball!”

I asked Tipper what she thought of my dad and she said, “Do you remember Oedipus?” God, that made me laugh!

Tipper came up to Boston on Spring Weekend, with her grandmother tagging along as chaperone. We went to see the Temptations. Please come to Boston, I begged her, and she said yes, she'd come to Garland Junior College, a short ride from Harvard on the subway.

The world changed the beginning of my sophomore year. Beer chugging was out. Smoking dope was in. And Tipper was there. I lived in Dunster House and passed out on a lot of couches. Or Tipper was in my room. It was as though I were living inside her, stoned or straight.

We read Wallace Stevens to each other. We went to see Doc Watson together. We liked to touch. To hold hands, to have an arm around each other. She said to Al Gorf, “You've got the greatest legs!” She made us some very special cookies.

We talked about living beyond the sea. She was going to paint and I was going to write. We talked about going to Tennessee and living in the hills, in a commune, growing vegetables. Sometimes we'd hang out on the lawn, both of us wearing bib overalls, laughing at my new Texas friend, Tommy Lee Jones, as he paced along a path by the Charles. He wore blue velvet—jacket and pants—held a rose, and recited lines from Shakespeare in a stoned, down-home twang.

Laughing as Tommy suddenly said, out of the blue, deep into his black turtleneck existentialist phase, “I just realized I'm gonna die.” I grew my hair long (my dad was angry) and flipped out over
Star Trek
and
2001: A Space Odyssey
.

Tipper and I hated the war in Vietnam. We got into the protests, but I had to be careful. I didn't want to do anything to hurt my dad, whose increasing liberalism was getting a lot of Tennessee voters more and more angry.

He asked me to go to the Democratic National Convention in 1968 with him and, even though I hated to be away from Tipper, I went. I was on the convention floor, helping him write a speech, while the whole world was watching what was happening outside. On election night, Tipper and I prayed for Hubert Humphrey. Instead, the man my dad called “the Vilest Man” became president.