American Rhapsody (51 page)

What also troubled me was that while he was a “storyteller” and an auteur, Warren was still, underneath all of it, an actor. And in my experience, actors were only as good as the lines somebody wrote for them. I didn't think Warren was a dummy—that wasn't the problem—although my experience had taught me that many actors quite happily and successfully were.

The problem as I saw it was that good actors really got into a part . . . and sometimes got stuck there even if they were supposed to be someone else in the next movie. Actors in film stayed in the part for at least two months, actors onstage often much longer. But a president had to play a different part every hour of every day. Threaten terrorists at noon, praise cops at two, chat up the House Republicans at four, welcome Tony Blair at six.

What if Warren got stuck? He was, after all, a Method actor, which meant a lot of intense preparation. What if he couldn't switch parts fast enough . . . after having supervised seventeen drafts of all the different speeches? What if his actor's training itself bollixed him all up? If he was still at his tell-off-the-terrorists mode with Tony Blair? If he was in his praise-the-cops mode with the House Republicans?

Fearing that I'd really hit on something, I thought about
Bullworth.
It was Warren's last movie before word of his candidacy, and Warren had played a politician who told the truth. It was classic Method actor syndrome, I thought. That's what all this was about! Warren had fallen in love with the part! Warren had been brilliant in the part!
And he still wanted to play the part!

What could he do? He couldn't reshoot the movie over and over again, could he? The studios wouldn't let him get away with that—maybe once, but not anymore. It was like Stallone playing Rocky over and over again for so many years, but Warren wasn't Stallone; Warren had a social conscience, true lefty beliefs he had formed in penthouses and limousines all over the world.

Warren could play Bullworth for the rest of his life and get away with it . . . if he did it on a public stage and not a soundstage. It was like watching himself on all those mirrors. He could watch himself playing Bullworth, improvising the already-written and already-shot script on TV, on the prime-time network news!

The improvising, I realized, would be rehearsed, mannered, and stylized—right there in the script, as most actors' improvisations are, but it would be fun. He would be playing Bullworth, and Bullworth was fun. Bullworth liked to say the
F
word, and Warren had advised Bill Clinton to fire up his stump speech in 1992 by shouting
fuck
a few times. I could see it now: The first president caught on camera saying the
F
word. This wouldn't be like Bob Kerrey telling his homophobic joke on-camera or George Bush talking on-camera about kicking Ferraro's ass. It was good Hollywood advice, really, used in movies since the seventies to punch up dialogue that was putting everybody to sleep, the white equivalent of blaxploitation's
motherfucker.

My fellow Americans, I don't know what the fuck's wrong with the economy, but I'm working on it . . . . Fucking Saddam . . . Fucking Milošević . . . Fucking Arafat . . . Fucking schvartzes—but no, that was Evans's word; Bullworth and Warren, hip Hollywood liberals, would never use
schvartzes.

As the buzz about Warren ricocheted crazily around Hollywood, the noncandidate, possible candidate, potential candidate, near candidate made a speech at the Beverly Hilton that was possibly the biggest Hollywood event until the cocktail party for the Dalai Lama. Warren was accepting the Eleanor Roosevelt Award from the ADA for “a lifetime of creative and political integrity.” (
Dick Tracy? Ishtar
?)

It was in the ballroom of the Beverly Hilton, and Warren arrived in his shades, with Annette on his arm. The shades weren't dorky like Clinton's, Annette was prettier than Hillary, and Warren even pressed the flesh. Well . . . he shook hands. Not pumping hands like Feinstein or Boxer or the old-style macho pols, but touching them a little fey, Euro-trashy, almost New Age.

He began by saying, “I had in mind a different kind of lighting—could we get the candles going again?” He made a dull speech—a few shouted
F
words would have helped—saying Al Gore and Bill Bradley weren't really liberals. The speech played like a movie written by seventeen screenwriters, visually interesting but nada at the core. Warren wasn't playing Bullworth and he was as boring as Al Gore separated from Clinton. Half of Evans's whorehouse was there, applauding, even though Warren was upstaged by Dustin Hoffman, who, in his last movie,
Wag the Dog,
had patterned himself after Evans.

Dusty introduced Warren this way: “Warren Beatty wouldn't make the mistakes of other presidents. Unlike Richard Nixon, he would have burnt the tapes. Unlike George Bush, he would have come up with something better than being ‘out of the loop.' Unlike Bill Clinton, he would have never trusted a twenty-two-year-old girl to be discreet.” Those who knew Warren said that Dusty had to be making dumb jokes: Warren wouldn't have burned the tapes; he would have made ten thousand phone calls to two thousand women asking their advice . . . and as far as trusting a twenty-two-year-old girl was concerned, almost all of the temptresses at Evans's house were in their early twenties.

Dusty also said that as a nine-year-old boy, Warren called Eleanor Roosevelt to praise her and began the conversation by saying, “Eleanor, what are you wearing right now?” Then Penny Marshall introduced Warren by saying that she'd had thirteen thousand telephone conversations with him over the years and he'd begun every one by saying, “Penny, what are you wearing right now?” Then Gary Shandling introduced Warren by translating the presidency into Hollywood terms: “If you get elected, make sure you get your name above the title of the country.”

Hollywood insiders admired Warren's gargantuan chutzpah. He was in his sixties. He hadn't had a hit movie in ages. His last movie had flopped. His next movie, about a man having a midlife crisis, had been rescheduled (surprise!) and was rumored to be not very good. He wasn't getting paid what he had once been. Adam Sandler was making more money than he was. And now he had put himself back on prime-time television, getting nightly exposure on the news . . . just as the video of
Bullworth
was about to be released.

Warren had figured out a way to get a
Wag the Dog
kind of box-office bump for
Bullworth
's video and for his next movie. Bill Clinton had bumped up
Wag the Dog.
Now, by implying that maybe he wanted Bill Clinton's job, Warren was delivering his own bump. For
his
movie.

It was a con job that soon had other practitioners. Activist attorney Gloria Allred started a boomlet for actress Cybill Shepherd's presidential candidacy. Cybill immediately became Clintonesque.

A magazine headline read
CYBILL—“I'M HOT TO TROT.”
And Cybill was quoted as saying, “I'm horny most of the time. There are few activities in life as pleasant as sex. And now that I'm suddenly single, I definitely feel very horny. I was always horny—I don't know how to say it other than that.” She made a list of “America's Sexiest Men,” which she called her “hit list of specimens,” the first time within anyone's memory that a putative presidential candidate released a hit list instead of a position paper. Her specimen / positions included Clint Eastwood, Kevin Costner, and Ted Turner.

Surprisingly, few people in Hollywood were surprised about Cybill's candidacy. They knew she didn't have a movie, didn't have a television show, and was making car commercials. Floating a presidential candidacy was a classy stepping-stone, people felt, back to prime time.

Maybe noting all the free air Warren and Cybill were getting, Arnold Schwarzenegger dropped hints that he “could” be a candidate in California's next gubernatorial election. “I think about running for office many times,” Arnold said. “The possibility is there, because I feel it inside. I feel there are a lot of people in politics that are standing still and not doing enough. And there's a vacuum. Therefore I can move in.”

While the Big Guy sounded like he was being honest—“I inhaled. Exhaled. Everything”—he did have a new movie coming out (the last couple had bombed) and some studio heads were worried about his bankability at a time when other action stars like Stallone, Seagal, and Van Damme were already roadkill. A little high-minded, socially committed ink or air never hurt.

As the Warren, Cybill, and Arnold noncandidacies were dissected and parsed on the evening news, the world's master parser, Bill Clinton, came to a Hollywood fund-raiser at the home of director Rob Reiner.

Ronald Reagan, writer-director Mel Brooks told Bill Clinton, was the greatest actor in the history of Hollywood and had turned in his best performance at the White House. “If you didn't know any better,” Brooks said, “you'd think Reagan was the president. He even fooled Gorbachev.”

“If President Reagan could be an actor and become president,” Bill Clinton said, “maybe I could become an actor. I've got a good pension. I can work for cheap.”

But it would never happen. Warren Beatty was no Bill Clinton, and Bill Clinton was no Warren Beatty. They did, though, have something in common. As the balmy Evans kept saying, over and over again, humming his life's mantra to anyone who'd listen: “Pussy hair, my boy, is stronger than universal cable.”

[11]

Ge
orge W. Bush Defines Himself

L
isten, I gotta tell you somethin'. This is the God's honest truth here. If you think my dad is a wimp, that's . . .
good
. Cuz I'm a
compaysionate
conservative and George Herbert Walker's wimpiness . . . works for our message. He's such a nice guy, my dad, isn't he? Hell yes, he really is.

Okay, you want the truth? I'll tell you the truth, but don't tell nobody, cuz this stuff's not ready for prime time. Not this stuff. We've spent a lot of damn money obfuscatin' this. Here goes: I'm not like my dad at all! I'm not a nice guy! I'll kick your fuckin' ass, boy, if you fuck with me! I'll bust your kneecap! I'll gouge your eye! I'll bust your nuts! I'll make you cry! (
Did you see the big tough war hero, John McCain, the day after I busted his chops on Super Tuesday
?) I'm a “political terrorist,” hoss, as that high-ass honey Mary Matalin said.

Ain't nothin' ”Poppy” about me! Cuz I'm my mama's boy, Bar's son, and my asshole little brother, Jeb, he calls her “the enforcer.”

You wanna hear a good one? The best damn one I heard in a long time? Thanks to Bill Clinton's pecker, I'm gonna set myself in the Oval Office. Thanks to Bill Clinton's pecker, the pigeons are gonna come home to roast. No more abortion. No more affirmative action. No gay marriage. No gay rights. No hate crimes. Prayer in the schools? Hell yes! More jails, tents, barracks to keep the thugs and the scum off the streets? Hell yes! The death penalty for fourteen-year-olds? Hell yes!

Hell yes, thanks to Bill Clinton's pecker, I'm gonna shove it up William Sloane Coffin's coffined dead ass, finally, after all these years. Chaplain Coffin, sir, you pompous Yankee dickhead, listen up! You never shoulda said to me that my dad—my own dad!—lost to a better man when he lost for the Senate.
I'm gonna destroy everything you believed in!

And you, Bill Clinton, and you, Hillary, you uppity skank, you never shoulda kept my mom and dad waitin' for a half hour at the inauguration.
I'm gonna dismantle all your programs!

And you, Al Gore, you Buddhist-kissin' bag of wind, you never shoulda made Donna Brazile your campaign manager against
me
—the same schemin' voodoo Ebonics witch who told the press in '88 that George Herbert Walker was hosin' his secretary.
I'm gonna be your controllin' legal authority!

Hell yes, the pigeons are all gonna come home to roast, every one of 'em!

You don't get it, do you? Not even the big-britch media superstars, not even Mr. Rather, who tried to coldcock George Herbert Walker on prime time. None of you get it! I am my mama's boy, and that means there's gonna be blood and hair on the walls!

Remember Mom sayin' she wanted to hang Saddam Hussein? Remember Ferraro and
bitch
rhymes with
rich
? I'm a shit-kicker, partner, not the preppy from Andover. I grew up on George Jones and Johnny Rodriguez, not Fleetwood Mac hippie music. I wear cowboy boots with the state of Texas star on 'em, not tasseled loafers.

Hey, I'm the guy who went up to Al Hunt of the
Wall Street Journal
and his wife and his little kid and called him a “fuckin' son of a bitch.” With his
little kid
there! I'm the one who says, “No comment, asshole!” to reporters I don't like! I'm the guy who went into John Sununu's office and told him his ass was grass and made him boo-hoo blubber! I'm the one who okayed the Dukakis in the Tank and the Willie Horton ads!

And when all the big chips were on the table and it was time to show and tell, when the media was snotful and ready to sneeze about George Herbert Walker and Jennifer Fitzgerald, I'm the guy—my mama's boy!—who went in to see my father and said, “You gotta tell me the truth, Dad, you been gettin' some of Jennifer's tail?”

You know how tough my mom is? So tough that when my little four-year-old sister died of leukemia, Bar went out and played golf the next day. Well, son, I'm just as tough! I ain't afraid of nobody or nothin'! I love my dad, but he got my dander up once, and I said to him, “Hey, you wanna go right here? One-on-one?
Mano a mano
?” Hell, I've always been like that. Mom had a miscarriage; I'm the one who drove her to the hospital, said to her afterward, “Mom, ain't you gettin' too old to still be havin' babies?”

The media put this preppy sweater on me, but that ain't bad. Shit-kickin' don't buy a lotta votes in the North and the Midwest.
Compaysionate
conservative don't mean callin' a guy a “fuckin' son of a bitch” with his little kid there or imitatin' to a reporter that murderin' chickenshit Tucker beggin' for her life. So maybe the preppy sweater, worn to rags and riches by George Herbert Walker, is gonna come in handy in the general election.

But it ain't me, babe.
This
is me! Bob Bullock, Texas lieutenant governor, sticks it to me with a bill in the legislature. There's a roomful of people there. I grab the son of a bitch by his lapel. I say, “If you're gonna fuck me, you gotta kiss me first!” I pull his ugly face right up to mine. He's got his mouth open, not knowin' what the fuck. I stick my old tongue in there. Yeah!
That's
me, hoss!

They say I grew up rich, the silver wine opener up my butt and all that, but that don't mean I noticed it stickin' out of there. I was in Midland fuckin' Texas, not in Palm Beach or Newport or Martha's Vineyard. I crawled under the high school stadium and got forty feet up on the crossbars, climbed the light poles all around the stadium, got sent to the principal's office for throwin' a football out the window and puttin' makeup on like Elvis. I didn't give a shit about school; I wanted to be Willie Mays and play outfield for the Giants. I worked hard at hittin' the curveball, not hittin' the books. I collected baseball cards, not straight A's. What I liked most about my dad, who mostly wasn't there, was that he could catch a baseball—no shit—with the glove behind his back.

I was out all day ridin' my bike with the other kids—Texas kids, shit-kicker kids—learnin' to cuss, suckin' on young beers. I got a little older and we'd drive over to Odessa. They had whores there and dirty and oily honky-tonks. You raised hell in Odessa was what they said; you raised a family in Midland. I sure as shit didn't have no silver wine opener stickin' out of me when I was doin' all that. Ain't no little honey's lips got split by no wine opener.

I noticed somethin' pretty young, though. I was a guy. I knew how to be a guy. Truth is, a lotta boys and men don't know how to be guys. I sure did right away. And guys liked me. I knew how to grin and tell a dirty joke. I knew how to pat somebody on the back or on the ass. I knew how to look somebody in the eye and hold their eyes on mine or wink or squeeze a bicep while I was talkin' to 'em. I knew how to cuss up a storm, turn the air blue with a stream of bad words, turn filth into locker room poetry. I knew how to rock on the heels of my boots and bob my head around. I loved Midland fuckin' Texas.

Then they sent me up to Andover. Up in New England. It was colder than Tricia Nixon's you know what. East Coast spoiled brats, phonies who hardly knew who Willie Mays was, let alone his lifetime battin' average against left-handed pitchin'. I tried out for everything, but all I got was cheerleader. Yeah, I know, you don't have to tell me. But don't try to
define
me with that. That don't mean shit about shit. It don't make me Richard Nixon, either, just because he was a water boy or a cheerleader or whatever the diddly shit he was.

By the time I got to Yale, it was hittin' the fan. The antiwar stuff. Hippies. A heaviness hangin' over everything. That whole downer scene. Everybody gettin' drunk on their own guilt—we were here havin' toga parties—they were havin' recon parties in the rice paddies. Big deal! You know what? Listen, this is the God's honest truth. It's not that I was for the damn war or against the damn war. I just didn't give a damn!

I still went to see as many ball games as I could and I discovered the pure-joy bliss of drinkin' Jack Daniel's with iced Budweiser behind it. Sometimes I mixed up a garbage canful of screwdrivers. Sure, I tried a little loco weed, who didn't? Even Tricia Nixon did. Bill Clinton may have been off protestin' against the war in England or Prague or Moscow or Hanoi (my dad's CIA friends say he was in Hanoi), but I was in New Haven, gettin' busted for stealin' a wreath off a store's door with my fraternity brothers or gettin' almost busted at Princeton for tryin' to pull the goalposts down.

I wasn't wallowin' in how awful everything in America was, because I didn't see anything that was awful. I loved my fraternity brothers and I loved hearin' the pledges squeal when we put ΔΚΕ on their asses with a red-hot coat hanger. And I loved hearin' some bead-wearin', peace-lovin', social-conscience little nitwit squeal when I made her feel good.

Mom and Dad were livin' in River Oaks, outside Houston, by then, and on vacations or in the summer, I was hangin' out with Lacey Neuhaus (who'd almost marry Teddy Kennedy one day)—
I guess Teddy and me got at least one thing in common.
And with Tina, who was a sizzlin'-hot handful and the actress Gene Tierney's daughter. (Gene Tierney was one of JFK's millions, so I guess I sorta indirectly
got somethin in common with JFK, too
.) Then I met Cathy, who was smart, sexy, and blond and who belonged to the country club. We got engaged, but then we broke up and
not
—hell no!—because her stepfather was Jewish, either.

You would've thought back then, readin' the papers and lookin' at the TV that this country was comin' apart, but I didn't get it. I didn't see that. What I saw was the media sensationalizin' everything.

There were a whole lotta young people like me who didn't grow their hair long and clack around with beads and smell like the inside of a fortune teller's. Truth is, there were more of us than there were of them. The fact that it was easier to get laid than ever before wasn't our fault. And to turn it down? At that age? (Bill Bennett, back then, used to date Janis Joplin! I'm not shittin' you, cowboy. Bill “Book of Virtues” Bennett and drunk-as-a-skunk, fuck-the-doorknobs Janis! True story!)

Hell, I wasn't
changed
by any of it. Alterin' my conscience like a lot of 'em. I still listened mostly to George Jones and Johnny Rodriguez. I still liked beer better than loco weed or . . . anything else. I still cussed up a storm. (Mom wouldn't play golf with me, I cussed so much.) I still went to as many ball games as I could. I swam. I jogged. I played ball. I still couldn't hit the damn curveball. I was still smokin' and chewin' tobacco.

The only part of Yale I really liked, besides the Dekes, was Skull and Bones, which was a different kind of fraternity. To get initiated, I had to lie down bare-assed in a coffin half full of mud. Then they locked the lid. (
Fuck John McCain and his war hero stories! That never happened to him!
) But what was fun was this braggin' we did. We had to brag the details of our sexual scores to the other braggers of Skull and Bones and they had to brag theirs. We knew everything about what everybody had done to whoever. So one day, you'd hear about this little old girl and the tricks she knew, and the next day, you'd call her and maybe experience 'em for yourself. It was like we were givin' tips on outboard power motors or sides of beef.

After Yale—Yale went completely to shit right after I left, thanks to Bill Clinton and his skank and the Black Panthers and the kind of college president who let protesters piss into the wastebasket in his office—I had a problem. I didn't wanna go to Vietnam, not because I had Clinton's fancy-ass, high-falutin theological differences with the war—but because I didn't wanna get my young ass shot off.

Then I heard about this Texas Air National Guard outfit and I went to see the guy and I told him who I was and he said fine. I wanted to be a fighter pilot anyway, after hearin' all my life about Dad gettin' to be a hero as one. And it's not like there wasn't a need for fighter pilots to defend our borders.

What if Castro's air force tried to take Galveston out? This was back in the good old Cold War days, don't forget. The guy with the shoe, remember? The bald Russian? The fat one? He beat on the table with his shoe and said he'd bury us!

I liked the Texas Air National Guard. Lt. Lloyd Bentsen III was the senator's kid and Capt. John Connally III was the secretary of the treasury's kid, and I met half the Dallas Cowboys team, who'd all signed up. I spent fifty-three weeks of flight trainin' school in Georgia, at Moody Air Force Base, in the shit-flake town of Valdosta. I learned how to fly a jet and got high on the sound of the burners. I drank a lotta beer and a whole lot more whiskey, and the women in Valdosta . . . aw, man! They just about trucked 'em in there from all over the piney woods, little halter tops, hot sweat, and iced beer, and I scratched my itch . . . from all the mosquitoes, oh yeah!

It was out of hand—no shit—I'm the first to admit, part of my feckless and irresponsive youth. Georgia peaches, yessir, Georgia peaches, Georgia peaches! The Officers' Club—wasn't nothin' but a shack, a stump house, a tin roof, a hot tin roof, up there on the roof on a summer night, a girl in a halter top on a tin roof on a summer night, pussycat on a hot tin roof . . . aw, shit, aw, man . . . jukebox blarin' George Jones, “White Lightnin',” real hot, so fuckin' hot, tubsful of iced Bud, sweat drippin' off me, took my shirt off, still sweatin', sweatin' like a pig, took my pants off, singin' ”White Lightnin'! White Lightnin'! White Lightnin'!” got up on the bar, bare-assed . . .
No! Hell no! Forget it! Didn't happen! Never happened! Wouldn'ta done that! No fuckin' way! Naked? On the bartop? Hell no! Hell no! Naked? With all those guys in there? . . . Why? . . . I'm not . . . Hell no!