American Rhapsody (54 page)

Jack Nicholson liked Bill Clinton a lot, a whole lot, better than he even liked Fidel Castro, almost as much as he liked Robert Evans, who kept Jack supplied with endless boxes of windup dolls, misty, vacant-eyed midwestern farm girls who'd come to Hollywood to be stars and who were now on the hairy, varicose first leg of that trip.

When Jack Nicholson and the president were finished schmoozing, they gave each other a hug, and then the president gave Rudy Durand a hug, and the Marine Corps guard in the box saluted Jack (as marines everywhere did after
A Few Good Men
).

Jack and Rudy went over and sat in the Chinese box, smack square on the fifty-yard line. The good old USA won the game. A great time was had by all.

Bill Clinton went back to Washington, but he would return soon. Rudy and Jack played some golf the next day. Mark Canton got his picture for his wall. He was so happy about the picture, he gave Rudy Durand a deal to produce two movies, the kind of deal Rudy hadn't had in Hollywood for a long time.

It was all thanks, Rudy Durand knew, to Bill Clinton. Hollywood . . . and Rudy Durand . . . and Sly Stallone . . . and Mark Canton just loved Bill Clinton!

[13]

Hillary Bares All

H
e'll end up like Nelson Rockefeller, his heart exploding as he grunts and groans on top of some young slut who's flattered him into being his aide. It's funny . . . I campaigned for Rockefeller in 1968, you know. The Democratic National Convention was about to become a symbol of a changing world, and where was I? At the Republican one, campaigning for Rockefeller. Make of that what you will, those of you who, like Barbara Olson, consider me the last Communist, who accuse me of having worked for a Communist in Berkeley, who say that Saul Alinsky was my Karl Marx. (Dick Morris was enamored of Saul, too, and he works for Trent Lott and Rupert Murdoch now.)

Did you read the Barbara Olson book? Did you know that her husband, Ted, is one of Ken Starr's best friends? Did you know that her publisher, Al Regnery, who's published so many books trashing Bill and me, has the same exact interests as Bill? Police who were called to his house found Al's porn stash, including a book with colored photos of “oral sex and the placing of objects into the vagina.” I've done my research, as you see. I've
always
done my opposition research.

But getting back to Bill: I once deluded myself into thinking that maybe in our dotage he would settle down. That atherosclerosis (from cheeseburgers) and flaccidity (from overuse) would sober his priapic drunkenness. I say “deluded myself” because, thanks to the marvels of modern medical science, that is no longer a possibility. No one ever considers the heartbreak that Viagra means to a woman like me.

You know, it was never very good with us, even in the beginning, when there
was
a was. Oh, he said it was good for him, but I somehow never believed him, even before I had the evidence, before I went through his pockets looking for phone numbers as soon as he was asleep. I tried to please him. I shaved my legs and armpits, even though I felt the act was a betrayal of my beliefs. God knows, all of you know how many times I tried changing my hair. Not that he was ever Adonis himself, with his pale gut sticking out of his T-shirt, his thighs like the flabby Crisco fat of a man who was twenty years older. But I tried. And kept trying. And kept trying. Until the pain and humiliation congealed into an angry black clump in my heart. It wasn't enough that he was cheating—he was rubbing it into my face.

I wondered for a while if that was a part of his thrill. He wanted to take Gennifer into that bathroom at the statehouse as I stood only a few feet away. He knew I saw them together outside that bathroom door. He brought that whore to the airport to kiss him good-bye. He knew I knew who she was. And on the morning we left for Washington after the election, at 5:15, he had to see that slut down in the basement, knowing that I was upstairs, knowing that I knew, knew even that she was wearing a raincoat with nothing underneath it. Was it any wonder, do you think, that I turned away from him when he moved to kiss me for the cameras at the inauguration? I'm not his prop. I am no one's prop. The fucker can't do me that way. Unless I want to be done.

I knew everything. I know about all of them. I've
always
known everything. God, do you have any idea of the pain knowing everything has entailed? I had to know to be able to protect him. To be able to protect
us
. We wanted to go to the White House. We've always wanted to get to the White House. The sluts and the whores, the bimbos and the groupies had to be silenced, neutralized. The stakes were too high. They had to be made to understand that if they spoke about what he had done with them, their own frailties and weaknesses would be exposed. They had to be reminded—by the troopers, by Terry, by Palladino—of their own
humanity
. They had to get a vulnerability wake-up call. Opposition research, really, that's all it was. If you tell someone what you did with him, the world will find out that you fucked half the high school football team on the fifty-yard line—even if you didn't. That sort of thing. An antidote to self-righteousness, an inoculation against a gag reflex to take fifty thousand dollars from the
National Enquirer.

I trust Terry Lenzner. I worked with him on the Watergate stuff. He knows who the good and bad guys are. He knows that reality-checking a whore is a venial and noble sin in the pursuit of keeping the bad guys out of the White House. But consider the position it put me into relative to my own heart. I
had
to know all the filth to know whom to silence. But it was filth that poisoned me against him with each piece of information. In the process of saving him, I was destroying him inside myself. But even if it meant his destruction within me, I
had
to destroy him in order to save him. It became the nightmare equation that had been worked out by the Pentagon in Vietnam, the equation that I had railed against and loathed so much: You have to destroy the village in order to save it. I was napalming my own heart and soul. I laughed when they called me Joan of Arc in the media. If they only knew. I was burning my own most intimate feelings at a stake of my own creation.

Why, you ask? Why would anyone do that to themselves? Is anything worth that price?
Power
? Power by itself, you mean? Power as a concept, as the ability to make people do things? No. Fuck that. Fuck power as a concept. I've never been interested in power that way. But power to accomplish goals that would make America a better place to live? That would make this country a more compassionate, more sensitive, more human place? Yes, I plead guilty to a quest for that kind of power—in the name of children, women, black people, gay people, the elderly, the disabled, the ill. In the name of the millions of repressed, unempowered, disenfranchised—yes! A thousand times yes!
That
is worth the humiliation and pain and inner destruction I've sentenced myself to. A reality check to a nation to remind it of its own humanity . . . the way Terry and Palladino and the troopers had to remind the whores and sluts and bimbos of theirs.

Is there anything wrong with wanting to make this a better America? My pain is
mine
. I've decided to take it upon myself. I'm not causing
you
pain. My aim is to better
your
life. But if I've taken that upon myself, then why do you quibble with the means I've chosen—the means I've
had
to choose? To get into a position where I can better
your
life, do
I
lie?

Of course I lie. Could Bill have been elected and reelected if I had said, Yes, he turned the statehouse and the White House into a whorehouse? . . . Yes, I've seen him so stoned, he was incoherent? . . . Yes, he was Brer Rabbit, dodging the draft? . . . Yes, his greatest talent is to seduce, whether it's a voter or a bimbo?

Could I have told the truth and said,
I
care about making this a better America;
he
cares about glory and victory and whores and doesn't give a shit what position he takes in order to get all of those things? Could I have said, some of the good things that this administration has achieved have been achieved because he is
afraid
of me? Afraid to disagree with me? Afraid I'll hit him? Afraid I'll leave him and destroy whatever vestige of his presidency and his posterity is left?

Yes, I've learned to lie and I lie well. I've learned to con the media and the voters with the sort of uplifting, bathetic, soporific ideas that I know will soften my image as Saul Alinsky's ill-begotten daughter.
It Takes a Village
and children's rights and health care and Social Security and Medicare—how can you not love me for waving those good-hearted flags?

Yes, I lie about him, and when the going gets rough and his approval ratings are down, I lend myself in those moments—if I so choose—as his prop. I let him tell that story of how the maids barged in on us in the residence as we were in bed, letting him imply that we were sleeping together and having sex. Or the time, during his darkest hours, when I allowed a photograph to be “surreptitiously” taken showing the two of us embracing in our bathing suits. I even let the world see my big butt just to try to keep Bill Clinton in office.

What hurts me most isn't what he does with his whores anymore; it's what he says to them. He told Gennifer about how he dreamed he could take a walk with her on a sunny day down a leaf-strewn street. He told the intern he had nothing in his life except his work. He called me Hilla the Hun and the Warden. Even if he betrayed me sexually, he didn't have to betray me that way. There's nothing in his life except his work? My God, even if I don't exist, even if he views me as his jailer, what about Chelsea? First he does his filth with a slut almost his daughter's age and then he just about tells his slut that his daughter doesn't exist in his life?

He has no right to be angry at me, but his actions show he is in a rage. I saved him countless times in Arkansas, I saved him on
60 Minutes
in New Hampshire, and I saved him from being removed from office. Had I left during impeachment, the whole country would have been applauding and he would have had to check himself into some place like Menninger. I've come to the conclusion over the years that he has one use for a woman. And I've come to the conclusion that I'm not a woman to him.

He has somehow desexed me in his own head, although I sometimes wonder if he ever really looked at me that way. He made me into his adviser/sister, his pol/buddy. Maybe I was wrong not to try to be more feminine in our Arkansas years, but maybe I was right not to shave or even shower that much—because I sensed that he wasn't attracted to me intimately . . . and in revenge, I wanted him to feel revulsion. Maybe it horrified me that I was married to a drooling sexual pig and that's why I was the way I was. Here he was . . . the enlightened, sensitive, empathetic New Man, the hero of the PTAs and the soccer moms, a candidate and a president who would empower women. And here I was . . . profoundly lonely, abandoned by him intimately, the woman he desexed, getting him out of trouble with women he'd used as living hand towels.

He rarely touched me that way, and even when he did, I questioned the dynamic, the underlying stimulus. One of the rare times I'm talking about took place in Arkansas. Vince and a young woman who was an associate and Bill and I went out to dinner and we all had too much to drink. We were walking outside afterward and Bill and the young woman started fooling around, kissing. And Vince started kissing me and holding me.

I could see Bill and her and he could see Vince and me. Our driver, a trooper, was nearby, watching all of us. Bill and I got back in the limo and he pulled the divider up and we had sex right in the backseat. He fucked me like he hadn't fucked me in a long time. And all the time he was inside me, I thought, You prick! You phony bastard! You're not fucking me; you're fucking that young blonde! You're not inside me; you're inside her! You're not squeezing my tits; you're squeezing hers! But I'm the one who hurt afterward . . . not her.

Vince's death was the final evidence to me that I had been right about all the humiliation I'd shouldered and the lies I had told. Because those motherfuckers at the
Wall Street Journal
killed Vince Foster as surely as if they had pulled the trigger. Those motherfucking, racist, Neanderthal, troglodyte, right-wing creeps who wrote their foul rag of an editorial page. When they wrote that scurrilous and false editorial about him, Vince took himself out of a politics he considered too dirty to be a part of. They assassinated his character, and it was like Vince said—“Fuck you! You want my character? I'll give you my body! I will force you to see what you've done!” My lovely Vincenzo Fosterini, always there for me in any way I wanted. And now they'd taken him, the forces of darkness I had fought against for so long, the forces that had to be kept at bay, in the gothic wilderness, out of the White House—if the America I believed in with every ounce of my body was to survive.

When it was the same editorial page of the same
Wall Street Journal
that broke the story of Juanita Broaddrick's alleged rape, I wasn't surprised. It was almost morbidly funny; they were calling me the last Communist and it was the ultimate symbol of capitalism, the
Wall Street Journal
, that had wounded me the most, not just once but twice.

I don't know what to tell you about Juanita Broaddrick. It's very difficult, almost impossible, for me to talk about her. I knew back in Arkansas already what people were whispering, and he, as always, denied it. I think I kept myself from really confronting it until I saw the videotape of her on television. I threw up afterward. I felt like taking a shower, but I knew it wouldn't do any good. I knew in my core that she was telling the truth. I sat alone in a room and thought about having had the same thing inside me that he had forced into her. And I had wanted it inside me and even remonstrated with him when he hadn't put it there. And now it had been exposed to me on national television in a grotesque, ugly manifestation . . . an instrument of torture. Yet it was also the instrument that had fathered Chelsea.

I wondered how that could be. A piece of flesh that could cause both excruciating misery and the greatest joy, suffering and celebration. I knew I didn't want it inside me anymore. No, that's not right: I knew I would never allow it inside me anymore. It was a thought that I knew was moot and profoundly sad, too, because I knew he didn't
want
to put it inside me anyway. This would relieve him of the painful obligation he felt once or twice a year. The pain I felt from what he had done to Juanita Broaddrick . . . the pain that would now cause the most intimate loathing I'd felt for any man . . . would probably be doing him a favor. He wouldn't have to go through his yearly charade with me anymore.

Sometimes I wonder what happened to the boy at Yale whom I fell in love with. At other times, I wonder whether I simply misperceived him—maybe he was always that way and I just didn't see it. I thought he had an inner life, a mental life that would deepen and root itself through the years. I didn't know that even the words
deepen
and
root itself
would turn into a cheap, dirty joke for me, a cruelly exact double entendre. I don't know how I didn't see that the boy I met at Yale would turn into a man interested not in his mind but in his dick, who would spend free hours not with the classics but with phone sex, whose idea of enjoying nature was jumping into the bushes with some slut.