You Will Die: The Burden of Modern Taboos (74 page)

Selene Waters, a nineteen-year-old starlet, was hit on by Reagan when she was with a date at Slapsie Maxie’s. Waters was excited about the possibility of being seen in public on the SAG president’s arm. After getting her address and phone number and verifying she lived alone he showed up unannounced at three that morning. He pushed his way in and forced sex on her. As she said in 1989:

This was a tumultuous time period for forty-two-year-old Reagan. His previous marriage proposal to twenty-one-year-old actress of the Baha’i faith, Christine Larson, had been rejected. Roughly a week after the Waters event, Reagan reluctantly proposed to a thirty-year-old B-level actress, Nancy Davis, who was pregnant with his child. Two weeks later an abbreviated marriage was held, to which Reagan did not invite his family.

Davis had slept her way into Hollywood,
²⁹
and had adored Reagan for years. She even joined the SAG board to get closer to him. It was known even before the pregnancy became public that Reagan and Davis’ sexual relationship had already begun because Reagan never closed his bedroom curtains.

When the baby, Patricia Reagan, was born to Davis, Reagan was not present. He was with Larson, crying to her that his life was ruined. He angrily broke off his affair with Larson shortly after the birth of Patricia, when he arrived at Larson’s one day to be met at the door by a French actor wearing only a bath towel. Reagan appears to have stayed committed after that, except for a brief dalliance in 1968, definitely nothing as sensational as Davis’ affair with Frank Sinatra in the early 1970s.

George H.W. Bush
³⁰
—H.W. Bush’s first reported affair occurred with an Italian woman with whom he shared an apartment in New York City. She sought legal counsel in 1964 when H.W. Bush did not follow through on his promise to divorce his wife, Barbara, and marry her. In the early 1970s a North Dakota woman divorced her husband and moved to Washington, DC, to be near him. In 1980 he had an affair with a young blonde photographer covering the presidential campaign.

In 1981 Bush was in a minor traffic accident with a “girlfriend” and he used his political clout to keep it out of the police logs so as not to attract attention. Another time in the 1980s, H.W. Bush was visiting a woman late at night when a fire in the building brought the Fire Department. His Secret Service detail would not let the firemen in the building until he was whisked out a back door.

The longest-lasting relationship H.W. Bush has had was with a divorcée eight years his junior, Jennifer Fitzgerald. He appears to have begun his romantic involvement with Fitzgerald in the early 1970s. He made her his secretary in 1974 when he became Chief of the United States Liaison Office in Peking, China, under President Gerald Ford. He kept her as a personal assistant when he was later put in charge of the CIA, and would continue to keep her employed in positions close to him.

This would change when H.W. Bush ran for president in 1988. In 1987, presidential candidate Senator Gary Hart confronted allegations of an affair by denying it and challenging reporters to follow him. They did and soon pictures emerged of a model sitting on his lap in a boat named
Monkey Business
. Originally the Democratic frontrunner, Hart’s campaign was wrecked. This incident ended the
press’ gentleman’s code that had protected politicians’ extramarital affairs.

In this new environment, Fitzgerald was moved to the State Department to keep her out of the White House during H.W. Bush’s presidency. When H.W. Bush ran for re-election against Democratic nominee Bill Clinton the candidates did not attack each other on the fidelity issue. As one Clinton aide said:

In 1992 the Fitzgerald affair received press coverage from a book and a
New York Post
article. In the first press conference following the article, Bush made sure his entire family was standing by his side, including his children’s spouses, grandchildren, his 91-year-old mother in a wheelchair, and their pets. Despite this domestic protection the query still came and he furiously responded:

One of his granddaughters then burst into tears. Fitzgerald has never responded to the allegations publicly.

Bill Clinton
—When Clinton was a sixteen-year-old Boys Nation senator he shook President John Kennedy’s hand at the White House. Young Clinton aspired
to Kennedy’s political greatness, and whether or not he knew it, his relations with the opposite sex would follow Kennedy’s as well. Upon returning to high school life in Arkansas, the young man who was always “on the hunt” had a new pick-up line.
³³
“Shake the hand that shook the hand of John F. Kennedy.”
³⁴

Clinton was president in the post-Gary Hart era, and with the help of his political opponents the press had no difficulty finding Clinton’s
Monkey Business
. In terms of quantity, Clinton undoubtedly has been a womanizer on par with Kennedy. However, the financial rewards and political climate that brought his paramours out in droves makes numerous stories suspect.

Nevertheless, Clinton appears to have lost his virginity to his childhood sweetheart, Dolly Kyle, sometime in high school. Although Clinton and Kyle moved on to other relationships in college, Kyle reappeared to become Clinton’s first act of adultery his senior year in college. Kyle was eight months pregnant by her husband when she met back up with Clinton on a trip to a national Catholic women’s conference. (Kyle would return the favor and sleep with Clinton when he was married.)

His proclivity for volume came when he broke up with his college girlfriend his senior year. Despite his girth, Clinton had no problem having dates almost every night and he soon developed a reputation for insisting on lights, but no condoms, during sex. It does not appear that Clinton ever slowed down. The summer after college he was “a very, very, very busy boy.”
³⁵
One of the women who kept him busy that summer was the reigning Miss Arkansas. (Clinton would eventually be romantically linked to three other Miss Arkansas title-holders as well.)

As a Rhodes Scholar at Oxford for two years, one friend believed Clinton had sexual relations with “a minimum of thirty women—and I stress the word ‘minimum.’”
³⁶
A common Oxford technique Clinton used was strip poker in his room with groups of women. He also took advantage of possibly being drafted for the Vietnam War by coaxing several women to sleep with him because his life might soon be over.

After Oxford, Clinton attended Yale and met his future wife, Hillary Rodham. Their courtship and engagement did not slow Clinton’s spiraling tally. One co-worker of Clinton’s in the early 1970s said that despite Hillary’s frequent presence he remembered Clinton “sleeping with at least three women in a one-week period.”
³⁷
During Clinton’s first run for Congress in 1974, Clinton’s biggest campaign
contributors were former lovers, who by his own estimate were “maybe fifty.”
³⁸
Some of his campaign staffers estimated that he had thirty lovers on the campaign trail, “one for each of the twenty-one counties plus some spares.”
³⁹

It was during the 1980s, when Clinton was Arkansas’ governor, that Gennifer Flowers alleges most of their twelve-year affair occurred. Flowers was a well-endowed news reporter in Arkansas’ capital when their relationship began in the late 1970s. Flowers revealed their relationship in great detail in two books. She claimed that Clinton was insatiable, however, his penis, “Willard,” was “not particularly well-endowed.”
⁴⁰
Flowers also alleged that early on in their relationship Clinton impregnated her and that he paid for the abortion. Over the years Clinton explored mild kinky sex with Flowers, using condiments, spanking, phone sex, having her tie him up, and requesting the vibrator be used on him. Flowers, however, drew the line at hot wax and a suggested threesome.

Clinton’s most famous marital affair would occur as president with his intern Monica Lewinsky. Her fellatio of him during his phone conversation with a congressman, his ejaculate on her blue dress, and his use of a cigar on her has been officially recorded by Congress’ investigation into the matter. Oddly, considering his past, his affair with Lewinsky was remarkably reserved. During their numerous dalliances he refused to penetrate her and often refused to orgasm. Clinton appears to have become sexually conservative with age.

George W. Bush
⁴¹
—Despite Bush’s notorious partying as a youth, which led to at least three arrests and eventual alcoholism, there are no credible reports of dalliances. Part of this may be because, as one of his fraternity brothers recollected, “[W. Bush] certainly was not an ass man, he could barely get a date in college.”
⁴²

Another possibility is that he was so intoxicated as a young adult that neither he, nor his female partners, remember what exactly happened or with whom it happened. A high school friend recalled hearing stories of W. Bush when they were both in college, saying, “Poor Georgie. He couldn’t even relate to women unless he was loaded . . . There were just too many stories of him turning up dead drunk on dates.”
⁴³
This was a man who became president of his fraternity, “the drinking jock house,” as only a junior and once rolled his drunk self home from a college party in the middle of the street.
⁴⁴

Another possibility is that W. Bush’s political handlers were able to successfully cover up the stories. Many have speculated that some of his father’s old friends at the CIA have played a part in the suspicious absence of
any
extramarital sex stories from W. Bush’s raucous past. Fuel for this speculation appeared during his run for Texas governor. A former call girl from W. Bush’s hometown of Midland, Texas, showed up in Austin claiming she had a past relationship with him and was willing to sell her story. According to a local political consultant, “she got a visit from some men who made her realize it was better to turn tricks in Midland than to stop breathing.” She described the men as “intelligence types” and quickly left Austin.
⁴⁵

In 2000, wealthy pornography publisher Larry Flynt was irate about W. Bush’s hypocrisy regarding abstinence-only education. He hired investigators, who found a woman W. Bush impregnated in the early 1970s and for whom W. Bush arranged an abortion. This occurred before the Supreme Court struck down laws preventing first-trimester abortions in
Roe v. Wade
and therefore it was illegal. Flynt knew the doctor’s identity and had four affidavits from the woman’s friends supporting the allegation. However, the mainstream press never publicized it (nor would they even ask W. Bush if it was true), because the woman, now married to an FBI agent, refused to come forward publicly.
⁴⁶

Even if the above allegations have validity, it appears that, unlike his presidential predecessor and father, W. Bush has stayed faithful to the wife he married at the age of thirty-one. However, it is highly unlikely that prior to marriage W. Bush partook so liberally in the immoral pleasures of alcohol and drugs,
⁴⁷
but remained sexually chaste. When his brother, Jeb Bush, made the statement that the only woman he ever slept with was his wife, and it was relayed to W. Bush, he was shocked. “Jeb said that? Oh, boy. No comment. I mean Jeb is setting a tough standard for the rest of us in that generation.”
⁴⁸
This is also a man who once responded to a reporter’s question of what W. Bush and his father spoke about with one word—“Pussy.”
^49
,
50

1.
        Joseph Ellis,
His Excellency: George Washington
, large print ed. (2004), pp. 61–63, 71–72; and Wesley Hagood,
Presidential Sex
(1995), pp. 6–9.

2.
        Robert Turner, “Truth About Jefferson,”
Wall Street Journal
, 3 July 2001.

3.
        Hagood,
Presidential Sex
, pp. 22–25.

4.
        Ibid., pp. 11–15.

5.
        Ibid., pp. 41–42.

6.
        Ibid., p. 74.

7.
        This quote and most of Harding sect. from Irving Wallace, et al.,
Intimate Sex Lives of Famous People
(1982), pp. 394–396.

8.
        Hagood,
Presidential Sex
, p. 89.