American Rhapsody (7 page)

There was even a phrase for the sleepy condition of the willards of these men at this time of day as they underwent their routine daily manicures, not completely focused, distracted, but getting the manicure anyway because it was a perk and a part of the schedule, like getting the Bentley detailed on Monday. The willards of these semierect men were called “Hollywood loaves.”

And now here was this Beverly Hills Valley Girl of the nineties, this Lewinsky, a nice Jewish girl with big lips, her mother a little screwed up maybe—
what was that business about the mother pretending to sleep with Pavarotti
?—and the titans of
today
got it, instantly understood even what the rest of America didn't get: Yes, she blew him, but they didn't have sex.

Because a blow job in Hollywood wasn't sex. A blow job was a little break in a busy afternoon . . . the traditional way to aid the digestion after a long lunch . . . better than Mylanta, better than Tums . . . a blow job was almost like a different way of taking a pee, for God sake! . . . A blow job was . . . a
manicure
.

So what was the big deal? Bill Clinton was a good president building a better America, a dream that many of today's titans, sixties kids, shared. Other presidents had had manicures. Bill Clinton was Hollywood's president anyway, in a town with deep liberal Democratic roots.

People here still talked about Mark Rosenberg, the late former head of production at Warner Bros. and one of the heads of the Students for a Democratic Society in the sixties. People here still talked about Gary Hart and how his binding friendship with Warren destroyed him. Gary, the joke was, wanted to be Warren—the greatest Hollywood swordsman since Milton Berle, and Marilyn had once said Uncle Miltie had the biggest willard she'd ever seen—and Warren wanted to be Gary, the serious social thinker.

At least Bill Clinton didn't have any destructive friendships like that, except for the smarmy pollster, Morris, who liked sucking hookers' toes. Bill Clinton's pals in town were Steven Spielberg—sexually, Steven was Saint Steven; Jeffrey Katzenberg—devoted to money and his wife, Marilyn; and David Geffen, who was gay.

Oh, sure, there had been some Hollywood buzzings about Bill Clinton through the years. Bill and Sharon, who had dinner together while some people prattled about Stone engaged with the president in the same kind of yipping, leg-elevated positions we saw her faking with Joe Pesci on-screen. And Bill and Barbra—but Barbra was almost dowdy now, older than Hillary even, no longer what producer Jon Peters once called “the nicest ass in town.”

Bill Clinton even had a family connection to Hollywood, although it was awfully low-rent. Barbara Boxer's daughter married one of Hillary's brothers . . . and Boxer's daughter used to work for the producer Rob Fried. The connection got Rob some golf with the president at Burning Tree, but little else.

.  .  .  

While godless and immoral Hollywood had been amusing itself with manicures for nearly a century, the blow job, we felt, was our generation's gift to American popular culture in the sixties. We didn't call it a “blow job” for aesthetic reasons (way too uncool). We called it “head.”

Head was ours the way the missionary position was our parents'. We'd seen our moms flush crimson when dad picked the chicken neck out of the pot and, grinning, held it up . . . and the idea that mom (or Mamie Eisenhower or Pat Nixon or Debbie Reynolds or Doris Day) was going to, you know . . . not in a million years!

Even in the sixties, most midwestern or southern or rural girls went, “Ooh! Yuk!” at the slightest suggestion that they lower their pretty heads. But California girls knew all about it: They had the talent their mothers would never have. They strengthened their jaw muscles with cucumbers and bananas and did oral yoga exercises with their lips, mouths, and tongues. They went to the dentist to file down teeth so they “wouldn't get in the way.” They learned to put condoms on with their mouths. They performed after licking ice or eating jalapeño peppers or chewing a Red Hot.

Head was the perfect sixties sex act. It was, literally, still outlawed in many states between men and men, as well as between men and women. You could go to jail for it. It was fast; you didn't even have to take your clothes off. And the fact that we were certain our parents hadn't done it was an important consideration at a time when fools like Abbie Hoffman and Jerry Rubin were telling us to “kill your parents” (while not killing theirs). Part of its outlaw appeal was that it was a black act more than a white one. Old blues songs like “Hog Me Baby” and “Down on Me” and “Scratch-Throat Blues” had celebrated it.

We had adopted black culture fervently and wholeheartedly in the sixties, to the point where if Black Panthers showed up at a party in the Haight and admired one of our “chicks” or “old ladies,” we longhaired white boys got out of the way and went outside to smoke some dope while she moved into the bathroom with the Panther. Both we and our chicks felt this was ideological penance, a personal way to redeem ourselves for slavery and untold generations of white racism. Some of our old ladies—not all—objected only when Panthers like Huey Newton, a successful pimp, tried to turn them out to perform for the dollars our generation pretended to disdain.

Head also caused some men to open doors they had forced closed all their lives. Stoned enough or drunk enough, they discovered they didn't really care if the form kneeling there in the lava light with lips bared and mouth open was a man or a woman.

The porn industry quickly picked up on what we'd started. Massage parlors opened everywhere suddenly, fluorescent-lighted churches in an America that was overnight becoming the Diocese of Fellatio. The naked priestesses in these grubby temples would never have intercourse, but they could be convinced with a donation to do massage with their lips and mouths. Men all over America ducked into these churches for quickie noontime prayer; the bells they heard going off in their ears had nothing to do with salvation.

By then, our generation had found its own miracle-dispensing sex symbol. Our fathers may have had B.B. and M.M. Our kids would one day have S.S. We had L.L.—Linda Lovelace, the Empress of Head. Her movie was called
Deep Throat
and everyone of our generation—future president Bill Clinton, future Supreme Court justice Clarence Thomas—saw it. It featured Lovelace doing nothing but head, taking it
all in
without gagging, every sixties man's dream. She was somehow able to relax, perhaps paralyze, her throat muscles completely. She claimed that her clitoris was in her throat. Her manager, an ex-marine named Chuck Traynor, explained it: “Once your throat opens, your esophagus gets quite large, like a sword swallower's.” We heard that Linda was doing a cross-country media tour where she was demonstrating to critics that what we saw on-screen wasn't movie magic. Head shampoo announced it was considering putting her in a television commercial.

When Richard Nixon was brought down by the source named Deep Throat, we thought it was poetry. Richard Nixon, doing a Linda Lovelace, taking it all in.

Hollywood had warm and fuzzy feelings about Bill Clinton, and there was the conviction that if he loosened up—like JFK when he came to town; producer Irwin Winkler's guest house is where JFK and Angie Dickinson used to tryst—Bill Clinton would fit right in. It was easy to visualize him hanging out in Evans's bedroom with Jack Nicholson, sharing a joint and watching as a magician twirled a girl around and around, C notes coming out of her every orifice. Listening to Evans talk about a girl he'd urinated upon, who got up and broke three of his ribs. Hanging out. Having fun. Just being human in Hollywood. The big house in Bel Air, the beach house at Carbon Beach, the two black Mercedes, the black Ducati, the black Dodge Ram, a daily manicure. You know . . . normal life. Listening to Sharon tell him how Bob Evans once kept one of her friends in a dog collar. Going over to the wall in Evans's bedroom and checking out the Helmut Newton photograph of the girl with the smoking cigar in her . . .

There was even some relatively serious talk that Bill Clinton would move to town after he left office. Didn't he say, “The best part of the White House isn't Camp David or
Air Force One
; it's all the movies people send me”? And he did like these three little guys—Steven and Jeffrey and David—very much, and they seemed to like being in the big guy's presence. He probably would have made a good CEO or CFO or whatever honorific the hard-nosed Geffen would have thrown the ex-president of the United States.

It wasn't even hard to see Bill Clinton at an important script meeting. He knew movies. He told Mel Brooks he watched
Blazing Saddles
every year, not once, but
six times!
He didn't say that publicly, of course; the six times may have raised some eyebrows. Publicly, he said his favorite movies were
High Noon, Casablanca,
and
The Ten Commandments
. (Really.) He claimed to love movies that were about “love, honor, and courage—stuff people care about.” And movies “about people who managed to stay human under inhuman conditions.” He loved Bogart—“He could get away with everything because he was so authentic”; De Niro—“He's got real range”; Meryl Streep—“one of the two or three greatest actresses ever”; and frequent Clinton contributor Tom Hanks—“tactile, compelling.” And he was relatively literate. He liked
Leaves of Grass
, and Walt Whitman was certainly better than average for Hollywood. After all, Michael Eisner's sole point of creative reference seemed to be O. Henry. And if Bill Clinton was able to handle the Indiana Jones–jacketed Newt and glassy-eyed Dick Armey and that rat-catching creep Tom DeLay, he could certainly convince screenwriters to rewrite and directors to reshoot. There would be no shame in being finessed by the man who'd finessed Bibi and Arafat—even though, with full-blown Hollywood egos, few screenwriters saw themselves as the fallen Bibi. And no director would ever tell the truth and admit to acting like Arafat.

Some people at Spago or Crustacean or Le Dome even talked about Hillary coming out with Bill. But Hillary didn't seem the right fit for a Hollywood wife. A little tummy tuck? A little liposuction? A little lip inflation? A little time in a tanning salon? A twice-a-week top-of-the-line facial at Veronica's on the PCH, where both Mel Gibson and his wife went? But it was all wrong . . . .
Wrong! Wrong! Wrong!

People thought about it and realized they just couldn't see Hillary in the new patio dining room of the Bel Air Hotel, talking about whether Wolfgang was still a better caterer than Along Comes Mary, whether Merv would make it much past the millennium with his prostate, whether Mark Canton's affair with Luc Besson's secretary would last, whether Michael Eisner was justified saying about Jeff Katzenberg, “I hate that little midget.” Everyone realized Hillary was too afire, too revved up, too alive to be doing that. How could you possibly have the patience to work with Wolfgang's wife, Barbara, organizing a charity tent event if you'd already co-run the whole world? How could you worry about the rhesus monkeys running amok in south central Florida, leftovers from a 1940s
Tarzan
movie shot there, if your normal frame of reference was global, perhaps even stratospheric? Besides, every Hollywood wife was 100 percent sure that, once out of office, she would dump him.

Some old-time William Morris agents who hung out in the bar of the Regent Beverly Wilshire, once Hernando Courtwright's glorious Beverly Wilshire Hotel, sucking on their unlit cigars, even started spitballing a whole new career for Bill Clinton, post-term, post-Hillary. They convinced themselves he could act, and the false rumor mill went into hyperactive overdrive for a few days.

Bill Clinton was still a young man, after all, and, with Sly's trainer and Michael Jackson's plastic surgeon, they could see it, these wise old showbiz hoot owls: Bill Clinton and Sharon in
Basic Instinct II
, Bill Clinton and Redford in
Butch and Sundance II
, Bill Clinton and Warren in
Shampoo II
. (He already had Hollywood's hottest hairdresser, Christophe.)

It made some sense. That ten-second eye-contact empathy turned on a camera
directly
, instead of on nearby cameras with human beings around—if Redford was so good as the Candidate, wasn't it possible the lifelong professional candidate would be as good as Redford? Some sashimi instead of cheeseburgers, Geffen's masseur, a little karate with Ovitz, some of Steven's mom's vegetables, who knew? . . . Jackie Chan's speech coach, sincerity tips from Sydney Pollack, a little Thai from Sharon's Chrome Hearts hash pipe . . . a star
could
be born.

He came out to Hollywood often during his darkest days, vamping fund-raisers, pressing friendly and selected flesh, and playing golf with a group of Hollywood players, one of them now primarily a grass dealer and gofer for movie stars. Bill Clinton, the gofer told me, never asked him for any dope (he knew the gofer had the best in town), but he really enjoyed lighting up a cigar after a few rounds of golf. Bill Clinton told the gofer it was the only place he could smoke a cigar anymore. The Secret Service agents always made sure nobody took any pictures while the cigar—it was a Davidoff, not a Cuban—was in the president's mouth.

Hollywood, the home of manicures, ultimately didn't care about the smoke from the Oval Office cigar, either, and the town's attention was soon diverted to another—this time, locally scandalous—blow job. It took place at a party in the Palisades, at the home of New Age former fur salesman turned agent Arnold Rifkin. The sister of another Morris agent was seen on a balcony giving New Line head of production Mike DeLuca a blow job. The balcony performance made the front page of the business section of the
Los Angeles Times
. “I have become what I beheld,” DeLuca told friends. The newspaper account missed the party's other sensational event: Farrah Fawcett, finding the bathrooms full, went outside and pooped the front lawn while the partygoers watched from inside.