Primary Colors (44 page)

"It's just a giant fucking LOOK fucking HERE sign, a solid-gold invitation to scrutinize, dontchathink?" Richard said that Sunday morning, sitting in the coffee shop of our nondescript Lexington Avenue hotel, near Grand Central. "But everyone's too damn lovesick to do much looking now. They'll get around to it, a few weeks. 'Course we may be deader than Eleanor Roosevelt by then. Shit, Henry, how much would you trust any of these guys who said he just got bored? How many of 'em get bored with power, with all these nubile teeny-bop muffins and munchkins paddin' around sayin', 'Ooh, Governor, can I get you this? Or maybe that? Can I clip your toenails?' "

"Maybe he's different," I said. "Maybe he's the real thing."

"The real thing? What on earth is that, Henri? There's no such thing. Not in this business. Not in this century"

"FDR?"

"Okay, but only because he was a cripple and had to live with pain every day," he said. "FDR minus polio is George Bush."

"Oh, come on."

"Callow, cheery rich boy, summers up in Maine, sends a lot of thank-you notes. Henri, never underestimate the educational power of sheer fucking pain."

"Maybe, then, Picker's been educated," I said.

"Mebbe," he said, taking a sip of Diet Coke, which-along with a barely pecked-at stack of pancakes-was his breakfast. "But it's a curious thing, dontchathink? It's got ol' Libby curious. Bumped into Lucille 'smorning and she told me Libby was kind of obsessing on Picker-turned out she worked for him in '74. Well, not really worked. She volunteered. She wore a button, said: 'I'm a Picker Person.' Member all these folks-Jack and Susan, Lucille, the Libsterall of them were working for McGovern down there in '72. Libby stayed on, hung out in Margaritaville. Gotta figure, if there's anything there, she'll wrastle it to the ground."

"If there's anything there," I said.

"When has there not been anything there lately?" Richard said. "There's always something there. He's a pol. Lookit the moves he's makin'. You don't come down off Harris's high horse smooth as he has and not be a pol."

But that wasn't quite true. Picker wasn't acting like the sort of politician we were used to. He hadn't brought on any consultants; in fact, he'd let Paul Shaplen go. He had announced, on Larry King, that he wouldn't do any thirty-second spots. Or polling. Or focus groups. "I'm not going to hire a bunch of folks to tell me what you're thinking and how to get at you," he'd said.

"Maybe you're right, Henri," Richard scoffed. "Maybe he ain't a pol. Maybe he's fucking Jesus Christ. Ain't hard to be the Jesus of the week in this business-for a week. Two weeks, though, kinda stretches the envelope."

"The blood thing is saintly," I said.

"The blood thing is politics, a fucking stroke of genius," Richard said. "Do you realize that every last one of my clients, every last one of the mangy suckers, called this week to ask if they should go down and donate a fucking pint of blood? It's like it was after that Supreme Court nominee, what was his name-Ginsburg? Yeah. After he said he'd smoked a couple joints, every last one of my clients called withi
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wenty-four hours to find out what they should say about marijuana. And they were right to ask. Scorps asked every fucking alderman in the country that week if they'd gotten high. So now it's blood." That Sunday there were stories in the papers about blood donations increasing nationally by 10 percent. But we didn't realize just how huge the thing had become until Picker held his first and only Connecticut rally, in the Yale bowl, that night. More than twenty thousand people turned out-and some enterprising soul, unaffiliated with the Picker campaign (according to the next day's stories) set up booths outside all the entrances to the stadium, selling a variety of blood artifacts-drop-of-blood lapel pins, bumper stickers, posters with a picture of a smiling Freddy Picker, lying down on a cot, sleeve rolled up, giving blood. A logo had suddenly materialized: PICKER, with the "I" in the shape of a drop of blood.

Picker spoke from a bare stage that night. None of the usual political trappings, just an American flag. He had most of the leadership of the Connecticut Democratic Parry up there with him. He was introduced by Paul Newman and Joanne Woodward. And he just stood there, frozen-frightened, it seemed-as the crowd went berserk. Richard, Daisy, Lucille and I watched it on C-SPAN. Stanton was off in Brooklyn, meeting with the Lubavitcher Rebbe.

"Who the fuck did this schedule?" Richard moaned. "We 'bout to get our butts kicked all over Connecticut and Jack's off in a different state sucking up to some medieval Jew?"

"You have to meet the Lubavitcher Rebbe when you do New York," Lucille said.

"You have to meet hint the Sunday night before the Connecticut primary?"

"It's when he said to come," Lucille sniffed.

"So we run on his schedule? We run on that fuckball Richie R
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cker's schedule?" Richard was screaming, red in the face. "Who the fuck is running for president here? This is the stupidest goddamn thing." "Jemmons, I've just about had it with you," Lucille said.

"Shut UP, everybody-please," Daisy said. The candidate was about to speak.

"Okay, okay-I'm sorry," Picker said, recoiling a bit from the echo, adjusting the microphone. He was wearing a dark suit, white shirt an
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a striped tie. He looked like a politician, but his body language was strange, different: diffident. "This is kind of overwhelming."

"WE LOVE YOU, FREDDY," a girl shouted.

"You hardly know me," he said. "I don't know . . . I don't want you to, ah, lose perspective. I, ah . . . I'm kind of nervous up here." The crowd exploded. People were waving handmade placards with large painted drops of blood. Picker pulled a handkerchief from his pocket and wiped his brow. He really did seem nervous.

"It's weird, Henri," Richard said. "He seemed much more comfortable in front of a crowd when I saw him in Florida. But I guess it's different when you're the man."

"Now there's a candidate for your mother," I whispered to Daisy. "Humble. Apolitical. Paul Newman likes him. And no thirty-second spots.

But Daisy was transfixed. Picker seemed to be struggling. He didn't know what to say next.

"I . . . I didn't expect this," he said. "And, ah, all you folks giving blood in the tents out back, I want to thank you." The crowd erupted again. It was deafening. "Look," Picker said uneasily, "could you do me a favor and not cheer so loud?" There was laughter. "No," he said. "I really mean it. I really want everyone to calm down. And I guess I mean everyone. I guess I mean the press, and the TV folks, and my colleagues, and the folks who make a living advising my colleagues-I think we all need to calm down."

And the crowd calmed down. "This is really a terrific country, but we get a little crazy sometimes," he continued. "I guess the craziness is part of what makes us great, it's part of our freedom. But we have to watch out. We have to be careful about it. There's no guarantee we'll be able to continue this-this highwire act, this democracy. If we don't calm down, it all may just spin out of control. I mean, the world keeps getting more complicated and we keep having to explain it to you in simpler terms, so we can get our little oversimplified explanations on the evening news. Eventually, instead of even trying to explain it, we just give up and sling mud at each other-and it's a show, it keeps you watching, like you watch a car wreck or maybe wrestling." He stopped; he liked what he'd just said. "That's right. The kind of posturing and hair-pulling you see us do in thirty-secon
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dvertisements and on podiums like this one is exactly like professional wrestling: it's fake, it's staged, it doesn't mean anything. Most of as don't hate our opponents; hell, we don't even know 'em. We don't have the fierce kind of ideological differences we used to have, back when the war in Vietnam was on. We just put on the show because we don't know what else to do. We don't know any other way to get you all riled up, to get you out to vote. But there are some serious things we have to talk about now. There are some decisions we have to make, as a people, together. And it's gonna be hard to make them if we don't slow this thing down a little, calm it down, have a conversation amongst ourselves."

He paused. "I guess . . . I guess--you know it's funny, I never even thought of it at the time," he said. "But I guess that's why I decided to start this thing by giving blood." There were cheers from the crowd; he tamped them down. "You can't do much else but be calm when you give blood. You just lie there and you can think, or listen to music, or to a book on tape--you don't feel like spouting off all that much. And all the while, you're giving something. Not a lot. Just a pint. But if each of us turned around and thought in those terms, thought about giving a little--instead of worrying about what we want to get, or what the government is taking from us . . . If we thought about it in those terms, we'd all just naturally sort of--calm down. Don't you think? And I guess that's what I want to do with this campaign: sort of calm things down a little, and see if we can start having a conversation about the sort of place we want America to be in the next century. I want Governor Stanton to know I welcome him into the conversation--and the president too, matter of fact, if he has the time. But that's what I . . ." He stopped, distracted for a moment. He looked down at the podium, looked up again: "Yeah, that's all I want to do. And, ah, okay. That's about all I have to say now." There was applause then, sustained and rolling applause, but no wild cheering, no craziness. He had tamed them. He had tamed us. We just stood around the television set, watching.

Finally, Richard said the obvious: "We are in seriously deep shit now."

Deeper than we could begin to imagine. If Freddy Picker seemed to be campaigning from Mount Olympus, all cool and breezy and high-minded, we were neck-deep in the Augean Stables. Nothing went right that week. Tuesday was especially juicy: We were clobbered in the Connecticut primary and the New York Post headline was STAN-TON'S BLACK LOVE CHILD. I had spent the past month dreading that headline, but now that it was here, it seemed almost superfluous. It seemed the nail after the final nail in our coffin; we were already feeling dead and buried by Freddy Picker. It wasn't much of a story, in any case. There wasn't much in the way of facts beyond the stuff Melville-Jones had put on his trashy TV show, and the governor denied paternity vehemently-but his denials didn't count for anything anymore. And the fact that Fat Willie had vanished was not useful. We spent that morning debating whether to admit that a blood test was in the works, that the governor had volunteered to have his blood taken-and decided, finally, that it was best to keep quiet. Any admission of involvement would imply complicity-and the blood contrast with Picker would be devastating. And the fact that we were even debating such a thing implied our utter hopelessness: in the New York press, his paternity was a fact.

Stanton was stunned. He was barely communicating. He sleepwalked through Howard's stupid schedule. The most rudimentary acts of politics-walking into an event, through the inevitable mob of cameras and screechers-became a near-unendurable agony, each movement demanding total discipline and tremendous exertion. The traditional New York politics of reflex and obligation had become twisted, distended, a forum for lunacy; our obligatory, scripted concessions weren't greeted with the usual mopey, self-righteous acquiescence, but with a fury-the blacks, the Jews, the Irish: no one was happy. All New York seemed off the edge, in the throes of some primordial catharsis. On Tuesday, after the McCollister story broke, the first feminists dressed as pigs began to appear. They waved OINK, OINK placards. They made pig noises. On Tuesday night, after Stanton graciously conceded Connecticut to Harris-Picker, he went to a downtown disco for a Women's Political Caucus benefit and could not speak because a group of gay radicals stood in the middle of the dance floor chanting, "BUGGER, BUGGER, BUGGER, BUGGER, BUGGER."

It was an odd protest. It seemed to have nothing to do with Jack Stanton; it was just a howling. A woman, a Broadway star I didn't recognize, wearing a slinky, sequined dress, tried to calm the crowd and eventually succeeded-by reminding them of Freddy Picker's plea for civility. Then Jack Stanton took the microphone and stared at the floor for a moment. "If all / knew about me was what you've been reading," he said, addressing the demonstrators, "I'd be out there booing, too. And if I were living, as many of you are, under a death sentence-and if I felt that no one cared, that no one was trying to help me-"

"STANTON, YOU'RE A PHONY," shouted a young, very proper-looking woman with long, jet-black hair. She was wearing a satin emerald ball gown and the anger distorted her face, reddened it beneath her makeup; she seemed to double over, trying to push every last bit of air out of her lungs. "YOU'RE A PEDERAST. YOU'RE A SICK HETERO FUCK."

Stanton took an involuntary half-step backward, raised both his arms in what seemed to be shock, as if he had been slashed across the chest. He appeared to crumple. "I can't even begin to deal with that," he said softly.

Afterward, the governor sat in the back of the van next to me. The seat next to the driver had been abdicated. We drove uptown along desolate avenues. "Henry," he finally whispered, putting his big hand on my shoulder. "I don't know how much more of this I can take."

But he kept on taking it. He took it on morning drive-time radio shows. He took it in the tabloids. He took it on the streets, where it seemed every third New Yorker had something awful to screech at him. We finally tossed Howard's schedule and went back to what felt comfortable, stopping in senior centers and schools and supermarkets, just chatting with the folks. Even that proved controversial. At a senior center in Brighton Beach, an old woman suddenly burst into tears-she had just found out her daughter was dying of cancer-and Stanton hugged her, and began to sing "You'll Never Walk Alone." It was a strange, corny, but absolutely legitimate moment, the first time-so far as I knew-he had sung publicly during the presidential campaign. There wasn't a dry eye in the room. But the Daily News headline next day was: THE SINGING SINNER. And that night, Jay Leno came out and said, "You see that Jack Stanton sang in Brooklyn yesterday. N0000, it was not Rock-a-Bye, Baby."