AMERICAN TRAVESTY
With a talking presidential penis and a
shovelful of
By
Peter Kurth
I'm telling you the truth -- I didn't know that about Ford. I knew that Betty Ford normally had to be
carried off Air Force One, drunk, after listening to her husband's speeches,
but not that, when she got home, she was subjected to blasts of wind beyond the
call of love or duty.
Neither did I know that Lyndon Johnson had scrotum skin that hung "halfway
to his knees. I did know that LBJ had a big dong,
This leads me to another thing in "American Rhapsody" that I didn't
know before I read it. Are you ready?
Because it's a killer:
I didn't know that the Hollywood party where New Line film producer Mike DeLuca
got a public blow job was the same Hollywood party where Farrah Fawcett was seen
"pooping" on the lawn. I knew
that
All the rest of the stories in "American Rhapsody" I already
knew. Honest. Or knew enough like them, about the same or
similar people, that they came as no surprise to me, much less as a shock,
"titillating," "sensational" or anything else.
I knew all of Eszterhas' stories about Sharon Stone, for example -- Stone
smoking Thai, Stone washing out her mouth after kissing Billy Baldwin during
the filming of "Sliver," Stone not wearing her panties, Stone
climbing on Eszterhas' back, also during the filming of "Sliver," to
show him how a real woman masturbates: "She
kept moving up and down, up and down ... She clenched my sides tightly with her
thighs, held them for a long moment, and then we both relaxed. 'Better?' she asked, laughing.
I knew all these stories before I read "American Rhapsody" because,
despite the much-touted embargo on the book, they were leaked to the press in
advance. Not to mention excerpted in the
current issue of Tina Brown's Talk, and
repeated in every entertainment wire story from here to the cold caverns of the
moon. Indeed, Liz Smith declared not
long ago that you had to live on the moon not to have heard about the
"scathing" revelations in Eszterhas' book. Liz and Joe were going to have lunch this
week, and, boy, was she looking forward to it!
- - - - -
- - - - - - - Point
of departure: There are Buddhists who believe that at the end of
this particular cycle of time another Buddha will appear, Maitreya, who will
preside over the final establishment of an enlightened society. Hindus, on the other hand, believe in more
than one doomsday. Each cycle of Hindu
time has four ages, called kalpa. We're
in the fourth age of the current one, the kali yuga. One Hindu scholar translates this as
"the lousy age. As the great
American journalist Dorothy Thompson remarked at the end of World War II,
"The age of darkness is not something distant. It is upon us. We are in it.
- - - - -
- - - - - - - You all remember Joe
Eszterhas, don't you? Child of poor Hungarian immigrants in Cleveland, '60s
radical, former gonzo reporter for Rolling Stone, National Book Award nominee and once the
highest-paid screenwriter in Hollywood.
Following a string of box-office flops in the '90s, Eszterhas, the
"wildman," "rule-breaking," pussy-poking author of
"Betrayed," "Flashdance," "Jagged Edge,"
"F.I.S.T.," "Showgirls" and, of course, "Basic
Instinct" -- remember Stone and her ice pick? remember Michael Douglas'
pathetic, sagging ass? -- has been so far off the
The buzz is that Eszterhas is so washed up in
Nearly three years ago, afraid that my public persona as a screenwriter
was overwhelming my creative life, I went to the
OK, if that's how he wants to spin it -- a self-imposed exile:
I played with my wife and played with my kids, let the sun beat me up,
and thought about things. About values
and success. About the Sixties. About my past relationships with the women
I'd used and my present relationship with the wife I adored. Somehow or other those thoughts about my life
inevitably led me to Bill Clinton.
Did I hear "juicy," "titillating," "must-read"?
Did I hear that "American Rhapsody," in the current parlance, would rock
my world? Because that, exactly,
is what it didn't do. I've read the
thing from cover to cover now and I'm still waiting to be blown away. With "sizzle" like this, you'd take
a long time to fry.
- - - - -
- - - - - - - Point
of clarification: Salon asked me to review "American
Rhapsody" because, as my editor says, I'm a "noncombatant. That is, I'm neither part of nor partial to
the hopped-up, hyped-up world Joe Eszterhas inhabits, or used to before
One of the advantages of being a poofter is that you don't have to play by the
white man's rules. The August issue of Talk also contains an item about a
planeful of
Is that shocking? Is that in bad taste? Good.
Because somebody's got to give this story a jolt. Revelation-wise, a bigger disappointment than
"American Rhapsody" couldn't exist this side of Eszterhas' "Burn
Hollywood Burn!"
Let's face it,
- - - - - - - - - - - -
All right, I'll be honest. There are
some
I'm going to come down there with a baseball bat and bust your knees so
you can't walk. Then I'm going to bust
your ribs so you can't breathe. Then I'm
going to bust your ears so you can't hear.
I'd bust your head, but you can't think anyway. So I'm going to bust your balls so you can't
fuck.
Etc. But Joe's
- - - - -
- - - - - - - Point
of curiosity: What does Gere's dick look like, Joe? How big? Fat,
skinny, long, short? White, pink, red, blue -- veins or no veins? Cut or uncut?
Were you stoned enough or drunk enough to ... well, I guess not. And so what? Years ago, in the early '80s, I
used to see Richard a lot at Joe Allen's in London, where he was filming
"King David" with a cast of thousands. He used to come in with five or six Gere
look-alikes in leather jackets, and believe me, the conversation at the next
table wasn't about baseball and boobs.
OK? Tell us something we don't know, Joe, or get back to your luau.
Eszterhas is equally tight-lipped when, musing about the contents of the Starr
Report, he describes a deeply footnoted reference to President Clinton and
Monica Lewinsky's "oral-anal contact" -- you know, rimming -- which
he says was the report's "most sexually incendiary revelation. That it may have been. But while noting that no one in the press or
the government "had the stomach, it seemed, not even Kenneth W.
Starr," to discuss "anilingus" any further, Eszterhas won't
discuss it, either. "Who was doing
the rimming?" he wonders, and that's that.
Did either of them shower first?
Amateur.
- - - - - - - - - - - -
Of course, "American Rhapsody" isn't about
"And, oh," Brown adds, "[it's] about Bill Clinton's penis as
well. As if you didn't know.
In fact, "American Rhapsody" is a 432-page "fantasia" on
the "American political landscape," the "shadow culture
war," the legacy of the 1960s and the silliest, most infantile, most
dispiriting and wasteful political scandal in history, the Clinton-Lewinsky
follies. You remember -- the impeachment
drama; Monicagate; 1998, if you need a nudge, and a little bit of 1999. Last century's news, you'd think, and you'd
be right.
So what's the catch? Here's Eszterhas again, splashing about in the shadow of
Kali:
I thought I recognized and knew Bill Clinton and what made him
tick. I understood the ambition, the
success, the political duplicity, the Hollywood charm. I understood the mad priapic obsession which
had always fuel-driven his life ... because it had driven mine until I met
Naomi.
Naomi, you should know, is Eszterhas' new wife, once the spouse of his best
friend and currently great with child.
(Geri, Eszterhas' first wife, got the house, the car, the art and, I
should think, the last laugh.) We're asked to believe that Naomi's love by
itself has ended Eszterhas'
own lifetime of whoring, pumping, thumping, fucking, shooting and dumping into
"holes" -- and if you believe that, you'll swallow for sure.
"I wasn't just thinking of Bill Clinton anymore," Eszterhas writes
solemnly, "but about a generation, my generation, which, in some ways,
even though it was entrenched in power, creeping up on sixty, was still
struggling to find itself. I was
thinking about the state of the union and the state of our hearts and privates,
as we tried not to stumble and slide on the treacherous Internet ice of the new
millennium.
We did? Quoting Dorothy Thompson again:
"There is nothing more terrifying than a society congealed in the
pattern of an adolescent mind. Too late
to worry about that, unfortunately. And
why shouldn't Eszterhas have a crack at Fornigate? Everyone else has. Why shouldn't he write about
The conclusion is automatic, nevertheless, and "American Rhapsody"
only bears it out: No one -- no
one -- would read this
book if it didn't have a talking cock as its grand finale, if Eszterhas'
favorite word, "panties," didn't appear for the first time on Page 4
("wet," at that), if Brown hadn't made it her baby, if it weren't
laden, larded -- throbbing -- with sentimental, he-man prose.
Speaking of Bill and Monica:
He kissed her then and they moved to the hallway she'd missed so
much. She unbuttoned his denim blue
shirt ... He kissed her again and unbuttoned the top buttons of her navy blue
dress. They did what they had done
before and she knelt down.
The rest, as they say, is history.
Except there isn't any history anymore, as everyone knows. There's only Joe, in this case, and, by
extension, you and me. An unhappy
conclusion, but what else can you think when even immediate history is
rewritten immediately, torn out of context and broadcast at a level of
frightful noise?
- - - - - - - - - - Point of fact:
Like most straight men
obsessed with their own penises, Eszterhas knows nothing about women. I mean, he knows nothing about women.
"Sympathetic" though he is to the president's Willard problem,
Eszterhas doesn't understand that the reason so many women go for Clinton is
that he has a strongly feminine nature.
"Ain't nothin' so pretty as a white boy with lips," as a black Republican friend of mine says.
According to Flowers' own book, repeatedly cited by Ezsterhas, Clinton likes to
be tied to the bed with silk scarves.
He likes hot wax dripped on his nipples. He asked Flowers to "use a dildo on
him. He can give it and he can take it,
in other words, and if he prefers jerking off to any other sexual activity --
well, a woman can understand that, too, knowing full well that she can give
herself a better blast than any thrusting Neanderthal can. (Take a look at Eszterhas' jacket photo and
you'll see what I mean.)
In the realm of women's character, moreover, as distinct from their holes,
Eszterhas is dead wrong on every count.
There's not a woman mentioned in "American Rhapsody" who isn't
trashed and slighted, from the abandoned Geri to the fecund Naomi (who seems to
have been put on this planet solely to reform Joe) to Jane Fonda, Arianna
Huffington, Tipper Gore, Jean Houston, Elizabeth Berkley (of
"Showgirls" fame) and right on to the book's predatory female leads,
Monica Lewinsky and Hillary Rodham Clinton.
(I won't even talk about the "Ratwoman," Linda Tripp, or
Lucianne Goldberg, the "Bag Lady of Sleaze," who can take care of
themselves.)
It's a fact that, as yet, few people have understood Lewinsky -- rarely does
anyone get how smart she is, for example, or how her energy and good nature
alone could seduce a man, despite her naivetι, her gooey hopes, her weight
problem and her Snoopy phone. Anyone
whose favorite painter is Egon Schiele and who can send the president of the
United States a card that reads "The only thing I'd like to see more than
you is you naked, with a lottery ticket in one hand and a can of whipped cream
in the other" is a character for the ages.
As to Hillary -- dream on, Joe.
Love her or hate her, she's a lioness.
She can't be dismissed as a coldhearted bitch, a putative lesbian or a
screaming Mimi who narrowly escaped being raped in the third grade. And Sharon Stone, whom Eszterhas thinks and
actually says he "created," is laughing her head off at his
characterization. Stone has recently
adopted a baby. She's getting $15
million for the sequel to "Basic Instinct. She has been noshing with the Dalai
Lama. "I knew he was funny,"
she says about Eszterhas, "but I didn't know he could write comedy. And if Eszterhas thinks you can invent Sharon
Stone without Sharon Stone, it's no wonder he's been grilling pineapples on the
beach.
- - - - - - - - - - - - Point
of order: Near the start of "American Rhapsody," Eszterhas
gets all silly about his children.
"We loved our kids and wanted the best for them," he writes,
speaking, as usual, about "our" generation: "We wanted them to be not like us, but
like our parents, like grandpa and grandma sitting watching the sunset after
fifty years of mostly monogamous marriage, talking about the long-ago senior
prom as they sipped their warming his-and-hers mugs of tea and honey.
Right. You bet we do. As an aside -- cough, cough -- the current
issue of Talk features a cover photo
of Elizabeth Hurley tonguing a rope of Harry Winston diamonds. Pundits are saying that Brown has hit her
stride with this one, that she's wrapped and packaged Talk to sit perfectly where she's been putting it, at the
supermarket checkout. Eszterhas' bio
insists that he has never missed a single one of his son's Little League games,
but somehow I don't believe him when he says he's worried about what the kids
are lapping up in this national cesspool, this 24-hour televised motel room,
which he has done as much as anyone to bring about. Grandpa and Grandma, my ass.
Don't lie to us, Joe. More important,
don't lie to them. Just take the money
and hope for the best. Someone's bound
to call, sooner or later.
- - - - - - - - - - - - Point
of honor: No writer's book should be panned merely on the
grounds of differing opinions or opposite tastes. Eszterhas is a good writer. Sometimes, he's a very good writer, and while
"American Rhapsody" tells us absolutely nothing about
Clinton-Lewinsky that we didn't know already -- "As the impeachment
psychodrama began, I watched every mini-second of it ... I read everything, I
saw everything" -- it reads like a rollicking novel when he allows it to,
when he takes himself and "us" out of it, that is, and just lets the
story rip. His chapters on James
Carville, Larry Flynt and Warren Beatty's presidential aspirations -- "The
Man With the Golden Willard" -- are worth the price of the book.
Eszterhas is especially good in the boldfaced imaginary monologues (from
Clinton and Al Gore, from Bob Dole, from John McCain, from Dubya) he has
invented both to skewer the powerful and to razz the Zeitgeist. These sections were written, Eszterhas tells
us, by "a little devil," "a writing partner who has cursed my
career" and who turns out to be -- what else? -- his own Willard, now
happily held in check by love, in the form of Naomi. These sections are funny and crazily insightful, and I'd be the last
person on earth to keep anyone from reading them. Hats off to you, Joe, for naming Richard
Nixon the "Night Creature" and reminding us that the lies and blather
Nixon fed his own Monica before he died -- Monica Crowley, girl amanuensis --
and that Crowley repeated with a straight face in her book about the Dick of
dicks, were "much deadlier" and more damaging to democracy than
anything Clinton stuck in his Monica's mouth.
So there, Joe -- get a blurb from that.
I mean it, every word. You should
be writing novels if you can't get work in
How big is yours, anyway, Joe? You never said.
I looked and looked, but you never said.
Tease.
By Peter Kurth for Salon
© Salon.com