Joe Eszterhas - American Rhapsody

For Naomi, Sunlight

Love is like a cigar. Once it goes out, you cant light it again. Its never the same.

RICHARD M. NIXON

Contents

Authors Note

Nearly three years ago, afraid that my public persona as a screenwriter was overwhelming my creative life, I went to the island of Maui with my wife and our three children, shut my phone down, stopped doing interviews, and pretended I wasnt a public man.

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 relationship with the women Id used and my present relationship with the wife I adored. Somehow or other, those thoughts about my life inevitably led me to Bill Clinton.

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 that had always fuel-driven his life... because it had driven mine until I met Naomi. I understood the fierce boom-box rhythms of his inner life the same way I understood and loved the demons shrieking in the darkness inside the Stones, the Doors, the artist now known again as Prince, and Dr. Dre.

I started reading everything ever written about Bill Clinton when we finally came back to Malibu, our phone still shut down, living a near-reclusive life now, not even calling agents, lawyers, and friends back, still refusing all interview requests. I was lost in a mirrored sea of my own creation, in snorkeling pursuit of myself and Clinton, swimming through his past in search of my own soul.

As the impeachment psychodrama began, I watched every minisecond of it, bleary-eyed, haggard, and grizzled, maniacally flicking channels, indulging gluttonously in the national bacchanal of information and bulimia of rumor. I read everything, I saw everything, digested whatever I could, and learned a lot... about myself and Bill Clinton and about America, the country I love as only an immigrant who grew up in the ethnic ghettos of Cleveland can love her.

I wasnt just thinking of Bill Clinton anymore, 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.

The book you are holding in your hand is filled with everything I thought about and learned. Ah, yes, except its not that simple. If only it were... but it never is.

I am loath to confess that I have had a writing partner who has cursed my career from the time I was in the sixth grade at Saint Emerics School and published a class newspaper, thanks to the toy printing set that I had received as a Christmas gift. I wrote some of the stories in the Saint Emerics Herald and my writing partner wrote others. I wrote childish investigative reports about the river in the valley below the school, in the smoky part of the city known as the Flats, a river so polluted with industrial chemicals that it burned your eyes as you watched it from the bluffs above. (Many years later, the river literally burst afire!) My writing partner wrote sensational exposs about which girls in our class were kissing which boys. (Hot off the press! A Herald exclusive! Frances Madar and Robert Zak!)

By the time I got to Hollywood, I knew my partner well enough to acknowledge him condescendingly in interviews as the twisted little man inside me. We wrote about different things, you see, but it all came out under my name. I wrote Music Box, Telling Lies in America, F.I.S.T., and Betrayed. He wrote Basic Instinct, Showgirls, Sliver, and Jadealthough sometimes he even intruded his back-alley homunculus self into my work: Why, after all, was there a need for lengthy, sexually graphic courtroom descriptives in a movie as aesthetically ambitious and as morally lofty as Music Box?

And as I wrote this bookabout a cultural shadow war that resulted in the figurative assassination of a president (Bill Clinton)I realized that the Twisted Little Man was writing feverishly, too. And hallucinating. Daydreaming. Wet-dreaming. Projecting. About Kenneth W. Starrs secret lust. About George W. Bush and Tricia Nixon. About Hillary and her forlorn, intimate relationship with Eleanor Roosevelt. About Al Gores heartbreaking, cuckolded fears. About Bob Dole and his electable missing shoulder. About John Wayne McCains painful broken promise and his love of identical Long Tall Sallies. About Monica and her spoiled-princess extortion of the president of the United States. About Bill Clinton and his eternal true love, his Willard.

Are the things the little lowlife wrote about true? Well, as a matter of fact, no. But thats also not so simple. Because in the little scuzzballs cockeyed, fun-house view, they are. He uses facts wickedly to shape his outrageous fictional perspective. He is a contortionist and a juggler of the historical record. No mere imposter, he is an abysmal, excrescent python who swallows his subjects, spits them back out, and spews his venom from their mouths. Is this little vermin a liar? Well, you know, in Bill Clintons mind, oral sex isnt sex. Is the little slime, as Mark Twain defined himself, a professional liar, making up fictions to reveal truths? Well, he is certainly supporting himself in Hollywood by professionally dressing up his tawdry, realistic lies.

I have decided, finally, after all these years of living with him as my writing partner, that it is time to distinguish what is his and what is mine.

If you are reading this typeface, the writing is mine, sometimes interpretive but based on well-researched facts.

If you are reading this typeface, the writing is fictional and his, starting with well-researched facts but blasted through and transformed by his hallucinatory dreams.

Ill put it another way, too. If you get angry while youre reading this brazen book, blame it on the crude, insulting little prickLord knows, hes gotten too many people terribly angry through the years. If you find things in this reflective book that frighten you, or if you find yourself laughing against your determined will, blame it on a little boy endlessly watching a sun-kissed river that makes him cry.

Writing my book about Bill Clinton, his political peers, and our national ethos has had a pronounced personal effect upon me. Now I want to play with my wife and children all the time! I want to pretend permanently that I am not a public man. Our phones, while not shut down, have gatekeepers with disembodied voices to safeguard our familys bliss. Me, my wife, our boys, the massive pinheaded bulldog we call Rep. Mud Nadler, the anti-impeachment Democrat from New York... and the Twisted Little Man.

The little devil and I had a nerve-racking, maddening, revolting, hilarious, and climactic time writing this book. We hope that your time reading it will be similar.

Joe Eszterhas

Point Dume, California

[ Act One ]

HEARTBREAK HOTEL

From my own voice resonant, singing the phallus...

The President with pale face asking secretly to himself,
What will the people say at last?

WALT WHITMAN , Leaves of Grass

[1]

The Whole World Is Watching