Porn-again Willie

>> American Rhapsody is lurid, scabrous and brilliant

by JUAN RODRIGUEZ

American Rhapsody--revelling in "thong-snapping, Altoid-sucking" Monica Lewinsky and "horndog" Bill Clinton's "lifelong yen for those ripe peaches, for rock and roll, and for convertibles"--is the monument to our age that we deserve. It's lurid, scabrous, scatological, banal and brilliant.

Joe Eszterhas dishes litanies and fevered meditations on sex, power and scandal worthy of an X-rated Trivial Pursuit, mercilessly exposing the worst--wurst?--of U.S. politics as hog heaven. This rap sheet is Dragnet on acid, People magazine on PCP (fact-as-gossip, and vice versa). Awash in outrageous strokes and fine detail, it's twisted history unsanctioned by the media's nattering nabobs.

He uncovers serpentine, incestuous and plain weird connections: Clinton's political saviours, Vernon Jordan ("the Ace of Spades") and Larry Flynt ("the assassinated Abe Lincoln of porn"), were shot by the same man. Linda Tripp ("Ratwoman") inherited her playbook from dirty tricker Richard Nixon ("the Night Creature") and FBI icon J. Edgar Hoover ("who had one teenager read to him from the Bible while another diddled him wearing a rubber glove"). His accounts of Bill 'n' Monica trysting is Jacqueline Susann meets Judy Blume ("She'd gone from heaven to hell"). There's Bubba's crush on Sharon Stone, and infatuation with Hollywood (its tradition of post-lunch "manicures"). There are stealthy run-downs on psychobabble ("Billy Can't Help It"), pop spiritualism (Hillary was into "the swami thing" before communing with Ghandi and Eleanor Roosevelt), and hilarious fictional soliloquies by Ken Starr (prurient), Bob Dole's "Johnhenry" (cruel), Al "Gorf" (nerdy) and the presidential penis, "Willard" (you don't want to know).

Eszterhas--golden-days-of-Rolling-Stone scribe who sold-out to Hollywood (Basic Instinct) and now flogs opportunistic redemption--is accused of thinking Hollywood, not Washington's Beltway, is the centre of the universe (he views "beltway" more literally). How could the scribbler of, ugh, Showgirls write something so lasciviously pitch-perfect? Maybe it takes one to know one. (Rhapsody occasionally smells of born-again sanctimony--the proverbial good wife-saving Joe.) Dig it: Monica read everything about Bill, then Joe reamed everything about Monica and Bill (psychic antecedents and, uh, spillage)--a synchronistic, perverse Magnificent Obsession.

It's a hoary cliché: the '60s were about sex, drugs and rock 'n' roll. John Leonard's thoughtful Rhapsody trashing in The Nation (8/21), decrying the irrelevance of postmodern analysis, says his '60s meant Martin Luther King Jr., et al. Fine, but relatively few were so committed. The '60s tingled with the sexual energy of rock 'n' roll, spawning assorted liberations--s-o-o-o welcome after the suffocating '50s--and hedonism to match. Marches were foreplay for radical après-ski. Little wonder we wound up with Clinton, who used "noble causes" to further his career... as the hard-core embodiment of Kissinger's dictum, "Power is the greatest aphrodisiac." Slick Willie had it made! Running on sex appeal, he became a foolhardy victim of another '60s cliché: "The medium is the message." The press--which tittered privately at politicians' pecadillos--now had to compete with dreck like, uh, Showgirls, so they let it all hang out. "If Reagan was Teflon, the Willard was Velcro."

Rhapsody ruminates darkly on America's frontier-spirit urge to "do it" (without saying what "it" is, or as Clinton uttered, "It depends what you consider the meaning of 'is' is") and its festering puritanism. Just do it. Just say no. Lie through Hollywood-clenched teeth: "I did not have sexual relations with..."

Clinton's sex odyssey put "disgrace" on the map but overshadowed his rank betrayal of liberal idealism (if indeed he had it). Clinton's lust for power 'n' pussy--I'm on top of the world, so "kiss it" baby--appeals to our prurient interests, as Eszterhas's gleeful (and occasionally tiresome) spritz attests. His legacy--increased cynicism towards politics, and lost promise--is Heartbreak Hotel. Or as Dylan said in "Positively Fourth Street": "You got a lotta nerve to say you are my friend."

American Rhapsody, by Joe Eszterhas, Knopf, 432pp., $43.95