Read Online American Rhapsody by Joe Eszterhas - Free Book Online Page B

next Sunday’s fire-and-brimstone serving, while all those liberal, posthippie women did his job for him.
    The climate for graphic and even not-so-graphic sex was so frosty—at the exact moment America caught its first suspicious sniffs of the Oval Office cigar—that Hollywood actors who’d become stars by playing sexpot parts—Sharon Stone in
Basic Instinct
, Julia Roberts in
Mystic Pizza
, Annette Bening in
The Grifters
—were now putting “no nudity” clauses in their contracts, cutting their hair, dressing like Russian apparatchiks, and making themselves look as sexually unappetizing as they possibly could on-screen, thereby flooding the market with an awful lot of box-office clinkers. Stone even took it a step further: She told the world she’d found Jesus at Cecil Williams’s Glide Memorial Church in San Francisco. But it was possible Stone had good reason to take it further and find Jesus. Of the three, only Stone had showed the world her pubic hair.
    Refusing to smell the smoke from Bill Clinton’s cigar was symptomatic of something else, too. There seemed to be a tendency among many in our generation to want to sanitize, cosmeticize, and pasteurize life, to put a rosy spin on daily existence, to pretend some things didn’t exist or happen. The attitude smacked of the kind of narrowness we were victims of in the sixties, when we were accused of un-Americanism. AMERICA , the bumper stickers said back then, LOVE IT OR LEAVE IT .
    I thought I heard echoes of that from the former victims, who were now crucifying Kenneth W. Starr for his report, who were now objecting to vulgar language and sex and violence on the big and little screens. Never mind that tens of millions of Americans often used vulgar language or that violence was rampant or that folks were having sex—some people in our generation didn’t want to hear about that any more than they wanted to hear Public Enemy or Snoop Doggy Dogg. They wanted to hear Yanni or music made by mating whales or the
Beatles Anthology
. They wanted to see movies that were touchy-feely and gauze-lit. They wanted to see Spielberg, not Spike Lee, and they absolutely did not want to hear that Hillary used the word
fuck
more times in one paragraph during meetings with the White House policy wonks than any president, including LBJ (who should have had the word, his favorite, on his tombstone).
    And they absolutely
did not, did not, did not
want to hear about the cigar. Smoking was too sore a subject anyway—the only thing some of us liked about Kevin Costner’s woefully awful
Waterworld
was that the scuzzball, low-life bad guys were called “the Smokers.” Releasing the
Starr Report
in this climate was like reading parts of Henry Miller, Terry Southern, Iceberg Slim, and Luther Campbell to the residents of a nunnery.
    While the rest of America didn’t want to sniff the cigar, Hollywood, it seemed, wanted to sniff it, lick it, inhale it, ingest it, digest it, and take a stool sample. This was the biggest Hollywood news (although no one said anything publicly, of course, of course, of course) since Ovitz left CAA . . . since they almost killed Lew Wasserman at Cedars . . . since Hugh Grant and Eddie Murphy got in trouble with
their
blow jobs.
    While it was the greatest dish, Hollywood wasn’t
shocked
by any of it. Hollywood, as someone said, had always been a big beautiful blonde with soiled underwear. I had heard most of the stories during a quarter century of screenwriting, told with the kind of booster’s pride you might find at a place like the City Club in Kansas City. But these stories weren’t Kansas City stuff; they were the windswept legendary grime that had encrusted in the cracks of the gleaming marble stars along Hollywood Boulevard.
    Hollywood was the kind of place that appreciated the honesty of Bugsy Siegel’s mistress, Virginia Hill, who said, “Hey, I’m the