"Monster Mash; What Sort of Animal Makes Music Like This?"

The Los Angeles Times, July 23, 2000
Book review of “AMERICAN RHAPSODY” by Joe Eszterhas

I kept asking myself as I muscled through Joe Eszterhas' speedy ruminations on our national id in "American Rhapsody" what on God's green Earth is this thing? Is this Old New Journalism? New Old Journalism? No journalism at all, but instead a tabloid clip job? Once a proud bearer of the Rolling Stone banner of countercultural credibility, Eszterhas, now primarily known as the one-time most highly remunerated writer in Hollywood, has written something entirely other. Is this a book? A media event? The footnotes of the Starr Report accessible finally in all its erotic narrative, with a techno-rave drumbeat of paranoia and sleaze? A wannabe literary nuclear bomb thrown into the trenches of the culture war?

For the most part, it is a sort of riff, a diatribe of first- person speculation, multiple-voice regurgitation of everything you've already heard, no longer care about and are quite rightly disgusted by: Monicagate. The subject, woven together with almost nostalgic anecdotes of '80s-style dinosaur misogyny in Hollywood, is a well-gorged-upon carcass, long picked over by more talented vultures, as well as by our finest writers and thinkers. This stuff can't even sustain a mediocre dinner party in Torrance anymore.

From what heights or (more accurately) depths does Eszterhas now address us, literally ad nauseum, about everything we have already read, reread and retread, like a Norman Mailer with attention deficit disorder? Think Hunter S. Thompson without the courage to tell you what stimulant is driving him or the kaleidoscopic originality of ideas; think "Howl" without poetry or Pat Robertson on acid. Eszterhas chooses never to distinguish among opinion, fact and utter poppycock. The difficulty of discerning any morsel of truth from the morass of speculation is complicated by Eszterhas' invention of a character he aptly names the Tawdry Little Prick, who is allowed in boldface type to literally make things up. He speaks as many characters but most outrageously as Willard, Bill Clinton's famous appendage.
But clearly this enterprise, whatever it thinks it is, was designed to outrage, provoke, infuriate and annoy, project some loud signal through the noise of pop culture as if someone's survival depended on it. Was it rushed to print as if newsworthy or just unedited? In all probability, it is merely a case of overly permissive editing, allowing stream of consciousness technique to a consciousness unworthy of streaming nonstop. The result is an exploration of the underbelly of our national sexual psychosis from a man whose greatest glory in the last 20 years was opening Sharon Stone's legs. And it is from that aperture that we get "American Rhapsody."

This book is definitely a product of this weird season of "Big Brother" and "Survivor." It feels like the publishing instance of the voyeuristic desperation that drives people to place cameras in their bathrooms and broadcast live, 24-7, to strangers around the world. Is this misguided effort at prepackaged pop culture buzz a ploy by otherwise savvy publishing moguls to mimic the behavior of their movie counterparts by marketing a book as though it were a summer blockbuster?

It comes with all the trappings of hype and titillating promise, as if something really naughty or salacious or even vaguely original will be revealed. It was said to be a zealously guarded manuscript with a 200,000 first printing and an exclusive magazine serialization. Of what? An expose of Hollywood? I don't think so. Of the Clinton sex scandals? Of wildly flung off-base parallels of Bill Clinton's sexual drive, his allies in Hollywood and the '60s generation? Do these very same smart publishing people actually think Eszterhas' career has earned him a point of view on all this? Or were they merely intoxicated with his go-for-broke, bring-down- the-house willingness to bite the hand that so well fed him? Surely they can do better than a few 7-year-old skanky anecdotes about Sharon Stone, now a happily married woman. Surely there must be equally famous in-need-of-fresh-cash Hollywood types with better access and better gossip.

It is a dirty book, but why should that surprise us? Eszterhas has become famous as a dirty movie writer. And he's proud of it. (Arguably, he wrote both the best and the worst of the decade's dirtiest movies, 1992's steamy and smart "Basic Instinct" and the unspeakably repellent 1995 "Showgirls.") As you do with any dirty book, you can skip through the boring stuff and go right to the scummy stuff, of which there's not nearly enough. Why rehash 5-year- old Monicagate drudgery when Philip Roth says everything there is to say about it this year in an often quoted astonishing paragraph in "The Human Stain": "It was the summer when--for the billionth time-- the jumble, the mayhem, the mess proved itself more subtle than this one's ideology and that one's morality. It was a summer when a presidential penis was on everyone's mind, and life, in all its shameless impurity, once again confounded America." So much for theme, brilliantly encapsulated elsewhere.

I am tempted to paraphrase Lloyd Bentsen here: Joe Eszterhas is no Philip Roth. So the most intriguing aspect of the book is the vantage point from which its author has anointed himself the speaker of our cultural truths. Is it from his former self, the crusading social reporter who was nominated for a National Book Award in 1974? Or from his more recent incarnation as a celebrity screenwriter musing about movie star-like presidents and celebrity cigar incidents? The answer to this most interesting of questions is in his preface, actually the book's most revealing three pages.

Eszterhas explains that he was tiring of his public life as the most famous screenwriter in Hollywood. From interview to interview, he confides, the constant attention was reducing him to a "public persona." So he did that thing we do when we tire of our public selves and whisked his family to Maui, locked himself in his room and read everything ever written about the president's erotic life in search of his true self. Eszterhas senses in his isolation that he and Clinton have much subterranean conflict in common: In Maui, Eszterhas writes, he "was living a reclusive life--not even calling agents [yeah, sure], lawyers, and friends back, still refusing all interview requests--lost in a mirrored sea of my own creation, in snorkeling pursuit of myself and Clinton, swimming though his past in search of my own soul." Here emerges the theme of "American Rhapsody," mythological narcissism: Joe is Bill.
They both spring from the roots of black music and the '60s: oral sex with the top down as a driving force of both their lives. Where Bill's wild side springs from Hot Springs, Ark., Joe's springs from blue collar Cleveland. Bill with his overactive Willard doing all the girls in Hot Springs; Joe with his own Willard, doing all the girls at the Rolling Stone office in San Francisco. And in a whole chapter entitled "Sharon and Bill," we see the parallel again: "I had created her. I had voted for him." Bill lusting after Sharon Stone; Joe crawling on all fours with Sharon Stone smoking Thai stick. " 'He was really, really hot for her,' Dick Morris had said (to whom? when?). . . . The President of the United States talked to his golf buddies about his favorite Sharon Stone scene. Yup. That was that scene . . . the one I'd written."

Once I came to understand the narrative conceit of "American Rhapsody," I tried to wrap my brain around its oeuvre. Some guesses: A pornographic political rave? A political pornographic rant? Dialectical pornography? A lurid, sleazy melodrama without a plot to speak of? A secret document issued from the vast right-wing conspiracy to discredit any last vestige of '60s idealism?
When Eszterhas claims that "[w]e took the White House" when Bill Clinton was elected, his sensibility is already so unseemly--and this on Page 2--that for the first time ever, I disowned myself from that generational "we." "The blow job we felt was our generation's gift to the American popular culture. . . ." The book at moments comes dangerously close to validating Ken Starr's worldview of the '60s as the root of all evil.
The license he takes with his various interior monologues takes the pushed and factional biographical style of Edmund Morris' "Dutch" and pulverizes it in an atom smasher, so there is no resemblance to any truth or even continuous subject matter. Eszterhas is the Heisenberg Uncertainty Principle incarnate, putting himself so much in the center of every event, dominating and intermediating every notion, that he transforms it and ultimately reveals only unintended psychological revelations about himself.

There are at least four kinds of falsehoods contained in this book:
* Delusional Self-Mythologizing Falsehood; for example, after Joe blasts Ryan O'Neal for touching his wife Naomi, in italics Joe talks to Bill, "You never told Vince that, did you?" Here he is more macho than Bill, even bigger.
* The Fictional Tawdry Prick Making Stuff Up; for example, as Willard: "Bill frightened me with Hilla [Hillary] for a while, but I quickly knew that he had to have the Hun for himself, not for me. . . . I didn't mind that he kept Hilla mostly away from me. I knew in my capillaries that Hilla didn't like me. . . . I just didn't feel I belonged in there. It was a dry and cold place. I sensed she always had another hidden agenda, and I wasn't interested in probing her underlying issues. I kept worrying she'd hurt me somehow."
* Shoddy Speculation that makes Lucianne Goldberg look like Walter Cronkite; for example, Bill doing coke with his brother Roger, based on an unnamed waitress' testimony to an Arkansas grand jury; Bill knowing that he couldn't "afford to piss Hillary off . . . too much. He needed her for his presidency and he needs her to shape his policies . . . and he knew that she knew how much he was screwing around."
* Out-and-Out Falsehood (based on being out of the loop); for example, that Michael Ovitz introduced the Clintons to Hollywood when, in fact, the late Dawn Steel and her husband, Charles Roven, did.

I suspect that part of the problem here is that Joe has been out of town for a while now. His last interview given at the February 1998 release of his satire on the movie business, "An Alan Smithee Film: 'Burn, Hollywood, Burn,' " was called "How a Jaded Hollywood Screenwriter Looking for Fun Turned Tinseltown Upside Down."

Eszterhas has been trying to turn Tinseltown upside down like a cock-eyed gunslinger, a motley Clint Eastwood, ever since he began his screenwriting career in 1978 with the labor drama starring Sylvester Stallone, "F.I.S.T.," and for a moment in 1989, after the success of "Jagged Edge" (1985), he almost did. It was a publicity stunt worthy of P.T. Barnum. It was his coup de gra^ce, his moment, the bugle call of his ambition.
After leaving CAA, he wrote a letter to Ovitz, then at the peak of his power. The letter was faxed all over town, a defining document in the iconography of Ovitz's supposed abuse of power. Eszterhas wrote that Ovitz had threatened to send "foot soldiers" "marauding" down Wilshire Boulevard in retaliation for his leaving the agency. It implied that Ovitz had "henchmen" who were hunting him down with, oh, I can't remember any more--elephant guns or Uzis or something--and in the classic adage of the Hollywood system he pretends to despise, he played his biggest hand: "You are as powerful as your enemy." In the same profoundly self-mythologizing manner with which he now compares himself to Clinton, he picked Ovitz, identifying with him and psychologically inflating himself to his scale. The masculine super-ego haunts him.

In 1993, he sold "Basic Instinct" for $3 million, then the highest amount ever paid for a screenplay. You get a sense of how far Eszterhas' social consciousness had evolved when he became the first screenwriter to claim he invented a movie star by writing a scene that displayed her pubic hair. Finally in 1995, he pulled out all the stops with the epic disaster "Showgirls," which collapsed many careers.

A word about Stone, for whom one gains a lot of sympathy while reading this book: There seems to be something deeply significant to Eszterhas about the fact that he "made" Stone, "[s]omeone I created . . . someone I'd made a star." He mentions it often. Perhaps this act of Pygmalionism gives him the power to arouse and provoke the president, elevates him to Clinton's stature. To my mind, Stone made Eszterhas, and it isn't very nice of him to say every single mean thing he can think of because she's the most famous person he knows. But this is his book after all. Anyway, the notion that she made him fits less well into the grand unified theory of narcissism that ontologically connects him to his subject: Joe-Bill.

Finally, after Eszterhas onanistically digests all the most salacious details gleanable from a) the Starr report footnotes; b) Juanita Broaddrick's sworn or unsworn testimony (only a member of the special prosecutor's office could trace all these leaks); c) Gennifer Flowers (his primary source); d) Monica Lewinsky; e) that irritating Kathleen Willey again; f) Dolly Whatever-her-name-is tell- alls; and g) everything ever fantasized by horny Arkansas state troopers, so that we think we finally know everything that is metaphysically possible to know about the size, characteristics, personality, history, pleasures and interior monologues of the presidential penis, he takes on others. People, not genitals. These added-on chapters about peripheral personalities grow increasingly distant from any recognizable narrative; we drift from Goldberg; Linda Tripp; Matt Drudge; Vernon Jordan; Bob Packwood; Wayne Hay's mistress, Elizabeth Ray; and Arianna Huffington to Monica's interior monologue as Hitler's whore and to every hooker who ever had a congressman. (Or so it seems.)

My mind wandered wildly for a common notion tying these disparate biographical threads together. It had to be sex. I found it in the vile and gratuitous attack on the homosexuality of Michael Huffington, thereby trying to justify an ugly chapter on his ex- wife, and in the scattershot list of every minor ancient Hollywood sex scandal-rumor of the last 20 years (Evans, Baumgarten, Farrah, Ryan, please!) in no context whatsoever. Trees have been felled for this. Why? Haven't we had enough? By the end of the book, one suffers not so much Clinton Fatigue as just mere fatigue. In the end, Eszterhas has given us 45 chapters on . . . nothing.

by Lynda Obst, The Los Angeles Times, July 23, 2000