The Rhapsody of Narcissism

There was Joe Eszterhas, famous Hollywood screen-writer, suffering from stomach cramps and hurrying back to the penthouse at the Beverly Wilshire Hotel, which had recently been vacated by Warren Beatty. Rushing up to the suite, Eszterhas ran into the bathroom — only to be confronted with the “godawful” image of himself from six different angles.

Not just in the bathroom but throughout the suite (where Beatty had resided for more than a decade), there were “mirrors everywhere — everywhere — on the walls, the ceiling.”

Recovering from his malady, Eszterhas wondered, “What sort of man wants to look at himself all the time, twenty-four hours a day, every day? . . . Was this how [Beatty] kept in touch with ordinary Americans? Was this the daily self-abnegation that fueled his bleeding liberal heart?”

Eszterhas professes to find such self-absorption distasteful, but American Rhapsody is a study in precisely such narcissism, whose poster boy is William Jefferson Clinton: the president of the United States who will end his reign besmirched by impeachment and public chortling over his sexual escapades in the Oval Office. As if we hadn’t already had enough salacious detail, Eszterhas introduces us to “Willard” (the pet name Clinton bestowed upon the organ that nearly crippled his presidency). Eszterhas grants Willard the final fictional soliloquy of the book: an opportunity for Willard to plead his cause, to ask the president to recall how much they’ve meant to one another, and to beg for the understanding of the American people.

This is not the way things were supposed to have turned out. In Clinton, Eszterhas’s generation had finally claimed the White House from the evil generation of Johnsons and Nixons, Reagans and Bushes. Rolling Stone prophesied a “new age in American politics.” But, after promising the most ethical presidency in history, Clinton found himself reduced to parsing the meaning of “is.” As Eszterhas puts it: “He was supposed to rock the world . . . but not like this. . . . He was supposed to tell the truth — finally — after all the White House liars we’d grown up and grown older and grown more cynical with.”

But Eszterhas should have seen trouble ahead for the first rock ‘n’ roll president. With the wisdom of hindsight, he now sees clearly that “behind the idealism and the social commitment and the herbal experiments related to self-awareness, the sixties were about sex” — sex, not love.

The degree to which the president was enamored of the rock ‘n’ roll life is evident in the story Eszterhas relates about Clinton avidly pursuing Connie Hamzy, the groupie immortalized in Grand Funk Railroad’s “We’re an American Band.” Clinton was not so much attracted to her physical appearance as to her legendary association with a slew of rockers. Eszterhas describes the famous four-way phone sex event — where, while Clinton chatted with Dick Morris on the phone each was being serviced by a woman — as a “telephonic orgy,” a “four-way disembodiment of intimacy.”

It was the Lewinsky affair that drew Eszterhas into Bill Clinton’s private world. Each chapter of American Rhapsody opens with dialogue from Monica and Linda Tripp (whom Eszterhas dubs “The Ratwoman”). But the key for Eszterhas is actually Gennifer Flowers’s book about Clinton — a book read by Monica as a self-help manual for seducing the commander in chief (not that this required much training). Eszterhas allows Flowers the harshest and most succinct description of Clinton as “a flat, two-dimensional piece of hardened paper, empty of all feelings.”

For Eszterhas, Clinton’s hollowness is intimately linked to his ability to use anyone that suits him and to destroy what blocks his path. It is equally in keeping with his character to assassinate the character of women who make allegations against him as it is to drop bombs on pharmaceutical plants to distract the nation from Monicagate. Clinton’s public narcissism peaked with the marshaling of the psychiatric industry to exonerate him from guilt. Clinton was “allegedly a victim of incest, pedophilia, child abuse, erotomania, sexual addiction, gambling addiction, alcohol addiction, rage addiction, wife beating, husband beating, grandfather beating, low self-esteem, jealousy, and poverty.” He was a wounded healer for the self-mesmerized, self-monitoring, therapeutic generation.

Perhaps the most chilling suggestion of Clinton’s violent indifference to others came after the impeachment hearings, when Juanita Broaddrick claimed that Clinton had raped her in an Arkansas hotel room years before. Eszterhas does not flinch from the details of this case, entitling his chapter “The Ugliest Story Ever Told.” The file on “Jane Doe # 5” may have motivated some waffling House members to vote for impeachment. But, Eszterhas notes, the country was so tired of the Clinton-Lewinsky debacle that it lacked the patience for yet another accusation.

The most surprising entrant into this national drama — and one to whom Eszterhas devotes considerable attention — is the pornographer Larry Flynt, whose ad in the Washington Post promising cash for stories about the sexual infidelities of Republicans, Eszterhas suggests, helped persuade some Republicans to back censure over removal. Eszterhas speculates that Flynt’s invitation to join John F. Kennedy Jr. at the White House Correspondents Dinner was a quiet acknowledgment of the important role played by the official pornographer of the Democratic party.

Eszterhas’s book, however, is less the morality play he imagines than a therapeutic exercise for its author. He speaks of the period of reflection out of which American Rhapsody grew as a time when he finally found marital fidelity and discovered the importance of children. He began to reflect about “values and success,” about what the 1960s really meant, and about the “ambition, success, political duplicity, and the Hollywood charm” that “made Bill Clinton tick.” Clinton, in other words, is someone Eszterhas used to be (except for the part about being successful in politics). Addicted to CSPAN, “indulging gluttonously in the national bacchanal of information and bulimia of rumor,” Eszterhas became lost in the “mirrored sea of his own creation, in snorkeling pursuit of myself and Clinton.”

There are those mirrors again, this time reflecting the psyche of author and object, Eszterhas and Clinton, a microcosm of the narcissistic generation. A former writer for Rolling Stone and the screenwriter of such films as Jagged Edge, Basic Instinct, and Showgirls, Eszterhas can’t resist calling attention to his own importance. The book is really all about Eszterhas. Sharon Stone makes a surprisingly large number of appearances in the book (given that Eszterhas rejects rumors about her liaisons with the president). Sharon wasn’t interested in Clinton — though she was, Eszterhas tells us, hot for Eszterhas. Wherever he looks, Eszterhas sees himself. He even insinuates himself into the other great media spectacle of the 1990s, suggesting that O. J. Simpson patterned his crime after the murder scene in Jagged Edge.

Eszterhas claims he learned a lot during this period of Clintonian self-examination. This is where he marks his own superiority to Clinton. (Or hadn’t he already done that by telling us how he bagged Sharon Stone and Clinton didn’t?) But Eszterhas is beyond all that, now; he has overcome his addictions, especially the one whose symptom is being the puppet of one’s sex organ, and has come to the realization that it’s all about the kids.

Repeatedly, Eszterhas says that what has made so many of his generation finally change their ways (other than near-death experiences and nightmarish flashbacks and fear of sexual-harassment charges) is concern for the next generation. He goes so far as to suggest that his generation wants the next generation to behave, not like their own generation, but like their grandparents’ — as though they all wish their daughters to be Donna Reed. Of course, they know this isn’t realistic. So they will attempt to counsel their children to stick to safe sex and safe drugs.

Is this all that’s left of the 1960s? Of course, Eszterhas still mouths the orthodox views on social policy, especially when it comes to matters of race and anything the Christian Coalition opposes. His most revealing words come when he echoes Toni Morrison’s claim that Clinton is our first black president: In addition to promoting social programs favorable to blacks, Clinton showed his affinity by being able to “get down . . . in all kinds of ways. With the sax. With the ribs. With his shades. With the b — tches.”

In the end, it’s clear Eszterhas hasn’t really changed at all. He’s just tired, and what he hopes to pass on is merely lip service to the self-proclaimed “ideals” of the 1960s. Having spent his passion on sex, drugs, and rock ‘n’ roll, he is now incapable of imagining a life of sacrifice and service. It was, in fact, long before Clinton became president that Eszterhas lost his edge. He speaks inexplicably enthusiastic terms about how excited he was to see Fleetwood Mac perform at the first Clinton inauguration. Fleetwood Mac? This was not even the geriatric rock of Mick, Keith, and the rest of the Stones. This was geriatric pop. Eszterhas would have done well to remember another 1960s slogan: Trust no one over thirty.

Thomas S. Hibbs teaches in the philosophy department at Boston College.