Free American Rhapsody by Joe Eszterhas

best damn fuck in town and I’ve got the diamonds to prove it.” Bill Clinton’s excesses were
bupkes
compared with those of Marlon Brando, who decorated walls with his old girlfriends’ Tampax and collected stool samples from his visitors while living on his private Fijian island . . . Robert Mitchum, who defecated on Harry Cohn’s white rug during a contract dispute and bent over and passed gas into the face of a passenger who asked him not to smoke on an airplane . . . Errol Flynn, who unzipped his willard at parties and played the piano with it, who walked over to the house of his next-door neighbor, gossip columnist Hedda Hopper, and masturbated on it.
    A blow job in the White House from a Beverly Hills airhead who looked and talked like a Valley Girl—oh, mama, the whole thing was s-o-o-o Hollywood!
Hollywood was Blow Job City, an industry historically identified with this particular act. What did Marilyn Monroe tell the press when she signed her first studio contract? She said, “This means I’ll never have to suck another cock in this town again.”
    Way back in the pioneer days, the old guys, Cohn and Goldwyn and Zanuck and Thalberg, the founding fathers—all those cigar smokers—they’d have a nice lunch at the Brown Derby or Musso’s or, later, Scandia . . . and maybe they’d take a little steam after . . . and they’d go back to the office and light up a cigar while they got their . . .
manicure
. A nice little after-lunch, after-steam, during-cigar . . . manicure. The manicure girls knew what they were doing. They knew how to do it so it didn’t have to take too long. Beautiful young girls from the Valley (the best manicure girls were always from the Valley and always in demand), down there under the desk, so if the secretary or the wife walked in, she didn’t even see her.
    It was the perfect activity, this manicure—not too much exertion after a rich meal and all that hot steam; the ticker wouldn’t stress. It was the perfect position, too, for a man of power, a titan, a founding father to enjoy. Down on her knees, her skirt hiked up, panties pulled down, taking it happily in her mouth, the same kind of well-kept mouth with which their PMSing, high-maintenance wives had driven them nuts for years. There was something satisfying, too, to the titans in the gagging and the swallowing. The highest paid Valley Girls always swallowed. Then they left and the titans finished their cigars and closed some important, boffo deals.
    There was even a phrase for the sleepy condition of the willards of these men at this time of day as they underwent their routine daily manicures, not completely focused, distracted, but getting the manicure anyway because it was a perk and a part of the schedule, like getting the Bentley detailed on Monday. The willards of these semierect men were called “Hollywood loaves.”
    And now here was this Beverly Hills Valley Girl of the nineties, this Lewinsky, a nice Jewish girl with big lips, her mother a little screwed up maybe—
what was that business about the mother pretending to sleep with Pavarotti
?—and the titans of
today
got it, instantly understood even what the rest of America didn’t get: Yes, she blew him, but they didn’t have sex.
    Because a blow job in Hollywood wasn’t sex. A blow job was a little break in a busy afternoon . . . the traditional way to aid the digestion after a long lunch . . . better than Mylanta, better than Tums . . . a blow job was almost like a different way of taking a pee, for God sake! . . . A blow job was . . . a
manicure
.
    So what was the big deal? Bill Clinton was a good president building a better America, a dream that many of today’s titans, sixties kids, shared. Other presidents had had manicures. Bill Clinton was Hollywood’s president anyway,