Free American Rhapsody by Joe Eszterhas Page A

in a town with deep liberal Democratic roots.
    People here still talked about Mark Rosenberg, the late former head of production at Warner Bros. and one of the heads of the Students for a Democratic Society in the sixties. People here still talked about Gary Hart and how his binding friendship with Warren destroyed him. Gary, the joke was, wanted to be Warren—the greatest Hollywood swordsman since Milton Berle, and Marilyn had once said Uncle Miltie had the biggest willard she’d ever seen—and Warren wanted to be Gary, the serious social thinker.
    At least Bill Clinton didn’t have any destructive friendships like that, except for the smarmy pollster, Morris, who liked sucking hookers’ toes. Bill Clinton’s pals in town were Steven Spielberg—sexually, Steven was Saint Steven; Jeffrey Katzenberg—devoted to money and his wife, Marilyn; and David Geffen, who was gay.
    Oh, sure, there had been some Hollywood buzzings about Bill Clinton through the years. Bill and Sharon, who had dinner together while some people prattled about Stone engaged with the president in the same kind of yipping, leg-elevated positions we saw her faking with Joe Pesci on-screen. And Bill and Barbra—but Barbra was almost dowdy now, older than Hillary even, no longer what producer Jon Peters once called “the nicest ass in town.”
    Bill Clinton even had a family connection to Hollywood, although it was awfully low-rent. Barbara Boxer’s daughter married one of Hillary’s brothers . . . and Boxer’s daughter used to work for the producer Rob Fried. The connection got Rob some golf with the president at Burning Tree, but little else.
    .  .  .  
    While godless and immoral Hollywood had been amusing itself with manicures for nearly a century, the blow job, we felt, was our generation’s gift to American popular culture in the sixties. We didn’t call it a “blow job” for aesthetic reasons (way too uncool). We called it “head.”
    Head was ours the way the missionary position was our parents’. We’d seen our moms flush crimson when dad picked the chicken neck out of the pot and, grinning, held it up . . . and the idea that mom (or Mamie Eisenhower or Pat Nixon or Debbie Reynolds or Doris Day) was going to, you know . . . not in a million years!
    Even in the sixties, most midwestern or southern or rural girls went, “Ooh! Yuk!” at the slightest suggestion that they lower their pretty heads. But California girls knew all about it: They had the talent their mothers would never have. They strengthened their jaw muscles with cucumbers and bananas and did oral yoga exercises with their lips, mouths, and tongues. They went to the dentist to file down teeth so they “wouldn’t get in the way.” They learned to put condoms on with their mouths. They performed after licking ice or eating jalapeño peppers or chewing a Red Hot.
    Head was the perfect sixties sex act. It was, literally, still outlawed in many states between men and men, as well as between men and women. You could go to jail for it. It was fast; you didn’t even have to take your clothes off. And the fact that we were certain our parents hadn’t done it was an important consideration at a time when fools like Abbie Hoffman and Jerry Rubin were telling us to “kill your parents” (while not killing theirs). Part of its outlaw appeal was that it was a black act more than a white one. Old blues songs like “Hog Me Baby” and “Down on Me” and “Scratch-Throat Blues” had celebrated it.
    We had adopted black culture fervently and wholeheartedly in the sixties, to the point where if Black Panthers showed up at a party in the Haight and admired one of our “chicks” or “old ladies,” we longhaired white boys got out of the way and went outside to smoke some dope while she moved into the bathroom