Free American Rhapsody by Joe Eszterhas Page B

with the Panther. Both we and our chicks felt this was ideological penance, a personal way to redeem ourselves for slavery and untold generations of white racism. Some of our old ladies—not all—objected only when Panthers like Huey Newton, a successful pimp, tried to turn them out to perform for the dollars our generation pretended to disdain.
    Head also caused some men to open doors they had forced closed all their lives. Stoned enough or drunk enough, they discovered they didn’t really care if the form kneeling there in the lava light with lips bared and mouth open was a man or a woman.
    The porn industry quickly picked up on what we’d started. Massage parlors opened everywhere suddenly, fluorescent-lighted churches in an America that was overnight becoming the Diocese of Fellatio. The naked priestesses in these grubby temples would never have intercourse, but they could be convinced with a donation to do massage with their lips and mouths. Men all over America ducked into these churches for quickie noontime prayer; the bells they heard going off in their ears had nothing to do with salvation.
    By then, our generation had found its own miracle-dispensing sex symbol. Our fathers may have had B.B. and M.M. Our kids would one day have S.S. We had L.L.—Linda Lovelace, the Empress of Head. Her movie was called
Deep Throat
and everyone of our generation—future president Bill Clinton, future Supreme Court justice Clarence Thomas—saw it. It featured Lovelace doing nothing but head, taking it
all in
without gagging, every sixties man’s dream. She was somehow able to relax, perhaps paralyze, her throat muscles completely. She claimed that her clitoris was in her throat. Her manager, an ex-marine named Chuck Traynor, explained it: “Once your throat opens, your esophagus gets quite large, like a sword swallower’s.” We heard that Linda was doing a cross-country media tour where she was demonstrating to critics that what we saw on-screen wasn’t movie magic. Head shampoo announced it was considering putting her in a television commercial.
    When Richard Nixon was brought down by the source named Deep Throat, we thought it was poetry. Richard Nixon, doing a Linda Lovelace, taking it all in.
    Hollywood had warm and fuzzy feelings about Bill Clinton, and there was the conviction that if he loosened up—like JFK when he came to town; producer Irwin Winkler’s guest house is where JFK and Angie Dickinson used to tryst—Bill Clinton would fit right in. It was easy to visualize him hanging out in Evans’s bedroom with Jack Nicholson, sharing a joint and watching as a magician twirled a girl around and around, C notes coming out of her every orifice. Listening to Evans talk about a girl he’d urinated upon, who got up and broke three of his ribs. Hanging out. Having fun. Just being human in Hollywood. The big house in Bel Air, the beach house at Carbon Beach, the two black Mercedes, the black Ducati, the black Dodge Ram, a daily manicure. You know . . . normal life. Listening to Sharon tell him how Bob Evans once kept one of her friends in a dog collar. Going over to the wall in Evans’s bedroom and checking out the Helmut Newton photograph of the girl with the smoking cigar in her . . .
    There was even some relatively serious talk that Bill Clinton would move to town after he left office. Didn’t he say, “The best part of the White House isn’t Camp David or
Air Force One
; it’s all the movies people send me”? And he did like these three little guys—Steven and Jeffrey and David—very much, and they seemed to like being in the big guy’s presence. He probably would have made a good CEO or CFO or whatever honorific the hard-nosed Geffen would have thrown the ex-president of the United States.
    It wasn’t even hard to see Bill Clinton at an important script meeting. He knew movies. He told Mel Brooks he