Books: Clintonian Rhapsody

In the living room of his sumptuous Point Dume villa--overlooking the Pacific Ocean and built, metaphorically, on the comely flesh of Elizabeth Berkley and the famously flashed nethers of Sharon Stone--grizzled screenwriter and author Joe Eszterhas is explaining the imperative of not treating women as sex objects. "If we yearn for a better America, that sensitivity is all important," he says, dead earnest. "We must work toward a society where we show a respect toward human beings and view them as human beings and not pieces of meat."

Yes, that was Joe Eszterhas, the high-priced scribe who riled women, gays and critics with such sex thrillers and cheesy erotica as Basic Instinct, Sliver and Showgirls. He is talking, though, about the Bill Clinton-Monica Lewinsky affair, the NC-17 national nightmare that is the subject--along with the journey of the baby boomers, the mingling of politics and show biz, and an Ahab-like fixation on his star and sometimes nemesis Stone--of his audacious book of (mostly) nonfiction, American Rhapsody (Knopf; $25.95; 432 pages).

In retrospect, it makes perfect sense: Who better to chronicle the presidency's most famous episode of bad sex? Eszterhas' obsession with Clintoniana began in 1997, when after doing ceaseless publicity for two movies, the high-profile, volatile writer got sick of his public persona--"one night I was flipping through channels and saw myself three times"--and decided to drop out. Lying low in Maui with his wife Naomi and their three sons, Eszterhas left the phone unplugged and thought about his writing career, his public life and his relationships.

With the requisite hubris of a Hollywood multimillionaire, he decided that his personal problems--the serial philandering in his first marriage, the compromises for success and fame--were best paralleled by those of none other than the President. Like other boomers, Eszterhas regarded Clinton as his own: America's "first rock-'n'-roll President."

When the scandal broke, Eszterhas saw that epithet's flip side. "Men of my generation in their hearts wanted to be rock stars," he says. "[Clinton's] relationship with women has been exactly the rock star's relationship--even, if you want to get specific, down to fellatio, which is always what happens backstage with rock stars and groupies." In Clinton, for whom Eszterhas voted, he saw the erotic liberation of the '60s devolved into junk-food sex. In Kenneth Starr & Co., he saw Puritan culture warriors out to eject the baby of tolerance with Clinton's filthy bathwater.

Eszterhas became "a red-eyed couch potato," glued to the news. He read everything he could find about Clinton. He read the Starr report. He read the Linda Tripp and Lewinsky transcripts, 3,000 blathering pages of them. And he wrote page after cramped longhand page of "riffs" that eventually began to look like chapters. The result, after 2 1/2 years, is a feverish mix of '70s Rolling Stone-esque gonzo punditry, juicy show-biz anecdotes and fictional soliloquies from the likes of Bill, Hillary and--capping off the book a la Molly Bloom in Ulysses--"Willard," the nickname, according to Gennifer Flowers, of the President's penis. (Why? "It's longer than Willie.")