Wag the Dog Page 11

  “To me,” Hartman went on, “the great presidents were Ike and Jack Kennedy. I had no use for Johnson, Carter, and Reagan. I didn’t think to analyze it until you came along. What was different about you, from Reagan, from Dukakis? I’ll tell you. George Herbert Walker Bush, Dwight David Eisenhower, John Fitzgerald Kennedy, they all saw real combat. Let’s face it, where was Ron Reagan when the world was at war? He was in Hollywood, with clean sheets and pretty girls, and his uniforms were fresh-pressed every day by the Santa Monica dry cleaners.

  “You were out there. Youngest pilot in the Navy. You put your life on the line. You know what that means.”

  “Those were great days,” the president said, and then asked, as Hartman had wanted him to, “Were you in the service?”

  “Yes, sir,” Hartman said, making his move.

  “Well, you’re a little young for the big one, when were you in? What branch of service?”

  “I was a Marine, sir. In Korea.”

  Bush was pleasantly surprised. “Well, some Navy men don’t think too much of the Army”—this was a good-humored, manly remark—”but by God, you can’t say anything against the United States Marines. Tell me about your service, Dave. And forget the sir and Mr. President bullshit. Call me George.”

  “I have to tell you, sir. It’s hard to call the commander in chief George. I’m just too much of a Marine, still, to do that.”

  “Well, you can relax, Dave. What’d you do in the service?”

  Hartman saw how the table lay, which was exactly how he expected, so he went ahead and played his ace. “Tell you the truth, sir. I was a pilot. Fighter jock.”

  “I’ll be a son of a bitch,” the president said. It had never occurred to him that a Jewish Hollywood agent would have been a Marine fighter pilot in Korea.

  “How many missions you fly? How many kills?”

  “I only flew five combat missions.”

  “How come?” the president asked.

  “I had to ditch in the ocean. I wasn’t shot down. I had a fuel-line malfunction, then the engine caught fire. I ejected. Good thing too. On my way down I got to see my plane explode. Thank God for those Air-Sea rescue boys. I got pulled out by a Navy chopper off of a carrier. You know, sir, better than I do, what it’s like to be sitting in a freezing ocean, wondering if it’s the first day of the rest of your life. Or the last.31Anyway, I hurt my back when I hit the water, and when they couldn’t fix it, they gave me my discharge.”

  “So I guess you understand how important it is,” the president said, “to keep America strong?”

  “The most important thing in the world,” Hartman said. “Not just for America, for all mankind.”

  Again, it’s possible to ponder the role of coincidence: that Hartman had chosen a way to win the president’s confidence which spoke directly to the things the president wanted to discuss with him. But it’s more likely that all three of them—the third being Atwater, although he was dead—had simply tuned in to the same thinking about basic themes. Maybe the president would have gone ahead even if Hartman had spoken about banking standards or the need for celebrities to support family values or of his commitment to free trade.

  “I have a project,” the president said. “You remember Lee Atwater?”

  “Very well. I admired him.”

  “He wrote a memo. He was a good friend,” Bush said. “The baddest good ol’ boy. I had a lot of fun with Lee. He thought well of you. Did you know he played blues guitar?”

  “He was an excellent person.”

  “This is a concept thing. He said, before he died, that you’re the person, what with today’s Hollywood. When a friend writes a deathbed memo, you have to do what you have to do. I have to swear you to secrecy.”

  “You have my oath. As an American. As a Marine.”32

  “The word of a United States Marine. You can’t ask for much more than that,” the president said. It may be that at this point the Halcion was kicking in. According to the president’s own schedule, it certainly should have been.33

  The president sat silent, trying to figure out how to formulate what Atwater had proposed. Then he suddenly wondered if they were being recorded. Not by some foreign spy but by his own people. Look what had happened to Nixon. Speech was never safe. Although they had decided never to show the memo to anyone, he and Baker, somehow showing it seemed—better. Clearer, easier, and safer. He reached into his pocket.

  “I want you to look at this,” the president said, and gave Hartman the memo. The limo turned past the gate and entered John Wayne. As it crossed the tarmac to Air Force One, Hartman read.

  Hartman had admired Atwater’s destruction of Dukakis. Lee had happened to see that the America of ’88 would vote for a waving flag and against violent sexual, black males. He happened to be running a presidential campaign, so that’s the choice he offered the public. What else, Hartman thought, should he have done? Most people either lack the capacity for thought or they’re too lazy to employ it. They shroud themselves in the fog of conventional morality and substitute knee-jerk sentimentality for thought-out reactions. Lee had refused to be that sort of cripple. Good for him.

  But this memo put Atwater in a whole different class. This was beyond intellectual rigor and unsentimental honesty—this required real audacity, this was true clarity. Atwater had proved a most worthy student of SunTzu and Clausewitz and Machiavelli. If he had been there, Hartman would have bowed in a formal gesture of respect, as they do in the East, to a teacher, someone to learn from and to emulate.

  But Atwater was dead and gone. Hartman didn’t believe in ghosts, or at least not in ghosts who listen. His tribute to Atwater was that he was the first to read the memo who didn’t say, “Jesus fucking Christ. Atwater’s fucking in-fucking-sane.” He turned to the president. He thought of a hundred different things he could say. His actual favorite was: George, I don’t know if you’ve ever used an agent before. We get ten percent. Of everything. But it’s not what he said. He thought of Oliver North, sat up as straight as the limo seat allowed, his back in a fair imitation of military posture. “Sir,” he said, raising his right hand, touching his fingertips to his eyebrow in a salute, “you do me great honor. In giving me this opportunity to serve you and my country. Thank you, sir.”

  26 Yale’s, and America’s, most famous publicly secret society. What Yalies are to the rest of us, members of Skull and Bones are to Yalies. Until 1992 it was an all-male group. Some of the practices include lying in a coffin, ritual masturbation (will this continue now that sexual integration has come? and if it does, will it change the psychic impact of the practice?), and written confessions. These written confessions are kept in logbooks which are, it is said, intact since the beginning of the practice, with one exception. Legend has it that the year which would have included George Bush’s entry is missing. Only Spy magazine, wouldn’t you know, has seen fit to print this information.

  27 Wasserman’s biggest breakthrough is fascinating for a number of reasons. MCA—and Wasserman personally—was Ronald Reagan’s agent. They did very well for Reagan even when his career as a film star was quickly fading. In 1952, when Reagan was president of the Screen Actors Guild, he negotiated a deal that permitted MCA and only MCA to get a blanket waiver to both represent actors and produce shows. This gave MCA an incredible advantage over both rival talent agents and rival producers. It gave them power over the studios. For example, they forced Paramount Pictures to produce a Hitchcock film on a lot at Universal—by then owned by MCA—even though Paramount had its own studio space.

  In the late sixties MCA helped arrange real-estate deals for Reagan that made him a millionaire and put him in a position to run for governor. A more detailed exposition can be found in Dan E. Moldea, Dark Victory: Ronald Reagan, MCA, and the Mob (Viking, 1986). Moldea paints Wasserman as an éminence grise who took care of Reagan and was, in turn, taken care of. Ronald Brownstein, in The Power and the Glitter: The Hollywood-Washington Connection (Pantheon, 1990), portrays Reagan
and Wasserman as two individuals on separate tracks that sometimes ran congruently and sometimes ran at odds.

  28 Like the other gossip and casual character assassinations in this book, we regard this as an unsubstantiated rumor, although Spy magazine treats it as established fact: “So let’s get this straight: A man who took huge amounts of steroids becomes head of the President’s Council on Physical Fitness, but his main worry is that people will think he smokes cigars.” (Charlotte Fleming, 3/92)

  29 Readers are very important lowly people in Hollywood. Anyone with any power or pull has scripts and books and treatments shoved at them all day long. No one has time to read them all. Yet everyone with power or pull is looking for a great property to produce. Hence they employ readers. Readers read and then write the equivalent of a high-school book report, a review that mostly summarizes but also rates. In the rare instance a reader says something is so hot the reader’s employer decides to run with it, he or she must then convince others—stars, directors, studio chiefs, name screenwriters—to jump onboard. None of them will have time to read the property, and they in turn will give it to their readers. Readers are among those thousands in Hollywood with the power to say no. It is also a position from which, legend has it, it is possible to rise.

  30 Vice President Quayle. A jocular reference. Quayle was at that time involved in moderate scandal about the use of military jets to take him on golfing trips. A mild irony is that he took most of them with Samuel K. Skinner, later the White House chief of staff—who was then secretary of transportation. OK, it’s a very mild irony.

  31 On September 2, 1944, George Bush’s plane was hit by antiaircraft fire while making a bombing run over Chichi Jima, about 150 miles north of the better-known Iwo Jima. Pilots made every effort to ditch at sea. Japanese POW camps were reputed to be terrible places. The one on Chichi Jima was run by a Major Matoba. After the war he was reported to have cut up prisoners and fed the pieces to other prisoners. With his plane on fire, Bush managed to get out over water, where he jumped. He landed in the ocean without major injury. He found his life raft—though without water or paddles. He was rescued several hours later by submarine.

  32 According to U.S. Army records, Hartman, a draftee, served one year in the Army, not the Marines. He never rose above private. He did receive a medical discharge. However, his previous boss, Allen Ross, had been a Marine pilot in Korea. Ross spoke of it often, and had a collection of military aviation books and memorabilia in the office. The story Hartman tells here, while similar to the president’s, is virtually identical to Allen Ross’s.

  33 The use of Halcion is controversial. Many, like the president’s doctor, consider it totally safe.

  Benjamin J. Stein, identified as a lawyer, writer, actor, and ex-speechwriter for President Nixon, said this in an op-ed piece in the New York Times, 1/22/92: “. . . Halcion is the most terrifying drug I have ever used and its effects are incalculably more frightening when they are at work on the president. I have been taking prescription tranquilizers since 1966. I have used almost every kind imaginable . . . but Halcion . . . is in a class by itself for mind-altering side effects. It is not just a classic sedative which basically just slows things down. No, benzodiazepenes are described by Halcion’s maker, the Upjohn Company, as ‘anxiolytics,’ meaning they cut the anxiety in your brain.

  “When Halcion hits you, it’s as if an angel of the Lord appears in your bedroom and tells you that nothing is important, that what you were worried about is happening on Mars and that Nirvana, Lethe, and the warm arms of mother are all waiting for you.”

  Chapter

  FOURTEEN

  THE EVENT OF the season is the bar mitzvah of David Hartman, Jr.,34son of David Hartman, head of RepCo, the most powerful, most ruthless, most important agent in Hollywood. A select list of 250 are invited. Twenty of them are friends of the thirteen-year-old boy. The rest are people in the industry. It is the most sought-after invitation, it defines who is who, it is the ultimate A-list.

  The cost of the catering, as released to the press, is substantially over $100,000. The cost of the party is hard to calculate. Entertainment is supposed to include performances by Michael Jackson and Bobby and several people I have never heard of. These people will not charge for their services and may, or may not, provide their backup musicians, roadies, mixers, special-effects personnel, light-and-laser shows as part of their homage.

  One of the themes of the party—at least for the kids—is Ninja. There is some talk that this is tastelessly self-serving. Hartman is a student of kendo, the Japanese art of sword fighting. His sensei, or teacher, is a Japanese swordsman named Sakuro Juzo. It is common gossip that Hartman’s devotion to kendo is part of his rivalry with Michael Ovitz. Ovitz is devoted to aikido, a martial art invented in the forties, also in Japan. Hartman whenever he discusses martial arts, points out that kendo, the way of the sword, contains the real teachings of Bushido, the way of the samurai, and that all the movements of aikido are actually based on—that is, derivative of—movements developed for the sword.

  Hartman is the prime mover behind a movie called American Ninja, which stars Sakuro Juzo as a Japanese Ninja master with a group of youthful American disciples who engage in virtually supernatural acts of derring-do in the service of truth, justice, and the American way. Hartman personally pitched it to David Geffen, describing it as Batman combined with The Mod Squad for the nineties, containing the spiritual and competitive values we should learn from the East.

  Again, this is partly ascribed to his rivalry with Mike Ovitz,35who is credited with making a movie star out of his sensei, aikido instructor Steven Seagal.

  Japan bashers and paranoids have accused Hartman of having more sinister motives than competition with a rival agent. That he is actually in the service of Japanese masters, who desire to create a new mythology, an illusion of Japanese-American cooperation but with a Japanese as the sensei of the Americans, now become the students. To the Japanese, in whose culture all relationships are hierarchical, this is a powerful statement indeed. Hartman’s motives are, of course, described as financial. This film and his sponsorship of Sakuro Juzo will establish him as a friend of the Japanese and they will therefore use him as point man, advisor, and deal broker as they buy up America, a position so lucrative it makes mere movie packaging look like spit.

  Sakuro and his top students, several of whom have been flown over from Japan, will give a kendo demonstration. All the stuntmen from the film will be present. There will be lessons for children of all ages in how to become invisible, how to infiltrate Oriental castles, how to kill in complete silence, and other things that thrill thirteen-year-old boys.

  Food will be both American and Japanese. Sushi chefs have been flown over from Japan. They specialize in serving live sushi, currently the hottest food trend in Tokyo. Included on the menu is puffer fish, also flown over, live, a fish which if not correctly prepared will cause paralysis and death. Serving it in America is illegal.

  The party will be filmed in 35-mm, utilizing seven cameras. Marty Scorsese will direct. Vilmos Zsigmond will be the director of photography. This is both serious and something of an in-joke since Hartman’s first media experience is reported to have been producing bar mitzvah movies.

  It is the first time Maggie is going to meet with Hartman since they had the lunch she told me about. It is also a major see-and-be-seen event, to which Maggie responds competitively. The preparation process takes several days. Selecting her clothes. Getting them tailored and retailored. Changing her mind. Getting extra exercise to firm up and slim down the already perfect form. Getting extra sleep to look radiant and rested.

  She gets the guest list and goes through it name by name. Then she starts working the phones. She double-checks who is still married, who is freshly divorced, who she can ask about their children and whose children are best not referred to. There are a few names she doesn’t know, mostly Japanese from Sony, Matsushita, and Musashi corporations. She finds out about them.
Whether they’re from Osaka or Tokyo or the country, if they have wives and children with them or left them behind, if they play golf or tennis. She has a terrific memory, but she jots the information down on file cards nonetheless.

  With this much activity I am pushed further into the background. I am not even driving her to the party. Limousine service is being provided by the major studios. The party is to begin in the early evening.

  I could take the night off as Mrs. Mulligan has done and go somewhere on my own. Part of me wants to go find some whore that looks vaguely like Maggie, the same color hair, cut the same way might be enough, or a torso about the same shape and size.

  But I don’t. I stay home. I crack open a bottle of bourbon. I sit down and read the copy of Sun Tzu that Kim gave me.

  Actually, I have been reading The Art of War since Preston Griffith gave me a copy in Saigon in ’70. Griff was CIA and an opium smoker. He said that he had had many people killed. Reading Sun Tzu brought him great despair. But he said for someone like me it would bring strength.

  It was written sometime between 480 and 221 B.C. It’s very Oriental, and the first time you try to read it, it’s like trying to get serious about a fortune cookie. “Nature is the dark or light, the cold or hot, and the Systems of time.” Or “Those who are certain to capture what is attacked, attack locations that are not defended.” On top of that, every translation you read is different. So you wonder what he really said. If he said anything.

  But we were in Nam. Where we had the firepower, the logistics, the organization, and the money. On paper we even had the manpower. And we were losing—to General Giap, who read Sun Tzu. And we lost China to Mao Tse-tung, who read Sun Tzu. We got our butt kicked, at least for a while, in Korea, by other generals who read Sun Tzu.