Wag the Dog Read online

  Sure I am, or have been, exactly that kind of guy. A lot of times I’ve been the kind of guy who didn’t even wait to slip silently away. With a lot of the women I’ve known in my life, I just put my cash down and walked out, everybody’s eyes open and everything in plain sight But with Maggie, she’s right, I won’t be that kind of guy. I’ll be there as close to forever as I can make it be.

  I play the role of chauffeur-bodyguard. It’s a role I’ve played before. When we go somewhere, I talk to the other service personnel and see what I can pick up.

  Maggie is unhappy. Knowing that someone is always listening to everything we do—not just talk, but when we eat and shit, piss and snore, grunt or fart or sing in the shower—is a strain. She seems to act out her tension by being busier. She asks for and reads scripts. She has lunches and dinners and drinks. She conferences with her lawyers and accountants, with producers and fiscal schemers. That’s fine, because almost every trip is an opportunity for me to meet someone. Most people in L.A. drive themselves, but if there are no other chauffeurs, I make the acquaintance of the maître d’ or even one of the kids from valet parking. If we go to someone’s home, I talk to the maid or the cook or the gardener. All of them are proud of their stars or power brokers; they all have stories to tell and pretend to inside knowledge.

  A waiter at Morton’s, outside on a reefer break, tells me how Brian De Palma dumped his girlfriend. I ask him if he knows Beagle. He says, “Sure, Beagle comes in all the time. Used to come in all the time. But he’s sick.” I ask with what? The waiter takes a deep, sad toke, and says, “What you think, man, what you think?”

  Maggie sends me to pick up some clothes for her, that she’s already picked out, from Simonette’s. A salesgirl named Tama tells me that Vanessa Swallow,14the pop star, is a lesbian who favors strap-on dildos. Tama swears that she personally saw Vanessa strap one on in the back room so that the seamstress could measure her and alter a whole set of underwear to accommodate the apparatus. I ask Tama if Beagle ever came shopping there. She says no. Then she says, could I do her a favor. I say what? She says she has a boyfriend, more of a best friend really, she loves him more than anyone else in the whole wide world, but it’s not like an exclusive thing, sexually, if I know what she means, he’s really talented and smart and he’s written a screenplay that would be perfect for Magdalena, just perfect, if I could just show it to Ms. Lazlo, just leave it on the seat of her car, you know, it would be so good for both of them, because once Magdalena read it, she would be glad she had discovered it.

  In order to speak, Maggie and I either go out on the beach or put on loud music. If it’s my choice, it’s country. We whisper in front of the speakers. She says Hank Williams is growing on her. Hank Junior pisses her off because he switches back and forth between being great and being dumb. She likes Willie, but then, she says, she liked him before me. But mostly she’s impatient. She doesn’t like the waiting.

  I hear about Nick Jackson and the gerbil at least once a day, and every single person who tells me the story tells me that they personally heard it from either the doctor who removed it from his famous rectum or from a doctor who is very close to the doctor who did the gerbilectomy.15

  Aaron Spelling has a little soiree. The driver who brings Kenneth Branagh goes out with a girl who is a maid who, he says, is best friends with Melanie Griffith’s maid. He tells me that when Melanie was pregnant, she did special exercises so that she could start having sex with Don Johnson again immediately after she had the baby. She couldn’t stand the idea of not doing it, even the very next day.16I ask him if he knows Beagle. He says yeah, he drove him once. I ask when. It was only a couple of weeks ago. I ask how he looked, did he look sick? “I heard he was sick,” the guy says, “but he didn’t look sick. Pale but not sick. He and his wife were having a big fight.” About what? “About their son. Beagle gave him some war toys. GI Joe dolls or something, and his wife was livid. Kid wanted ’em, Beagle says. I don’t care, his wife says. Real, what you might call strident. I would call her a bitch. Wife talks to a man like that, she needs an attitude adjustment, if you know what I mean. But it’s none of my business. I just transport ’em, I don’t critique ’em.”

  When Maggie comes out, it’s with Kenneth Branagh. They stop and stand and talk for a minute—out of earshot, but it has a special warmth and intimacy. She touches his arm. She laughs her laugh. He gives her a ciao-type kiss on the cheek; her body presses against his and lingers long enough for him to feel it’s a body.

  I should be cool. I try to be cool. I hold the door open for her and don’t say anything. As we drive down Sunset, she puts a CD on the player. Not country. Classical. She puts it up loud. Then she says, “Don’t look at me that way.”

  “What way?”

  “Like you’re my father or my husband.”

  “I’m neither,” I say.

  “That’s right, you’re not.”

  “You’re an independent, grown-up woman who kisses me on the beach from time to time . . .”

  “Twice.”

  “Yes,” I say. “Twice.”

  “We have to stop this, Joe. We have to. I can’t have you trailing behind me like some puppy. Branagh’s brilliant. As it happens, he’s got a wife he’s in love with . . .”

  “They all have wives they’re in love with. Who the fuck do you think you’re talking to? You want to hear tapes of happy husbands? I got tapes of happy husbands saying, ‘I love my wife, but she doesn’t suck like you do, baby.’ I once recorded the wife of the CEO of MacGregor Defense Industries, she was talking to her daughter’s tennis coach, she said, ‘I love my husband, I really do. But his thing, it’s just smaller than yours.’ Being in love with his wife means shit . . .”

  “The point is,” Maggie says, “the next time he makes a picture—and he’s going to make more pictures—it’s important that Magdalena Lazlo is in his mind. Even if he discusses a picture and idly mentions it might be good to work with Magdalena Lazlo. That’s the game. And if I have to press a little bit of breast against him to make that impression, that’s what I do. Don’t be a child.”

  “Is that what you did to me, Maggie?”

  “Go to hell. Just drive me home.”

  The next morning she drives out alone.

  She returns around lunchtime. I’m sitting in the kitchen trying to eat a sandwich that I have no appetite for. She gives me a package. She’s bought me a CD player and fourteen Willie Nelson CDs. While I’m looking through them all, she goes into the living room. I hear the Stardust album playing. It’s not country, but it is Willie. He’s singing old romantic standards. I don’t think about programming CDs and such because I’m not used to them. When I walk into the living room, she pushes some buttons and it switches from the first song on the album to the last, which is “Someone to Watch Over Me.”

  Like Maggie said, this situation has been the subject of a lot of movies.

  But this is real life and it doesn’t seem to be either automatic or inevitable that the rich girl is going to fall in love with the chauffeur.

  14 A pseudonym

  15 Fictitious name. Real rumor. Astoundingly widespread. A prototypical Hollywood rumor big-name star, perverse sexual act, attribution to a personal friend who has a specific relation to the star—maid, doctor, plumber, chauffeur.

  16 Another prototypical rumor. The author heard this one in New York from a very sophisticated literary agent in her mid-thirties who believed it absolutely. It’s interesting because it is easy to trace the distortion that created it. Many modern obstetricians and midwives teach their pregnant patients to do an exercise that consists of flexing the vaginal muscles. The exercises are called Kegels. It is designed to help prepare a set of muscles that are going to be violently stretched to return to their normal function afterward. It is done for reasons of general health as well as a return to sexual function. So what is normal procedure prescribed by your average old ob-gyn for a normal woman, here becomes a tale of sexual voracity and a mytholo
gy of esoteric and perverse sexual practices known only to a few.

  Chapter

  ELEVEN

  GARRY TRUDEAU IN his Doonesbury comic strip had been twitting the president about his shattered syntax and making it appear as if the president couldn’t organize a sentence on his own. While that was frequently true when speaking extempore, he could do so with preparation. To prove it—not to Trudeau, who wouldn’t be there to see, but to himself and those around him—he decided to write his own remarks for a group of Orange County and Los Angeles Republicans.

  He had made notes. He wanted to touch several bases. He asked his secretary to get them from his briefcase.

  The president’s regular secretary was ill. Her regular replacement was on vacation. The regular second backup was already assigned a certain activity. That left Carol Boomsliter, a woman from the White House secretarial pool who had never actually served the president before. She was doing the best she could and going by her personal code: when in doubt, do twice as much.

  Bush’s notes were little more than a scrawl on the back of an envelope. Ms. Boomsliter, an anal retentive, couldn’t believe that no more had been done, even for a minor speaking engagement, even if it was identical in every way to the twenty that had come before it. She searched the briefcase quite thoroughly and, for the first time in four months, the Atwater memo appeared. A single glance was enough to frighten her. Not because of its content. Like so many people in government, she had gotten to the point, or perhaps had come to Washington with the mindset that content was completely meaningless. Like Stan the Steward, she was cleared for Top Secret—Limited Distribution, for Ultra and even, technically, for YEO, but she certainly did not want to be caught handling a YEO that she had not been handed by a very authorized hand. Now that it was in her hand, with her fingerprints on it, she had to make a decision. And, unlike Stan, she noticed that it was not addressed to Bush but to J.B.III. Of course, she knew who that was. She did not doubt that the president was authorized to see it, but she could visualize a scenario in which J.B.III missed it, went searching for it, and, when it was found, even in the presidential briefcase, demanded an investigation. The FBI would come in, check for fingerprints—she realized she didn’t know how to wipe fingerprints off paper, and even if she did, she did know that criminals always made a mistake and left some trace. She decided to come clean.

  She handed George Bush the envelope with the scrawls and then the neatly refolded memo from Lee Atwater. She apologized for having seen it and she swore that she had read no further than the letters YEO.

  If the president’s regular secretary had been in the room, he might have reflexively handed it to her and said to either file it or shred it. If the secretary of state to whom it was addressed had been in the room, Bush might have turned it over to Baker. But without those options and with so many presidential things to think about, it became that 2,134th detail that the presidential mind could not handle, akin to, Should the black socks be to the right or the left of the blue socks in the sock drawer or should “Me” follow “Mac” or come after “Max” in the contributor’s-list filing system or where to actually put bills when he vetoed them.17

  Because there was no one there to take it from his hand immediately and because he couldn’t decide if he wanted to shred it or re-reread it and because he had no idea how to file it, George Bush put Lee Atwater’s deathbed memo in his pocket. Where it bulked and crinkled and reminded its carrier that it was present.

  It was there when the president climbed into his helicopter. Still there when the copter brought him to Air Force One.

  This was a working flight. Several members of his undistinguished cabinet were onboard. Each with urgent matters to attend to. In addition, there were his press secretary; the presidential pollster, Kenny Moran, on loan from the Gallup Organization, ostensibly employed by the Department of Agriculture,18and the current head of the Republican Party, who had arranged the West Coast fund-raiser to which they were all on their way.

  The five hours of flight time passed quickly. There was a lot of business. None of the news was cataclysmic or catastrophic. But none of it was good.

  Noriega’s lawyers were fighting to unfreeze his assets. This was delaying the trial, and until the trial ended and Noriega was convicted, the invasion of Panama teetered on the edge of an abyss named Farce. The economy was the lead depressant. It was just stagnating. The savings-and-loan scandal stumbled along, growing from billions to tens of billions to hundreds of billions lost, lurch by lurch. Bush’s son—why was it that the sons of great men, excepting himself of course, were such disappointments?—was ensnared in one of the messes. Anyone dumb enough to invest in a bank named after a shoot-’em-up movie, Silverado, should be willing to take their loss and not complain. Fortunately, the sins of the son were not being visited on the father. He didn’t expect them to be. After all, Jimmy Carter had survived Billy Carter, Reagan had survived both a “ballet-dancing son” and a Mommy Dearest daughter. But that could change. Just as what a grown man did with his own penis had suddenly become a matter of public policy under the heading of “character”—a man carries the weight of the world on his shoulders and he isn’t even entitled to a little discreet release of tension—so too could the whole family’s faults suddenly become the basis for judging a politician. The balance of payments continued to slide the wrong way. The deficit continued to grow.

  After about four hours of this damp news, he came to feel like he was standing under an awning, waiting for the rain to pass, with a slow leak above him and a drip that somehow always found the gap between his neck and his collar—plus, he had to urinate.

  Which he did.

  While he was gone, the fax that they had been waiting for finally arrived over the encrypted communications system. The first thing he saw as he walked out zipping his fly was the new data printing out. Moran had taken the high post beside the machine, watching the data possessively.

  “What do we have, Kenny?” the president asked.

  “I’m sorry, sir, but it looks down another quarter point.”

  “Me? Me, personally?”

  “Yes, sir. But it’s just a quarter point.”

  “But it’s the trend. That’s what counts. That’s what you guys are always telling me. Isn’t that what you always tell me? Watch the trend?”

  “Yes, sir. I’m just the messenger.”

  “You’re more than that. You’re the magician that reads the entrails.”

  “Huh?”

  The president threw himself down in his chair. “Out. Everybody out. I have to figure this out.” His aides knew he didn’t mean it. They were at eighteen thousand feet.

  A few minutes later he retired to the bedroom to change into a fresh shirt and suit for the fund-raiser. Transferring the contents of his pockets, he came across the memo. Partly because he didn’t want to go back out and face more news that was neither good nor bad, just dreary, he unfolded it and read it again.

  Maybe because it was a little more familiar, it didn’t seem quite so insane this time.

  And the dead Lee Atwater promised to do what no living person seemed able to do—he offered a way to slice through all the niggling bullshit, all the tedious nit-picking that was tearing him down in the polls in inexorable half- and quarter-point increments; he offered a way to change it all in one grand stroke.

  The memo made reference to a specific person as the key agent to implement the plan. If there had been a conference about the matter, it might have been decided that “someone of that sort” was the point, not one individual and that individual only. It was a man that Atwater knew but that Bush had never met. Yet. Bush was scheduled to meet him, coincidentally, at the fund-raiser, in about—the president looked at his watch as he felt the 747 begin its descent—twenty, twenty-five minutes.

  It is also possible to suppose that none of that really mattered. That the power was in the idea. And it was bound to make itself manifest no matter if the physical piece of pap
er it had been written on was shredded or lost or forgotten. The paper and the print were nothing—the power was in the idea.

  17 It is all too easy to make fun of presidents, particularly since they have come to be judged by the standards by which we judge fictional characters who appear on our TV screens. It’s ridiculous and it’s unfair. TV characters appear in a show that lasts twenty-two minutes, once a week, twenty-six or thirty-nine times a year. The TV character gets retakes and his mistakes become outtakes. Jerry Ford bumps his head and he is defined as a bumbler for the rest of his life. Richard Nixon tries, and fails, to pry the cap off the aspirin bottle with his teeth one night and it becomes a character-revealing trait, implying an unimaginable depth of dysfunction. Jimmy Carter has a run-in with a rabbit and is forever after labeled boob and wimp.

  Then there’s the sex business. For example, there are persistent rumors that Bush has girlfriends. Remember that “power is the ultimate aphrodisiac,” look at Barbara, and there are three possibilities: George is a normal male attracted to younger women and he cheats; George chooses to have sex exclusively with a woman who looks like a Hallmark greeting card grandmother; George is a eunuch. Think about it—which George would you want running the country?

  The only guy who could handle being “on-camera” every public minute and come out of it looking good was the guy who spent his life “on-camera,” Ronald Reagan.

  If the experiment with Bill Clinton is no more satisfactory than those with Nixon, Ford, Carter, and Bush, then perhaps Reagan will turn out to be the harbinger of things to come and the practice of having someone “act” as president will be institutionalized.

  18 It is common practice to employ campaign people in government posts. I have no specific knowledge that there was a pollster employed on a DOA line, and Kenny Moran is a fictitious name.