Eszterhas Starts a New Chapter

For more than two years, no one in Hollywood really knew what had become of Joe Eszterhas.

With his trademark biker look--the shoulder-length hair and Grizzly Adams beard--he had risen in the decade between 1985 and 1995 to become Hollywood’s hottest screenwriter with his recurring themes of eroticized violence evident in such steamy thrillers as “Jagged Edge,” “Basic Instinct,” “Sliver” and “Jade.”

By the time “Showgirls,” with its adults-only NC-17 rating, debuted to largely negative reviews in 1995, Eszterhas’ popularity was on the wane and his very name came to symbolize, in many minds, just how far Hollywood had sunk.

After his 1998 spoof of the film industry, “An Alan Smithee Film: Burn Hollywood Burn,” bombed, Eszterhas vanished. His agents sent him faxes, wondering if he was OK. Some people thought he was terribly sick. Rumors surfaced that he was working on a secret project for Steven Spielberg.

What no one knew but his wife, Naomi, is that Eszterhas, that purveyor of sleaze, was holed up in his cliff-side Mediterranean-style house overlooking Point Dume, writing a book filled with invective about a real-life steamy drama that was unfolding 3,000 miles away in the nation’s capital.

Proving that life is stranger than fiction, the product of his isolation will become public today, when Alfred A. Knopf publishes his book “American Rhapsody.”

At 432 pages, “American Rhapsody” is Eszterhas’ lively take on the impeachment of President William Jefferson Clinton and the circus that sprang up around that whole sordid, but historically important, case.

In what Eszterhas himself calls an “odd, mutant” book, “American Rhapsody” is a rolling-thunder critique of Clinton and his accusers with the same cast of characters who starred in the real-life soap opera: Bill and Hillary, Monica Lewinsky, Linda Tripp, Lucianne Goldberg, Kenneth W. Starr, Vernon Jordan, Arianna Huffington, Larry Flynt, Gennifer Flowers, James Carville and even former LAPD Det. Mark Fuhrman of O.J. fame.

Part fiction, part nonfiction, each page is sure to raise eyebrows with chapter headings like “America Gags, Hollywood Swallows,” “Bubba in Pig Heaven” and “Billy Likes Doing It.”

To Eszterhas, Tripp, the former White House employee who befriended Lewinsky and taped their phone conversations, is “Ratwoman.” Goldberg, the literary agent whom Tripp turned to for advice, is “the Bag Lady of Sleaze.” Syndicated columnist Huffington is “the Sorceress From Hell.” Internet sleuth Matt Drudge is “the Scavenger From Cyberspace.”

And, just as the Starr Report made for titillating reading, there’s a potboiler feel to some of Eszterhas’ prose when he re-creates scenes when Monica and Clinton are alone in the White House: “The president explored her body with his hands and moved a hand under her panties.” . . . “He stopped her in the hallway, where there were no windows, and kissed her.”

Publishers Weekly, in its review, called the book a “hyped, bombastic take on the Clinton presidency” but added that the detail it revealed “testifies to the prodigious research that apparently went into this volume (‘apparently’ because it lacks bibliography and footnotes).”

Along the way, Eszterhas takes time to reminisce about his own sex-crazed, druggie days writing for Rolling Stone and also launches a few literary Scuds at such Hollywood celebrities as Sharon Stone, Farrah Fawcett, Michael Douglas, Jeff Bridges, Oliver Stone and Glenn Close.

Eszterhas writes, for example, that during the making of “Sliver,” Stone demonstrated how a woman would perform a certain sex scene by straddling his prone body with her legs in a suite at the Four Seasons and moving up and down while the director looked on.

“I noticed,” Eszterhas writes, “that she wasn’t wearing any underwear.”

In a terse statement issued about the book by her publicist, the actress said: “I think it’s hilarious. I knew he was funny, but I didn’t know he could write comedy.”

That a respected publishing house like Knopf (home to John Updike and Toni Morrison) would warmly embrace “American Rhapsody” might strike some as stunning. But Eszterhas was also feted in Hollywood--that bastion of Clinton support--last week when Talk magazine editor Tina Brown flew into town to host a lavish party for Eszterhas at the Mondrian. The magazine, co-owned by Miramax Film Corp. and Hearst Communications Inc., is publishing excerpts from the book.

Sonny Mehta, president and editor in chief of Knopf Publishing Group, said he doesn’t believe “American Rhapsody” conflicts with the staid image of his small literary house.

“We weren’t looking for this book when it arrived on our doorstep,” Mehta said, noting that plans call for an initial run of 200,000 copies. “You look for books that are distinctive, and this certainly has difference going for it.

“I don’t think it is a cut-and-dried book about the Clinton-Lewinsky affair,” he continued. “I think it goes deeper and broader than that. . . . It’s about Eszterhas; it’s about being a first-generation American; it’s about the ‘60s and how America has changed. What it isn’t is a Washington insiders’ book.”

So, why has this child of the ‘60s--who once wrote for Rolling Stone, grooved to music like Stevie Wonder’s “Fingerprints,” Cozy Cole’s “Topsy II” and Gary U.S. Bonds’ “Quarter to Three,” who as a novice newspaperman in Dayton, Ohio, was the only white face at a black Baptist church listening to Stokely Carmichael speak, who joined his counterculture brethren in despising Richard Nixon--now written a book that disses Bill Clinton, the first chief executive from the rock ‘n’ roll generation? Eszterhas notes that he even voted for Clinton--twice.

“I didn’t care at all what went on in the hallway between the Oval Office and the private study or the bathroom,” Eszterhas said in an interview. “That was not relevant to me. What I cared very much about was when he jabbed his finger in my face . . . almost as though he were a guy in a bar who’d been challenged, and said, ‘I did not have sexual relations with that woman, Miss Lewinsky.’ ”

Eszterhas Wrote Book on Spec

Eszterhas said he wrote “American Rhapsody” on spec, not even nosing around first to see if a publisher would be interested.

The idea for the book came to him while he sat glued to his television screen day after day, flipping the channels on his satellite hookup. Soon, he was reading every book about the case he could lay his hands on, as well as newspaper and magazine clippings.

Then he took pen in hand and began writing out the story--as he interpreted it--in longhand, rubbing a callous on one finger that still hasn’t disappeared. The manuscript grew to 900 pages (he later cut out six chapters).

As Naomi typed the manuscript into their home computer late one night, she stood up and told her husband, “That’s it. We’re going to have to move if this book is published.”

It was the final chapter, the one titled “Willard Comes Clean,” that was sure to infuriate the White House, since it was told from the perspective of the president’s sexual organ. (Eszterhas stresses that the final chapter and others printed in boldface are written as fiction, while the rest of the book is “sometimes interpretive but based on well-researched facts.”

When the Drudge Report ran an exclusive on its Web site under the headline “Clinton Penis Speaks, Eszterhas Unleashed; White House ‘Furious,’ ” Naomi turned to Joe and said, “I can’t believe we are sitting here and the president of the United States is really angry at this thing that we have been working on.”

Asked for comment on the book, a White House spokeswoman told The Times last week: “We know that this book is being promoted as nonfiction, but we generally do not comment on a work of fiction.”

Eszterhas defends his reportage, noting that Random House, parent firm of Knopf, sent a team of lawyers headed by a former federal prosecutor to vet the book.

“I brought all the books down that I had read in preparation for it,” Eszterhas said. “There were like 300 books. That rug [pointing to his living room rug] was filled with books.” He said he went through the same scrutiny with lawyers for Talk.

Michael Isikoff of Newsweek, who as a journalist covered the impeachment scandal from its inception and wrote the book “Uncovering Clinton: A Reporter’s Story,” said that based only on the excerpt in Talk he had read, he isn’t that impressed.

“This has been one of the most exhaustively reported stories of all time and, based purely on the excerpt,” he said, “I can’t see where he brings a lot to the table.”

The public persona of Eszterhas stands in stark contrast to the mellow, family man who greets a visitor at the door of his Malibu home.

He is 55 now, still looks like a biker, still has that hulking body welded to spindly legs, but this son of Hungarian immigrants who grew up on the streets of Cleveland and has never lost his love of their major league baseball team, the Indians, lives a much mellower private life centered on his wife and kids.

In fact, Eszterhas claims he is the happiest he has been in many years, with Naomi, whom he adores, and their three photogenic sons--Joey, who is 6; Nick, 4; and John Law, 2. Another son will be named Luke Anthony when he is delivered by Caesarean section on Aug. 12, Naomi notes, God willing.

He does not want to rehash the personal “soap opera” that engulfed him and Naomi before their engagement, how his long marriage that produced two now-grown children had broken up when he fell in love with Naomi, who was married to producer Bill McDonald, who dumped Naomi after he fell in love with Sharon Stone on the set of “Sliver.”

Upending his life to live with Naomi, he will only say, was “the greatest decision of my life.”

It might surprise outsiders, but Eszterhas and his wife say they are not party animals. Life revolves around their kids.

They both hail from Ohio (Naomi grew up an hour outside Cleveland in Mansfield) and they quickly discovered how much they had in common.

“The reason we have such a wonderful mix is because I’m Hungarian-born and her parents were Italian-Polish,” Eszterhas says. “Walking into her dad’s house was like walking into my same sort of little ethnic house with crucifixes on the walls.”

Bob Dylan may live just across the road, but Joe and Naomi want to “put some Ohio” in their boys.

Seated in his high-ceilinged living room with glass doors that open out on the glorious Pacific, Eszterhas lights a cigarette as the family pet, a 2-year-old English bulldog named Mud Nadler, races around the room trying to escape the lunging grasp of a female housekeeper.

Mud Nadler? What kind of name is that? Eszterhas is asked.

“You know the anti-impeachment congressman from New York--Jerry Nadler?” Eszterhas explains. (The dog does kind of resemble the thick-jowled congressman). “When we found out that she was bred in Arkansas, we said, ‘OK, it’s Mud Nadler, Democrat from Arkansas.”

Given the circumstances, it makes perfect sense.

*

“What I cared very much about was when he jabbed his finger in my face . . . almost as though he were a guy in a bar who’d been challenged, and said, ‘I did not have sexual relations with that woman, Miss Lewinsky.’ ”

JOE ESZTERHAS

Author and screenwriter