Author: Jed Mercurio
Category: Other
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Frank took credit for applying a Hollywood sheen to the senator’s campaign, his patronage attracting leading celebrities to fund-raisers, though the senator always felt this benefit needed to be balanced against the potential embarrassment of his putative association with a certain Italian-American subculture. While the long nights of gambling, whoring, drinking and fornicating continued, it was a risk worth absorbing, and it was Frank who first introduced the subject to Judy, with the irresistible taster that “she looks a lot like Elizabeth Taylor.” (The subject once suggested Ms. Taylor as a potential Palm Springs entertainment, but Frank felt she was unavailable due to an overzealous obedience to her marriage vows, a state of mind easy to discount when one is so accustomed to socializing with more enlightened individuals.)
Judy is an old girlfriend the President likes to keep warm, so when he hears via Frank that she’s going to be in town on a night when coincidentally his wife is staying with friends in New York, the President has no hesitation in inviting her to the White House for dinner, which they share with a couple of presidential aides for the sake of appearances, before the aides retire, allowing the President to escort her to the Lincoln Bedroom, where they pick up pretty much where they left off in Vegas a few months before the election.
Frank follows up the next morning with a telephone call, via Mrs. Lincoln’s office, and the two men agree it’s been too long since they last saw each other (the Inauguration Ball), whereupon Frank jokes about what happened that night when, en route from one gathering to the next, with the First Lady asleep at home, fatigued by the various celebrations, the President gave Angie and another starlet a ride in the presidential limousine, only to realize the recklessness of being seen cruising through town with two gorgeous young actresses on his first night in office, dropping them off discreetly and sending his driver around the block a couple of times before he made his entrance unaccompanied. The President laughs as Frank reminds him of the girls’ dismay at being denied the grand entrance— and Frank being denied the opportunity to witness the subject stroll into the party with a beauty on each arm in a passable impression of Hugh Hefner—and then he switches to the upcoming dates when his diary places him in Washington, which the President promises to pass on to Mrs. Lincoln with the firm intention of extending him an invitation to come visit, but after the call the President hears an echo of his laughter and reacts in a most peculiar way, feeling a surge of antagonism, for which there can be no justification, since Frank paid him the compliment of addressing him as “Mr. President” and the humor they shared was no more irreverent than with any other old friend.
When the presidential campaign gathered momentum, the balance of power between them began to shift. Though the senator constantly acknowledged Frank’s contribution to the campaign, he was one of many, and the senator began to suspect ulterior motives when Frank offered him women. Perhaps Frank was sensitive to the situation, which both of them appreciated would reach a turning point in Los Angeles that summer, where the senator for Massachusetts would either receive his party’s nomination or sink back into his former obscurity. Either outcome would have its own particular effect on their alliance, a matter about which they jested but never discussed seriously, as neither wanted to surgically explore its anatomy.
Frank called a few weeks ahead of the convention, inviting the senator to a dinner he was hosting at Romanoff’s, with the enticement of a beautiful actress who was keen on an introduction. “It’s someone new, Jack,” he said, “but I daren’t say who.” He laughed. The senator laughed too and agreed to fly in.
The senator had a list Frank knew about, not a formal list that was written down anyplace, rather a bevy of actresses to whom conversation usually turned between the two of them, such as Angie, whom the senator had admired in Rio Bravo, and Jayne, whose forgettable movies he’d never even given himself the opportunity to forget, but he’d had them both by then, so the excitement arose of the mysterious dinner guest being one of the other ladies on the list. Frank being Frank, he never let on, so fantasies played in the subject’s imagination, and then, at dinner in Romanoff’s, Frank introduced him to Marilyn for the first time.
She was a luminous star who professed a fascination for politics. Frank had told her all about the campaign, and she wanted to lend her support. The senator paid courteous attention to her opinions and interests, yet the whole evening Frank must have observed them from a platform of privileged insight, knowing that the subject would immediately be calculating how he might lure the goddess into bed. Though she confessed a degree of estrangement from her own husband, the subject calculatedly disclosed little about his own personal life.
After she left, Frank said, “She’s one of them chicks who reckons she never screws for its own sake. It’s always gotta be about something.”
So, when the senator called her the next day, he explained how much he’d enjoyed their meeting, how flattered he was by her interest in the campaign, and how intelligent and thought-provoking he’d found their discussion. She gladly accepted an invitation to renew their acquaintance when he returned for the convention, at which, when proceedings began in earnest, he soon found himself shuttling from private meetings onto the floor and back, every hour consumed by the effort to secure votes from the Party. With any ordinary girl, the subject would have bused her to his hotel suite, where he could launch an amatory broadside, but he was acutely aware of Marilyn’s extraordinary status and the necessity of convincing her she was respected as well as adored. He managed to speak to her on the telephone on the first day, explaining, “I’m somewhat occupied with the business of becoming the next President, but taking you out for dinner strikes me as a matter of equal national importance.” They agreed he would call her again when he opened a window in his schedule, but, while the lead he had established over the other candidates in the primaries appeared to be maintained on the convention floor, creating a likelihood of the nomination, this optimism did not create a relaxed atmosphere, instead fomenting an ethos that the campaign should put its foot on the gas to close out the opposition. It soon became apparent that, if he didn’t escape that evening, the following evening—that of the final voting for the nomination—would be his last in Los Angeles and therefore the last chance of bedding Marilyn, when the imperatives of politics would no doubt squash sexual exigency. The senator wrestled with the dilemma for some time before informing his staff, to their astonishment, that he intended to exit the convention in favor of a private dinner.
The senator entertained his target at Puccini’s, an exclusive Italian restaurant in Beverly Hills, where he succeeded in consuming a mild pasta dish and a glass of wine without precipitating an embarrassingly Augean withdrawal to the men’s room. She confided she had suffered a loveless upbringing, never having known her father, while her mother suffered from mental illness, so that she had spent her childhood in foster homes and orphanages. The subject was tempted to respond by revealing his sister’s psychiatric problems, but couldn’t discuss the lobotomy without betraying his sadness at her resulting condition, so he forbore. He believed she would respond better to the strength of a father figure, offering a paraphrase of Lawrence: one needs to be loving to find love, but too many people insist on being loved when there is no love in them.
She was eager to talk politics. “Will you be the next president?” she said.
“So far, so good,” he said.
“Jack, that’s wonderful. Let’s celebrate.”
And so the transaction presented itself, to a man on the brink of the highest public office, with the most desired sex symbol in the land.
Marilyn struggled in modeling and walk-on parts for almost a decade before she became a star, so one imagines the situation at dinner that night was not unfamiliar, but the subject felt his station was sufficiently grander than a movie impresario to permit a tribute from a personage even of her elevation. Offering to see her home, he ordered his driver to set course for her apartment, the sky still cradling enough
light to give outlines to the roofs, black on indigo, as their shapes tracked across the limousine windows. She shone, even in the gloom, her hair expertly dyed to the luster of white gold, her cheek and neck of alabaster, above the dramatic swell of her bust. A man might suffer from nerves. But the subject has enough experience to appreciate that one cannot make love to a goddess.
In that crucial moment, he did wonder if Frank had some agenda in introducing him to Marilyn. Certainly he would understand the delicacy of their relationship, his and his as well as his and hers, if the nominee took up with her. But that night such considerations were of secondary importance. As he would with any beautiful woman on the backseat of a limousine gliding through a city on a clear summer night, he laid his hand on hers, and felt it quiver and squeeze his in return.
The President and the First Lady cross the Atlantic aboard the Special Air Mission Boeing out of Idlewild, during which they try to spend some private time together. Travel plays havoc with his back, causing tingling and numbness to spread down his left buttock into his ham. Now propped up by four pillows, following the Canadian accident, the President spoons a bland porridge of a meal while the First Lady sips a glass of French wine and chain-smokes a pack of L&M’s. She’s not eating because she was a couple of pounds over on the scales this morning and hasn’t had time to work off the weight on the trampoline. In her way, she’s just as nervous about this European tour as the President.
They dine in the private cabin where he enjoyed the assignation with Marilyn, yet he is unfazed, so long past counting conquests he now discounts them.
The subject epitomizes how a man requires a particular character to be a successful philanderer. He must possess low levels of guilt regarding his conduct—ideally none, as in his case; after all, a man burdened by post-coital angst can hardly enjoy his dalliances, which rather defeats the point of them. He absolutely should not be a bad liar, the best lie being a fact one adopts as the truth. And he must appreciate that, while true love demands a certain toughness of character to overlook its flaws and illogic, adultery requires even more.
He is not alone in these attributes. After their first encounter, at a social dinner ten years ago, he walked his future bride out to her car only to find her fiancé waiting behind the wheel. She had the toughness to shed the wrong man and jump for the right one. Occasionally, particularly during quarrels early in their marriage, she threatened to take lovers, but, being a politician, he was careful neither to endorse nor oppose such a course, knowing his reply in the heat of the moment might return to haunt him. His undisclosed opinion was that, if she enjoyed the occasional private adventure, it would carry no consequence were he to know nothing, a condition he would abundantly prefer over a tearful confession, particularly if the affair benefited her mood in some respect, and the man wasn’t someone of whom he’d disapproved (a communist dictator, or a Republican).
The First Lady crouches to peer out the porthole, the setting sun providing just enough light to distinguish the dark sky from the blank sea, and he stretches up to cross the cabin and join her, slipping his arm around her narrow shoulders. She says, “Every time I see the size of the ocean, I can’t imagine how you did it.”
That first night when he walked her out to her car, he shook her hand and studied her nervous glances toward her fiancé, but the subject knew she had weighed up his experience commanding a tiny torpedo boat on the biggest ocean on the planet, and knew he held the advantage over the other man, even though that man was closer in age and probably easier company. She realized he had the toughness she needed, to match hers, the toughness for marriage and parenthood and success. But, then, when they became married, they found themselves out on the ocean in a small boat, and at times she looked like she wanted to fling herself overboard.
The problem in those days was the creeping realization that he could never have enough premarital sex just as one can never eat a big enough meal to fast without eventually getting hungry. He’d been accustomed to so much that, paradoxically, he might have adjusted better had the opposite been true, since he wouldn’t have missed it so very much. Married men who don’t miss other partners must not have been particularly interested in women in the first place.
But of course, actually, that wasn’t the issue. Rather as she didn’t understand how a young man could stand on a tiny boat on a vast ocean and swallow his fear, his wife, who didn’t crave other partners, didn’t understand why his urges might not have been extinguished by connubial attachment. A few weeks into their marriage, after the gourmet bingeing of honeymoon had slumped into the TV dinners of monogamy, the subject’s attraction toward other women visibly returned and she responded with a cold, possessive outrage that so infuriated him he made his natural needs more manifest, at parties flirting with other women, on one occasion removing a girl for a quickie that narrowly escaped his wife’s discovery. He maintained this strategy of insidious humiliation until her response was no longer controlled and possessive, but shattered and defeated. This was her punishment for failure to comprehend the potency of his urges. He made the point in order to establish a modus vivendi for their marriage. One will had to overcome the other or else they would have split. And he never felt guilty; once a man starts on that road, who knows where he’ll stop?
* * *
He limps back to bed and she helps with the pillows. The mattress is rigid, and stuffed with cattle-tail hair so as not to inflame his allergies. She helps remove the brace and then injects a painkiller into his back, after which he swallows various steroid and thyroid pills, another to prevent diarrhea, plus an antibiotic and a sedative. She climbs in beside him. He kisses her and holds her close as they listen to the hum of the engines.
The President decided to include his pair of White House concubines on the trip, even though they have little or no contribution to make to the business of foreign policy. But they would help him concentrate. He adopts the converse of Flaubert’s dictum to “be regular and orderly in your life so that you may be violent and original in your work.” He gave considerable thought to how he might achieve this little coup, yet in the end simply gave an aide a nonchalant order as if booking passage for the presidential golf clubs. He followed Frank’s exemplar of the conduct of a king, and the aide reacted as one of Frank’s entourage would to an order for a dozen hookers divided equally between blondes, brunettes and redheads. Just as one of Frank’s stooges wouldn’t dare quibble that his boss was overordering on the redheads, the aide simply nodded and withdrew to deal with his conscience elsewhere. No doubt it was a matter of gossip among the staff, and later the President’s suspicions were confirmed when he saw the Secret Service manifest on which the girls were code-named Fiddle and Faddle, though he doesn’t recall who was who.
A name that appears on no manifest is Dr. Feelgood, whom the President has instructed to travel by private jet and add the cost to his bill.
Although the exercise program has improved the condition of the muscles around his lumbar spine, the President suffered an agonizing setback on a state visit to Canada two weeks prior, when he participated in a tree-planting ceremony with the Governor-General. Handed a shovel, in front of a large crowd of reporters and photographers, the President faced a challenge to his vim. It was unthinkable he would permit a national embarrassment akin to being found to throw like a girl or to be unable to urinate in front of other men. The Governor-General led, shifting continental volumes of earth, after which the President gripped the handle and planted his feet, before plunging the spade into the soil and heaving. At once, he felt a lightning bolt shoot through his lower back. He straightened slowly, maintaining a smile in the face of ringing applause, but as the ensuing minutes passed, the hinges locked, and by evening he was on triple painkillers and crutches. Away from the public gaze, the President has been employing crutches ever since, and has conscripted Dr. Feelgood to tail the presidential party and ensure the current maladies don’t subvert the global impression of our President as the embodiment
of American vigor.
The good doctor alights at a private airfield on the outskirts of Paris, claiming to be personal physician to the First Lady.
Meanwhile the President’s first port of call is a hot tub, in which he’s still immersed when Dr. Feelgood arrives. A quick history precedes the preparation of potions, then the First Lady and a nurse help the President out of the tub, laying him naked, face-down on a mat, in the bathroom that stays humid from the steamy bath. Dr. Feelgood begins with some gentle manipulation, but he has weak hands and no feel for it, before proceeding to prepare the lumbar region for a series of injections. His fingers invade the dips and hollows, each of which is so exquisitely tender that the President squeals, each time Dr. Feelgood saying curtly in his accent, “I’m sorry, Mr. President,” while the First Lady grips both her husband’s hands, appearing aghast at his uncontrollable weeping, before the procedure begins in earnest, a sharp needle being driven repeatedly into the spaces round the discs and ligaments, after which the Old Nazi gives a final injection of magic potion into the buttock.
By the time he faces the crowds, the President is bounding. The French have lined the streets in the thousands for a glimpse of the First Couple as they glide along the Champs Élysées in their motorcade, waving at the myriad Gallic grimaces. The First Lady has dressed with even more exquisite chic than usual, having spent days with designers ensuring she’d travel with the most stunning array of outfits. In this instance, he’s been quite permissive about her spending. At home, there exists a school of thought, particularly in what is wryly termed Middle America, that the First Lady is exhibitionist, spoiled, aloof and a bon viveur (euphemism for a lush), these unfair criticisms principally originating from observers who place themselves in the comfortable middle of our citizenship, whereas most demographic indicators would place them at the bottom, their intellectual conservatism sharing a pew with piety, though it’s curious that people with the least for which to thank God always seem to believe in him most.