Private-Jet Sex
Here's a cute-but-frightening true fact I just discovered: My 9-year-old
daughter knows the name of Rupert Murdoch's new wife. I'll be sure to forbid
her from traveling on private planes.
You are, of course, completely correct about the chick-magnet effect of
Lears and Bombardiers and Gulfstreams. Private jets undoubtedly get rich men
laid--for guys inhabiting HerbAllenWorld, a Gulfstream is a 'Vette to the Third
Power. In fact, as you know, my novel contains several private-jet scenes, and
a main character specifically imagines his wife fucking her boss on the boss'
private jet. (However, just to make clear that fiction isn't necessarily
autobiographical: My own wife, when she worked for Viacom, once flew across the
Atlantic on the corporate jet with the company's chairman, and I never
entertained any thoughts at all about onboard fornication involving her and
Sumner Redstone.)
Dustin Hoffman generated Nora Ephron's ghastliest show-business moments? Was
this on All the President's Men ? Jeez ... how perfectly, amazingly,
uncannily apt. I thought of Hoffman the other day as I watched The
Insider , the forthcoming All the President's Men -ish movie in
which Al Pacino plays a crusading high-strung TV news producer. (By the way, in
the movie, Don Hewitt, the producer of 60 Minutes , is portrayed as a
completely craven asshole. I think he'll be unhappier than any of the other
real people depicted in the film, including the tobacco-company P.R. man John
Scanlon, who is portrayed merely as evil, not unlikable.) Anyhow, watching
Pacino, I wondered who feels more professional jealousy or competitiveness for
the other ethnic hyper-acting 1970s superstar from Greenwich Village--Hoffman
toward Pacino or Pacino toward Hoffman? I also thought: How astounded we would
have been, 25 years ago, to be told that the All the President's
Men -ish movie of 1999 would portray CBS News as villainous and the
attorney general of Mississippi as a hero.
No, I haven't read Jesse Ventura's book. What's frightening about it? To me,
his libertarianism and call-a-spade-a-spade plain-spokenness seem
attractive--since moral authoritarianism (Gary Bauer, Pat Buchanan, et al.) and
mealy-mouthed temporizing (practically every politician except the moral
authoritarians Bob Kerrey and Bill Weld) are the things that scare and disgust
me most in contemporary politics. I do confess that every time I actually hear
Ventura speak I sort of hate him. However, if elections are won by Authenticity
+ Balls (your version of my Happiness + Guyism), then Ventura looks like a
winner, doesn't he? And in any case, by both our reckonings, Al Gore is a sure
loser.
By the way, I disobeyed you. And Coliseum Books was relieved when my
publisher called and suggested we might want to think about rescheduling the
reading there on account of Floyd's torrents. So, when you get back, I'll come
to your apartment, read all the passages about private jets out loud, and sign
your copy of the book.
P.S.: You say, apropos of the fact Bush seems authentic and ballsy, that
"this is why W. is so dangerous." I don't quite get this. I guess this is why
I'm not a good Democrat. First, aren't authenticity and ballsiness good things?
And "dangerous"? Tell me how a George W. Bush administration would be
dangerous. Yes, I'd rather have Al Gore picking Supreme Court justices than
George Bush, and I'd rather have Bill Bradley than either of them ... but Bush
doesn't scare me. This is, conversely, among the many reasons I could never be
a good Republican--I just don't get the anti-Clinton apoplexy. He's sort of
creepy, sure, but ... so what? Clinton and George W. Bush kind of seem like the
same guy to me, humanly and ideologically--fun but slippery guys without much
there there.
