Wag the Dog by Larry Beinhart Page A

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.”
    â€œIs that what you did to me, Maggie?”
    â€œGo 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.
    Â 
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    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 mythology of esoteric and perverse sexual practices known only to a few.

Chapter
E LEVEN

    G ARRY T RUDEAU 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 thatcontent was completely meaningless. Like Stan the Steward, she was cleared for