But Enough About You: Essays (54 page)

Once, at a party for a Condé Nast magazine executive, I noticed bulky men with earpieces. Was the president attending, I asked? My attention was directed to a nondescript, rather unkempt woman at a table having an intense conversation with a young man wearing a rather conspicuous fur hat. Madonna and her retinue. There might have been fifteen security men.

Another time, I watched Frank Sinatra move through a Las Vegas casino inside a phalanx of plainclothes centurions led by his faithful friend, a walleyed immensity named Jilly Rizzo. It was a spectacle worthy of the place’s name: Caesars Palace. Sinatra never went anywhere—other than to the bathroom in the middle of the night—without an entourage. His Rat Packs varied in quality, from Dean Martin and Sammy Davis, Jr., to the bodyguards he sometimes used as a private police force. He was at his least sublime at such moments, as when he unleashed them on a man who’d had the temerity to protest when Ol’ Blue Eyes made a pass at his wife in the restaurant. The bodyguards followed him to the
pissoir
and gave the insolent wretch a good lesson in respect.

There have been some peculiar entourages throughout history.
Friedrich Wilhelm I of Prussia (d. 1740) had a thing for giants. He dispatched his agents all over Europe to kidnap them. On one occasion, a tall priest in Savoy was sandbagged at the altar and packed off to Potsdam.

Certainly one of the more consequential bizarre entourages would be the one maintained by Ferdinando I and Francesco II, brothers and dukes of Mantua in the early seventeenth century. Their penchant was the opposite of Wilhelm’s—for dwarves. They were insatiable. In the process of collecting them, they managed to bankrupt the Mantuan state, hard as it may be to imagine packing a palace to the rafters with dwarves.

Their family, the Gonzagas, had amassed what was at the time probably the greatest private art collection ever assembled. But as the saying goes, there is no such thing as a free dwarf, and eventually they had to sell the art to support their fetish for leprechauns. The buyer was Charles I of England. He wasn’t on very good terms with Parliament, and the purchase of the Gonzaga art collection helped put him over the line into the red, triggering the English Civil War. So in a way, constitutional government in Great Britain owes its origin to a pair of Italian princes’ insatiable need for dwarves.

The mid-eighteenth-century duke of Somerset once mischievously gave a dinner for a large circle of his acquaintances, none of whom knew one another, and all of whom stammered. That was the point of the dinner. Since no one knew the others, they didn’t know whether the others were imitating them. Did anyone stick around for brandy and cigars that night?

Normally, entourages consisting of the differently abled had a more functional value. The Ming emperor maintained a court staffed by seventy thousand eunuchs. These were no lisping sissies. Au contraire—you wouldn’t want to mess with these guys. There were grand eunuchs, one of whom, Grand Eunuch Zheng He, was put in charge of important naval expeditions. “He led,” according to the historian John King Fairbank, “a can-do group of eunuchs.” (This may be the only recorded instance of the phrase “can-do group of eunuchs.”) Being a eunuch back then was a bit like having a law degree these days—the essential union card for getting ahead in government.

According to the historian Jonathan Spence, the noncastrated males were restricted to the outer edges of the court, beyond the inner gates. All things considered, I’d have been content to work on the fringes of power. Spence notes that Hong Xiuquan, a mid-nineteenth-century Chinese taiping, employed
no
eunuchs, so his inner palaces were run entirely by two thousand women under his general supervision. To paraphrase Mel Brooks, it’s good to be the taiping.

One group of attendants is assigned to the care of his upper body, one for his lower. His beard is trimmed, his hair is combed and neatly coiled, his nose is wiped, his feet and lower parts kept clean, and the area near his navel cleansed with special care. Carefully they see to the rugs and quilts and braziers that will keep him warm, prepare his heated ginseng and shaved deer horn to give him strength, massage his head and feet, ankles, arms and knees to ease the tiredness of his body . . .

His anger can be provoked by anything from a misplaced swing of a fan to the late arrival of his hot towels. Anyone making a mistake twice is considered a habitual offender . . . beating is the commonest punishment—those enduring the blows are expected to look cheerful and even to praise their Heavenly King as the blows fall.

One of the advantages of being a future monarch was that you got to have a whipping boy, whose job was to be beaten senseless whenever
you
misbehaved. But the whole point of having an entourage is to be able to assign idiosyncratic individual duties. JFK kept a man in his inner circle whose function was pretty much to sing “Sweet Adeline” to him whenever he was feeling blue.

Roman senators employed
nomenclators
, whose job was to hiss into their ears the names of approaching people of importance. Roman emperors kept a sort of shadow entourage of professional zealots whose job was to shout flattery at them in public places—
We hail you as God, not Caesar!
—a forerunner of the modern-day floor demonstration at political conventions, when the assembly “spontaneously” erupts with frenzy as the candidate enters the hall.

Napoleon Bonaparte is said to have kept a man on his staff with the exact same size feet as his, whose only job was to break in the emperor’s new shoes. One of the duties of Prince Charles’s valet is to iron the five-pound notes that he puts in the collection plate at Sunday church service, folded so that Queen Elizabeth’s head is facing outward. Kenneth Clarke, the art historian, had his butler iron the daily newspapers. FDR liked to surround himself with homeless royals, particularly Dutch and Yugoslav, so that he could call them by their Christian names, while they had to address him as “Mr. President.” The Jain merchants of India sent their servants on ahead to the next town to sleep in their beds and become infested with all the bugs that would otherwise ruin their own night’s sleep. Nice work, if you can get it.

Not all entourages are equal. One of LBJ’s former Secret Service agents told me that one cold, shivering night at the Johnson ranch in Texas, he was standing post outside the presidential bedchamber. The president emerged, buck naked—
what
a sight that must have been—and began urinating on the agent’s leg. (Johnson was surely our crudest chief executive. He once received the Israeli foreign minister Abba Eban in the Oval Office while sitting on the presidential crapper.) Relieving himself on his employees seems to have been one of his favored pastimes. He did it on another occasion. This time, when the hapless agent protested, “Sir, that’s my leg you are urinating on,” Johnson replied, “It’s my prerogative.” It could have been worse. The Moroccan emperor Moulai Ismail’s favorite pastime was leaping onto horseback while simultaneously beheading a slave.

There are a thousand reasons not to have been a member of Hitler’s entourage, but for me a very big one would have been the sausages. Hitler’s disastrous obsession with blood and blood purity is well documented, but according to the historian Robert G. L. Waite’s excellent book,
The Psychopathic God: Adolf Hitler
, the Führer was an even stranger camper than you might imagine. He was fascinated by his own blood. He would periodically have vials of it drawn, which he kept in a cabinet in his office. One of the regular rituals in a German household was the killing of the pig and the making of
blutwurst
, blood sausage. In a twisted parody of the Last Supper, come sausage-making season,
Hitler would offer vials of his precious hemoglobin to his inner circle so their fraus could mix it in with the sausage and give it a little sacral tang. Their response isn’t recorded. What do you say in such a situation?
I couldn’t—really.

I played a very modest part in a fairly large White House entourage for a while. It was interesting, even exciting work, and no one peed on my leg. One time I got to have possession of the football, the briefcase with the nuclear launch codes. We were at a baseball game and the Air Force colonel who carried it didn’t want to walk with it alone through the crowds to the men’s room. Sitting there with this thing wedged between my knees was an I-don’t-think-we’re-in-Kansas-anymore-Toto kind of moment.

I had my own code name—“Typewriter”—and once in South Korea, I even had my own car and motorcycle escort. (It’s a memorable sensation, driving through crowded streets in Seoul at 90 miles an hour, watching people hurl themselves out of the way.) Normally, I rode in the rear of the motorcade, in a van with staff secretaries and the medical technician and the beach cooler that contained emergency blood for the vice president. The doctor, an Air Force major, once reached into his pocket and took out a white packet stamped in military lettering:
BATTLE DRESSING
.

It was an edgy time. President Reagan had just been shot. The pope had been shot, and there was evidence suggesting that this might have been done on orders from the Kremlin. Martial law was being declared in Poland, Libyan hit squads were rumored to be on their way to the United States, and the White House was declaring its war on Colombian drug cartels. At one point, Reagan’s three senior staff, James Baker, Michael Deaver, and Edwin Meese, had their own Secret Service protection; even the entourage needed an entourage. You’d see them at events shadowed by agents carrying what looked like garment bags slung over their shoulders. They were easy-access Velcro carrying cases for their Uzi submachine guns. (Uncovered Uzis tend to change the tone of a cocktail party.) When we were in Puerto Rico, I peeked into the back of the CAT (Counter-Assault Team) vehicle that tailed the vice president’s limousine and saw a Stinger anti-aircraft missile. The ultimate option in a Chevy Blazer.

The Secret Service gave a memorable orientation briefing to members of the traveling staff. It consisted of home assassination movies: Zapruder, Bremer shooting Wallace, Hinckley, an attempt on President Park of Korea in which one of his security people bravely took cover behind Mrs. Park.

In Bogota, they found 75 pounds of C-4 explosive under our runway; in London—London, of all places—we drove through angry crowds of protestors who screamed obscenities and spat on us. I gave them the finger, and it was satisfying. Vice President Nelson Rockefeller once did that to a crowd of hecklers in New York, but then he didn’t care about getting reelected.

Being in a White House entourage, where the office is a downtown fortress surrounded by armed guards, where you fly around on Air Force planes, where you chopper into a tropical city at night in Army helicopters, where you drive in motorcades that don’t have to stop for lights and snarl rush-hour city traffic for hours, where you pick up the phone and tell the White House operator to get you so-and-so, and so-and-so, no matter how important he is, takes your call every time—all this does not do wonders for your humility and sense of insignificance in the cosmic scheme of things. You need to be on the lookout for creeping signs of self-importance. It was amusing to watch staff members jockeying like Indy race car drivers for position in the motorcade.
For God’s sake, you can’t ceriously expect me to ride in the same car as the speechwriter!

The most fun to watch were the advance men, possibly the most empowered human beings on earth. No one says no to a White House advance person. The Chinese emperors had their eunuchs; White House advance men turn other people into eunuchs. I watched them reduce important people, masters of their own universes, to impotent, spluttering, vein-bulging rage and indignation—and there was
nothing they could do
. The Bermudan government officials had a hard time with our twenty-nine-vehicle motorcade, which was more or less the length of Bermuda. I was present once when the custodian of one of Europe’s most exquisite palaces, where an event was to be held, was informed by a cocky twenty-something, “The facilities will be adequate.”

If being a member of the entourage swells the head, imagine what having an entourage of eight hundred must do to it. Do presidents ever stop and say to themselves,
Do I really
need
all these people?
If President Nixon was able to open China with a staff of two hundred, why does it now take eight hundred just to keep it open? To think Jimmy Carter carried his own garment bag.

About a hundred years ago, an eighteen-year-old George Marshall, seeking a commission in the Army, walked into the White House holding a letter of introduction. He asked, “Where’s the president?” The butler told him, “He’s in there, but you can’t go in.” He walked in anyway and there was President McKinley, talking with some folks. In due course the people left and McKinley turned to Marshall and said, “And what can I do for you, young man?” Try
that
today.

When my ship comes in and I get an entourage of my own, there’ll be someone to iron my church collection money, another to call up the American Express overdue accounts department and tell them that’s
my
face on the national currency. I’ll have zealots scattered throughout the frozen-food section at the supermarket to hail me as God, not Caesar, as I push my cart along, and someone with size-ten feet to break in my new shoes. Maybe with all this
E. coli
beef mooing, it would be a good idea to have a taster on retainer. And I’m tempted by the person with a cooler full of type-O blood. And I’ll be needing an Apothecary to the Household, for that late-night heartburn after the double-jalapeño pizza.

—
Forbes FYI
, November 1998

In every movie involving spies invariably comes the moment when the good guy turns to the co–good guy—best friend, lover, dog Fido, whoever—and says, “Trust no one.” Invariably a few scenes later, he finds himself staring into the muzzle of a pistol held by one of the above saying, “You
said
not to trust anyone. Didn’t you?”