American Outlaw - Jesse James [133]
“You can’t believe all of that crap that you’re seeing on television, Chandler,” I told my daughter. “You know that, right?”
My daughter looked down at the floor. “Yeah, Dad, sure. I know.”
During this time, I came to see how true a friend Karla was to me. She was my salvation and partner throughout the ordeal. She knew I’d screwed up bad, but never once, not for a single instant, did she waver in her loyalty to me.
Together, we figured out how to get the kids to school, how to keep them sane amid the hell of the scandal. Being able to talk to her was the one thing that kept me stable.
“It’ll be all right, Jesse.”
“Yeah,” I said. “Sure it will.”
“Jesse,” Karla said. “You have always been the toughest guy in the room. Always. Now it’s time to prove it.”
Karla wasn’t just a loyal friend, though. She was also a comrade against the paparazzi.
“Hey! YO, KARLA! Isn’t it true that he cheated on you, too?”
“Fuck you!” Karla snapped, furious.
She was a menace to them. If anyone was going to go Sean Penn on someone, I think it would have been her. No one yelled at Karla after the first day.
I kept waiting for things to cool off, but incredibly, like in a bad dream, new sludge just kept seeping to the surface. On Monday morning, after one of the loneliest weekends of my life, when all I could think of was Sandy and how she was holding up under this craziness, Us magazine published a photo of me in an SS cap, doing a Nazi salute.
“Oh my fucking lord,” I sighed. “They are going to absolutely kill me for this one.”
The photo had been taken at a party at my house ten years before: I’d been given the cap by a buddy of my dad’s, Barry Weiss. Barry rented a building in Gardena to a guy whose job it was to make costumes and uniforms for films like Schindler’s List and Band of Brothers. The cap was a reproduction, something he’d given to me as a joke. In a moment of stupidity, I’d put a couple of fingers over my top lip to form a Hitler mustache, and had thrown up a Sieg Heil. You could tell by the goofy expression on my face that I was anything but serious.
But of course, no one was in the mood to believe that. The perfect storm had formed around me: first, I’d betrayed America’s Sweetheart, and then a decade-old picture of me doing a Hitler salute had made the cover of Us magazine. Yep, I was ready for the shit bin.
“I might as well have stuck my dick in the pope’s mouth,” I said to Bill wearily.
“That would have gone over better,” he said.
I had a lot of explaining to do. But how do you explain that you’re not a racist? That in fact, you were kidding when you threw up the Nazi salute, while wearing an SS cap? At that point, everything just sounds like a lie.
“Barry,” I pleaded. “You have to come out and support me. You’re my one phone call.”
“Can’t do it,” he said, regretfully. “I got a show on A&E this fall—I can’t afford to get mixed up in all this crap. Sorry, Jess. You’re on your own, kiddo.”
So I just chose to clam up. I hoped my record would stand for itself. I had been the first person to feature a black dude in an ad in Easyriders magazine. I’d traveled to Israel and lived on a kibbutz for a month just the previous year with my son, for Pete’s sake, while I was apprenticing under a blacksmith. I wasn’t a Nazi, or anything like that.
What really got me was the fact that it had been a former assistant of mine who had sold the photo to Us Weekly, for $200,000. It wasn’t even a revenge thing; she and I had parted on good terms. I was learning all kinds of things about human nature, it seemed. Friendship could be sold. Money trumped all.
Smelling blood, the gossip magazines dove for the kill. They spread their talons out in a five-mile radius, their wings overshadowing the entire Long Beach area, pupils dilating on anyone who might have ever known me, even incidentally. They knocked on doors, offering my friends and acquaintances serious money to attest to all kinds of bullshit, like that I was an animal abuser or a skinhead. Women I’d never met were offered $50,000 to swear that they’d had an affair