I'm telling you the truth -- I didn't know that about Ford. I knew that Betty Ford normally had to be carried off Air Force One, drunk, after listening to her husband's speeches, but not that, when she got home, she was subjected to blasts of wind beyond the call of love or duty.

Neither did I know that Lyndon Johnson had scrotum skin that hung "halfway to his knees." I did know that LBJ had a big dong, Texas style, that he fucked his playthings on the floor of the White House, if not in the Oval Office, and that his creatures used to brief him in the morning while he was sitting (if you like) on the toilet -- assuming he got that far. Johnson was known to conduct the high business of state in bed, lying on his side while one of his nontyping secretaries gave him an enema.

This leads me to another thing in "American Rhapsody" that I didn't know before I read it. Are you ready? Because it's a killer:

I didn't know that the Hollywood party where New Line film prod Mike DeLuca got a public blow job was the same Hollywood party where Farrah Fawcett was seen "pooping" on the lawn. I knew that Hollywood producers like their blow jobs, of course -- who doesn't? -- and that Fawcett, God bless her wizened, has-been head, had pooped on somebody's lawn after her breakup with Ryan O'Neal. But I didn't know that these things happened at the same time!

All the rest of the stories in "American Rhapsody" I already knew. Honest. Or knew enough like them, about the same or similar people, that they came as no surprise to me, much less as a shock, "titillating," "sensational" or anything else.

I knew all of Eszterhas' stories about Sharon Stone, for example -- Stone smoking Thai, Stone washing out her mouth after kissing Billy Baldwin during the filming of "Sliver," Stone not wearing her panties, Stone climbing on Eszterhas' back, also during the filming of "Sliver," to show him how a real woman masturbates: "She kept moving up and down, up and down ... She clenched my sides tightly with her thighs, held them for a long moment, and then we both relaxed. 'Better?' she asked, laughing."

I knew all these stories before I read "American Rhapsody" because, despite the much-touted embargo on the book, they were leaked to the press in advance. Not to mention excerpted in the current issue of Tina Brown's Talk, and repeated in every entertainment wire story from here to the cold caverns of the moon. Indeed, Liz Smith declared not long ago that you had to live on the moon not to have heard about the "scathing" revelations in Eszterhas' book. Liz and Joe were going to have lunch this week, and, boy, was she looking forward to it!

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Maya Angelou reads from "The Heart of a Woman"