Almost forty years later, they still hurt sometimes.
X
I went to Hollywood for the first time in the early seventies while I was a writer for Rolling Stone magazine, then in San Francisco. I was on assignment to meet two priests of a satanic cult called the Process.
I don’t know why my devilish priests picked Hollywood as the site of our meeting but they did.
While I was waiting for them, I checked out Grauman’s Chinese Theatre and the Hollywood Roosevelt Hotel. I saw a used-car lot with caged reindeer atop its office. I bought an autographed photo of Zsa Zsa Gabor for $3. I stayed in a motel on Hollywood Boulevard and shared some lines of cocaine and his girlfriend with a bass guitarist from Miami who was staying at the same motel.
The devilish priests called me at the motel and switched the meeting site to Palm Springs, so I took a Greyhound over there and waited for them at the old Biltmore, ramshackle and falling apart, but once the meeting place for Hollywood stars sunning in the desert.
I waited three days for Satan’s helpers to show but they stood me up. Meanwhile, I read a worn paperback of Mailer’s The Deer Park, the best book ever written about Hollywood.
I took the Greyhound back to Hollywood, thinking I’d had a total Hollywood experience: Satan, Zsa Zsa, cocaine, a shared bimbo, sun, and Mailer’s doomed characters.
· · ·
Except for Zsa Zsa Gabor, I was now Hollywood’s most famous or infamous living Hungarian.
Through the years, Hollywood had experienced many other famous or infamous Hungarians: Ivan Nagy, Heidi Fleiss’s boyfriend; Mickey Hargitay, Jayne Mansfield’s muscleman husband; Adolph Zukor, Jolie Gabor, Thomas Ince, the Korda brothers, Vilma Banky, Ilona Massey, Eva Gabor, George Cukor, Cornel Wilde, S. Z. Sakall, Magda Gabor, Ernie Kovacs, Joe Pasternak, Tony Curtis, Leslie Howard, Bela Lugosi, etc., etc.
There had even been a sign at the cash register of the MGM commissary that said, “It’s not enough to be Hungarian, you still have to pay for the chicken soup.”
Through the years, people in Hollywood had gotten to know Hungarians and said these things about us:
“If a Hungarian is in a revolving door behind you, he will arrive ahead of you.”
“If you have a Hungarian for a friend, you don’t need an enemy.”
“The difference between a Romanian and a Hungarian is that a Romanian will offer to sell you his sister and the Hungarian will do it.”
“If you see a Hungarian on the street, go up to him and slap him. He will know why.”
Yet even as I was becoming famous or infamous, for many years I kept resisting the town, happy to take Hollywood’s money but keeping Hollywood at arm’s length, dealing with Hollywood people over the phone or during hurried trips to L.A. but keeping myself aloof from …
From what, exactly?
Well, from everything I had heard and read about the place—to put it more exactly: from everything I’d read and heard had happened to writers there.
Writers got fucked there, they got their hearts broken there, they had their balls cut off there, they got screwed, blued, and tattooed.
Look at Fitzgerald, writing his scripts out there, broke, drinking full glasses of gin, taking notes from studio moguls, sleeping with a gossip columnist … dying there, between her legs, it was said. So tawdry, so Hollywood—Fitzgerald dying there between the gossip columnist’s legs—please God! no—think Philip Roth atop Leeza Gibbons or Saul Bellow atop Rona Barrett.
Or look at Faulkner in Hollywood, doing his rewrites at Howard Hawks’s beck and call, taking Hawks’s notes, slugging bourbon from the silver flask in his tweed coat’s pocket, falling down drunk, flat on his face, during a script meeting—William Faulkner sleeping for years with a script girl, a secretary from the studio’s pool—but at least he went back to Mississippi after many years of screenwriting, at least he didn’t die between the secretary’s legs.
What Hemingway said made a lot of sense: a writer, he said, should get as close to Hollywood as the Nevada-California border. He should take Hollywood’s money at the border and turn right back around and head east.
And when he left Hollywood and drove back to Mississippi, Bill Faulkner, screenwriter, actually stopped at the California state line and got out of his car.
If it were up to him, he thought, he would erect a sign for travelers going into California: “Abandon hope, all ye who enter here!”
I stayed away from Hollywood for seventeen years while I was working there—seventeen years of commuting from Marin County for meetings with studio executives and studio heads, seventeen years of dinners at Morton’s and stays at the old Beverly Wilshire and the Westwood Marquis.
Even though I always had the feeling deep inside … (deep, deep inside, in the refugee camp part of me, in the blackest part of my heart) that I had nothing to fear, that the studios couldn’t fuck me or break my heart. That I’d do the fucking and the nut-cutting, thank you. That I was a hunkie from Cleveland, made not out of Fitzgerald porcelain or Faulkner oyster shell but out of some rusted, red-hot bastard metal—like … Mailer.
Yes, that was it, Norman Friggin’ Mailer!
Mailer, who’d gone to Hollywood, had his ass kissed by the whole town, banged Shelley Winters, and left, his only seeming regret that he hadn’t been able to nail Marilyn (how it would obsess him that it was that long string of intellectual spaghetti, Miller, who’d done it).
Oh, well, never mind, if not nailing Marilyn was your only regret, that was good enough for me—Mailer, the tough guy from Brooklyn, would be my role model.
I didn’t know then that I’d create my own Marilyn and that I’d nail her. But that nailing her would pale in comparison with the havoc that her presence would wreak with my life.
I’m glad I nailed her, though. Not because I nailed mine (as Paddy Chayefsky had nailed his) and Mailer didn’t nail his. Not because nailing her felt all that good (it was okay). But because as a result of Sharon Stone’s presence in my life, I met and married Naomi, my one true love.
I didn’t attach too much significance to my one-night stand with Sharon.
I had done other one-night stands in Hollywood and so, I guess, had she. So I didn’t think Sharon had attached much significance to it either.
I figured that since I had written the biggest hit of her life for her, she was just saying thank you.
I knew most screenwriters would have felt overwhelmed … Paddy Chayefsky never did get over Kim Novak!
And I knew that Sharon thought she was flattering me that night, but still … Basic Instinct had been the number one box office hit of the year … in the whole world!
I felt I deserved her.
Robert Evans had stirred this unholy brew with Sharon and me by getting me to agree to write the screenplay for Ira Levin’s novel Sliver.
That’s how I met Bill and Naomi Macdonald.
That’s how I could introduce my friend Sharon to my friend Bill.
That was the only way, the shrinks would say … outside of homicide … that I could have Naomi for myself.
Naomi was the real (subconscious) reason I introduced Sharon and Bill.
Such a devilish concatenation of events, no wonder that Evans’s favorite movie was Rosemary’s Baby, a movie about the devil also written by Ira Levin. No wonder that as an actor, Evans had played The Fiend Who Walked the West.
The only reason I’d agreed to write Sliver was that Evans was broke and down on his luck, curled up in the fetal position much of the time, staring into space, humming.
He had been suspected of murder and had been convicted of possessing cocaine. He adored women but was living off handouts from his brother, Charlie, and Jack Nicholson.
Evans defined Hollywood and the movies to me. His films, either as producer or studio chief, included The Godfather and Love Story and Rosemary’s Baby and Chinatown, and Ali MacGraw and Phyllis George and Camilla Sparv and hundreds, maybe thousands of gorgeous women were always hanging around his house
.
I loved movies and, may God forgive me, I liked Evans a lot, too.
It’s only fair, too, that I put my hand on the Bible and state this about Evans: All the lies ever told anywhere about Robert Evans are true.
The script I wrote for Sliver was somehow a part of this evil mix.
In my script, Sharon discovered that Billy Baldwin was a murderer and didn’t care—because she loved him and was convinced he loved her. She married him. That’s how my script ended.
And that’s what caused that secretary in Evans’s office wearing the Blessed Virgin Mary T-shirt to flip out and say I had written a script on the side of evil.
That was the ending which Evans had liked so much that he sent the human telegram wearing only the mink coat over to my hotel.
According to that secretary in the Blessed Virgin Mary T-shirt, then—my script was sympathetic to the devil.
And the fact that it was sympathetic to the devil is, of course, what made Evans, the real devil, like it so much.
When I met him, the devil had just finished making a documentary about Pope John Paul II.
He had done the documentary by court order, part of his sentence for possessing cocaine.
XI
I’d always loved movies. My parents and I arrived in America from the refugee camps in 1950 and went to Cleveland shortly afterward. We lived above the printing shop of the newspaper where my father had just been hired as editor. We lived on Lorain Avenue, a blue-collar “strudel ghetto” made up of the ethnic poor.
I was in love with movies before I ever saw one.
My father went to the Lorain Fulton, the theater down the street from us, once a week and I couldn’t wait until he got home. I’d kneel at the window of our apartment overlooking the street, excited to see his roly-poly figure shuffling in the darkness through the snow. He kept a box of popcorn under his coat so it would still be warm and handed it to me as soon as he came through the door.
I ate the popcorn slowly, kernel by kernel, licking my fingers.
· · ·
Pretty soon he was taking me with him to see movies like Open City and Paisan and Bicycle Thief and Bitter Rice. I was seven years old. My mother was too religious to come with us: she stayed home to say the Rosary, which was broadcast on WERE, in English. She was combining learning this new language with her belief in God.
The Lorain Fulton was playing Italian-made neorealist classic movies because the theater was in an ethnic neighborhood where most people couldn’t speak English anyway so they didn’t mind the subtitles.
Also, many of the immigrants living on Lorain had picked up bits and pieces of Italian in the refugee camps so they found it easier watching Italian movies than American ones.
Also, these movies were about World War II and most of these immigrants were here on Lorain Avenue because of World War II, so it made sense to the theater owner probably that they would feel right at home with the subject matter up there on the big screen.
I felt right at home … with that bombed-out building up on-screen—it was just like the one we’d been in that was bombed out in Szombathely: and those soldiers rolling around with that naked girl in the grass on-screen, why that was just like the naked woman I’d seen …
I munched my nice hot popcorn. I was watching scenes I’d already experienced. At age seven, I was already educating myself, without even knowing it, without even speaking English—to be an American screenwriter. (A critic who didn’t like Showgirls would say, years later, “it’s obvious English is his second language.”)
Sitting in the dark munching hot popcorn, my dad next to me, watching girls rolling around naked in the grass, I liked movies a lot!
The very first movie I saw alone was High School Confidential! with Russ Tamblyn.
Yeah, I know, this wasn’t Vittorio De Sica or Roberto Rossellini, and the women weren’t Anna Magnani or Silvana Mangano, but the real star of the movie for me was Jerry Lee Lewis, who was already one of my true childhood heroes—along with Rocky Colavito of the Cleveland Indians, Shondor Birns, a dapper Hungarian gangster, Lou Teller, a Hungarian bank robber who was from the West Side, too, and Zsa Zsa Gabor, the most famous Hungarian in the world and the reason my pimpli (it was what we called it in Hungarian, okay?) was so red raw I could hardly move.
Jerry Lee Lewis, his long blond hair flying, stomping out “Open-up-a-honey-it’s-your-lover-boy-me-that’s-a-knockin” on top of a piano that he’d already literally set on fire.
Rock and roll! Switchblade knives! Tight angora sweaters with hot milky titties underneath ’em! That’s what High School Confidential! was about, an obvious precursor to a movie about an ice pick and a tight white dress with milky white stuff underneath it that I’d write many years later.
Russ Tamblyn, too, was close to my heart. Not just because he starred in High School Confidential!, the movie that influenced me more than De Sica and Rossellini. But because he also starred in The Kid from Cleveland, which featured the entire Cleveland Indians world championship team of 1948!
I met Redford and Hoffman and Cruise and Max Schell and Kevin Bacon and Jeff Bridges and Debra Winger and Glenn Close and blah blah blah over the course of twenty-five years of writing screenplays … but I never met Russ Tamblyn.
It is my great Hollywood regret. Mailer never nailed Marilyn and I never met Russ Tamblyn.
My only other Hollywood regret is that I never met Zsa Zsa Gabor, the most famous Hungarian in the world and the dominatrix of my boyhood pimpli, either.
When I was already a famous or infamous Hollywood screenwriter, I asked a mutual friend to call and tell Zsa Zsa that I would be calling her soon.
“But no, dahlink, no,” Zsa Zsa said to my friend. “I will not speak to such a dangerous man.”
I called, left a message, and she never called me back.
I fell in lust for the first time at the Lorain Fulton Theatre, where I’d sneaked in to see a movie the Catholic Church was trying to stop from being shown.
I was an altar boy and this movie was all that the older altar boys were talking about.
And God Created Woman was the title.
Her name was Brigitte Bardot. She was a “sex kitten.”
I watched her walk. I watched her eat with her fingers. I watched her pout. I watched parts of her body, which seemed more naked than they actually were.
I heard lines of dialogue like: “She does whatever she wants whenever she wants.”
And: “What are you afraid of?” “Myself.”
And: “You’d make a good wife.” “No, I like to have too much fun.”
I sneaked back in to see it two other times and when the Cleveland Plain Dealer arrived each morning I attacked it to find anything written about her.
I found that she had held a press conference in New York. Someone had asked her, “What was the best day of your life?” And she said, “It was a night.”
Someone asked why she wasn’t wearing lipstick. And she said, “I don’t like lipstick. It makes trouble. I like to kiss. But if I kiss anyone when I am wearing lipstick, it makes trouble.”
I saw a photograph of her in Life magazine. She was in a swimming pool wearing a tiny little bathing suit. The pool was filled with milk. According to the story, she had insisted it be “ass’s milk.”
I marveled at that. I still didn’t know the English language very well and the only “ass” I knew about didn’t have milk coming out of it.
By then, of course, I was already going crazy.
Hair grew from my palms.
I was going blind.
Even though I loved movies, I never wanted to be a screenwriter. I wanted to write novels.
There was a secondhand paperback bookstore down the street from our apartment on Lorain Avenue which was really a front for a bookie’s wire. The bookie let me use the place as a library.
The first book I got from there was William Faulkner’s Sanctuary. I picked it because of the cover: a young woman who, as the guys on Lorai
n Avenue said, “was built like a brick shithouse.”
I had no idea what being built like a brick shithouse meant.
As a matter of fact, I still don’t.
And I had no idea you could do that with a corncob, either.
But I do now, don’t I?
I’m a writer whose view of women was permanently affected by Temple Drake on a lurid paperback cover. Just another writer ruined by the influence of the alcoholic, mostly impotent Bill Faulkner, failed screenwriter, who never nailed his Marilyn, who slept with the girl in the secretarial pool.
Heh heh heh.
Come to think of it, I made ice picks as famous as he made corncobs, didn’t I?
A casting director at the studio who had read Sanctuary told William Faulkner, screenwriter, that she understood that an author always put himself in his books.
“Which character are you in Sanctuary?” she asked.
“Madame,” Faulkner said, “I am the corncob.”
And I am the ice pick.
XII
What, you might well ask, is all this talk about Fitzgerald and Faulkner and Mailer coming from a screenwriter? Why all this high-toned babble about novelists in a book about Hollywood? Why not compare myself to other screenwriters?
Say what?
Compare myself to other screenwriters? On what basis? Most screenwriters don’t even have a body of work that amounts to five let alone fifteen movies. Most screenwriters do adaptations of novels and rewrites of other scripts: they rarely write original screenplays—that is—novels written directly for the screen in screenplay form.
Truth to tell, bottom line, most screenwriters don’t want to be screenwriters: they want to be directors so they can tell other screenwriters who want to be directors what to write. For most screenwriters, screenwriting is hopefully nothing more than a temporary stop on the way to the mountaintop, on the way to big bucks, pussy, fame, and auteurhood: Directing!
Trouble is, screenwriting, for me, has already led to all those all-American jackpots. I became a famous screenwriter making millions, scoring A-list pussy, picked as one of the hundred most powerful people on Hollywood.
Hollywood Animal Page 4