Hollywood Animal

by Joe Eszterhas

  The studio boss did everything he could to persuade Kenneth Woolcott, the well-known English novelist, to be a screenwriter at his studio. He finally offered him $1,000 a week. The gas station attendant grudgingly accepted the offer.

  The studio was so pleased with Woolcott’s work that they kept him under contract at $1,000 a week for a whole year. After which Kenneth Woolcott went back to pumping gas.

  We were going to celebrate the fact that Carolco Pictures had bought my script of Showgirls and was going to make the movie with Paul Verhoeven directing it.

  The producer, Charlie Evans, Bob’s brother, was going to throw a lavish party that night at his house in Beverly Hills, complete with mariachi band and Chasen’s special chili.

  That morning, Paul Verhoeven and I had a script meeting in the dining room of the Four Seasons Hotel. Paul had a suggestion that I rejected. Within minutes our tempers had flared.

  “Fuck you!” I said. “I’m not rewriting the script!”

  “Then I don’t go to party!” Paul yelled in his Dutch but very German-sounding accent.

  “Fuck the party, too,” I said. “I’m not going to the party, either!”

  “Then I get another writer, ja?” Paul yelled.

  I got up and stormed back upstairs to my suite.

  An hour later, Carolco called my agent to say that, at Paul’s direction, they were going to bring in another writer to make changes in my script.

  Charlie Evans called my agent nearly in tears. “What’s going on?” Charlie said. “What about the party? I can’t cancel the mariachi band!”

  I called my lawyer, who looked at the Carolco contract and called me back with the news that I hadn’t signed it yet. My agent then called Carolco and said I owned the script, not them. My agent also said that I wanted another director on the project or I was going to sell my script to another studio.

  Charlie Evans called me and said, “What about the party? What am I going to do about the chili?”

  During the course of the afternoon, my agent and my lawyer had several volatile conversations with Carolco Pictures. The outcome of these conversations was:

  I owned the script; Carolco didn’t.

  I had the right to sell it to another studio without Paul Verhoeven’s involvement.

  The party would go on that night anyway because the mariachi band had to be paid and Charlie Evans didn’t want all this great Chasen’s chili to spoil.

  No one was under any obligation to go to the party since it was no longer a party that had any connection to Showgirls or Carolco Pictures.

  By the time Naomi and I got to the party, Paul Verhoeven and his wife, Martine, were already there. The chili was superb. The mariachi band was sensational. The tequila flowed.

  Naomi and I were on one side of the room, Paul and Martine on the other.

  I was sitting in a thronelike antique chair when Paul came over. He told me he was sorry he’d talked about bringing another writer in to rewrite my script. He said he really wanted to direct the movie. He knelt on the floor in front of my thronelike chair as he said these things. Someone took a picture of the director kneeling in front of the screenwriter.

  Paul and I laughed.

  He said he’d changed his mind about the suggestion he’d made this morning at the Four Seasons.

  Paul and I toasted each other. His wife, a chamber violinist, played some Franz Liszt and dedicated it to me.

  I allowed him to direct the movie.

  I signed my Carolco contract.

  True to his word, Paul made no changes to my script. All the words were mine.

  Showgirls made film history.

  Right alongside Ishtar, Waterworld, and Heaven’s Gate.

  XIX

  The worst best-intentioned advice I ever got about screenwriting came from Richard Gilman, the distinguished literary critic, at a party in New York almost thirty years ago.

  “Whatever you do,” said Dick Gilman to the beginning screenwriter, “don’t put your heart into your scripts. You’ll get it broken.”

  For almost thirty years now (and thirty scripts, and fifteen produced movies), I’ve put my heart into my scripts … and my heart is unbroken.

  My advice to beginning screenwriters is this:

  Put every ounce of heart and soul and guts and passion that you possess into every sentence of every screenplay.

  And laugh.

  · · ·

  She was a fiery, street-smart woman with a nasty temper who’d come to Hollywood out of the world of marketing. She was sexy and no-bullshit with a hank of hair you wanted to press your face into. She had a commercial eye and used it (and her sexiness and toughness) to become first a VP and then head of production. She got a golden parachute, got married, and gave birth to a little girl.

  I hadn’t seen her for a while and when we had dinner at the Ivy, what struck me was how gloriously happy she was. With her husband, with her little girl. With her life as a wife and a mother. We didn’t talk business all night. We talked about our kids.

  She wasn’t in a hurry anymore. She didn’t speak at the rate of a thousand miles an hour. She wasn’t looking through me to see who else was in the room. She was almost serene.

  I’d always liked her and when I hugged her good night outside the restaurant, I thought—Yes, there are happy endings, even real ones, in Hollywood.

  A few months later, she was diagnosed with a brain tumor.

  And not much later, Dawn Steel died.

  My advice to everyone is this:

  Put every ounce of heart and soul and guts and passion that you possess into every nanosecond of your life.

  And pray!

  CHAPTER 2

  [Flashback]

  Ragamuffin

  JONES

  What the fuck do you know about what happened half a century ago in some goddamn part of the world you never even been in? What the fuck does anybody know about their parents?

  Music Box

  I WAS BORN in Hungary. On the 23rd of November in 1944 in a village near the Austrian border called Csákánydoroszló. American bombs fell. Hungary was a Nazi ally.

  The bombs denuded Hungarians, stripping them of their clothes. Women were left wearing nothing but the rubber band inside their panties. They were also left dead, as were many men and children.

  My paternal grandfather, Jozsef Kreisz, was a Hungarian teamster. He loved his horses, his beer, his wife, and his three children. He was drafted into the Austro-Hungarian army after the assassination of the Archduke Ferdinand and fought on the Russian front. He fell into a hole, nearly froze, and was captured by the Russians. When he was released, he was half blind. He had aged so much that his wife didn’t recognize him.

  Hungary had been taken over by a Communist government, run by an angry Hungarian named Béla Kun, whose leather-jacketed, Lenin-capped followers hanged many Hungarians on lampposts. My grandfather took my father, who was a little boy, out into the streets of Budapest and showed him the bodies on the lampposts.

  It was my father’s earliest memory. He remembered the corpses up there and that they had been hung there by Béla Kun, who was a Communist and a Zsido … a Jew.

  My father grew up in Kispest, a Budapest working-class district, not far from the canning factory where my grandfather now worked, since he was half blind. My grandmother, a devoutly religious Roman Catholic, prayed and raised the three kids, my father and his two older sisters.

  They were dirt-poor. When he was a little boy, my father contracted scarlet fever, which infected his hip. Surgery was required. My father had surgery eleven times on his hip without any anesthetic. There was no money for anesthetics, which, after the assassination of the Archduke Ferdinand, were in short supply. The surgeries left him with one leg shorter than the other and a pronounced limp.

  He was the baby of the family, doted upon by his mother and two sisters. He stayed in bed and read much of the time. He read The Count of Monte Cristo, The Three Musketeers, and his favorite, the Germ
an writer Karl May, who wrote of the American West he had never seen (but which my great-grandfather had). My father’s favorite Karl May character was the gunslinger called Old Shatterhand.

  And there was another little boy living not far away from my father, in Austria, whose favorite writer was Karl May and whose favorite character was Old Shatterhand. This little boy’s name was Adolf Hitler.

  My father thought, reading so much about Old Shatterhand and the Count of Monte Cristo, that maybe he could write, too. He began writing short stories and sending them to the Budapest newspapers. They were, in the time-honored way, all rejected.

  He went to school and excelled, knowing he couldn’t support himself with physical labor. He kept writing the stories which kept being rejected. He became a mailman but his hip couldn’t take the walking. He got a law degree and was the world’s worst lawyer.

  Then a story was accepted by one of the Budapest newspapers. And another. And another. A book was published which became commercially successful. And another. And another.

  He became an adviser to the Hungarian prime minister. He paid for the eye surgery which restored my grandfather’s sight. He was a successful Hungarian writer. A short, balding young man so heavy that a half circle had to be cut out of his desk so he could reach it. He loved Westphalian ham, Csabai kolbász, hard salami, black bread, palacsinta, and dark beer. He still lived with his parents and two sisters, a hardworking responsible young man who only occasionally lapsed.

  Like the time he was in a small town on the Hungarian Plains and was arrested for shooting out half the town’s traffic lights.

  He saw my mother in a Budapest church one day and fell in love. Her name was Mária Biro. She was ten years younger than he, twenty-seven years old, a classic Hungarian beauty: tall, high-cheek-boned, her dark hair highlighted by slanted, deeply brown Eurasian eyes. He inquired about her, discovered that she was a secretary in the Hungarian government’s secretarial pool, arranged that she be assigned to his office.

  She was the daughter of a tavern-keeper on the grounds of Budapest’s largest military academy. Her father was an alcoholic, the size of a swollen buffalo. Her mother, a chain-smoker, had died when she was fifteen. Her father put the extremely shy, fifteen-year-old girl behind the cash register at the tavern—the only woman among the young and sexually aggressive recruits of the military academy.

  Six months after her mother’s death, her father advertised in the Budapest newspapers for a new wife. He married a prostitute and soon contracted gonorrhea from her. My mother saw her father in the parlor one day: he was trying to clear his penis of pus with a long needle.

  She had a nervous breakdown and was sent to live with a Belgian family for a year. When she returned, she moved into a tiny apartment of her own and became a secretary. She was intensely religious. She wore a scapular. She said the Rosary twice a day. She went to Mass every morning.

  My parents married in early 1944. She towered over him. He stood on a stack of encyclopedias to match her height. They were startlingly different people. She was inward. He loved the limelight and the applause at the end of a speech. She was deeply private. He was a public figure. She read religious journals. He was literary and political. She was a chain-smoker who liked an occasional sip of brandy. After his arrest for shooting out the streetlights, he was a teetotaler.

  I would very much become their son. I was her height and I inherited her cheekbones and her slanted eyes and his jowls and tendency to fat. I was a chain-smoker who liked more than occasional sips of bourbon and beer and wine. I was shy and hid my shyness with a strutting, macho bravado.

  I became a public figure whose private life became, on occasion, fodder for tabloids. I felt ambivalent about the limelight, at times reclusive, but at all times enjoying—and then blaming myself for enjoying—the applause at the end of an appearance.

  By the summer of 1944, the war was ending. Russian troops were invading Hungary. Hungarians were terrified. The Red Army was on its way. It was the figurative return of the now reviled Béla Kun. The Russians, Hungarians told each other, were barbarians. They were filled with venereal disease. They were raping their way through Hungary. Even old grandmothers weren’t safe from the priapic savagery. They were such animals, Hungarians told each other, that they filled their arms with stolen wristwatches—twenty, thirty, on each arm. They drank from the toilets. They urinated in holy water fountains. They ate cats and dogs. They raped anally.

  When my mother was five months pregnant with me, my father got her a maid and arranged that they move to a city near the Austrian border, to Szombathely, as far away from the advance of the Red Army as possible. He stayed temporarily in Budapest, in his capacity as an adviser to the prime minister, but would join us when I was born.

  He made it through the chaos of the combat lines two weeks after I was born. His father and mother and his two sisters joined us. The Red Army was sweeping through Hungary. American bombs fell hourly from the sky. We all lived in an apartment house in Szombathely. Air raid sirens wailed all the time.

  During one bombing, as my mother raced down the stairs with me in her arms, my father next to her, the roof collapsed onto the stairway. I was knocked from her arms as she and my father were propelled down the stairs. When it was over, desperate, they searched for me and couldn’t find me. They thought I had been covered by the rubble.

  They finally found me. An old woman had picked me up. She had taken her babushka and covered my mouth with it. She had saved my life. The apartment house had taken a direct hit.

  My parents lost everything but one suitcase. The suitcase was filled with cartons of cigarettes, not for my mother to smoke, but to be used as currency in this ravaged new world.

  We moved to a different apartment house, which took a direct hit the following week. We hid in the basement from the bombs. When we crawled out, my parents heard the screams coming from the basement of the neighboring apartment house, which had caved in and was burning. The people in that basement had sought shelter in a huge furnace. They couldn’t get out. No one could get them out. The building atop the furnace burned. The people inside the furnace roasted to death. Slowly.

  My father decided after that bombing that we had to leave Hungary, but my grandfather, Jozsef Kreisz, said he wasn’t coming. He wasn’t afraid of the Russians, my grandfather said, no matter what stories the Hungarians were scaring each other with.

  He had met many Russians he had liked in his captivity. He spoke Russian fluently and he knew the Russians couldn’t be as bad as the Romanians who had occupied Hungary briefly after his return from captivity. Those bastard Romanians had worn pancake makeup—pancake makeup on men!—and say what you want about all the watches the Russians were wearing, they certainly weren’t wearing pancake makeup!

  My father begged him to come with us but Jozsef Kreisz hugged and kissed us, then walked away to the nearest hotel. When the Russians arrived in Szombathely, it was Jozsef Kreisz who, sleepy-eyed and in his shirtsleeves, served as the translator between the Hungarian mayor and the four-star Red Army general.

  My father drove us in his small Steir car from Szombathely toward the Austrian border. We were jammed in there—me, my mother, my father, my grandmother, my two aunts, driving through lush green countryside and shadowy black forests. Refugees and retreating Nazis and Hungarian soldiers were everywhere. American fighter pilots buzzed the treetops and machine-gunned the cars (like ours) below. They machine-gunned us, but my father roared the Steir over a ditch and into the trees. We crossed the Austrian border and were incarcerated by the Nazis.

  The Nazis took us to a camp called Mauthausen. It was a Zsido extermination camp, filled with Jews from all over Europe. The Nazis put us on the same diet as the Jews: nothing but pine needle soup. A German soldier gave my mother a sliced-in-half gasoline can so she could bathe me. We were at Mauthausen for two months.

  One morning the Germans were gone. The war was over. We were free. Some of the Jews went into the countrysi
de and exacted a horrible revenge upon the neighboring Austrian farmers who had abused them as slave laborers.

  It was chaos! It was anarchy! It was hell! That’s what my father told me and I, of course, believed him.

  We don’t know the early part. We never know the early part. Our parents tell us and we love them. So we take their word for it.

  My father did not tell me that the Hungarians, when the war was clearly over, when they were out of ammunition, marched Hungarian Zsidos to the Danube each day and garroted them with wire or choked them with their bare hands, killing so many that the Blue Danube wasn’t blue … it was red.

  I learned this as an American man, reading history books.

  The Nazis were gone and the British and the Americans came. We stayed in one refugee camp for a while and then we moved to another—from Hayd to Kellerberg to Spital, all in Austria.

  We lived in barracks, separated from each other by cardboard or hanging blankets. There wasn’t any food for months—except polenta, which we called puliszka.

  One day someone shot a horse and after months without meat, everyone ate it. We got very sick. The smell of shit and vomit was everywhere.

  My life was saved by an American soldier who brought me a Hershey bar every day. It was all I had to eat. He had a child my age. He showed us his picture.

  I cried all the time. I cried when I had to eat puliszka. And when I saw them shoot the horse. I cried whenever I saw a soldier. Any soldier. Of whatever uniform. I started crying the instant I saw a uniform. I cried whenever I heard a siren, and I heard sirens often in the camps because fires in the barracks were common.

  One night the sirens sounded and people were screaming, running out of the barracks. They ran to the outhouse. I ran outside, too, holding on to my mother. They pulled a body out of the outhouse, the body of a little boy. He smelled. He was covered in shit and was dead. He had fallen through the hole into the shit and drowned there.