· · ·
Halfway down the red carpet, Gerri suddenly stopped.
“Oh my God,” she said.
“What’s the matter?”
“I lost my shoe.”
I glanced back. I saw her shoe about five feet behind us on the red carpet. The three of us turned, arm in arm, and she very gracefully stepped into her shoe.
There were F.I.S.T. belt buckles and yellow F.I.S.T. trucks on the tables at the ABC Entertainment Complex’s largest banquet hall. I noticed that we were seated very far away from the main tables, far in the back. As a matter of fact, I didn’t even know some of the others at our table.
Norman walked the half mile from his table to ours and asked if I wanted to come over and meet Sly. The twinkle in Norman’s eye was pulsing.
“Aw come on,” I said.
But Gerri and I followed Norman across the vast hall and we finally got to Stallone’s table, which was surrounded by bodyguards. The bodyguards turned and stared at me as I approached.
Stallone got up with a big grin and stuck his hand out. I’d never met him, of course, and what struck me was that he was short standing next to me.
“Hey,” he said. He drew the word out.
“How ya doin’,” I asked.
I introduced Gerri. Stallone put his hand out to shake hers.
And Gerri hit him. Playfully, sort of, but hard enough. With her fist. Right in the gut. Stallone wasn’t expecting the sucker punch. He groaned a little, then turned it into a laugh.
“She hit you!” Jewison yelled. “She hit you!”
Everybody laughed and we went back to our table, where someone had stolen our yellow F.I.S.T. truck. (We wanted it for the kids.)
There was another premiere we were invited to days later—this one in Dubuque, Iowa, where the movie was filmed. Stallone was not attending this one. Studio rumors said that the father of one of those cheerleaders was very mad at him.
Our flight connected through Chicago and at the Chicago airport, I found the new issues of Time and Newsweek, which had reached the stands an hour earlier.
Time’s review said “J.U.N.K.” and Newsweek’s said “Sylvester Hoffa.” The reviews were scathing.
“We’re dead meat, kid,” Norman said when I saw him in Dubuque.
I couldn’t believe what he was saying to me so casually: three years of work … “great buzz” … a red-carpet L.A. premiere … the hottest star in the business … and we were dead meat?
“Are you sure?” I said.
“I’m sure.”
“Now what do we do?”
He laughed. “We smile till our faces are sore.”
The studio sent me out on a publicity tour during the movie’s opening week. Marcia told me it was the first time they’d ever sent a screenwriter out on tour, but my Hatfields and McCoys act with Stallone had attracted so much attention from the press—Esquire had even done a long feature on it—that they thought it’d be worthwhile.
It wasn’t. Nobody in any of those cities—Cincinnati, St. Louis, Pittsburgh—knew what to do with me. A screenwriter for Christ’s sake? Most of the people interviewing me had never even met a screenwriter before.
I was a relief to the young PR woman who had been assigned to squire me around. Her previous tour had been with James Caan. James Caan, she said, did most of his interviews in his hotel suite with a towel loosely wrapped around him.
In Pittsburgh I met a salt-of-the-earth white-haired old exhibitor who insisted on showing me the real Pittsburgh. He took me to every good kielbasa place in town and drove me to the airport when I left.
“You’re a good kid,” he said, as I got out of the car, “but that goddamn piece of shit movie you wrote—I had eight people in my two theaters last night!”
In St. Louis, the last stop of the publicity tour, I met a young married woman who was at the Park Chase Hotel attending an emergency room nurses convention. She told me she had seen my movie F.I.S.T. a few days earlier and hated it but allowed me to escort her up to my suite anyway.
She called her husband from my suite while, naked, she knelt on the floor in front of me.
She told him how much she missed him and loved him and then she hung up and got busy with me.
When she was finished with me, she told me in great detail how the screenplay of F.I.S.T. should have been changed to make it a better movie.
Many years later, I put that hotel room scene at the Park Chase Hotel in St. Louis into my screenplay for One Night Stand.
I’ve often wondered if that no-longer-young woman saw the movie and recognized herself kneeling on the floor naked and telling her husband how much she loved him.
· · ·
F.I.S.T. was a complete critical and commercial stiff and when that was clear, Sylvester Stallone apologized to me. He did it publicly, in Us magazine.
“I feel like a man who’s been burgling Joe Eszterhas’s house for the past year and a half,” he told Us and went on to say that he’d done no real work on the script: it was all mine.
I called Norman and said, “Well, what do you know? He’s a stand-up guy. He admits that he lost his bearings with all those magazine covers. How many times have you seen a big star actually do a public apology?”
“You schmuck,” Norman said. “Don’t you get it? The movie failed. All he’s doing is washing his hands: he’s saying your script is to blame. Not his—yours. He didn’t apologize when the movie had great buzz, did he?”
The day after Us magazine appeared on the stands, Sly’s manager, Herb Nanas, called and said Sly wanted to get together for lunch “so bygones can be bygones.”
We had lunch at the Universal commissary. Sly was working on Paradise Alley, a movie which he’d really written, and was in the middle of a blazing affair with his co-star, Joyce Ingalls.
A gigantic blowup of Joyce Ingalls and other Universal stars faced us as we ate. He wore a black T-shirt and black jeans and looked very cut. He was having vitamins and sprouts for lunch and I was eating a cheeseburger and French fries. He’d sneak his hand over every couple of minutes and steal some of my French fries.
“That woman is hot,” he said, staring at Joyce Ingalls’s blowup. “She’s driving me crazy. Certifiable, you know what I mean? Not as bad as Melinda Dillon on the movie, though. One night she just took off and started driving. She was in about the next state when they finally caught up with her.”
We talked about our feud.
“Did you really say I fight like a sissy?” he said.
“Yup. I sure did. Maybe I was stretching things a little, though.”
He looked at me and smiled.
He said, “Uh-huh.”
“Well, listen,” Sly said, “I’m sorry I said that stuff. My life has been so insane. This stuff just—like happened overnight to me. It doesn’t matter, though. Everybody in town knows it’s your script.”
“Yeah,” I said, “but the movie failed.”
“That fucking Jewison,” he said. “I told him. He wouldn’t listen to me. The public doesn’t want to see me die. I’m Rocky Balboa. You kill Rocky Balboa and there’s gonna be a price to pay.”
“You were supposed to be Johnny Kovak,” I said.
“Johnny Kovak is nothing compared to Rocky Balboa. He’s just a character you made up.”
“But isn’t Rocky Balboa,” I said, “just a character you made up?”
“Not anymore,” Sly said. “Rocky Balboa is an American myth now. He’s Superman with heart and vulnerability.”
He ate some more sprouts and he said, “Yo, Adrian,” and started to laugh.
“You know what I told Jewison? I said—Break this thing into two movies and release them a month apart in the theaters. F.I.S.T. I and F.I.S.T. II. The first one ends on a high—Kovak wins against the bad guys. Rocky Balboa triumphant. The audience would have eaten it up. Then, a month later, you put the other one out and get into The Godfather stuff.
“It would have worked,” Sly said. “I’m telling y
ou it would have worked. But no—Jewison won’t listen to me. Directors, God help us. I’m gonna direct all my stuff from now on.”
A group of Universal executives sat down in the roped-off area near us and all nodded or waved to Sly, who grinned and waved back.
He ate some more of my French fries and shot them a glance.
“Those smiling motherfuckers,” he said. “They’ll spit me out like bad meat if I ever stop being hot. They think I don’t know it.”
He took me upstairs after our lunch and showed me his offices, furnished with expensive antiques, and took me over to the Moviola to show me some footage from Paradise Alley, which he had also directed.
He was watching himself on film and smiling and when Joyce Ingalls came onto the film his smile turned to a leer.
“Look at her,” he said, “just look at her.”
“You think she’s going to be a big star?” I asked.
“I don’t know,” he said. “Who knows? Who the hell knows anything in this town? Probably not, but she is sweet. She … is … sweet!”
These were his final words: “You tell Jewison we could’ve had a hit movie! Two parts would have done it! We could’ve had two hit movies!”
When I saw Marcia Nasatir that same afternoon, she told me that my novelization of F.I.S.T. had also badly failed. (The editor who had agreed to pay the record $400,000 price was in danger of losing his job.)
Marcia and I went for a walk around the studio backlot, our conversation echoing around blocks of false facades.
“Jesus, Marcia,” I asked her, “what’s going to happen now? Is my screenwriting career over?”
“Not a chance, honey,” Marcia told me with a smile. “You wrote a brilliant script—everybody in town read it. Sly Stallone is going to be a very big star. Norman Jewison will go on to direct many other movies.”
“You mean,” I said after a while, “there is no responsibility?”
We stopped and were staring at one of the false fronts—a huge brick wall with nothing but air behind it.
“When you called me on the phone and called me all those names …”
She let the sentence dangle and wasn’t looking at me. Our eyes were on the false facades.
I said—“Yes?”
“Did I make you take responsibility for saying those horrible things to me, calling me those vile names?”
I said—“No.”
We looked at each other then and she slowly smiled.
“It’s just Hollywood, honey,” Marcia said.
[Voice-over]
The Pool Man
HENRY TOOK CARE of our swimming pool at the Malibu Colony. He was sixtynine years old and lived in the Valley:
I knew all the big stars when I was about seventeen, eighteen. Cary Grant came into the house once and the first thing he said was, “It’s very nice to see you, Henry.” He was really looking at me. I was a good-looking kid.
They’d all come to the house to see my dad. He was at Paramount then. He’d been at RKO before then and later on went to Columbia.
I went to Beverly Hills High School where I was a really shitty student. I spent all my time in the pool at home and we also had a place out in Malibu so whenever I wasn’t in the pool I was out at the beach, riding the waves and getting a tan.
Man, I had a great tan but that wasn’t what I really cared about. That just happened by itself because of all of the time I happened to be out in the sun but what I cared about was being in the water.
All this time later I could still take you out to the best beaches out there. There’s a place off of Dume just south of Zuma that very few people would go to. You’d swim out fifty feet and you were in so deep you could bump into whales out there, I’m not kidding.
Well, okay, maybe a couple hundred feet, but then you’d run into schools of dolphin romping around just like I was. I had my arms around a dolphin’s neck once, I really did. I know what it sounds like, but I really did. I had that sucker around the neck, hanging on to him as he was joyriding around.
It has something to do with how deep how quickly the water is out there. The currents attract the whales and the dolphins. They’re the same currents that used to wreck a lot of ships.
I was around the Colony in Malibu a lot, too. My dad’s place wasn’t far from it although the Colony then wasn’t like the Colony now. It was just a bunch of fancy beach shacks and the person living there then that everybody was talking about was this nutty guy in a big straw hat and a beer gut and a walrus mustache. A writer. Saroyan.
I saw him once out there. He was collecting stones off the beach. I asked him what he was doing and he looked at me like I was screwy and said he was collecting stones off the beach. Oh-kay. Whatever. I asked my dad about him and he said—Well, I don’t think he’ll ever be a screenwriter. Later on I read something by him but it didn’t do anything for me. It was about a guy who was a writer who collected stones off the beach.
Being out there at the beach all the time and having the pool at home in Beverly Hills was about the worst thing for me. That’s all I cared about, you see. The water. The damn water. I fell in love with the water. Can you believe that? My dad would say to me—I can fix you up with any job you want on any lot—and I didn’t want any of it. I just wanted to be around the water. If it wasn’t the pool, it was the beach.
It’s not just that I wasn’t studying anything … I wasn’t even around a lot of kids my age, not even around a lot of girls. Girls weren’t like the water. Girls were complicated and sometimes they’d downright bite you in the ass for something you said or did. With a girl, I’d get hung up. With the water, I’d glide.
It completely messed my life up, really. My parents got divorced. My dad couldn’t get any other studio jobs and went to New York to run a clothing company. My mom moved to Paris. We had to sell the house in Beverly Hills first, then the one in Malibu.
I stayed in L.A. I didn’t go to college, I just hung around the beach. It was all I had left. I didn’t have a pool anymore. I got a job at a hamburger stand on the beach in Santa Monica.
A guy I worked with at the hamburger stand quit and went to work for a pool company. He was cleaning and servicing pools all over Bel Air and Beverly Hills. They had another opening and he asked me about it and I said fine.
I’ve been working on pools for almost forty years now. It keeps me around water. I’m around water six days a week, ten hours a day. I’ve got my own company. I hate the maintenance part of it, the motors and heaters and wiring problems. But I like the water. I like putting the chlorine in it, I like putting my hands in it. If there’s a problem with the lighting, I’ll wade in and fix it. I’ve got a place in Tarzana. I’ve made enough money so that I’ve got my own pool at home.
On the weekends, I go down to the beach.
I think about my dad sometimes. He was smarter than I was. He was always with his big stars or on the phone to their agents. I never saw him in the pool, he was hardly ever out at the beach. I don’t think he even knew how to swim.
CHAPTER 4
Michael Ovitz Fondles My Knife
DAVID
You’re in charge here.
CUFFORD
You know, when I met you I didn’t know what a pain in the ass you’d be.
Jade
UNITED ARTISTS, FEELING, I think, that I’d worked nearly three years on a screenplay for not very much money, threw me a bone. It was an adaptation of Brian Moore’s novel The Doctor’s Wife.
I loved Brian Moore’s novels and my idea of an adaptation was to stick as close to the book as I could, using as much of the novel’s dialogue as possible. That was not, however, the producer’s idea.
His name was Frank Rosenberg. He was in his early seventies and he had begun working as legendary studio boss Harry Cohn’s publicity man in New York in the thirties. Harry Cohn was legendary not just because he’d run Columbia for many years but because he had a thick white shag rug in his office and an elevated desk.
Fr
ank Rosenberg wore a very ill-fitting toupee and arrived at his office each morning with a fresh bag of Winchell’s donuts which he offered no one else. I asked him the first time we met about Robert Mitchum pissing on Harry Cohn’s rug but for some reason Frank took offense at the question and launched into a diatribe about the changes we’d have to make on Brian Moore’s novel.
I disagreed with everything he said. Then he launched into a harangue about the manner in which we’d work.
“You’ll sit here,” Frank Rosenberg said, pointing to a small desk in his office, “and I’ll sit here,” pointing to his desk, “and when you finish a page you’ll hand it to me.”
“You mean I’ll work in your office and hand you the pages as I write them?”
“You got it,” he said, munching a chocolate donut.
I went to see Marcia Nasatir.
“This guy is some kind of moron,” I said. “I can’t do this.”
Marcia did two things: 1. She called Frank Rosenberg and told him that it was “unreasonable” that I be asked to work that way. 2. She brought in a director to put some distance between Rosenberg and me.
The director was Karel Reisz. Even though UA had thought his last movie was so “unwatchable” they wouldn’t let him direct F.I.S.T., it was evidently not so “unwatchable” that they wouldn’t bring him in to direct The Doctor’s Wife.
Karel and I met, scrupulously avoiding any mention of F.I.S.T., and we agreed to take a crack at Moore’s novel. Then Karel met Frank Rosenberg, listened to his ideas, observed his style, and went to Marcia and said: “This man and I are not in accord in any way. I can’t do this.”
Marcia convinced him that my presence put some distance between them, so the three of us, Karel, Frank, and I, sat down to discuss the adaptation.
The book was set mostly in Belfast and in Villefranche, in the South of France. I had never been in those places and a few hours into our discussion, it became obvious that I didn’t know what I was talking about.
“How could they give me a screenwriter who’s never even been in the South of France?” Frank asked.
He called Marcia and asked for a new screenwriter and, instead of bringing one in, Marcia had a better idea. I would go to Belfast and I would go to Villefranche before we resumed our discussions.
Hollywood Animal Page 14