Richard told him that we really did need more time to talk to him and Dylan said, “You want to fly into Portland? I can see you in Portland. I know you’re here and I’m here, but I’m going to Portland.”
When we left, Richard said, “Don’t worry, it’ll work out.”
“How?”
“I’ll talk to him on the set.”
“What if you don’t convince him on the set?”
“I will.”
“You know, this is Bob Dylan here,” I said to Richard. “It may not be that easy to convince him.”
“Trust me,” Richard said.
He went to England to shoot the movie and every time he called me he told me how wonderfully it was all working out. Fiona and Dylan and Rupert Everett, he said, were great friends.
“Dylan and Rupert are friends?” I asked.
“Great friends.”
“They’re not supposed to be,” I said. “They’re supposed to hate each other.”
“Well, they do, sort of, in the script.”
“Sort of? This is a romantic triangle. Where’s the drama going to come from if they don’t hate each other?”
“Don’t worry,” Richard said, “trust me.”
He brought the rough assembly to L.A. with his editor and showed it to me along with three or four Lorimar executives. He and his editor kept laughing at moments that weren’t funny.
Bob Dylan did not kiss Fiona on-screen. He and Rupert Everett did not hate each other. The romantic triangle was gone. The movie had no humor, no energy, and no dramatic tension.
The Lorimar executives, including Craig, made their usual disingenuous disclaimers—It’s great, but it needs some work—and quickly left the room.
I didn’t say a word until Richard and I wandered outside and were alone.
“It’s awful, isn’t it?” he said.
“It is,” I said. “I’m sorry, but it is.”
He had tears in his eyes.
“I blame myself first,” I said. “I never gave you a script that was any good. Fiona can’t act. Dylan can’t act and it’s not Rupert’s movie. I’m sorry, Richard.”
“Is there anything we can do to fix it?” he asked.
“I don’t know.”
We tried everything—recutting, tightening, expanding. I wrote some new scenes, but we couldn’t persuade Lorimar to do any reshooting—no good money after bad money, the rule in Hollywood says.
Richard took the negative back to England with him and would work on it until dawn, exhausting himself, trying everything he could think of.
He called me near dawn one day and he was crying. “Nothing works,” he said. “It’s just a bloody bad movie.”
“It’s only a movie, Richard,” I said. “Remember that. Please. We’ll have some hits, we’ll have some misses, but it’s only a movie.”
He called me about a week later to say he had thought about what I’d said to him and was going off to Greece with Carol to sit in the sun for a week, swim, and walk in the sand. He sounded good for the first time in a long time.
“Think about what we should do next, Squire,” he said. “I’ve got some thoughts myself.”
I said I would and said that I was happy he was taking the time off. He had a wonderful wife, beautiful children, he was one of the most successful directors in the world and this was—
“Only a movie,” he said at the same time that I did.
He called from London two weeks later to tell me that he and Carol had had a delightful time in Greece.
“I feel like I’m twenty years old again,” he said with a laugh.
Carol called me the next day to tell me that he had sat down to dinner after my conversation with him and during dinner he had stood up suddenly and then collapsed.
He had suffered a massive stroke. A few days later, my great friend Richard Marquand was dead. He was forty-eight years old.
· · ·
I couldn’t believe it. I was in shock. I lost myself in a whiskey fog for days. I cried and grieved for the man I had loved.
I understood the full horror of the lesson here: If you allowed Hollywood to infect your soul … not your brain, not even your heart, but your soul … you became vulnerable to the shiv with which Hollywood could kill you.
Hollywood had handed my friend Richard Marquand that platinum and diamond shiv and he had taken it and plunged it into himself. He hadn’t died of a stroke after all. He’d been killed by a very bad movie called Hearts of Fire.
Lethbridge, Canada, where Costa was shooting Betrayed, is farm country two hours south of Calgary in the Canadian West, where the jukeboxes blared Anne Murray and Lynyrd Skynyrd, and where the big deal on a weekend night was to get rip-roaring “toasted” on tequila shooters.
The driver who picked me up at the Calgary airport was a longtime Lethbridge resident who gave his twisted version of a Junior Chamber of Commerce speech.
“We’ve got a real nice town,” he said, “this part of Canada has the lowest AIDS rate in all of North America. We’ve never had a movie filmed here, most of our residents don’t do a lot of traveling, and we have some damn pretty women. You feel free to enjoy yourself.”
As he drove me to the Lethbridge Inn, where I was to meet Irwin Winkler, I saw that the town was decked out and ready for the film crew. The liquor store had big signs that said: “French champane.” The restaurants had signs that said: “Caesar salad now being served.”
Irwin had called and asked me to come. “Something’s up,” he had said in his laconic way. He was already in the dining room of the inn, waiting, when I got there. He looked strangely pensive. Irwin Winkler’s usual style is cool, inheld, and controlled.
We had a problem, Irwin explained. Costa was about halfway through the shoot and he and Irwin suddenly realized that the script was too long. If Costa shot the rest of it as it was written, the movie would be two hours and forty-two minutes long.
“Didn’t anyone time the script before he started shooting?”
Irwin shrugged.
“Evidently not. Or if someone timed it, they timed it wrong.”
“What can we do?” I asked.
“We have to cut from the scenes that have not yet been shot,” Irwin said.
“That’s nuts. It’s bad enough to have to cut so much out, but to have to cut from only what hasn’t been shot—it can throw the whole balance of it off.” Shaking my head, I said, “Is there any good news?”
“Plenty.” Irwin smiled. “The dailies are terrific and Debra’s a dream.”
Winger, he said, was the ultimate pro. All that talk about how difficult she could be was just talk. She was going through a tough time, too. She had recently given birth, put herself on a crash diet to be ready for the movie.
When the shoot began, Irwin said, Tom Berenger was obviously intimidated by her. Debra noticed it and started going out of her way to put him at ease. She’d make coffee for him and kid with him. The crew, Irwin said, was terrified of her. Winger started playing poker with them—on the night when they got paid. Now the crew was in love with her. They had discovered that Debra Winger was an ace poker player. They didn’t even seem to mind losing most of their money to her.
I saw how much Winger was the heart and soul of the set the next day, when I arrived on location. It was 12:30 in the afternoon when I finally got there and Debra was in the middle of a scene.
She stopped cold when she saw me and very loudly said, “Well, look who’s arrived. At 12:30 in the afternoon. The writer has graced us with his presence. Will somebody please get him a cup of coffee?”
I started trying to cut the script from what had not yet been shot. It was a terrible, frustrating process that kept me at it in a small office behind a loading dock until well past midnight every day.
As I worked, I saw what made Irwin Winkler such an exceptional producer. He was on the set every day, from seven in the morning till seven at night. It was 100 degrees outside and under lights inside a barn it was much hot
ter than that, but Irwin was there for every moment. One day he was so exhausted and dehydrated that he got very dizzy.
“Irwin,” I said to him, “it’s only a movie.” It was painful for me to even say the words I had so recently said to Richard.
He nodded.
“I know it,” he said, “but all directors are a little nuts. The best directors are more than a little nuts. I want to be there to make sure we don’t experience any unexpected improvisations.”
When I finally was finished, Costa said he wanted to sit down with me and Irwin because he had had “a formidable inspiration.”
He explained his inspiration formidably indeed, with his customary passion. The script as written ended with Winger coming back to see Berenger’s children, some time after she had killed him. What if, when she came back to see the children, Costa asked, she was pregnant with Berenger’s child. “It will accentuate the tragedy,” Costa said.
I didn’t think that Debra’s pregnancy (from Berenger) would “accentuate the tragedy.” I thought it would move the piece closer to … Peyton Place. Irwin adamantly agreed with me and after nearly a day of discussions, Costa termed his suggestion “not so formidable maybe” and forgot about it.
· · ·
There is nothing quite like a location shoot for Hollywood romance. You’re in a strange town with strange restaurants and bars. You’re in a completely isolated land whose Constitution is the shooting schedule and whose president is the director.
And since you’re in a strange town and a tough world where deadlines have to be met and there isn’t a lot of time to sleep, you get lonely.
There are no class distinctions on a location shoot, either, as opposed to a shoot on a studio soundstage, which means that the star can relieve her loneliness with the stuntman or the makeup person.
Egalitarianism is in the air: that cute little extra, a good-looking daughter of some local, can be admitted into this insular world, too, albeit temporarily (the length of the shoot), if she so desires and if she is willing to ease the loneliness of one of these deadline-pressured out-of-town celebrities.
Also very much in favor of romance is the understanding that whatever relationship began on location will … and has to … end at the wrap party, where the romancers will appear with their mates and air-kiss those who willingly and knowingly swallowed their well-meant lies about love.
When the shoot ended, Costa took the negative back to Paris and began editing it there. A week into the edit, he called and asked me to fly over to Paris to help him. I worked with him for three weeks.
I loved what I was seeing. He had somehow—beautifully, almost lyrically—captured the visual nuances of the American Midwest. A director who had never been in the Midwest before I took him there, he had made perhaps one of the most authentic films ever made about the heartland.
Lee Rich and Tony Thomopoulos flew over to join us and after they saw the rough cut, they called my agent and wanted to turn our one-picture deal into a three-picture deal at $750,000 per script.
When Costa finished the final cut, Irwin and I and the studio felt that it was a movie we would always be proud of—daring, visually stunning, finely crafted with superb performances. We felt we had pulled it off and, startlingly, had remained as allied at the end as we were at the beginning.
When the movie opened its first weekend, we had reason to rejoice. It did more than $6 million. There were block-long lines in L.A. and New York. Some exhibitors were reporting that some audiences found the movie so disturbing that people started yelling in the theaters.
The next weekend the movie died. It fell from $6 million to $3 million. The same word of mouth that had turned Flashdance and Jagged Edge into box office juggernauts had killed Betrayed.
People wanted to see it the first weekend very much. They had high expectations of it. They saw it, they disliked it, they told their friends they disliked it, and, in less than a month, Betrayed was gone.
We knew we had also been hurt by the critics, who damned it universally. They felt we had created an “unrealistic … apocalyptic vision.”
People like these heartland neo-Nazis didn’t exist, the critics said—or, if they did, they were part of bizarre microscopic cults which posed no danger to America.
One columnist disliked the movie so much that he attacked Costa and me as “foreigners trashing America.” The columnist was Patrick Buchanan, future presidential candidate of the Republican right wing.
I wonder what those critics were thinking eight years after Betrayed’s release when Timothy McVeigh, the reification of the Tom Berenger character, blew up the Federal Building in Oklahoma City.
CHAPTER 9
[Flashback]
Sins and Zip Guns
KAROHY
Maybe I’ll join the priesthood. You don’t have to work, you live in a nice house, you don’t go hungry.
FATHER NORTON
Is that what you think the priesthood is about, Mr. Jonas?
KARCHY
Well, you don’t get laid, but I’m not getting laid anyway, Father, so what’s the difference?
Telling Lies in America
MY MOTHER WAS having severe stomach pains but she wouldn’t see a doctor. She went a couple of blocks down Lorain Avenue and saw the Hungarian pharmacist, Alex Sajo, instead. Alex Sajo gave her a tin can filled with medicine.
I watched her eat her medicine at dinner. She opened the can and put six round pieces of charcoal on her plate. She ate one piece after the other. Her mouth and her lips were black.
“I didn’t know you could eat charcoal,” I said.
“Oh yes,” my father said. “It is an old Hungarian cure.”
“Do you want to try a piece?” my mother asked me.
“No thanks.”
“I’ll take one,” my father said, and popped it into his mouth like a peanut.
· · ·
Every year I went with my classmates at St. Emeric’s to the Kraus Costume Company in downtown Cleveland and rented a Hungarian Hussar’s outfit. High black boots. A cockade cap. Red peasant vest. Billowing white shirt. Tight black pants.
All decked out, we stood on the back of a flatbed truck in a parade down Lorain Avenue as Hungarian csárdás music blared from a loudspeaker. My father and mother were very proud of me. One of my father’s friends took lots of pictures. I hated it. I felt like a geek.
Howdy Doody as a Hussar!
I was looking at the girls’ bodies in school. Their breasts and their behinds and the way they crossed their legs. I felt my pimpli grow and become rigid sometimes when I looked at them.
When I was in the apartment alone once, I touched my rigid pimpli and pulled it and the most amazing thing happened. White juice came out of it and I felt an overwhelming warmth spreading through my body.
I discovered that if I focused my imagination on girls’ bodies, on the women I’d seen on the ship, on the things I’d seen on Erzsi, my pimpli would grow rigid and I could make myself feel this miraculous warmth by pulling on it.
I did it to myself over and over again in the dank darkness of the apartment basement. In the bathroom. On the couch at night when my parents were asleep.
Sometimes there was so much juice my stomach was wet and I had to use a towel.
My mother was sick, she had a high temperature and was throwing up. Her stomach hurt and her skin was yellowish. A Hungarian doctor named Bognar came to the apartment and said she needed to have her gallbladder removed.
My father had an old Hungarian friend now living in Canada, Dr. Laszlo Szöllösy, who was a surgeon. My father didn’t trust the American surgeons in Cleveland. Neither did my mother.
They took the train to Canada. By the time they arrived in Hamilton, eight hours away, she was in a near coma.
They left me alone in the apartment. My mother’s friend, Dora Szakács, would bring me food every day and check on me.
I started throwing up about an hour after they left for the train. I felt like I wa
s burning up. I lay down in my parents’ bed and felt so weak I couldn’t get up. I had to go to the bathroom but I couldn’t get up, so I went in the bed. It smelled and it was all over me and the bed but I couldn’t get up. I was very thirsty but I couldn’t even get up for a glass of water. Everything was spinning around very fast.
Dora Szakács forgot to come.
She came the next day, when the bed was dripping to the floor with everything that was coming out of me. She called a doctor. I had a 105 degree temperature.
Dora Szakács took me to her home and I stayed with the Szakácses until my parents got back. Her husband, Zoltán, a kindly man, bought me marbles to make me feel better.
In school the nuns said that playing with ourselves was a mortal sin. We would burn in hell forever. Hair would grow on our palms and we would go blind. We would go mad and have to be taken to asylums where jackets would be put around us so we couldn’t touch ourselves.
As Sister Rose was saying these things, I was watching Karen Buganski’s breasts. Karen was eleven and had breasts you could see clearly, dark, flashing big eyes and long brown hair. I felt my pimpli grow rigid as Sister Rose talked. I said I had to go to the bathroom.
I went to the bathroom and, thanks to Karen Buganski’s breasts, made myself feel wonderful.
My father read the Plain Dealer in the morning, his English-Hungarian dictionary at his side, desperate for news about Josef Stalin’s successors.
And I read the Plain Dealer when he was done, his English-Hungarian dictionary at my side, desperate for news about the Hungarian bank robber Lou Teller and his big-breasted girlfriend, Tina Mae Ritenour.
I was scissoring the photographs of American women whom I liked from the Plain Dealer:
Zsa Zsa Gabor, Mamie Van Doren, Betty Grable, Esther Williams, Jane Russell, Marilyn Monroe, Lana Turner, Joanne Dru, Debra Paget, Dana Wynter … and Tina Mae Ritenour.
Tits!
It was a new American word I had learned!
My father was gone a lot now. He was traveling on the Greyhound and making speeches to Hungarians in Youngstown, Ohio, and Detroit, Michigan, and Windber, Pennsylvania.
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