I told Jeff I was sticking with Irwin and at three o’clock that afternoon, the auction ended. Mario Kassar, the head of Carolco, bought Basic Instinct for $3 million (and another $1 million for Irwin to produce). More significantly maybe in the context of Michael Ovitz’s threats, every studio entity in town with the exception of Fox had bid for it.
You talk about kissing the sky? Six months after the Ovitz business, I had set a staggering new writer’s record. It was more money than most directors and some stars were getting.
Guy was right: The town ran on greed.
Daily Variety put a big bold headline across the top of the front page that said, “A NEW ERA DAWNS IN HOLLYWOOD.” The story said, “In what must have felt like vindication for Eszterhas in his battle with Michael Ovitz …”
It was big news everywhere, even on the wire services and in the daily papers. CBS even put an interview with me on its Nightly News. Most stories mentioned my letter to Ovitz in their second paragraph.
The day after the sale, I took Steve to a baseball card show in San Jose and bought him six Rickey Henderson rookie cards.
The best news to me was that we could buy our big house now. I’d made so much money on Basic that whatever Michael Ovitz did or tried to do, Gerri and I and Steve and Suzi would be okay.
· · ·
Gerri and I hadn’t made love for years … until now, down here in Captiva, Florida, on this balmy summer afternoon. We were sky-high, celebrating the $3 million I’d gotten for writing Basic Instinct.
Steve and Suzi were outside playing on the beach. The day was sun-kissed. There was a tropical breeze.
We spoke afterward about the money—how it would free us, how we could now buy a house big enough for the kids to have their own bedrooms, how all the years of struggle and battle had been worth it.
We didn’t realize until years later that even though we could buy our big house now … we weren’t free … that, on that afternoon in Captiva, we should have been talking not about money … but about why we hadn’t made love in years.
I was driving by the CAA building one day and, without giving it a thought, I stuck my hand out the window and gave the building my middle finger.
It was a kind of reflex action.
It felt so good that I did it every time that I passed the building from then on.
It felt so good that I was still doing it ten years later, when Michael Ovitz was long gone from CAA.
I even did it on film for ABC’s 20/20. They didn’t get the shot right so we kept driving around the building over and over again as I pumped my middle finger into the air.
A reporter asked me after my letter became public if I was afraid of Michael Ovitz.
I listed the reasons why I wasn’t afraid of him:
He didn’t grow up in refugee camps.
He didn’t grow up on the West Side of Cleveland.
He never carried a knife strapped to his wrist.
He never owned a zip gun.
He was the president of his college fraternity.
He went to college at UCLA.
He was short.
He was nearly bald.
He grew up middle-class in the Valley.
He took karate lessons from Steven Seagal.
[Quick Cut]
“You Know I Love You”
Hollywood Lies:
You look terrific!
My answering service keeps screwing my messages up.
We’ve got half the financing.
I was working on the script with Kubrick when he died.
Did you lose weight?
He’s a writer’s director.
We’re messengering the check to your accountants.
I never read the trades.
I never read my reviews.
I didn’t see the movie.
I’ll read your script tonight.
I’d love to be there but we’re in Aspen this weekend.
I really respect his artistic integrity.
It’s not about the money.
I’ll read your script tomorrow.
Tom and Penélope are coming.
Steven almost committed to it.
I’ll read your script this weekend.
I couldn’t get it past business affairs.
I wrote that movie but the Writers Guild screwed me out of the credit.
I’m only halfway through your script but I love it.
This is just a suggestion.
Don’t make any changes in your script you don’t want to make.
I love this ending but market research doesn’t.
I believe in redemption.
I love ambiguity.
I want it to be like Network.
Think Oscars, not grosses.
It did great foreign.
The studio took it away from me and recut it.
All your script needs is a little touch-up.
This isn’t about ego, it’s about getting it right.
I don’t believe in control.
We’re friends, aren’t we?
Harvey’s interested.
We had creative differences.
You know I love you.
CHAPTER 11
[Flashback]
Attempted Murders
OBIE
Lots of things aren’t fair, are they, Mom?
OBIE’S MOM
How do you mean?
OBIE
In life.
OBIE’S MOM
No. But we live with them.
OBIE
I know. But they hurt.
Big Shots
I’D BEEN BEGGING my parents for a pet and my mother brought home a kitten she’d found huddling in a gutter. We named her Caesar, kept her in a box with a clock, and fed her with a baby bottle.
As the kitten got older, she went pee-pee in only one spot: on my father’s newly typed manuscripts. My mother thought that was funny.
My father said Oszkár Moldován and the other linotype operators were laughing at him because his writing always smelled like cat piss. My mother thought that was funny, too.
When I got home from school one day, Caesar was gone. I looked everywhere in the apartment, in the circulation office downstairs, in the printing shop, in the concrete yard, in the alley. I even looked in the Num Num Potato Chip factory truck lot. I was frantic.
“Stop looking for the cat,” my mother said without warning at dinner. “Your father killed it.”
My father said, “What did you say?”
“You killed it,” my mother said, looking him right in the eye.
“How can you say such a horrible thing?” my father said. His voice was high. He looked like he was in shock.
“You and your precious writing,” she spat at him. “Caesar knew its worth!”
“What’s wrong with you, Mária?” he said. “Why are you angry with me? What have I done to you?” He looked like he was going to cry.
She said nothing and literally ran out of the room.
Radio Free Europe said the Communists had launched a Sputnik with a dog named Laika in it.
I found my mother sitting at the kitchen table one day, the ice bag on her head, pressing on her temples as hard as she could.
“Are you all right, Mama?” I asked.
My mother said, “It is up there.”
“What?”
“The Sputnik. It is up there going around and around shooting out its rays. Around and around, it never stops.”
On another day when I asked her how she was feeling, she said, “I couldn’t sleep all night. I kept hearing that poor dog howl.”
I said, “What dog?”
“That Laika,” she said, “up there howling, going around and around. Didn’t you hear her?”
I said, “No, mama.”
She said, “Honestly, I really don’t understand how you and your father can sleep through that poor dog’s misery.”
“Ex Libris” is what it said on the bottom of the pieces of paper
which my father was sticking into his books.
It said “Dr. István Eszterhás” on the top next to a design which he had drawn: a globe with the holy crown of St. Stephen on top of it.
My mother was holding one of these pretty pieces of paper.
“How much did these cost?” my mother said.
“Not much,” my father said, “hardly anything.” He said one of the Franciscans had printed it for him downstairs in the printing shop.
“But still something,” my mother said. “There must be the cost for the paper it’s printed on.”
My father shrugged. “Almost nothing,” he said.
“We live like paupers,” my mother said. “There are lice in the clothes that we buy. We eat fruit that is almost spoiled with worms inside sometimes. The boy’s shoes fall off his feet. And you buy fancy decorations for the books that your kurva gives you—”
“Stop it!” my father cried.
“—Your kurva gives you at the library.”
“Stop it now!” he cried, slamming a book to the table. “Enough! I have nothing! Nothing! I can at least have this in my books like I had in my books in Hungary! At least this! Do you understand me, you crazy woman? At least this!” He was trembling. His face was purple.
“Ex Libris!” She laughed in a high, tinny voice. “Ex Libris!” I saw she was shaking, too.
I came home from school one day and she was at the kitchen table cooking something. I kissed her on the cheek as was my usual custom when I got home from school. She wouldn’t even look at me.
I started talking to her but she didn’t respond. She kept her eyes on the stove. I asked her what was wrong but she didn’t say anything. I was sure that my parents had discovered something awful that I had done.
“Did I do something wrong?” I asked my mother.
She didn’t answer me. She wouldn’t look at me.
I found my father in the printing shop wearing his dark green visor and looking at the page proofs of that week’s newspaper.
“What’s wrong with Nana?” I asked.
“I don’t know,” he said. He didn’t look up from the proofs.
“Did I do something, Papa?”
I saw him smile slightly. “Probably,” he said, “but if you did I don’t know about it yet.”
“She won’t talk to me,” I said.
“She won’t talk to me, either.”
“Did something happen?” I asked. “Did you have an argument?”
“No,” he said. “She woke up this morning and never said good morning and hasn’t said anything all day.”
“Is she okay?”
“Her head hurts,” he said. “I saw her put the ice bag on it.”
That night at dinner she was mute. There was a faraway look in her eyes. She served the soup, ate little, and smoked her cigarettes.
My father and I tried to talk to her.
“Did I hurt you somehow, Mária?” my father said. “If I did I’m sorry.”
And: “Please tell us what the matter is, Mária. Please. Whatever it is it will be all right, Mária.”
And: “Don’t do this, Mária, please. Don’t do this to the boy.”
I was sitting at the table, crying.
“Nana,” I said, “what’s wrong? Tell me what’s wrong. I’m sorry, Nana. If I did something, I’m sorry. Please, Nana.”
She was stone-faced, unblinking, her jaw set. She didn’t say a word. I fell asleep on my living room couch. For the first time in my life, she didn’t kiss me good night.
I couldn’t focus on anything in school the next day and ran the sixteen blocks home from school.
She was in the kitchen again, a cigarette in her mouth, her face stone, her jaw set.
As I moved to kiss her, she moved away from me. I started to cry and ran for my father in the printing shop. He hugged me.
“She must be sick,” he said. “We’ll try to talk to her tonight.”
“What’s wrong with her?”
“I don’t know,” my father said.
That night at dinner she sat there unblinking, mute, eyes distant again. My father tried again.
“Mária, are you sick? I’ll call the doctor. What’s wrong, Mária? Please, we love you. I love you. The boy loves you.”
He was choking up and started to cry.
“We only have each other, Mária,” he said. “Just the three of us. We have nothing else. Just us.”
And then she suddenly started to laugh. It was a high-pitched and hyena-like sound that I’d never heard before from a human being. It put chills down my back.
My father’s face flushed deep red. He got up and held on to the kitchen table—he had high blood pressure and suffered dizzy spells—and he started to yell at her. “Stop this! This isn’t funny! You think this is funny? Look what you’re doing to the boy!”
I was shaking. I felt tears running down my cheeks.
My mother got up from the table and, her eyes wild, started to scream words at my father. She screamed that he was in love with the woman at the library … that he and the priests were teaching me to be a “pervert” like them … that I was spilling my filthy and smelly seed into the living room couch at night and she had to scrub it away with Ajax every morning … that I had perverted sick pictures in my wallet and … she suddenly threw something she had in her apron pocket onto the kitchen table.
I stared at it, horrified. It was a prophylactic that I had no use for but that I had recently hidden in the fold of my wallet.
My father was yelling back at her. “What is wrong with you? Are you crazy? Have you lost your mind, Mária? How can you say such filth?”
And always the words: “Look at the boy, Mária! My God, look what you’re doing to the boy!”
I was shaking so hard that I startled myself with my own movements.
Everything in the room was somehow blurry to me.
And then my father collapsed suddenly. He fell onto the linoleum floor, reaching for the table as he fell, then rolled over onto his face.
I was screaming now, screaming for him not to die, atop his body on the floor, trying to roll him over so he could breathe better. His face was ashen, thick sticky drool came out of the side of his mouth. He was taking big gulps of air as I screamed and then the color came back into his face and he was struggling to get up, leaning on me.
My mother stood there watching us, laughing again in that spine-chilling way, a cigarette in her hand, taking fast little puffs on it. I helped my father into the bedroom to lie down and she followed us in.
“Drama!” she cackled at him in a screeching-high voice. “Drama for the boy! Anything for sympathy! Liar! Liar! I believe not a word anymore! I have heard all the lies! I have seen through all the lies! I know! I know what you are! Devil! Devil!”
She was screeching that word in Hungarian: “Ördög! Ördög!”
I looked at her and caught her eye for a moment and she looked right at me and screamed “Ördögök”—Devils! looking for a long moment at the two of us.
She went back to the kitchen and sat at the table, staring hollow-eyed at nothing, chain-smoking her cigarettes.
My father said he was better and needed to rest. I stayed with him until he fell asleep and went to my couch in the living room and tried to sleep. I could hear her out in the kitchen striking matches for her cigarettes.
The next morning my father woke me when it was still dark and told me my mother wanted to go to Mass. We went with her to the seven o’clock Mass at St. Emeric’s.
She said not a word as we walked the sixteen blocks, her jaw set, but my father whispered that she would like it if I could serve the Mass. So when we got to church I asked Father John if I could serve because my parents were there. He looked at me a little strangely but said yes.
I was the only altar boy and I saw my parents were in the front row. I kept craning my neck around all through the Mass to see them—I was afraid my father was going to collapse again and die. I was afraid my mother would s
tart to scream or laugh that terrible laugh.
Father John noticed me craning around and hissed, “What is wrong with you?”
· · ·
My father met me in the sacristy afterward and told me not to worry. He felt fine now, he said, he had just gotten dizzy last night. Everything would be “okay.” He would call a doctor when they got home.
I asked where my mother was and my father said she was still sitting in church. I saw the bags under his eyes and his pallor as he stood in his old trench coat, his beret in his hands. I hugged him close to me.
I felt the tears on his face and he looked at me through his thick, horn-rimmed glasses and with the twinge of a smile said, “It okay, Joe” in English.
I glanced into the dark church from the sacristy and saw my mother sitting in her pew, staring blankly ahead. She was smoking a cigarette. In church. Very calmly. Taking long deep puffs.
When I got home from school, the doctor was there. His name was Michael Varga-Sinka and he had been with us in the refugee camps. He was a friendly man and he was smiling now, talking calmly with my mother, who was screaming at him.
“Why are you with them?” my mother screamed.
“Whom, Mária?”
“With them!” She pointed to my father and me. “Why are you trying to hurt me?” I saw she was wearing her rosary around her neck.
“I’m trying to help you, Mária,” Dr. Varga-Sinka said. “They’re trying to help you. You’re tired. You need some rest.”
“No!” she said. “You’re trying to put me to sleep so I won’t see their filth. I have to scrub that couch every morning! He puts his seed into it. My own boy! He sins!”
She went on that way. All the while Varga-Sinka kept talking to her calmly, cajolingly, telling her she needed to rest, trying to persuade her to allow him to give her a shot.
“Please, Nana,” I said. “Let him give it to you. It’s good for you.”
“Why did you join them?” she said to me. “I loved you, Jozsi.”
She started to cry and so did I and she suddenly put her arm around me and kissed me.
“All right, Jozsi,” she said, “all right.” She held her arm out to the doctor and Varga-Sinka, seizing the moment, plunged the needle in. She fell into a deep sleep within minutes.
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