Hollywood Animal

by Joe Eszterhas

  I watched my back for many years as Michael Ovitz kept denying over and over again the things I alleged he had said to me at our meeting in the fall of 1989.

  Then, in an authorized biography published in 1997 called Ovitz, written by Robert Slater, I was astounded to read the following paragraphs:

  The question that was on the minds of everyone connected to the Eszterhas Affair, and that certainly was uppermost in the author’s mind as he talked with Ovitz, was this: Had he or had he not made the notorious threat to march his foot soldiers down Wilshire Boulevard and blow the screenwriter’s brains out?

  The question was posed: What in fact had he said to Eszterhas in that regard?

  Then came Ovitz’s startling response:

  “Eszterhas and I were joking with each other when I said: ‘You don’t want our foot soldiers going up the street gunning for you, do you?’”

  Until that moment, Ovitz had denied ever making any foot soldiers’ remarks of any kind. Was this the first time he had admitted to making the infamous remark?

  “Yes,” said Ovitz, “it was.”

  We had been joking!

  That was funny!

  · · ·

  Two years after I sold Original Sin, I got a script from Andy Vajna, the head of Cinergi, with a note that said, “Read immediately!”

  I started reading it and recognized it as Original Sin with a different title and by a writer I’d never heard of.

  Someone had Xeroxed my script and put a new cover and title on it.

  I called Vajna and he told me the story:

  The script in front of me had been sold to Hearst Television the previous week for $250,000.

  Cinergi’s lawyers had discovered that the “author” worked in Chicago as a mailman and lived with his aged mother. He had taken a screenwriting course at a local community college where Original Sin had been part of the course and where copies of my script had been distributed to the class.

  The mailman Xeroxed my script, changed the title, put his name on it, and sent it to a Chicago agent who sent it to a Hollywood agent who sold it to Hearst Television.

  Cinergi’s lawyers were now threatening the mailman with the tortures of hell.

  You couldn’t expect to sell every script you didn’t write, of course. Cinergi’s lawyers determined that the mailman had tried to sell another of my scripts, too—Sacred Cows—but this time had failed in his efforts.

  [Close-up]

  The Dentist

  HE HAD VERY bad teeth and the reason he went to Dr. Abramson in the first place is that he was ashamed of his teeth and didn’t want them to become part of industry gossip.

  Abramson wasn’t a dentist to the stars; he had a small office in a dingy part of mid-Wilshire.

  Abramson took one look at his teeth and said, simply, “Ah, we have some work to do.” He didn’t give him a sermon, he didn’t tell him that he had ruined his teeth by rarely brushing and never flossing them.

  Abramson asked him what he did and he told him he was a producer. Abramson revealed that he saw at least six movies each week. They spent the long painful hours in the chair discussing their favorite movies. After a while he began telling Abramson the plots of scripts submitted to him and Abramson started giving him advice on which ones to make.

  He scoffed mostly at the dentist’s advice but he took it once and the movie turned out to be a hit. He took his advice again and had another hit. As a result, he was made the head of the studio.

  He made a quiet deal with Abramson then. He paid him a significant amount of money to read every script he was considering green-lighting. He had one hit after another.

  When Abramson, a fat man badly out of shape, had a heart attack and died, the studio head almost had a heart attack himself.

  He tried to find other Abramsons—a parking lot attendant, a waitress, a high school classmate, but none of them had the dentist’s encyclopedic knowledge of hit movies.

  He green-lighted one stinker after another and was fired at the studio. He didn’t fare any better as a producer.

  Industry gossip said he was spending much of his time in dentist’s offices. He had developed gum disease from neglecting his teeth. He was, it was said, in great and ceaseless pain.

  CHAPTER 13

  [Flashback]

  Me and Anastas Mikoyan

  KARCHY

  I can’t say “the.” My tongue. I can’t get it right.

  MAGIC

  Put a rubber band on it.

  KARCHY

  I never thought of that.

  Telling Lies in America

  THE FIRST BOOK I read was Jules Verne’s Michael Strogoff, set in the world of czarist Cossack horsemen. It had been a Christmas gift from my father’s friend, the novelist and poet Gyula Bedy, and had been on a shelf unopened for two years. Suddenly I found myself out in the Russian steppes, far from back alleys, juvenile caseworkers, and my mother’s loony laughter. I moved on to The Three Musketeers, The Man in the Iron Mask, and The Count of Monte Cristo, books my father had read when he was a boy.

  I read either on my living room couch, if my mother was okay, or, if she wasn’t, in my nonbathroom sitting on my non–toilet seat with wadded-up Kleenex in my ears.

  Sometimes I told my father I was going down to the public library after school … and this time I really did, sitting in the Reading Room with the bums who came there to either warm up or cool off.

  I started to haunt a used paperback store on West 30th and Lorain, a front, I discovered, for a horse racing wire. They sold paperbacks here with many of their covers torn off for either two cents or five and I moved on to Faulkner and Fitzgerald and Hemingway and Steinbeck and Salinger and C. S. Forester and A. J. Cronin and Mickey Spillane and Eric Ambler and Mary Roberts Rinehart.

  The horse bettors, moving through to the back room of the store with big cigars in their hands, would sometimes give me literary advice.

  “Hey, kid, didja read Henry Miller yet?”

  “No.”

  “Read him. He’ll make your dick grow.”

  “I can’t sell him Henry Miller,” the owner said, “he’s a minor. They’ll put me in jail.”

  But I begged the man and he sold me Tropic of Cancer and Tropic of Capricorn for ten cents. So I read Henry Miller and he didn’t make my dick grow but I widened my eyes sometimes when I read his descriptions. And I read Wolfe and Tennessee Williams.

  I was a catholic (small c), ecumenical, and promiscuous reader. I read anything and everything that appealed to me. I hung around so much the owner asked if I wanted to help him in the back with the wire for $5 a day. I was tempted—$5 was a lot of money—but I remembered my promise to Father John and turned him down.

  I told him I had made a promise to a priest to make something of my life. Touched somehow by that, he let me have the paperbacks for nothing as long as I brought them back when I’d read them.

  I felt myself transported when I read a book. Nothing else existed when I was reading. I didn’t exist, either. I was Michael Strogoff and Tom Joad and Gatsby and Nick Adams and Mike Hammer. Their problems were my problems; their loves were my loves. I was in love with Daisy Buchanan because I was Gatsby.

  My father gave me one of his beaten-to-death Hungarian-language typewriters—he typed with two fingers and smashed the keys—and I started making lists for myself of the books I had read.

  Each listing had the author’s name, the major characters’ names, and a summary of the plot.

  I also made lists of words that I hadn’t understood, their definitions in English, and their Hungarian translations.

  I read only in English, to my father’s consternation. I refused, even, to read his own novels, copies of which were slowly gathering from subscribers who’d seen his ad asking for copies of his books.

  “Why won’t you read Hungarian?” he asked. “You know how. Your mother taught you.”

  “It’s easier for me to read in English,” I said.

  “Are you ashamed of
being Hungarian?”

  “No.”

  “Then what?”

  “You told me to read,” I said to him. “I’m reading. You didn’t tell me to read in Hungarian.”

  “Yes.” My father smiled. “Unfortunately that is absolutely true.”

  Besides getting copies of his books from Katherine Webster or subscribers to his newspaper, my father would also steal them. Well, he wouldn’t really steal them because he’d pay for them—but he’d take them from the public library, and then say that he’d lost them.

  I was with him one day when he told a librarian that he had lost four books and wanted to pay for them. The librarian wrote down the book’s titles and she wrote down the author and my father paid her $20 and she wrote my father a receipt.

  When she wrote the receipt she stopped suddenly and said, “But this name—your name—is the same as the author’s!”

  “This name,” my father said, deadpan, “Eszterhás—this name is as common in Hungarian as Smith or Jones.”

  “Really,” the librarian said.

  My father said, “True!”

  “Well, you learn something every day,” the librarian said.

  We were laughing as we left the library that day … Eszterhás was most definitely not a common Hungarian name. It was such a rare Hungarian name that we knew of no other Eszterháses in the whole world.

  “Did you get a copy of Nemzet Politika yet?” I asked my father.

  “Why do you ask me about Nemzet Politika?” My father smiled. “You don’t read my books anyway.”

  “You said it will be the most difficult to find.”

  “No, I don’t have a copy yet,” my father said.

  “When I grow up,” I said, “I will find it for you.”

  “Thank you.” He smiled. “Will you read it, too?”

  “All right,” I said, “I promise you that if I find Nemzet Politika I will read it.”

  “Thank you,” he said, his arm around me. “That means very much to me. I will hold you to your promise.”

  Glancing through the National Catholic Register one day, I saw an announcement for a contest. If I answered 250 questions relating to American history, art, literature, and religion correctly, I’d win $1,000.

  I told my father I was going to go down to the library after school every day and dig into all the books there and win $1,000.

  “What will you do with the money?” he asked.

  “I’ll buy a record player and I will buy every Jerry Lee Lewis, Elvis Presley, Chuck Berry, and Little Richard record ever made.”

  He shook his head and said Ohkay! And Fein! And when I got back from the library the next night I found a stack of musty and rain-damaged World Book Encyclopedias on the kitchen table.

  “For Elvész” (the word means “lost” in Hungarian), my father said. “Elvész Prezli” (the lost pretzel).

  I worked for a month answering the 250 questions and when I was finished my father drove me in our blue Nash to the downtown post office and we mailed my thick envelope Special Delivery to the National Catholic Register offices in Denver.

  A week later I got a postcard back informing me that I’d lost but that I could subscribe to the Register at a special rate.

  My father saw how disappointed I was and tousled my hair.

  “There is an old Hungarian saying,” he said.

  “I know all the old Hungarian sayings,” I said. “I don’t want to hear another one now.”

  “You don’t know this one,” he said. “Nem minden papsajt, van papszar is.”

  It really made me laugh. “Not everything is priest’s cheese; there is priest’s shit, too.”

  I even thought I detected, shockingly, a glimmer of a smile on my mother’s set and stern face.

  “You worked very hard,” my father said. “You lost. But you learned many things. Correct?”

  I shrugged. All I knew was that I’d lost.

  “So,” he said, “as far as I’m concerned, you won and to reward you for winning, I will give you two dollars every week from now on.”

  I laughed and hugged him and I saw that my mother was smiling, too, and in my joy I moved to hug her, too. She backed away from me and left the room.

  I stood there. My father was looking at me evenly.

  “She doesn’t mean it,” he said.

  I won my spelling bee at St. Emeric’s School and my father and I studied the dictionary together for the West Side finals.

  I was eliminated in the first round of the finals for misspelling a word.

  I ran home and my father and I looked it up in the dictionary and there it was: I had spelled it correctly.

  Dictionary in hand, he came back to the school with me to confront the teacher with the evidence.

  The teacher looked at the dictionary, then at the flyleaf, shook his head, and said, “This is an English dictionary you have here, published in Great Britain. They spell it differently over there.”

  My father said, “It correct. Boy study in dic-cherry.”

  “Sorry,” the teacher said, “wrong dictionary. Where did you get it?”

  “Voloontair America,” my father said.

  The teacher smirked.

  On the way home, my father said to me in Hungarian, “I read an article in the Plain Dealer about a famous American writer, he knows all the big words, but he can’t spell them. So he pays someone to spell all the big words for him—a lawyer, I think. When you are a famous American writer, you will pay a lawyer to spell words, too.”

  I passed the playgrounds slowly sometimes but kept walking. The alleys and streets were not the lure they had once been. The rawness and edge of the alleys didn’t amount to much compared with the worlds I lived in in Tennessee Williams and Faulkner and Mickey Spillane.

  I ran into Chuckie Chuckles on the way home from school. He had a brown paper bag of Manischewitz and offered it to me but I shook my head.

  His family was heading back to Kentucky, he said, and José’s older brother had been killed while holding up a grocery store on Clark Avenue.

  “Dumb shit,” Chuckie said. “He goes in with a zip gun and the guy behind the counter has a real Luger he brought home from the war.”

  My father made me a soccer game with his own hands. It was a piece of wood painted green with wire mesh nets at each end and metal rims around the sides.

  The game was played with buttons. Larger coat buttons were the players and a little white shirt button was the ball. We took turns flicking “the ball” with the larger coat buttons toward the net.

  The coat button “players” soon had distinctive “personalities” and my father and I rummaged through the button jars at the Salvation Army and the Volunteers scouting new player buttons. It was the first time that going to the Salvation Army or the Volunteers was ever fun.

  I played the game so much either with my father or by myself that my thumb got badly blistered.

  For Christmas he bought me a toy printing set with rubber letters and its own ink supply. I decided to publish my own newspaper, the St. Emeric Herald, which I left on the desks at school early one morning.

  It was filled with local news—“Frances Madar Seen Necking with Robert Zak in Cafeteria” was one headline.

  I wrote an editorial that said, “Masturbation is not a sin. It will not make you blind. Everybody does it, even Father John, Sister Rose, and the other sisters, especially the sisters.”

  Sister Rose immediately summoned Father John, who, I thought, was going to kill me. All copies of the St. Emeric’s Herald were collected by Sister Rose and burned in the alley.

  “Are you forgetting the promise you made to me?” Father John scolded.

  “No, Father,” I said. “Look. I wrote a whole newspaper. All by myself. It was hard work.”

  “I don’t know what will become of you,” he said, “I just don’t,” but he was smiling … sort of … just a little.

  My father bought me a BB pistol that I had been eyeing in the front wind
ow of Sam Finesilver’s hardware store. It was for the two of us, he said, to be used only for target practice.

  We drove out to Metropolitan Park in our old Nash, put bull’s-eye paper targets on the trees, and fired away. We were laughing and having fun together.

  I loved that BB pistol and just couldn’t leave it up there on top of the bookshelf until the next trip to Metropolitan Park.

  When my mother was in the kitchen or my father in the printing shop, I snuck to the living room window with the pistol and waited for targets to come along.

  My favorite target was a fat Hungarian prostitute with a huge derriere. Each time she passed beneath our window I’d shoot her in the butt. All she did was smack herself back there as though she’d been stung by a mosquito.

  Then I started on the big blazing Papp’s Bar neon sign right next to our window. First I shot out all the green lights, then all the red lights, then all the yellow lights … until the big neon sign was dark.

  When the policemen came, I couldn’t even deny it … they’d picked all the BBs out of the gutter right underneath our window.

  When the policemen left—after my father had agreed to pay old man Papp for the damage—my mother went completely berserk, screaming that my father was teaching me to shoot people.

  I said, “All she did was scratch her behind, it didn’t even hurt the fat kurva.”

  My father turned calmly away and started to play his violin.

  My mother screamed at him. “A murderer,” she said. “Your son. Your son. A murderer. Like you!”

  I said, “Nana, really, she didn’t even feel it.”

  She kept screaming about murder. My father kept playing the violin.

  I went into my nonbathroom, stuck the Kleenex in my ears, and read War and Peace.

  I read:

  Kon-Tiki by Thor Heyerdahl and wondered if it was possible to take a raft across Lake Erie.

  The Little World of Don Camillo by Giovanni Guareschi and wondered if, like Father John, Father Camillo had a funeral director’s wife in his life.

  The Catcher in the Rye by J. D. Salinger and wrote the words “Colder than a witch’s tit” into a notebook.