East of Eden by John Steinbeck and hoped I’d meet a “monster” like Catherine when I grew up.
The Blackboard Jungle by Evan Hunter and thought high school was going to be a lot of fun.
Andersonville by MacKinlay Kantor and was very happy I wouldn’t have to go to jail.
Mandingo by Kyle Onstott and imagined Tina Mae Ritenour, Brigitte Bardot, Justine Corelli, Mamie Van Doren, and Zsa Zsa Gabor as my slaves.
And I read The Rains Came by Louis Bromfield, whose farm and mansion I had visited with my father and Huldah Kramer. I hated it.
My father was at home more, making fewer speeches and rarely out of town. Huldah Kramer didn’t come to see him in his office anymore and I heard nothing about his librarian friend, Katherine Webster.
I hardly ever saw him reading a Hungarian book or a classic. He was only reading his American paperbacks now—not just Spillane but writers named Macdonald and Hammett and Chandler and Woolrich.
During one of my mother’s better periods, my father said we would go on a vacation. I would be the navigator, he said. I could pick out where we would go—as long as it was in Michigan or Pennsylvania, not too far away.
I went down to the library and to the automobile club on Euclid Avenue and studied vacation spots. I announced my choice—a place in Michigan called Houghton Lake. I gathered the maps and we set off. My father drove—my mother sat between us. It took us about eight hours to get there.
For the first seven hours of the trip she was fine—smiling, friendly. Then she turned on us.
“You are not Mindszenty,” she said to my father. “Torturer! You are Mindszenty’s torturer!”
“Diszno!” she said to him—“Pig! I know what filth you do to the boy!”
She made the Sign of the Cross.
I started to shake. I braced my arms against the dash and watched my arms as they shook like feathers.
My mother looked at me and smiled.
“Stop acting,” she said sweetly to me. “You and your father are such actors!”
· · ·
We found a cabin at a place called Chet’s Resort, which was right on the lake. We were there for a week.
The first day, we went into the water. It was filled with little fish that nibbled at us. When the first fish nibbled at my mother, she ran screaming from the water and never came back in again.
“That’s why you picked this place!” she said angrily to me. “You knew that the fish would torture me!”
My mother said, “Torturer! Just like your father.”
Staying in the cabin next to us was a family from Detroit, the Jacksons. Mr. and Mrs. Jackson and their sixteen-year-old daughter, Karen. I thought she was prettier even than Justine Corelli.
We swam together and rode a boat together. We talked about American Bandstand and Elvis and I told her about the windows José and I had broken after seeing Jerry Lee Lewis.
“How old are you?” she asked.
I lied and told her I was sixteen, not fourteen.
There was an old unused trailer behind the cabins and we went in there and smoked a cigarette.
It was colder than a witch’s tit in there. She let me kiss her and touch her breasts. The day after I touched her breasts, she and her parents left, their vacation over.
My father bought me a portable transistor radio. I kept it near me twenty-four hours a day—at night it was next to my pillow.
“Don’t let your mother get her hands on it,” he said. “God knows what she’d do to it. Boil it maybe, ha?” He smiled.
It was the most beautiful radio I’d ever seen. It even picked up a station from Memphis, Tennessee, where Elvész and Jerry Lee Lewis lived, a station the Philips shortwave had never picked up. It picked up baseball games played by the Brooklyn Dodgers and the Chicago Cubs and White Sox.
I listened to it nonstop, hearing masterpieces like “Get a Job” by the Silhouettes, and “At the Hop” by Danny and the Juniors.
My father heard me listening to it and he even sat and listened to “Great Balls of Fire” by Jerry Lee Lewis, who was more famous, I told him, than Franz Liszt.
“Please,” my father said, “if you tell me that again I’ll give your radio to your mother to boil.”
But he even found a song he liked, forced to overhear the jungle music he didn’t like on the radio he had given me.
He looked up every time he heard it. I even heard him humming it. The first American song he had ever liked. Doris Day sang it.
Que sera, sera, whatever will be, will be, the future’s not ours to see, que sera, sera, what will be, will be.
The Cleveland Indians had a player I liked a lot. He was young—a hard-line-drive hitter who always hustled. He was exciting to watch, particularly good in the clutch when the game was tied. He looked like he could be an All-Star someday. The Indians traded him.
His name was Roger Maris. He would soon break Babe Ruth’s home run record.
He wanted to write a book, my father said, in English, not in Hungarian. He couldn’t speak English, but I could. Maybe I was a little young, at fourteen, to be a translator, he said, but he didn’t know any other translators.
If I translated his book, he would get the Franciscans to print it and send it to American newspapers through the mail. The American newspapers would write about it and then Americans would buy it.
And if enough Americans bought it, we could buy a mansion and a farm like the one owned by Louis Bromfield. We could also buy a car beneath whose rusted-out floor we couldn’t see the street.
We could go to vacations not to Cook Forest or Houghton Lake but to Viareggio in Italy, where my father said he had vacationed as a young man and had eaten fresh oysters from the sea. We could eat Westphalian ham and Hertz salami not just at Christmas but every day. We could wear clothes not from the Salvation Army but handmade by Italian tailors, who had made the silk suits he wore as a young man.
It was, my father said, up to me. If I agreed to translate his book, all those things could … no, no, probably would happen.
And just to be fair—because this was going to be a lot of work—he would pay me before I did the work.
He would buy me a television set.
We carried the set home together from the furniture store. When we got it through the door, my mother started yelling.
“No!” she said. “Enough rays! You won’t bring any more rays into this house and torture me with them!”
“Do you want the boy back out on the streets?” my father yelled at her.
She was so upset she was dancing around us, stomping her feet.
He laid down rules. I could watch the set for two hours on weekdays and four on weekends.
I watched American Bandstand every afternoon and I watched the Cleveland Indians and Naked City and Peter Gunn and M Squad and The Lineup. Sometimes my father watched with me but my mother never did. She stayed as far away from the rays as possible, in the kitchen.
My father’s favorite program, which he never missed, was I Led Three Lives starring Richard Carlson. It was about the underground FBI agent Herbert Philbrick who was spying on Communist spies. Each week Philbrick uncovered more spies and each week when the show ended my father said “Jó volt”—“That was a good one.”
He tried to persuade my mother to watch the capture of the Communist spies but my mother said the Komchis were just trying to get her closer to their rays by putting on a program about Communist spies.
We worked on his book after school and on the weekends. He read it to me sentence by sentence and I wrote it down in English in longhand after consulting the three Hungarian-English dictionaries on the kitchen table.
Then he took my longhand English sentences and typed them up. We did that sentence by sentence, paragraph by paragraph, page by page, day by day, week by week, month by month. I understood very little of what I was translating. The book was about political science and filled with words like “autonomy” and “interdependence” and “hegemony.�
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He knew I wasn’t having any fun and one day, after we’d worked for seven hours, he took a package out of the refrigerator and opened it on the table.
It was a few slices of Westphalian ham.
“A preview,” my father said, “of all the Westphalian ham we will eat after Americans buy this book.”
My mother risked the rays inside the television set for one hour every week. She sat down next to my father and took little sips of her cognac. I joined them sometimes as they watched Lawrence Welk.
It wasn’t my kind of music, but it was the one hour each week when we were really all together, when we were having fun. My father talked about how wonderful the champagne lady, Alice Lon, was. My mother talked about how wonderful the accordionist was. I imagined how wonderful the youngest Lennon sister, Kathy, the one with the hair and the freckles, would be.
Life was just a-wonderful, a-wonderful!
The Franciscans printed the book, now entitled Social Proportion, and my father went down to the public library and made a list of a thousand of America’s newspapers.
He wrote a cover letter which I translated giving his address and telephone number and saying that he would happily make himself available for interviews. He and I put the books into brown envelopes, went to the post office downtown, and mailed them.
“I couldn’t have done this without you, Jozsi,” he said. “Thank you.”
We waited for the American newspapers to write or call. Viareggio vacations! Oysters! Italian clothes! Westphalian ham every day!
We waited.
And waited.
Nobody wrote.
Nobody called.
After three months without a response from the American newspapers’ book editors, my mother made a detailed list of how much Social Proportion had cost.
We owed the Franciscans $500 which they would deduct from my father’s salary, plus the money for the envelopes, plus the money for the stationery for the cover letters, plus the money for the stamps.
My mother handed him the list and said, “This is what you have wasted.”
He turned red and I thought he was going to yell at her, but he didn’t. Instead he said, “Oh, Mária, what have I done to make you hate me so?”
In 2002, after I did a Hardball with Chris Matthews show in Cleveland, an old man stopped me with a book in his hands.
It was Social Proportion.
He asked me to autograph it and as I did, I noticed my father had already signed it … in 1958.
“Where did you get this book?” I asked him.
“I was at the Volunteers of America down by the West Side Market,” the old man said, “and I saw it on a shelf. I thought it was one of your books.”
I told the old man how I had translated this book when I was a kid and the old man said, “Both of you signing it—this is gonna be worth a lot on that eBay, don’t you think?”
The Volunteers of America near the West Side Market …
My father’s book had wound up on the shelf at the Volunteers … the same store where he and I had shopped for our clothes, the same store where we’d found buttons for the soccer game we played.
The butcher of Budapest, Anastas Mikoyan, the Soviet foreign minister, was coming to Cleveland to visit his friend Cyrus Eaton, the international tycoon and multibillionaire, Cleveland’s wealthiest resident, once John D. Rockefeller’s personal assistant.
Mikoyan was the Soviet leader, the press informed us, who had secretly flown into Hungary to plan the Red Army’s deadly attack against the freedom fighters.
Hungarians in Cleveland hated Cyrus Eaton because he was Nikita Khrushchev’s friend—Khrushchev had given him a Russian troika—and because, after a trip to Hungary after the revolution, Eaton had said America was “more of a police state than Hungary.”
My father, as the newly elected president of the Committee for Hungarian Liberation, organized a demonstration at the downtown Hotel Cleveland for Mikoyan’s arrival.
My father and I and hundreds of Hungarians filled our pockets with rotten eggs. When Mikoyan got out of his limousine in front of the hotel, protected by a police cordon, we screamed “Russki go home!” at the top of our lungs and fired our eggs.
And the egg that I threw … with the arm strengthened by all those games of baseball, the American pastime … hit Anastas Mikoyan on the side of his butchering dirty Commie-rat face.
I was a hero among the Hungarians on the West Side.
My father said, “I have never been prouder of you than I am today.”
“It is because of all the bazball I’ve played,” I told him.
My father said, “Don’t say that!”
Many years later, when I was a reporter for the Cleveland Plain Dealer, I got a note from Cyrus Eaton telling me how much he liked a story I had written and asking me to visit him at his office.
He was a friendly, courtly, and grand old man in his eighties and we talked about our mutual loathing of the war in Vietnam.
“Do you remember that day Mikoyan visited you and there was a demonstration against him at the hotel?” I asked.
“Yes, of course I do,” Cyrus Eaton said.
“Do you remember that egg that hit Mikoyan in the face?”
“I’ll never forget it.” Cyrus Eaton smiled. “He was mad as a hornet. I thought for a moment that silly egg was going to affect the course of Soviet-American relations. He’s Armenian, you know. He has quite a temper.”
“I threw it,” I said.
“You did what?” Cyrus Eaton said, thinking he’d misunderstood me.
“I threw the egg that hit Mikoyan,” I said.
“Why, you scamp!” Cyrus Eaton said, and laughed so hard he had to ask for a glass of water.
CHAPTER 14
I Climb the Hill of Broken Glass
TONY
You got something wrong with your nipples?
NOMI
No.
TONY
They’re not stickin’ up. Stick ’em up.
NOMI
What?
TONY
Play with ’em a little bit.
Showgirls
WHEN BASIC INSTINCT turned into a worldwide event, Guy said, “Boy did we dodge a big one. Imagine a three-million-dollar screenplay, imagine all the publicity over the record sale, and then imagine it going into the toilet. We would’ve been in deep shit.”
Mario Kassar at Carolco called me to say, “Joey, that three million dollars for your script was the best investment I ever made. I paid you peanuts for a money tree.”
I knew how much Mario was enjoying the fruits from his money tree. He had been soundly trashed by a lot of people in Hollywood for paying a writer, any writer, $3 million.
It was payback time for Mario now.
He’d paid $3 million to make $450 million.
· · ·
A few months after the release of Basic, my Marin County producer friend Ben Myron, who’d just produced the powerful independently made One False Move directed by Carl Franklin, came up with a movie idea.
“A dark musical,” Ben said, “like Flashdance but much darker, about Vegas. The underside of Vegas. The real Vegas, the one the casino PR people try to hide.” I told Ben I thought it was a great idea. A dark musical seemed like a fresh and original concept to me in 1992.
Then Ben said, “Verhoeven!”
I laughed. “He’ll kill me, I’ll kill him, life is too short.”
“He’s never done anything like this,” Ben insisted. “He’s got a jazzy style. He’d be perfect for it.”
“Call him,” I told Ben. “See if he wants to have lunch with us. He might just say he never wants to see me as long as he lives.”
“Let’s bet,” Ben said. “You gave him the biggest hit he’s ever had. He’ll be there.”
We met at the Ivy on Robertson. I hadn’t seen Paul since our session with the protesters in San Francisco. He was friendly, but wary, with an edge.
Ben pitched his idea a
nd Paul loved it.
“We do it honest, ja?” he said. “We go there, we research.”
“You mean you’re committing to do it?” I asked.
“Of course not. I commit when I see a brilliant script.”
“Why don’t you commit to develop it with a studio?”
“Oh no,” Paul said. “So you can get three million dollars because the studio thinks I’ll direct it? I’m not going to do that for you.”
“I got three million dollars without you being anywhere near the project on Basic,” I said.
“True. But you also had a finished script. You do what you did with Basic, ja? Then I see if I will direct.”
“This is different, Paul. I wrote it, then we sent it out to the studios. You came into it after Carolco bought it. If I do this as a spec, and the town knows I did it with you or with you in mind—and you pass—I’ll never sell it.”
“That’s the risk you run to get me,” Paul said.
Ben said, “What if we don’t talk about making a deal now? What if we go to Vegas, the three of us, and see what we find there. We’ll do the research, we’ll interview people. Then we’ll decide if we want to do it.”
“Who pays for Vegas?” Verhoeven asked.
I laughed. I knew that while I had made $3 million on Basic, Paul had been paid $7 million to direct it.
“I’ll pay for it,” Ben said.
“You are not rich.” Paul smiled. “You are a struggling producer. Joe is very rich. He should pay for all of our expenses.”
“Fine.” I laughed. “I’ll pay for all our expenses.”
“The beginning of some justice, ja?” Paul said.
Ben hired a researcher to lead us around and we flew into Vegas. What we found was a hidden sexual carnival. There were no hookers walking the streets anymore thanks to the town’s new corporate-run squeaky-clean image. But the Yellow Pages listed hundreds of escort services.
You could order a woman the way you’d order a pizza … short, blond, tall, brunette, anchovies, etc. And she’d be at your hotel room door in an hour, dressed to look like somebody’s date or wife so no questions would be asked by hotel security.
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