Hollywood Animal

by Joe Eszterhas

  “I couldn’t do anything about it. I tried to dissuade Nomer from coming, but she really wanted to come.”

  “Well, call her and tell her she can’t come. Make up something.”

  “It’s too late,” he said, looking at his watch. “She’s on her way from the Marina. She’s meeting us here.”

  I said. “You can’t let Naomi come to this party. Do you want to blow your own marriage?”

  “Jesus, I know it,” he said. “You’re right. What the hell can I do?”

  He slugged another vodka and sat down on the couch, his head in his hands.

  So I thought up a cockeyed story about the threat of a lawsuit from MGM as a result of rumors about the formation of Renegade.

  “Go downstairs,” I said. “Wait for Naomi. Meet her when she comes in. Tell her this suit thing just came up and it’s an emergency. Tell her we probably won’t make it to the party either because we have to have a meeting at Guy’s house.”

  “You’re pretty good at this,” he said as he left to go downstairs.

  “I’ve had a lot of practice lying to my wife.”

  I watched them from the window of my suite as Bill gave Naomi the silver broken heart which I had selected and paid for.

  I watched as Bill kissed her goodbye and as she drove away in her vintage Mercedes.

  “God she looked beautiful,” Bill said after he came back up. “I can’t believe how beautiful she looked.”

  I agreed with him.

  When I saw Sharon and Bill at the wrap party, I was happy I’d stopped him from bringing Naomi. They were all over each other, laughing, flirting, wrapped up in a little world of their own far away from everyone else.

  “Lovebirds,” Evans said, watching them. “Goony birds. She goes for him and she thinks I’m de Sade.”

  He was shaking his head in wonderment, finally permitted to be in Sharon’s eyesight now that the shoot was over.

  At that wrap party, Robert Evans went up to the woman who’d banned him from his own set and presented Sharon with a gleaming silver cross.

  As he handed it to her, he denied once again keeping her model friend on a dog collar at his house and said he would pay Sharon $300,000 if she could prove that he had done it.

  Sharon took the cross, but never answered Evans, turning all of her attentions on Bill.

  As she walked away with Bill, Evans watched her sadly and said, “The cunt won’t even talk to me!”

  “Thank you,” Sharon said to me while Bill was getting her a Perrier.

  “For what?”

  “For introducing us. You knew this would happen, didn’t you?”

  “How can anyone have known this was going to happen?”

  “You knew.” She looked radiant.

  At that moment Bill came back with her Perrier and Sharon said, looking at him, “You created us.”

  Bill called me the next morning and said we had to talk. I was going back to Marin that afternoon. We met at the Four Seasons bar. He looked like he hadn’t slept. His hands trembled as he lifted the vodka to his lips.

  “I’m leaving Nomer,” he told me.

  I shook my head. “This is crazy.”

  “I’m getting a divorce.”

  “You’ve lost your mind,” I said.

  He smiled a little. “I know it,” he said.

  “You think you’re in love with Sharon?” I said. “Fine. Have an affair with her, give it some time, see where it leads. But you don’t have to leave your wife and get a divorce to do that.”

  “I can’t just have an affair with her,” he said.

  “What do you mean you can’t have an affair with her? That’s the way it’s done. People don’t have lunch with somebody and then five days later say they’re getting a divorce!”

  “She won’t sleep with me until I leave Nomer.”

  “What is that? One of the Ten Commandments?”

  “She says it’s her rule.”

  “Bill,” I said, “she is an actress. She acts. That’s what she does. She loves drama. She loves scenes.”

  “She’s in love with me,” he said. “I can’t believe this. Sharon Stone is in love with me. Me. Bill Macdonald.”

  “She’s in love with you but she won’t sleep with you unless you dump your wife. What’s Naomi? Some kind of sacrificial offering that has to be dropped at Sharon’s feet before Sharon opens her legs?”

  “Come on.” He was hurt. “Don’t talk about her like that. You know how much Sharon likes you.”

  We sat without saying anything for a long moment.

  “She’s going to get me off cigarettes and booze,” Bill said. “She’s got an organic and healing approach to life. We were lovers in a past life, you know.”

  I couldn’t help laughing. “I told you, she’s an actress. She’s reading you bad lines out of some New Age paperback one of her girlfriends bought her.”

  “I know you don’t believe in past life stuff,” Bill said, “but I do.”

  I shook my head and ordered another Bloody Mary.

  “She’d be perfect for Renegade,” Bill suddenly threw in.

  “Bill,” I said, “if I would have wanted to go into a business partnership with Sharon, don’t you think I would’ve asked her?”

  “Think about the headlines,” he said. “Stone, Eszterhas, and Macdonald—in one production company. I’ve talked to her about it. She wants in.”

  “Well I don’t want her in.”

  “She’d be terrific,” Bill said. “You should hear her ideas about Atlas Shrugged.”

  I looked at Bill. This was the guy I was going to go into a business partnership with?

  “When are you going to tell Naomi?”

  “I don’t know,” he said. “Today, tomorrow, the next day. Whenever I get my courage up.”

  “Jesus,” I said, “you’ve been married five months, and five days after you have lunch with Sharon you leave your wife.”

  “The only reason I married Nomer,” Bill Macdonald said, “is because our dog died in a fire.”

  [Close-up]

  The Sheriff

  HIS DAD WAS a big macho TV star, always playing cowboys, cops, or soldiers, living it in his personal life, too: the big ranch, the horses, the gun collection, the vintage pickup trucks, Mexican spurs, silver-inlaid saddles.

  He was his father’s first child and idolized him, although it was mostly the image of his father he idolized since he saw his father more on television than in real life. His dad was on his fourth marriage now and the father of little kids and he sometimes felt very out of place at his father’s house on Thanksgiving or at Christmas, a big, hulking twenty-seven-year-old playing on the floor with kids who were young enough to be his and not his father’s children.

  He worried what his father thought about him. He was still taking acting lessons but wasn’t really getting any real parts, even with his dad’s agent’s help. He vaguely had his father’s looks but lacked his father’s swagger, his “Don’t fuck with me ’cause if you do I’m gonna fuck you up bad” style.

  The only thing about himself, he knew, that really pleased his dad was that he had gotten a job as a part-time, mostly weekend, sheriff’s deputy in the Valley. He could tell that when his dad looked at him wearing his yellow slicker with Sheriff’s Department on the back, or when his dad saw him in his sheriff’s uniform wearing his gun, his dad was really proud of him.

  “My kid’s a sheriff’s deputy,” he could imagine his father bragging to one of his old drinking buddies, usually stuntmen or the Teamsters who drove him to his sets, “nobody fucks with him.”

  He didn’t tell his dad that the reason he had gotten the sheriff’s job was that the personnel people had recognized his father’s name. He didn’t tell his dad that he wasn’t allowed out of the office; he sat there on weekends in his uniform, wearing his weapon on his hip, in front of a computer all day, while the other guys in the office asked him questions about his dad, his dad’s TV shows, his dad’s wives, and the women
his dad had dated.

  CHAPTER 20

  [Naomi’s Journal]

  Industry Dirt

  TEDDY

  You played me. You played me so well.

  JACK

  No!

  TEDDY

  You set me up from the very beginning.

  Jagged Edge

  April 6, 1993

  How do I begin to explain the events which have brought me to this point? I’m on a plane bound for Hawaii with Joe and Gerri Eszterhas, friends who have reached in and pulled me from the burning structure that has become my life.

  I will begin with February 17, the anniversary of my mother’s death, the day a part of me died.

  The day before Bill had come home anxious and depressed. He said it was because of this vicious and awful movie business. I tried to encourage him but he went to sleep without saying very much. He looked so disturbed.

  As I waited for him to come home on February 17, I felt a great sadness. My mother’s memory was with me all that day and her absence was so pervasive.

  Bill was late as he had been all week and I called him in the Jeep. He said he’d had a horrible day.

  “Is it Renegade?” I asked. He said no.

  Finally, in tears, he said, “It’s us.”

  He said, “I’m in love with someone else.”

  I said, “Sharon Stone?”

  “Yes,” he said. “She went to a psychic who told her we were lovers in a previous life. She broke up with Charlie Peters for me.”

  I said, “I thought you were happy the day we got married.”

  He said, “It was the happiest day of my life.”

  He said he was confused, that he needed time, that he couldn’t live without me in his life, that it was the saddest day of his life. He asked me if I would give him two months to sort his feelings out.

  I asked if he had slept with Sharon.

  He said he hadn’t because he didn’t want to “dishonor” me.

  He said that Joe and Gerri had known for days that he was in love with Sharon.

  The next day I told my older brother Bernie I was going to fly back to Ohio. I didn’t tell him why.

  As I waited for Bill to come home from the office, I decided that we would not spend this night in tears. I cooked a beautiful dinner, dressed beautifully, and tried to put on a bright face.

  Just before Bill came home, I called Gerri Eszterhas.

  What I learned from Gerri is that, in fact, Sharon had given him an ultimatum: “You can’t touch me until either she or you are out of the house.”

  I learned that Guy McElwaine, whom I’d never met, and Joe had tried to talk Bill out of walking away from a ten-year relationship for a woman he hardly knew and had never slept with.

  When Bill got home I told him what I’d learned. He denied that Sharon had given him an ultimatum. I wanted to believe him but I knew that Gerri had told me the truth.

  In the morning, as the reality sank in, I said, “I’m scared.”

  And he said, “Me too.”

  He asked that I please give him the two months to sort out his feelings and I named one condition.

  “I’ll give you the two months if you promise me you won’t see her for just ten days. Soul-search for ten days. Give me some consideration. Think everything over for ten days before you see her.”

  His eyes filled with tears and he hugged me hard. “I promise,” he said.

  I held up my chin and headed to Ohio.

  That was a Friday morning. What I learned subsequently was that after I left, Bill told everyone, including and especially Sharon, that I had moved to Ohio, that we were getting a divorce, and that we were over.

  He told friends that the night before I left—the night I dressed up and made a special dinner—I had mixed up a bunch of barbiturates in a cocktail and was threatening to drink it. He said I was suicidal.

  When I left that morning, he had promised me the ten days I had asked him for.

  What I learned later is that that same night he took Sharon to see a movie we had planned to see and he took her in my car, not his … my old vintage Mercedes.

  I couldn’t pick up a magazine in Ohio without seeing Sharon Stone on the cover. My brother Bernie and his wife, Joyce, tried to keep my spirits up.

  “Nobody has a successful marriage in Hollywood,” Bernie said.

  I said, “My friends Joe and Gerri Eszterhas do.”

  And then I found out why I was having such severe cramps. While Bernie and Joyce were at work, I took a cab to a nearby clinic. There I discovered I was experiencing a “precarious pregnancy.” I was four weeks pregnant.

  I asked, “Could you please put that in writing?”

  And the doctor said, “For insurance purposes?”

  And I said, “No. For my husband.”

  I told no one. I told Bernie I was going home. I prayed. I got on a plane and arrived in L.A. on a Wednesday night.

  Bill wasn’t there. I knew where he was.

  I sent the dog sitter home and spent the night curled up next to our dog, Jake.

  The next morning I called Bill in his Jeep. As I guessed, he was on his way to work at the Robert Evans Company.

  I told him I was back in L.A. and it was urgent that I speak to him.

  When he walked in the door I said, “I asked you to give me ten days to think of me and what I meant to you. I gave you ten years, I asked for ten days, and you didn’t even give me ten minutes.”

  He said nothing and looked down at his feet.

  Then I showed him the note from the doctor.

  He paced back and forth, talking to himself.

  “I’ve got to call Sharon,” he suddenly said.

  When he came out of the bedroom I said, “What did Sharon say?”

  “She said, ‘Well, this certainly adds a whole new twist to things.’”

  The next twenty-four hours were grueling. He said he knew he was destroying me and destroying himself. He said he was probably destroying his career, too, all for a woman “who probably doesn’t give a shit about me.”

  He crawled around on the floor, putting his head in his hands, telling me he never wanted to hurt me and that he’d rather be dead.

  Yet he kept talking to Sharon. She would call or he would call her.

  She wanted to know why he hadn’t packed his things and left.

  At one point, I sat in cramped pain by the fireplace in the living room while he spent nearly forty minutes in the bedroom on the phone.

  When he came out I asked, “What did she say?”

  And he said, “She said, ‘Are you the only person she can talk to about this? Doesn’t she have any friends she can call?’”

  I realized that, besides cramping badly, I must also have managed to catch my little nephew’s strep throat in Ohio.

  In between the bouts of tears, I felt my throat closing. I welcomed the physical pain. It was a throbbing distraction from my emotional hurt.

  Bill told me he adored me. He told me I was beautiful. He told me he was still very physically attracted to me.

  He told me I was his soul mate, that he couldn’t live without me.

  And he told me he couldn’t stay with me.

  “The reality is, Nomer,” he said, “I don’t deserve you.”

  At some point during this endless evening, something in me began to protect me. I heard these awful hurtful things yet I no longer felt them.

  I asked him—“What are you saying—that I should get rid of the baby?”

  And he said, “Maybe that would be best.”

  I saw his lips move, but what came out … crushed me.

  He finally said, “I can’t take this anymore, I have to leave,” and he walked out and went to Sharon’s house.

  I was cramping badly and my throat ached and my heart was broken.

  I called Jeremy, my little brother, who worked in L.A. in public relations.

  I hadn’t told him anything was wrong with my marriage.

  I asked him t
o come and get me.

  “Jeremy,” I said, “Bill is in love with Sharon Stone. He’s leaving.”

  He didn’t know what to say.

  He was there very quickly.

  As he drove I told my little brother in a numb monotone of the events that had transpired.

  As I told him, I remembered one of the most hurtful things Bill had said to me that night, “Don’t I deserve to love someone as much as you love me?”

  Jeremy took me to a clinic the next day. My throat was nearly closed and my stomach cramps were worse. I discovered that I had strep throat. And I discovered that I had lost the baby.

  I went back to stay at Jeremy’s apartment and Carl, a friend of Bill’s, came to see me. He was very upset about what had happened. He had known both of us for a long time.

  He said that Bill was sitting calmly by our fireplace amidst the boxes I had packed and he said, “You know, Carl, this is very Machiavellian. I have Joe Eszterhas in my pocket, I have Sharon Stone, I own Paramount.”

  Then Bill said, “But, you know, I’m really worried. Nomer worked so hard to clear up my credit rating, and now all these bills are coming in and no one’s keeping the books and I’m afraid my credit is going to get screwed up again.”

  The day after I returned to our apartment, a friend called. She is an actress and always privy to “industry dirt.”

  She said, “I heard.”

  I said, “About Sharon and Bill?”

  And she said, “Last Saturday a friend of mine went to a huge party in L.A. and she told me Sharon Stone was there with her new boyfriend. She said he was married but was dumping his wife for Sharon. When I asked her his name, she said ‘Bill Macdonald’ and I almost fainted. Since then I’ve heard that you’re pregnant and that you’ve tried to kill yourself.”

  One morning after about a week at home, Carl called. He said, “Bill called me and asked me if you were spreading rumors about town.”

  I said, “Me? Why would I say I’m suicidal? That’s the only rumor I’ve heard.”

  Carl said, “He’s such a coward. He wanted me to ask you about it, but I told him he’d have to call you himself.”

  An hour later Bill called.

  He said, “Are you going to be home later? I want to come over and talk to you about all these rumors I’ve been hearing. They’re not true.”