Hollywood Animal

by Joe Eszterhas

  He arrived promptly. He gave me a very awkward hug and said, “That’s a nice top.”

  “I bought it for the Sliver wrap party.”

  He said, “You look really pretty. Your teeth are so white.”

  I said, “My teeth have always been white.”

  He said, “I want to talk about these rumors.”

  “Good. I’ve been hearing I’m threatening to drink barbiturate cocktails.”

  “That’s ridiculous,” he said. “We don’t have anything in the house stronger than aspirin.”

  · · ·

  He handed me some papers.

  I asked, “What’s this?”

  “They’re dissolution of marriage papers that my attorneys drafted.”

  He asked me to take my time over the weekend and read them.

  “I won’t cheat you, Nomer,” he said.

  Then he said, “We have to get our story straight to the press.”

  “What do you mean?”

  “We have to decide what story we want to tell publicly.”

  “Why don’t we just tell the truth?” I said. “So many people already know the truth.”

  “Yes, but people only believe what they read.”

  I said, “What story would you like me to tell?”

  “Why don’t we say that you decided you didn’t like the movie business, that I was never home and you were unhappy and you left me.”

  “I left you?” I said.

  He said, “It’s just that Sharon is afraid that this will hurt her career. And I don’t want to end up looking like Mr. Stone.”

  I said, “I’m not going to lie to protect Sharon Stone.”

  He asked me to please think about changing my story—to protect myself. He told me I should sign the dissolution papers—to protect myself.

  “Protect myself?” I said, “I haven’t done anything.”

  He said, “Can you imagine if it gets out that I’m living with Sharon and you don’t even have a formal separation? It’ll be embarrassing.”

  “I’m willing to endure the humiliation,” I said. “I have so far.”

  He shrugged and said, “Chances are the press won’t call you anyway.”

  He said he’d call me on Sunday to see what I’d decided. As he walked to the door, he paused and asked, “What are you doing tonight? Do you have plans?”

  I said yes.

  “Where are you going?”

  I said I was going to an art show.

  He asked if I was going with this person … or this person … or that person.

  I said, “What does it matter, Bill?”

  He put his head down and said, “Okay.”

  Then he walked to the elevator and turned and said, “Who are you going with? Tell mie.”

  I didn’t want to tell him I was going alone.

  “I guess I can’t ask you that anymore, can I?” he said.

  “No.”

  He looked lost. He lingered still as he held the elevator door open and then as I closed my door, he quickly ducked into the elevator.

  A few days later, I was home alone, fixing myself a sandwich. I couldn’t remember the last time that I’d eaten.

  Just as I finished making it, the phone rang. It was a woman from the Paramount Pictures publicity department.

  She said, “We’ve just learned that Sharon is going to announce her engagement to Bill on the Barbara Walters special after the Academy Awards.

  “Since we’re handling Sharon’s publicity, we thought we might be able to handle any media calls for you.”

  I hung up and gave Jake the sandwich.

  Bill was on the Barbara Walters special. He was introduced as Sharon Stone’s new fiancé.

  He didn’t even know who she was the first time I mentioned her. After we saw Total Recall I said to him, “That woman is going to be a big star.” He said, “Who?” I said, “Sharon Stone.” He said, “Which one was she?”

  Then she did a black-and-white nude pictorial in Playboy, which Bill never reads and I subscribe to. I showed him the pictures. “Remember her? From Total Recall?” He barely glanced at them. “Yeah, I guess,” he said.

  Then she was the lead in Basic Instinct. Bill wasn’t interested in seeing it, so I went without him. Afterward I told him, “You should see it.” He said he would see it when it came out on video.

  Next came her Playboy interview. I was reading it in bed and kept reading parts of it aloud to Bill. I saved the interview for him. I put it on his nightstand, but he never picked it up.

  After she was cast as the lead in Sliver, I said, “Hey—maybe you’ll get to meet Sharon Stone …”

  One day he came home and said, “I finally met Sharon.”

  I said, “What’s she like?”

  He said, “I think she liked my tie.”

  I went out and bought him some new Hermès ties.

  And now she’s his fiancée and I’m his wife.

  [Close-up]

  Clash of the Super-Studs

  RENATA WAS THE girl who got away, the girl Evans didn’t like to talk about.

  She was a German model. She was one of Evans’s girls, staying in Evans’s house, which was where, at a party, she met Eddie Fisher.

  This was years back, when neither Evans nor Eddie were golden agers.

  Eddie met Renata and lightning struck. True love. Roomsful of roses. The whole Hollywood schmeer.

  Evans was pissed. He was a legendary Hollywood super-stud and he wasn’t going to let Eddie, this other legendary Hollywood super-stud, take her.

  Evans proposed a duel on his tennis court at dawn. A real, old-time cinematic duel. With real guns!

  Eddie was game, but Renata, even though she was German, didn’t like violence.

  And: she suddenly decided she was in love with Evans, not Eddie. Lightning struck again. Roomfuls of roses. The whole Hollywood schmeer.

  Evans flew her to New York and away from Eddie. Evans flew her two dogs, which Eddie had given her, to New York, too. Evans even flew her blind cat, which she had found wandering around Beverly Hills, to New York.

  But … away from Eddie … Renata missed him.

  And: Renata suddenly decided she was in love with Eddie, not Evans. Lightning struck again. Blah blah blah.

  Eddie flew her to Vegas and away from Evans. Eddie flew her two dogs and her blind cat and blah blah blah blah blah.

  Renata started to gamble in Vegas. She couldn’t lose. She won thousands of dollars.

  And: she decided she was in love with neither Eddie nor Evans.

  She flew back to Hamburg with her two dogs and her blind cat. She built her mother a beautiful house.

  And: away from both Evans and Eddie, Renata was happy.

  CHAPTER 21

  Tabloids and Flailing Scissors

  FRANK

  You’re fucking my wife?

  JEREMY

  Of course I am.

  FRANK

  I’m gonna kill you!

  JEREMY

  Frank, Frank—this kinda stuff happens, okay?

  Male Pattern Baldness, unproduced

  WHEN I WENT back to Marin from L.A. and told Gerri that Bill was divorcing Naomi, she got hysterically upset. She called Sharon a witch and a demon and said Sharon had wrapped both Bill and me around her little finger.

  I knew how close Gerri felt to Naomi, but I knew, as she carried on, that it was more than just that.

  My relationship with Gerri had been strained for some time. We had grown apart as Steve and Suzi had grown up. As I watched my wife of twenty-four years now, she was raging, it seemed to me, not just about Bill’s betrayal of Naomi but of her own husband’s intimate betrayals that played themselves out in one-night stands and painful morning-afters (never discussed, never mentioned).

  When Gerri flailed at me with a pair of scissors, just missing my face, I saw the shape she was in. Gerri was a strong woman, not prone to hysterics. I suggested professional help and she snapped at me that she didn’t need it. Sh
e’d frightened me with the scissors. I didn’t know what to do to try to calm her down. I finally booked a suite for the two of us, without the kids, at the Kahala Hilton on Oahu, where we’d spent so many happy times as a family.

  Our second day there, over breakfast, Gerri suddenly said, “You’re screwing around on me, aren’t you, Joseph?”

  I looked at her. Her eyes were red. She looked like she’d been crying all night. It was the one question she’d never asked me in twenty-four years.

  “Please don’t ask me that,” I said. “I’m not going to lie to you. The answer to that question doesn’t have anything to do with my affection for you or with our marriage.”

  She told me that she knew. She told me that she’d had a vision “beamed to her from L.A.” by Sharon Stone.

  She saw me making love in this vision to a woman with short blond hair. Then, Gerri said, the woman turned so she could see her face. It was Sharon.

  “My God, Gerri,” I said. “Sharon and I are friends.”

  “You’re lying to me, Joseph,” she said. “She’s a demon. You took her body and she took your soul.”

  We went back to Marin County and Gerri kept it up about demons and witches and Sharon. She bought a collection of books about witchcraft and spent long hours underlining them.

  I remembered my mother ranting at my father and me when I was a boy, calling us “Ördögök!”—Devils!

  As I watched Gerri alternate between tears and rage … we somehow kept it from Steve and Suzi, now eighteen and sixteen, busy with their teenage social lives … I realized that my personal life had turned into a nightmare.

  On any intimate level, my marriage had been dead for a very long time. Whatever brief solace I had found with women in bars and clubs was illusory and meaningless.

  Wanting to escape and think, I flew down to L.A., where there were problems with Sliver, which was still in the editing room.

  Phillip Noyce’s cut of my script, a word-for-word shoot, had been tested by the market research people and found to be lacking.

  The studio had decreed a rewrite and reshoots. Noyce, who believed in the script, was aghast at the studio’s “suggestions.”

  But he agreed to make the studio’s changes. Evans viewed the market research failure of the movie as his personal triumph. He was working around-the-clock on his own cut as well as his own musical score (Love Story–like).

  Evans was going to be the hero now. Evans was going to “save” Sliver.

  · · ·

  Stanley Jaffe was the head of the studio at Paramount and his son, Bobby, a nice young man, was a vice president of production.

  Bobby was going to London on business and he wanted to get laid there so Stanley Jaffe asked Evans to set it up for him.

  Evans called me, nearly crying. “This is what my life has come to,” he said, “getting the boss’s son laid.”

  What was he going to do? I asked.

  No problem, said Evans. He had called his friend Heidi Fleiss, the famous madam, and Bobby Jaffe was all set.

  “In like Flynn,” Evans said.

  The studio was aswirl with stories of Sharon and Bill. They were tabloid fodder now. Bill had moved in with Sharon and was accompanying her everywhere. He looked trapped in the headlights to me—in Paris, in Rome, in Vegas.

  A friend had sat next to them at an exhibitors convention in Vegas. “Bill came in a little late. Sharon looked at him and said, ‘Change that tie.’ He didn’t say a word, just went upstairs and reappeared with a new tie.”

  At the same time, Sharon was telling the Star: “He is square, square, square. I love it. He’s really macho with a deep voice. It gives me such a thrill that he’s so square after all these really hip guys with their waist-length hair and their mellow artistic temperaments. Give me my macho, old-fashioned square boyfriend who says ‘Come here’ and I do—because it’ll be good when I get there. Last weekend my boyfriend just said, ‘You’re done working weekends. You’re not doing more than two pictures a year.’ The point is, he can take charge. There’s a bit of tension there, and I like that. At this point in my life, no one is going to take control of me. The point is finding somebody over whom I don’t have complete control.”

  I went back to Marin. Gerri called Naomi in L.A. and asked her to come up and “hide out” at our house if she wanted to.

  Naomi was being besieged by paparazzi. One of them had even tried to pay her dog sitter off for a photograph.

  Gerri handed me the phone and I urged Naomi to come up to see us. She sounded devastated. I knew, though, that she had a great sense of humor and I thought I detected it when she mock-berated me.

  “I blame you for all of this,” Naomi said. “She never would’ve been in Sliver had you not written Basic. This is all your fault.”

  I knew that Gerri and Naomi had become good friends and hoped that her presence would brighten Gerri a bit. And then there was the bottom line: life in our house these days, with problems out in the open now between Gerri and me, was bleak.

  I liked being around Naomi. She made me smile.

  As Naomi and Gerri spent their days together, I tried to work on the rewrite the studio was insisting upon.

  Evans sent me a case of scented candles for inspiration.

  I kept thinking about how Ira Levin, a writer I admired, would feel when he saw the movie … he had called to praise and thank me when he’d read my first draft, now about to be obliterated.

  Naomi and I, always in Gerri’s company, were seeing a lot of each other.

  Gerri, I thought, was lightening up a little. She even started laughing at herself one day when she was reading aloud from a witchcraft book and drawing analogies to Sharon.

  I told Naomi I gave the relationship between Sharon and Bill six months.

  One day while Naomi was staying in Tiburon with us, Gerri and I drove her out to a fisherman’s restaurant called the Tides on the coast in Bodega Bay.

  Naomi and I smoked a joint in the car on the way back … and Gerri offered to drive while the two of us giggled at nothing like loons.

  There was a Beatles tape on in the car and we heard the song called “Don’t Let Me Down.”

  “Play that—” I said, and Naomi hit the button again before I even finished the sentence.

  We played that song over and over again until we got to Tiburon.

  Gerri said, “I don’t know why you guys like that song so much.”

  On another night in Tiburon, all three of us had smoked a joint and Naomi told us how, after Bill had met Sharon, Naomi had given Bill a nice new tie for Bill’s next meeting with her.

  “Freud would say,” I began, “that you wanted Bill to look nice for Sharon, that you subconsciously wanted out of your relationship with Bill and wanted to palm him off on Sharon.”

  “Oh, Freud!” Gerri suddenly said. “I’m so tired hearing about Freud from you! Fuck Freud! That’s what I say! Fuck Freud!”

  Naomi and I, sky-high, started to laugh and couldn’t stop as Gerri went into a full rant:

  “Joseph and his Freud! You have no idea how tired I am of hearing about him! What would Freud say? Who cares? Nobody cares! Nobody cares, Joseph! Fuck Freud!”

  After a while Gerri started to laugh, too, and soon she was laughing harder than we were. Suzi came down from her room and saw us laughing like idiots.

  “You guys are sure having fun!” Suzi said, and she started to laugh, too.

  Gerri and I and Steve and Suzi and two of their friends had a spring vacation trip planned to Maui in a week and Gerri asked me if we could invite Naomi along.

  We were both enjoying her presence. She was lightening the gravity of our marital problems, the kids liked her very much, so I agreed.

  Naomi didn’t want to come.

  I knew what she meant. We were having too much fun together, even though it was always in Gerri’s company.

  We had too much to talk about, we had too many things in common … Ohio and reading and music and ethnic back
grounds … and even Evans.

  For all those reasons, Naomi didn’t want to come … but I convinced her.

  Gerri, meanwhile, was confiding in Naomi like she’d never confided in any other friend. She told her how unhappy she had been in our marriage for a long time. She told her how she should have stayed in Lorain, the small Ohio town where she grew up. And she talked over and over again about Sharon Stone being a demon.

  Naomi told her Sharon Stone was not a demon … just a woman who happened to have fallen in love with Naomi’s husband. And she told Gerri that I was her husband and that Gerri should stop railing at me about infidelities real or imagined.

  I felt Gerri was feeling much better (and so, I thought, was Naomi) and I went back down to L.A. to have what turned out to be my final meetings over Sliver.

  Evans, looking reborn, racing around in a White House cap given to him by Marlin Fitzwater, was trumpeting his own cut.

  Noyce, unshaven and haggard, looked like he’d eaten some poisonous mushrooms.

  Stanley Jaffe, the head of the studio, perhaps sensing that his days at Paramount were numbered, looked like he needed an IV of Maalox.

  Tom Berenger, awaiting the reshoot, was taking swigs off a bottle of vodka in his trailer.

  And Sharon and Bill were off somewhere in Tabloid Nirvana, paparazzi in hot pursuit.

  I told Evans and Noyce and the studio that I was going to Maui. Lots of luck on the reshoot, guys, but I was gone.

  Phillip Noyce, a hangdog and forlorn sadness in his eyes, said, “You, too, mate. You have abandoned me, too.”

  Bill Macdonald appeared in Guy McElwaine’s office.

  “Evans,” Bill said, “will have Sharon killed if she doesn’t support Evans’s cut of the movie over Noyce’s.”

  Bill told Guy that he knew for a fact that Evans had already had three people murdered.

  Guy knew it was bullshit. Everyone who knew Evans knew that Evans was the devil, but everyone also knew that he was incapable of ordering the murder of anyone. Evans was the devil with a heart: Lucifer Sweet.

  “If what you’re saying is true,” Guy said to Bill, “put your allegations into writing. Then I can present it to the FBI and the powers at Paramount.”