Hollywood Animal

by Joe Eszterhas

  It was a meat market, it was packed. Gerri went outside to talk to the kids, to see what their plan for the evening was. Joe walked up to the dance floor, where many people stand and watch the band. I was left with Guy, who was slowly sipping a drink.

  I glanced back at the table and saw Naomi sitting with Guy as, one after another, the guys in the place went up and asked her to dance. I saw her shaking her head. Gerri wasn’t there.

  I thought—I know what Joe’s doing. The tension is thick. He’s catching his breath for a minute.

  I wanted to dance with her. That’s all I felt. I wanted to hold her in my arms.

  As I looked at him, I thought—I want to be near him. I don’t want to sit here with Guy. I said, “Guy, I’m going to talk to Joe. Will you watch my purse?”

  He looked at me long and hard. Then he just reached out his hand and took my purse.

  I watched her come toward me from the table. As she came up, I saw Gerri back at the table, standing there, her eyes on me.

  The band was called the Missionaries. They were playing rock and roll. When Joe saw me, he was silent for a minute. Then he said, “You want to dance?” He said it so calmly.

  I said, “Yes.”

  So he put his drink down and took my hand.

  I felt Gerri’s eyes burning at us, laserlike, across the room.

  Just as we walked to the floor, the song ended. We stood there a few seconds. Then the band began to play a slow, throbbing love song. The floor cleared. For a moment I thought he would say, “Let’s wait for the next one.” But he didn’t.

  I danced with her. We melted into each other out there alone on that dance floor, holding on to each other as though each of us was a lifeline. We were both trembling.

  He took me in his arms and in that moment the club disappeared for me. I only felt him, smelled him, saw him. I wanted never to let go.

  Guy was there suddenly.

  He said, “You don’t want to do this.”

  I said, “Leave me alone.”

  He said, “You don’t want to do this like this—come on, go back to the table, let me dance with Naomi.”

  I said, “If you touch Naomi, I’m gonna break your fuckin’ neck.”

  Joe gave him one of those looks that can stop a wild boar in its tracks. My heart was pounding. Guy went back to the table.

  Gerri was out on the dance floor.

  “Do you want me to go, Joseph?” she said.

  She wasn’t crying. She almost whispered the words, her eyes almost blank now.

  I said, “It’s up to you.”

  She stood there a moment as I held Naomi, watching us, and then she went back to sit down with Guy.

  We finished the dance. We quickly left the club. Gerri had given the kids the van, so we took a cab back to the Four Seasons. I rode up front with the driver, the girl in the little red dress. Joe sat with Guy and Gerri in the back. It was forty minutes of utter dead silence.

  I remembered on that taxi back to Lahaina what I had said to Bill Macdonald to stop him from letting Naomi come to the Sliver wrap party: “Do you want to humiliate your wife?” I knew that I had just humiliated mine.

  When we got to the hotel Gerri quickly got out and hurried into the lobby ahead of us.

  Guy said an awkward good night. He had tears in his eyes.

  I took out another room in a different wing of the hotel under a false name. Naomi and I went up to the room and I took Naomi’s red dress off with my teeth.

  She left at four in the morning and went back to her own room. I ordered a pot of coffee and sat out on the patio watching the sunrise and trying to sort out what I was going to do with my life.

  The next morning at eight Joe called me in my room. “What’s going on next door?” he said. I hadn’t heard anything yet.

  I said, “I’m going to go over.”

  He said, “I’m on my way up, do you want to wait?”

  I said, “No, I’ll meet you there.”

  Gerri had a right to confront me alone, to say what she wanted, without me walking in under Joe’s protection.

  I went up to Guy’s room first. He hadn’t slept all night.

  “What are you going to do?” he said.

  “I’m going to tell Gerri.”

  “You can’t do that,” he said. “Not now. Not here. Not on a vacation with your kids here.”

  “There’s nothing left to tell her, Guy,” I said. “She saw everything last night.”

  “People have too much to drink,” he said. “Things happen. Gerri wants an excuse not to believe what she saw.”

  “She knows I didn’t spend the night with her last night. What does she think I was doing?”

  “You went down to the beach,” Guy said. “You fell asleep on the beach. I found you there this morning. We’ll go in together. Get in my shower and get a little wet, then we’ll go up.”

  “Guy,” I said, “I’m tired of all the lying and all the stories. It’s gone on too long.”

  “Fine,” he said, “but you don’t have to end it here, with your kids here—before you have a chance to think out what you really want to do.”

  “I know what I really want to do,” I said. “I want to be with Naomi.”

  I knocked on her door and said, “Gerri?” She said, “Come in.” She was sitting on the couch with her elbows on her knees, wearing the hotel robe. She turned and looked at me with raw hatred.

  “You were my friend!” she said. “I told you everything!” Her words hung and I just stood there. Then she looked back down at the floor. I closed the door and went to sit in the chair next to the couch.

  “I’m sorry,” I said. “I am so desperately sorry. I don’t know what happened. I lost control. I am so strongly attracted to him I can’t even think straight. I’m sorry. I don’t know what else to say. It was awful and I’m sorry.”

  She was sneering. Her eyes were coal-black. “I told you all my secrets,” she said, “and you used them against me. You told him everything I said and then turned him against me.”

  “I never told him anything,” I said. “I was trying to help you and then, I don’t know what happened, I am just so drawn to him.”

  “What are you telling me?” she said. “That you’re in love with my husband?”

  I thought for a moment. Should I lie? What will Joe say to her? And I thought—I’ve been honest with her until now. I won’t lie.

  I said, “I don’t know, Gerri. I guess I am.”

  She said, “Is he in love with you?”

  And I said, “I don’t know. You’ll have to ask him that.”

  She looked at the floor and then, as it bubbled up inside her, she raged. She said I was evil. She said I had planned the whole thing. She said I had “poisoned” Joe.

  I listened for a while and then I said, “What did you do? Always insisting I sit beside him, leaving us alone together for hours and days, trying to buy me sexy lingerie because he’d like it. What was that? You were practically throwing him at me!”

  She thought for a minute and looked down. We sat in silence for what must have been fifteen minutes. It seemed like hours.

  · · ·

  I was standing in Guy’s shower, wearing shorts and a T-shirt, getting wet but not too wet … just wet enough for having fallen asleep on the beach.

  I felt like a schmuck. I was forty-eight years old and I was playing out the first part of an idiotic, absurd charade.

  I got out of the shower and Guy looked me over and said, “Perfect!”—it was one of his favorite words and the title of one of the biggest failures he had green-lighted when he was the head of Columbia.

  I said, “This is demeaning!”

  “You’ll thank me for this later,” he said. “I know what I’m talking about. I’ve been in this situation.” He shrugged. “Lots of times.”

  “I can’t go through with this,” I said.

  “Sure you can. I didn’t think I could go through something like this either,” he said. “The fi
rst time.”

  There was a knock at the door, Gerri answered it. Before Joe could say anything, she said, “So here’s the man who’s in love with Naomi Macdonald!”

  I said, “I didn’t say that, Gerri. I said you should ask him yourself.”

  She was standing right in front of Joe.

  She said, “So are you?”

  I thought—Well, this is the moment. The moment when most men, at least the ones I’ve known in my life, say, “Now everybody calm down. Let’s sort this out. Things are way out of control …” and somehow beg the question. Or deny it completely.

  I said—Yes I am.

  Guy just turned and headed for the door.

  Gerri looked at me and said, “I want to speak to my husband alone!”

  Joe said, “Guy, will you take Naomi and wait next door?”

  Gerri said, “I want her out of the hotel!”

  Joe said, “I want her next door.”

  Gerri started to cry, almost in a whimper, when they left the room.

  The mother of my beautiful children, my wife of twenty-four years, a lovely woman with a gentle and big heart, and I started to cry, too.

  We cried and talked for nearly three hours, discussing intimate and painful things we should have talked about many, many years ago. Our talk was hurtful, loving, draining … and too late.

  She begged me not to leave her and she said that both Sharon and Naomi were demons. “Sister beings,” she said. She said I was possessed by both of them.

  I told her that I had never wanted to hurt her, but had been lonely for a long time.

  “I’ll change, Joseph,” she said, “I promise you, but please don’t do this.”

  I told her that we would call it a trial separation. I said I was taking Naomi to the Ritz-Carlton, on the other side of the island, and that I was going to come back tomorrow to tell the kids (who were camping).

  “What will you tell them?” she said, almost in shock.

  I told her I’d tell them the truth.

  “How can you do this?” Gerri said. “How can you hurt your own children this way?”

  “I don’t know,” I said. “I don’t know how I can hurt them this way. I never thought I would.”

  I went into the bedroom and started packing my suitcase.

  “What are you doing?” she said, horrified.

  “I’m packing, Gerri. I told you. I’m going over to the Ritz-Carlton.”

  “But I always pack for you,” she said.

  I had to look away. I felt I was being choked by an overwhelming sadness.

  “Aw, come on, Gerri,” I said. “Please.”

  She went to the suitcase and started packing my things.

  When we got to my room, Guy said, “I need a beer. Where’s the key to your minibar?”

  I said, “I don’t use it. The only thing I ever drink is Diet Coke and I don’t like to get it from the minibar because it’s too expensive.”

  He looked at me like I was deranged.

  “I’m going to my room to get a beer,” he said. “I’ll be right back.”

  When he came back, we sat out on the balcony in silence for a moment. I had only met him the day before and we’d just been through a lifelong twenty-four hours.

  He took a long drag on his cigarette and said, “This is very serious. This marriage is in a worldful of hurt. Are you sure you love him?”

  I thought long and hard. I could profess undying love, but I wanted to answer as honestly as possible.

  “Well, I know what people are going to say. That I was in love a month ago with somebody else. That I’m a trauma victim and that I don’t know what I’m doing. That it’s impossible to so quickly be over the ordeal I’ve been through. That I cried because Sharon ruined my marriage and now I’m wrecking Gerri’s. And I understand that.

  “All I know is that I always thought I was happy. But now I don’t think I ever knew what happiness was. I certainly never felt like this. All I think about is him. When he’s in the room, I’m happy. Even if he’s across the room talking to someone else, I feel overjoyed to have him near.

  “I can’t focus on anything else. And I know that for a long time, they weren’t happy. Before either of them knew me. And I just can’t let the best thing that’s ever happened to me walk away just because Gerri is my friend, too. Or because I will be ridiculed for the hypocrisy and the immorality of it. It’s bigger than all that. And that’s the best way I can explain it.”

  Guy thought about it and said, “Well, that sounds like love to me.”

  I kissed Gerri on the cheek, asked her to forgive me, and said I’d be back the next day to talk to Steve and Suzi.

  I went next door and saw Naomi sitting on the bed.

  “How quickly can you pack?” I asked.

  He looked like he’d aged five years in that other room. I thought he was telling me that I was going back to L.A.

  He said, “We’re going over to the Ritz-Carlton.”

  Naomi held me. She went to get her suitcase and had trouble lifting it. I helped her. We were both shaking, overwhelmed by the moment.

  We couldn’t figure out why the suitcase was so heavy.

  When we opened it, we found that Gerri had filled it with gift soaps and shampoos during our stay. Naomi held these things … that Gerri had planned as a surprise for her … and started to cry.

  I went out on the patio and Guy looked at me and said, “How was it?”

  “Awful.”

  “Did you tell her?”

  I nodded.

  “All of it?”

  I nodded.

  Guy took a long slug off his beer bottle. “I’ll stick around for a couple days,” Guy said, “give Gerri somebody to talk to, walk the beach with her.”

  “Thank you,” I said.

  I’d leave with Naomi … and my agent would stay behind to work the deal … and hold Gerri’s hand.

  It was such a Hollywood ending.

  We drove across to the Ritz and as I held Naomi snuggled against me, I felt exhilarated and decimated.

  I was in love like I’d never been in love before … and I was decimating a woman whose only crime was that she and I had grown in different ways and in different directions in the course of twenty-four years.

  And I, who had always worked so hard to protect my children from hurt and harm, would now inflict upon them the greatest pain of their young lives.

  On the way over to the Ritz-Carlton, as I held her against me, I told Naomi my greatest secret.

  I told her about my father … about how much I had loved him and how, three years ago, in 1990, I had tried to stop loving him … the man who’d been the most important person in my life.

  I cried sometimes as I told her. After a while Naomi cried with me. For me. For us. For everything.

  CHAPTER 26

  Sins of the Fathers

  ANN

  This Michael Lászlo must have lied when he got his citizenship. He’s accused of war crimes.

  HER FATHER

  What I know war crime? I don’t do nothing like that. I not like that.

  ANN

  Papa, it’s not you. It’s somebody else. They made a mistake. We’ll clear it up. Don’t worry.

  Music Box

  JANE FONDA HAD never met Richard Marquand although, she was saying, she would have liked to. She said she had liked Jagged Edge very much.

  “I should have done it,” Jane said, “I made a mistake.”

  We were sitting at Don’s Hideaway at the Beverly Wilshire in 1987 (Jane had called and asked to see me).

  She said, “I have an idea that I would very much like you to do. I don’t know what it is with the two of us—it never seems to work out—Silkwood, then Jagged Edge, maybe this one will.”

  She wanted to do a remake of All About Eve, set in the movie business. It was one of her favorite movies. She thought the story could be better told shifted to the world of film from Broadway.

  I agreed with her. It was an exciting i
dea, but there was no way I would do it.

  “Jane,” I said, “I live in Marin County. I don’t know the innards of this town. I try to stay away from it as much as possible to keep myself relatively sane. I don’t want to hurl myself into this world.”

  We went back and forth and I finally convinced her.

  “Well, damn,” she said, stopping the waiter, “can I have a triple tequila please?” She was kidding. We all laughed.

  I smiled. I very much wanted to work with this woman. Putting it at its simplest, I admired her.

  “I’ve got another idea,” I said. It was something that I’d been thinking about for a long time, even before I started writing screenplays. “How about a piece about an American lawyer of ethnic descent who discovers one day that her father, a man she adores, is being accused of having been a war criminal in the old country. She has to defend him.”

  Jane said, simply, “Yes. It puts chills down my back.”

  The next day her agent made a deal for United Artists and the story of the lawyer and her accused war criminal father was slotted into my new three-picture deal. I asked Irwin Winkler to produce it. He liked the idea as much as Jane did.

  “What nationality will you make her?” Irwin asked.

  “Well, she’s American,” I said, “she came to this country when she was very little.”

  “No,” Irwin said, “I mean her father—what nationality will you make her father?”

  “Hungarian,” I said.

  Irwin looked at me strangely for a moment and then he nodded.

  The movie which I wrote, Music Box, is about a Hungarian immigrant named Mihály Lászlo who comes to America from the refugee camps and raises his children to be successful Americans. His daughter, Ann Talbot, becomes a respected criminal attorney in Chicago.

  One day, out of the blue, the Justice Department’s Office of Special Investigations announces it is prosecuting her father for war crimes allegedly committed in Hungary many years ago. Ann Talbot defends him.

  Thanks to her efforts, her father is cleared of the charges. It is only then that she discovers he is guilty. Her father, the man she has loved most in her life, is a war criminal, a moral monster.