Costa-Gavras committed to direct my script the moment he finished reading it. Jane Fonda loved it, too. She had no suggestions, no notes, no changes. Jane said, “When do we shoot?”
She admired Costa, who was also a friend—she and her husband, Tom Hayden, had even taken Costa, the world-respected intellectual, to the Super Bowl. And Costa admired both Jane’s acting and politics, but came to the conclusion that she was too old for the part. Irwin Winkler and I disagreed with him. We both thought Jane would be wonderful as Ann Talbot. I thought that Jane was so talented she could do anything she wanted to do.
Costa called Jane and told her he was suddenly having difficulties seeing her in the part, but didn’t say why.
Jane called and asked me to help her. “I know he’s got a problem,” she said, “but I don’t know what it is.”
I respected Jane and told her the truth: “He thinks you’re too old for the part.”
“Shit,” she said, “what can I do?”
“Convince him you’re not,” I said.
She asked to do a screen test. In a town where most stars considered even reading for a part to be demeaning, here was Jane Fonda, one of the biggest stars in the world, asking for a screen test. She changed her hairstyle, had a makeover, and called me to say, “I’m going to convince him I’m nineteen.”
Irwin and I thought her test was sensational. Costa didn’t. He thought Jane looked too old. She was heartbroken. Costa didn’t budge.
She was paid $1.25 million “to go away.”
“Going Away Money,” I knew, was viewed as the kiss of death to a movie career. Costa cast Jessica Lange instead.
Marlon Brando was our first choice to play Jessica Lange’s father, and Costa flew to the Fijian island where Brando was living. When he got back to L.A., Costa said he had met with Brando and had ruled him out, even though Brando said he was interested in the part.
I didn’t get it: Brando was an icon; his presence in the movie would immediately have high-profiled it.
Costa was reluctant to tell me why he had ruled Brando out, but I pressed him.
“It is a problem of focus,” Costa finally said.
“What do you mean?”
“Brando focus on other things,” he said in his Franco-Greek accent. “Other thing than this script.”
I said, “Like what?”
Costa smiled and shrugged.
Costa finally cast the German actor Armin Mueller-Stahl, who, I thought, was too cerebral for the part, lacking a more elemental, Anthony Quinn–like temper, but the shoot went smoothly.
Costa embraced me the night before we began shooting and said, “Joe, I thank you for your script and your passion.”
I loved the finished movie. While I still had some reservations about Armin’s coldness, I thought Jessie’s performance was genius.
I was proud of the film on a very personal level. I, who was Hungarian-born, had showed the world what the Hungarians themselves … not occupying Nazi forces but the Hungarian people themselves … had done to the Jews at the end of the war.
When the war was decided and over, when there was no more ammunition, Hungarians had taken those Jews not already sent to Auschwitz down to the Danube and strangled them with their bare hands. I took great pride in exposing the full magnitude of this Hungarian horror to the world.
The movie got some terrific reviews and did very little business. “Joe Eszterhas,” the respected critic Michael Sragow wrote, “has written the ultimate feminist screenplay.” Elie Wiesel praised it.
We weren’t surprised the movie wasn’t doing much business. We hadn’t expected much—it was, at its core, a piece about a time in Hungarian history.
It very nearly wasn’t made. When I finished the script, MGM-United Artists, which had financed the script, told us they were pulling out.
“No one’s going to care what happened in Hungary at the end of the war,” an MGM-UA executive said.
We sent the script to Universal and Tom Pollock, the head of the studio, said he’d make the movie if I changed the ending: If Ann Talbot got her father off because he was innocent. If, in other words, I changed it to the clichéd, everybody’s happy Hollywood ending.
“I can’t do that,” I said. “If I changed it to that ending, the movie would become a rallying point for all those arguing that prosecution of war criminals fifty years after the fact is unfair. The Justice Department, and the Office of Special Investigations, would be villains.”
“Yes,” Tom Pollock said, “but with a happy ending—a daughter saving an unjustly accused father—you’ll have a chance—still a long shot—at a hit movie.”
Most producers in that situation do anything to a script to get it made, but Irwin Winkler was a very special producer. “We’re not changing anything,” he told Pollock. “We’ll find somebody who’ll make it our way.”
Irwin did, too. He found Carolco, whose co-chairman, at the time, Andy Vajna, was Hungarian and Jewish and had lost relatives in the Holocaust.
When the movie won the Best Film award at the Berlin Film Festival, Irwin, Costa, and I weren’t surprised. It was, after all, a very European movie. I was personally pleased to hear that it played for six sold-out months in Budapest.
And when Jessie was nominated for an Oscar, I was overjoyed for her and hoped she’d have better luck than Bob Loggia, who’d been nominated for Jagged Edge.
My father, eighty-three years old, saw the movie in Cleveland and said, “I’ve never been prouder of you than I am at this moment.”
As the weeks went by, he told me the Hungarian émigré community in America was enraged. They were accusing me of humiliating Hungary in the eyes of the world and betraying my heritage. He sent me an editorial from an émigré Hungarian-language newspaper which called me a “traitor.”
When he went to a Hungarian meeting, my father said, he was hissed and booed when he walked in.
About a year later, in November of 1990, while I was in L.A., Gerri called me early one morning to tell me my father was desperately trying to reach me.
“He sounds panicked,” she said.
I called my father in Cleveland and he was so upset he could hardly speak. He had just received, by registered mail, a letter from the Department of Justice.
He read it to me over the phone. It informed him that he was the target of a war crimes investigation by the Office of Special Investigations. The letter announced dates for hearings to be held at the federal building in Cleveland.
I sat down as he read the letter. I was dumbstruck. I remembered the scene … the scene I had written … in Music Box where Armin Mueller-Stahl tells Jessie about a letter just like this one, and Armin says, “It must be a different Mihály Lászlo.”
“What can this be about?” I asked my father.
“I don’t know,” he said, “I don’t know.”
I told him I’d be in Cleveland the next day and called my old friend Gerry Messerman, one of the city’s top criminal lawyers, a nationally respected figure who had devoted much of his life to civil rights issues and causes, a lawyer so good that F. Lee Bailey once said that if he were in trouble, he’d want Gerry Messerman to defend him. He had a brilliant, razor-sharp analytical mind and great depth. He was, in my estimate, a wise and profoundly good man.
I told Gerry about the letter my father had received from the Justice Department. He was equally dumbstruck.
“You better get here as soon as you can,” Gerry Messerman said finally. “This sounds very serious. Let me make some calls and see what I can find out.”
When I saw him in Cleveland the next day, Gerry looked grave. “This is a full OSI investigation,” he said. “They’ve been working on it for years. It has mainly to do with a book your father wrote in Hungary.”
“What book?”
He looked at his notes and spelled it. N-E-M-Z-E-T P-O-L-I-T-I-K-A.
He saw the startled look in my eyes. It was the book—National Policy—which my father said he could never find,
the only book of his that he could never find, the book that I had promised as a child that I would find for him when I grew up.
“There’s other stuff, too,” Gerry Messerman said. “He allegedly worked in the Propaganda Ministry during the war. He was allegedly in charge of anti-Semitic propaganda and he allegedly wrote anti-Semitic articles in newspapers.”
It felt like the ground was shifting under me. My father had always told me he worked in the Hungarian Prime Ministry, as an assistant to the prime minister; he had never mentioned the Propaganda Ministry or anti-Semitic propaganda. I remembered the times as a child when I had seen him arguing with the Franciscans or other Hungarians who had said ugly things about Jews.
I believed in the Office of Special Investigations. I had just written a movie heroizing the office and its agents. I believed that prosecuting war criminals fifty years after the fact was a just and honorable endeavor.
Now the very people whom I’d heroized in a movie seen around the world, the very people who, I believed, were heroic doing what they were doing … were investigating my father!
“What’s going to happen?” I asked Gerry Messerman.
“They’ll hold hearings first and—depending on what happens in the hearings, they can move to prosecute him. If he’s found guilty, he’ll be deported to Hungary.”
I said, “Jesus God.”
“I have to ask you something,” Gerry said. He kept his eyes, burning chunks of coal, on mine.
“You knew about this, didn’t you?”
I said, “No. God no!”
“Then why did you write Music Box?”
“Because I hated what Hungarians did at the end of the war.”
“How do you know what they did at the end of the war?”
“I read it. I’ve studied the subject since I was sixteen.”
“Why did you study the subject?”
“Because I felt awful that Hungarians had done it.”
“It didn’t have anything to do with your father?”
“No!”
“Nobody will believe that,” Gerry said. “Everybody will think you were writing about your father, exposing what he did. You felt guilty because of what he did and because he’s your father, so you exposed him.”
“Bullshit!” I said. “I didn’t know any of it.”
“Maybe not consciously,” Gerry Messerman said, “but you had to know it.”
When I saw my father that night at his little house in Cleveland Heights, the same house where my mother had died in 1967, I saw he was terrified. I told him what Gerry Messerman heard the OSI would allege.
He told me he hadn’t read Nemzet Politika since 1934, the year he wrote it, but he was certain there was nothing anti-Semitic in it. He said categorically that he’d never written anti-Semitic propaganda and insisted the “little work” he’d done for the Hungarian government was in the Prime Ministry.
I sat in the darkness of my suite that night at the Ritz-Carlton watching the lights twinkling across the Cuyahoga River on the West Side streets where I’d grown up. I could see St. Emeric’s church spire from my window.
I thought about those times I’d seen my father arguing with the Hungarian anti-Semites.
My father had taught me that all men are equal and I had spent my lifetime as a human being, as a journalist, as a screenwriter dedicated to that proposition …
… And I suddenly flashed on a line of dialogue in Music Box: “You are his best alibi,” someone says to Ann Talbot about her father.
Was it possible that my father had instilled humanitarian values in me so that my public expression of those values in America would serve as an umbrella to hide sins he had committed in Hungary?
Was it possible that you could love your son and train and use him as your alibi at the same time? Because I had no doubt how much my father had loved me all of my life. He was, once my mother got sick, the only parent in my life …
… And I flashed to Music Box again: Why had I created a scenario in which Ann Talbot’s mother dies when she is very young and her father becomes her only parent?
It took me back to Gerry Messerman’s question: Why, with a worldful of other things to write about, did I write this particular story?
· · ·
My father met me the next day in Gerry’s office. He looked haggard, the pouches under his eyes purple bruises. The OSI had Fed-Exed us a copy of Nemzet Politika and when I tore the envelope open I was shocked to discover that it was in English. I realized that the Justice Department had gone to the trouble and expense of translating Nemzet Politika in its entirety.
My father had always dreamed that one of his books would be translated into English. Now, thanks to the U.S. government, his dream had come true.
Gerry and I scanned through the pages hungrily as my father sat there calmly, staring out a window. It didn’t take us long to find it, a section headed “The Question of the Jews.”
My heart sank.
It read like the Hungarian version of Mein Kampf. Jews were “parasites” that “the body politic had to rid itself of.” There were sentences like: “The iron fist of the law must be applied to this parasitic race.”
The words blurred in front of me as tears filled my eyes. Gerry held his head in his hands as he read the pages. I couldn’t even begin to fathom what he must have been feeling … this proud and strong Jewish man, my dear friend, who had lost so many family members in the Holocaust.
A government investigator had this opinion of Nemzet Politika:
“It slanders the democracies, most of all the United States, and insists that a dictatorship is the highest form of efficient government; it incites to murder against the Jews and advocates ‘radical methods to silence the Jews forever.’”
A United States immigration affidavit that my father signed said:
“I have never advocated or assisted in the persecution of any person because of race, religion, or national origin.”
My father was still staring out the window.
“Is it bad?” he asked me.
“It’s bad,” I said.
“I wrote it so long ago,” he whispered.
“But you wrote it.”
“I must have,” he said. “If it’s there. I didn’t remember.”
“I don’t believe you,” I said.
He looked at me, tears flooding his eyes too now, then he looked away.
I said, “It’s filth. It’s shit. You’ve smeared your whole life with this shit. You’re smearing my life with this shit. How could you have written this filth?”
“I was young,” he said. “I was so young I even forgot about it.”
I said again, “I don’t believe it!”
· · ·
Gerry Messerman and I spent much of the next week questioning him in preparation for the hearings … grilling this old and sometimes feeble man who had raised me to be the man I was, who had supported me when I needed support, who had somehow made me believe in myself.
He kept denying that he’d been a part of the Propaganda Ministry, insisting, even, that his job with the Prime Ministry was so innocuous that he’d written his novels at the office while on the job.
Gerry and I both felt that he was lying over and over. He denied things or said he couldn’t remember.
“I’m eighty-three years old,” my father said. He waved his age like a flag.
At the end of our days grilling him, Gerry and I were depressed and badly shaken, as exhausted as my father.
As I drove him home one night, my father said, “You don’t have to act so cold to me.”
I didn’t respond and he said, “You’re my son. I’ve never loved anyone or anything in my life as much as you.”
“Why did you write these horrible things?” I asked.
“I never hurt any Jews,” he said. “I didn’t hit anyone or kill anyone.”
“But others may have struck them or killed them after reading the things you wrote.”
“It was a
different time,” he said. “I was poor. I was ambitious. Everybody hated the Jews.”
“So you wrote these things, this filth, for your career?”
“I never hated Jews,” he said, “like so many did. I’ve never been a strong man. I’ve always been weak. I’m not like you.”
“Don’t!” I said. “Don’t try to manipulate me! Please!”
“This wouldn’t be happening,” he said, “if we wouldn’t have lost the war.”
“You,” I said. “Not we. Not me. You. If you wouldn’t have lost the war.”
“Yes, me!” he said bitterly. “You don’t know. What do you know? You, the American! My American son! What do you understand? You don’t know what it was like in those days. Everybody was crazy then. Hitler on one side, Stalin on the other. We were such a small country. We were too small to survive alone. We had to go to one side or the other. We tried Communism with Béla Kun in 1919. There were dead people hanging off the lampposts everywhere. Nobody wanted to go through that again.”
He said, “Good night, my American son!” when we got to his house, “I love you.”
I watched him go slowly up the porch steps in his heavy overcoat and Hungarian peasant hat.
I went back to my hotel those nights and played a tortured game with myself. I tried to figure out what I had known as a child.
I realized my father must have been in constant fear in the forty years he’d by then lived in America. Fear of being uncovered. Fear of being deported.
Was that why he had stayed so close within his Hungarian world in America? Was that why he’d worked so long for paltry wages for the openly anti-Semitic Franciscans? Was that why the Franciscans had chosen him to edit their paper? Because they knew of his anti-Semitism?
Why then did I see him arguing with the Franciscans and other Hungarians who wanted to write anti-Semitic articles for the newspaper? Was that because he was afraid those articles would come to the attention of Americans who would then look into his background?
And I thought about my mother—my pious and religious mother. She must’ve known about his writings. Did she agree with that filth?
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