My father: “Yes.”
And what had he done?
Had he, as I had so naively asked him when I was a teenager, “tried to stop it”?
No, he had worked for the government … for the Arrow Cross government, for the Nyilas … until the last moment before the Communists took control of Budapest.
As I watched my father deny everything or claim not to remember, I thought suddenly of his childhood friend, Puskás Öcsi, the internationally famous soccer star, and what he had said: “Your father was one of the toughest kids I’ve ever met.”
“Your father couldn’t run because of his limp,” Puskás Öcsi had said. “So he constructed a wooden shield for himself that he put on his back like armor. All the beer bottles bounced off his back.”
Whenever a new charge was made, my father either denied it or said he couldn’t remember. And when the evidence was presented, he stared and blinked at the newspaper or affidavit or the internal memo with his signature on it and shrugged or shook his head.
At the end of a day of the hearings, the first Gulf War broke out and Saddam Hussein fired his rockets at Israel. As Gerry Messerman and my father and I were leaving the building, there were erroneous news reports that Tel Aviv had been hit with chemical weapons. We hurried to the car and put the radio on. My father asked me in Hungarian what was going on and I told him that Tel Aviv had been hit with chemical weapons.
And in English he said to Gerry, “Horrible. Why somebody do something so horrible to Israel?”
We dropped Gerry off and I went inside my father’s house.
“You hate me,” he said.
I said, “No, you’re my father. I love you but I will hate what you did to the day I die.”
“No,” he said. “You hate me. I feel it.”
I said, “Why did Nana join the Arrow Cross?”
“Everybody joined it.”
“Not everybody,” I said.
“Her friends were all joining it.”
“Did she hate Jews?”
“How can you ask me such a thing?” He was offended. “You know how your mother was. She couldn’t hate anybody.”
“No,” I said. “I don’t know how my mother was. I thought I knew how you were, but I don’t. I don’t know how you could have done all these things.”
“I did it for you and your mother,” he said.
I said, “Stop. Don’t try to blackmail me with your love. You wrote that book ten years before I was born!”
“Why did this have to happen to me?” he cried suddenly. “I don’t care about these hearings! I don’t care if they deport me! I’m eighty-three years old! All I care about is you. All I’ve ever cared—”
I said, “Please don’t, Pop.”
“Is this my punishment? That you hate me? My son hates me? Every damn thing in my life I lost. I lost my career, I lost my country, I lost my money, I lost my house, I lost my books, I lost my wife to her madness. Now I lose you? Is this what my fate is? To lose everything, finally and even—you?”
He was crying. “My God,” he said. “I wish I wouldn’t have lived this long for you to learn about all this shit.”
I went over to Gerry Messerman’s house and fell asleep on his couch while I waited for him to come back from dinner. He saw the shape I was in when he returned, saw how much I needed to talk.
“My dad sold used cars,” Gerry said, “and one day I discovered he was playing with the odometers.”
He let it hang there and he said, “Well, it ain’t exactly the same thing!” and we both started to laugh.
It was classic Messerman. I knew that he was almost as broken up that night as I was, but he always managed to find a kernel of humanity or humor, even if by necessity the humor was dark.
“I wish I could say something to you to really make you feel better,” he told me. “The things we heard today were awful. Neither of us will ever get over the things we heard in that room today and I suspect you’ll spend a lifetime trying. But I do ask you as your friend to remember that your father was always your friend, he was always there when you needed him. His love for you wasn’t and isn’t fake. No matter how you feel now about his motivations, remember that.”
On one of those hearing days during the Gulf War, Eli Rosenbaum told Gerry that his parents lived in Israel now.
It was obvious to us that Eli was concerned about his parents’ safety and the dire hourly developments in Israel.
Gerry didn’t have a television in his office, so I went out and bought one and set it up so Eli could catch up on the news during breaks in the hearings.
I watched Eli as he anxiously scanned the news … on the TV set bought by the son of an alleged war criminal … so he wouldn’t worry about the fate of his Jewish parents in Israel.
On one of those days when my father was testifying, his voice had weakened and the microphone in front of him wasn’t picking him up well. One of the court reporters propped the mike up so it was angled closer to him.
I stared at that prop underneath the microphone.
It was a tape of Music Box which Gerry and I had given to the OSI representatives.
The microphone picked up my father perfectly with Music Box underneath it … and my father continued with his denials and lies.
Gerry and I talked about the legal case itself. “They’ve got all the cards,” he said. “They’re good. They put together a very solid investigation. I’m impressed. They’ve got his naturalization application where he flat-out lied and said he was a printer. He entered the United States under false pretenses. On the basis of just that, they can deport him. If they do, he may face war crimes charges in Hungary.”
The next day my father told Gerry and me that he would voluntarily go back to Hungary and in that way avoid a trial.
“I don’t want to cause you trouble,” my father said to me. “I don’t want to cause you public embarrassment or hurt your career.”
One night when I was driving him home, I said to my father: “Do you remember the cat that I had—the cat that would always piss on your manuscripts?”
He nodded and said nothing to me.
“The cat that ran away,” he finally said.
“Nana said you killed it.”
My father said nothing.
“I was looking for it for weeks in the alleys, but Nana said I was wasting my time because you killed it.”
“Nana was sick,” my father said.
I said, “You killed it, Pop, didn’t you?”
He looked at me and then away and out the window.
“All these accusations,” he said, “and now you’re accusing me of killing your cat.”
I said, “You did, didn’t you?”
It hung there for a moment, and then my father turned to me and said, “No. I did not kill your cat.”
He looked out the window again and said, “But I did take it down to the Animal Shelter. I couldn’t tolerate it in the house anymore.”
I said, “You took it down to the Animal Shelter and they killed my cat for you. You didn’t have to kill it yourself.”
“This is absurd,” my father said. “What are you trying to do—draw analogies from this absurdity?”
I said nothing to him and he continued, “Look. You’re a writer yourself. How would you feel if you had a cat who pissed on what you wrote as soon as it came out of your typewriter? Would you tolerate that?”
After a while I said, “No. I wouldn’t. But I wouldn’t lie about doing it.”
“I had to lie!” my father said vehemently. “I had no choice. You would have hated me for getting rid of your cat. You didn’t understand then. You were a child.”
I said, “So your lie worked.”
“I had no choice!” he said again. “I had to lie to you! You understand now because you’re an adult and because you’re a writer yourself. You’re able to forgive me now.”
I said, “I’m not sure I can forgive you now.”
My father said, “You will.
But it will take you some time.”
Gerry and I spoke alone about the case that night.
“We’ve only got one card to play,” Gerry said. “You.”
“It’s like Music Box again,” I said. “I’m his alibi. I get him off the hook.”
“That’s right,” Gerry said. “They can deport an eighty-three-year-old man and, in the process, publicly damage the career and life of his son, who stands for the things the OSI stands for. It’s an unusual case only in the sense that Music Box would bring so much attention to it. Is it worth it for the OSI to send an old man back to Hungary and in the process to hurt you? I don’t think so and I don’t think they’re going to do it. They’re good and decent people. Let’s just hope it doesn’t leak into the press. Once this is out there, it’s all over the world and our best argument to stop the OSI from doing it is gone.”
· · ·
At the end of the hearings, in an off-the-record session with the OSI, Gerry spoke to Neal Sher and Eli Rosenbaum and Judith Schulmann and pointed out how the publicity attendant to my father’s deportation or trial would hurt me both personally and in Hollywood.
I had written three movies about racism and anti-Semitism: Betrayed, Music Box, and Big Shots … and one of the projects I wanted to do in the future, Gerry Messerman said, was about Father Charles Coughlin and the anti-Semitic isolationist forces rampant in America in the thirties and early forties.
The OSI decided to “continue the investigation” and my father was neither deported nor placed on trial.
I had gotten my father off—just as my character Ann Talbot had saved her father in Music Box.
But, like Ann Talbot, I felt like a piece of my heart had died. I’d lost my mother at thirteen, when her madness began, and now, at age forty-seven, I felt like I had lost my father as well.
My father promised me that he would write a book about the nature of anti-Semitism and describe what he had seen in Hungary and what he had experienced. It would be a confessional book.
“If you write that book,” I said, “I will be proud of you. I didn’t think I could ever be proud of you again.”
He moved to hug me.
I moved away and remembered how my mother had often moved away from me.
After the hearings ended, I sat down and watched Music Box again … the movie I had written two years before I knew about the things my father was accused of.
I had seen the movie dozens of times, but never from this perspective.
It was the saddest movie I’ve ever seen.
I cried all the way through it.
These were some of its saddest moments for me:
The prosecutor: “You’re an anti-Communist, Mr. Lászlo, swell, so was Hitler. But you can’t hide behind it anymore. It’s over.”
Ann’s ex-husband: “What if your father did it? Would it make any difference? He’d still be your dad. You’d still love him. Blood is thicker than spilled blood, that’s the bottom line.”
Michael Lászlo: “You my daughter. I got trouble, you help. You got trouble, I help.”
Michael Lászlo, to his daughter: “You know everything about me. If you don’t know me, then nobody know me.”
Michael Lászlo, to his daughter: “It not me they talkin’ about. They make mistake. It not me. I don’t do nothin’ wrong. That not you father.”
Jack Burke, to Ann Talbot: “That’s the perfect camouflage, isn’t it? You raise some good, all-American kids, you avoid even any shadow of suspicion. You’re his best alibi.”
Michael Lászlo: “We come this country, everybody call us name. Greenhorn, dirty greenhorn. DP. Dirty DP. We people just like Jews. Jews no dirty. Jews people.”
Michael Lászlo: “I live too long, that the trouble.”
Michael Lászlo: “No! I did not do this! I am a father! I was a husband! I loved my wife. I could not do these things!”
Ann: “I don’t care who says what. I don’t care what it looks like. He’s not a monster. I know that better than anyone.”
Ann, to her father: “It makes me ashamed to be Hungarian, Papa.”
Ann: “You make my skin crawl, Papa.”
I will never watch Music Box again.
My advice to writers: Be careful what you write … what you write can break your own heart.
In the course of the next year, I rarely spoke to my father.
About five months after the hearings ended, I asked him if he was working on his book.
“What book?” he said.
“The book about anti-Semitism.”
“Oh, that,” he said. “I’m not writing it. I’m too old to write that book.”
He called often and begged to come to California to visit his grandchildren. I told him I wasn’t ready to see him yet.
“Let’s let some time go by,” I said.
“I’m eighty-three now,” he said. “I don’t have much time.”
He asked me if I had told Steve and Suzi about the things he’d done in Hungary.
“No. Not yet,” I said. “They’re too young. I’ll tell them when they’re older.”
“Tell them when I’m gone,” my father said.
I finally let him come out to California to visit a year and a half after the hearings.
He’d lost weight and was pale. We were wary and strained around each other. I scheduled an L.A. trip to get away from him while he was around Steve and Suzi.
One night when I was in L.A., he woke up and couldn’t breathe. Paramedics rushed him to Marin General Hospital. An angiogram determined that he needed a heart valve replacement, very serious and dicey surgery at age eighty-five.
“What do you want to do?” I asked him.
“What do you want to do?” my father asked me.
“It’s up to you.”
“They say if I don’t do this I’ll be dead in six months.”
“Yes.”
“I want to live,” he said.
He looked at me. “Do you want me to live?”
I said, “Yes, Pop … if you want to live.”
We scheduled the surgery and I saw him in a small basement room in the hospital after he’d been scrubbed and readied for surgery. He was sitting on a gurney, bare-chested and looking very frail. He had his head down and he was crying.
When he saw me he grabbed my hand—his hands were shaking—and he kissed it.
“Forgive me,” he said. “Please. I beg you.”
I wanted to hug him as he sat there but I couldn’t bring myself to do it. I held his hands.
I wanted to say “I forgive you” but I couldn’t form the words.
He survived the seven-hour surgery and, three days later, had to be operated on again for a circulatory breakdown in his intestines. He spent three months in intensive care.
I stood next to an ICU doctor one night watching him and the doctor said, “You know, I never believed in miracles until I saw your dad. He should have died six times. I’ve never seen a human being with this kind of will to live.”
As I sat in my father’s room with him sometimes, he hallucinated—a result, the doctor said, of the surgery and the medication. He whispered feverishly to me in Hungarian. He always thought I was his father.
“Papa,” he whispered. “Are you here? I’m scared, Papa. I don’t want to die. Please don’t let me die, Papa.”
Five months later, the doctors thought he was ready to fly back to his home in Cleveland Heights. The night before he was to leave, I went to his room to say goodbye.
I was startled to see he was watching Music Box on a cassette.
He took my hand and held it as he watched the movie and then he shut it off with his remote. He stared at the blank screen for a while and then, without looking at me, he said, “Tell me the truth. Do you still love me?”
“I love you, Pop,” I said, “but I love you differently.”
He said nothing as he held my hand and then he said, “That’s not so bad, is it?”
I said, “It feels bad some
times, but not all the time, not anymore.”
He nodded. He said, “No man could have a better son.”
I kissed his forehead and the next day a man who worked for me took him to the airport, stayed with him on the plane, and drove him home to Cleveland Heights.
I didn’t do that myself.
I easily could have, but I didn’t. I paid a stranger money to take my father home.
I saw my father only occasionally. His health prevented him from traveling anymore and I went to see him about once a year.
At each visit, he kept repeating three things.
“I never lied to you,” he said.
And: “Everything I did, I did for you.”
And: “I love you.”
My friend Gerry Messerman said to me: “You have to forgive him.”
I said, “I’ve tried. I can’t.”
Gerry Messerman said, “You have to try harder.”
The first draft of my screenplay wasn’t entitled Music Box.
It was entitled Sins of the Fathers.
I didn’t change the title: Costa-Gavras did.
I remembered the dream my father had told me about so often.
I was a little boy and we were walking through a labyrinthine train station. He was holding my hand and he somehow let it go and suddenly … he had lost me.
He was sobbing, running up and down, yelling my name, trying to talk to people who didn’t speak his language.
No one understood what he was trying to say … and I was gone, lost somewhere in this foreign world.
CHAPTER 27
Two for the Road
BRAD
This is the city of car-jackings and drive-bys, home invasions and holdups.
MATT
L.A.’s gonna kill her?
BRAD
You’ll kill her. L.A. will take the fall.
The Perfect Crime, unproduced
OUR SUITE AT the Ritz-Carlton had been Jerry Garcia’s favorite. Suite 1729 overlooked the pineapple fields and the sea.
Naomi and I stayed in those rooms three days without leaving. We made love five and six times a day. We hardly ate, but I cleaned out the minibar completely.
I smoked up a storm, of course. There were so many post-climactic cigarettes to smoke … and we talked a lot, too.
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