Jake started going after a piece of driftwood in the water. Naomi called for him but he wouldn’t come. The tide was coming in quickly. Jake went farther out in the water. Naomi kept calling for him but he wouldn’t come. The tide was getting higher.
Naomi had to run for the steps that lead from the beach. She barely made it before the water covered the steps. And here came Jake swimming for the ladder!
He made it.
Naomi was petrified and soaking wet when she got back to the house.
I got the .45 out of my nightstand, put it to Jake’s head, and blew Bill Macdonald’s dog’s brains out.
(Just kidding.)
Jake shat the rug constantly, but only on my side of the bed.
Jake was history.
Naomi gave Bill Macdonald’s dog away to a nice couple far away who owned a big ranch.
I kept missing Steve and Suzi. They were in their first year of college—Steve in Oregon, Suzi in Colorado—and I saw them rarely, though I spoke to them almost every day.
They wanted to have nothing to do with Naomi.
When they came down to visit, they refused to stay with us and stayed at the Malibu Beach Inn down the Pacific Coast Highway.
When they came to the house, they refused to speak to her. I spent the days out in the streets with them when they visited—on Melrose, on the Santa Monica Promenade, on Venice Beach, trying to do things together on days filled with long silences.
Suzi and a girlfriend were at our house once and they were eating Chinese food and Naomi told me Suzi picked up a carton and then put it down.
“Why aren’t you having any?” her girlfriend asked her.
“Because she ate from it,” Suzi said, pointing at Naomi.
Naomi left the room.
All I could hope for was that with the passage of time, Steve and Suzi would forgive me for leaving their mother, that as they got older they’d understand the complexities of love and the vagaries of the heart.
I didn’t have much hope that this would happen soon or even in the near future.
All I could hope was that my kids would remember all the time I’d spent with them in their childhood: the Little League games, the animal rights meetings and protests, the hugs, the laughs, the barbecues, the Gang Up On Dad Dunk’ems in so many swimming pools.
One day maybe they’d realize that my breakup with their mother had nothing to do with them … that the marriage had lasted as long as it did because of them.
The day before Christmas Eve, Naomi and I went down to Rodeo Drive to feel Christmas in the air. We were looking for carolers and Salvation Army Santas and steaming hot mugs of Irish coffee and maybe some Dickensian fog.
There were no carolers, no Salvation Army Santas, and no Dickensian fog. It was 92 degrees. We were drenched in sweat. We drank ice-cold beers in an air-conditioned place as Mel Tormé sang “The Christmas Song” on the piped-in music.
When we came back out of the place, we finally saw Santa, but he was riding a camel down the middle of Rodeo Drive, sweat streaming down his face as he dispensed little bottles of tequila in a promotion giveaway.
We went back to Malibu, cranked the air conditioner up as high as it would go, pulled the drapes, put the Christmas tree lights on, built a fire, and watched a video of A Christmas Carol.
After a while it got so chilly we joyously put sweaters on.
As I sat in the predawn hours beating away at my Olivetti manual typewriter with the surf crashing behind me at the Malibu Colony, I thought to myself: Man, what are you doing here?
You don’t even like L.A. You lived in Marin County all those years and commuted down here because you didn’t want to get too close to this place. And now you’re not only living in L.A., but in Malibu, behind gates at the fucking Colony, the holy of holies of Hollywood showbiz and glamour.
Oh, sure, you may be wearing your Cleveland Indians T-shirts and your Brotherhood of Teamsters jacket, but you’re getting takeout pizzas from Wolfgang Puck’s Granita and Jon Peters’s model girlfriend, Vendela, is telling the world that you’re her favorite writer.
You’re Vendela’s favorite writer?
You’re living in Woody Harrelson’s house and smoking weed in his teepee?
What the fuck?
The road begins in the refugee camps of Austria and ends in the Malibu Colony? With the ghost of a nude Marilyn Monroe slinking in and out of the fog on rainy nights?
In an interview in Us magazine, Sharon Stone was asked: “Are you planning your wedding soon?”
“Bill and I love each other very much,” she said, “and are committed to spending the rest of our lives together. Primarily, I feel and think how happy I am to have found such a beautiful love in my life and how grateful I am for the existence of that love. My life is full of joy. I’m in love and I’m really, really happy about it.”
Robert Evans called to tell me he was going to remake Breakfast at Tiffany’s and wondered whether I had any interest in writing it. I knew why he wanted to remake it.
Like so many other beautiful young girls from the Midwest, Rhonda somehow wound up staying at Bob’s house. Bob was always nice to his girls and introduced them to his friends, who were nice to the girls, too. Barely out of her teens, soon Rhonda was going out with studio heads and celebrities she saw on TV.
Rhonda wanted to be an actress, of course, but meanwhile she kept going out with Bob’s powerful friends and even got a part-time job in a real estate office in Beverly Hills.
One afternoon a man with a gun came into the real estate office and for some reason—was it a robbery? Did it have to do with one of Evans’s powerful friends?—blew Rhonda’s brains out.
Evans was devastated and spent many sorrowful hours thinking about her life and made a deal with the studio to remake Breakfast at Tiffany’s with an edge, Beverly Hills–style … Rhonda as Holly Golightly … Rhonda, a studio exec said, go-blithely, Holly go-dead.
Sharon and Bill Macdonald broke up—she sent his “antique engagement ring” back to him by Federal Express.
She dove quickly into another love affair—with the assistant director of the movie she was shooting.
Bill, we heard, was living only a few miles from us in Malibu, above a garage.
I wrote a script called Foreplay about serial killers—a spooky, dark comedy, set in St. Petersburg, Florida, where Gerri, Steve, Suzi, and I had done so many of our summer beach crawls.
Guy McElwaine decided to auction it and a new production company named Savoy Pictures outbid six others.
The deal we structured gave me $1 million up front and another $4 million when the movie was made. But I was also guaranteed two and a half cents for every dollar Savoy took in from all income, including video. I was also guaranteed one percent of soundtrack sales.
“This is the big barrier we’ve wanted to cross for some time,” Guy told me. “Even a lot of big-time actors don’t have it. No writer with the possible exception of Neil Simon has ever gotten it, and if he did then he got it for adapting one of his stage plays to the screen.”
The media covered the Foreplay deal as a landmark breakthrough.
A reporter named Jerry Carroll of the San Francisco Chronicle said to me: “Writers all over America are lighting joss sticks in your honor.”
“Or they’re out of their minds with jealousy,” I said.
The man who made this landmark deal with me … who gave to a writer what a writer in Hollywood had never gotten before … was the head of Savoy, Frank Price.
Frank Price was the former head of Columbia, the man who’d insisted I change the ending of Jagged Edge, the man whose firing I had waited out before turning in my script.
Since I’d worked on my spec script Foreplay while I was also working on a picture, Gangland, for Columbia and Jon Peters … I thought it only fair to let Jon read the script before anybody else.
Guy agreed with me.
I called and told Jon that I had written a new spec and that he would be the first
to read it.
He was overjoyed.
“You know what?” he said, “that’s one of the nicest things anyone has ever done for me. You’re good people. When can I read it?”
“Whenever you can come over here,” I said. His house in the Colony was almost directly across the street from the one we were renting.
“I’ll send somebody over to pick it up,” Jon said.
“I can’t do that,” I said. “I can’t let it out of my hands. You’ll have to read it over here.”
“I’m not going to let anybody else read it,” he said. “I’m not going to show it to anybody else. I give you my word.”
“I’m sorry,” I said, “you’ve gotta read it here.”
“You’re not going to take my word?” Jon said. “My word isn’t good enough for you?”
“Jon,” I said, “I’m giving you a jump on the whole town. What are we arguing for?”
“You wanna get into a fight with me?” he yelled suddenly. “I’m not fuckin’ Mike Ovitz fraternity boy! You don’t want to get in a fight with me! Trust me!”
I said, “Listen, man, we’re friends.”
“Then give me the fucking script!” he yelled.
“I can’t!” I yelled back. “You gotta read it here! You can’t take it! I can’t take the chance it’ll get out somehow! For Christ’s sake, don’t you get it? I’m trying to do you a favor!”
Jon hung up on me.
· · ·
At ten o’clock the next morning, our gate bell at the Colony rang. I saw it was Jon and let him in. He was wearing a sport coat and tie. He looked sensational.
“All right,” he said with a grin. “Where is this fucking script? It’s probably a piece of shit anyway. I’ll tell you what: if I wanna buy it, maybe I’ll just give you my beach house for it and we can call it a deal.”
I got the script and handed it to him.
“You can sit right in here,” I said. “It’ll be quiet in here.”
“I’m just going to take it across the street to my house and read it there,” Jon said.
I stared at him. Was he serious? After everything I had said to him last night?
Very slowly I said, “I told you. You can’t do that.”
He stared back at me. Very quietly he said, “It’s just across the street.”
In a whisper, I said, “No.”
Almost pleading, he said, “I’m not going to Xerox it or show it to anybody.”
I said, “No. You’re going to read it right here in this room and not take it anywhere.”
He sat down on the couch and put the script in front of him on the big teak coffee table. His face, I saw, was a dark shade that was nearly purple.
He suddenly smashed the coffee table with his clenched fist—so hard that the table cracked.
He jumped up.
“You cocksucker!” he yelled into my face. “You sonofabitch! You know what you are? You’re a mean motherfucker!”
He gave me an ugly look, brushed by me, and went out the door. When he got to the gate, he had trouble opening it.
The teak coffee table he cracked was a recent purchase Naomi and I had made at the Wirtz Brothers secondhand furniture store in Santa Monica.
It had belonged to the famous and respected producer David Wolper.
That fact made it a truly incestuous Hollywood moment: Jon Peters broke David Wolper’s cocktail table because he got mad at Joe Eszterhas.
Guy told me that Jon showed up at Columbia the next day with his hand in a cast.
He was telling people, Guy said, that he’d had a “creative difference” with me … and had scaled my gate “like Batman” and had hurt his hand.
Two days after Savoy bought Foreplay, bootleg copies of the script were being sold at bookstores on Sunset and Hollywood Boulevard for $25 a Xerox copy.
Signs on the bookstore windows said “New Eszterhas Script Available Here.”
Years later I was having lunch with former Sony head Mark Canton at the Bel-Air Hotel and I told him about Jon, who was a friend of Mark’s, and Foreplay.
“Jon’s dyslexic,” Mark said, “didn’t you know that?”
“No,” I said, “I didn’t.”
“Everybody in town knows that.”
“Neither Guy nor anybody else at ICM said anything to me about it,” I said.
“Jon doesn’t read scripts himself,” Mark said. “Either someone reads a script to him or he hires people who dramatize the script and put it on tape for him.”
“I’m sorry,” I said, “I didn’t know that.”
“Sure,” Mark said. “Jon figures everybody knows that. So when you were going to make him sit there and read the script, he figured you were being a mean motherfucker … because you knew he couldn’t do that due to his dyslexia.”
“I swear to you I didn’t know that,” I said.
Mark said, “You’ll never convince Jon.”
Based on Mark’s response to my script Foreplay, I was nervous about how Columbia was going to react to my script about John Gotti—Gangland, based on Howard Blum’s best-seller. I wrote Mark Canton, then the studio chairman of Columbia, a letter:
Dear Mark,
I wanted to express my concern and consternation to you concerning your response to Foreplay.
The script, you told me, “had no plot … not many surprises … no sense of jeopardy … needed more plot twists.” In addition, you thought it “nihilistic and dark” and said it needed “more savvy, James Bondian cops.” You said it was “neither Jagged Edge nor Basic Instinct and dismissed the humor as a “series of one-liners.”
This was your response to a script that sold for the highest price in Hollywood history in a deal that calls for no rewrites but calls for only a director’s polish.
After having said all of those things to me—and after having heard Guy McElwaine’s response on my behalf expressing my feeling that you were totally out to sea—I was completely flabbergasted when I heard that you offered a million dollars to buy Foreplay.
What concerns me is that I am deep into the Gotti script, which I will deliver to you on June 30. I genuinely hope your response to Gangland will not be as benighted as it was to Foreplay.
At the same time, I want to underline my oft-reiterated position that John Gotti is not, as you once said to me, “a Robin Hood figure.” He is a man who, according to Howard Blum’s book, once chain-sawed another man with his own hands. He will be a villain in my piece—colorful, larger-than-life, but a villain—as he deserves to be. I will have nothing to do with sugarcoating him for public perception.
I bear no bad feeling, incidentally, for Jon Peters. While I have never before had anyone come into my home, fracture his hand on my coffee table, and spew forth a series of obscenities … I appreciate his passion for Gangland.
Best,
Joe
Suzi was in town with a girlfriend from college. They were staying at the nearby Malibu Beach Inn. I’d been out to dinner with them and had then come home to Naomi and our house in the Colony.
At 4:30 in the morning, the house felt like a box being violently shaken up and down. I screamed “Quake!” The shaking continued.
Naomi was eight months pregnant. She froze. I lifted her off the bed. A bookcase collapsed and dumped books everywhere near us. I half carried Naomi outside. The water in the swimming pool was a storm-tossed sea. Car alarms were wailing.
I held on to Naomi, who was crying. I was shaking so badly I didn’t think my knees would hold me up.
“We’re okay,” I kept saying. “We’re okay.”
Then it hit me: Oh, God, Suzi was here … three blocks away … on the top floor of a hotel with three floors.
Naomi grabbed a robe. We jumped into the Land Rover. The security guard at the Colony gate stopped me. He said it’d been the Big One. He said power was out and damage was heavy. Power lines were everywhere in the streets.
“You can’t go out there,” he said.
We drove out
onto the Pacific Coast Highway. Fire trucks and police cars were screaming by in both directions.
I prayed that when we got to the Malibu Beach Inn I wouldn’t find a pile of rubble.
It finally came into view and I saw the building was still standing. I raced into the lobby. Fallen plaster was everywhere. Suzi was there with her friend.
“I knew you’d be the first car here, Pops,” Suzi said with a smile. She and her friend were shaken up and still shaking, but unhurt. They’d run down the stairway from their room, dodging the plaster falling all around them.
I told Suzi that Naomi was outside in the car. I told her we were going to go back to our house in the Colony—all four of us. Suzi said she wasn’t coming. She said she wasn’t going to get in the same car with Naomi, let alone the same house.
I yelled at her. I told her we’d just lived through the Big One. I told her the roads would be closed, food wouldn’t be available, the aftershocks would start. Just then the first aftershock struck—a single, hard jolt as though the hotel had been kicked in the butt.
Suzi agreed to come to our house with her friend. They stayed with us for three days until the roads reopened. Suzi acted like Naomi wasn’t there. She said not one word to her. She looked right through her. We kept running in and out of the house to the lawn during those three days whenever there was an aftershock.
When I drove Suzi and her friend to the airport, Suzi didn’t want Naomi to come with us.
“Forget it,” I said to her, “I’m not leaving the woman I love who is eight months pregnant with our child alone when there is an aftershock every couple of hours. If you want me to drive you, she’s coming. If you don’t, take a cab.”
Naomi came to the airport with us, but Suzi didn’t say a word all the way there.
The aftershocks continued after Suzi was gone. We weren’t getting any sleep. I was worried about the effect on Naomi’s pregnancy. We drove down to San Diego. We checked into our hotel room at six o’clock at night and were asleep by seven. We slept until eleven the next day.
Spago is a glitzy place. We walked in. The room froze. Everyone gaped. We were with Muhammad Ali!
Ali suffers from Parkinson’s. Ali didn’t say much. Ali’s speech was slurred. Ali’s wife spoke for him. Ali looked down at his plate. Ali ate his food. Ali kept his head down. Over dessert, Ali looked up. Ali stared straight ahead.
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