Hollywood Animal

by Joe Eszterhas

  Bimbos, sluts, and starlets wiggled by, smiling at him.

  Ali’s face was set. Ali’s eyes were glassy. Ali didn’t react.

  Ali’s wife went to the bathroom.

  Ali stared at nothing. Ali leaned over to me suddenly. Ali smiled. Ali whispered something. Ali’s voice was clear.

  “Man, they got some fine foxes in here, don’t they?” Ali said.

  · · ·

  We were having dinner at Morton’s late in Naomi’s pregnancy and, excited, she took the sonogram photo of the baby we had decided to call Joey … and passed it around the table to our friends.

  We didn’t know that a reporter from Buzz magazine was hovering around nearby.

  Buzz wrote: “What is Joe pulling out of his pocket for all to see? Why it’s the sonogram of the littlest Eszterhas, issue of his adulterous union.

  “Now, sonograms passed around like snapshots are creepy enough … but here comes the truly frightening thing! While most sonograms look like blurry fish, in this one—and there was no mistaking it—the fetus looked … exactly like Joe.”

  I wrote Buzz magazine a letter.

  “I know I’m a former journalist,” I wrote. “I know I make a lot of money. I know some present-day journalists who don’t make any money might have a very personal problem with that.

  “But come on—some things should be sacred. To say that our beautiful baby boy looked like me when he was in his mother’s womb is unfair to our baby boy … even the National Enquirer wouldn’t lower itself to saying that.

  “The only thing that gives me solace is knowing that your writer is doomed to a lifetime of penury, jealousy, and oblivion.

  “Oh, well. Poor schmuck.”

  Naomi’s journal:

  I went for an ultrasound today. As the nurse was looking at the screen she said, “I’ll go get the doctor …”

  As soon as she left I got frantic. Joe said, “Be cool. This is nothing. Don’t get hysterical. Everything’s fine. Trust me.”

  He held my hand. The doctor came in, looked at the screen, and said, “Well, we can’t get a measure of the size of the baby because it’s off the screen. It’s too big for this machine, which means it’s well over nine pounds now. You can go over to Cedars and we’ll use another machine, or we can end this and just induce labor. We can go tomorrow, or Thursday or Friday. What do you want to do?”

  I thought to myself, tomorrow is just too scary. I need a day. Thursday is March 10, Sharon Stone’s birthday …

  I said “Friday.”

  We agreed I would go in Thursday night for delivery on Friday.

  Joe drove me to the hospital about 8:00 P.M. I was terrified. I knew this baby was big, and I couldn’t believe they were going to be able to get it out. Joe sang “Volare” all the way to the hospital while holding my hand. He knows it makes me laugh.

  My fear proved justified. The first drug didn’t work. No labor pains. So they had to do a second procedure (a torture test that I won’t relive by writing it). As I lay there waiting to feel something, anything, I could hear a woman screaming, “Jesus God help me! God help me!” It went on all night.

  For hours, as I inched closer to higher and higher levels of pain, I listened to her pleas. I asked a nurse about her. She said, “Oh, she’s a lightweight …”

  This was barbaric. By the next afternoon, after hours and hours of labor and no baby movement, they finally saw something on my heart monitor that caused them to do an emergency cesarean. They also felt the baby was in distress.

  They made Joe leave the operating room as soon as he walked in. They said he looked like he was going to faint.

  So I was alone. They couldn’t get the baby out. They had to get two people to scrub up and come in and literally lay on my stomach to help push it out. I kept saying, “I can’t breathe.”

  Finally I heard the doctor say, “Say hello to Son of Bigfoot! Somebody get me a scale! This is a big baby!”

  He weighed ten and a half pounds. The doctor said he would have easily been eleven pounds or more if we’d left him in until he was ready. He became known in the nursery as “the Moose.”

  I couldn’t even hold him or see him. My eyes were swollen shut (from the strain of trying to push him out myself for a day) and the drugs had given me uncontrollable shakes. I didn’t hear him cry. I thought he was dead.

  But then they held him close and I could vaguely see golden fuzz all over his head, and tiny ears. Joe had always teased me that our children would have bright red hair and big ears. I smiled. He wasn’t Howdy Doody.

  · · ·

  In her twenty-third hour of labor with Joey, Naomi was drenched in sweat, her face was purple, and her heartbeat was arrhythmic.

  Our Ob-gyn, who was also Madonna’s gynecologist, a former major league baseball player, was sitting right next to her, at the Hospital to the Stars, holding her hand.

  “You worked with Jennifer Beals, didn’t you?” he said to me. “She always looked to me like she’d be really hot. Was she?”

  I realized that I loved Gerri, that I would always love Gerri—as a sister, not as a partner and a wife and a lover.

  I decided I was filing for divorce.

  When I told Suzi, she started to cry. When I told Steve, he said, “Are you sure, Pops? Are you absolutely sure?”

  I said I was sure.

  He said nothing and finally I said, “You know how much I love you, Mano.”

  “I know that, Pops,” he said.

  When I told Gerri, she said, “Fuck you, Joseph!” and hung up.

  All my male friends and business associates—every single one of them—told me not to get divorced. Even those who’d been divorced themselves.

  This was their argument:

  Look, you’ve been married almost a quarter century. That’s a very long time. You’ve got two beautiful grown kids—if you do this, you’re going to lose all the money you’ve made.

  Forget the fifty-fifty stuff in California … there’s something called community goodwill, too … in a long marriage like yours, your wife will argue that she helped make your career.

  You’re going to lose your houses, your cars, everything. Is that worth it? To be broke again when you’re almost fifty years old?

  This happens all the time. A guy your age meets a woman Naomi’s age and a guy your age loses his mind.

  You’ve got a beautiful family! There’s no need to destroy a family over this and lose all your money and hurt your kids.

  All you have to do is keep Naomi on the side. It happens all the time in this town. Don’t get a divorce. Support Naomi, support the kids you might have together. And hold on to everything you’ve got.

  I couldn’t quite believe that here I was telling all my Hollywood friends that I was getting a divorce … and my Hollywood friends were responding by telling me about family values!

  The lawyer had come highly recommended to me. He was one of the top lawyers in Los Angeles.

  He came to our house in the Colony but he didn’t want to talk there. He asked if we could go for a walk on the beach.

  He spoke softly as we talked—I could barely hear him above the crash of the waves.

  “You’re fucked,” he said. “That’s the truth. There’s no way around it. You’ve been married twenty-four years. You have two grown kids. You’re completely fucked.”

  “Is that why you wanted to come out here?” I asked him with a smile. “To tell me that I’m fucked? I don’t need you to tell me that I’m fucked. I can tell if I’m fucked myself. I’ve been there before in my life.”

  He smiled back at me and said, “Not like this you haven’t.”

  Then the smile stretched into a grin and he said, “You’re a real pistola, aren’t you?

  “Your wife will go away,” he whispered. “A hundred grand. Paid to me for legal services.”

  I thought I might have misunderstood. I said, “What?”

  He kept grinning and said, “Come on, no bullshit. Yes or no.”
r />   I said, “Go away where?”

  “I don’t know where. I’m not sure how I feel about an afterlife.”

  “I can’t do that,” I said.

  He said, “You’re gonna lose every penny you’ve got.”

  When I stared at him, horrified, and shook my head, he said, “It’s your funeral then.”

  I fired him, even though I hadn’t really hired him.

  Evans, I heard, was back in the fetal position.

  Four hookers had written a book about their Hollywood adventures.

  Evans was featured prominently in the book, greeting them in his screening room, feeding them booze, coke, and Quaaludes … then taking them into his bedroom and giving them directions: “Lisa, you lick Tiffany there … Tiffany, darling, put your finger in there!”

  I always suspected Bob was a frustrated director.

  This was the final Evans direction in the book: “Tiffany, my dear, would you please pee on me?”

  This is how incestuous Hollywood is:

  The head of the publishing company which published the hookers’ book was Evans’s next-door neighbor!

  On our first visit to our pediatrician in Beverly Hills, I noted that his office was filled not with pictures of children but with signed movie posters.

  At the end of our first visit our new pediatrician asked me if I could send him two signed posters of my movies, too.

  On our next visit I noted that my posters were up on the wall, too—Basic Instinct, and Showgirls—centerpieces of a roomful of coughing and sneezing and crying little boys and girls.

  Many a night at the Malibu Colony after Joey’s birth, Naomi and I stayed up at night rocking him back to sleep.

  We had the TV set on in the background and watched the chases as we rocked him. The TV stations in L.A. covered all police chases live. Most of them took place late at night, so we saw a lot of them.

  We started rating them like movies. While the O.J. chase, years later, became the Gone With the Wind of chases, Naomi and I saw a lot of great B movie chases while we rocked Joey.

  We saw one that began on the 405, the San Diego Freeway, cut over to the 10, the Santa Monica Freeway, then onto the streets of Santa Monica and onto the Pacific Coast Highway.

  We stared as the chase came closer and closer on the PCH toward our house in the Colony.

  We lowered the volume so we could hear the sirens pass us outside in real life and not on the TV.

  On the 6th day of April, 1994, I asked Naomi to come for a walk with me.

  We walked in the Colony—past Jerry Perenchio’s house, past Irwin Winkler’s, past where Burgess Meredith used to live. When we got to the actor Brian Keith’s house, we walked across the back of his yard and jumped down to the beach. The sun was setting on a warm and rare Maui-like day.

  I handed Naomi a little box and she looked at it and started to open it with trembling fingers and exactly at the moment when she opened it and saw the ring … I said, “Will you marry me, Guinea?”

  She jumped into the air like a little girl and yelled, “Yayyyyyyyyy!”

  And then she said, her teary face very close to mine, “You don’t have to marry me.”

  I remembered the moment I had asked Gerri to marry me a quarter century earlier … at night, at a romantic spot in a meadow near Shaker Lakes in Cleveland.

  Gerri opened the box and took the ring out of it to put on her finger … and I dropped it! Into thick grass.

  Gerri and I got down on the ground to find it … but we couldn’t see.

  Because exactly at that moment—Honest to God, this is true—there was an eclipse of the moon!

  We had to wait fifteen minutes in the pitch-black before we could even begin the hunt for Gerri’s engagement ring.

  We found it, and as I put it on her finger, I dropped it again!

  I told Steve and Suzi and Gerri that I had asked Naomi to marry me and it was one of the saddest phone calls of my life.

  All three of them cried.

  I told my lawyers and accountants that I was marrying Naomi and they didn’t cry, but they certainly sounded sad.

  When I told them there wouldn’t even be a prenuptial agreement, I thought I heard at least one accountant start to sniffle.

  These, according to the court’s ruling, were the terms of my divorce based on “community goodwill” and the fact that Gerri and I had been married for twenty-four years:

  Gerri got both houses, all four of the cars, and most of the cash.

  I was to pay her $32,500 a month in alimony—after taxes. In other words, I had to earn $65,000 a month to pay her.

  I was to pay for the kids’ college educations.

  I was broke, starting all over again, a refugee again, living in Los Angeles, a place that I hated.

  I didn’t care. Naomi was worth it.

  Naomi said, “You threw everything away for me, your castles, your carriages. You’re risking your relationships with your children for me. Your friends think you’re crazy. I feel like Wallis Simpson.”

  I said, “From what I know about the Duke of Windsor, I don’t want to feel like the Duke of Windsor.”

  Sharon Stone was telling the world that she’d been “tricked” into doing that scene by Paul Verhoeven.

  I knew what Sharon was doing and she was doing it well. She didn’t want to be forever known for showing the world her pubes; she considered herself, after all, a serious actress.

  No one needed to know that, the morning she had shot that scene, she had handed her scented panties to Paul and said, “I won’t be needing these today.”

  As part of her campaign to rehabilitate her image—post-pube redemption—she even engaged in a public fight with a studio head, telling him that under no circumstances would she do a nude scene.

  I knew what she was doing and laughed when a limo driver in New York told the world that Sharon had yelled at him: “Don’t you know who I am? I’m the American Princess Di.”

  Sharon Stone as the American Princess Di? Well sure. It made sense. From a flash of cinematic beaver to American royalty.

  After all, she had even dated Dodi Fayed … back before he’d met the other Princess Di … even before she’d handed Paul Verhoeven her scented panties. April 6, 1994, the day I proposed to Naomi, was my father’s birthday … his eighty-seventh birthday.

  I thought about calling him to wish him a happy birthday.

  I thought about telling him that I asked the love of my life to marry me on his birthday.

  I thought about it … but I didn’t make the call.

  [Close-up]

  A Joint for Robert Mitchum

  NOT WANTING TO be bothered, Robert Mitchum was sitting at a table with his back to the bar on a dank Saturday afternoon at the Formosa Café, in L.A., where his photograph was up on the wall.

  The photograph showed a sinisterly handsome young man with a smile that was a sneer and eyes that bespoke a certain nihilism of the soul.

  The old man sitting with his back to the bar now and sipping his tequila had a face like cracked Moroccan leather and a body pouched and ravaged by time, cigarettes, the tequila, and a bad temper.

  For many years he was one of the biggest movie stars in the world, separate from the others because of a wildness in his soul which the camera wouldn’t hide no matter what the role. James Dean was a simpering poseur compared to him.

  As a young man he spent time in a chain gang for smoking a joint. As a movie star, he resolved a contract dispute by defecating on the studio chief’s white shag rug. As an older man, he countered a belligerent woman’s request that he not smoke in the smoking section of an airliner by bending over and passing gas into her face.

  I sat at the bar of the Formosa Café as he sat with his back to us not wanting to be seen or bothered. I didn’t want to bother him but I couldn’t resist.

  I went over to his table and took the joint I had in my pocket and said, “Mr. Mitchum, I just wanted to tell you how much I admire your work,” and handed
him the joint.

  Robert Mitchum took it, sniffed it, and grinned.

  “Son,” he said, “it’ll be a helluva nice ride back to Santa Barbara.”

  CHAPTER 28

  We’re Hollywood Animals

  CATHERINE

  What happened, Nick? Did you get sucked into it? Did you like it too much? Nicky got too close to the flame. Nicky liked it.

  Basic Instinct

  MADAM STONE, AS Guy always called Sharon, fired him.

  I was the one who convinced her to hire him and I was sure I was the reason she fired him.

  It took her a while, but I knew after Guy came to the Sliver premiere with Naomi and me … and not with Sharon and Bill … that his days were numbered.

  Guy knew it, too, but came with us anyway.

  I knew Sharon … and I knew she especially wanted Guy to be with them and not with us … because I was with Naomi, who had called her a “home wrecker” on TV.

  When Guy came with us, Sharon felt betrayed.

  Now that he no longer represented Sharon, I was Guy’s only “star” client.

  I had told Robert Evans about my outline for the movie to be called Jade while we were working on Sliver.

  I had sold it in the late eighties to the Weintraub Entertainment Group. It was about the wife of a philandering husband who gets even with him by hooking on the side.

  The outline, I told Evans, was lost in a morass of legal problems. The Weintraub Entertainment Group had gone into bankruptcy … the rights to the outline somehow had to be pried loose from WEG’s other bankruptcy assets. Over many months, Bill Macdonald had worked heroically and had pried the outline loose through truly Herculean and shrewd legal efforts.

  · · ·

  Sherry Lansing, the new head of Paramount, made Jade her first big green-light announcement. And now, as we were living in the Malibu Colony, I finished the Jade script.

  Naomi and I were in Palm Springs the weekend the studio executives read it, and we were suddenly bombarded with bottles of Cristal and tins of caviar.