So my wife goes out of town to do a show in New York. That leaves me alone in the house with the Frenchie. It’s not funny considering what it wound up costing me but I can’t help laughing. Middle of the night, here comes the Frenchie. No nightgown, no nothing.
My wife comes back from New York, the Frenchie tells her what happened, and my wife sues me for divorce. I get wiped out and the Frenchie becomes the famous political socialite. And I have to see her on TV Sunday morning before the maid’s even had a chance to make the Bloody Marys.
My fifth wife was happy ‘go’ lucky, if you want to know the truth. I didn’t give a rat’s ass about that. Everybody in town knew the kind of woman she was but it never stopped me from taking her to the screenings and the openings and the parties and the banquets. I saw the way some guys looked at her, saw that smirk of recognition, but I pretended that I didn’t. I liked Christy a lot and maybe … well, maybe if it hadn’t ended the way it did … maybe I’d say that I loved her.
I met her in New York. I was in town promoting a new picture for Twentieth and I had a suite at the Pierre. I called a friend and said I needed a girl and Christy met me at the bar at the Sherry. She wasn’t what I expected. She had a fresh, scrubbed quality about her, a lot of Doris Day and a little of Kim Novak. She wore a simple black dress and pearls. She was built, sure, my eyes are still okay, but it was all … held in.
She was modeling, she said. Yeah, I know … She was doing department store modeling for the ads in the papers, some lingerie, sure, but mostly dresses. She liked champagne, so we killed a bottle of Cristal at the bar and then went over to the Pierre and ordered another in my suite. Christ, her body. Christy had the most beautiful breasts of any woman I’ve ever seen.
We talked and she told me the truth, nothing fancy, no frills. She grew up in San Francisco, wanted to be an actress. That didn’t work out—surprise!—so she drifted to modeling. That didn’t pay enough so she did some hooking on the side, but only through friends. She had a very select client list. A lot of people in L.A. knew her, she said. She’d spent some time at Bob’s house and Evans had taken her down to Acapulco a couple of times. Once, she said, she was walking around the beach there with her top off and she brought all the beach traffic to a stop. She laughed. She laughed a lot. I liked the way she laughed.
When I got back out here from New York, I missed her. Couple weeks later, I called her and flew her out, met her at the airport in a limo with some flowers, a bottle of Cristal on ice in the back, the whole thing. She stayed at the house with me. I still had the house from my last divorce but most everything in it was gone thanks to the damn lawyers. Even the paintings were gone.
We had fun together. She’d watch the games with me on Sundays and sip her champagne. We closed a lot of bars, saw a few friends of mine, went to some parties, went to Spago a lot, went to Vegas, went to Catalina, stayed at the Ritz in Laguna Niguel. We had a lot of breakfasts in bed.
Evans said to me at a party when she was in the loo, “God, isn’t she some hank of pussy?” When he met her, Bob said, she was flying back and forth from L.A. to New York in first class trying to find someone to marry her. I told Evans I didn’t want to hear that kind of shit and Bob apologized. He’s always been a gentleman.
We went to the Princeville on Kauai for a couple weeks and when we got back I bought her an engagement ring. It was a nice diamond. She said it was the biggest diamond she’d ever seen and cried when I asked her to marry me. “You know what I am,” she said, and me—dumb fuck—I said it didn’t matter, I didn’t care. All that mattered was how we felt about each other. She said she loved me.
We had a great two years—come on, two years is eternity in this town—and then I noticed that she was drinking more champagne than ever before and asked her what was wrong. She was lonely, she said. She felt unfulfilled. She wanted a baby. She said she loved me.
I told her I didn’t want any more kids. Besides, I’d had a vasectomy before my last marriage. She cried. As the months went by and I kept seeing a sadness in her eyes, I said fuck it—I didn’t want her to be unhappy, it hurt me to see her unhappy, we’d adopt a child.
We adopted a beautiful six-month-old boy we named Art Jr. I hadn’t named any of my kids after me—besides, naming him Art Jr. was her idea. God did we have a lot of fun with him. I never expected to spend as much time with Art Jr. as I did. I hadn’t spent that much time with any of my other kids, so it surprised me how great it was being around him. He was a sweet, gentle kid who never cried. Christy was a terrific mother. Oh, she spoiled him, sure, but she couldn’t help herself. She wasn’t drinking much champagne anymore.
Everything seemed to be okay to me. I convinced her to come to the Cannes Film Festival with me without Art Jr. and we had a lot of fun in Cannes. A producer friend of mine had a yacht and we all got nice tans—you know, not the Evans kind of tan, but healthy ones—and we drank a lot of champagne. Hell, we were in Cannes, what were we supposed to do, drink water?
We decided to take the QE2 back. The studio was picking up the tab. Mel Gibson was in the suite across from us and we got to know each other and had a lot of laughs and drank more champagne. Christ, the champagne and caviar were complimentary, were we supposed to turn it down?
One night mid-passage I woke up and Christy wasn’t there next to me in bed. I heard some voices and got up and followed the voices out into the corridor. Christy was out there buck naked trying to convince Mel to let her into his suite. Mel was grinning and saying he didn’t think it was a good idea.
I dragged her back into our suite. She was crazy drunk and said a lot of ugly things. One of the things she said was that she’d been sleeping with an old boyfriend every time she visited her mother in San Francisco. Another thing she said was that she didn’t love me and didn’t think she’d ever loved me.
We got back and saw the damn lawyers and worked it out amicably, which means she got most everything I had left.
Art Jr. is eight years old now and he’s with me three times a week. I take him to see the Dodgers and I take him to Pink’s for a chili dog. Three times a week I drive him to school in the morning. He’s a great kid and I can’t tell you how happy I am that we adopted him.
CHAPTER 32
The King of Cleveland
BILLY MAGIC
Mistake on the lake.
OLD MAN
What’d you say?
BILLY MAGIC
“Mistake on the lake”—that’s what they call this place, ain’t it?
OLD MAN
Hell no! Where’d you hear that? They call this “The Best Location in the Nation.”
Telling Lies in America
THERE WAS ALWAYS some damn movie being filmed at night on the beach below us in Malibu keeping us awake.
And Joey found a used hypodermic to play with on the local play-ground.
And we were forced to buy what we called our “Brinks Mailbox” because someone in the neighborhood was stealing our mail.
And an Alaska Airlines jet crashed a few miles out at sea and the beach beneath us was awash for weeks with body tissue and suitcases.
And we’d fired one of our nannies because L.A. sheriff’s deputies had caught her threatening and stalking the television actor Robert Conrad.
And yet, that wasn’t really what was wrong. Something was very wrong, I felt, but none of those things, added together, summed up the problem.
I was the problem. Something was wrong with me.
· · ·
In some deep part of me, I didn’t want to be here anymore. I didn’t want to go to the wall and fight the battles … and do the seductive, empty chitchat at Morton’s. I still wanted to write screenplays, but I didn’t want the rest of the package: the fights with directors, the paparazzi at the premieres, the limos, the best table at Spago, the weekends in Palm Springs or Laguna.
I felt like I’d befouled myself somehow, like I had turned into something I didn’t want to be: the screenwriter as Hollywood Animal �
� not as victim and servant and peon and whore … but as the Hollywood Animal, the gun in my hand.
An ancient Hollywood equation says that in the beginning of a project, the screenwriter has the gun and when his script is finished he hands the gun off to the director … and when the director’s cut is finished, the director hands the gun off to the studio … and when the studio has the gun … the studio fires the gun and kills the screenwriter and the director with it.
Well, not me! I had the gun and kept it and could even aim it at studio heads and get them to throw their hands up and give me what I wanted!
Hollywood animal behavior. Another symptom of the same disease that had caused a producer friend of mine to slap his maid bloody for not moving fast enough at a dinner party, or another producer friend who viciously beat up his fiancée two weeks before their wedding date—a date he kept, but with another woman.
You’ll never work in this town again was blackmail and extortion, because there was always an “if” attached to that time-worn sentence … “If you leave CAA,” Michael Ovitz had said to me …
And now I was engaging in the same sort of blackmail and extortion. I was a Hollywood animal, I feared, just as much as Ovitz, pulling the same gangster tactics on the town that he’d pulled on me. I had become what I detested.
“So do whatever you want to do,” I’d written to Ovitz, “and fuck you,” more than implying that he was trash, Hollywood scum, and I didn’t want to have anything to do with him. Now I was off my high horse, muscling and browbeating the other players in the gutter.
I felt like I should send myself the same letter I’d sent to Ovitz. There was no doubt in my mind that the Ovitz jacket I saw myself wearing fit to a tee: Michael had even turned on Ron Meyer, his best friend, the way I’d turned on Guy McElwaine.
I found myself reconsidering and reevaluating my whole battle with Ovitz. Was it really wanting Guy back in my life that made me resist Ovitz eleven years ago? Or was it me saying: You’re candy, frat boy. Welcome to Lorain Avenue. You don’t have a chance. I’m gonna hit you in the fuckin’ head with a baseball bat … because I’m the real Hollywood animal, asshole, I’m the real Thousand-Pound Gorilla!”
The longer I’d lived in this town the worse I’d become … until I was out of control, amok in Malibu. Wildlife. A barbarian hanging scalps and check stubs off his figurative dick. There was something about this cursed and glitzy town that infected you and fired you with delusions. Living here was like functioning on low-desert meth cut with just a crust of PCP.
L.A. was a separate nation, not a state within the United States … but a separate nation between the United States and Mexico whose Twin Towers was the Industry. It was impossible to imagine this separate nation without the Industry because the Industry was its big, beeping, buzzing, glowing sacred heart.
Everyone wanted to be a part of the Industry … as a screenwriter, actor, producer, gofer, gaffer, whatever—it didn’t matter. As long as they could be a part of it and suck off its glamorous, poisonous, siliconed, corrupt tit.
Jeremy, Naomi’s forty-year-old little brother, made a lucrative salary. He was a brilliant PR man, a talented singer and songwriter. Yet one day, out of the blue, he suddenly decided to write screenplays with a friend. Why? Because if Ben Affleck and Matt Damon could do it …
Jeremy read the trades too, tried to get invited to “industry events.” He kept a list in his office of movie stars he and his co-workers had glimpsed in the outdoor cafés of the Sunset Strip.
A screenwriter! He was a screenwriter now! Boom! Just like that! Out of the blue! Even though he’d never written anything but songs and PR releases before. Even though he got so jittery sitting in one place for twenty minutes that he had to get up and pace around the room.
Naomi and I loved Jeremy and we feared this deadly suckhole of a town was sucking him in, too. He drove a hot car. He went to the gym each day. He was on his cellular all the time. He didn’t check his at-home mail for a week, but he checked his e-mail at his office every hour.
The truth was that in the Nation of L.A. you … didn’t matter … if you weren’t sucking off the Industry tit. You were nothing even if it seemed that you were something.
A producer friend was introduced to Richard Riordan, who at the time was the mayor of Los Angeles, at a cocktail party.
The mayor took my friend aside and said there was something important he wanted to discuss with him.
My friend, a politically active man with a bubbling-over social conscience, was excited. Would the mayor ask him to be a part of some cultural commission? Would he ask him to be part of the board of directors of the Los Angeles Fine Arts Outreach program?
Mayor Riordan took my producer friend out on the lawn next to a gazebo and looked around to make sure no one could overhear him. Satisfied, the mayor pitched the plot of a screenplay he was writing.
This was the mayor of the Nation of L.A. acting this way, wanting to be a screenwriter instead of the mayor … a powerful man eager, his politician’s mouth wide open, to suck on the tit … so eager that he was willing to transmogrify himself into a powerless screenwriter … just to get a taste of the tit.
Or maybe he, like Bono of U2, just wanted to grow up to be Joe Eszterhas … at the same time that Joe Eszterhas was looking into the mirror and trying to avert his eyes from Frankenstein’s monster he had willed himself to become.
On a day when the beach beneath us was awash with detritus from the Alaska Airlines crash, I turned to Naomi and said, “You know, we’ve really got to get out of here.”
I wasn’t one of those Malibu New Agers anyway … standing on my cliff with Sharper Image or Hammacher Schlemmer binocs pressed to my eyes watching spouting whales. No, hell no, I didn’t plop myself in the sand at sunset watching the smog-painted setting sun. Nor did I play Gregorian chants or Nusrat Fateh Ali Khan on my back-deck speaker, setting off dog howls as far north as Palos Verdes.
I was an aging street kid who prided himself on having come from Cleveland, a steel city, a rust belt pit, where the flame above the mills burned all night and bars stayed open after hours serving boilermakers and Cleveland martinis: a shot of Southern Comfort and a cold Bud.
Spouting whales? Nusrat Fateh Ali Khan? I preferred a honkytonk with a choking haze of viscous cigarette smoke, Jerry Lee Lewis, the Killer, stomping away on the jukebox, telling that little red-lipsticked high-ass sweetie to move it around just a little bit.
No New Age spirituality for me, thank you—even if Kenny G himself lived around the corner from our playground and scared my little boys shitless with the studio-quality special effects at his annual neighborhood Halloween party.
New Age spiritualism be damned! I still believed that iodine was more effective than Mercurochrome because iodine hurt. I understood Mike Tyson when he said he bit Holyfield because Holy kept butting him. I preferred the Stones to the Beatles; Howling Wolf to Yanni; Canseco to McGwire; Bukowski to Grisham; David Alan Coe to Toby Keith; Kinky Friedman to Robert Parker.
Sean Penn was another reason we began making plans to leave Malibu … for someplace.
He was over at our house chain-smoking and waiting for the steak I was grilling him and he told us that he had grown up right on this bluff and this beach.
He looked at the riptide surf outside our wall-high window and he glanced at Joey and Nick playing together, their hair long and bleached almost yellow by the sun.
It wasn’t the Malibu sun—we had recently spent a month in Maui to warm up and get away from Malibu.
Sean asked, “They learn to surf yet?”
Naomi and I looked at each other and then at Sean like he was some kind of freak.
Sean saw the look and laughed.
“Let me tell you guys something,” Sean said. “You guys may not go down to the Viper Room. You guys may not even know where the Viper Room is, but in a couple years Joey and his brother will.”
That night before we fell asleep, Naomi said, “You’re right. We’
re getting out of here!”
A couple of months later, Sean Penn’s wife, Robin Wright, and Sean’s kids got carjacked in Santa Monica.
Sean got out of L.A. fast with his wife and kids. He moved to the village of Ross, in yuppified Marin County, where I’d lived for twenty-two years.
We were having lunch on the patio at a little Italian place in the Cross Creek Center in Malibu … Steve was visiting us from Oregon … and word swept by the tables like a firestorm that Pamela Anderson Lee was down at the playground by the swings.
Steve, who was twenty-four, excused himself and went down to the playground. A mop-haired friend of Joey’s from kindergarten came by our table and said to Joey, “Dude! Pamela Anderson!”
Joey, who was six, went down to the playground to join Steve.
We could see the two of them from our table, trying to look cool like the hundred other men and boys down there, watching Pamela Anderson in a cowboy hat and tight jeans and a T-shirt as she played with a baby on a swing.
“Oh boy,” I said, “oh boy oh boy oh boy oh boy!”
“I know,” Naomi said.
There were times when Naomi and I contemplated a life away from movie sets and television interviews, from the chitchat at the local market about how poor Pierce Brosnan’s son got hurt in that wreck over the weekend. Times when we didn’t want Johnny Carson or Cher or Barbra as our neighbors anymore. When we didn’t want our boys trick or treating at Kenny G’s or Gary Busey’s house.
Sometimes we didn’t even want to hear the surf crashing outside our windows anymore. The surf made us uneasy as we watched our boys watching it or skipping through it.
We kept thinking about what Sean had said about the Viper Room.
We didn’t want them anywhere near the Viper Room.
She was a beautiful little girl with baby blue eyes. Her parents, friends of ours, dressed her in clothes special-ordered from Milan, strolled her down Rodeo in a gleaming English pram, backpacked her up and down the Santa Monica Promenade.
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