But most impressive to me: Elvis’s favorite football team, whose games the King watched by special cable as he munched his fried banana and peanut butter sandwiches … the Cleveland Browns!
In the late eighties, trying to talk him into starring in my movie Checking Out, I visited Jeff Daniels at his big white house on a small lake not far from Ann Arbor, Michigan.
We went out on Jeff’s paddleboat and talked about the script. It was a glorious summer day and as I watched Jeff’s little kids splashing around in the water, I thought: What a smart man you are, Jeff, to be away from L.A. and to be here, raising your children.
When we were done on the paddleboat, we drove into a nearby small town and had lunch in the town’s best restaurant. We had two bratwurst sandwiches each and two ice-cold beers. Everyone in town knew Jeff, I soon realized, but they didn’t know him as a Hollywood celebrity. They talked about his kids’ Little League teams and the skunk problem under the bridge leading into town and the Fourth of July ox roast.
“We didn’t want to raise our kids in Hollywood,” Jeff Daniels had said to me during our script meeting in his paddleboat.
“Everybody’s famous, and our friends, probably more often than not, would have been people in the Industry or famous people in the Industry. And I just wanted our kids to be away from that. There’s a fantasy world there that can mix with reality, and I just didn’t want them to be confused about that.”
I wasn’t sure I’d ever envied anyone more in my life than I did Jeff Daniels at that moment, when I shook his hand goodbye and drove over the bridge that smelled of skunk.
Naomi and I were going to drive over to Palm Springs with Evans and his new young girlfriend. At the last minute, Evans’s girlfriend couldn’t make it.
“Her stupid parents are taking her to Disneyland for the weekend,” Evans said.
There was nothing to eat in Malibu, except sushi. Oh, not really, of course, but certainly metaphorically.
After seven years of living there, I decided that I was starved. I didn’t want any more holy or saintly food. And I didn’t want to see any more waiters who acted like I’d insulted their genealogy when I asked for the salt and pepper.
Damn it, I wanted a juicy, blood-dripping prime rib! I wanted golden-crusted, breaded fried fish! I wanted Wiener schnitzel and the food of my Magyar forefathers! Burnt pork chops and chicken paprikás drenched with sour cream and big, buttered, and garlic-stuffed baked potatoes, not those shavings of organically grown designer potatoes they served here.
I couldn’t even find a decent loaf of bread in Malibu. Bread was unhealthy, bread put fat on you—I knew all the Malibu wisdom about bread—but I loved bread. I loved bread with butter on it, with anchovy paste on it, even, may the Good Lord forgive me, with deviled ham spread thick on it! But the bread they sold in Malibu was either so doughy it felt like you’d filled your stomach with bricks, or it was filled with all this healthy, good-for-you, you’ll-live-forever crap—raisins, bananas, olives, figs, blueberries.
I didn’t want it to be good for me! I just wanted to eat a crusty, light, and un-strawberry-douched loaf of bread that I could spread my deviled ham on or stuff my sausage into.
We had to drive forty minutes into Santa Monica to find the bread that I liked and, when I asked for the can of deviled ham at my Malibu grocery, the clerk tried to talk me into raspberry yogurt instead.
For those of us who felt that living in Malibu or Carbon Beach or Broad Beach provided a safe shelter from the violent hurly-burly of life in L.A. … there were occasional nasty reminders that we weren’t even safe out here.
Three chopped-up bodies were found in a park in Topanga Canyon, just off the Pacific Coast Highway.
And on a sunny Sunday afternoon, a man went up to a group of sunbathers on the beach, took out a nine-millimeter, and started firing bullets which sprayed the surf and sand. A group of men chased the gunman across the sand and up to the PCH and over it to the other side of the road into the hills as he shot at them and they shot at him.
Gangbangers, the police said, who’d come all the way from Compton to get a little sun on the beach just down the winding lane from Michael Eisner’s estate.
We were bored, too, with our friends. Almost all of them were Industry Friends and, while we weren’t big partygoers, we had them over for dinner or holidays. They had nothing to talk about, we painfully realized, except the Industry.
What movie Brad was doing next and why there was going to be no Titanic sequel and why Ovitz would fail with his management company.
It was like being around people who lived twenty-four hours a day inside a house wallpapered with Daily Variety, the Hollywood Reporter, and the National Enquirer. Discussions of even specific movies were not in terms of their artistic qualities but in terms of their budgets. Even those couples who had kids talked not about the kids but about the clothes at Baby Gap vs. the clothes at Fred Segal.
We couldn’t discuss books with them because our friends didn’t read books; they read scripts or, more likely, readers’ reports of scripts. Many of them were nice people, but there just wasn’t a whole lot of “there” there.
Many of them, too, didn’t seem to project a personality. They listened, they asked questions, they smiled: it was as though they were afraid to talk about themselves, afraid to reveal things about themselves, hiding themselves within cool and possibly Prozac-ed cocoons while they “interviewed” Naomi and me.
They were the extended family equation of the agent who calls you three times a week and says, “I’m just checking in,” and has absolutely nothing else to say. (“Don’t check in,” I said to such an agent once. “I’m a human being, not a hotel,” and he was so shook up by what I said that I had to fire him soon afterward.)
To have a stimulating political conversation with our friends was nearly impossible. They believed in the Enlightened Political Positions, but that was exactly the problem. They were all Liberal Democrats imbued with a Social Conscience. It was like we were all Moonies who’d had the same programming.
Voicing a different opinion about a combustible political issue was sacrilege, met not with rebuttal but with shock. I startled a roomful of friends by making a case against Bill Clinton and they thought I was kidding, Joe doing his quirky court jester–dancing bear act again, Joe the provocateur trying to get a rise out of them.
Certain of our friendships broke up for other reasons: a producer who did read books and did offer opinions and revelations decided to retire, took Berlitz courses, and was in Italy much of the time … an agent who knew the history of the business lost his job and was so humiliated he didn’t come out of his Westwood condo much anymore.
We started to realize that the only time we were at all stimulated by our friends was when they came in from out of town and were not Industry—or when they were family—especially Naomi’s three brothers: Bernie and Bep, both in the steel business in Ohio, and Jeremy, the successful non-Industry public relations man in Los Angeles.
Bernie and Bep weren’t interested in movie budgets and shooting schedules. They weren’t afraid to say, “Boy, what a piece of shit that movie was!” as opposed to our Industry friends who, when they felt that way about a movie, said, “I haven’t seen it yet.”
Bernie and Bep spoke honestly, with real human emotion, about their kids’ failures and successes. They weren’t afraid to make off-color cracks or politically incorrect remarks. They weren’t afraid to call Bill Clinton a “dumb asshole.”
I purposely held some things back from Naomi about Cleveland which I was afraid she might find disturbing.
Buffalo Bill Cody hated Cleveland. He wrote in his memoirs that it was “like living in a sinkhole.”
Rodin’s internationally renowned The Thinker, located outside the Cleveland Museum of Art, was the victim of an unsolved bomb blast in the seventies.
Cleveland was mass murderer and cannibal Jeffrey Dahmer’s favorite city, the place he always asked his dad to take him when he
was a little boy.
Ray Chapman of the Cleveland Indians was the only player ever to have died in major league baseball, the victim of a beanball.
Cleveland Mayor Ralph J. Perk banned the Beatles from appearing in the city.
Ralph Waldo Emerson was booed off the stage during an appearance in Cleveland.
Cleveland Orchestra director George Szell ordered all members of his orchestra to shave their beards and mustaches.
Abolitionist mass murderer John Brown was raised in a small town just outside Cleveland.
Future presidential assassin John Wilkes Booth was the popular star of the Cleveland Academy of Music.
Cleveland’s most celebrated poet, Hart Crane, committed suicide.
The guy who wrote Leaving Las Vegas was from Cleveland, too. He, too, committed suicide.
Hart Crane’s father, Cleveland confectioner Clarence Crane, invented Life Savers.
Hart Crane ate a lot of Life Savers, but they obviously didn’t save his life.
In many ways, even living in glamorous fastest-track Malibu, we were already poster children for Midwestern family values.
Our focus was our family; our obsession was our children.
I grilled burgers and hot dogs on the Weber. We made a big deal about the Carving of the Thanksgiving Turkey. We took the boys down to see Baby Jesus in the nativity crèche on the Pacific Coast Highway each Christmas, as we took them to sit on Santa’s knee at the Broadway mall in Santa Monica.
I drove a pickup truck; Naomi drove a Chevy Suburban. Naomi said prayers with the boys each night before they fell asleep. We didn’t cheat on each other, we didn’t even flirt with others, we were devoted to our marriage.
We went searching for fresh corn in the summer. I liked buffets where they served country ham for Sunday brunch. We liked “real” country music: Willie and Ray Price and Ernest Tubb.
There was one other way we were Midwesterners, too: we’d had the four kids in only six years.
We’d created a very big family very fast and were still at it, thinking how wonderful it would be if we had a little girl … or how terrific it would be if we had our own basketball team … or baseball team.
None of this West Coast family planning nonsense for us! We didn’t give a fuck about the world’s overpopulation problem! My global consciousness was limited to certain globes of Naomi’s body.
There wasn’t a whole lot to do in the dead of winter in the Midwest. Sometimes it was even hard to leave the house and get out on the road, so people stayed inside and enjoyed indoor activities and had gigantic families. Not cool, California-style “extended” families, but the real, sweaty, intercourse-created thing.
We’d been staying inside and growing our family in the dead of winter in California even … the size family we could grow as Midwesterners actually living in the Midwest … seemed unlimited to us.
Within this intimate context, the fact that I was Hungarian-born was relevant, too. A Reuters wire story said, “Forget Latin lovers—horny Hungarians are now the most active between the sheets, leading a charge of Eastern Europeans in the global sex charts. Condom maker Durex’s annual global sex survey showed that Hungarian lovers enjoy sex 152 times a year. The French—fiercely proud of their sexual prowess—only manage 144 performances a year. The Italians and Spanish lag even further with scores of 119 and 123 times a year, while American make love an average of 118 times a year, Germans 120 and Australians 125.”
Naomi told me a story: “When I was a little girl we lived on Mifflin Lake and each year we waited for the ducks to come. They were the same ducks each year, led by a glorious-looking, strutting mallard. All the other ducks were always fluttering around the mallard, but he only had eyes for one scroungy-looking little duck, always after her, just her, always loving her. One day as he was loving her, a snapping turtle took one of her legs off. That didn’t stop the mallard. He kept loving her, just her. One year the ducks came and the mallard was there but the scroungy little duck he loved wasn’t. I knew that little duck was dead. And I knew that mallard had loved her to death.”
Yet even as Naomi and I talked about moving to Cleveland, we couldn’t, as we said in the Industry, “pull the trigger on the deal.”
Part of it was that both Naomi and I, growing up on Lorain Avenue and in Mansfield, had been desperate to get out of Ohio. There had been a narrowness and provincialism there that used to drive me nuts, a grayness of the spirit symbolized by the leadenness of the sky and a sun which seemed trapped behind an iron curtain of pollutants.
I was an adventurer as a young man, flouting and rebelling against the rules of church and state. I finally fled to California where a lot of Clevelanders felt I belonged … out there on the Left Coast among all those drug-addled and nekid hippies, living not far from Berserkeley, my hair shaggy and long. Good riddance! America, love it or leave it!
And as far as they were concerned, they were sure I’d left it. Because California wasn’t a part of their America. California was what was wrong with this country—it was no wonder that I was a Californian.
And now, thirty years later, the father of six children (so far), divorced, happily remarried to another Ohio girl, as I was nearing age sixty, I was contemplating going back.
Home. The return of the prodigal son. To a nice, quiet place where it would be fun to love my wife, raise my kids, and write.
To my hometown, which I’d thought so narrow and provincial.
Cleveland? Forget all my previous “adventures” of so many years ago. What about my more recent “adventures” for which I’d been, in some quarters, on dubious moral grounds, pilloried?
Did you hear the news, boys and girls? The guy who wrote Basic Instinct and Showgirls and Sliver and Jade … the guy who, even in the Plain Dealer’s opinion, was perhaps “Satan’s agent” … this guy was going to set up shop in Cleveland? In Ohio? In the heartland? In Ronald Reagan and George W. Bush country?
At certain moments it put chills down my spine just thinking about it.
Naomi found an interview which Kevin Bacon had done during the filming of Telling Lies in America.
In the interview, Kevin called me “the King of Cleveland.”
“Are you really the King of Cleveland?” Naomi asked.
“Hell no,” I said, “I’m just another shitass honky refugee from the West Side trying to make his way in the big world.”
The school system in Malibu troubled us, too. John Law and Nick were in preschool; Joey was in kindergarten.
I resented the intrusion of the teachers in our home. We got phone calls announcing the teachers’ visits. They were constantly inviting themselves to our home so they could see “the home environment” the boys were living in.
I wondered what they were thinking: they were checking out “home environment” for two preschoolers and a kindergartner? They knew that the boys were living in a very expensive Malibu neighborhood and they knew that their father was a millionaire screenwriter. What kind of “home environment” did they think the boys were living in? A hovel? A pigsty? A child-abusing torture chamber? The teachers came and strolled through our house like prospective buyers.
They asked questions like: How long did you research Showgirls? Do you know Sylvester Stallone? Is he nice? Is Jean-Claude Van Damme really short? They asked me to contribute signed Basic and Showgirls posters to the school auction. They took a cursory look at the boys’ rooms (home environment) and invariably asked about the signed Beatles poster and the signed Muhammad Ali photograph. One of them was a former Vegas dancer who said, “My best friend is the girl in Showgirls who chipped her tooth on a Quaalude.”
“Community Involvement” was another teacher mantra. Three times a week, “family homework” was assigned and Naomi and I started feeling like we were back in school. A teacher told us we either had to “volunteer” for school activities or, if we were too busy, we had to pay the school $1,000 a semester. Nannies and housekeepers, school policy said, couldn’t substitute f
or parents.
“A thousand dollars is extortion,” I told Naomi, “not volunteer work,” but we paid the money anyway.
“Field trips,” I soon deduced, were the biggest scam. A field trip once a week to all parts of L.A.—to the Planetarium, the Imax Theatre, the Farmers Market in Santa Monica. Pile all the kids into strangers’ cars, zip them down the Pacific Coast Highway, the most dangerous and lethal road in the whole state of California, and onto the freeways, which weren’t just a dodge ’em collision course but a place where hucksters in teams faked accidents each day to cheat insurance companies.
All this to see fresh vegetables being sold at the Farmers Market? Why? Because the teachers were bored and wanted to buy some fresh produce for the weekend? Meanwhile, Joey in kindergarten couldn’t spell or read but was learning to do both at home with the $300 phonics set we had bought.
The topper for me was when Joey’s favorite teacher, a New Age, post-hippie earth mother was suddenly fired by the school one day. We made some inquiries and discovered that she was gone because she’d been living homeless in her car and had a killer prescription drug habit. She went to Florida to join her two grown children—both of whom, naturally, were … surfers.
It seemed to me, while I was living in Malibu, that I heard from just about every Hungarian who lived in the L.A. Basin.
Thousands of Hungarians writing, calling, telegramming, e-mailing their fellow Hungarian—the famous Hungarian screenwriter—to suggest to him a collaboration on a screenplay about … always about, invariably about … Attila the Hun.
In November of the year 2000, in a doctor’s office in Beverly Hills, I was diagnosed with two benign polyps on my vocal cords. I was what is known as a polyp “grower” and had had benign nasal polyps surgically removed three times.
The doctor who made the diagnosis was known as an “E-N-T Man to the Stars.” His office was filled with gold and platinum records given to him by singers he’d treated.
There was no rush to do the surgery, the doctor said; those polyps had been growing for a long time. But it would eventually have to be done because, as they grew, the polyps would block my air path.
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