Hollywood Animal

by Joe Eszterhas

  Babe Ruth, my great hero, died of throat cancer, too. He was a libertine and a glutton and an alcoholic and he chain-smoked cigarettes and cigars. No wonder he was my hero. No wonder he died of throat cancer.

  On the day that I was released from the Cleveland Clinic, Marshall Strome told me once again that if I smoked or drank, I would die.

  For a while I would have to come back to the hospital once a week, he said, to be examined.

  I’d have the tube in my throat for at least another month.

  I had lost forty pounds since my surgery. I’d gone from a size 42 waist to a size 36.

  Almost as soon as we walked out of the clinic, I began having severe nicotine and alcohol cravings. I was using the anti-smoking patch, but my cravings continued nevertheless.

  I wish I could say that I was overjoyed to have survived and to be back home … but I was badly depressed and jangled. My nerve endings were raw.

  I felt myself to be half asleep and acutely restless at the same time. My heart raced sometimes and at other times seemed to be skipping beats. I was nauseous sometimes and had occasional gastrointestinal cramps.

  I looked at my beautiful boys and my lovely wife and it was almost as though my cravings were blocking them out … all I could think about was having a cigarette or a drink.

  My hands shook and I sweated out at night and I saw myself in vivid detail going down to Medic Drugs and buying a pack of Salems … and then driving over to the Coyote Moon Café and having an ice-cold beer and a shot of tequila.

  I spent my days in agony, still feeling like I was in acute withdrawal from my dual addictions.

  I still got the shakes and the sweats and I was profoundly depressed, writing few messages for Naomi on my Fisher-Price Magna Doodle.

  This was no kind of life for a vibrant and beautiful still-young woman.

  Maybe everyone would be better off, I thought, if I just crawled into a bunch of leaves under a tree, and died.

  Naomi turned to me one day with great affection and great concern in her eyes and said, “Please, my great friend, don’t let me down!”

  I got home from the clinic on a Monday and asked Naomi to call the nursing home … to ask them to tell my father that we would be visiting him on Friday.

  I couldn’t tell him myself, of course, because of my Fisher-Price Magna Doodle.

  That Thursday the nursing home called us to say that István Eszterhás had died in the night.

  On the morning I heard that my father was dead, I needed a drink and a cigarette more than I’d ever needed them in my whole life … and I couldn’t have them.

  My father’s funeral was held at the Louis A. Bodnar Funeral Home, across the street from Nick’s Diner, a block from where I’d grown up on Lorain Avenue.

  The week before my throat cancer surgery, I’d left instructions with Gerry Messerman that if I didn’t make it through the surgery, I wanted my services to be held at the Louis A. Bodnar Funeral Home.

  I asked Louis Bodnar to take my father’s wedding ring off his hand. He gave it to me and I put it on my finger, right above my wedding band.

  · · ·

  Gerry Messerman came to my father’s funeral, to the funeral of the man he’d represented on war crimes charges.

  I even asked Gerry to be one of the pallbearers and Gerry even accepted.

  Steve and Gerry and I (with some others) took my father to his grave.

  A woman my age showed up at the funeral home and said I had slept with her one night when we were in college.

  I hadn’t seen or spoken to her since … almost forty years ago … but she said she’d seen my father’s obit in the paper and wanted to come by to express her condolences.

  Gerri sent a tiny bouquet of flowers to the funeral home with a note that said, only “From Steve and Suzi’s mother.”

  I didn’t exactly blame her. “Joe is my son,” my father had told her, “but you are not my daughter.”

  Right back at ya … even in the grave.

  My father had died alone, surrounded by strangers, not his family. I hadn’t been there to hold his hand like I had held my mother’s.

  And, as it turned out, I had literally exacted Jessica Lange’s Music Box punishment upon him: he had never met or seen Joey and Nick and John Law and Luke.

  Costa-Gavras had said to me, while we were working on Music Box, that every son needed to kill his father … and if that was right, then maybe I’d finally killed István Eszterhás, author and Hungarian nationalist and alleged war criminal … killed him for what he had done and not done, killed him for loving me and lying to me.

  I am exacting the final part of Jessica Lange’s punishment upon my father right now … with you, as you read this book. I am exposing what my father did just as Jessica Lange exposed what her father did in Music Box.

  What I am referring to as “Jessica Lange’s punishment” is, of course, a literary conceit and a personal evasion.

  I created Jessica Lange’s character, Ann Talbot. I told Ann Talbot how to punish her father. Cutting him off from his grandchildren and exposing him to the world were my ideas … not Ann’s.

  If what Costa-Gavras said was true, if every son needed to kill his father, then it meant that I would be killed five times by five boys … and what they would do to me would hurt me five times as much as I had hurt my father.

  If, that is, I lived long enough … heh heh heh … to see my little boys grow into men.

  My father’s housekeeper came up to me at the funeral home and handed me a piece of paper. It was a new will my father had made out in the past month with the housekeeper as his witness.

  In this new will handed to me at his funeral, my father directed me not to bury him here … not to bury him in America … but to fly his body back to Hungary and bury him there.

  It was the final giveaway, I thought, as to how he felt about America. He hated America, I was convinced, as much as I loved her. Because America had defeated his Hungary, his Nazi Hungary, in the war.

  He had lived in America for more than fifty years … hiding all that time in his strudel ghetto among other Hungarians who were also hiding from deportation … and these were his final words to the nation that had given him shelter and his son success.

  Even dead, he wanted nothing to do with America. Even dead, he wanted to go back to Hungary … like he’d always wanted to go back to Hungary.

  He could finally do it safely now … dead … because the Hungarian government didn’t prosecute dead people for their crimes.

  He said nothing in this new will, I noted, about disinterring my mother and flying her body back to Hungary along with his. He wanted my mother’s body left in Cleveland. He wanted to go back to Hungary without her.

  It convinced me that my mother had been right: he hadn’t loved her.

  He wanted to be free of her, too, along with America, back in Budapest, alone.

  I refused my father’s final, dying request.

  We buried him at Calvary Cemetery in Cleveland, right next to my mother … the wife he wanted to leave behind in death.

  I viewed it as maybe my father’s final punishment.

  I hadn’t let him meet or see his grandchildren and I was going to write a book exposing him … and now I was putting him into the ground of the America he hated.

  There were about a hundred Hungarians at my father’s funeral. I couldn’t speak very well to any of them because of the tube in my throat.

  The only time I cried was when they sang the Hungarian national anthem at the end of the ceremony.

  I thought I could hear him accompanying them on his violin.

  My father willed his violin to Steve and the violin that was mine when I was a boy to Suzi. Neither of them played the violin and they didn’t know what to do with them. They took them to Gerri’s house in Tiburon, where the violins are on a shelf in the basement.

  Back at home after the funeral, I cursed myself for what I had done to myself. I had maimed myself. I felt l
ike a freak when I tried to talk. I saw people’s heads swivel my way when they heard my raspy croak. I saw little kids nudge each other and stare.

  Once upon a time, I had had such a good voice that a lot of people told me I should go into broadcasting. Now, thanks to my own actions, I had cut my own throat as surely as Marshall Strome had cut it to save me.

  I felt a constant, overwhelming physical craving for a cigarette … centered almost exactly at the spot in my throat where the surgery had been done.

  I had an intense physical craving in my mostly gone larynx for mentholated smoke … for smoke hitting my larynx and then moving down into my lungs.

  It felt like a nearly sexual need.

  My long hair, down to the middle of my back, was driving me crazy. It kept getting into my trach or into the hole in my throat along with the bugs and mosquitoes.

  “Above-the-title hair,” the columnists Liz Smith and George Christy had called it.

  But I went to a barbershop now in the town of Chagrin Falls and had it cut off. Short. Very short.

  I stopped highlighting my hair, too. I turned grayer—in spots whiter, in spots snow-white.

  Besides going to the barbershop, I was going to the grocery store and driving my pickup truck and going to the bank and, one spring day, with the trach still in my throat, I went to play baseball with my little boys.

  It wasn’t a smart thing to do. Joey hit a line drive back at me that was headed for my throat. It could have shattered my trach, but I snapped my head sharply out of the way.

  I visualized a Plain Dealer headline on the second page of the metro section: “SCREENWRITER KILLED BY THE GAME HE LOVED.” The subhead read: “SON’S LINE DRIVE KILLS DAD.”

  In an effort to ease my cigarette and alcohol cravings, I changed my diet completely:

  I became a near-vegetarian and drank juices all day—carrot juice and grapefruit juice and cranberry juice.

  I ate lots of green vegetables, fish, and very little meat.

  Swallowing was still extremely difficult at times but I forced myself to drink quarts of the juices.

  Dr. Strome also put me on a regimen of multivitamins and antioxidants.

  I noticed that if I was really tired, my cravings weren’t as bad … so I started purposely trying to tire myself.

  I went on an hour walk in the morning and walked for another hour at night.

  My leg and back muscles started to hurt.

  I started reading every book I could find about cancer, smoking, and alcoholism.

  I discovered that Hungarian men had the highest death rate from cancer in the world … Hungarian women ranked second among women worldwide.

  I discovered that it would take me many years before I could say that I had beaten either of my addictions. I’d been smoking for forty-four years and drinking for forty-two—not one day had passed in all those years when I hadn’t had something to smoke or something alcoholic to drink.

  Now, suddenly, just like that, I had stopped both.

  My books told me that there was no way anyone could do that without suffering … that I would have to suffer my way through this for a long time … that I would have to conquer my body’s cravings with my mind.

  I couldn’t watch the television news at six o’clock each night because that time of night was tied in to cocktail hour for me.

  It was the time of night I’d always had a couple of stiff gins or Jack Daniel’s.

  Instead of watching the news, we’d have dinner early at that hour. I’d eat as fast as possible and leave the table because sitting there made me crave a drink and a cigarette.

  I couldn’t even listen to my favorite music, I noticed, because my favorite music—Dylan, Bruce, the Stones, Cohen, Otis, Johnny Cash, Sinatra, Billie Holiday—was all soaked with booze and cigarette smoke.

  All those years I’d spent listening to that music while I was smoking and drinking … and now, when I heard it, I desperately wanted to smoke and drink again.

  I’d developed allergies as well. I’d never had them in Ohio before but now, suddenly, my eyes and nose were dripping, my wound of a throat filled with nasal drip as I tried to hawk the stuff up.

  It felt like I was drowning in my own snot.

  · · ·

  I read a book by Stephen King called On Writing, in which he wrote honestly about his own addictions: he chain-smoked and drank a case of beer a day and he had such a bad cocaine habit that when he looked down, blood dripped from his nose. And he’d beaten all three of his addictions.

  I read the book three times. It helped me. Thank you, Stephen.

  I wasn’t able to completely focus on either my reading or a movie. I often drifted off. At other times I suddenly got so restless that I immediately had to walk around.

  “Sitzfleisch!” my father had said so often to me.

  “Sitzfleisch!” I’d said so often to young writers.

  “Sitzfleisch!” I said to myself now … but I couldn’t do it.

  Hollywood was not the kind of place where people wanted to work with a cancer victim … so we didn’t want anyone to know I was sick. Nor, if my cancer came back, did I want the press keeping a gossip column death watch.

  So Naomi told everyone who called that I couldn’t talk because I’d just had two benign polyps removed.

  A friend at the Plain Dealer told me that the paper had learned I was being treated for throat cancer at the clinic … but had decided not to report it.

  I had four little boys who were most of the time doing something that they shouldn’t be doing … that they could hurt themselves doing … and I had no voice to yell at them with.

  I saw them going too fast with their bikes and I couldn’t yell at them to stop doing that. I saw them get too close to the lake and I couldn’t tell them to back up. I saw them trying to retrieve a ball from the pond and I couldn’t yell and tell them to forget the ball.

  I cursed myself for robbing myself of my voice.

  We went to a baseball game at Jacobs Field that featured all the old Indians stars of the past. I saw Bob Feller and Al Rosen and Herb Score and Steve Gromek and Rocky Colavito … and as I saw them limp and shuffle onto the field, I felt tears in my eyes. I knew I wasn’t crying for them. I was crying for me.

  I suddenly remembered the day my father took me to the Indians-Yankees game when I was a boy. I smiled through my tears as I saw my father in his trench coat and beret, sitting in the stands reading his book as I watched the game. When I remembered the book he was reading that long-ago day, I felt like laughing.

  Crime and Punishment.

  Of all books.

  Naomi and I went to Cleveland Heights with some movers and cleaned my father’s house out.

  I took some of his coats and hats for myself and I took the chair that he’d bought from the Volunteers of America and that he sat on when he wrote all of his books and articles.

  I am sitting on my father’s chair now as I write this book that will reveal his sins to the world.

  I kept all of my father’s Hungarian novels that I found in his house. On the first page of each one was a green sheet that said, “EX LIBRIS—István Eszterhás” and a painting of the Hungarian flag with the Holy Crown of St. Stephen in the middle of it.

  I thought about my father as I sorted through his faded and dusty things and I realized that the first script I wrote after his Justice Department hearings, Original Sin, was about how the past doomed two lovers … and the ending of the second script I wrote after the hearings, Sliver, showed a woman disregarding the fact that her lover was a murderer … because she loved him.

  My father died, I reflected, like his hero Lajos Kossuth, the Hungarian patriot … old, half blind, poor, and alone—not in Turino, Italy, but in Cleveland, Ohio.

  I found a small plastic statue of Jesus which Father John Mundweil had given me for my first Holy Communion. I gave it to Naomi, who put it on her nightstand.

  I found an old Playboy magazine featuring a mostly nude Suzanne Somer
s, one of my father’s favorite actresses. I took it. I don’t know why. It is on the coffee table in my office now, atop an old Time, with its Man of the Year cover of the Hungarian freedom fighter.

  I found an old passport belonging to my mother among my father’s things … as well as my mother’s Arrow Cross identification card, complete with swastika-like arrow and cross symbols.

  I found his old trench coat. I kept the trench coat and put it in my closet. It hangs there not far from Bill Macdonald’s Renegade jacket.

  · · ·

  Sitting on the front porch with Naomi and sipping the cold lemonade she had made me, I said, “I’m sorry, Guinea. Forgive me. I love you more than anything in the world. I haven’t been treating you right. I’ve been rude to you at times, cold, distracted. I just wanted to tell you how much I love you and that without you, I couldn’t be doing any of this.”

  Naomi kissed me and said, “I forgive you.”

  She bought me a present for not smoking and drinking: a 1997 Cleveland Indians American League championship ring, given only to team members and Indians’ executives.

  I wore my Wahoo ring proudly.

  Steve stopped smoking, too. He was already a two-pack-a-day smoker, and stopping was very difficult for him but he did it. Now we were cheering each other on.

  I asked him how he quit and he said, “I told myself that if I quit, Pops, you’d live, and if I didn’t, you’d die.”

  My neighbors … even strangers … were a blessing. They’d recognize me at a Giant Eagle or pumping gas and say “Welcome home!” or “You’re not one of those Hollywood people anyway!” and “Are you writing?”

  I wasn’t writing … partly because I couldn’t focus and partly because every time I sat down to write, my cigarette cravings became excruciating.

  I remembered how I’d looked forward to moving here and eating all the ethnic meats and sausages that I loved so much.

  I couldn’t eat any of it because:

  Meat made me crave cigarettes and alcohol more.

  Ethnic meats were cancer-causing.

  I remembered the dream I’d had before we moved here about jogging by the woods each day.

  I wasn’t jogging, but I was walking at a pretty fast clip and there was little doubt I was living out my dream.