Hollywood Animal

by Joe Eszterhas

  Evans, who had always had ego problems with directors—“The best time to hire a director is right after they’ve had a great failure,” he’d said—didn’t like Phillip either.

  I was almost feeling sorry for Evans, banned from his own set, desperate to contribute, frantic to be the creative hero of yore. Evans was now down to meetings with the music supervisor and the costume designer.

  I knew his musical tastes … Nat King Cole was his favorite; he knew nothing about Enigma or UB-40, the groups we were talking about using.

  He told the costume designer he thought Billy Baldwin should be wearing the clothes he wore—not the kind of clothes Evans wore—but the clothes themselves. So he had a grip from the set bring his clothes from his house to his office: white shoes and white belts and lavender slacks and monogrammed slippers were everywhere.

  Evans was also conducting a guerrilla campaign against his own movie. He said he hated the dailies.

  “That lummox can’t direct,” he said about Noyce. “That scene where they’re supposed to be making love. They don’t make love, they don’t even fuck. They rut. They’re wild hogs. Horses. We’ve got a script about pussy by a writer who knows pussy with a producer who knows pussy and it’s being directed by a lummox who thinks his dick is something to pee with.”

  He loathed Sharon for banning him from his set and took it out on her dailies. “You can’t even shoot her ass anymore. She’s over already. She’s too old. Who’d want to fuck her anymore? Who’s gonna buy their popcorn and come watching her?”

  He didn’t like Billy Baldwin much, either.

  “All those big schwantz brothers in that family and we had to pick this goony putz.”

  I don’t know how many times my son Steve saw Basic Instinct, but I know the videotape I had of the uncut European version was worn out pretty fast.

  I got Sharon to sign a sultry bathing suit picture which Steve put up on his wall. It said, “To Steve—All My Love, Sharon.”

  Sometimes when Sharon and I were hanging out together, enjoying each other’s company, I wondered what was going on in Steve’s head. I was certain they were the same kinds of goings-on that had gone on, when I was Steve’s age, between me and Mamie Van Doren, me and Zsa Zsa Gabor, me and Brigitte Bardot.

  In a very complex and intimate way, I knew, I had introduced Sharon to Steve.

  I was at a party at a producer’s house in the flats of Beverly Hills and I had to pee.

  The line to the bathroom was long, though, and everyone standing there seemed to have the sniffles, so I thought it would be some time before I could get in there.

  I left, jumped into my rent-a-car, and thought I could wait till I got back to the hotel.

  A few blocks away, though, still in Beverly Hills, I realized I couldn’t wait anymore. Not one minute longer. Not even thirty seconds.

  I jumped out of the car on a dark side street and spotted a high wall surrounding an estate and peed against the wall.

  I was still in midstream when bright lights from all directions illuminated me and a loud alarm went off.

  I was still zipping myself up when two Beverly Hills police department cruisers pulled up, sirens wailing, cherries whirling.

  The cops put me against the wall and frisked me and told me what I’d done was a crime and they were going to arrest me for it.

  I told them that I had just come from the producer’s party and that Don Simpson, the producer who’d made Beverly Hills Cop, was a good friend of mine.

  I recited my credits for them.

  One of the cops said, “Did she know her pussy was getting shot for that scene?”

  I said she did indeed, and the Beverly Hills cops sent me on my way.

  Besides Sharon, I had also become good friends with Bill Macdonald, the head of Evans’s production company. Bill was in his late thirties and liked to have a drink and a good time.

  Bill was a man of many implications. He implied that he had an offshore fortune and he implied that he had a Texas ranch and he implied, oh so delicately, that he’d been involved with the CIA in certain vague and unmentionable Far East exploits.

  Pinned down, Bill blithely admitted that his father was a San Francisco surgeon famous for the pub crawls that even Herb Caen wrote about … but he implied that his mother was General Douglas MacArthur’s illegitimate daughter.

  I thought Bill’s implications were a hoot and had fun matching yarns and tequila shooters with him.

  I liked Bill’s girlfriend just as much as Bill. They had been together ten years and were about to be married soon. She was thirty-two years old and drop-dead gorgeous. She had a razor-sharp wit … and she was from Ohio.

  Her name was Naomi Baka.

  From the time she was a little girl, Naomi wanted to leave Mansfield and Ohio.

  She dreamed of a place with broader horizons—it was something most of her family—her father, her older brothers, her sister—didn’t understand. They loved Mansfield—it was a great, crime-free place to raise kids.

  Only her mother and her younger brother, Jeremy, got it. Her mother, who grew up in a small mining town in Illinois, always encouraged her to broaden her horizons, to live, to “color every page.”

  Naomi did. She read. She took photographs. She saw lots of movies. She drew. She was Richland County Fire Queen. She went to Ohio State and became the first person in her family to graduate from college. She worked in factories to pay her tuition; she was a busgirl at the local Ramada Inn. After college, she worked as a stringer for a newspaper in Columbus and then as a public relations rep at the phone company in Mansfield.

  She wanted to get out of Mansfield, but she was still in a relationship with her high school boyfriend. Her boyfriend worked in Mansfield, too, and talked about moving to Kansas City.

  Naomi didn’t want to live in Kansas City. She wanted to live in New York, the city she’d dreamed about since she was a little girl. Her mother kept urging her to go; her father kept telling her she was crazy.

  She rented a U-Haul, put a few pieces of furniture into it, and said she was going to New York. She had $800 in her pocket. Her father didn’t even kiss her goodbye when she left. He shook her hand and said, “You’ll be back. With your tail between your legs.”

  She went to New York and with the little money she had, she became the roommate of a woman subletting one room of her apartment. She went to all the big firms with her résumé and got lucky with Warner Communications. They hired her as a secretary and moved her quickly to public relations. She was making enough money now to have a small apartment of her own.

  She gloried in New York—a dazzlingly beautiful young woman from Ohio, of all places, sweet and seemingly naive. Men found her “charming” and “different.” She went to places like “21” and the Oak Room bar and Trader Vic’s. She loved the mad swirl of Manhattan streets and the food in the neighborhoods—Chinese and Brazilian and Caribbean—exotic and exciting foods they’d never even heard of in Mansfield.

  But they didn’t understand, back there in Mansfield, what she was so excited about. She persuaded her sister to visit her in New York but her sister thought the city was dirty and dangerous and hurried home.

  She got an even better job in public relations at American Express, flying to corporate retreats in Arizona and Vermont and Florida. She was even flown to a conference in Rome, where she met the pope. No one took her for a naive farm girl from Ohio anymore. She persuaded her little brother, Jeremy, to go to New York and he got a job in public relations there, too.

  She met a young man named Bill Macdonald, who said he was in the import-export business. She settled into a relationship with him. They went to parties with the Kennedys; they crashed the Petrushka Ball; they spent holidays with the Armours of Texas and visited the Biddles of Philadelphia.

  When Bill Macdonald decided to move to L.A. to get into the movie business, she followed him to California and got another, higher-paying job in public relations. She and Bill lived in Venice Beach and
then in Marina Del Rey. She drove a little Mercedes 280 SL. She started drawing portraits of James Dean and Elvis and Brando and displaying them in galleries. She persuaded Jeremy to follow her to California and get another PR job.

  Shortly after I met Naomi, I was watching her at dinner with a group of people. She was elegantly dressed and was talking about working on Wall Street with her WASPy friends.

  Her hands were moving in the air and her eyes were flashing and she suddenly reminded me of a girl I’d known once in Italy.

  I interrupted what Naomi was saying and said, “You’re a Guinea, that’s what you are, a little Guinea.”

  She stared at me curiously for just a moment and then she said, “Yes, that’s what I am,” holding my eye.

  She told me that her Polish father had always called her Italian mother “the Little Dago.”

  Bill Macdonald became my wingman on my prowls through San Francisco’s and L.A.’s clubs, though I noted he wasn’t interested in picking up any women—all he was interested in was his tequila.

  On one of those prowls, I wound up in a tiny house in Larkspur, California, making love on the living room floor with a waitress I had picked up … while Bill lay on a couch inches from us, feigning sleep.

  I didn’t know that Bill was relating every detail of these club prowls to his girlfriend, Naomi, telling her even about the moans that he had heard and the sights he had seen on that living room floor in Larkspur, California.

  I didn’t know that “little devil” Naomi was keeping a journal.

  CHAPTER 15

  [Naomi’s Journal]

  Robert Evans Kneels in Prayer

  NOMI

  What are you doing here?

  CRISTAL

  What am I doing here? I’m doing the finest cocaine in the world, darlin’. You want some?

  Showgirls

  April 8, 1989

  Someone is stealing Evans’s shoes. Bill’s not even that upset about it, since the shoes Bob owns are those sort of half boots that zip up the sides that they wore in the seventies (that’s how long he’s had them). Bill has been trying to encourage Bob to get a more “modern” look.

  But Bob is perplexed and devastated. The suspects are a man-and-wife team that works there. God knows what they want with Bob’s shoes.

  Now all he has left are the shoes he got from the movie The Two Jakes. I’ve seen them. Sort of brown and white saddle shoes out of the forties. He loves them. From the seventies to the forties … but they actually look pretty good with his bolo ties …

  May 4, 1989

  Over the weekend we went up to Bob’s. I haven’t been there for a while. There’s a new girl at the house named Bridget. She is beautiful but looks about fifteen years old.

  When we arrived, she answered the door sweetly. She was wearing a tiny black maid’s outfit with a little ruffled white slip and white panties peeking out from underneath. It had a tiny white apron and she wore a little cap.

  I said, “Oh, you should wear that at Halloween.”

  She looked at me sort of blankly.

  As we headed to the screening room Bill whispered to me “She wears that every day—Bob likes her in it!”

  June 8, 1989

  Bill is an exhausted nervous wreck ever since he drove Bob to Scripps for his stint in rehab. When he arrived at Bob’s house, he found Evans nearly incoherent, stuffing hundreds of photos of nude women he has known (most of them now other men’s wives) into a briefcase. Bill had to practically drag him into the car.

  Then on the way down Bob kept desperately trying to get Bill to turn around. At the “intervention” with his friends and family it had all seemed like a good idea, but in the reality of day he was having a nervous breakdown.

  They passed some sort of resort hotel and Evans shrieked “Turn in here! Turn in here!” but Bill kept going.

  Then Bob pulls an absolutely huge dildo out of his briefcase and tries to shove it out the car window.

  “What is that!?” Bill says to him.

  “Bridget gave it to me—I have to get rid of it!” Evans says as he struggles to force it out the window.

  “For God’s sake Bob! We’re going to get pulled over! Have you lost your mind?!” Bill is yelling at him.

  They finally get to Scripps and Bill leaves him there.

  The next day Evans calls and I answer. He’s frantic. “I’ve got to get out of here. I can’t sit here in a room full of women with blue hair … I’m going to lose my mind …”

  I just said, “Bob, you need help. You promised everyone you love you would get it. You have to stay there …”

  The very next day he checked himself out, called a limo which came and picked him up, and went home. Thus ends Evans’s rehab.

  July 14, 1989

  Bill and I had dinner with Bob, his son Josh, and Ali MacGraw last night. It was the most fun I’ve ever had with Bob. He was in his element and I found him hysterical—telling old Hollywood stories as only he can.

  There was one really interesting part of the evening. Every time I see Ali she rushes over to me and says, “You look gorgeous! You look absolutely incredible! What are you doing with yourself?”

  The first time it happened (I ran into her at Tribeca) I was flattered. It was so spontaneous and I just glowed with the compliment.

  But then the next time I saw her she said “You look absolutely beautiful tonight!” and I thought “Well, maybe she just thinks I’m pretty.”

  But last night was very revealing. Josh was imitating Bob—his baritone voice, his mannerisms. We were howling.

  Then he said, “Yeah, I can do my mom, too …” and he said, “You look fantastic! You look absolutely gorgeous tonight! My God, you look incredible.”

  I felt my ears get hot and I knew my face turned red, but I don’t think anyone noticed.

  They were all laughing at Josh (including Ali). All I could think of was, “You idiot, you actually believed her …”

  April 4, 1990

  It seems Lotto has reached somewhere near $70 million. Evans, who is desperate for cash, has decided Lotto might save him. He bought hundreds of tickets hoping that some miracle would bail him out of the debt that keeps growing.

  When we entered the screening room last night, there on the large round table were hundreds and hundreds of Lotto tickets. Daphne and several other visiting bimbos were gathered around the table reading off the numbers. (Daphne is Evans’s latest fixture at the house. She told me they met in St. Tropez on the beach when he admired her tattoo.) Even Darryl the tennis pro, dressed in his whites with his racket leaning against his chair, had come in off the court to lend a hand. It sounded like one of those telemarketing calls with the hum of voices droning in the room.

  “Can you fucking believe this?!” Evans was shouting and pacing around the screening room. “Not one fucking winning number in the bunch! I’m the unluckiest Jew that ever lived!” He was nearly spitting, waving his glasses around and screaming at the bimbos not to mix up the ones that had been rechecked with the ones that had been re-rechecked.

  We decided not to stick around. He was in no mood to discuss setting up a monthly budget, which was the purpose of Bill’s visit. Besides, we would have ended up sitting at the table checking Lotto tickets.

  July 8, 1991

  Bill came home last night with stars in his eyes. The Evans overall deal with Paramount was signed. Bill said Bob cried. They’ve decided to move into Evans’s old offices on the lot. Bill said to Bob, “Let’s take the Robert Evans Company sign off the garage door, shine it up, and put it back on the Paramount lot.”

  July 11, 1991

  Bill and Evans spent last night writing the press announcement for the Paramount deal. Just the two of them—Bill seated at the computer and Bob spouting grandiose plans.

  July 17, 1991

  Bill and Evans rode in their new company car (a white Jag) to the studio today to look at temporary offices.

  Evans is flipping out. This is all happening so fast.


  I think that in June of 1988, when Bill met him, Evans had one foot in the grave (at least psychologically and emotionally).

  The day he met Bill, Evans said, “I need you more than you need me, you just don’t know it yet.”

  July 31, 1991

  Bill came home excitedly bearing his Paramount parking access card and paycheck.

  Finally he’s in an office.

  August 20, 1991

  Evans took The Saint bolo tie he always wears and put it over Paramount executive John Goldwyn’s head and dragged him down the hall by the bolo and the neck to David |Kirkpatrick’s office. David is the head of production.

  Evans was screaming at Goldwyn “to have some balls and make The Phantom. Your grandfather would have made it! This place needs to make movies, not memos.”

  September 19, 1991

  Bill spent the afternoon on Friday with Joe Eszterhas, whom he has decided he likes very much. They have a lot in common. Joe’s favorite vacation spot is near Reggiomaggiore in Italy (which is one of Bill’s favorite spots in the world).

  Joe lives in Marin County near San Francisco and is a real family man. He and Bill will get along fine.

  September 28, 1991

  Bill and Evans went to a screening of a movie with Michelle Pfeiffer. He and Bob were given the red-carpet treatment.

  Bob was sitting next to the director of the film, and Bob fell asleep and started to snore. A woman sitting near them said to Bill, “Is Bob commenting on the film or is he snoring?”

  Bill said, “He’s snoring.”

  The woman said “Oh my God” in this wonderfully clipped English accent.

  September 30, 1991

  I talked to Evans for over an hour on the phone. Bill wasn’t home when he called. Evans read me the preface to his upcoming autobiography and a letter he wrote about Alzheimer’s disease.

  We chatted awhile and Evans convinced me to look up a new word every day in the dictionary, write it down five times, use it in a sentence five times, and then do a quiz at the end of two weeks.

  The first word I’ve chosen is contumelious: “insulting.”

  October 1, 1991

  Bill was up at Bob’s house and found a goodly amount of the forbidden fruit—cocaine—in one of his couches. He brought it home and is going to confront Bob.