Hollywood Animal

by Joe Eszterhas

  Suzi said, “I hate Naomi—I hate her! I hate her! I hate her!”

  I said, “Naomi didn’t cause this.”

  Suzi said, “That’s bullshit, Dad! You and Mom never even argued. We never heard a single argument between you.”

  I said, “That’s because your mother and I worked very hard not to upset you guys. Not to let you hear us argue. Believe me that we argued hundreds of times through the years. All the arguments ended with your mother crying and saying ‘Please don’t leave me, Joseph.’”

  Suzi said, “I don’t care how many times you argued. People argue, husbands and wives argue. But you didn’t leave Mom until Naomi came into your life, did you, Dad?”

  I said, “I started leaving your mother a long time ago in my heart.”

  Suzi said, “Bullshit! You’re just trying to protect Naomi. You’re just trying to deny her part in all this!”

  We said nothing for a while and I finished another glass of white wine.

  Steve said, without looking at me, “What are you going to do now?”

  I said, “We’re going back to Maui.”

  Suzi said, “You’re just running away. Maui isn’t the real world.”

  I said, “I can’t argue that.”

  We rented a little house on Maui overlooking the golf course at the Kapalua Hotel behind iron security gates.

  Producers, directors, and studio executives flew over from L.A. to have meetings. They usually took a couple of hours and then they and their significant others stayed at the Ritz or the Kapalua for the next four or five days and charged it all to the studio.

  They didn’t argue much with me either about the script or the new deal we were discussing because they were relying on me to tell the studio that our meetings took four or five days and not a couple of hours.

  On occasion they even relied on me to introduce them to a local contact who provided them with various island substances that made them more catatonic than they already were.

  They flew back to L.A. and told their friends in the business how much they’d enjoyed their meetings with me and then their friends flew over … and my new deals to write more screenplays kept piling up.

  I started Showgirls and, as I sometimes do, I kept a diary.

  Entry #1: I’m going to call her Nomi—Naomi’s mom used to call her that and since I’m going to spend the rest of my life with her, I like it that the first script I write since we’ve been together will have her nickname as the central character … Nomi’s young, nineteen, we’re probably going to have trouble with casting, she’s going to have to be a helluva dancer besides being able to act, but I’ll let Paul Verhoeven worry about that—thank God I don’t direct. Nomi Malone—the sound’s nice and symbolic, a young woman alone in the world.

  Entry #2: Spent a lot of the day out by the pool, trying to chart the rest of it … it feels like it’s going to be long … a big story … but I have to take her from the lap-dancing, sleazy stuff to the big Vegas stage stuff—different worlds, have to show her progression from one world to the other—have to show the worlds themselves—that takes time and scenes. At the end, is the world of Vegas big stages actually sleazier, more corrupting than the world of the lap-dance clubs? Does Nomi make it and realize that she’s lost it—internally, spiritually? I like the irony.

  Is the world as full of irony as my own life is?

  Entry #3: Cristal’s in it now … the meeting between Cristal and Nomi … the beginning of the flirtation or battle or fight or sexual attraction maybe, although I’m not sure where I’m going to take it. Does Cristal like Nomi? Does she see Nomi as a kind of young, unformed image of herself—the mirror reflection—is that good or bad? Does that attract her or repel her? Does Cristal hate or love herself or a gray between the two shades.

  Cristal will be a hot part for somebody. Sharon? Can Sharon dance? Wouldn’t that be the ultimate irony—Sharon, after all this personal tangle, playing Cristal. Paul would probably love it, though—we bring Sharon back as a dancer.

  Paul’s waiting … Charlie Evans going batshit to get the script—everything’s backed-up like crazy thanks to the craziness of my own life.

  Entry #4: We’re going to have ratings trouble, but there’s no honest way to describe what these clubs are like without making them sleazy—they are sleazy—can’t cosmeticize it but the language itself could get us into ratings trouble—more worries for Paul.

  Entry #7: I like what I’ve got. I think it’s working. It’s great to be writing again. It makes the pain with the kids easier. With all the swimming I’m doing, too, I’m a little bit more cooled out at night maybe. Sleep is easier and I love Naomi—not the script’s Nomi, but my Nomi—more than I thought it possible to love anyone. Jesus, I waited almost fifty years for her.

  Entry #12: Debate taking the day off, but I’m too much into it—the characters are speaking to me—up to page 55. The audition scene—Tony. Tough scene, verbal rape, simulated rape—in a way sleazier than the Zip City, lap-dance club stuff. I like that the hotel-casino is supposed to be a classy place and that she’s violated there in a simulated way … much worse than what she went through at the lap-dance club.

  How far will I push the bisexual thing with Cristal? It’s almost impossible to push the sexual stuff too far in a movie about Vegas … People think Vegas is gambling and money—that’s only the top, visible layer … underneath it’s all sex.

  Entry #17: I’ve stopped at page 73 and I’m retyping the whole thing from page 1. I’m going to send the first chunk to Verhoeven when I’m done with it. Paul is getting itchy and I don’t want to lose him. I think this piece is so out there on the edge that if Paul doesn’t direct it, nobody else can or will.

  It’s completely Nomi’s piece … if she doesn’t work, we’re dead—if she isn’t cast right, we’re dead. Is it possible to find a nineteen-year-old who can act and dance?

  Why can’t I ever do anything that’s easy?

  Entry #20: I wrote one of the dance sequences for the brothers and priests who’d taught me at Cathedral Latin:

  BLISS

  The set: a blazing neon cross is center stage. We see spotlights, the spinning red lights of police cars. Time: Night.

  When we open, we see Cristal on the neon cross, crucifìed. She wears only a G-string and pasties. We see the stigmata on her body. A moment of silence as we see her on the neon cross, the others around the cross, barely clad … and then the music begins … and her limbs begin to move on the cross … and she dances off the cross.

  On the ground now, the others dance around her, kneeling to her, beseeching her … the women are topless but they wear veils … not giving her any space. She tries to dance away … we see the blood from the stigmata on her body … but they block her, hem her in, with their prayers and their pleas.

  She blesses them, dancing … she touches them … they reach out constantly to try to touch her … putting their fingers into the stigmata … smearing her blood on themselves … genuflecting.

  And she constantly tries to dance away from them … but they surround her … swoop in on her in a group … force her to the ground … and converge on her … kissing her body, touching her … devouring her body and blood … until finally—

  She breaks away from them. She dances back toward the cross, the others after her … she dances herself up the cross again … crucified again … her limbs moving again … and then she stops as the others on the ground beneath her dance their hallelujahs.

  · · ·

  Entry #22: I took the 73 pages down to the Kapa Lua offices here and faxed them to Paul.

  I’m on page 94.

  With Nomi and Cristal, it’s spiritual combat played out in sexual terms. Isn’t that what we all do? It’s so intertwined, their thing. Cristal’s view of the entertainer as hooker and Nomi’s refusal to be that … or to accept that … or to realize in the deepest part of her that she’s done that … can you actually hook, actually do it, and protect yourself somehow from be
ing tarnished, corrupted? Is that an amazing strength of character or is it self-delusion, fatuousness, naivete? Is Cristal purposely trying to corrupt Nomi—or trying to force her to recognize and reject corruption? Is she trying to hurt Nomi by doing that or is she trying to help her grow up? And, in the middle of this complicated tangle, Cristal wants to sleep with her.

  Entry #27: Paul loves the pages—great news—meanwhile I’m to 112 script pages.

  Cristal is on the offensive with Nomi—pushing and pushing her. It’s sort of like it was with Gerri. Pushing and pushing me, pushing Naomi and me together. Subconsciously, she wanted the marriage over—she just didn’t want to be the one to do it because of the kids. Subconsciously, Cristal wants out of being a star the same way Gerri wanted out of being my wife.

  Entry #33: Done. Way too long, but I like it. A difficult script to write at a helluva difficult time, but maybe the fact that I called my lead “Nomi” and saw little pieces of Naomi in the woman I was creating helped. A kind of tribute to Naomi, though not quite a labor of love, considering Charlie Evans’s lawsuit threats.

  Entry #34: Retyping the final chunk—there was a big rainbow out there this morning.

  Naomi will read it tonight, the first one to read it in toto and it’s the first script of mine she’ll have read.

  Entry #35: Naomi didn’t like it. She found it “dark and depressing.”

  I’m deeply disappointed in her reaction, of course, but I love her for her honesty.

  I hope she’s wrong.

  · · ·

  While I was writing Showgirls, Naomi read an interview with Sharon in which Sharon spoke about Jake, who had been Naomi’s dog … but who was now Sharon’s.

  Naomi told her lawyer to tell Bill’s lawyer that she wanted Jakey back. Bill’s lawyer said no way—Sharon liked Jakey.

  It drove Naomi nuts that Sharon was now playing with her dog.

  I called Bill, who was staying at Sharon’s house off Mulholland overlooking the Valley.

  Bill picked the phone up.

  I said, “Listen, if you don’t give Naomi the dog back, I’m going to squish you like a fucking bug.”

  Bill said nothing … but he held the phone for a few seconds … and then hung up.

  Bill’s lawyer called Naomi’s lawyer shortly afterward to say that Naomi could have Jakey back.

  We had to board him at a kennel until we got back from Maui.

  Paul Verhoeven called to say that he was coming over to Maui to talk about the script. He was bringing his wife of nearly thirty years, Martine, with him.

  At the same time, I read an interview with Paul in a film magazine.

  “It was very personal to me,” Paul said about Basic Instinct. “It was the relationship between me and Sharon that was not consummated in the bed. To have been involved with her would have been a disaster, but the movie was good because of my feelings. …

  “I was not aroused by the lap dancers in Vegas. Ultimately, sex for the sake of sex is boring. I prefer to drink a cup of coffee.”

  As I read the interview with Paul, I remembered two moments during our Showgirls research trips to Vegas:

  A dancer we were having drinks with said to Paul: “What’s the most important thing to you?”

  Paul said, “My work. I couldn’t live without my work.”

  She turned to me and said, “What’s the most important thing to you?”

  I said, “Love.”

  The dancer smiled and said, “You’re so bad.”

  Paul said, “He is! He is! You are exactly right! He is!”

  I was smoking a joint in my suite with two dancers I had interviewed that day. I called Paul and asked him to come over.

  He came but he wouldn’t take a hit off the joint. He said he never put anything poisonous into his lungs.

  He watched the three of us as we acted dumb and stoned and loose. He left suddenly.

  One of the girls said, “Who was that masked man?”

  The other girl said, “Did you see his wristwatch? It had Jesus’ face on it.”

  Naomi’s journal:

  I’m holding my breath there won’t be some meltdown that ends with Paul flying out of here in a huff and the script in limbo. He makes me nervous anyway.

  He’s very likable, but there’s always some push and pull when he and Joe are together.

  Last night at dinner we were talking about marriage. Paul suddenly said matter-of-factly, “I stopped being faithful the day I stopped wearing my wedding ring.” No one said anything. It felt sad.

  Then on the way home in the limo, Paul sat facing backward at one end and we sat facing him on the other. The song “Take the Money and Run” came on the radio.

  Joe laughed and said, “Hey Paul! Listen! They’re playing my song!”

  And Paul said, “Ah yes. Who wins? Joe wins.”

  The ride continued and Joe and I were sitting nearly on top of each other, laughing and generally enjoying each other as we always do.

  I looked up and could just barely see Paul in the darkness. Staring at us.

  Paul sketched every scene of the movie in his copy of the script. I looked at a page and saw a sketch of an odd-looking, octopus-like object.

  “What’s this?” I said to Paul.

  “A pussy,” Paul said.

  Naomi’s journal:

  I like Martine, but they do seem like an odd couple. With both of their girls grown and moved away, she is into her music and her dogs and Paul is never home.

  Last night they joined us for dinner outside on the lanai at our house. We were talking and Joe said something to the effect that, yes, he probably could have stayed married and kept seeing me secretly, but that would have been living a lie and he just didn’t want to live that way. There was a silence then.

  Martine looked at her wine glass.

  Then Paul said, “If I divorced Martine, she would take every penny I have, wouldn’t you, Martine?” He said it with a smile, but there was such resentment in it.

  She smiled back and said, “Everything.”

  We all laughed, but it was nervous laughter.

  Naomi and I were blissfully happy, but I couldn’t get Steve and Suzi out of my mind no matter how much I wrote or drank or how much weed I smoked.

  My dreams were full of things that had happened to them in their childhoods:

  The time Suzi choked on a hot dog and I had to hold her upside-down by her ankles as she turned blue … The time Steve missed a curveball I threw him and it went smashing into his nose … The times they collaborated on home videos, “written by Suzi, directed by Steve” … The time Steve played barber and chopped out a big chunk of Suzi’s hair … The time they scrawled “Zorro” all over the walls of the house.

  I dreamed several times of a moment when we were living in San Rafael, on a street that was a cul-de-sac, and Steve, who was about six, was playing in the front yard … and a van without windows came down the street … and I suddenly didn’t see Steve. I went running out into the street bare-chested, yelling his name, hearing no response, waiting for the van to come back down from the cul-de-sac … here it came … I got in front of it, then went around to the driver’s front door, swung it open, grabbing the driver (a petrified teenage boy) by his shirt and swung him out of the van, yelling “Open the fucking back!” … when I suddenly heard Steve’s voice from the side yard: “Dad? Dad?” … and hurled the teenage kid back into his van, saying, “Get the fuck outta here!”

  And the poor kid flattened his gas pedal and went roaring away.

  I dreamed of Suzi holding on to me, sitting on my shoulders watching fireworks on the Fourth of July … Suzi losing her dolly in London and how I’d moved hell and high water to get it back … and Steve, very sick with a virus, in the emergency room at Marin General Hospital saying, “Don’t hurt you tummy, don’t hurt you tummy.”

  I dreamed of the time Suzi wore a T-shirt to high school which said “Jesus” on the front and “Joker” on the back, and her school principa
l told her she’d be suspended from school if she wore it again … I said to him, “Do you really want to get into a war with me? Think about that. I don’t think you do because if you get into a war with me, I’m going to turn your life into a legal nightmare.”

  Suzi was allowed to wear her Jesus T-shirt anytime she wanted.

  I was a wild man when it came to defending my kids.

  The wild man who’d always defended and protected them had turned his back on them now and was sitting in the lotus position with a joint in his hand on the island of Maui Wowee.

  Suzi called, crying, late at night. She said she was sitting in the den in Tiburon with the lights out.

  She said that’s what my absence from the house was like: darkness.

  “Like the sun in my life has been shut off.”

  That night I got up and threw up and when I came back to bed Naomi said, “I’m sorry.”

  I said nothing and she said, “Is all this pain we’re causing to everybody worth it?” She was crying.

  I held her and said, “I love you so much.”

  While Suzi at least talked to me … yelling or crying, angry or sad … Steve cut me out of his life.

  He never called me and when I called him, he never wanted to talk long.

  Once he said, “What’s there to talk about, Pops? You made your choice. You’re there and we’re here.”

  Drinking and smoking too much, throwing up in the middle of the night, desperately missing Steve and Suzi, I started snapping at Naomi.

  “What have you accomplished with your life?” I asked her during a dinner.

  And: “What do you know about movies? You didn’t even know Brando was a method actor.”

  Sometimes Naomi turned to me, out of the blue, with tears in her eyes, and said, “I’m sorry.”

  And at those moments I said, “I’m sorry, too.”

  Naomi said, “I messed up your wonderful life.”

  I said, “You’ve made my life wonderful.”

  I flew up to see Steve, who was in school at the University of Oregon in Eugene. Naomi came up with me, but stayed in the room while I waited for Steve in the lobby of our hotel.