Hollywood Animal

by Joe Eszterhas

Sherry called me and asked me to come in to talk to her as soon as I got back from the desert. The script, she said, was ready to go out to directors and she wanted to see who I had in mind.

  I was flattered but I smelled what was coming. Sherry was married to Billy Friedkin, who desperately needed a hit movie—The Exorcist and The French Connection were so very many years ago.

  The very first thing Sherry said at our meeting was “Billy just loves your script.”

  I nodded and didn’t say anything, forcing her to say, “How do you feel about Billy directing it?”

  I said, “Billy hasn’t had a hit in over twenty years, Sherry. There are people in town who think the only reason Billy still works is because he’s married to you.”

  Sherry said, “That’s not true!”

  “Nevertheless,” I said, “some people think that.”

  She said, “He just loves this script. He thinks it’s the perfect script. He wouldn’t change a comma.”

  “He wouldn’t?”

  “Not a comma,” Sherry said. “I promise you.”

  I said, “You promise me?”

  Sherry said, “I promise you.”

  I had lunch with Billy Friedkin and he repeated that he wasn’t going to change a comma.

  “Music to my ears, Billy,” I said.

  “I mean it, Joe,” Billy said. “It’s the perfect script.”

  I liked Billy’s gray-haired, gone-to-fat, street-kid style … I loved Billy’s attitude about the script … and I sat back down with Sherry, who said she had a problem.

  She was going to be criticized, Sherry said, for letting Billy direct Jade … and she wanted me to say it was my idea for Billy to direct Jade, not hers.

  As I thought about it, Sherry said, “I’ll owe you a favor, honey.”

  I smiled and simply said okay and Sherry said, “I love you, honey.”

  The headline in the Calendar section of the Los Angeles Times of April 18, 1994, read “FRIEDKIN SIGNING KEEPS ‘JADE’ IN LANSING FAMILY.”

  The subhead read: “Selection of Paramount Chief’s Husband as Director Raises Eyebrows, Even in an Industry Known for Nepotism.”

  The article said:

  “Eszterhas, also the film’s executive producer, maintains that Friedkin had long been his first choice to direct Jade. He vehemently objects to the insinuation of nepotism …

  “Said Eszterhas: ‘What Friedkin brings to the party is a kind of spooky, dark energy which fits perfectly into Jade. He has a great sense of visual style. …’

  “Eszterhas said he was also impressed when Friedkin ‘told me he doesn’t want to change a comma.’

  “But more skeptical observers say that Friedkin would never have been given this opportunity if not for his marriage to Lansing.”

  My father called to tell me that one of the nurses who had taken care of him in Tiburon after his heart surgery visited him in Cleveland Heights.

  “Amelia,” he said, laughing.

  I knew it had to be Amelia.

  She was in her early forties—my father was eighty-five then—and she considered herself a poet and a painter. I didn’t know that, of course, when I hired her to take care of my father; I thought I was hiring a nurse. She painted an oil portrait of my father while she was in Tiburon and one day she asked to speak to me. She told me she was in love with my father.

  I spoke to my father and we agreed that I should fire her. And now, five years later, she had showed up at his house in Cleveland Heights.

  “What did she want?” I asked.

  “To move in,” my father said.

  He was laughing.

  “What did you say to her?”

  “I showed her my catheter. I asked if she knew how to clean it. Then I asked her if she was strong enough to support me to the bathroom.”

  “What did she say?”

  “She didn’t understand why we had to get rid of the nurses if she moved in. She said she had to visit another friend here and then she’d stop back. That was a week ago.”

  He was laughing again.

  He said, “This catheter would scare anybody away.”

  We sent our friends this invitation from our son, Joey:

  “Joseph Jeremiah Eszterhas invites you to celebrate the marriage of Joe Eszterhas and his great friend, Naomi Baka … at the Kumulani Chapel of the Ritz-Carlton Kapalua on the island of Maui.”

  At the bottom left-hand corner of the invitation were these words:

  “Life is strange.”

  “Life is amazing.”

  Naomi’s journal:

  This afternoon I went to the Kapalua Ritz-Carlton salon on Maui to have my nails done with my sister. The place was buzzing with gossip about hotel guests who are there for my wedding. It seems Guy’s fiancée is having her hair and makeup done for the big day. “You’d think she was getting married …” one of the hairdressers griped. She came in to have it done this morning on a trial basis so it looks good for tomorrow. I’m just doing my own hair and makeup at home in the morning.

  The big buzz though was about Evans’s “writers.” He brought two young girls with him to the hotel and said they are writing the book he’s working on. He introduces them as “my writers.”

  One of the stylists said, in her New Orleans accent, “Wa, I sweya! Do you know what one o’ them told me? She said, ‘We’re so excited! Evans says we can do anything we want—massages, manicures, pedicures—he’s payin’ for everthin’!’ They were ooooin’ and ahhin’ ova everthin’ … and then they go upstaiyas.”

  The party last night was fun but a little weird. To mix these people with my family and Dana, my childhood best friend from Ohio (who showed up as a surprise), is like seeing a screwball comedy. Evans is talking about how the last time he was in Maui was on one of his honeymoons and divorce followed soon after.

  The strangest moment of the party was when Guy’s fiancée sat next to me. Looking into her eyes is like looking into two blue marbles. She had an absolutely huge diamond on her finger.

  I said, “I love your ring.” She said, “Oh, I’m taking it back. It isn’t at all what I wanted. For starters, the diamond’s too small. I told Guy I wanted two baguettes on either side of a pear-shaped diamond. This is just not what I told him I wanted. He never listens. It’s like his new glasses. I told him I hated them and he still hasn’t gotten new ones.”

  I said, “But he picked the ring out for you, doesn’t that make it special?” (I couldn’t resist.) She stared blankly at me and said, “I told you, I don’t like it.”

  I got up on the morning of July 30, 1994, the day I married the Great Love of My Life, by answering the phone: “Last Chance Saloon.”

  I missed Steve and Suzi badly, but knew there was no chance they’d be here for this party.

  Naomi went over to the Ritz to get ready with her sister and her friends and I sat in the sun and swam my laps and thought about my wedding with Gerri: it was a solemn High Mass at St. Margaret of Hungary Church in Cleveland—there were so many people there, police were needed to direct traffic.

  I was afraid a former girlfriend—whose mother had threatened to commit suicide when she heard I was marrying Gerri—would show up.

  I had given the girlfriend’s picture to the ushers and told them to escort her as quietly as possible out of the church if she showed up.

  I was twenty-three years old.

  I had gone to a coffee shop that morning and had some donuts and played the jukebox and thought:

  Maybe you’re a little too young to be doing this.

  I’d been right.

  And that, maybe more than anything else, was the main reason my marriage to Gerri broke up nearly twenty-five years after that morning in the coffee shop.

  After I finished my laps, I went back to the house we were renting to put my white Armani suit on. I wore it with a black tank top and cowboy boots with Naomi’s silver bullets around one boot.

  Guy was there and so was Gerry Messerman, who’d flown in from Clevelan
d along with Naomi’s brothers.

  We had a couple glasses of champagne, and headed over to the chapel at the Ritz-Carlton.

  When I saw Naomi, she looked so pretty I got tears in my eyes. In a few moments, the world’s most beautiful little devil barracuda gun moll would be my wife.

  Joey was there, screaming in his nanny’s arms. The little bastard didn’t seem like he was happy about being legitimized.

  Paul Verhoeven was there, taking pictures—our unofficial wedding photographer.

  I sure wasn’t twenty-three years old anymore.

  · · ·

  Bernie, Naomi’s brother, read a letter from Naomi’s late mother to Naomi when she was in her early twenties urging her to “color every page” of her life.

  Gerry Messerman read from Faulkner’s Nobel Prize address.

  Jeremy, Naomi’s little brother, sang a song he had written for us called “Two People Together.”

  Our New Age nondenominational minister said a few New Aged words … we made our vows … and Naomi jumped up and yelled “Yayyyyyyy!”

  Outside, in a meadow near the beach lighted by torches and the moon, we ate sashimi and filet mignon and lobster and drank Cristal.

  Guy sang “I’ll Remember You.”

  Evans made a toast, babbling once again about that past trip to Maui that had doomed one of his marriages. (Next to him stood one of his “writers” in a see-through dress.)

  I made a toast and then Naomi and I, holding Joey between us, danced … to Rod Stewart and Leonard Cohen and most of all to the Beatles and “Don’t Let Me Down.”

  The toast I made at my wedding was this: “I came to this country when I was six years old. I’ve felt like a loner all of my life. Naomi, I don’t feel that way anymore. Thank you.”

  When I finished my toast, Naomi left her seat at our table, ran across the grass, and hugged me. I held her close. I smelled plumeria and Naomi and the sea.

  Gerry Messerman told me that my father had written him a letter begging his forgiveness for the things he had done in Hungary.

  Gerri Eszterhas went back to court and sued me for 50 percent of my writing income for the rest of my life!

  Her argument was that I had come up with or may have been influenced to come up with … ideas … during the course of our marriage … which I might turn into scripts sometime later.

  It would be a full-scale court proceeding in front of a judge in Marin County with expert witnesses testifying on both sides.

  I had no choice but to fight it, of course.

  I wrote a four-page outline for a script called One Night Stand about a man who falls in love at a corporate convention.

  Guy loved the outline and showed it to Jeff Berg, the head of ICM, who showed it to Adrian Lyne, who had directed Flashdance and Fatal Attraction and Indecent Proposal. Adrian loved the outline and said he’d direct the movie. ICM decided then not to wait for the script but to auction the four-page outline with Adrian attached to direct it.

  Berg said that Adrian and I were so “hot” after having written and directed hit movies that the auction would be a “no-brainer.” He was right. I sold the four-page outline for $4 million to New Line.

  The sale made such big news that the Today show decided to do a series about One Night Stand from sale to release in the theaters.

  On the first segment of the series, the reporter asked me how long it had taken me to write the outline.

  I told him the truth: “About three or four hours.”

  A million dollars an hour!

  A million dollars a page!

  I wasn’t broke anymore.

  Naomi and I had the money to buy a house.

  When we bought our house in Point Dume, we made sure it was far from any fault lines. That’s one of the reasons we picked Point Dume, which was in very northern Malibu.

  Joey, eighteen months old, was sensitive to the slightest noise, coming screaming awake when a window rattled, sensitive to even the slightest jolts when he was being driven around in his baby carriage.

  Two months after we moved into our Point Dume house, on a quiet Sunday afternoon, our new house was badly jolted three times. It felt like the house had been hit by a bulldozer.

  I ran upstairs, grabbed Joey, and helped Naomi run down groggily from the bedroom. She had viral pneumonia.

  We thought it was yet another accursed aftershock of the Northridge quake. It wasn’t.

  It was a brand-new quake on a brand-new, previously undetected fault line.

  Its epicenter: Point Dume.

  Naomi said, “Point Doom.”

  Our house stood next door to a shack, proof positive of Malibu’s egalitarian spirit, evidenced, too, by the fact that Barbra, the Barbra, that Barbra, another one of our neighbors, lived near a successful and convicted dope dealer.

  I could see into the shack next door to us. There were opened scripts all over the floor of the main room. A balding man with long gray hair in the back of his head crawled on his knees from one open script to another. He seemed to be reading each script—but only for a few moments, as though his concentration span couldn’t afford each script more time.

  I recognized the man. He was a producer who had won an Oscar for Best Picture twenty-some years ago.

  A young woman knocked on our door one afternoon. She was frazzled, out of breath, and sweating—selling carpet cleaner door to door.

  “What’s the matter?” I asked. “You okay? Did someone hurt you? Should I call the cops?”

  She held the carpet cleaner cans up. Her hands were shaking. She was having trouble speaking. There were tears in her eyes.

  “I just sold two cans,” she said. “To Bob Dylan! Can you believe it? To Bob Dylan himself! He opened the door himself.”

  I offered her a glass of water. She glugged it down and smiled. She looked at me.

  She said, “You’re not Joe Cocker, are you?”

  “Come on, you guys have to come, it’ll be fun!” the producer said, but Naomi and I were uncertain.

  The producer always hugged Naomi a little too warmly, and his wife had tried to play footsie with me only days after I’d married Naomi.

  We thought we understood the kind of extendedly familial trip to Vegas they had in mind, and we hadn’t ever even met the man who would be our host, the producer’s friend Dodi Fayed.

  “We’ll take Dodi’s plane,” the producer said. “He’ll be there with his girlfriend. He’s paying for the whole trip. Suites at the Mirage, dinner at Spago, we’ll catch some shows, fly back in his plane. You’ll love Dodi. Come on, you guys gotta come, it’ll be fun.”

  But we decided not to join them and, a few days later, the producer’s wife came over to our house and brought dozens of little packages of smoked salmon from Harrods with a card enclosed that said, “Compliments of Dodi Fayed.”

  “You guys missed the greatest time,” the producer’s wife said, but Naomi and I were happy we hadn’t gone to Vegas and we very happily ate Dodi Fayed’s delicious smoked salmon.

  Costa-Gavras came to visit us in Malibu. I told him about Father Charles Coughlin and the isolationists of World War II who kept America from going to war—even when the American government knew about Auschwitz and Dachau.

  I told Costa how Coughlin was the most popular commentator of his time—an anti-Semite who knew how to use the media (and the pulpit) to spread hatred. I showed Costa the big box of research I had amassed—though I didn’t tell him why I was so impassioned to write this script … or how I thought about Neal Sher and Eli Rosenbaum and Judith Schulmann’s faces as they sat in a theater in a few years watching this movie.

  Costa thought it would be a powerful, important film and wanted to direct it.

  Together, we went to meet with Phoenix Pictures and several of their executives, including Mike Medavoy, one of the smartest and most literate producers in town.

  I outlined our story for the executives and one of them said, “But what kind of movie is this? Who will we have to root fo
r?”

  I said, “That’s one of the stupidest remarks I’ve ever heard in twenty-five years of meetings like this.”

  The executive grabbed her Kleenex and fled the room.

  I looked insufferable once again.

  Phoenix Pictures passed on doing a movie about Father Charles Coughlin.

  Peter Bart, the editor of Variety, was a smart and classy man who liked sticking the needle into Hollywood types.

  Since I was now obviously a Hollywood type living in Malibu, Peter stuck his needle into me in two places: my obsession with making big script sales and my many appearances on television.

  I replied quickly:

  1. You’re right about my obsession with big bucks. I was paid $275,000 to write Flashdance; it made the studio over $300 million. I was paid $500,000 to write Jagged Edge; it made the studio more than $50 million. I was paid $3 million to write Basic Instinct; it made the studio more than $400 million. I was paid $1 million to write Sliver; it made the studio more than $100 million.

  If you put all those numbers together, I was paid $4,775,000.

  The studio’s take was $850 million.

  They made $850 million and I made less than $5 million. They made about two hundred times more than I did.

  At that rate of exchange, wouldn’t you, too, get a little obsessed about making more, about evening things out … just a little bit?

  2. You’re right about all the TV exposure. I forgot for a second that screenwriters should be neither seen nor heard. They are at the bottom of the monkey-point food chain. They should live in obscurity, beset by melancholia and Styron-like depression. They should be victims, proud of their Victimhood. They should write books about their victimization and make money off their self-proclaimed misery, impotence, and humiliation.

  I promise, in the future, to try to act depressed, even though—since I’m happier now than I’ve ever been in my life—it won’t be easy. I’ll take the bullets off my cowboy boots and keep Bill Goldman’s Adventures in the Screen Trade on my nightstand next to Jimmy Carter’s book of poetry.

  Naomi’s journal:

  We finally went on the set of Showgirls. Paul was asking and asking and finally Joe said, “Okay, but don’t film any of the nude scenes on the day we go.” Paul agreed.