Hollywood Animal (108 page)

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 for 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.

The surgery would be done on an outpatient basis at Cedars Sinai and I would be released a few hours after it was done.

“Nothing to it,” the doctor said. “I do it all the time. I’ve done thousands of them.”

But I was uneasy. I knew that Cedars had almost killed Lew Wasserman, one of their biggest financial benefactors, the venerable former head of MCA Universal, counselor to presidents from Kennedy to Reagan. A routine surgery and Lew Wasserman had almost
died
. I knew that the puppeteer Shari Lewis’s estate was suing Cedars, claiming that Lewis, in their care, had died choking on her own vomit.

I also knew that Julie Andrews and former California governor Pete Wilson had had this kind of benign polyp surgery in L.A. and Julie Andrews couldn’t sing anymore and Pete Wilson could hardly speak.

For some reason, I didn’t like the presence of all those platinum and gold records on my doctor’s walls, either. I wanted to be in the hands of a doctor who kept medical certificates on his walls.

The Cleveland Clinic, I knew, had an international reputation equal to the Mayo’s. Saudi kings flew there to have their surgeries.

“I’m not going to have these polyps taken out here,” I said to Naomi. “I certainly don’t sing as well as Julie Andrews did. But I still like to sing in the shower.”

“You sing horribly,” Naomi said.

“Yeah, I know,” I said, “but nobody can hear me in the shower. I don’t want some guy doing this who’s got gold records on his wall. There’s got to be some kind of limit put on starfucking in this town.”

“Fine,” Naomi said, “we’ll get it done in Cleveland.”

We drove our little boys over to Woodland Hills in the Valley to see the neighborhood which turned into a Christmas festival each year … and found the street we loved aglow with Christmas lights and blocked off by police crime scene tape.

A man was lying on the sidewalk in a pool of blood under a home-built papier-mâché float of Santa and his elves, shot to death less than an hour before by his girlfriend’s jealous husband.

To consider, too, as we contemplated moving to Cleveland, was the matter of my father.

He was ninety-three years old and living in the same house in Cleveland Heights which he’d bought with my mother in 1966. I’d supported him since 1978 and, since 1992, I’d hired around-the-clock nursing care for him as well as a Hungarian housekeeper.

He was bed-bound now, with a catheter, and was in and out, lucid one day and befogged the next. There was a time in my life, when I was a young man, when my father had been my best friend. That time had passed.

I loved my father but we were no longer best friends. I loved him, but I also loathed him.

When he was accused of war crimes by the Justice Department, I discovered a painful jigsaw of lies that went to the core of who I thought my father was. I started avoiding him and avoiding talking to him because I knew all I’d get were more lies.

I spoke to him periodically on behalf of the black nurses who worked so hard to take care of him. He’d screamed at them to serve him his meals, hiding cans of Coke from them under his bed. I spoke to him on their behalf but it did no good.

His nurses couldn’t take care of him anymore: he was too heavy to lift and difficult even to turn over. The Hungarian housekeeper made daily gastronomic extravaganzas of chicken paprikás and stuffed cabbage and my father, on a catheter and without teeth, somehow kept eating it all and getting bigger.

It was time finally, I knew, for a nursing home—the decision I’d been dreading because I knew how much being
in his home
meant to him. My father had always been there for me when I was a kid and an adolescent and as much as my feelings for him had changed through the course of the past decade
… I didn’t want to do this to him …
He still spoke the English language, after fifty years in America, with a thick, difficult-to-understand accent. To take him out of his home and to put him into an American setting where they’d have difficulty understanding him would probably not only be a death sentence but a sentence of torture.

It occurred to me that by forcing him out of his house, I’d be effecting the deportation which Gerry Messerman and I had stopped the Justice Department from doing.

But the nurses kept calling to tell me we had to do something. My father lay in bed staring off, vegetating, not even watching the big-screen TV I’d bought for him.

He had bedsores, the nurses said, which were getting worse.
We had to do something … we had to do something … we had to do something
.

Shortly after New Year’s of 2001, I got a call from one of my father’s nurses telling me that he was failing and that we had to do something quickly about getting him into a nursing home. Naomi and I decided to fly back to Cleveland immediately to see him.

His hospital bed was in the middle of the living room and a nurse was changing his diaper when we walked in. I hugged him and he started to cry, held him as she tried to roll him over. I saw bedsores all over his back and body.

Naomi and I sat next to the bed and we tried to talk to him. He couldn’t
hear
very well. He refused to use the hearing aid which I’d bought him. I couldn’t shout because of the polyps in my throat and tried not to strain my voice because the doctors told me if I strained it, I’d lose it.

And Naomi couldn’t speak Hungarian, of course, and my father, even when he could hear, couldn’t understand English very well.

Naomi and I tried, as people do at moments like this, to joke, to brighten his life for a few hours, to talk about his grandchildren, whose framed photographs were all over his walls … to make him smile and laugh, to blot momentarily the grimness of his daily life, his catheter, his bedsores.

“Pop,” I said, “listen to this. Joey is my Arab son, always making deals to his benefit with his little brothers. Nick is my Italian son, flashing his temper, instantly ready to use his fists, John Law is my Hungarian son—he’s inherited our triple chins—and Luke, he’s my Russian son. He’s very charming but all he does is drink.”

My father laughed, as he was supposed to. Granting us our victory over his misery. He was happy. Smiling and laughing. And then he closed his eyes—eyes exactly the slate-blue color of Luke’s … and started to cry.

I held his hand.

He said, “I’ve never lied to you” and, knowing that it was a lie, I kissed his hand and held it. I was crying, too, and so was Naomi. We cried quietly for a long time, saying nothing, not looking at each other.

“Are you tired, Pop?” I asked him in Hungarian.

He couldn’t hear me. My voice, now that I’d been talking for a while, was much weaker.

There was a cruel kind of poetic irony at work here, I thought.

He couldn’t hear. I couldn’t speak. The only way we could communicate now was through Naomi.

I repeated the Hungarian words slowly to her. Naomi yelled them phonetically into my father’s ears.

“I am tired to death,” my father said.

“Are you bored?”

“There is nothing I can do,” my father said. “I can’t hear, I can’t see, I can’t get out of this bed. Some mornings I wake up and I can’t speak for an hour or so. I can’t read, I can’t write, I can’t watch the TV. My friends are all dead. You’re in California.”

I tried to joke again.

“Well,” I said in Hungarian, “the good news is that you can still eat. Margit”—his housekeeper—“makes great chicken paprikás for you.”

He couldn’t hear me again.

I repeated the Hungarian words slowly to Naomi again and she yelled them phonetically into his ear, again.

My father smiled at her.