Hollywood Animal (4 page)

As the standoff continued into the next day, I called my city editor from the scene and said, “What if we fly the shooter’s mother in here? She lives in a small town in Pennsylvania. We’d interview her, find out everything there is to know about the shooter, and then maybe she could talk her son out of there.”

The cops went ballistic. They said if we flew the mother in, we’d be playing Russian roulette. What if the shooter didn’t like his mother? What if her presence triggered more violence?

The
Plain Dealer
decided to fly the mother in anyway on a private plane. Gerri and I met her at the airport. She was a pleasant, white-haired old lady and Gerri immediately made friends with her. We drove her around Cleveland for a
couple
of hours, interviewing her, getting all the details about her son before we drove her to the scene of the standoff.

The cops tried to tell her to go back home, but she wanted to see her son. I talked her into taking me inside the building with her. The cops seethed.

We went inside the apartment house and up a flight of stairs. Cops with shotguns crouched all over the stairway. The old lady said one word:
“Baby?
”

Her son shot the girl and killed himself.

In the twenty-four years of our marriage, Gerri and I never—not once—talked about what we had accomplished that day at that apartment complex down the street from my father’s house … while we were courting.

After the shooting … at the end of that day … I knew that I would ask Gerri to marry me.

Thirty years later, after my divorce from Gerri, I wrote a script about that day for Paramount called
Reliable Sources
.

Paramount paid me $2 million for it.

Were Gerri and I accomplices to the shootings of two people and the shooting death of one of them?

Was I then paid $2 million—thirty years later—for my part in the crime?

Thanks to the details of our divorce settlement, Gerri got some money from the two mil, too.

Gerri’s father, George, was an electrical engineer, a graduate of the University of Chicago, who was once arrested for beating his wife in front of Gerri and her sister and her two brothers.

George was an alcoholic who came home from work at four each afternoon and cracked open the bottle of vodka which he finished by eight that night. In the course of those four hours, as he worked on the bottle, George verbally and sometimes physically abused his family. Once he chased Gerri down to the dock on Lake Erie behind her home and threatened to drown her. She ran from the dock and down the street and caught a bus and spent the next week at a friend’s apartment in Cleveland.

Gerri’s mother, Susan, had an eighth-grade education and didn’t much like her husband, let alone love him. Their marriage had been arranged by their old-country Hungarian and Slovak parents.

Gerri’s mother was bitter that she, the most beautiful young woman in the town of Castalia, Ohio, had been forced to marry this plain-looking
engineer
.

Gerri and her sister and brothers heard their mother and father arguing all the time … because her mother refused to have sex much of the time with her father.

On these occasions, her father would say to her mother: “God bless St. Joseph for what he went through.”

And: “The dog will have his day!”

When I was a Hollywood screenwriter and a King Shit agent named Michael Ovitz threatened to destroy my career, that’s the last thing I said to him before I left his office:

The dog will have his day!

Ovitz looked at me like I’d lost my marbles and laughed.

Gerri’s favorite family member was her maternal grandmother, Sue Balazsik, who lived with her family until her death in her early eighties. The big house on the lake they all lived in was Sue Balazsik’s house.

An illiterate Hungarian immigrant, she not only owned and managed Lorain, Ohio’s, best Hungarian restaurant, the Cozy Corner (Perry Como came to eat the paprikash every time he appeared in Cleveland), but was also, during Prohibition, Lorain’s biggest bootlegger. She made a fortune outwitting the feds, contributed to a lot of local politicians’ campaigns, and built the big house on the lake.

When Gerri was a little girl, she and her grandmother watched
The Untouchables
every week. It was the old woman’s favorite TV show, the program the former bootlegger called “The Touchables.”

And on Lorain Avenue, in Cleveland, twenty-seven miles from Lorain, Ohio, where Gerri and her grandmother were watching
The Untouchables …

My father and I were watching it, too.

It was
our
favorite show, too.

My mother, however, wasn’t watching it. She was in the bathroom hiding from the television set, which she believed was filled with rays from outer space poisoning her.

My father and I didn’t know as we watched the show—and neither did Gerri and her grandmother—that Eliot Ness became the safety director of the city of Cleveland after he finished with Capone and Nitti and the other little Guinea homeboys in Chicago.

We didn’t know that Ness was forced to resign as safety director after, rip-roaring drunk, he was involved in a hit-and-run accident on Cleveland’s Shoreway.

We didn’t know that Eliot Ness died shortly afterward, drunk and broke.

Many years later, I enlightened a Hollywood studio executive about these things while proposing a movie called
Ness at Twilight
.

The studio executive said, “What are you,
perverse?
Eliot Ness is a greater hero to the American public than George Washington and Abraham Lincoln
and
Spider-Man combined. And you want to do a movie about him as a drunk driver?”

Not willing to see a several-million-dollar deal go down so fast, I regrouped quickly with that studio executive.

“Listen,” I said, “Ness did some truly heroic things in Cleveland, too, when he was the safety director. He fought Fritz Kuhn’s American Nazi Bund tooth and nail. Cleveland had a lot of Nazis and Nazi sympathizers among its millions of immigrants and they staged massive parades and protests. Ness stayed on top of them and finally put them out of business. I heard that Costner wants to do something patriotic anyway.”

The studio exec thought about it.

“Not bad,” he finally said. “But how about we move the story to Chicago? Chicago’s about to be taken over by the Nazis and Costner stops them. Cleveland’s for losers: Chicago’s got Michael Jordan. Kevin would like it in Chicago better than Cleveland, trust me. Maybe we can get Billy Friedkin to do it, he’s
from
Chicago and he’s old enough to know who the Nazis were.”

“That’s great.” I smiled. “Billy and I did
Jade
together.”

“Oh Christ, that’s right, I forgot,” the studio exec said. “Forget it. Billy won’t want to work with you again.”

“Billy and I are still … friends,” I said.

“Well sure you are,” the studio exec said with a smile. “So what? But if Billy works with you again, he can’t blame your script for bringing
Jade
down. If he works with you again, that means he’s publicly saying he thinks you’re a good screenwriter. And if he thinks you’re a good writer, then it means
he
had something to do with
Jade’s
failure. You think Billy Friedkin is career-suicidal?”

When Gerri’s grandmother was in her fifties, her husband left Sue Balazsik and their kids for a younger woman. He married the younger woman and had children with her.

Till the day he died, Gerri’s grandmother believed that her ex-husband would come back to her.

He didn’t.

As our twenty-four-year marriage was breaking up, Gerri would often say to me: “If you leave me, Joseph, I’m going to be just like my grandmother. I’m going to wait until you come back to me.”

Steve and Suzi tell me she’s still waiting.

· · ·

The original, rough-draft title of
Basic Instinct
was
Love Hurts
.

VIII

From the refugee camps to the A-list in Hollywood
—what a great tag for
Lifestyles of the Rich and Famous
, which used exactly that promo line when I was on the show.

I could even argue that
my
house was in a better Malibu location than Bob Dylan’s—mine was right on my own cliff, facing the sea: Bob’s was across the road on Birdview Avenue. Bob didn’t have his own surfside cliff—but I did!

Plus his house was built from the profits of a
lot
of smash hit records, while I had bought my house from the profits of one
cocktail napkin
—on which I had scribbled the plot of one screenplay—a cocktail napkin (from Le Dome) which I had turned into a four-page outline … for which one studio (New Line) had paid
four million dollars!

And what was the plot outline which had bought my house overlooking the sea? What did the cocktail napkin say?

“Guy meets hooker,” it said, “falls in love, leaves wife and kids, discovers she’s not a hooker but a wife and mother cheating on her husband.”

… Success! Redemption! The Streets Are Paved with Gold! Only in America! Hooray for Hollywood!

Lawdy, lawdy,
Premiere
magazine had even picked me as one of the hundred most powerful people in Hollywood, right up there with Eisner and Tom Cruise and Diller and Julia Roberts and Ovitz and Adam Sandler!

A
screenwriter
, a schlub, a leper, a maggot, a nigger—for the first time in history on the Big Shot List! It was something even my own personal hero, Paddy Chayefsky, the only screenwriter in Hollywood who’d ever had any
real
balls, hadn’t achieved. (Though, God bless him, he’d slept with Kim Novak, one of the first childhood jackoff loves of my life.)

From the near west side of Cleveland, Lorain Avenue, to the far west side of Los Angeles, Malibu!

Faded stars like Faye Dunaway were calling me at home trying to persuade me to write them
secondary
parts in future scripts. Starlets were leaving their photos (many in thong bikinis) and home phone numbers with the concierge in hotels where I was staying.

I was a Horatio Alger story. I couldn’t stand in a ticket line or sit in a restaurant without being asked for an autograph. I was the man who was single-handedly getting even for all the Pat Hobby stories about the million ways screenwriters were abused and humiliated in Hollywood.

I was the schlub, the leper, the maggot, the nigger … the screenwriter for Christ’s sake as
star!

I was the rape victim come back as Charles Bronson in
Death Wish
.

Oh how I loved it! I signed every autograph I was ever asked for, even if it meant interrupting my dinner.

According to that
Premiere
magazine list, I was the 78th most powerful person in all of Hollywood.

Less
powerful than I were: Denzel Washington (79), producer Arnold Kopelson
(80),
CAA agent Richard Lovett (81), John Grisham (82), producer Andy Vajna (83), Francis Coppola (84), producer Joel Silver (85), Universal president Casey Silver (86), producer Peter Guber (87), producer Bruce Berman (88), producers Don Simpson and Jerry Bruckheimer (89), Winona Ryder (90), Tom Clancy (91), Savoy chairman Victor Kaufman (92), director Mike Nichols (93), Turner Pictures president Amy Pascal (94), producer/director James L. Brooks (95), agent Nick Stevens (96), Fox 2000 head Laura Ziskin (97), Eddie Murphy (98), producer Wendy Finerman (99), animator Glen Keane (100).

I was a screenwriter who had no interest in doing anything except writing. I didn’t have an office or a secretary or a production company. I didn’t even own an electric typewriter, let alone a computer. I still used a manual Olivetti.

Yet I was more powerful than Denzel and Eddie and Winona … more powerful than
four
studio heads … more powerful than film factories Grisham and Clancy … more powerful than legendary Hollywood animals like Peter Guber … and even my producer friend Don Simpson, who, I was sure, had suffered a near-stroke when he saw me on this list eleven places in front of him.

Oh … my … God … how … I … fucking … loved it!

Bruce Willis was only eleven places in front of me … Jack Nicholson only ten … and Sharon Stone, my very own Frankenstein monster, three.

GQ
magazine wrote: “To his beleaguered confreres, Joe Eszterhas is a superstar, chiefly for having commanded huge fees on his own terms. … This ballsy approach, combined with his willingness to wage war with very powerful people when his work was at stake, eventually made Eszterhas something of a Hollywood folk hero—debunking the pathetic, long-held perception of screenwriters as gin-soaked novelties on the career skids, as sweaty and scared East Coast geeks camped out in the bungalows.”

Hey, Michael Ovitz:

The dog had his day!

And when a movie of mine failed or I couldn’t sell a script, I had a ready response:

“The hell with it,” I said. “It ain’t the refugee camps.”

IX

When I was in college at Ohio University, it was
From the refugee camps to the White House!

I was named the outstanding college journalist in America by the William Randolph Hearst Foundation.

I went to the White House, where President Johnson was to award me a gold medal.

But when I got there, President Johnson was busy on his Texas ranch and Vice President Hubert Humphrey gave me the gold medal instead.

I loved that gold medal—heavy, shiny but, alas, brass not gold.

I kept it shined and in plain view on my various coffee tables for almost forty years.

I also got a thousand dollars which I was supposed to spend on my further education.

I still had the White House medal on our coffee table in the living room of the house overlooking the sea in Malibu where Naomi and I lived with our little boys.

It was stolen there by one of the many reporters who came to interview me.

I have no doubt the reporter thought it was gold, not brass.

Going to the White House was my greatest moment at Ohio University. My worst moment came after a night of demonic substance abuse with some friends.