Hollywood Animal (86 page)

“I swear to you I didn’t know that,” I said.

Mark said, “You’ll never convince Jon.”

Based on Mark’s response to my script
Foreplay
, I was nervous about how Columbia was going to react to my script about John Gotti
—Gangland
, based on Howard Blum’s best-seller. I wrote Mark Canton, then the studio chairman of Columbia, a letter:

Dear Mark
,

I wanted to express my concern and consternation to you concerning your response to
Foreplay.

The script, you told me, “had no plot … not many surprises … no sense of jeopardy … needed more plot twists.” In addition, you thought it “nihilistic and dark” and said it needed “more savvy, James Bondian cops.” You said it was “neither
Jagged Edge
nor
Basic Instinct
and dismissed the humor as a “series of one-liners.”

This was your response to a script that sold for the highest price in Hollywood history in a deal that calls for no rewrites but calls for only a director’s polish
.

After having said all of those things to me—and after having heard Guy McElwaine’s response on my behalf expressing my feeling that you were totally out to sea—I was completely flabbergasted when I heard that you offered
a million dollars
to buy
Foreplay.

What concerns me is that I am deep into the Gotti script, which I will deliver to you on June 30. I genuinely hope your response to
Gangland
will not be as benighted as it was to
Foreplay.

At the same time, I want to underline my oft-reiterated position that John Gotti is not, as you once said to me, “a Robin Hood figure.” He is a man who, according to Howard Blum’s book, once chain-sawed another man with his own hands. He will be a villain in my piece—colorful, larger-than-life, but a villain—as he deserves to be. I will have nothing to do with sugarcoating him for public perception
.

I bear no bad feeling, incidentally, for Jon Peters. While I have never
before
had anyone come into my home, fracture his hand on my coffee table, and spew forth a series of obscenities … I appreciate his passion for
Gangland.

Best
,

Joe

Suzi was in town with a girlfriend from college. They were staying at the nearby Malibu Beach Inn. I’d been out to dinner with them and had then come home to Naomi and our house in the Colony.

At 4:30 in the morning, the house felt like a box being violently shaken up and down. I screamed “
Quake!
” The shaking continued.

Naomi was eight months pregnant. She froze. I lifted her off the bed. A bookcase collapsed and dumped books everywhere near us. I half carried Naomi outside. The water in the swimming pool was a storm-tossed sea. Car alarms were wailing.

I held on to Naomi, who was crying. I was shaking so badly I didn’t think my knees would hold me up.

“We’re okay,” I kept saying. “We’re okay.”

Then it hit me:
Oh, God, Suzi was here …
three blocks away … on the top floor of a hotel with three floors.

Naomi grabbed a robe. We jumped into the Land Rover. The security guard at the Colony gate stopped me. He said it’d been the Big One. He said power was out and damage was heavy. Power lines were everywhere in the streets.

“You can’t go out there,” he said.

We drove out onto the Pacific Coast Highway. Fire trucks and police cars were screaming by in both directions.

I prayed that when we got to the Malibu Beach Inn I wouldn’t find a pile of rubble.

It finally came into view and I saw the building was still standing. I raced into the lobby. Fallen plaster was everywhere. Suzi was there with her friend.

“I knew you’d be the first car here, Pops,” Suzi said with a smile. She and her friend were shaken up and still shaking, but unhurt. They’d run down the stairway from their room, dodging the plaster falling all around them.

I told Suzi that Naomi was outside in the car. I told her we were going to go back to our house in the Colony—all four of us. Suzi said she wasn’t coming. She said she wasn’t going to get in the same car with Naomi, let alone the same house.

I yelled at her. I told her we’d just lived through the Big One. I told her the roads would be closed, food wouldn’t be available, the aftershocks would start. Just
then
the first aftershock struck—a single, hard jolt as though the hotel had been kicked in the butt.

Suzi agreed to come to our house with her friend. They stayed with us for three days until the roads reopened. Suzi acted like Naomi wasn’t there. She said not one word to her. She looked right through her. We kept running in and out of the house to the lawn during those three days whenever there was an aftershock.

When I drove Suzi and her friend to the airport, Suzi didn’t want Naomi to come with us.

“Forget it,” I said to her, “I’m not leaving the woman I love who is eight months pregnant with our child alone when there is an aftershock every couple of hours. If you want me to drive you, she’s coming. If you don’t, take a cab.”

Naomi came to the airport with us, but Suzi didn’t say a word all the way there.

The aftershocks continued after Suzi was gone. We weren’t getting any sleep. I was worried about the effect on Naomi’s pregnancy. We drove down to San Diego. We checked into our hotel room at six o’clock at night and were asleep by seven. We slept until eleven the next day.

Spago is a glitzy place. We walked in. The room froze. Everyone gaped. We were with Muhammad Ali!

Ali suffers from Parkinson’s. Ali didn’t say much. Ali’s speech was slurred. Ali’s wife spoke for him. Ali looked down at his plate. Ali ate his food. Ali kept his head down. Over dessert, Ali looked up. Ali stared straight ahead.

Bimbos, sluts, and starlets wiggled by, smiling at him.

Ali’s face was set. Ali’s eyes were glassy. Ali didn’t react.

Ali’s wife went to the bathroom.

Ali stared at nothing. Ali leaned over to me suddenly. Ali smiled. Ali whispered something. Ali’s voice was clear.

“Man, they got some fine foxes in here, don’t they?” Ali said.

· · ·

We were having dinner at Morton’s late in Naomi’s pregnancy and, excited, she took the sonogram photo of the baby we had decided to call Joey … and passed it around the table to our friends.

We didn’t know that a reporter from
Buzz
magazine was hovering around nearby.

Buzz
wrote: “What is Joe pulling out of his pocket for all to see? Why it’s the sonogram of the littlest Eszterhas, issue of his adulterous union.

“Now, sonograms passed around like snapshots are creepy enough … but here comes the truly frightening thing! While most sonograms look like blurry
fish,
in this one—and there was no mistaking it—the fetus looked
… exactly like Joe
.”

I wrote
Buzz
magazine a letter.

“I know I’m a former journalist,” I wrote. “I know I make a lot of money. I know some present-day journalists who don’t make any money might have a very personal problem with that.

“But come on—some things should be sacred. To say that our beautiful baby boy looked like me when he was in his mother’s womb is unfair to our baby boy … even the
National Enquirer
wouldn’t lower itself to saying that.

“The only thing that gives me solace is knowing that your writer is doomed to a lifetime of penury, jealousy, and oblivion.

“Oh, well. Poor schmuck.”

Naomi’s journal:

I went for an ultrasound today. As the nurse was looking at the screen she said, “I’ll go get the doctor …”

As soon as she left I got frantic. Joe said, “Be cool. This is nothing. Don’t get hysterical. Everything’s fine. Trust me.”

He held my hand. The doctor came in, looked at the screen, and said, “Well, we can’t get a measure of the size of the baby because it’s off the screen. It’s too big for this machine, which means it’s well over nine pounds now. You can go over to Cedars and we’ll use another machine, or we can end this and just induce labor. We can go tomorrow, or Thursday or Friday. What do you want to do?”

I thought to myself, tomorrow is just too scary. I need a day. Thursday is March 10, Sharon Stone’s birthday …

I said “Friday.”

We agreed I would go in Thursday night for delivery on Friday.

Joe drove me to the hospital about 8:00
P.M
.
I was terrified. I knew this baby was big, and I couldn’t believe they were going to be able to get it out. Joe sang “Volare” all the way to the hospital while holding my hand. He knows it makes me laugh.

My fear proved justified. The first drug didn’t work. No labor pains. So they had to do a second procedure (a torture
test
that I won’t relive by writing it). As I lay there waiting to feel something, anything, I could hear a woman screaming, “Jesus God help me! God help me!” It went on all night.

For hours, as I inched closer to higher and higher levels of pain, I listened to her pleas. I asked a nurse about her. She said, “Oh, she’s a lightweight …”

This was barbaric. By the next afternoon, after hours and hours of labor and no baby movement, they finally saw something on my heart monitor that caused them to do an emergency cesarean. They also felt the baby was in distress.

They made Joe leave the operating room as soon as he walked in. They said he looked like he was going to faint.

So I was alone. They couldn’t get the baby out. They had to get two people to scrub up and come in and literally lay on my stomach to help push it out. I kept saying, “I can’t breathe.”

Finally I heard the doctor say, “Say hello to Son of Bigfoot! Somebody get me a scale! This is a big baby!”

He weighed ten and a half pounds. The doctor said he would have easily been eleven pounds or more if we’d left him in until he was ready. He became known in the nursery as “the Moose.”

I couldn’t even hold him or see him. My eyes were swollen shut (from the strain of trying to push him out myself for a day) and the drugs had given me uncontrollable shakes. I didn’t hear him cry. I thought he was dead.

But then they held him close and I could vaguely see golden fuzz all over his head, and tiny ears. Joe had always teased me that our children would have bright red hair and big ears. I smiled. He wasn’t Howdy Doody.

· · ·

In her twenty-third hour of labor with Joey, Naomi was drenched in sweat, her face was purple, and her heartbeat was arrhythmic.

Our Ob-gyn, who was also Madonna’s gynecologist, a former major league baseball player, was sitting right next to her, at the Hospital to the Stars, holding her hand.

“You worked with Jennifer Beals, didn’t you?” he said to me. “She always looked to me like she’d be really hot. Was she?”

I realized that I loved Gerri, that I would always love Gerri—as a sister, not as a partner and a wife and a lover.

I decided I was filing for divorce.

When I told Suzi, she started to cry. When I told Steve, he said, “Are you sure, Pops? Are you absolutely sure?”

I said I was sure.

He said nothing and finally I said, “You know how much I love you, Mano.”

“I know that, Pops,” he said.

When I told Gerri, she said, “Fuck you, Joseph!” and hung up.

All my male friends and business associates—every single one of them—told me not to get divorced. Even those who’d been divorced themselves.

This was their argument:

Look, you’ve been married almost a quarter century. That’s a very long time. You’ve got two beautiful grown kids—if you do this, you’re going to lose all the money you’ve made.

Forget the fifty-fifty stuff in California … there’s something called community goodwill, too … in a long marriage like yours, your wife will argue that she helped make your career.

You’re going to lose your houses, your cars, everything. Is that worth it? To be broke again when you’re
almost fifty years old?

This happens all the time. A guy your age meets a woman Naomi’s age and a guy your age loses his mind.

You’ve got a beautiful family! There’s no need to destroy a family over this and lose all your money and hurt your kids.

All you have to do is keep Naomi on the side.
It happens all the time in this town
. Don’t get a divorce. Support Naomi, support the kids you might have together. And hold on to everything you’ve got.

I couldn’t quite believe that here I was telling all my Hollywood friends that I was getting a divorce … and my Hollywood friends were responding by telling me about
family values!

The lawyer had come highly recommended to me. He was one of the top lawyers in Los Angeles.

He came to our house in the Colony but he didn’t want to talk there. He asked if we could go for a walk on the beach.

He spoke softly as we talked—I could barely hear him above the crash of the waves.

“You’re fucked,” he said. “That’s the truth. There’s no way around it. You’ve
been
married twenty-four years. You have two grown kids. You’re completely fucked.”

“Is that why you wanted to come out here?” I asked him with a smile. “To tell me that I’m fucked? I don’t need
you
to tell me that I’m fucked. I can tell if I’m fucked myself. I’ve been there before in my life.”

He smiled back at me and said, “Not like this you haven’t.”

Then the smile stretched into a grin and he said, “You’re a real
pistola
, aren’t you?

“Your wife will go away,” he whispered. “A hundred grand. Paid to me for legal services.”

I thought I might have misunderstood. I said, “What?”

He kept grinning and said, “Come on, no bullshit. Yes or no.”

I said, “Go away where?”

“I don’t know where. I’m not sure how I feel about an afterlife.”

“I can’t do that,” I said.

He said, “You’re gonna lose every penny you’ve got.”

When I stared at him, horrified, and shook my head, he said, “It’s
your
funeral then.”