Hollywood Animal (106 page)

My fatigue probably made me feel my mortality for the first time in my life
—one
reason, but not
the
reason, we were looking at houses in Cleveland, the only hometown the refugee kid who’d grown into a Hollywood animal had ever known.

“Remember, it’s only a movie,” the producer Irwin Winkler had said to me over and over again, trying to teach me how to stay human in Hollywood.

I had tried passing that lesson on to my director friend Richard Marquand when he was heartbroken that our film,
Hearts of Fire
, didn’t work. But he didn’t listen to me … and died.

And I had tried passing that lesson on to my screenwriter friend and colleague Jim Morgan, who’d written a script with me called
City Hall
and who was devastated that the studio wouldn’t green-light it.

“Remember, it’s only a movie, Jim,” I told him, but he didn’t listen to me … and died.

I was saying it to myself a lot these days.

“Remember, it’s only a movie, Joe.” But I wasn’t sure I was listening.

I knew I was drinking too much.

I started drinking when I was fourteen years old—a shot of vodka in the morning in the Eastern European tradition—and there were very few days in the forty-two years since then that I hadn’t had
something
alcoholic to drink.

I was never drunk. I never wobbled or slurred. I was never pulled over, never arrested. I never got mean or hostile due to alcohol.

I had an amazing tolerance for alcohol and loved the whole romantic malarkey that tied booze to writers and writing. When I was a kid, all the writers I admired—Faulkner, Steinbeck, Hemingway, Fitzgerald—were boozers.

And as I grew older, I fell in love with bars. The best bars were holy places where I was a participant in a sacred ritual, a kind of sacrilegious, alcoholic Mass where the bartender was the priest, the jukebox the choir, and the shelves full of bottled Eucharist.

I didn’t, naturally, view myself as an alcoholic. Booze had a different effect on my system, I thought, than on that of others. Booze was my fuel, it gave me my energy. I sipped gin or cognac while I wrote (and smoked), and I had at least one glass of white wine before any major interview, including the
Today
show at four in the morning California time.

In the past year, I knew, but told no one, including Naomi, that I was drinking more than ever: a secret shot of gin in the morning, three or four glasses of wine with lunch, a couple of tall icy glasses of gin or Jack Daniel’s before dinner, then a couple of bottles of wine.

I was never hung over, my energy was unflagging, but I’d put weight on and I hated to see myself on television or in photographs: my bloated face reminded me of Elvis’s as he was about to set off on the last tour.

Truth to tell, I had stopped enjoying movies, too. It was almost common for those of us who worked in film not to enjoy seeing them anymore, but it was something I had sworn would never happen to me.

Seeing a movie, I remembered, used to be a magical experience, but not anymore. I knew too much now about the sausage factory grinding out the magic … about vacuous stars who were megalomaniacal monsters … about directors who did
anything
to keep working … about screenwriters who did thirty drafts of the same script so they could get a credit and keep collecting their Guild medical benefits.

I, like so many of my colleagues, didn’t want to go to the movies anymore. I, like so many of my colleagues, rooted for every movie I
had
to see … to be awful … to fail spectacularly.

The only time I’ll root for anybody to be a success,” an Oscar-winning producer said to me, “is if he or she has cancer and I know for certain that the cancer is terminal.”

I had gotten some death threats and the security people we’d hired had instructed us not to open any suspicious packages.

A package arrived in the mail from Neiman Marcus. It somehow looked suspicious to me, although it had a proper-looking Neiman Marcus return address. Naomi said she hadn’t ordered anything from Neiman Marcus.

I got a kitchen knife and took the box out onto the lawn as far from our house as I could get.

Naomi was screaming that I’d lost my mind. She pointed out none too calmly that I was going to open a box that I suspected had a bomb in it with a kitchen knife. I thought Naomi had a good point there.

I told her to go back inside the house and stop bothering me. She started calling me ugly but not inaccurate names.

I opened the box very gingerly with the kitchen knife. There was another box inside it. The other box showed a photograph of a Sony video camera on its top. We didn’t have a video camera. We
needed
a video camera.

I yelled to Naomi that it was a video camera. Naomi yelled back that she hadn’t ordered a video camera and called me more ugly names.

I opened the video camera box very gingerly with the kitchen knife. It was filled with bubble wrap. On the bottom of the bubble wrap was a manila envelope with a Paramount Pictures return address.

I didn’t think it was a bomb anymore. I started to rip the envelope open and Naomi ran out of the house and started screaming at me about letter bombs.

So I opened the envelope gingerly. Inside was a small white envelope and a script.

I opened the small white envelope (yes, gingerly, gingerly). It was a letter from a man in San Francisco. He said he was blind. He said he had five children, one of whom had brain damage. He wanted me to read his enclosed screenplay and pass it on to an agent so the agent could sell it for a lot of money. He enclosed photographs that showed a blind man in his forties and a child around ten who looked cross-eyed.

I certainly admired his chutzpah. He had gotten ahold of a Neiman Marcus box, a Sony video camera container, and a Paramount return address.

But it
could’ve
been a bomb … and I
would’ve
been dead by now and … blind or not, brain-damaged or not … I didn’t read his script.

I thought of the seventeen years I’d spent writing screenplays while living with Gerri, Steve, and Suzi in Marin County, away from L.A.

I had enjoyed going to see movies in those days. I’d never gone to Hollywood parties. I’d never dispensed diet advice. I’d never made pronouncements at writers’ seminars. I’d never spoken to the
Today
show at four in the morning. And I hadn’t been drinking nearly as much, either.

My life in Marin had been focused on my family—especially Steve and Suzi. I attended Steve’s Little League games and Suzi’s animal rights protests. Guy used to say about me in Hollywood: “Joe’s got the flu this month. His kid’s in Little League. He’ll be down here next month.”

I had four little boys now and a wife I adored and I wanted to spend as much valuable time with them as I had spent with my first family.

I was burning out in L.A., tired enough to consider fleeing back to my old, weatherworn bag lady of a hometown … the place I had fled for California thirty years ago.

Maybe, I thought, I was doomed to be a displaced person, a DP, a refugee, all my life. Maybe that term “DP”—the first epithet ever hurled at me—would wind up defining my life.

I had sought refuge in Cleveland at age six.

I had sought refuge in California at age twenty-seven.

Now, at age fifty-six, I was thinking of going back to Cleveland.

I was tired of not living normally.

I hadn’t been inside a bank in twenty-five years. I didn’t know how to use an ATM machine. My finances were handled by accountants who went to the bank
for
me. When we needed cash, a bank messenger brought the money in plastic bags.

I didn’t even see the checks I was getting; the amounts showed up on my weekly cash balances. I asked for a Xerox copy of a million-dollar check once just to see what one looked like.

I rarely drove one of our three cars. I had drivers who drove me in limos in L.A. and New York and San Francisco and Cleveland.

When we flew somewhere, a VIP representative met us at curbside as we were getting out of the limo, walked us to the VIP lounge, and then to the gate when the flight was taking off. Needless to say, we got on the plane before anyone else did.

We even had to be careful about what we got in the mail. I wasn’t allowed by my lawyers to read any script sent to me for fear that someone would sue me, claiming I’d stolen an idea from them.

A store clerk at a kids’ shop in Malibu introduced us to a producer’s wife by saying, “She’s one of us, too.”

One of us
.

Even our telephone answering service was incestuous: we often got Denzel Washington’s messages.

The most I saw of “real people” was when they waved to the darkened window of the limo as we passed them on the freeway.

The housekeeper or one of the nannies shopped for food and liquor. I hadn’t been in a grocery store since Steve and Suzi were kids and, as a special treat, I stopped at a grocery store to buy them some candy. I didn’t know on that trip how to use my credit card at the checkout counter but, luckily, I had cash.

We didn’t even leave the house to get our hair cut, styled, teased, and highlighted … somebody from Cristophe—Lori, Lisa, Matteo—drove out to Malibu to “do” us at home.

Occasionally, when she happened to be in Beverly Hills, Naomi stopped by the Cristophe studio for a quick touch-up, noting how Lori, Lisa, Matteo, or Olivier would stop “doing” whomever they were “doing” … just to talk to Naomi and “get her started.”

Naomi understood, consequently, when she was in the chair one day and Lori stopped “doing” her … and walked abruptly away from her chair … and got Steven Spielberg’s wife, Kate Capshaw, “started” as Naomi sat there staring at herself in the mirror.

For Naomi, going to the doctor in Beverly Hills was always an educational experience.

Her dentist was also Sharon Stone’s dentist and, during an office visit one day, Naomi learned that Sharon had porcelain inlays.

Bill Macdonald and I (and the dentist) told Naomi that she had much nicer teeth than Sharon.

The fact that we were even thinking about Cleveland was, funnily enough, thanks to Chicago.

Naomi and I had always talked casually about getting out of Malibu and L.A. when the kids got older. And Joey was now in kindergarten. But we’d talked of places like Maui or Florida or Santa Fe or Tucson or Sonoma County or Santa Barbara, eliminating those places only after research and discussion.

The medical care on Maui was so bad people in trouble had to be helicoptered to Oahu. Santa Fe had a booming crime rate. Tucson was hell in the summer; Sonoma was too close to Gerri Eszterhas’s house in Tiburon; Santa Barbara was as Hollywood as Malibu, Michael Douglas its pampered prince.

We were in Chicago on an extensive book tour and had some time to kill. It was a springlike summer day and I asked Naomi if she’d ever been in the neighborhoods here. She hadn’t and I asked our driver to recommend a great Polish restaurant to us and we drove down there for lunch.

It was a neighborhood very much like the ones I’d lived in in Cleveland. The restaurant, which looked like a diner (linoleum and Formica tabletops), served world-class kielbasa and huge drafts of ice-cold beer. We sat there and had more fun for a few hours than anyplace else we’d been on the tour.

We drove through some of the other neighborhoods and then up to Winnetka and back to the Four Seasons, with its sweeping view of the lake.

“We could be happy here,” Naomi said, “we’d have fun raising the boys here.”

“You’re right,” I said.”

“Let’s do it,” she suddenly said.

I wasn’t surprised. She’s Italian and
spontaneous
.

“Are you serious?”

“I’m very serious. It would be fun.”

“Not a chance,” I told her.

“Why not?”

“Because I hate this town.”

“You do not!” she said. “I saw how much fun you had today.”

“I hate Chicago,” I said, “loathe it.”

She smiled. “Why?”

“Because after the Cleveland Indians lost the World Series in 1954, they
traded
half the team to the Chicago White Sox, including knuckleball king Early Wynn, and the White Sox kept beating on the Indians after that. I’ve hated Chicago ever since, that’s why.”

“You’re certifiable,” Naomi said.

“I don’t care about the White Sox,” Naomi said.

“I don’t either,” I said, “but I care about the Indians. If you want to live in Chicago, we can live in Cleveland, instead.”

She said,
“Great!
”

If we moved to Cleveland, I figured, we wouldn’t even have to miss our great and devilish friend Evans. Because anyone who’s ever been to Cleveland can tell you that Bob Evans in Cleveland, Ohio, is as big as the other Bob Evans in Hollywood.

Bob Evans’s sausages are a staple of Cleveland’s haute cuisine, almost as good as the chicken sausages Bob Evans
always
serves to his friends in Beverly Hills.

Evans would never be out of our minds in Cleveland … big billboard signs proclaiming Bob Evans’s Restaurants are everywhere in Cleveland, all over the town, all over the state of Ohio!

The Cleveland that I loved and had grown up in was a shot-and-a-beer town where the locals wore T-shirts that said,
“C
LEVELAND
—Y
OU
G
OTTA
B
E
T
OUGH!
”

It was, as Huey Lewis sang, “The Heart of Rock and Roll” and boasted some of the best early rock and roll disc jockeys in the world: Alan Freed and Bill Randle and Pete (Mad Daddy) Myers.

Cleveland was the home of such great smash-mouth rock and roll artists as Bocky Boo and the Visions, the James Gang, Joey Walsh, Sonny Geraci, Eric Carmen, Pere Ubu, and Michael Stanley. It was the home of WMMS, which
Rolling Stone
magazine for many years called “the best rock and roll radio station in America.”

Yeah, but you had to be tough all right: 10 below in winter, 100 in the summer, three bars on most city blocks, and a whole buncha smoke in the air all the time!

“The boys would learn about the Cleveland Indians and wear Chief Wahoo on their hearts and chests,” I said.