Hollywood Animal (2 page)

Approaching sixty, he then returned to Mansfield, Ohio, and bought the property that he called Malabar Farm. His friends Humphrey Bogart and Lauren Bacall got married there.

He never wrote any other best-selling books or big-buck screenplays and drank himself to death, dying in the ambulance on the way to the hospital in Cleveland.

There was a little hill on Malabar Farm called Oh Jesus Hill. Looey had named it that because he’d made love to the wealthy heiress Doris Duke on that hill and had said “Oh, Jesus!” at a certain moment.

Naomi’s only visit to Malabar Farm was when she and her boyfriend visited it in high school.

Naomi claimed not to have visited Oh Jesus Hill but …
Oh, Jesus!
… I’m not sure I believed her.

I don’t mean to sound insufferable, but …

I realized reading about Looey Bromfield that I’d written more successful screenplays than he and while he’d written many more best-selling books than I, I’d gotten a much bigger advance for
my
best-selling book than he’d gotten for any of his.

I also realized that my houses in Tiburon and Stinson Beach and Malibu were all bigger and more beautiful than the house I’d been so razzle-dazzled by as a child … Looey’s relatively rinky-dink Malabar Farm in Mansfield, Ohio.

I had worked and studied like Looey Bromfield had worked and studied and had become a famous American writer like Looey … but I owned much bigger houses than Looey.

I was a Great American Success Story.

I had out-Looeyed Looey!

III

I was a militant, fanatical smoker. I smoked three to four packs of Salem Ultra Lites each day. I’d started smoking when I was twelve years old, thinking that those who smoked in the movies I liked so much—like
High School Confidential!
—with Jerry Lee Lewis—looked cool.

Now I was writing smoking into my movies, combining smoking with sex as in
Basic Instinct
, because I still thought smoking was cool.

Through the years, I’d smoked Marlboros and Gauloises and Luckies, even smoked a pipe for years, and then discovered menthol cigarettes, cool with a K. I’d worked my way down to Ultra Lites and didn’t even have a smoker’s cough in the morning.

My mother, a chain-smoker, died of cancer when she was fifty. Her mother, a chain-smoker, died of lung cancer at forty-five.

Naomi begged me to stop but her parents had been heavy smokers, too. Her father died when he was seventy-eight of complete respiratory arrest. Her mother’s death was not smoking-related.

“Don’t worry,” I’d say to Naomi, “I’m going to be that little old guy you read the stories about, the one who’s puffing away at a hundred and two.”

A half hour before my mother died, she smoked her last cigarette. She was fifty years old.

I held it to her lips because her hands trembled so badly she couldn’t hold it.

When she was finished smoking that cigarette, I left her room and went outside and smoked a couple of cigarettes myself.

Then I went back inside and held her hand.

She died holding my hand.

My hand was bleeding from how hard she had dug her fingernails into it.

My mother smoked Herbert Tareyton filters and then Viceroy filters, but only after she “purified” them.

She took each cigarette out of the pack and sliced the filter off it. Then she put the cigarettes back into the pack and took them out all day and smoked them that way.

I asked her why she didn’t simply smoke unfiltered cigarettes but she said the unfiltered ones were too strong and filled with poisons.

She said the people at the cigarette factories purified their cigarettes in the process of putting filters on them and all she was doing was purifying them twice by slicing the filters.

That’s why, my mother said, she didn’t even have a smoker’s cough in the morning.

Naomi’s father, Barney Baka, smoked Viceroys, too, like my mother, but he didn’t razor the filters off them.

After a lifetime of smoking, he never got cancer.

But he couldn’t laugh. He coughed instead of laughing. He had a good sense of humor, so he coughed much of the time.

The morning my mother died, a hearse from the John J. Hriczo Funeral Home in Cleveland came to take her body away.

The two men from the funeral home had just gotten her body into the hearse and were ready to go … when the garbage truck came by for the weekly pickup.

The hearse had to stay in the driveway with my mother’s body inside it as the garbagemen emptied out one garbage can after another.

For many years afterward, I dreamed about the hearse waiting for the garbagemen to empty the garbage cans.

The day my mother died, the roses she had so carefully cultivated at the back of our house in Cleveland Heights died as well. The roses in all of our neighbors’ yards were alive and blooming.

After the worldwide success of
Basic Instinct
, a tobacco company released Basic cigarettes, no doubt inspired by the sex/smoking scenes in the movie.

Thanks to me, even more people in the world would be smoking.

Thanks to me, more people would die.

IV

Here are some other reasons why Naomi is the perfect woman for me:

Madonna almost played the part of Cristal in
Showgirls
, but Paul Verhoeven, the director, didn’t like Madoo’s script ideas.

Had Paul liked Madoo’s ideas:

Besides Madoo, Paul Verhoeven nixed both Drew Barrymore and Sharon Stone for
Showgirls
.

Had
Showgirls
starred Madonna and Drew Barrymore instead of Gina Gershon and Elizabeth Berkley …

The script would have been very different, thanks to Madoo.

The acting would have been very different, thanks to Drew.

And it’s just possible that
Showgirls
would have been a hit movie!

If the script had been Madonna’s, then I probably wouldn’t have called it “a deeply religious message.”

Had I not called it “a deeply religious message,” I probably wouldn’t have issued a press release telling teenagers to bring their fake IDs to see it.

Had I not told teenagers to bring their fake IDs, I would have avoided making a colossal asshole of myself.

A hit movie! Showgirls! A hit movie!

You have no idea how happy that would have made me!

Because I had done something else tragically foolish, too.

I had named the lead character of
Showgirls
“Nomi” …
Nomi
… Naomi’s childhood nickname …
Nomi
… the name I loved and was always going to call her in our most intimate moments.

Until the movie came out and disastered and turned my true love’s childhood nickname into a national joke.

No more “Nomi”!

Now I never call the love of my life “Nomi” anymore!

For the record
… what I was thinking by saying
Showgirls
has “a deeply religious message” was this:

At the end of the movie, Nomi Malone turns her back on stardom and leaves Vegas because of the amorality she has seen and experienced there.

She has become a star as the result of participating in that amorality … but rejects her stardom … and that amoral world … and gets back on the road, hitchhiking out of town … with her own billboard looming above her.

Whatever I was trying to do, I admit now that it was a dumb-ass thing to do.

For the record …
what I was thinking by telling teenagers to bring their fake IDs to get into the theaters to see
Showgirls
was this:

Whatever I was thinking … I admit now that telling teenagers to bring their fake IDs to see
Showgirls
was a dumb-ass thing to say.

V

In the year 2000, I was fifty-six years old, a Hollywood screenwriter, the author of fifteen movies. Some of them (
Basic Instinct, Jagged Edge, Flashdance
) were some of the biggest box office hits of our time. Some (
Showgirls, Jade, Sliver
) were some of the biggest critical disasters in recent memory. Some were pretty good:
Music Box, F.I.S.T., Telling Lies in America, Betrayed
. Some were movies that I loved but few others did:
An Alan Smithee Film: Burn Hollywood Burn, Big Shots
. Some were movies that I hated:
Nowhere to Run, Hearts of Fire
.

My movies had grossed more than a billion dollars at the box office. I had
made
millions and millions of dollars writing them. I had sold one script for $3 million, another for $3.7 million, another for $4.7 million.

I was the only screenwriter in the history of Hollywood who had groupies.

I was one of the few screenwriters in the history of Hollywood who were paid more for writing their scripts than some directors were for directing them.

The
New York Times
headlined: “Big Bucks and Blondes—Joe Eszterhas Lives the American Dream.”

ABC News called me “a living legend.” And
Time
magazine asked this question: “If Shakespeare were alive today, would his name be Joe Eszterhas?”

I was “the Che Guevara of screenwriters” (
Variety
) and “the Andrew Dice Clay of screenwriters” (the
New York Times
).

Details
magazine said, “He is a sexually transmitted disease.”

Another
New York Times
article said, “In his own way, Mr. Eszterhas is as much an object of fantasy as Sharon Stone.”

In a story about the rock group U2, the
Los Angeles Times
wrote: “Remember when people thought Bono just wanted to be God? Now he wants to be Joe Eszterhas.”

I got two thousand fan letters a week.

The best fan letter I’d ever gotten came to me when I was a writer at
Rolling Stone
magazine in the seventies.

A young woman wrote: “Do you want to come to Mars with me and play?”

It was addressed to “Ms. Esther Has.”

When I knew I was falling in love with Naomi, twenty years later, I asked Naomi the same question: “Do you want to come to Mars with me and play?”

Fan letters and autographs and limos and groupies … I was in hog screenwriter heaven … I was insufferable!

How insufferable was I?

Well, I called one of my directors “a doddering old fuck.”

How insufferable was I?

At a meeting with a group of studio executives, I said, “You guys better get your hands off my dick and stop diddling me.”

I was wearing an International Brotherhood of Teamsters jacket as I said that. Underneath the jacket was a black T-shirt with the words: “My inner child is a mean little fuck.”

How insufferable was I?

On my last movie, I wasn’t content with screen credits for screenwriting and executive-producing. I insisted that the first credit to be shown on-screen say: “Joe Eszterhas presents.”

How insufferable was I?

My hair was halfway down my back. I wore frayed jeans patched with red bandanas and a black hooded jacket with the words “Fuck You” at the top.

How insufferable was I?

I said to Robert Evans, “I’m not going to roll over and let him fuck me just because he’s the director and happens to be married to the head of the studio! You’ve rolled over so many times that it doesn’t even hurt anymore.”

How insufferable was I?

When I said that to him, Evans was (and still is) a dear friend of mine.

I was such a big-shot screenwriter that, in San Rafael, California, as I was being wheeled into an ambulance after an artery in my nose burst …

I saw a man on the street with his son pointing to me.

“Look,” the man said, “there! That’s Joe Eszterhas!”

His son said, “Where?”

The man said, “
There! Bleeding
.”

I was such a big-shot screenwriter that I could even keep Mick Jagger waiting.

Mick was calling from Bali, trying to talk me into letting him get an early look at a script I had written about Otis Redding called
Blaze of Glory
.

I told him that I really couldn’t do that … it wouldn’t be fair to the other producers, etc., etc. … enjoying every moment of it as Mick started to charm and nearly beg to have a shot to produce it.

Here he was, Jumpin’ Jack Flash, the ultimate rock star of my generation, begging just to be able to
read
my words.

So I finally said okay—he was, after all, Mick Jagger, the man every guy of my generation wanted to be. Naomi and I faxed every page of the script over to him in Bali and …

He didn’t even call me back to tell me he didn’t like it.

An assistant called three days later, to say that Mick had passed.

Oh, well, it was worth what had been my opening line to him: “
Please allow me to introduce myself, I’m a man of wealth and taste
.”