Hollywood Animal (21 page)

What a piece of work this Golden Beef was!

We were on our way to La Scala for lunch one day—Guy was a permanent resident there with his own banquette.

The sun was in our eyes and an attractive woman, walking toward us, stopped us.

“Guy, how are you?” she gushed.

“I’m just fine, thank you,” he said.

He was peering at her, his Gucci shades on. I could tell he didn’t know who she was.

“Well you look really great,” she told him with a smile.

“Thank you.” He smiled back. “So do you.”

“Guy, don’t you recognize me?” She laughed.

“Well sure, of course I do,” he said but she and I both knew he had no idea who she was.

“But Guy,” she said, “I was your first wife.”

Another time we were having dinner and there was a stunning woman in her forties sitting near us with a white-haired man in his seventies. When the
man
went to the restroom, she turned to us and said, “Guy, you never call me anymore.”

He oozed charm and said he was very sorry but that he certainly would.

“It’s been such a long time,” she said, “I miss you.”

“I miss you too, darlin’,” Guy said, smiling.

When her friend came back from the restroom they left.

“Who was she?” I asked him.

“I don’t know,” he said.

“You don’t know?” I laughed.

“Well, I remember her. I don’t think I ever knew her name, but twenty years ago she used to give the best head in this town.”

Another night at La Scala with Guy, I also met a young agent who had just started his own agency. Michael Ovitz was with Sally Struthers and they stopped at our table on their way out.

At the moment they stopped, I was holding a hunting knife that I’d bought on Wilshire Boulevard at Abercrombie & Fitch that afternoon.

I was showing it to Guy and the six-inch blade was open when Ovitz and Struthers stopped.

Guy introduced me to them and after a few moments of agent banter, Ovitz suddenly turned to me, glancing at the knife, and said: “Do you eat dinner with that thing?”

“No,” I said, “but I carry it into all of my meetings.”

“You’ll probably go a long way in this town.” Ovitz laughed.

Sally Struthers asked to see the knife, so I handed it over, its blade open.

“This thing is really lethal,” she said.

She handed it to Ovitz, who checked it for heft, rubbed it admiringly, and made some stabbing motions with it.

“Maybe I’ll borrow it sometime,” he said with a smile.

“Not while I’m around,” Guy said.

We all laughed.

“Anytime,” I said to Michael Ovitz and he smiled and handed the knife back to me.

One of the more memorable meetings in Guy’s office was with Jann Wenner, my old boss at
Rolling Stone
, whom I’d always called Napoleon, partly because of his size and partly because of his accomplishments.

Jann had just gotten a three-picture producing deal at Paramount through his friendship with studio head Barry Diller and we were now talking about my writing a script for him.

The irony didn’t escape me. I’d written magazine articles for him all those years and now here he was, back as my potential “producer.”

The only problem with the meeting was that Jann was zonked out of his
mind—not
on grass or coke or some of the other more arcane highs that we’d shared (
ibogaine? belladonna?
) … but on vodka.

Even Guy, who must’ve been a part owner of Jack Daniel’s, was sort of taken aback. I was amused: when I was at
Rolling Stone
, Jann knew so little about alcohol that when Yevgeny Yevtushenko (a world-renowned drinker) came to visit us, I had to draw up a liquor list for his arrival.

Now, in Guy’s office, Jann was lurching around and fixated on the boots I was wearing.

“
Those are Beatle boots!
” he said.

“No they’re not.”

“Yes they are. They’re Beatle boots. I can’t believe you’re wearing Beatle boots.”

“I am
not
wearing Beatle boots.”

“Cleveland, you’re from
Cleveland
. It makes sense. No wonder you’re wearing Beatle boots. Guy, don’t those look like Beatle boots?”

“Well, a little, I guess,” Guy said. “Maybe.”

“Beatle boots!” Jann crowed.
“Fucking Beatle boots!”

I also met Don Simpson during that period of time. He was the head of production at Paramount, working with and under a stellar cast of people that included Craig Baumgarten, Jeff Katzenberg, Michael Eisner, and Barry Diller.

I was in Don’s office to discuss adapting one of my books,
Nark
, to the screen, and in the room were Craig Baumgarten and a producer Barry Hirsch had recommended to me. I knew that Simpson had come out of the music business and I was immediately drawn to his let’s-kick-some-ass, passionate, rock and roll style. He was firing ideas off in machine-gun bursts and at one point in the meeting he got so excited about what he was saying that he got up from behind his desk and started hurling himself around the office.

I knew that the producer Peter Guber was known in town as “The Electric Jew” but Simpson truly was some kind of dervish-like force.

As Simpson hurled himself about the office, waving his arms, nearly booga-looing, I got up from the chair I was sitting in and wandered behind his desk, sat down in it, and put my feet up on it.

Simpson gaped at me. He looked frozen.

“What are you doing with your feet up on my desk?” he whispered.

“I’m stretching my legs,” I said.

He stood there, riveted to the spot, and smiled, then he started to giggle. Then we all started to giggle.

“Make the fucking deal with him,” Simpson said to Craig. “Now I know what I’m dealing with.”

And then, turning to me, he screamed—“GET THE FUCK AWAY FROM MY DESK!”

I did.

It seemed sometimes that the Beverly Wilshire Hotel was becoming my temporary home.

The suite I favored looked across Wilshire Boulevard down Rodeo Drive.

I sat on my patio one night watching an army of policemen and SWAT team members as they cordoned Rodeo off. Helicopters buzzed the night sky. Spotlights turned night into day. Police sirens wailed.

I wondered what movie they were shooting and was looking for the sound trucks when a bulletin on my TV set announced that a robbery had gone wrong at Van Cleef & Arpels Jewelers on Rodeo. Hostages had been taken. Police were on the scene.

Maybe it wasn’t a movie being filmed, but what difference did
that
make?

I had a great front-row seat!

Steven Spielberg was an old friend of Guy’s. When Steven was starting out in the business, Guy would let him drive his car and offered him a spot at his Thanksgiving table each year. Now Steven was thinking about doing a remake of
A Guy Named Joe
and Guy wanted to bring the two of us together.

I went to Steven’s house in the Palisades. It was filled with toys and miniatures of sets from his movies.

Steven told me he was going through a tough time: he was breaking up with Amy Irving and he wanted to get into another project as soon as possible—meaning
now
.

We watched the movie together at his house and when it was over he told me he had read a couple of my scripts and wanted me to do it. Was I interested?

Yes I was, I told him, but I couldn’t get to it for at least another six months because I had agreed to write an idea from my old agent, Bob Bookman, for ABC Films, about migrant wheat farmers in the Midwest.

“Did you sign a contract?” Steven asked.

“No, but I agreed to do it,” I said. “Besides that, I hear nobody in town signs a contract.”

“But you didn’t sign one, right?” he said.

“No.”

“I’ll talk to Guy,” Steven Spielberg said.

Guy spoke to me the next day.

“It’s no problem,” he said, “I can get us out of the ABC thing. We didn’t sign anything.”

“But I gave my word to Bookie that I’d do it.”

“This is Steven Spielberg we’re talking about here,” Guy said.

“I’ll do it in six months,” I said.

“He can’t wait,” Guy said, “he’s going through this breakup with Amy Irving. He wants to work on this
right now
. You’re probably going to have to go to London for a couple months to baby-sit him through it.”

“I’m not a baby-sitter, I’m a writer.”

“Well, you know what I mean,” Guy said. “Think about it.”

I did and called him back.

“I don’t feel comfortable with this,” I said. “I’ve given my word to Bookie and I’ve never been good at baby-sitting anybody—”

“Forget the baby-sitting part. I just meant spending time together, hanging out. Steven needs a friend right now.”

“I don’t even know the man. I met him once and liked him but—”

“Do you really want me to tell Steven Spielberg that you won’t work with him because of some dipshit ABC project about farmers?”

I said: “Yes.”

He called me back and said he had spoken to Steven.

“What did he say?”

“He’s pissed off at you.”

“How can he be pissed off at me? What if I’d made an agreement with him and then did something else?”

“Nobody does that to Steven Spielberg.”

“Does what?”

“Turn him down.”

“What did he actually say to you?”

“He said—‘I can’t believe Joe’s turning down a chance to work with Steven Spielberg.’”

I went off to Nebraska and Iowa and hung out with the migrant farmers instead of Steven and sent ABC an outline.

“This is a great outline,” Bookie said in his new corporate digs, “but we want you to do something else.”

“Something
else?
”

“I’ll tell you the truth,” he said. “We market-researched this idea. Market research says a movie about migrant wheat farmers won’t be a hit movie.”

“Why didn’t you market-research it before we made an agreement that I’d write it?”

“We probably should have, but we didn’t. Jeff was right.” Jeff Katzenberg, at Paramount, had issued a recent edict that movies with “dust” weren’t to be made because they were a box office turnoff. Wheat farmers meant
a lot of dust
.

“Don’t worry about it,” Bookie said, “we’ll find something else for you to do.”

“But I’ve already done the research and I’ve spent a lot of time figuring out a story.”

“What can I say?” Bookie said. “I’m sorry.”

Guy wasn’t sorry when he heard what had happened, he was apoplectic. As I sat in his office, he called Bookie.

“You’re
sorry?
” he said. “You made a deal with him to write this script on this subject. He began to perform. Now you don’t want him to perform because of market research? Well fuck market research! You pay him out completely and have the check on my desk in an hour! If you want to make another deal with him to write something else, we’ll consider it! If the check isn’t here within the hour, this agency will cease doing any business with ABC Films!”

He slammed the phone down and made himself a drink.

“I always did like Bookie.” He smiled.

Then he turned to me and said: “The moral of the story is don’t ever turn down Steven Spielberg.”

My kids were growing and I was starting to make a lot of money, but it was screwy. No movie had been made from any of my scripts since
F.I.S.T
., but my price was escalating and I was more and more in demand.

I was commuting to Los Angeles more often, still living in Marin County, being the dad, cooking hamburgers for the nursery and grade schools, getting involved in Little League, but my day-to-day life was as much about Hollywood as it was about Marin County.

Gerri felt estranged from the world that I was spending increasingly more time in.

One night at dinner in San Francisco with Paramount vice president Craig Baumgarten and his then-wife, the actress Vicki Frederick, Gerri suffered an allergic attack that I thought was more about Hollywood than about the pine nuts she had accidentally eaten.

Vicki, starlet-slick and cat-eyed, kept tossing her hair back theatrically and vetting the other diners and Gerri’s face started to swell. Her eyes became webbed and finally her breathing became choked and I wound up rushing her to Marin General Hospital.

She knew what had happened, too, I think, because she said, “I never want to eat dinner with people like that again,” when she recovered.

We were living in bucolic Marin County because we felt it was a peaceful place to raise our kids.

At three o’clock in the morning on a rainy winter night—when Suzi was four and Steve five—there was a banging at our front door in quiet San Rafael.

I looked through the glass and saw a figure in a camouflage outfit, his face blackened, carrying an M-16.

I almost shot him on sight with the .22 Beretta I had in the pocket of my
robe
. He must’ve seen my hand move in my pocket because he yelled: “No! Don’t!
Don’t!
My name is Officer Guerra of the San Rafael Police Department. Call this number right now!”

He gave me his office’s number and they told me that he was a member of the SWAT team. They also told me that in the house right next to ours, a teenage boy had taken his parents hostage.

I let Officer Guerra in and he told Gerri and me that since our house was in the teenager’s gunsight, we’d have to wake Steve and Suzi and evacuate our house.

Gerri and I, terrified, woke the kids, but before we could leave our house there were gunshots next door and newly arrived policemen told me we couldn’t leave our house now … we had to get down on the floor in a room of the house that was away from the line of fire.

Steve and Suzi screamed and were so terrified we could hear their teeth chattering as we lay down on the floor of a spare bedroom.

Our house became a command post for the SWAT team. Men with blackened faces and M-16s and semiautomatic weapons kept opening the door to the room where we were lying on the floor.

As Gerri and Steve and Suzi lay on the floor, I crouched at the window to see what I could see.

I saw men with weapons crouching by all the bushes.

And I saw our kitty-cat go promenading up the middle of the street in the glare of the police lights.