Hollywood Animal (39 page)

“Irwin,” I said to him, “it’s only a movie.” It was painful for me to even say the words I had so recently said to Richard.

He nodded.

“I know it,” he said, “but all directors are a little nuts. The best directors are more than a little nuts. I want to be there to make sure we don’t experience any unexpected improvisations.”

When I finally was finished, Costa said he wanted to sit down with me and Irwin because he had had “a formidable inspiration.”

He explained his inspiration formidably indeed, with his customary passion. The script as written ended with Winger coming back to see Berenger’s children, some time after she had killed him. What if, when she came back to see the children, Costa asked, she was pregnant with Berenger’s child. “It will accentuate the tragedy,” Costa said.

I didn’t think that Debra’s pregnancy (from Berenger) would “accentuate the tragedy.” I thought it would move the piece closer to …
Peyton Place
. Irwin adamantly agreed with me and after nearly a day of discussions, Costa termed his suggestion “not so formidable maybe” and forgot about it.

· · ·

There is nothing quite like a location shoot for Hollywood romance. You’re in a strange town with strange restaurants and bars. You’re in a completely isolated land whose Constitution is the shooting schedule and whose president is the director.

And since you’re in a strange town and a tough world where deadlines have to be met and there isn’t a lot of time to sleep, you get lonely.

There are no class distinctions on a location shoot, either, as opposed to a shoot on a studio soundstage, which means that the star can relieve her loneliness with the stuntman or the makeup person.

Egalitarianism is in the air: that cute little extra, a good-looking daughter of some local, can be admitted into this insular world, too, albeit temporarily (the length of the shoot), if she so desires and if she is willing to ease the loneliness of one of these deadline-pressured out-of-town celebrities.

Also very much in favor of romance is the understanding that whatever relationship began on location will …
and has to …
end at the wrap party, where the romancers will appear with their mates and air-kiss those who willingly and knowingly swallowed their well-meant lies about love.

When the shoot ended, Costa took the negative back to Paris and began editing it there. A week into the edit, he called and asked me to fly over to Paris to help him. I worked with him for three weeks.

I loved what I was seeing. He had somehow—beautifully, almost lyrically—captured the visual nuances of the American Midwest. A director who had never been in the Midwest before I took him there, he had made perhaps one of the most authentic films ever made about the heartland.

Lee Rich and Tony Thomopoulos flew over to join us and after they saw the rough cut, they called my agent and wanted to turn our one-picture deal into a three-picture deal at $750,000 per script.

When Costa finished the final cut, Irwin and I and the studio felt that it was a movie we would always be proud of—daring, visually stunning, finely crafted with superb performances. We felt we had pulled it off and, startlingly, had remained as allied at the end as we were at the beginning.

When the movie opened its first weekend, we had reason to rejoice. It did more than $6 million. There were block-long lines in L.A. and New York. Some exhibitors were reporting that some audiences found the movie so disturbing that people started yelling in the theaters.

The next weekend the movie died. It fell from $6 million to $3 million. The same word of mouth that had turned
Flashdance
and
Jagged Edge
into box office juggernauts had killed
Betrayed
.

People wanted to see it the first weekend very much. They had high expectations of it. They saw it, they disliked it, they told their friends they disliked it, and, in less than a month,
Betrayed
was gone.

We knew we had also been hurt by the critics, who damned it universally. They felt we had created an “unrealistic … apocalyptic vision.”

People like these heartland neo-Nazis didn’t exist, the critics said—or, if they did, they were part of bizarre microscopic cults which posed no danger to America.

One columnist disliked the movie so much that he attacked Costa and me as “foreigners trashing America.” The columnist was Patrick Buchanan, future presidential candidate of the Republican right wing.

I wonder what those critics were thinking eight years after
Betrayed
’s release when Timothy McVeigh, the reification of the Tom Berenger character, blew up the Federal Building in Oklahoma City.

CHAPTER 9

[Flashback]

Sins and Zip Guns

KAROHY

Maybe I’ll join the priesthood. You don’t have to work, you live in a nice house, you don’t go hungry.

FATHER NORTON

Is that what you think the priesthood is about, Mr. Jonas?

KARCHY

Well, you don’t get laid, but I’m not getting laid anyway, Father, so what’s the difference?

Telling Lies in America

MY MOTHER WAS
having severe stomach pains but she wouldn’t see a doctor. She went a couple of blocks down Lorain Avenue and saw the Hungarian pharmacist, Alex Sajo, instead. Alex Sajo gave her a tin can filled with medicine.

I watched her eat her medicine at dinner. She opened the can and put six round pieces of charcoal on her plate. She ate one piece after the other. Her mouth and her lips were black.

“I didn’t know you could eat charcoal,” I said.

“Oh yes,” my father said. “It is an old Hungarian cure.”

“Do you want to try a piece?” my mother asked me.

“No thanks.”

“I’ll take one,” my father said, and popped it into his mouth like a peanut.

· · ·

Every year I went with my classmates at St. Emeric’s to the Kraus Costume Company in downtown Cleveland and rented a Hungarian Hussar’s outfit. High black boots. A cockade cap. Red peasant vest. Billowing white shirt. Tight black pants.

All decked out, we stood on the back of a flatbed truck in a parade down Lorain Avenue as Hungarian csárdás music blared from a loudspeaker. My father and mother were very proud of me. One of my father’s friends took lots of pictures. I hated it. I felt like a geek.

Howdy Doody as a Hussar!

I was looking at the girls’ bodies in school. Their breasts and their behinds and the way they crossed their legs. I felt my
pimpli
grow and become rigid sometimes when I looked at them.

When I was in the apartment alone once, I touched my rigid
pimpli
and pulled it and the most amazing thing happened. White juice came out of it and I felt an overwhelming warmth spreading through my body.

I discovered that if I focused my imagination on girls’ bodies, on the women I’d seen on the ship, on the things I’d seen on Erzsi, my
pimpli
would grow rigid and I could make myself feel this miraculous warmth by pulling on it.

I did it to myself over and over again in the dank darkness of the apartment basement. In the bathroom. On the couch at night when my parents were asleep.

Sometimes there was so much juice my stomach was wet and I had to use a towel.

My mother was sick, she had a high temperature and was throwing up. Her stomach hurt and her skin was yellowish. A Hungarian doctor named Bognar came to the apartment and said she needed to have her gallbladder removed.

My father had an old Hungarian friend now living in Canada, Dr. Laszlo Szöllösy, who was a surgeon. My father didn’t trust the American surgeons in Cleveland. Neither did my mother.

They took the train to Canada. By the time they arrived in Hamilton, eight hours away, she was in a near coma.

They left me alone in the apartment. My mother’s friend, Dora Szakács, would bring me food every day and check on me.

I started throwing up about an hour after they left for the train. I felt like I was burning up. I lay down in my parents’ bed and felt so weak I couldn’t get up. I had to go to the bathroom but I couldn’t get up, so I went in the bed. It smelled and it was all over me and the bed but I couldn’t get up. I was very thirsty but I couldn’t even get up for a glass of water. Everything was spinning around very fast.

Dora Szakács forgot to come.

She came the next day, when the bed was dripping to the floor with everything that was coming out of me. She called a doctor. I had a 105 degree temperature.

Dora Szakács took me to her home and I stayed with the Szakácses until my parents got back. Her husband, Zoltán, a kindly man, bought me marbles to make me feel better.

In school the nuns said that playing with ourselves was a mortal sin. We would burn in hell forever. Hair would grow on our palms and we would go blind. We would go mad and have to be taken to asylums where jackets would be put around us so we couldn’t touch ourselves.

As Sister Rose was saying these things, I was watching Karen Buganski’s breasts. Karen was eleven and had breasts you could see clearly, dark, flashing big eyes and long brown hair. I felt my
pimpli
grow rigid as Sister Rose talked. I said I had to go to the bathroom.

I went to the bathroom and, thanks to Karen Buganski’s breasts, made myself feel wonderful.

My father read the
Plain Dealer
in the morning, his English-Hungarian dictionary at his side, desperate for news about Josef Stalin’s successors.

And I read the
Plain Dealer
when he was done, his English-Hungarian dictionary at my side, desperate for news about the Hungarian bank robber Lou Teller and his big-breasted girlfriend, Tina Mae Ritenour.

I was scissoring the photographs of American women whom I liked from the
Plain Dealer:

Zsa Zsa Gabor, Mamie Van Doren, Betty Grable, Esther Williams, Jane Russell, Marilyn Monroe, Lana Turner, Joanne Dru, Debra Paget, Dana Wynter … and Tina Mae Ritenour.

Tits!

It was a new American word I had learned!

My father was gone a lot now. He was traveling on the Greyhound and making speeches to Hungarians in Youngstown, Ohio, and Detroit, Michigan, and Windber, Pennsylvania.

He was also forming friendships with American women who came to his office that he introduced me to. Huldah Kramer, an American magazine writer, and Katherine Webster, the librarian at the Carnegie West branch at Fulton and Lorain.

While I was walking with him at night to the library he told me a story
about
a man named Casanova who was the greatest lover of women in history. He said that when he was a young man in Hungary, he had been Casanova.

“Don’t tell your mother about this,” he said. “I’m talking to you as a man now.”

I was a ten-year-old man.

In the fall of 1954, I ran after school each day to the corner of West 25th and Bridge. On this corner, behind the store windows of a furniture store, stood six Zenith television sets.

On each of these sets, the Cleveland Indians were playing the New York Giants in the World Series. I watched Willie Mays catch a ball impossible to catch off the bat of the Indians’ Vic Wertz. I watched Al Rosen and Larry Doby and Wally Westlake strike out again and again.

I watched a lumbering man named Dusty Rhodes, a pinch-hitter for the Giants, hit so many home runs that I hated him as much as the Komchis and the Krampusz combined. The Indians lost four games in a row. I cried.

To make me feel better, Oszkár Moldován bought me a Cleveland Indians American League Champions pennant. It was my prized possession: glaring red and yellow, featuring a grinning Chief Wahoo, the Indians’ mascot. It had the name of every player on it.

I climbed to the roof of the printing shop and waved it at the truck drivers in the Num Num Potato Chip factory lot. They cheered.

My mother’s teeth had always hurt. Now, within two weeks, she had all of them pulled.

When she got her false teeth, she stopped working in the printing shop behind the linotype machine and got a job as a bookkeeper at the Central National Bank on West 25th Street. She spoke little English but she was a whiz with numbers and many of the other bookkeepers were also Hungarian women.

She worked from nine to six, but even when she was home there were long silences between my parents I hadn’t noticed before.

She complained of severe headaches and my father urged her to smoke less. She switched brands instead, from unfiltered Philip Morrises to filtered Herbert Tareytons. But then she cut the filters off the Tareytons with a razor blade and smoked them that way.

She said they tasted better.

Huldah Kramer drove my father and me on a rainy Sunday to a small town nearby, Mansfield, Ohio. My father asked my mother to come but she said she had a headache.

“You go with Huldah,” my mother said.

“And the boy,” my father said.

“Yes, of course, the boy,” my mother said.

We were going to see the farm of the famous millionaire American writer Louis Bromfield.

Huldah drove her beautiful new car and my father sat in the front with her. I sat in the back. She was teaching my father words in English but they also spoke in German. Huldah spoke German fluently, and my father spoke a little. Classical music was playing on the car radio.

I hated Huldah. I didn’t know why.

We got letters from Hungary sometimes, from my grandfather Jozsef Kreisz and my grandmother and aunts. They said they were happy and well. They said they were praying for us.

My father got angry whenever we got a letter. He said the letters were lies. He said the Komchis had forced them to write these things. He said no one was happy and well under Communism. He said they were being forced to write these things because the Komchis were trying to lure him back to Hungary.

“What would happen if you went back to Hungary, Papa?” I asked him.

“The Komchis would hang me.”

“Why?”

“Because I have spent my whole life fighting them.”