Hollywood Animal (56 page)

Sharon and I had fun together; we made each other laugh.

“You created me,” Sharon teased me and sent me notes signed “Catherine.”

I bought her two hundred roses when she was nominated for a Golden Globe and a gold wildlife bracelet made in Hawaii.

One memorable night I picked her up at her tiny house off Mulholland overlooking the Valley. Sharon brought out a bottle of frosty Cristal, we put James Brown on, and then she brought out some grass that she said was Thai. We shared a joint and it blew the tops of our heads off.

We were crawling around her living room rug, around the dollhouse she loved so much, slugging from another bottle of Cristal. We were ripped out of our skulls but we thought we should have something to eat and somehow made it down to Citrus, the industry’s flavor of the month, after what seemed the longest ride.

“Holy Christ,” I kept saying.

“I know, I know,” Sharon giggled, almost trilling the words.

Citrus was jammed full of the usual industry faces and we must have been an odd sight sitting in our booth, our eyes rolling around in our heads.

Sharon blinked at the other diners and said, “Who are these fucking people?”

I looked around and identified certain producers and agents, all trying not to stare at the spectacle we were creating. Sharon smiled at them and good-naturedly said, “Fuck ’em.” She had some white sauce running down her chin and I wiped it off with my napkin.

“That felt nice,” she said and smiled.

Another bottle of Cristal later we were ready to leave and I asked the maître d’ to ask our driver to pull the limo as close to the door as he could so we could fall into the car and not have to walk. The maître d’ gave us a signal a couple minutes later and we wobbled and lurched across the restaurant as the other diners, frozen, stared.

We fell into the car and Sharon, somewhat revitalized, said we had to hear some more James Brown. Now. Right now.

The driver took us to Virgin Records on Sunset, pulled up as close to the door as he could, and we wobbled and lurched inside. James Brown CDs were upstairs.

I wasn’t sure I could navigate the steps but Sharon went zigzagging up. A few minutes later, she reappeared on the top step, holding a stack of CDs. She threw her arms wide and yelled, “I’m coming down!”

I heard laughter from some of the people in the store and then some of them started to applaud. Sharon came zigzagging back down the stairs, her arms wide, and threw herself three steps up into my arms. Now I heard more applause.

We somehow paid for the CDs and were trying to leave the store when the security guards came over. We were trying to leave, they explained, through the front store window. They graciously led us to the door, where our driver was waiting for us and helped us into the car.

In the limo, we put James Brown on, Sharon pulled out another joint. There was a moment when I put my hand on her thigh—she was wearing chocolate-brown suede pants—and she said, “I knew you’d put your hand there, that’s why I wore these.”

We had a brief and insane argument.

“My ass hangs halfway to my knees,” she said.

“You’ve got a beautiful ass,” I told her.

She said, “I’m pushing forty. This should have happened to me twenty years ago. I crawled a hill of broken glass. Why didn’t you write this script twenty years ago?
Why?
”

We had another bottle of Cristal back in her house and crawled around the dollhouse some more. Then I went back to my hotel. The phone rang as I was walking in the door to my suite.

It was Sharon. She sounded hysterical. “My burglar alarm went off,” she said. “I woke up in the living room. I grabbed a butcher knife from the kitchen. I started to look around, then I got scared and ran down the street and the security people picked me up.”

I could visualize the scene: Sharon Stone, the biggest star in the world, the ice pick queen, running down her little suburban street with a butcher knife in hand.

“Where are you?” I asked.

“They brought me back home. The burglar alarm was off. The security people said it had never gone off.”

“Do you want me to go over there? I’ll be right there.”

“No,” she said. “I’m okay now. I think I’m okay now.”

I said, “You just freaked on the dope.”

“This happened to me on Ecstasy once,” Sharon said. “I had to go to the hospital. I thought I was having a heart attack.”

“Are you sure you don’t want me to go over there?”

“No,” she said. “It’s okay.” She paused and in a little girl’s voice she said, “We had fun, didn’t we?”

“Yeah.” I laughed. “We sure did.”

At my recommendation, she hired Guy McElwaine as her agent and, thanks in no small part to Guy, she agreed to do
Sliver
.

She had reservations about doing another movie with erotic content, but she thought I was her good luck charm.

I had, after all, as she kept saying, “created” her. And we had fun spending time together.

Guy told me he was devastated. His marriage had broken up. It was his eighth or ninth marriage. I’m not sure. He was married at least twice to the same woman.

Guy is the world’s last romantic. Each time he marries, he is in love. He thinks it’ll last forever each time.

When he told me that this marriage had broken up, I told him that I was sending him to Hawaii for two weeks—all expenses paid—at the Mauna Kea Beach Hotel resort on the Big Island.

An hour after I told him, his secretary called me to ask if my offer was for Guy alone or for Guy and “a friend.”

“Don’t tell me Guy and his wife are getting back together again,” I said. “That’s terrific.”

His secretary said, sadly, that they weren’t … but that Guy had a friend—formerly married to an actor and a rock star—and if it was okay with me, he wanted to take her to the Mauna Kea “to cheer him up.”

I said that was fine with me: let the cheering up begin!

· · ·

When Robert Evans heard that Sharon was doing
Sliver
, he was overjoyed. He was suddenly a big shot again, producing a movie starring the world’s newest screen sensation. But when Evans found out the condition with which Sharon was doing the movie, I thought he was going to go into cardiac arrest.

Sharon’s condition was simple, flat, and nonnegotiable: Evans could not go to the set of his own movie when Sharon Stone was filming.

She did not want to be around Robert Evans. Sharon did not want to
cast her eyes
on Robert Evans. And, since the biggest stars in the world always get what they want, Paramount had happily agreed to Sharon’s condition.

The problem was a girl in a dog collar. According to Sharon, a friend of hers from her modeling days wound up as one of Bob’s house bimbos. According to Sharon, Bob supposedly kept the young woman naked and in a dog collar for weeks at a time. Sharon said that her friend needed psychiatric care for months after leaving the Evans house.

According to Evans, Sharon’s story was whole-cloth fiction. He was enraged. “You talk to any girl who’s ever been in this house,” Bob said. “There are no dog collars here. This isn’t that kind of a house.”

I felt he had a point. The girls that I had met in Bob’s house all seemed very fond of him, treating him like a classic Hollywood “daddy.”

“She can’t kick me off my own set!” Evans raged. “Who the fuck does she think she is? A dog collar? The name is Evans! Robert Evans! Not the Marquis de Sade!”

Sharon, however, was adamant and unyielding and, as the shoot began, Evans was not allowed to go within one hundred yards of his own set.

Our director was Phillip Noyce, a big, shambling Aussie whose first big hit was
Dead Calm
and who had directed the recent hit
Patriot Games
.

Sharon, perhaps sensing that she intimidated the physically gawky Noyce on a sexual level … Phillip seemed to
gaze
at Sharon a lot … didn’t like him. She called him “the Creep” and “the Bozo.”

Evans, who had always had ego problems with directors—“The best time to hire a director is right after they’ve had a great failure,” he’d said—didn’t like Phillip either.

I was almost feeling sorry for Evans, banned from his own set, desperate to contribute, frantic to be the creative hero of yore. Evans was now down to meetings with the music supervisor and the costume designer.

I knew his musical tastes … Nat King Cole was his favorite; he knew nothing about Enigma or UB-40, the groups we were talking about using.

He told the costume designer he thought Billy Baldwin should be wearing the clothes he wore—not the
kind
of clothes Evans wore—but the
clothes themselves
. So he had a grip from the set bring his clothes from his house to his office: white shoes and white belts and lavender slacks and monogrammed slippers were everywhere.

Evans was also conducting a guerrilla campaign against his own movie. He said he hated the dailies.

“That lummox can’t direct,” he said about Noyce. “That scene where they’re supposed to be making love. They don’t make love, they don’t even fuck. They
rut
. They’re wild hogs. Horses. We’ve got a script about pussy by a writer who knows pussy with a producer who knows pussy and it’s being directed by a lummox who thinks his dick is something to pee with.”

He loathed Sharon for banning him from his set and took it out on her dailies. “You can’t even shoot her ass anymore. She’s over already. She’s too old. Who’d want to fuck her anymore? Who’s gonna buy their popcorn and
come
watching her?”

He didn’t like Billy Baldwin much, either.

“All those big
schwantz
brothers in that family and we had to pick this goony
putz
.”

I don’t know how many times my son Steve saw
Basic Instinct
, but I know the videotape I had of the uncut European version was worn out pretty fast.

I got Sharon to sign a sultry bathing suit picture which Steve put up on his wall. It said, “To Steve—All My Love, Sharon.”

Sometimes when Sharon and I were hanging out together, enjoying each other’s company, I wondered what was going on in Steve’s head. I was certain they were the same kinds of goings-on that had gone on, when I was Steve’s age, between me and Mamie Van Doren, me and Zsa Zsa Gabor, me and Brigitte Bardot.

In a very complex and intimate way, I knew, I had introduced Sharon to Steve.

I was at a party at a producer’s house in the flats of Beverly Hills and I had to pee.

The line to the bathroom was long, though, and everyone standing there seemed to have the sniffles, so I thought it would be some time before I could get in there.

I left, jumped into my rent-a-car, and thought I could wait till I got back to the hotel.

A few blocks away, though, still in Beverly Hills, I realized I couldn’t wait anymore. Not one minute longer. Not even thirty seconds.

I jumped out of the car on a dark side street and spotted a high wall surrounding an estate and peed against the wall.

I was still in midstream when bright lights from all directions illuminated me and a loud alarm went off.

I was still zipping myself up when two Beverly Hills police department cruisers pulled up, sirens wailing, cherries whirling.

The cops put me against the wall and frisked me and told me what I’d done was a crime and they were going to arrest me for it.

I told them that I had just come from the producer’s party and that Don Simpson, the producer who’d made
Beverly Hills Cop
, was a good friend of
mine
.

I recited my credits for them.

One of the cops said, “Did she know her pussy was getting shot for that scene?”

I said she did indeed, and the Beverly Hills cops sent me on my way.

Besides Sharon, I had also become good friends with Bill Macdonald, the head of Evans’s production company. Bill was in his late thirties and liked to have a drink and a good time.

Bill was a man of many
implications
. He
implied
that he had an offshore fortune and he
implied
that he had a Texas ranch and he
implied
, oh so delicately, that he’d been involved with the CIA in certain vague and unmentionable Far East exploits.

Pinned down, Bill blithely admitted that his father was a San Francisco surgeon famous for the pub crawls that even Herb Caen wrote about … but he
implied
that his mother was General Douglas MacArthur’s illegitimate daughter.

I thought Bill’s
implications
were a hoot and had fun matching yarns and tequila shooters with him.

I liked Bill’s girlfriend just as much as Bill. They had been together ten years and were about to be married soon. She was thirty-two years old and drop-dead gorgeous. She had a razor-sharp wit … and she was from Ohio.

Her name was Naomi Baka.

From the time she was a little girl, Naomi wanted to leave Mansfield and Ohio.

She dreamed of a place with broader horizons—it was something most of her family—her father, her older brothers, her sister—didn’t understand. They loved Mansfield—it was a great, crime-free place to raise kids.

Only her mother and her younger brother, Jeremy, got it. Her mother, who grew up in a small mining town in Illinois, always encouraged her to broaden her horizons, to
live
, to “color every page.”

Naomi did. She read. She took photographs. She saw lots of movies. She drew. She was Richland County Fire Queen. She went to Ohio State and became the first person in her family to graduate from college. She worked in factories to pay her tuition; she was a busgirl at the local Ramada Inn. After college, she worked as a stringer for a newspaper in Columbus and then as a public relations rep at the phone company in Mansfield.

She wanted to get out of Mansfield, but she was still in a relationship with her high school boyfriend. Her boyfriend worked in Mansfield, too, and talked about moving to Kansas City.

Naomi didn’t want to live in Kansas City. She wanted to live in New York,
the
city she’d dreamed about since she was a little girl. Her mother kept urging her to go; her father kept telling her she was crazy.