Hollywood Animal (59 page)

CHAPTER 16

My Hollywood Mistress

DR. PALME

He likes games and danger, courts it. He’s sociopathic, a great danger to women. His defense system is extraordinarily developed, an acute schizophrenia, nonparanoid, classic Jekyll and Hyde syndrome.

Sliver

CLEVELAND WAS BACK
in the news again. Even the
Wall Street Journal
was doing stories about “the Cleveland Resurgence.”

It was all thanks to a Republican mayor named George Voinovich, who, among other things, had lighted up the Terminal Tower, Cleveland’s vest-pocket version of the Empire State Building.

I read one day that George Voinovich’s little girl had run out into the street in front of her house and been dragged to her death by a passing car. The first on the scene was her older teenage sister, Betsy.

I was at home in Tiburon in Marin County when an old friend called to say he was coming to town and would like to visit … with him would be a young woman who wanted to meet me and wanted to be a screenwriter, the governor of Ohio’s daughter, Betsy Voinovich.

She was twenty-six now, a coltish blonde who had studied writing under John Barth and Joyce Carol Oates, wrote startling short stories set in the world of grunge rock, and was the world’s biggest John Lennon fan. She’d played in her older brother’s band around the Cleveland area and had barnstormed for her father, whom she adored, around the state of Ohio.

She had dinner with my friend and me and Gerri and Steve and Suzi in Tiburon and the next day I took her, along with my friend, down to Stinson
Beach,
where the three of us checked out my old Victorian and walked on the beach.

I told her I was scheduled to do a writing seminar at Ohio University in a couple of months and she suggested I visit her father at the Governor’s Mansion in Columbus on my way back to California.

“Will you be there?” I asked her.

“No,” she said, “I’ll be moving into my apartment in L.A.”

“Why should I visit your father then?”

“Because he’s an interesting man,” she said, “and so are you.”

I looked at her; I was forty-seven years old, old enough to be her father.

“Is your father a more interesting man than I am?” I smiled.

“No,” she said, “you’re a much more interesting man than he is. But you’ll like him, I think, and he’ll like you and then you can call me in L.A. and tell me how much you liked him. Or you can come down and tell me in person and we can listen to my John Lennon collection.”

Gerri saw me air-kiss her goodbye, but Gerri didn’t see the look in my eye as I did it.

Betsy met my eye, smiled, and said, “See you in L.A.”

At dinner in the Governor’s Mansion in Columbus, I liked George Voinovich immediately.

I thought him a sensitive and caring man who viewed his stewardship of the state in the manner of a secular priest. He and his wife lived monastically at the mansion, using only a tiny apartment upstairs. We talked a lot about his Croatian background and my Hungarian one and I noticed a jangled, skittish quality about Betsy’s mother. It made me wonder whether anyone ever got over the loss of a child.

They were both afraid for Betsy, away from home, out there in L.A., and afraid that her dreams of becoming a screenwriter would come to naught.

“Maybe you can keep an eye on her out there for me,” George Voinovich said, looking me in the eye. “I would consider it a personal favor.”

“I’ll do that,” I said.

“I’ll be in your debt,” he responded.

A lone butler served a simple pasta and vegetable dish and the portion was so small that on the way back to the hotel I stopped at McDonald’s and ate a quarter-pounder.

I went from Columbus to Cleveland to see my father and ran into a barmaid at the Ritz-Carlton who recognized me and told me how much she’d loathed
Basic Instinct
. She said it was sexist and homophobic and she hadn’t seen a movie she’d disliked so much in years. She also showed me her nipple ring.

She came up to my room when she got off work and we killed a bottle of Dom Pérignon and continued our discussion of
Basic
and fell happily into bed.

When she left in the morning, I called Betsy and told her how much I’d liked her dad.

“He asked me to keep an eye on you,” I said.

“What did you say?”

“I told him I would.”

“So when are you coming to L.A. so you can start doing that?”

“Soon,” I said.

I hung up and walked into the bathroom to shower.

Lipsticked words had been scrawled on the mirror. They said, “Welcome to the wonderful world of AIDS.”

I wasn’t worried. The same message had been left for me by another young woman on another mirror in Vegas recently.

It was the new practical joke going around.

I saw Betsy in L.A. for the first time on my forty-eighth birthday. I had lunch with her at the Café Rodeo and told her the scripts she’d left behind for me to read were awful.

I meant it: Her short stories were wonderful. Her scripts sucked.

“I can get better.” She smiled. “I’m glad you told me the truth. Most people don’t.”

She asked me what I was doing that night for my birthday and I told her Guy McElwaine was throwing a birthday party for me at Dominic’s.

“Can I go?” she asked.

“Sure.”

“Can I go with you?”

I laughed and said, “I like you—you’re very appealing and attractive, but I’m married. I have two children, I—”

“I’ve met them,” she said with a smile. “They’re very nice. I
like
them. But I’m a big girl.”

“Okay,” I said.

“I’m a big girl,” she repeated, laughing at me.

I took her to the party that night and watched her. Sharon Stone was there … Tom Berenger, wearing a Confederate hat and fairly drunk … Phillip Noyce … Bill Macdonald. Betsy held her own with all of them. She seemed to put Sharon off somehow; I thought it was Betsy’s youth.

We all drank too much and wound up at Guy’s house. Guy found an ancient mud-colored joint he’d hidden in a jewelry box in 1976 and he put Frank Sinatra on.

Betsy and I drifted away from the others and found ourselves in a child’s room filled with mobiles and stuffed animals. I kept a close eye on her … as I had promised her father, the governor of Ohio … all night.

I saw Betsy steadily after that whenever I went to L.A. She said she was falling in love with me. I knew I liked her very much. I knew this was a relationship, but I didn’t think it was love.

“I’m going to wind up hurting you and I don’t want to do that,” I said.

“You can’t hurt me,” she said, “you’re a big old softie.”

It made me laugh.

“I think you should leave your wife and kids and run away with me and live happily ever after,” Betsy said.

I said, “I can’t do that.”

“Sure you can. What’s the best place we can run away to? I’ll bet you’ve seen some places.”

“Useppa,” I told her. “What’s that?” she said.

“A tiny island in Florida. It’s hidden away. The CIA used it to train the guys who were slaughtered at the Bay of Pigs.”

“Perfect,” Betsy said. “Poetic. Tragic. Idyllic for us.”

We were in a suite at the Four Seasons in Beverly Hills.

“I’m going to dream about being on Useppa with you,” Betsy said, turned over, and went to sleep.

But she didn’t dream about Useppa. I woke up at dawn to her choked sobs. She was dreaming, as she often did, about the little sister she’d found broken to pieces in the street just down from her house.

“I want you to leave Gerri and your kids and come to Useppa with me,” Betsy said.

“I can’t,” I said. “I just can’t. Sometimes I think I wish I could but I just can’t.”

“You really don’t love me, do you?” Betsy said.

“I really don’t know. There are moments I think I do.”

“When? When we’re making love?”

“Please stop this,” I said, “I haven’t lied to you.”

“Fuck you,” she said, “asshole.”

She went for a long walk with her father and told him she was in love with me.

“He reminded me,” Betsy said, “that you were married and had kids and that we were good Catholics and that this was wrong. Then he said that he liked you and that you’d looked lonely to him. Finally he said that he loved me very much and would be there to support me whatever happened between you and me.”

“What a great dad,” I said.

“Asshole,”
Betsy said to me, “don’t you realize how much fun you’d have in our family?”

I had to be in Cleveland to make a speech. Betsy wanted to come back with me but couldn’t—she didn’t have the money.

I flew there and late at night my phone rang. It was Betsy. She was two hours from the city on the turnpike—she had driven all the way from L.A. just to be with me.

I was happy Betsy called.

I got the barmaid with the nipple ring who didn’t like
Basic Instinct
out of my suite quickly.

Betsy said she was running out of money. I believed her. I had seen George Voinovich’s home in Cleveland and was convinced that if there was one honest politician left in America, he was it.

Betsy couldn’t afford her apartment anymore; the new one she’d picked out was in a high-crime gang area in Venice.

“You can’t live there,” I said. “You’ll get raped or killed or both.”

“I want to stay in L.A. for two years to see if I can make it writing scripts,” she said.

“What would it take for you to live on for two years?”

“Fifty thousand dollars.”

“I’ll lend you the money,” I said.

“I’ll pay you back,” she promised.

I gave a close producer friend a $50,000 loan and he gave Betsy a check for $50,000. That way Gerri Eszterhas wouldn’t suspect anything.

Sometimes Betsy and Bill Macdonald and I would go out to a club and drink and listen to live rock and roll. Bill and Betsy and I liked each other and the three of us almost always had fun together.

Bill told me he had told Naomi about my relationship with Betsy and said that Naomi was very curious about her.

“What did you tell Naomi?” I asked Bill.

“I told her Gerri is your anchor in life and you’ll never leave her,” Bill said.

I was supposed to fly to Paris to shoot a Chanel commercial I’d written that Roman Polanski would direct. Bill Macdonald asked if he could come with me. We’d hang out in Paris for a week while Naomi went up to Marin to hang out with Gerri. I was taking the Concorde from New York. Bill was taking a charter flight from Washington. We’d meet in Paris. That was the plan.

When I got to New York to catch the Concorde, I got a message that my father had suffered a stroke in Cleveland. I turned around and headed back to Cleveland. It was too late to inform Bill, who was already on his way.

I reached him in Paris. He turned right around and flew to Cleveland to be with me at a difficult time.

When he got to the hospital in Cleveland I thanked him and he said, “Hey, I love ya, man.”

And I said, “I love you, too, Billy.”

Betsy was with me, too. She came to be by my side.

The night I took Sharon Stone out to dinner … the night I wound up on the floor crawling around her dollhouse … the night Sharon went down her street wearing bra and panties and carrying a butcher knife … Betsy was in my suite at the Four Seasons waiting for me when I got back.

I told Betsy some of what had happened and Betsy kidded, “Damn. We could’ve had
some
threesome!”

“Go back to Cleveland,” I said. “You’ve been out here too long.”

“Three months.”

“That’s what I mean.”

Betsy thought that was funny.

Sometimes, when Betsy and I were in Cleveland together, I did feel there was a possibility I was falling in love with her.

She came alive in Cleveland, she
radiated
. Her eyes sparkled and she walked down the street with a strut, letting her boot heels clomp the concrete. She sipped white wine in L.A. but she gulped tequila shooters as we watched hard-rock blues bands in the Flats in Cleveland in bars decorated with old, battle-scarred Cleveland Browns helmets.

She was, of course, the governor’s daughter, the former mayor’s daughter, recognized by passersby who always greeted her with a smile.

At times, with her Slavic cheekbones and blue-collar style, she reminded me of young women I’d known on Lorain Avenue as a kid. She was as ethnic as I was, enjoying tripe with eggs at a factory café and stuffed cabbage at the Slovenian Home. We both had more fun in those places than at Spago or at the Ivy in L.A.

I was going out to dinner in L.A. with Betsy, but I’d never visited Bill and Naomi at their apartment in Marina Del Rey, so I stopped by on my way to dinner. Their place overlooked the beach and they had a fireplace going when I got there. Naomi had bought two bottles of Cristal and smoked salmon and Hungarian salami, all my favorites.

I couldn’t take my eyes off Naomi. She wore tight jeans and cowboy boots and a Western shirt and as she walked across the room to bring some more smoked salmon, I couldn’t stop myself from saying, “Hey, look at
you!”

She turned and gave me a special smile and I knew that she knew that I had been looking at her body.

Bill seemed oblivious to all of it, maybe because, he confessed, he’d had four or five screwdrivers.

We drank the Cristal and I told them I had to go. I said I had to have dinner with Stanley Jaffe and Sherry Lansing of Paramount, but I could tell from her expression that Naomi knew that was a lie—she knew I was going to see Betsy.

“You just got here,” she said.

“I’m sorry,” I said, “but I’ve gotta go.”

I gave Bill a hug and then Naomi and headed out the door. Naomi stopped me and handed me something in an envelope—two perfectly rolled joints.

“Two for the road,” Naomi said.

I knew how very carefully she had picked her words. She knew that
Two for the Road
was my wife’s favorite movie of all time. She knew that the movie was about the relationship between a philandering husband and his wife. And I knew that she knew that Gerri’s husband was going off into the night to do some philandering.