Hollywood Animal (64 page)

CHAPTER 19

It’s a Wrap!

COLT

We’re going to be zombies when we get to New York.

ANNE

Then you can do your zombie act. New York expects it of you.

COLT

All right, fuck me! Zombies we will be!

Hearts of Fire

SHARON STONE AND
Bill Macdonald were sitting across from each other at the little restaurant around the corner from Paramount and I saw how their eyes sparkled and how they laughed.

This was the first moment they’d spent any real time together—they’d seen each other on the set and said a few words … but even this lunch had happened almost accidentally.

Bill had come to the set with me and Sharon said, “Do you want to eat?” I said “Sure” and she’d glanced at Bill and said, “He can come.”

After lunch, back in his office, he said, “God is she incredible! She is
awesome!”

I said, “Do you want to pop her? She can probably be had.”

He looked at me aghast. I knew Bill tended to prudery, still very much the good Catholic boy trained by the Jesuits at Bellarmine. He would run from the room when a tampon commercial came on TV and he had lectured me often about my extramarital flings and one-night stands.

“Gerri is your
anchor
,” he would say.

We’d been out together at night, both of us married now—he had recently, finally, married Naomi after ten years—and I’d never seen him make the slightest move toward another woman. He blanched when he saw me flirt with a girl
in
a bar or a club … and he was horrified and nearly evangelistic the morning after he’d pretended to sleep on the couch while that young woman and I were making love on the living room floor beneath him.

I told him in his office that Sharon didn’t have much going on in her romantic life. She had an alleged “boyfriend,” Charlie Peters, producer Jon Peters’s wealthy young son, but Charlie didn’t look like any serious obstacle to me.

Sharon had told me of the time she’d seen a red dress in a store window while driving by on Melrose, called Charlie on her cell phone, said, “I just drove by this red dress I’ve got to have,” and young Charlie had driven right down and bought it for her.

Jon Peters, meanwhile, even as his son was seeing Sharon, was telling me about a wild weekend he’d spent with Sharon in a New York hotel many years ago … a sexual extravaganza which Sharon said was “a great big ugly lie” designed to one-up his own son.

“So,” I said to Bill, “she’s popable.”

“Will you please stop it?” he said.

He came to see me the next day to say that he had just visited her on the set. He was glowing … flying.

“I haven’t felt like this about a girl since I was thirteen years old,” he said. “I think I’m in love with her.”

I laughed. “How can you be in love with her? You don’t know anything about her. You haven’t spent any time with her.”

“I don’t know, but that’s what I feel.”

I saw Sharon on the set and she said, “Tell me everything about him.”

“Who?”

“You
know
who.”

“Well,” I said, grinning, “what do you want to know?”

She seemed to be as cranked up as Bill was when I had seen him.

“How long have you known him?”

I told her and she said, “Tell me what you think of him. Don’t fuck around.”

“You know what I think of him,” I said. “You’ve seen us together. He’s my friend.”

“Are you going to start this Renegade company with him?”

“We’re talking about it. I love the logo. We’ve got a dark screen—”

“I love it, too. The bullet shatters the screen. He told me all about it.”

She smiled to herself. She was thinking.

When Sharon thinks, it is a
dramatic
think. You can see the wheels
clanking
on-screen.

“Sharon,” I said, “he’s married. He just got married a few months ago.”

“So are you,” she said, a knowing smile on her face.

“He’s different. He takes his Catholic upbringing seriously.”

She thought about that and she said, “Well, he’s not married to
me
, is he?”

I said, “No he’s not,
Catherine
.”

“What’s she like? What’s her name?”

“Naomi. She’s smart as a whip and she’s beautiful.”

“How beautiful?”

“With a wife like that,” I said, “I wouldn’t give you a second look.”

“You’re horrible.” She smiled. “Why did
you
have to create me? Why couldn’t someone nicer create me?”

Guy called me that night and said, “What’s going on between Macdonald and Madam Stone?”

“I’m not sure what the hell’s going on. What do you hear?”

“True love,” Guy said.

“He doesn’t even know her. He hasn’t even spent any time with her. You know how Bill is. I’m sure as hell he hasn’t slept with her.”

“They were lovers in a past life,” Guy said.

I said, “You’ve
got
to be shitting me!”

“That’s what Madam Stone says.”

I suddenly got the giggles. I knew where that “lovers in a past life” stuff was coming from. Sharon had just read my script
Original Sin
, which was about two people who’d been lovers in a past life.

Sharon was talking about starring in it for her next movie.

She was, I thought, prematurely getting into the part.

Evans called next—as always, direct.

“Is Bill fucking Stone?”

“Not a chance,” I said. “You know Bill.”

“There are rumors all over the set. They’re goony over each other.”

“That part of it’s possible.”

“Did you introduce them?”

“Yes.”

“That was brilliant, my boy. Do you think he can talk to her for me about this dog collar stuff?”

“Ask
him
, Bob. He works for
you
.”

“If she’s goony over him, maybe she’ll listen.”

Then Evans added, “Why would she be goony over the fuckin’
putz
. I don’t get it.”

Bill and I went shopping for Valentine’s Day at Maxfield’s on Melrose.

I bought Sharon a silver Chrome Hearts hash pipe.

Bill bought Sharon a silver signet ring.

I bought Bill a silver Chrome Hearts watch which I was going to surprise him with later.

Bill said that was all he was going to buy.

I said, “You’ve gotta buy Naomi something.”

He said he didn’t have any more money.

I paid for Naomi’s gift from Bill. I even selected it: a silver broken heart on a leather cord.

I bought Gerri Eszterhas nothing.

The next day was the
Sliver
wrap party, to be held at the Roxbury, a Sunset Strip club. Bill met me at my hotel late in the afternoon. He was almost
eating
cigarettes and knocked down a triple vodka as soon as he came in.

“I’m in love with her,” Bill said. He was upset, pacing the floor.

“Jesus Christ, man,” I said, “you just married Naomi.”

“I know it. She’s coming to the wrap party.”

“Of course she’s coming to the wrap party. She’s the star of the movie.”

“No,” he said, “Nomer.”

“You’re bringing Naomi to the wrap party? With Sharon there? With everybody on the set talking about you and Sharon? Are you out of your mind? Do you want to humiliate your wife?”

“I couldn’t do anything about it. I tried to dissuade Nomer from coming, but she really wanted to come.”

“Well, call her and tell her she can’t come. Make up something.”

“It’s too late,” he said, looking at his watch. “She’s on her way from the Marina. She’s meeting us here.”

I said. “You can’t let Naomi come to this party. Do you want to blow your own marriage?”

“Jesus, I know it,” he said. “You’re right. What the hell can I do?”

He slugged another vodka and sat down on the couch, his head in his hands.

So I thought up a cockeyed story about the threat of a lawsuit from MGM as a result of rumors about the formation of Renegade.

“Go downstairs,” I said. “Wait for Naomi. Meet her when she comes in. Tell her this suit thing just came up and it’s an emergency. Tell her we probably won’t make it to the party either because we have to have a meeting at Guy’s house.”

“You’re pretty good at this,” he said as he left to go downstairs.

“I’ve had a lot of practice lying to my wife.”

I watched them from the window of my suite as Bill gave Naomi the silver broken heart which I had selected and paid for.

I watched as Bill kissed her goodbye and as she drove away in her vintage Mercedes.

“God she looked beautiful,” Bill said after he came back up. “I can’t believe how beautiful she looked.”

I agreed with him.

When I saw Sharon and Bill at the wrap party, I was happy I’d stopped him from bringing Naomi. They were all over each other, laughing, flirting, wrapped up in a little world of their own far away from everyone else.

“Lovebirds,” Evans said, watching them. “Goony birds. She goes for
him
and she thinks
I’m
de Sade.”

He was shaking his head in wonderment, finally permitted to be in Sharon’s eyesight now that the shoot was over.

At that wrap party, Robert Evans went up to the woman who’d banned him from his own set and presented Sharon with a gleaming silver cross.

As he handed it to her, he denied once again keeping her model friend on a dog collar at his house and said he would pay Sharon $300,000 if she could prove that he had done it.

Sharon took the cross, but never answered Evans, turning all of her attentions on Bill.

As she walked away with Bill, Evans watched her sadly and said, “The cunt won’t even talk to me!”

“Thank you,” Sharon said to me while Bill was getting her a Perrier.

“For what?”

“For introducing us. You
knew
this would happen, didn’t you?”

“How can anyone have known this was going to happen?”

“You
knew
.” She looked radiant.

At that moment Bill came back with her Perrier and Sharon said, looking at him, “You created
us
.”

Bill called me the next morning and said we had to talk. I was going back to Marin that afternoon. We met at the Four Seasons bar. He looked like he hadn’t slept. His hands trembled as he lifted the vodka to his lips.

“I’m leaving Nomer,” he told me.

I shook my head. “This is crazy.”

“I’m getting a divorce.”

“You’ve lost your mind,” I said.

He smiled a little. “I know it,” he said.

“You think you’re in love with Sharon?” I said. “Fine. Have an affair with
her,
give it some time, see where it leads. But you don’t have to leave your wife and get a divorce to do that.”

“I can’t just have an affair with her,” he said.

“What do you mean you can’t have an affair with her? That’s the way it’s done. People don’t have lunch with somebody and then
five days later
say they’re getting a divorce!”

“She won’t sleep with me until I leave Nomer.”

“What is that? One of the Ten Commandments?”

“She says it’s her rule.”

“Bill,” I said, “she is an
actress
. She
acts
. That’s what she does. She loves drama. She loves
scenes
.”

“She’s in love with me,” he said. “I can’t believe this. Sharon Stone is in love with me.
Me
. Bill Macdonald.”

“She’s in love with you but she won’t sleep with you unless you dump your wife. What’s Naomi? Some kind of sacrificial offering that has to be dropped at Sharon’s feet before Sharon opens her legs?”

“Come on.”
He was hurt. “Don’t talk about her like that. You know how much Sharon likes you.”

We sat without saying anything for a long moment.

“She’s going to get me off cigarettes and booze,” Bill said. “She’s got an organic and healing approach to life. We were lovers in a past life, you know.”

I couldn’t help laughing. “I told you, she’s an
actress
. She’s reading you bad lines out of some New Age paperback one of her girlfriends bought her.”

“I know you don’t believe in past life stuff,” Bill said, “but I do.”

I shook my head and ordered another Bloody Mary.

“She’d be perfect for Renegade,” Bill suddenly threw in.

“Bill,” I said, “if I would have wanted to go into a business partnership with Sharon, don’t you think I would’ve asked her?”

“Think about the headlines,” he said. “Stone, Eszterhas, and Macdonald—in one production company. I’ve talked to her about it. She wants in.”

“Well I don’t want her in.”

“She’d be terrific,” Bill said. “You should hear her ideas about
Atlas Shrugged
.”

I looked at Bill.
This
was the guy I was going to go into a business partnership with?