Hollywood Animal (66 page)

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He handed me some papers.

I asked, “What’s this?”

“They’re dissolution of marriage papers that my attorneys drafted.”

He asked me to take my time over the weekend and read them.

“I won’t cheat you, Nomer,” he said.

Then he said, “We have to get our story straight to the press.”

“What do you mean?”

“We have to decide what story we want to tell publicly.”

“Why don’t we just tell the truth?” I said. “So many people already know the truth.”

“Yes, but people only believe what they read.”

I said, “What story would you like me to tell?”

“Why don’t we say that you decided you didn’t like the movie business, that I was never home and you were unhappy and you left me.”

“
I
left
you?
” I said.

He said, “It’s just that Sharon is afraid that this will hurt her career. And I don’t want to end up looking like Mr. Stone.”

I said, “I’m not going to lie to protect Sharon Stone.”

He asked me to please think about changing my story—to protect
myself
. He told me I should sign the dissolution papers—to protect
myself
.

“Protect
myself?”
I said, “I haven’t done anything.”

He said, “Can you imagine if it gets out that I’m living with Sharon and you don’t even have a formal separation? It’ll be embarrassing.”

“I’m willing to endure the humiliation,” I said. “I have so far.”

He shrugged and said, “Chances are the press won’t call
you
anyway.”

He said he’d call me on Sunday to see what I’d decided. As he walked to the door, he paused and asked, “What are you doing tonight? Do you have plans?”

I said yes.

“Where are you going?”

I said I was going to an art show.

He asked if I was going with this person … or this person … or that person.

I said, “What does it matter, Bill?”

He put his head down and said, “Okay.”

Then he walked to the elevator and turned and said, “Who are you going with?
Tell mie
.”

I didn’t want to tell him I was going alone.

“I guess I can’t ask you that anymore, can I?” he said.

“No.”

He looked lost. He lingered still as he held the elevator door open and then as I closed my door, he quickly ducked into the elevator.

A few days later, I was home alone, fixing myself a sandwich. I couldn’t remember the last time that I’d eaten.

Just as I finished making it, the phone rang. It was a woman from the Paramount Pictures publicity department.

She said, “We’ve just learned that Sharon is going to announce her engagement to Bill on the Barbara Walters special after the Academy Awards.

“Since we’re handling Sharon’s publicity, we thought we might be able to handle any media calls for you.”

I hung up and gave Jake the sandwich.

Bill was on the Barbara Walters special. He was introduced as Sharon Stone’s new fiancé.

He didn’t even know who she was the first time I mentioned her. After we saw
Total Recall
I said to him, “That woman is going to be a big star.” He said, “Who?” I said, “Sharon Stone.” He said, “Which one was she?”

Then she did a black-and-white nude pictorial in
Playboy
, which Bill never reads and I subscribe to. I showed him the pictures. “Remember her? From
Total Recall
?” He barely glanced at them. “Yeah, I guess,” he said.

Then she was the lead in
Basic Instinct
. Bill wasn’t interested in seeing it, so I went without him. Afterward I told him, “You should see it.” He said he would see it when it came out on video.

Next came her
Playboy
interview. I was reading it in bed and kept reading parts of it aloud to Bill. I saved the
interview
for him. I put it on his nightstand, but he never picked it up.

After she was cast as the lead in
Sliver
, I said, “Hey—maybe you’ll get to meet Sharon Stone …”

One day he came home and said, “I finally met Sharon.”

I said, “What’s she like?”

He said, “I think she liked my tie.”

I went out and bought him some new Hermès ties.

And now she’s his fiancée and I’m his wife.

CHAPTER 21

Tabloids and Flailing Scissors

FRANK

You’re fucking my wife?

JEREMY

Of course I am.

FRANK

I’m gonna kill you!

JEREMY

Frank, Frank—this kinda stuff happens, okay?

Male Pattern Baldness
, unproduced

WHEN I WENT
back to Marin from L.A. and told Gerri that Bill was divorcing Naomi, she got hysterically upset. She called Sharon a witch and a demon and said Sharon had wrapped both Bill and me around her little finger.

I knew how close Gerri felt to Naomi, but I knew, as she carried on, that it was more than just that.

My relationship with Gerri had been strained for some time. We had grown apart as Steve and Suzi had grown up. As I watched my wife of twenty-four years now, she was raging, it seemed to me, not just about Bill’s betrayal of Naomi but of her own husband’s intimate betrayals that played themselves out in one-night stands and painful morning-afters (never discussed, never mentioned).

When Gerri flailed at me with a pair of scissors, just missing my face, I saw the shape she was in. Gerri was a strong woman, not prone to hysterics. I suggested professional help and she snapped at me that she didn’t need it. She’d frightened me with the scissors. I didn’t know what to do to try to calm her
down
. I finally booked a suite for the two of us, without the kids, at the Kahala Hilton on Oahu, where we’d spent so many happy times as a family.

Our second day there, over breakfast, Gerri suddenly said, “You’re screwing around on me, aren’t you, Joseph?”

I looked at her. Her eyes were red. She looked like she’d been crying all night. It was the one question she’d never asked me in twenty-four years.

“Please don’t ask me that,” I said. “I’m not going to lie to you. The answer to that question doesn’t have anything to do with my affection for you or with our marriage.”

She told me that she knew. She told me that she’d had a vision “beamed to her from L.A.” by Sharon Stone.

She saw me making love in this vision to a woman with short blond hair. Then, Gerri said, the woman turned so she could see her face. It was Sharon.

“My God, Gerri,” I said. “Sharon and I are friends.”

“You’re lying to me, Joseph,” she said. “She’s a demon. You took her body and she took your soul.”

We went back to Marin County and Gerri kept it up about demons and witches and Sharon. She bought a collection of books about witchcraft and spent long hours underlining them.

I remembered my mother ranting at my father and me when I was a boy, calling us “
Ördögök!”
—Devils!

As I watched Gerri alternate between tears and rage … we somehow kept it from Steve and Suzi, now eighteen and sixteen, busy with their teenage social lives … I realized that my personal life had turned into a nightmare.

On any intimate level, my marriage had been dead for a very long time. Whatever brief solace I had found with women in bars and clubs was illusory and meaningless.

Wanting to escape and think, I flew down to L.A., where there were problems with
Sliver
, which was still in the editing room.

Phillip Noyce’s cut of my script, a word-for-word shoot, had been tested by the market research people and found to be lacking.

The studio had decreed a rewrite and reshoots. Noyce, who believed in the script, was aghast at the studio’s “suggestions.”

But he agreed to make the studio’s changes. Evans viewed the market research failure of the movie as his personal triumph. He was working around-the-clock on his
own
cut as well as his
own
musical score (
Love Story
–like).

Evans was going to be the hero now. Evans was going to “
save
”
Sliver
.

· · ·

Stanley Jaffe was the head of the studio at Paramount and his son, Bobby, a nice young man, was a vice president of production.

Bobby was going to London on business and he wanted to get laid there so Stanley Jaffe asked Evans to set it up for him.

Evans called me, nearly crying. “This is what my life has come to,” he said, “getting the boss’s son laid.”

What was he going to do? I asked.

No problem, said Evans. He had called his friend Heidi Fleiss, the famous madam, and Bobby Jaffe was all set.

“In like Flynn,” Evans said.

The studio was aswirl with stories of Sharon and Bill. They were tabloid fodder now. Bill had moved in with Sharon and was accompanying her everywhere. He looked trapped in the headlights to me—in Paris, in Rome, in Vegas.

A friend had sat next to them at an exhibitors convention in Vegas. “Bill came in a little late. Sharon looked at him and said, ‘
Change that tie
.’ He didn’t say a word, just went upstairs and reappeared with a new tie.”

At the same time, Sharon was telling the
Star:
“He is square, square, square. I love it. He’s really macho with a deep voice. It gives me such a thrill that he’s so square after all these really hip guys with their waist-length hair and their mellow artistic temperaments. Give me my macho, old-fashioned square boyfriend who says ‘Come here’ and I do—because it’ll be good when I get there. Last weekend my boyfriend just said, ‘You’re done working weekends. You’re not doing more than two pictures a year.’ The point is, he can take charge. There’s a bit of tension there, and I like that. At this point in my life, no one is going to take control of me. The point is finding somebody over whom I don’t have
complete
control.”

I went back to Marin. Gerri called Naomi in L.A. and asked her to come up and “hide out” at our house if she wanted to.

Naomi was being besieged by paparazzi. One of them had even tried to pay her dog sitter off for a photograph.

Gerri handed me the phone and I urged Naomi to come up to see us. She sounded devastated. I knew, though, that she had a great sense of humor and I thought I detected it when she mock-berated me.

“I blame you for all of this,” Naomi said. “She never would’ve been in
Sliver
had you not written
Basic
. This is all your fault.”

I knew that Gerri and Naomi had become good friends and hoped that her presence would brighten Gerri a bit. And then there was the bottom line: life in our house these days, with problems out in the open now between Gerri and me, was bleak.

I liked being around Naomi. She made me smile.

As Naomi and Gerri spent their days together, I tried to work on the rewrite the studio was insisting upon.

Evans sent me a case of scented candles for inspiration.

I kept thinking about how Ira Levin, a writer I admired, would feel when he saw the movie … he had called to praise and thank me when he’d read my first draft, now about to be obliterated.

Naomi and I, always in Gerri’s company, were seeing a lot of each other.

Gerri, I thought, was lightening up a little. She even started laughing at herself one day when she was reading aloud from a witchcraft book and drawing analogies to Sharon.

I told Naomi I gave the relationship between Sharon and Bill six months.

One day while Naomi was staying in Tiburon with us, Gerri and I drove her out to a fisherman’s restaurant called the Tides on the coast in Bodega Bay.