Hollywood Animal (67 page)

Naomi and I smoked a joint in the car on the way back … and Gerri offered to drive while the two of us giggled at nothing like loons.

There was a Beatles tape on in the car and we heard the song called “Don’t Let Me Down.”

“Play that—” I said, and Naomi hit the button again before I even finished the sentence.

We played that song over and over again until we got to Tiburon.

Gerri said, “I don’t know why you guys like that song so much.”

On another night in Tiburon, all three of us had smoked a joint and Naomi told us how, after Bill had met Sharon, Naomi had given Bill a nice new tie for Bill’s next meeting with her.

“Freud would say,” I began, “that you wanted Bill to look nice for Sharon, that you subconsciously wanted out of your relationship with Bill and wanted to palm him off on Sharon.”

“
Oh, Freud!
” Gerri suddenly said. “I’m so tired hearing about Freud from you! Fuck Freud! That’s what I say!
Fuck Freud!
”

Naomi and I, sky-high, started to laugh and couldn’t stop as Gerri went into a full rant:

“Joseph and his Freud! You have no idea how tired I am of hearing about him!
What would Freud say?
Who cares? Nobody cares!
Nobody cares
, Joseph! Fuck Freud!”

After a while Gerri started to laugh, too, and soon she was laughing harder than we were. Suzi came down from her room and saw us laughing like idiots.

“You guys are sure having fun!” Suzi said, and she started to laugh, too.

Gerri and I and Steve and Suzi and two of their friends had a spring vacation trip planned to Maui in a week and Gerri asked me if we could invite Naomi along.

We were both enjoying her presence. She was lightening the gravity of our marital problems, the kids liked her very much, so I agreed.

Naomi didn’t want to come.

I knew what she meant. We were having
too much fun
together, even though it was always in Gerri’s company.

We had too much to talk about, we had too many things in common … Ohio and reading and music and ethnic backgrounds … and even Evans.

For all those reasons, Naomi didn’t want to come … but I convinced her.

Gerri, meanwhile, was confiding in Naomi like she’d never confided in any other friend. She told her how unhappy she had been in our marriage for a long time. She told her how she should have stayed in Lorain, the small Ohio town where she grew up. And she talked over and over again about Sharon Stone being a demon.

Naomi told her Sharon Stone was not a demon … just a woman who happened to have fallen in love with Naomi’s husband. And she told Gerri that
I
was
her
husband and that Gerri should stop railing at me about infidelities real or imagined.

I felt Gerri was feeling much better (and so, I thought, was Naomi) and I went back down to L.A. to have what turned out to be my final meetings over
Sliver
.

Evans, looking reborn, racing around in a White House cap given to him by Marlin Fitzwater, was trumpeting his own cut.

Noyce, unshaven and haggard, looked like he’d eaten some poisonous mushrooms.

Stanley Jaffe, the head of the studio, perhaps sensing that his days at Paramount were numbered, looked like he needed an IV of Maalox.

Tom Berenger, awaiting the reshoot, was taking swigs off a bottle of vodka in his trailer.

And Sharon and Bill were off somewhere in Tabloid Nirvana, paparazzi in hot pursuit.

I told Evans and Noyce and the studio that I was going to Maui. Lots of luck on the reshoot, guys, but I was gone.

Phillip Noyce, a hangdog and forlorn sadness in his eyes, said, “You, too, mate. You have abandoned me, too.”

Bill Macdonald appeared in Guy McElwaine’s office.

“Evans,” Bill said, “will have Sharon killed if she doesn’t support Evans’s cut of the movie over Noyce’s.”

Bill told Guy that he knew for a fact that Evans had already had three people murdered.

Guy knew it was bullshit. Everyone who knew Evans knew that Evans was the devil, but everyone also knew that he was incapable of ordering the murder of anyone. Evans was the devil with a heart: Lucifer Sweet.

“If what you’re saying is true,” Guy said to Bill, “put your allegations into writing. Then I can present it to the FBI and the powers at Paramount.”

Bill, of course, never put it into writing.

But Sharon walked into studio head Stanley Jaffe’s office and told him what Bill had told Guy … and added that she was afraid for her life.

Stanley Jaffe knew, too, that Evans wasn’t a murderer … knew better than anyone probably because Bob was the godfather of one of his children.

But Stanley called Bob in to tell him what Sharon had said Bill had told her about him.

Evans collapsed and was rushed to Cedars Sinai. It seemed at first to be a massive coronary, but it wasn’t … only Bob’s blood pressure, sky-high, out of control.

Naomi, meanwhile, started talking to the press. She talked about how she had lost her baby. She talked about how Sharon had gone to a psychic to learn that she and Bill were lovers in a past life … about how Sharon had given Bill the ultimatum about not sleeping with him until they had broken up … about Bill asking her to “get their stories straight” for the press so Sharon wouldn’t be embarrassed.

The tabloids went bonkers, her story blew up around the world, and Sharon Stone was an international home wrecker.

The headlines said, “SHARON STONE STOLE MY HUBBY … HEART OF STONE … STONE-COLD … JILTED BRIDE CASTS A STONE … ANGUISH OF BRIDE JILTED FOR SEX SIREN.” The
Boston Herald
headlined, “NEWLYWED SAYS SHE MISCARRIED AFTER STONE STOLE HUBBY” and
USA Today
said, “FIANCE’S EX ON THE HEART OF STONE.” The
London Sun
used an old nude photo of Sharon on her hands and knees on the front page and bannered: “SHARON STONE COST ME MY BABY!”

· · ·

I was in my last
Sliver
meeting at Paramount with a roomful of executives and they were talking about the new ending to the movie.

Someone suggested that the villain go down in a bloody hail of bullets and then someone mentioned Naomi and the potential damage of Sharon being known worldwide as a “home wrecker.”

“That’s it,” Stanley Jaffe said sardonically. “We’ve got our new ending. Sharon’s career is over anyway. We shoot the bitch.”

Word of the film’s problems had leaked to the press, as evidenced by a Richard Johnson column from the
New York Daily News
. Talking about her interview with Barbara Walters, Johnson wrote: “Stone talks about her affair with Macdonald in the interview she taped for the Oscar night special. Why would she go public? Word in Hollywood is that
Sliver
isn’t doing too well with test audiences and that the decision was made to help it out with
even this
kind of publicity.”

When I got back to Tiburon, only a few days away from leaving for Maui, I saw that my hope that Gerri’s condition was improving was false.

I was sitting in my downstairs den, reading. Gerri had gone out for a walk. She came bursting through the door, sweated and hysterical, and threw the car keys at me.

She was yelling … she was sorry she’d ever met me … I’d ruined her life … she had nothing in her life, I had all the friends and all the glory. She hated … California … Hollywood … herself … me.

She started knocking things off desks and counters, taking books off shelves and throwing them at me. She was crying, in a blind and furious rage. I tried to calm her down. I talked about Steve and Suzi, our two beautiful kids (who, luckily, were out of the house), about the good times we had shared in our twenty-four years of marriage.

I was crying now, too, trying to calm her, but nothing worked. She was laying waste to the den, which contained the mementos of thirty years of writing.

As she was going through the bookshelves, ripping and tearing at the books I had collected and loved so much, I ran upstairs to find Naomi, who was somewhere in the house.

I asked her if she could try to help Gerri and ran to the phone to call a doctor friend. He was at the house ten minutes later and found Gerri sobbing and hysterical, holding on to Naomi.

He forced Gerri to take two Valiums and she drifted off to sleep in the den.

I went up to the kitchen, poured myself a stiff drink, and sat at our hammered wooden monk’s table, not able to stop my tears.

Naomi came up after a while, poured herself a drink, too, and I noticed she was also crying.

We sat there for a long time sipping our drinks, not saying anything. She asked me if I was hungry and she made fried bologna sandwiches with pickles and mayonnaise, the kind I used to eat when I was a kid growing up in Cleveland.

We ate our sandwiches in silence and I suddenly turned and looked at her and said, “Do you want to come to Mars with me and play?”

She smiled at me and I put my hand on hers. She took my hand and held it. It was the first time that I’d touched her.

We didn’t look at each other; we stared out the big picture window at the bay.

We sipped another drink, holding hands in the kitchen, saying nothing to each other.

She got up and went upstairs and I sat at the kitchen table, staring out the window.

I knew my marriage was over. It had been over for a long time and Gerri and I had swept its death under the rug for the sake of Steve and Suzi. We had dodged the truth for too many years, but Steve and Suzi were grown now, leading their own lives, mostly gone from the house. Gerri and I were left there, alone, with the death of our relationship between us.

Gerri came up from the den as I sat at the kitchen table. She was still crying, but they were tears of heart-wrenching sadness, no longer tears of rage.

“I’m so sorry,” she kept saying, “I’m so sorry, Joseph. It’s my fault. I know it’s my fault. I’m so sorry.”

“It’s not,” I said as I held her. “It’s not, Gerri. It’s my fault, forgive me.”

That night, as we were falling asleep, Gerri said to me, “Naomi’s the perfect woman for you. She’s the one you should have married.”

I said, “Please stop this,” then I put my arm around her, pulled Gerri close to me, and kissed her forehead.

She turned away from me.

I turned the other way and fell asleep listening to my wife crying.