Hollywood Animal (81 page)

I knew Joe had written a book about Kent State, and certainly knew his sympathies did not lie with the guardsmen. So I held my breath. Finally, Bep paused. I was sitting in between the two.

Joe leaned over me and said, “Let me tell you something. You don’t know what the fuck you’re talking about.”

The table froze. Everyone was uneasy except Bernie; he seemed to be loving it.

Finally Bep looked at Joe and said, “You know, you’re probably right.” It was hilarious.

The next day we visited St. Emeric’s in Cleveland, where Joe went to elementary school. We even went to the basement where there was a little classroom. On the small chalkboard were children’s names in Hungarian. Joe looked at it like he was a million miles away.

We went up to the church and tiptoed in. It felt so strange. A few months before, I hardly knew this man. Now I was visiting the deepest parts of his past; the most difficult parts of his life. I felt so grateful.

A church is such a familiar place for me. I spent the first thirteen years of my life going to church every morning six days a week. So, once again, I felt I had gone back home.

Joe suddenly leaned over and whispered in my ear, “I will love you forever. I promise you that.” He said it with such earnestness and gravity, it was like a boy who makes a small cut on his finger, and then cuts yours, rubs your blood together with his and makes a vow for life.

I walked her from St. Emeric’s over to the West Side Market, where I had spent so much time when I was a boy.

As we were walking through, an old Italian vendor spotted me. He had a huge grin on his face.

He yelled, “Here ya go, Joee!”

And he tossed me an apple … just like he had when I was a boy.

We went back to L.A. so I could do a week’s publicity for
Sliver
. The interviewers, I quickly discovered, weren’t interested in
Sliver …
or me … as much as they were interested in the story of Sharon and Bill and Joe and Naomi and Gerri.

The
New York Times:
“His girlfriend, Naomi Macdonald, is sitting next to Mr. Eszterhas, wearing a lace bustier, cutoff jeans, and matching brown leather boots. He has given her a few pounds’ worth of silver necklaces and bracelets based on Apache designs that match his own. …

“As Guy McElwaine, his agent at International Creative Management, points out, Mr. Eszterhas’s life has become as lurid a psychosexual drama as his scripts, with Ms. Stone taking a role in real life that could prompt some people to confuse her with Catherine Tramell, the man-eating, manipulative, hypnotic vixen of
Basic Instinct. …

“Although it has been said that Mrs. Macdonald resembles Ms. Stone, the
only
resemblance is in coloring. Mrs. Macdonald has blond hair and blue eyes, but she is more the sweet Midwestern farm girl than Hollywood glamour boat.”

People
magazine: “Appearing on Fox’s
A Current Affair
April 6, Naomi Macdonald claimed that Stone has brought a calculated end to what had been a blissful marriage, causing Naomi so much stress she’d suffered a miscarriage.

“Naomi, however, was in no position to throw Stones. Just weeks after her teary TV appearance, she went from woman scorned to woman smitten. Her suitor: none other than Joe Eszterhas.

“Left out in the cold is Gerri, who, along with being Eszterhas’s wife, used to be Naomi’s best friend. ‘Even by Hollywood standards,’ says one Paramount executive, ‘the whole thing’s weird.’”

Guy suggested we sit down with Army Archerd, Hollywood’s unofficial gossip historian.

We had a delightful lunch with Army at the Four Seasons in Beverly Hills and I told him that “Guy McElwaine kids me about setting this whole thing up, of introducing Bill and Sharon purposely so I could have Naomi for myself.”

When Army’s story came out, at the very top of his well-read column, it said, “Joe admits that he introduced Bill and Sharon so he could have Naomi for himself.”

Everyone in town was suddenly talking about Army’s story … about how the guy who wrote
Jagged Edge
and
Basic Instinct
was so manipulative and devious that he even manipulated his friend (Bill) to get his friend’s wife (Naomi).

It reminded me of the time Army said that I had quit the Rolling Stones rock band to write the script called
F.I.S.T
.

There was a party at Evans’s house for the cast and crew of
Sliver
.

Naomi and I decided to go.

We got a standing ovation from everyone when we walked in.

One of Bob’s bimbos—the one who’d come over to my hotel with a note from Bob wearing nothing but a fur coat—said to me, with Naomi right beside me, “So why her and not me?”

Jon Peters, the fabled producer, and Mark Canton, the chairman of Sony, wanted to talk about
Gangland
, the script I had contracted to do for them … over dinner at the Grille in Beverly Hills.

I asked if I could bring Naomi but they said this was business only and I left Naomi in our suite at the Four Seasons.

We had a pleasant dinner during which it became obvious to me that Jon was the man in charge. Mark even referred to him several times as his “rabbi.” Jon had a street-smart gravitas about him (in relative Hollywood terms), while Mark kept bobbing around him like Jon’s own little jack-in-the-box.

I remembered the first time I had met Mark at Warner Brothers nearly twenty years ago, and Mark had shown up with a pair of bright red boxing gloves because he had heard I was a tough guy.

Nothing much had changed, I saw, in twenty years. I could imagine him with the shiny red boxing gloves at this dinner, too.

As dinner was winding down, two young women who just happened to have the booth right next to us came over to the table.

Jon and Mark knew them and introduced them to me. They were above-average Hollywood model-actresses carved by surgeons, puffed by chemicals.

Mark excused himself and said he had to go home. Jon asked the two young women to join us.

They sat down—one next to me, one next to Jon—and I said I had to go, too.

Jon said, “No you don’t. Let’s all go to my house and smoke some great dope and get to know each other better.”

I looked at the two young women and I realized there was nothing better I would have liked—before I met Naomi.

“Jon,” I said, “I’m just in the process of putting my ex-wife and kids through a terrible time and the woman who I’m doing that for is at the Four Seasons waiting for me.”

I grinned and said, “I’ve gotta go, man,” and got up.

“Hey,” Jon said, “what she doesn’t know won’t hurt her.”

I said, “It’ll hurt me.”

One of the young women put her hand on my arm and said, “That’s so sweet!”

Jon said, “Putz.”

But he was smiling as I left.

I knew he had good reason to think that kind of evening might appeal to me.

The first time I met Jon, about eight months before I met Naomi, I was supposed to see him for lunch at his house at 11:30.

I got there at 12:45.

He was pissed.

“Where the fuck were you?” he said.

I said, “I got delayed.”

“You couldn’t call me?”

“I don’t have a cell phone.”

“Time to get one,” he said.

He said, “I make a deal with you for over three million dollars and you can’t show up on time for our first meeting? What kind of shit is that?”

I decided the one chance I had here was to tell this pissed-off Hollywood animal the truth.

I had been with a young woman in my suite at the Four Seasons who’d been with me the night before … and we got up late and had a champagne room service breakfast … and one thing led to another … and I knew that if I went nosing and prowling around inside her … I’d be late for Jon … and I chose her over Jon.

“I’m really sorry I was late,” I said as I concluded my story.

He glared at me—his eyes like flat rocks—and he said, “You’ve got a lot of balls to tell me that story.”

I said, “From everything I hear about you—in that same situation—you would’ve made the same decision. You would’ve been late for lunch, too.”

“Only when I was younger,” Jon Peters said. “When I cared about pussy more than money.”

He smiled a killer smile. “I’m older and wiser now.”

Then he said, “Come on, I’ll show you around,” put his arm around me, and led me outside to show me his magnificent estate.

With tabloids all over the world writing about what they called “the Bob and Carol and Ted and Alice aspect” of our relationship, Guy convinced me that I needed a Hollywood PR man to “handle the situation.”

I had just left my wife of twenty-four years for a much younger woman and my new press representative (or “rep”) was nervous that my movie
Sliver
was being released “in this climate.”

“I’m worried,” my rep said. “You’re too high-profile. The media’s going to come down on you. ‘Husband and Father Leaves Wife and Kids for Hot Blonde.’ That’s going to be their take. I need an angle.”

“What kind of an angle?”

“Something you can talk about in the interviews before
Sliver
opens. Something that will neutralize the flak.”

I knew his credentials were good. He represented big-name movie stars.

“Like what?” I said.

“Were you abused as a kid?”

I said, “What do you mean?”

“Anything from sex to being hit.”

“My mom used to slap me a lot. My dad separated his shoulder hitting me once.”

“He
separated his shoulder
hitting you? That’s awful! I’m sorry.”

I said, “Forget it. It hardly hurt. He was in really bad physical shape. Way overweight. It sounds worse than it was.”

“What about your mother’s slaps?” he said. “What kind of slaps were they—did they hurt?”

“Sure.”

“Did they traumatize you?”

“Sure. She wanted to traumatize me. It got my attention.”

“Do you want to talk about it publicly?”

“She did it for my own good. She was right. I deserved it.”

“Come on”—he smiled—“get with the program here. We’ve got to find something.”

“I loved my parents,” I said. “My mom’s life was hard. She was a schizophrenic.”

“Voices?” he said. “Split personality? All that?”

“Yes.”

“It couldn’t have been easy.”

“It wasn’t.”

“So you want to talk about it publicly?”

I said, “No thank you.”

He laughed.

“Okay,” he said, “how did you grow up?”

“Poor. Dirt poor. I got into trouble a lot.”

“What kind of trouble?”

“Rolling drunks. Breaking and entering. Stealing cars. I almost killed a kid with a baseball bat.”

“Jesus,” he said, “you’re kidding.”

I said, “It wasn’t as tough as the refugee camps.”

“What refugee camps?”

I told him about the camps in Austria, about eating pine needle soup, about getting rickets, about watching the old lady who lay down on the railroad tracks in front of the train.

“You saw that?”

“I did.”

“You ate that stuff—what was it? Tree leaf soup?”

“Pine needle soup. I ate it, yes.”

“Fantastic,” he said.
“Fantastic!”

He booked me on TV shows and on radio. He even booked me into chat rooms on the Internet.

All before
Sliver
came out.

I talked about the pine needle soup, about the rickets, about the old lady on the railroad tracks.

It worked.

An old lady committing suicide on the railroad tracks is a much better story than just another wife dumped after twenty-four years of marriage.

Sharon was going to the
Sliver
premiere with Bill and I was going with Naomi. Paramount was nervous. Sharon, the diva, insisted that she and Bill arrive last so that she and Bill would be the stars of the paparazzi show.

I purposely delayed our driver and got there late, minutes before Sharon and Bill’s scheduled arrival.

The paparazzi had never seen Naomi and me together and wanted hundreds of pictures. We smiled and posed for them.

A Paramount PR person came up to us. “You guys have to get inside,” she said.

“We’ve got time,” I said casually.

“No we don’t. We’ve got to start on time. Sharon isn’t here yet.”

“She’d better hurry,” I said.

Naomi and I started smooching for the photographers. The PR woman started to sort of jitter around in circles.

I glanced behind us and saw Sharon and Bill arriving. They couldn’t wait any longer. The showing would start without them.

The paparazzi were still taking pictures of us smooching. Sharon and Bill were only a few feet away now.

A reporter yelled, “How do you spell Naomi’s last name?”

I stopped and yelled, “M-A-C-D-O-N-A-L-D!”

Sharon and Bill were ten feet behind us. Bill looked stricken. Sharon looked like she could kill me.

I looked at Naomi. She was smiling radiantly.

Naomi’s journal:

We went to the
Sliver
premiere Tuesday night. As we got out of the limo, Joe had his arm around me so tightly I could see white imprints on my shoulder from his fingers. I was overwhelmed by the whole scene. I’ve never even been to a premiere let alone the center of attention at one. Then we finally get inside in the dark and I’m so relieved.

When Joe wrote the script he had used my name in it for a peripheral character. Bill told me months ago, but I had forgotten. About fifteen minutes into the movie, Sharon says, “You slept with Naomi, didn’t you?”

Joe laughed and I died. I felt like thirty pairs of eyes looked over at me. It was all so twisted.

Then we went to the after-party. Joe had told me earlier that his only concern for anything ugly happening was some friend of Sharon’s who reportedly was seething from my
Current Affair
performance. I never saw her.

It was the first time I’d seen the movie.

I hated it.

The final line of dialogue—“Get a life!”—was the final nail in the coffin … a line written, studio executives told me, by Sharon Stone, although the whole world thought I’d written it since I was the only writer listed.