Hollywood Animal (83 page)

And she constantly tries to dance away from them … but they surround her … swoop in on her in a group … force her to the ground … and converge on her … kissing her body, touching her … devouring her body and blood … until finally—

She breaks away from them. She dances back toward the cross, the others after her … she dances herself up the cross again … crucified again … her limbs moving again … and then she stops as the others on the ground beneath her dance their hallelujahs.

· · ·

Entry #22:
I took the 73 pages down to the Kapa Lua offices here and faxed them to Paul.

I’m on page 94.

With Nomi and Cristal, it’s spiritual combat played out in sexual terms. Isn’t that what we all do? It’s so intertwined, their thing. Cristal’s view of the entertainer as hooker and Nomi’s refusal to be that … or to accept that … or to realize in the deepest part of her that she’s
done
that … can you actually hook,
actually
do it, and protect yourself somehow from being tarnished, corrupted? Is that an amazing strength of character or is it self-delusion, fatuousness, naivete? Is Cristal purposely trying to corrupt Nomi—
or trying to force her to recognize and reject corruption?
Is she trying to hurt Nomi by doing that or is she trying to help her grow up? And, in the middle of this complicated tangle, Cristal wants to sleep with her.

Entry #27:
Paul loves the pages—great news—meanwhile I’m to 112 script pages.

Cristal is on the offensive with Nomi—pushing and pushing her. It’s sort of like it was with Gerri. Pushing and pushing me, pushing Naomi and me together. Subconsciously, she wanted the marriage over—she just didn’t want to be the one to do it because of the kids. Subconsciously, Cristal wants out of being a star the same way Gerri wanted out of being my wife.

Entry #33:
Done. Way too long, but I like it. A difficult script to write at a helluva difficult time, but maybe the fact that I called my lead “Nomi” and saw little pieces of Naomi in the woman I was creating helped. A kind of tribute to Naomi, though not quite a labor of love, considering Charlie Evans’s lawsuit threats.

Entry #34:
Retyping the final chunk—there was a big rainbow out there this morning.

Naomi will read it tonight, the first one to read it in toto and it’s the first script of mine she’ll have read.

Entry #35:
Naomi didn’t like it. She found it “dark and depressing.”

I’m deeply disappointed in her reaction, of course, but I love her for her honesty.

I hope she’s wrong.

· · ·

While I was writing
Showgirls
, Naomi read an interview with Sharon in which Sharon spoke about Jake, who had been Naomi’s dog … but who was now Sharon’s.

Naomi told her lawyer to tell Bill’s lawyer that she wanted Jakey back. Bill’s lawyer said no way—Sharon liked Jakey.

It drove Naomi nuts that Sharon was now playing with her dog.

I called Bill, who was staying at Sharon’s house off Mulholland overlooking the Valley.

Bill picked the phone up.

I said, “Listen, if you don’t give Naomi the dog back, I’m going to squish you like a fucking bug.”

Bill said nothing … but he held the phone for a few seconds … and then hung up.

Bill’s lawyer called Naomi’s lawyer shortly afterward to say that Naomi could have Jakey back.

We had to board him at a kennel until we got back from Maui.

Paul Verhoeven called to say that he was coming over to Maui to talk about the script. He was bringing his wife of nearly thirty years, Martine, with him.

At the same time, I read an interview with Paul in a film magazine.

“It was very personal to me,” Paul said about
Basic Instinct
. “It was the relationship between me and Sharon that was not consummated in the bed. To have been involved with her would have been a disaster, but the movie was good because of my feelings. …

“I was not aroused by the lap dancers in Vegas. Ultimately, sex for the sake of sex is boring. I prefer to drink a cup of coffee.”

As I read the interview with Paul, I remembered two moments during our
Showgirls
research trips to Vegas:

A dancer we were having drinks with said to Paul: “What’s the most important thing to you?”

Paul said, “My work. I couldn’t live without my work.”

She turned to me and said, “What’s the most important thing to you?”

I said, “Love.”

The dancer smiled and said, “You’re
so
bad.”

Paul said, “He is! He is! You are exactly right! He is!”

I was smoking a joint in my suite with two dancers I had interviewed that day. I called Paul and asked him to come over.

He came but he wouldn’t take a hit off the joint. He said he never put anything poisonous into his lungs.

He watched the three of us as we acted dumb and stoned and loose. He left suddenly.

One of the girls said, “Who was that masked man?”

The other girl said, “Did you see his wristwatch? It had Jesus’ face on it.”

Naomi’s journal:

I’m holding my breath there won’t be some meltdown that
ends
with Paul flying out of here in a huff and the script in limbo. He makes me nervous anyway.

He’s very likable, but there’s always some push and pull when he and Joe are together.

Last night at dinner we were talking about marriage. Paul suddenly said matter-of-factly, “I stopped being faithful the day I stopped wearing my wedding ring.” No one said anything. It felt sad.

Then on the way home in the limo, Paul sat facing backward at one end and we sat facing him on the other. The song “Take the Money and Run” came on the radio.

Joe laughed and said, “Hey Paul! Listen! They’re playing my song!”

And Paul said, “Ah yes. Who wins? Joe wins.”

The ride continued and Joe and I were sitting nearly on top of each other, laughing and generally enjoying each other as we always do.

I looked up and could just barely see Paul in the darkness. Staring at us.

Paul sketched every scene of the movie in his copy of the script. I looked at a page and saw a sketch of an odd-looking, octopus-like object.

“What’s this?” I said to Paul.

“A pussy,” Paul said.

Naomi’s journal:

I like Martine, but they do seem like an odd couple. With both of their girls grown and moved away, she is into her music and her dogs and Paul is never home.

Last night they joined us for dinner outside on the lanai at our house. We were talking and Joe said something to the effect that, yes, he probably could have stayed married and kept seeing me secretly, but that would have been living a lie and he just didn’t want to live that way. There was a silence then.

Martine looked at her wine glass.

Then Paul said, “If I divorced Martine, she would take every penny I have, wouldn’t you, Martine?” He said it with a smile, but there was such resentment in it.

She smiled back and said, “Everything.”

We all laughed, but it was nervous laughter.

Naomi and I were blissfully happy, but I couldn’t get Steve and Suzi out of my mind no matter how much I wrote or drank or how much weed I smoked.

My dreams were full of things that had happened to them in their childhoods:

The time Suzi choked on a hot dog and I had to hold her upside-down by her ankles as she turned blue … The time Steve missed a curveball I threw him and it went smashing into his nose … The times they collaborated on home videos, “written by Suzi, directed by Steve” … The time Steve played barber and chopped out a big chunk of Suzi’s hair … The time they scrawled “Zorro” all over the walls of the house.

I dreamed several times of a moment when we were living in San Rafael, on a street that was a cul-de-sac, and Steve, who was about six, was playing in the front yard … and a van without windows came down the street … and I suddenly didn’t see Steve. I went running out into the street bare-chested, yelling his name, hearing no response, waiting for the van to come back down from the cul-de-sac … here it came … I got in front of it, then went around to the driver’s front door, swung it open, grabbing the driver (a petrified teenage boy) by his shirt and swung him out of the van, yelling “Open the fucking back!” … when I suddenly heard Steve’s voice from the side yard: “Dad?
Dad?
” … and hurled the teenage kid back into his van, saying, “Get the fuck outta here!”

And the poor kid flattened his gas pedal and went roaring away.

I dreamed of Suzi holding on to me, sitting on my shoulders watching fireworks on the Fourth of July … Suzi losing her dolly in London and how I’d moved hell and high water to get it back … and Steve, very sick with a virus, in the emergency room at Marin General Hospital saying, “Don’t hurt you tummy, don’t hurt you tummy.”

I dreamed of the time Suzi wore a T-shirt to high school which said “Jesus” on the front and “Joker” on the back, and her school principal told her she’d be suspended from school if she wore it again … I said to him, “Do you really want to get into a war with me? Think about that. I don’t think you do because if you get into a war with me, I’m going to turn your life into a legal nightmare.”

Suzi was allowed to wear her Jesus T-shirt anytime she wanted.

I was a wild man when it came to defending my kids.

The wild man who’d always defended and protected them had turned his back on them now and was sitting in the lotus position with a joint in his hand on the island of Maui Wowee.

Suzi called, crying, late at night. She said she was sitting in the den in Tiburon with the lights out.

She said that’s what my absence from the house was like: darkness.

“Like the sun in my life has been shut off.”

That night I got up and threw up and when I came back to bed Naomi said, “I’m sorry.”

I said nothing and she said, “Is all this pain we’re causing to everybody worth it?” She was crying.

I held her and said, “I love you so much.”

While Suzi at least talked to me … yelling or crying, angry or sad … Steve cut me out of his life.

He never called me and when I called him, he never wanted to talk long.

Once he said, “What’s there to talk about, Pops? You made your choice. You’re there and we’re here.”

Drinking and smoking too much, throwing up in the middle of the night, desperately missing Steve and Suzi, I started snapping at Naomi.

“What have
you
accomplished with
your
life?” I asked her during a dinner.

And: “What do you know about movies? You didn’t even know Brando was a method actor.”

Sometimes Naomi turned to me, out of the blue, with tears in her eyes, and said, “I’m sorry.”

And at those moments I said, “I’m sorry, too.”

Naomi said, “I messed up your wonderful life.”

I said, “You’ve made my life wonderful.”

I flew up to see Steve, who was in school at the University of Oregon in Eugene. Naomi came up with me, but stayed in the room while I waited for Steve in the lobby of our hotel.

He got there forty-five minutes late and was in an ugly mood.

I said, “What’s the matter, Mano?”

He said, “I think maybe it’d be better if we didn’t see each other for a while.”

I suddenly started to shake. I got up and said, “I left something in the room, I’ll be right back.”

Every breath I took seemed a struggle. Every step felt like I was wearing cement boots.

I got back to the room and Naomi said, “Oh my God! What’s the matter? You’re snow-white.” Then she saw how badly I was shaking and said, “Lie down.”

I lay down flat on the floor and lit up a cigarette and Naomi poured me a
glass
of wine. I glugged three or four glasses and felt okay enough to hurry back to Steve.

He was still sitting in the lobby, staring at nothing.

“Come on, Mano,” I said to him. “I flew all the way up here—at least have a drink with me.”

He came into the bar with me and after a couple drinks, Steve loosened up a little.

He took me down to his quad and showed me the room he lived in—it was a hovel.

He made a point of telling me that one of his neighbors had recently OD’d on smack.

We flew back to Maui.

But I was hurting so much that as the weeks went by on Maui, I couldn’t face thinking about Steve’s or Suzi’s or Gerri’s pain.

Because if I thought of their pain, it would make
my
pain unbearable. I’d start to shake or throw up or I’d reach for another joint or another glass of Tanqueray or white wine.

I missed my house, too, the Tara-like dream home atop a hill in Tiburon that overlooked the bay.

I had decorated every room, had selected every African mask and every painting and every vintage, turn-of-the-century Tiffany lamp. I had designed even the crystal in the kitchen door and the tulips in the kitchen tile.

I missed driving my big black Mercedes on a foggy day over the hill to my other house in Stinson Beach, which I had decorated with a Hungarian motif, even finding a cabinet carved in the 1870s with the figures of hussars all over it.

And I missed my dogs: Macko, the hard-headed husky who listened only to my directions … Bookshi, the ugliest dog in the world, a Chihuahua I’d bought at a flea market for ten dollars … Cigi, our lab, the Mexican army dog who ran away at the first sign of trouble.

I missed my
home
.

· · ·

I went back to Tiburon with Naomi for Steve’s high school graduation. I sat next to Gerri at the ceremony while Naomi stayed at the Huntington hotel.

I hugged Steve as he came down the aisle with the other graduates.

He looked away from me when I hugged him.

I had a drink with Gerri afterward and told her I couldn’t handle the pain of this anymore. I told her I was coming back home.

When we got to the house, Suzi was there. I told her that I was coming back home and Suzi held me and cried.