Hollywood Animal (85 page)

He never looked at me, he just laughed one big
“Haw!”
out loud.

Then he said, “Zis is true.”

The Pacific Coast Highway to Malibu was closed, but the cops finally let us through when we convinced them we were residents.

The air was filled with ash. Hillsides were still blazing. We drove inch by inch through a brown-hazed war zone. Burning embers and tree branches were all over the road.

It took us almost three hours to get to the Colony. Hundreds of fire trucks were lined up in a wall guarding it, spraying the fields in front of the Colony walls.

Much of the rest of Malibu had burned, but this panzer division of fire trucks had kept the Colony safe.

Of course
, I thought to myself.

The gods may have been angry at us … but our neighbors had
juice
.

We got Naomi’s golden retriever, Jake, back from the ranch where he’d been temporarily staying and now Jake was with us in our house at the Colony.

There was one problem, I quickly noted. Jake wasn’t just Naomi’s dog … he was also Bill Macdonald’s.

Jake hated me. He snarled and barked at me.

Every afternoon, as I did my laps in the pool, Jake waited for me and … at just the right moment … Jake hurled himself onto the middle of my back, trying to drown me.

Naomi went for a walk on the Colony beach with Jake.

Jake started going after a piece of driftwood in the water. Naomi called for him but he wouldn’t come. The tide was coming in quickly. Jake went farther out in the water. Naomi kept calling for him but he wouldn’t come. The tide was getting higher.

Naomi had to run for the steps that lead from the beach. She barely made it before the water covered the steps. And here came Jake swimming for the ladder!

He made it.

Naomi was petrified and soaking wet when she got back to the house.

I got the .45 out of my nightstand, put it to Jake’s head, and blew Bill Macdonald’s dog’s brains out.

(Just kidding.)

Jake shat the rug constantly, but only on my side of the bed.

Jake was history.

Naomi gave Bill Macdonald’s dog away to a nice couple far away who owned a big ranch.

I kept missing Steve and Suzi. They were in their first year of college—Steve in Oregon, Suzi in Colorado—and I saw them rarely, though I spoke to them almost every day.

They wanted to have nothing to do with Naomi.

When they came down to visit, they refused to stay with us and stayed at the Malibu Beach Inn down the Pacific Coast Highway.

When they came to the house, they refused to speak to her. I spent the days out in the streets with them when they visited—on Melrose, on the Santa Monica Promenade, on Venice Beach, trying to do things together on days filled with long silences.

Suzi and a girlfriend were at our house once and they were eating Chinese food and Naomi told me Suzi picked up a carton and then put it down.

“Why aren’t you having any?” her girlfriend asked her.

“Because she ate from it,” Suzi said, pointing at Naomi.

Naomi left the room.

All I could hope for was that with the passage of time, Steve and Suzi would forgive me for leaving their mother, that as they got older they’d understand the complexities of love and the vagaries of the heart.

I didn’t have much hope that this would happen soon or even in the near future.

All I could hope was that my kids would remember all the time I’d spent with them in their childhood: the Little League games, the animal rights meetings and protests, the hugs, the laughs, the barbecues, the Gang Up On Dad Dunk’ems in so many swimming pools.

One day maybe they’d realize that my breakup with their mother had nothing to do with them … that the marriage had lasted as long as it did
because of them
.

The day before Christmas Eve, Naomi and I went down to Rodeo Drive to feel Christmas in the air. We were looking for carolers and Salvation Army Santas and steaming hot mugs of Irish coffee and maybe some Dickensian fog.

There were no carolers, no Salvation Army Santas, and no Dickensian fog. It was 92 degrees. We were drenched in sweat. We drank ice-cold beers in an air-conditioned place as Mel Tormé sang “The Christmas Song” on the piped-in music.

When we came back out of the place, we finally saw Santa, but he was riding a camel down the middle of Rodeo Drive, sweat streaming down his face as he dispensed little bottles of tequila in a promotion giveaway.

We went back to Malibu, cranked the air conditioner up as high as it would go, pulled the drapes, put the Christmas tree lights on, built a fire, and watched a video of
A Christmas Carol
.

After a while it got so chilly we joyously put sweaters on.

As I sat in the predawn hours beating away at my Olivetti manual typewriter with the surf crashing behind me at the Malibu Colony, I thought to myself:
Man, what are you doing here?

You don’t even
like
L.A. You lived in Marin County all those years and commuted down here because you didn’t want to get too close to this place. And now you’re not only living in L.A., but in
Malibu
, behind gates at the fucking
Colony
, the holy of holies of Hollywood showbiz and glamour.

Oh, sure, you may be wearing your Cleveland Indians T-shirts and your Brotherhood of Teamsters jacket, but you’re getting takeout pizzas from Wolfgang Puck’s Granita and Jon Peters’s model girlfriend, Vendela, is telling the world that you’re her favorite writer.

You’re
Vendela’s favorite writer?

You’re living in Woody Harrelson’s house and smoking weed in his teepee?

What the fuck?

The road begins in the refugee camps of Austria and ends in the Malibu Colony? With the ghost of a nude Marilyn Monroe slinking in and out of the fog on rainy nights?

In an interview in
Us
magazine, Sharon Stone was asked: “Are you planning your wedding soon?”

“Bill and I love each other very much,” she said, “and are committed to spending the rest of our lives together. Primarily, I feel and think how happy I am to have found such a beautiful love in my life and how grateful I am for the existence of that love. My life is full of joy. I’m in love and I’m really, really happy about it.”

Robert Evans called to tell me he was going to remake
Breakfast at Tiffany’s
and wondered whether I had any interest in writing it. I knew why he wanted to remake it.

Like so many other beautiful young girls from the Midwest, Rhonda somehow wound up staying at Bob’s house. Bob was always nice to his girls and introduced them to his friends, who were nice to the girls, too. Barely out of her teens, soon Rhonda was going out with studio heads and celebrities she saw
on
TV.

Rhonda wanted to be an actress, of course, but meanwhile she kept going out with Bob’s powerful friends and even got a part-time job in a real estate office in Beverly Hills.

One afternoon a man with a gun came into the real estate office and for some reason—was it a robbery? Did it have to do with one of Evans’s powerful friends?—blew Rhonda’s brains out.

Evans was devastated and spent many sorrowful hours thinking about her life and made a deal with the studio to remake
Breakfast at Tiffany’s
with an edge, Beverly Hills–style … Rhonda as Holly Golightly … Rhonda, a studio exec said, go-blithely, Holly go
-dead
.

Sharon and Bill Macdonald broke up—she sent his “antique engagement ring” back to him by Federal Express.

She dove quickly into another love affair—with the assistant director of the movie she was shooting.

Bill, we heard, was living only a few miles from us in Malibu, above a garage.

I wrote a script called
Foreplay
about serial killers—a spooky, dark comedy, set in St. Petersburg, Florida, where Gerri, Steve, Suzi, and I had done so many of our summer beach crawls.

Guy McElwaine decided to auction it and a new production company named Savoy Pictures outbid six others.

The deal we structured gave me $1 million up front and another $4 million when the movie was made. But I was also guaranteed
two and a half cents for every dollar Savoy took in from all income, including video
. I was also guaranteed
one percent of soundtrack sales
.

“This is the big barrier we’ve wanted to cross for some time,” Guy told me. “Even a lot of big-time actors don’t have it. No writer with the possible exception of Neil Simon has ever gotten it, and if he did then he got it for adapting one of his stage plays to the screen.”

The media covered the
Foreplay
deal as a landmark breakthrough.

A reporter named Jerry Carroll of the
San Francisco Chronicle
said to me: “Writers all over America are lighting joss sticks in your honor.”

“Or they’re out of their minds with jealousy,” I said.

The man who made this landmark deal with me … who gave to a writer what a writer in Hollywood had never gotten before … was the head of Savoy, Frank Price.

Frank Price was the former head of Columbia, the man who’d insisted I change the ending of
Jagged Edge
, the man whose firing I had waited out before turning in my script.

Since I’d worked on my spec script
Foreplay
while I was also working on a picture,
Gangland
, for Columbia and Jon Peters … I thought it only fair to let Jon read the script before anybody else.

Guy agreed with me.

I called and told Jon that I had written a new spec and that he would be the first to read it.

He was overjoyed.

“You know what?” he said, “that’s one of the nicest things anyone has ever done for me. You’re good people. When can I read it?”

“Whenever you can come over here,” I said. His house in the Colony was almost directly across the street from the one we were renting.

“I’ll send somebody over to pick it up,” Jon said.

“I can’t do that,” I said. “I can’t let it out of my hands. You’ll have to read it over here.”

“I’m not going to let anybody else read it,” he said. “I’m not going to show it to anybody else. I give you my word.”

“I’m sorry,” I said, “you’ve gotta read it here.”

“You’re not going to take my word?” Jon said. “My word isn’t good enough for you?”

“Jon,” I said, “I’m giving you a jump on the whole town. What are we arguing for?”

“You wanna get into a fight with me?” he yelled suddenly. “I’m not fuckin’ Mike Ovitz fraternity boy! You don’t want to get in a fight with me! Trust me!”

I said, “Listen, man, we’re friends.”

“Then give me the fucking script!” he yelled.

“I can’t!” I yelled back. “You gotta read it here! You can’t take it! I can’t take the chance it’ll get out somehow! For Christ’s sake, don’t you get it? I’m trying to do you a favor!”

Jon hung up on me.

· · ·

At ten o’clock the next morning, our gate bell at the Colony rang. I saw it was Jon and let him in. He was wearing a sport coat and tie. He looked sensational.

“All right,” he said with a grin. “Where is this fucking script? It’s probably a piece of shit anyway. I’ll tell you what: if I wanna buy it, maybe I’ll just give you my beach house for it and we can call it a deal.”

I got the script and handed it to him.

“You can sit right in here,” I said. “It’ll be quiet in here.”

“I’m just going to take it across the street to my house and read it there,” Jon said.

I stared at him.
Was he serious?
After
everything
I had said to him last night?

Very slowly I said, “I told you. You can’t do that.”

He stared back at me. Very quietly he said, “It’s just across the street.”

In a whisper, I said, “No.”

Almost pleading, he said, “I’m not going to Xerox it or show it to anybody.”

I said, “No. You’re going to read it right here in this room and not take it anywhere.”

He sat down on the couch and put the script in front of him on the big teak coffee table. His face, I saw, was a dark shade that was nearly purple.

He suddenly smashed the coffee table with his clenched fist—so hard that the table cracked.

He jumped up.

“
You cocksucker!
” he yelled into my face.
“You sonofabitch! You know what you are? You’re a mean motherfucker!”

He gave me an ugly look, brushed by me, and went out the door. When he got to the gate, he had trouble opening it.

The teak coffee table he cracked was a recent purchase Naomi and I had made at the Wirtz Brothers secondhand furniture store in Santa Monica.

It had belonged to the famous and respected producer David Wolper.

That fact made it a truly incestuous Hollywood moment: Jon Peters broke David Wolper’s cocktail table because he got mad at Joe Eszterhas.

Guy told me that Jon showed up at Columbia the next day with his hand in a cast.

He was telling people, Guy said, that he’d had a “creative difference” with me … and had scaled my gate “like Batman” and had hurt his hand.

Two days after Savoy bought
Foreplay
, bootleg copies of the script were being sold at bookstores on Sunset and Hollywood Boulevard for $25 a Xerox copy.

Signs on the bookstore windows said “New Eszterhas Script Available Here.”

Years later I was having lunch with former Sony head Mark Canton at the Bel-Air Hotel and I told him about Jon, who was a friend of Mark’s, and
Foreplay
.

“Jon’s dyslexic,” Mark said, “didn’t you know that?”

“No,” I said, “I didn’t.”

“Everybody in town knows that.”

“Neither Guy nor anybody else at ICM said anything to me about it,” I said.

“Jon doesn’t read scripts himself,” Mark said. “Either someone reads a script to him or he hires people who dramatize the script and put it on tape for him.”

“I’m sorry,” I said, “I didn’t know that.”

“Sure,” Mark said. “Jon figures everybody knows that. So when you were going to make him sit there and read the script, he figured you were being a mean motherfucker … because you knew he couldn’t do that due to his dyslexia.”