Hollywood Animal (87 page)

I fired him, even though I hadn’t really hired him.

Evans, I heard, was back in the fetal position.

Four hookers had written a book about their Hollywood adventures.

Evans was featured prominently in the book, greeting them in his screening room, feeding them booze, coke, and Quaaludes … then taking them into his bedroom and giving them directions: “Lisa, you lick Tiffany there … Tiffany, darling, put your finger in there!”

I always suspected Bob was a frustrated director.

This was the final Evans direction in the book: “
Tiffany, my dear, would you please pee on me?
”

This is how incestuous Hollywood is:

The head of the publishing company which published the hookers’ book was Evans’s
next-door neighbor!

On our first visit to our pediatrician in Beverly Hills, I noted that his office was filled not with pictures of children but with signed movie posters.

At the end of our first visit our new pediatrician asked me if I could send him two signed posters of my movies, too.

On our next visit I noted that my posters were up on the wall, too
—Basic Instinct
, and
Showgirls
—centerpieces of a roomful of coughing and sneezing and crying little boys and girls.

Many a night at the Malibu Colony after Joey’s birth, Naomi and I stayed up at night rocking him back to sleep.

We had the TV set on in the background and watched the chases as we rocked him. The TV stations in L.A. covered all police chases live. Most of them took place late at night, so we saw a lot of them.

We started rating them like movies. While the O.J. chase, years later, became the
Gone With the Wind
of chases, Naomi and I saw a lot of great B movie chases while we rocked Joey.

We saw one that began on the 405, the San Diego Freeway, cut over to the 10, the Santa Monica Freeway, then onto the streets of Santa Monica and onto the Pacific Coast Highway.

We stared as the chase came closer and closer on the PCH toward our house in the Colony.

We lowered the volume so we could hear the sirens pass us outside in real life and not on the TV.

On the 6th day of April, 1994, I asked Naomi to come for a walk with me.

We walked in the Colony—past Jerry Perenchio’s house, past Irwin Winkler’s, past where Burgess Meredith used to live. When we got to the actor Brian Keith’s house, we walked across the back of his yard and jumped down to the beach. The sun was setting on a warm and rare Maui-like day.

I handed Naomi a little box and she looked at it and started to open it with trembling fingers and exactly at the moment when she opened it and saw the ring … I said, “Will you marry me, Guinea?”

She jumped into the air like a little girl and yelled, “
Yayyyyyyyyy!
”

And then she said, her teary face very close to mine, “You don’t have to marry me.”

I remembered the moment I had asked Gerri to marry me a quarter century earlier … at night, at a romantic spot in a meadow near Shaker Lakes in Cleveland.

Gerri opened the box and took the ring out of it to put on her finger … and
I dropped it!
Into thick grass.

Gerri and I got down on the ground to find it … but we couldn’t see.

Because exactly at that moment—Honest to God, this is true—there was an
eclipse of the moon!

We had to wait fifteen minutes in the pitch-black before we could even begin the hunt for Gerri’s engagement ring.

We found it, and as I put it on her finger,
I dropped it again!

I told Steve and Suzi and Gerri that I had asked Naomi to marry me and it was one of the saddest phone calls of my life.

All three of them cried.

I told my lawyers and accountants that I was marrying Naomi and they didn’t cry, but they certainly sounded sad.

When I told them there wouldn’t even be a prenuptial agreement, I thought I heard at least one accountant start to sniffle.

These, according to the court’s ruling, were the terms of my divorce based on “community goodwill” and the fact that Gerri and I had been married for twenty-four years:

Gerri got both houses, all four of the cars, and most of the cash.

I was to pay her $32,500 a month in alimony—after taxes. In other words, I had to earn $65,000 a month to pay her.

I was to pay for the kids’ college educations.

I was broke, starting all over again, a refugee again, living in Los Angeles, a place that I hated.

I didn’t care. Naomi was worth it.

Naomi said, “You threw everything away for me, your castles, your carriages. You’re risking your relationships with your children for me. Your friends think you’re crazy. I feel like Wallis Simpson.”

I said, “From what I know about the Duke of Windsor, I don’t want to feel like the Duke of Windsor.”

Sharon Stone was telling the world that she’d been “tricked” into doing
that
scene by Paul Verhoeven.

I knew what Sharon was doing and she was doing it well. She didn’t want to be forever known for showing the world her pubes; she considered herself, after all, a serious actress.

No one needed to know that, the morning she had shot
that
scene, she had handed her scented panties to Paul and said, “I won’t be needing these today.”

As part of her campaign to rehabilitate her image—post-pube redemption—she even engaged in a public fight with a studio head, telling him that under no circumstances would she do a nude scene.

I knew what she was doing and laughed when a limo driver in New York told the world that Sharon had yelled at him: “Don’t you know who I am?
I’m the American Princess Di.”

Sharon Stone as the American Princess Di? Well sure. It made sense. From a flash of cinematic beaver to American royalty.

After all, she had even dated Dodi Fayed … back before he’d met the other Princess Di … even before she’d handed Paul Verhoeven her scented panties.
April
6, 1994, the day I proposed to Naomi, was my father’s birthday … his eighty-seventh birthday.

I thought about calling him to wish him a happy birthday.

I thought about telling him that I asked the love of my life to marry me on his birthday.

I thought about it … but I didn’t make the call.

CHAPTER 28

We’re Hollywood Animals

CATHERINE

What happened, Nick? Did you get sucked into it? Did you like it too much? Nicky got too close to the flame. Nicky liked it.

Basic Instinct

MADAM STONE, AS
Guy always called Sharon, fired him.

I was the one who convinced her to hire him and I was sure I was the reason she fired him.

It took her a while, but I knew after Guy came to the
Sliver
premiere with Naomi and me … and not with Sharon and Bill … that his days were numbered.

Guy knew it, too, but came with us anyway.

I knew Sharon … and I knew she
especially
wanted Guy to be with them and not with us … because I was with Naomi, who had called her a “home wrecker” on TV.

When Guy came with
us
, Sharon felt betrayed.

Now that he no longer represented Sharon, I was Guy’s only “star” client.

I had told Robert Evans about my outline for the movie to be called
Jade
while we were working on
Sliver
.

I had sold it in the late eighties to the Weintraub Entertainment Group. It was about the wife of a philandering husband who gets even with him by hooking on the side.

The outline, I told Evans, was lost in a morass of legal problems. The Weintraub Entertainment Group had gone into bankruptcy … the rights to the outline somehow had to be pried loose from WEG’s other bankruptcy assets. Over many months, Bill Macdonald had worked heroically and had pried the outline loose through truly Herculean and shrewd legal efforts.

· · ·

Sherry Lansing, the new head of Paramount, made
Jade
her first big green-light announcement. And now, as we were living in the Malibu Colony, I finished the
Jade
script.

Naomi and I were in Palm Springs the weekend the studio executives read it, and we were suddenly bombarded with bottles of Cristal and tins of caviar.

Sherry called me and asked me to come in to talk to her as soon as I got back from the desert. The script, she said, was ready to go out to directors and she wanted to see who I had in mind.

I was flattered but I smelled what was coming. Sherry was married to Billy Friedkin, who desperately needed a hit movie
—The Exorcist
and
The French Connection
were so very many years ago.

The very first thing Sherry said at our meeting was “Billy just loves your script.”

I nodded and didn’t say anything, forcing her to say, “How do you feel about Billy directing it?”

I said, “Billy hasn’t had a hit in over twenty years, Sherry. There are people in town who think the only reason Billy still works is because he’s married to you.”

Sherry said, “That’s not true!”

“Nevertheless,” I said, “some people think that.”

She said, “He just loves this script. He thinks it’s the perfect script. He wouldn’t change a comma.”

“He wouldn’t?”

“Not a comma,” Sherry said. “I promise you.”

I said, “
You
promise me?”

Sherry said, “
I
promise you.”

I had lunch with Billy Friedkin and he repeated that he wasn’t going to change a comma.

“Music to my ears, Billy,” I said.

“I mean it, Joe,” Billy said. “It’s the perfect script.”

I liked Billy’s gray-haired, gone-to-fat, street-kid style … I
loved
Billy’s attitude about the script … and I sat back down with Sherry, who said she had a problem.

She was going to be criticized, Sherry said, for letting Billy direct
Jade …
and she wanted me to say it was my idea for Billy to direct
Jade
, not hers.

As I thought about it, Sherry said, “I’ll owe you a favor, honey.”

I smiled and simply said okay and Sherry said, “I love you, honey.”

The headline in the Calendar section of the
Los Angeles Times
of April 18, 1994, read “FRIEDKIN SIGNING KEEPS ‘JADE’ IN LANSING FAMILY.”

The subhead read: “Selection of Paramount Chief’s Husband as Director Raises Eyebrows, Even in an Industry Known for Nepotism.”

The article said:

“Eszterhas, also the film’s executive producer, maintains that Friedkin had long been his first choice to direct
Jade
. He vehemently objects to the insinuation of nepotism …

“Said Eszterhas: ‘What Friedkin brings to the party is a kind of spooky, dark energy which fits perfectly into
Jade
. He has a great sense of visual style. …’

“Eszterhas said he was also impressed when Friedkin ‘told me he doesn’t want to change a comma.’

“But more skeptical observers say that Friedkin would never have been given this opportunity if not for his marriage to Lansing.”

My father called to tell me that one of the nurses who had taken care of him in Tiburon after his heart surgery visited him in Cleveland Heights.

“Amelia,” he said, laughing.

I knew it had to be Amelia.

She was in her early forties—my father was eighty-five then—and she considered herself a poet and a painter. I didn’t know that, of course, when I hired her to take care of my father; I thought I was hiring a nurse. She painted an oil portrait of my father while she was in Tiburon and one day she asked to speak to me. She told me she was in love with my father.

I spoke to my father and we agreed that I should fire her. And now, five years later, she had showed up at his house in Cleveland Heights.

“What did she want?” I asked.

“To move in,” my father said.

He was laughing.

“What did you say to her?”

“I showed her my catheter. I asked if she knew how to clean it. Then I asked her if she was strong enough to support me to the bathroom.”

“What did she say?”

“She didn’t understand why we had to get rid of the nurses if she moved in. She said she had to visit another friend here and then she’d stop back. That was a week ago.”

He was laughing again.