Hollywood Animal (88 page)

He said, “This catheter would scare anybody away.”

We sent our friends this invitation from our son, Joey:

“Joseph Jeremiah Eszterhas invites you to celebrate the marriage of Joe Eszterhas and his great friend, Naomi Baka … at the Kumulani Chapel of the Ritz-Carlton Kapalua on the island of Maui.”

At the bottom left-hand corner of the invitation were these words:

“
Life is strange
.”

“
Life is amazing
.”

Naomi’s journal:

This afternoon I went to the Kapalua Ritz-Carlton salon on Maui to have my nails done with my sister. The place was buzzing with gossip about hotel guests who are there for my wedding. It seems Guy’s fiancée is having her hair and makeup done for the big day. “You’d think
she
was getting married …” one of the hairdressers griped. She came in to have it done this morning on a trial basis so it looks good for tomorrow. I’m just doing my own hair and makeup at home in the morning.

The big buzz though was about Evans’s “writers.” He brought two young girls with him to the hotel and said they are writing the book he’s working on. He introduces them as “my writers.”

One of the stylists said, in her New Orleans accent, “Wa, I sweya! Do you know what one o’ them told me? She said, ‘We’re so excited! Evans says we can do anything we want—massages, manicures, pedicures—he’s payin’ for everthin’!’ They were ooooin’ and ahhin’ ova everthin’ … and then they go upstaiyas.”

The party last night was fun but a little weird. To mix these people with my family and Dana, my childhood best friend from Ohio (who showed up as a surprise), is like seeing a screwball comedy. Evans is talking about how the last time he was in Maui was on one of his honeymoons and divorce followed soon after.

The strangest moment of the party was when Guy’s fiancée sat next to me. Looking into her eyes is like looking into two blue marbles. She had an absolutely huge diamond on her finger.

I said, “I love your ring.” She said, “Oh, I’m taking it
back
. It isn’t at all what I wanted. For starters, the diamond’s too small. I told Guy I wanted two baguettes on either side of a pear-shaped diamond. This is just not what I told him I wanted. He never listens. It’s like his new
glasses
. I told him I hated them and he still hasn’t gotten new ones.”

I said, “But he picked the ring out for you, doesn’t that make it special?” (I couldn’t resist.) She stared blankly at me and said, “I told you, I don’t like it.”

I got up on the morning of July 30, 1994, the day I married the Great Love of My Life, by answering the phone: “Last Chance Saloon.”

I missed Steve and Suzi badly, but knew there was no chance they’d be here for
this
party.

Naomi went over to the Ritz to get ready with her sister and her friends and I sat in the sun and swam my laps and thought about my wedding with Gerri: it was a solemn High Mass at St. Margaret of Hungary Church in Cleveland—there were so many people there, police were needed to direct traffic.

I was afraid a former girlfriend—whose mother had threatened to commit suicide when she heard I was marrying Gerri—would show up.

I had given the girlfriend’s picture to the ushers and told them to escort her as quietly as possible out of the church if she showed up.

I was twenty-three years old.

I had gone to a coffee shop that morning and had some donuts and played the jukebox and thought:

Maybe you’re a little too young to be doing this
.

I’d been right.

And that, maybe more than anything else, was the main reason my marriage to Gerri broke up nearly twenty-five years after that morning in the coffee shop.

After I finished my laps, I went back to the house we were renting to put my white Armani suit on. I wore it with a black tank top and cowboy boots with Naomi’s silver bullets around one boot.

Guy was there and so was Gerry Messerman, who’d flown in from Cleveland along with Naomi’s brothers.

We had a couple glasses of champagne, and headed over to the chapel at the Ritz-Carlton.

When I saw Naomi, she looked so pretty I got tears in my eyes. In a few moments, the world’s most beautiful little devil barracuda gun moll would be my wife.

Joey was there, screaming in his nanny’s arms. The little bastard didn’t seem like he was happy about being legitimized.

Paul Verhoeven was there, taking pictures—our unofficial wedding photographer.

I sure wasn’t twenty-three years old anymore.

· · ·

Bernie, Naomi’s brother, read a letter from Naomi’s late mother to Naomi when she was in her early twenties urging her to “color every page” of her life.

Gerry Messerman read from Faulkner’s Nobel Prize address.

Jeremy, Naomi’s little brother, sang a song he had written for us called “Two People Together.”

Our New Age nondenominational minister said a few New Aged words … we made our vows … and Naomi jumped up and yelled “
Yayyyyyyy!
”

Outside, in a meadow near the beach lighted by torches and the moon, we ate sashimi and filet mignon and lobster and drank Cristal.

Guy sang “I’ll Remember You.”

Evans made a toast, babbling once again about that past trip to Maui that had doomed one of his marriages. (Next to him stood one of his “writers” in a see-through dress.)

I made a toast and then Naomi and I, holding Joey between us, danced … to Rod Stewart and Leonard Cohen and most of all to the Beatles and “Don’t Let Me Down.”

The toast I made at my wedding was this: “I came to this country when I was six years old. I’ve felt like a loner all of my life. Naomi, I don’t feel that way anymore. Thank you.”

When I finished my toast, Naomi left her seat at our table, ran across the grass, and hugged me. I held her close. I smelled plumeria and Naomi and the sea.

Gerry Messerman told me that my father had written him a letter begging his forgiveness for the things he had done in Hungary.

Gerri Eszterhas went back to court and sued me for 50 percent of my writing income
for the rest of my life!

Her argument was that I had come up with or may have been influenced to come up with
… ideas …
during the course of our marriage … which I might turn into scripts sometime later.

It would be a full-scale court proceeding in front of a judge in Marin County with expert witnesses testifying on both sides.

I had no choice but to fight it, of course.

I wrote a four-page outline for a script called
One Night Stand
about a man who falls in love at a corporate convention.

Guy loved the outline and showed it to Jeff Berg, the head of ICM, who
showed
it to Adrian Lyne, who had directed
Flashdance
and
Fatal Attraction
and
Indecent Proposal
. Adrian loved the outline and said he’d direct the movie. ICM decided then not to wait for the script but to auction the four-page outline with Adrian attached to direct it.

Berg said that Adrian and I were so “hot” after having written and directed hit movies that the auction would be a “no-brainer.” He was right. I sold the four-page outline for $4 million to New Line.

The sale made such big news that the
Today
show decided to do a series about
One Night Stand
from sale to release in the theaters.

On the first segment of the series, the reporter asked me how long it had taken me to write the outline.

I told him the truth: “About three or four hours.”

A million dollars an hour!

A million dollars a page!

I wasn’t broke anymore.

Naomi and I had the money to buy a house.

When we bought our house in Point Dume, we made sure it was far from any fault lines. That’s one of the reasons we picked Point Dume, which was in very northern Malibu.

Joey, eighteen months old, was sensitive to the slightest noise, coming screaming awake when a window rattled, sensitive to even the slightest jolts when he was being driven around in his baby carriage.

Two months after we moved into our Point Dume house, on a quiet Sunday afternoon, our new house was badly jolted three times. It felt like the house had been hit by a bulldozer.

I ran upstairs, grabbed Joey, and helped Naomi run down groggily from the bedroom. She had viral pneumonia.

We thought it was yet another accursed aftershock of the Northridge quake. It wasn’t.

It was a brand-new quake on a brand-new, previously undetected fault line.

Its epicenter: Point Dume.

Naomi said, “Point Doom.”

Our house stood next door to a shack, proof positive of Malibu’s egalitarian spirit, evidenced, too, by the fact that Barbra,
the
Barbra,
that
Barbra, another one of our neighbors, lived near a successful and convicted dope dealer.

I could see into the shack next door to us. There were opened scripts all over the floor of the main room. A balding man with long gray hair in the back of his
head
crawled on his knees from one open script to another. He seemed to be reading each script—but only for a few moments, as though his concentration span couldn’t afford each script more time.

I recognized the man. He was a producer who had won an Oscar for Best Picture twenty-some years ago.

A young woman knocked on our door one afternoon. She was frazzled, out of breath, and sweating—selling carpet cleaner door to door.

“What’s the matter?” I asked. “You okay? Did someone hurt you? Should I call the cops?”

She held the carpet cleaner cans up. Her hands were shaking. She was having trouble speaking. There were tears in her eyes.

“I just sold two cans,” she said. “To Bob Dylan! Can you believe it? To Bob Dylan himself! He opened the door himself.”

I offered her a glass of water. She glugged it down and smiled. She looked at me.

She said, “You’re not Joe Cocker, are you?”

“Come on, you guys have to come, it’ll be fun!” the producer said, but Naomi and I were uncertain.

The producer always hugged Naomi a little too warmly, and his wife had tried to play footsie with me only days after I’d married Naomi.

We thought we understood the kind of extendedly familial trip to Vegas they had in mind, and we hadn’t ever even met the man who would be our host, the producer’s friend Dodi Fayed.

“We’ll take Dodi’s plane,” the producer said. “He’ll be there with his girlfriend. He’s paying for the whole trip. Suites at the Mirage, dinner at Spago, we’ll catch some shows, fly back in his plane. You’ll love Dodi. Come on, you guys gotta come, it’ll be fun.”

But we decided not to join them and, a few days later, the producer’s wife came over to our house and brought dozens of little packages of smoked salmon from Harrods with a card enclosed that said, “Compliments of Dodi Fayed.”

“You guys missed the greatest time,” the producer’s wife said, but Naomi and I were happy we hadn’t gone to Vegas and we very happily ate Dodi Fayed’s delicious smoked salmon.

Costa-Gavras came to visit us in Malibu. I told him about Father Charles Coughlin and the isolationists of World War II who kept America from going to war—even when the American government knew about Auschwitz and Dachau.

I told Costa how Coughlin was the most popular commentator of his
time—an
anti-Semite who knew how to use the media (and the pulpit) to spread hatred. I showed Costa the big box of research I had amassed—though I didn’t tell him why I was so impassioned to write this script … or how I thought about Neal Sher and Eli Rosenbaum and Judith Schulmann’s faces as they sat in a theater in a few years watching this movie.

Costa thought it would be a powerful, important film and wanted to direct it.

Together, we went to meet with Phoenix Pictures and several of their executives, including Mike Medavoy, one of the smartest and most literate producers in town.

I outlined our story for the executives and one of them said, “But what kind of movie is this? Who will we have to root for?”

I said, “That’s one of the stupidest remarks I’ve ever heard in twenty-five years of meetings like this.”

The executive grabbed her Kleenex and fled the room.

I looked insufferable once again.

Phoenix Pictures passed on doing a movie about Father Charles Coughlin.

Peter Bart, the editor of
Variety
, was a smart and classy man who liked sticking the needle into Hollywood types.

Since I was now obviously a Hollywood type living in Malibu, Peter stuck his needle into me in two places: my obsession with making big script sales and my many appearances on television.

I replied quickly:

1. You’re right about my obsession with big bucks. I was paid $275,000 to write
Flashdance;
it made the studio over $300 million. I was paid $500,000 to write
Jagged Edge;
it made the studio more than $50 million. I was paid $3 million to write
Basic Instinct;
it made the studio more than $400 million. I was paid $1 million to write
Sliver;
it made the studio more than $100 million
.

If you put all those numbers together, I was paid $4,775,000
.

The studio’s take was $850 million
.

They made $850 million and I made less than $5 million. They made about two hundred times more than I did
.

At that rate of exchange, wouldn’t you, too, get a little obsessed about making
more,
about evening things out … just a little bit?

2. You’re right about all the TV exposure. I forgot for a second that screenwriters should be neither seen nor heard. They are at the bottom of the monkey-point food chain. They should live in obscurity, beset by melancholia and Styron-like depression. They should be victims, proud of
their
Victimhood. They should write books about their victimization and make money off their self-proclaimed misery, impotence, and humiliation
.

I promise, in the future, to try to act depressed, even though—since I’m happier now than I’ve ever been in my life—it won’t be easy. I’ll take the bullets off my cowboy boots and keep Bill Goldman’s
Adventures in the Screen Trade
on my nightstand next to Jimmy Carter’s book of poetry
.