Authors: Joe Eszterhas
“And they’d get their hearts broken by the Cleveland Browns and learn what it feels like to lose most games in the final thirty seconds,” Naomi said.
I loved that you could smoke in the bars and restaurants in Cleveland.
I contemplated what bliss it would be: to be sitting at a great bar in front of
a
fireplace with the snow falling outside and the jukebox playing Elvis’s “Merry Christmas, Baby” … a double shot of Cuervo in front of me … a cigarette in my ashtray next to the Cuervo … smoke snaking blue/white into the air … as I kissed Naomi, watching perfect, six-pointed snowflakes.
“Tell me some great things about Cleveland,” Naomi said.
I told her the things I thought would impress her.
Cleveland had been named an all-American city five times, more than any other city in America. Some people called it “
Cleanland
.”
Its major export was salt. It had the biggest bowling alleys in Ohio. There were Picassos at the Cleveland Art Institute, sculptures by Oldenburg and Noguchi. There were buildings designed by Philip Johnson, Buckminster Fuller, and I. M. Pei, who had also designed Mike Ovitz’s CAA building. There was a cinemathèque and a poets league and even a ballet for those in wheelchairs. There was even a rain forest at the Cleveland Zoo!
Restaurants? Bill Clinton had stopped twice at Parma Pierogi, JFK had dinner at Helriegel’s, and Mussolini had said that his favorite chef in the whole world was Cleveland’s own Chef Boyardee!
Celebrities had always
flocked
to Cleveland! Buffalo Bill Cody lived there. So did Bob Hope, Paul Newman, Debra Winger, Swingin’ Sammy Kaye, Arsenio Hall, John D. Rockefeller, Drew Carey, Roger Penske, Halle Berry, Jack Paar, Wes Craven, Phil Donahue, Bone Thugs-N-Harmony, and Joel Grey.
Howard Stern partied there in the parking lot of a strip club called Tiffany’s. Doonesbury’s B.D. was based on former St. Ignatius High School quarterback Brian Dowling. Martina Navratilova and Bjorn Borg played for the Cleveland Nets. George Burns and Gracie Allen got married there.
Literary Cleveland was like the Paris of the Midwest. Hart Crane, Artemus Ward, Toni Morrison, Langston Hughes, Harlan Ellison, Bruce Catton, Jerry Siegel (the creator of Superman), were all Clevelanders at one time or another.
But most impressive to me: Elvis’s favorite football team, whose games the King watched by special cable as he munched his fried banana and peanut butter sandwiches … the Cleveland Browns!
In the late eighties, trying to talk him into starring in my movie
Checking Out
, I visited Jeff Daniels at his big white house on a small lake not far from Ann Arbor, Michigan.
We went out on Jeff’s paddleboat and talked about the script. It was a glorious summer day and as I watched Jeff’s little kids splashing around in the water, I thought: What a smart man you are, Jeff, to be away from L.A. and to be here, raising your children.
When we were done on the paddleboat, we drove into a nearby small town and had lunch in the town’s best restaurant. We had two bratwurst sandwiches each and two ice-cold beers. Everyone in town knew Jeff, I soon realized, but they didn’t know him as a Hollywood celebrity. They talked about his kids’ Little League teams and the skunk problem under the bridge leading into town and the Fourth of July ox roast.
“We didn’t want to raise our kids in Hollywood,” Jeff Daniels had said to me during our script meeting in his paddleboat.
“Everybody’s famous, and our friends, probably more often than not, would have been people in the Industry or famous people in the Industry. And I just wanted our kids to be away from that. There’s a fantasy world there that can mix with reality, and I just didn’t want them to be confused about that.”
I wasn’t sure I’d ever envied anyone more in my life than I did Jeff Daniels at that moment, when I shook his hand goodbye and drove over the bridge that smelled of skunk.
Naomi and I were going to drive over to Palm Springs with Evans and his new young girlfriend. At the last minute, Evans’s girlfriend couldn’t make it.
“Her stupid parents are taking her to Disneyland for the weekend,” Evans said.
There was nothing to eat in Malibu, except sushi. Oh, not really, of course, but certainly metaphorically.
After seven years of living there, I decided that I was starved. I didn’t want any more holy or saintly food. And I didn’t want to see any more waiters who acted like I’d insulted their genealogy when I asked for the salt and pepper.
Damn it, I wanted a juicy, blood-dripping prime rib! I wanted golden-crusted, breaded fried fish! I wanted Wiener schnitzel and the food of my Magyar forefathers! Burnt pork chops and chicken paprikás drenched with sour cream and big, buttered, and garlic-stuffed baked potatoes, not those shavings of organically grown designer potatoes they served here.
I couldn’t even find a decent loaf of bread in Malibu. Bread was unhealthy, bread put fat on you—I knew all the Malibu wisdom about bread—but I loved bread. I loved bread with butter on it, with anchovy paste on it, even, may the Good Lord forgive me, with deviled ham spread thick on it! But the bread they sold in Malibu was either so doughy it felt like you’d filled your stomach with bricks, or it was filled with all this healthy, good-for-you, you’ll-live-forever crap—raisins, bananas, olives, figs, blueberries.
I didn’t want it to be good for me! I just wanted to eat a crusty, light, and un-strawberry-douched loaf of bread that I could spread my deviled ham on or stuff my sausage into.
We had to drive forty minutes into Santa Monica to find the bread that I liked and, when I asked for the can of deviled ham at my Malibu grocery, the clerk tried to talk me into raspberry yogurt instead.
For those of us who felt that living in Malibu or Carbon Beach or Broad Beach provided a safe shelter from the violent hurly-burly of life in L.A. … there were occasional nasty reminders that we weren’t even safe out here.
Three chopped-up bodies were found in a park in Topanga Canyon, just off the Pacific Coast Highway.
And on a sunny Sunday afternoon, a man went up to a group of sunbathers on the beach, took out a nine-millimeter, and started firing bullets which sprayed the surf and sand. A group of men chased the gunman across the sand and up to the PCH and over it to the other side of the road into the hills as he shot at them and they shot at him.
Gangbangers, the police said, who’d come all the way from Compton to get a little sun on the beach just down the winding lane from Michael Eisner’s estate.
We were bored, too, with our friends. Almost all of them were Industry Friends and, while we weren’t big partygoers, we had them over for dinner or holidays. They had nothing to talk about, we painfully realized, except the Industry.
What movie Brad was doing next and why there was going to be no
Titanic
sequel and why Ovitz would fail with his management company.
It was like being around people who lived twenty-four hours a day inside a house wallpapered with
Daily Variety
, the
Hollywood Reporter
, and the
National Enquirer
. Discussions of even specific movies were not in terms of their artistic qualities but in terms of their budgets. Even those couples who had kids talked not about the kids but about the clothes at Baby Gap vs. the clothes at Fred Segal.
We couldn’t discuss books with them because our friends didn’t read books; they read scripts or, more likely, readers’ reports of scripts. Many of them were nice people, but there just wasn’t a whole lot of “there” there.
Many of them, too, didn’t seem to project a personality. They listened, they asked questions, they smiled: it was as though they were
afraid
to talk about themselves,
afraid
to reveal things about themselves, hiding themselves within cool and possibly Prozac-ed cocoons while they “interviewed” Naomi and me.
They were the extended family equation of the agent who calls you three times a week and says, “I’m just checking in,” and has absolutely nothing else to say. (“Don’t check in,” I said to such an agent once. “I’m a human being, not a hotel,” and he was so shook up by what I said that I had to fire him soon afterward.)
To have a stimulating political conversation with our friends was nearly impossible. They believed in the Enlightened Political Positions, but that was exactly the problem. They were all Liberal Democrats imbued with a Social Conscience. It was like we were all Moonies who’d had the same programming.
Voicing a different opinion about a combustible political issue was sacrilege, met not with rebuttal but with shock. I startled a roomful of friends by making a case against Bill Clinton and they thought I was kidding, Joe doing his quirky court jester–dancing bear act again, Joe the provocateur trying to get a rise out of them.
Certain of our friendships broke up for other reasons: a producer who
did
read books and did offer opinions and revelations decided to retire, took Berlitz courses, and was in Italy much of the time … an agent who knew the history of the business lost his job and was so humiliated he didn’t come out of his Westwood condo much anymore.
We started to realize that the only time we were at all stimulated by our friends was when they came in from out of town and were not Industry—or when they were family—especially Naomi’s three brothers: Bernie and Bep, both in the steel business in Ohio, and Jeremy, the successful non-Industry public relations man in Los Angeles.
Bernie and Bep weren’t interested in movie budgets and shooting schedules. They weren’t afraid to say, “Boy, what a piece of shit that movie was!” as opposed to our Industry friends who, when they felt that way about a movie, said, “I haven’t seen it yet.”
Bernie and Bep spoke honestly, with real human emotion, about their kids’ failures and successes. They weren’t afraid to make off-color cracks or politically incorrect remarks. They weren’t afraid to call Bill Clinton a “dumb asshole.”
I purposely held some things back from Naomi about Cleveland which I was afraid she might find disturbing.
In many ways, even living in glamorous fastest-track Malibu, we were already poster children for Midwestern family values.
Our focus was our family; our obsession was our children.
I grilled burgers and hot dogs on the Weber. We made a big deal about the Carving of the Thanksgiving Turkey. We took the boys down to see Baby Jesus in the nativity crèche on the Pacific Coast Highway each Christmas, as we took them to sit on Santa’s knee at the Broadway mall in Santa Monica.
I drove a pickup truck; Naomi drove a Chevy Suburban. Naomi said prayers with the boys each night before they fell asleep. We didn’t cheat on each other, we didn’t even flirt with others, we were devoted to our marriage.
We went searching for fresh corn in the summer. I liked buffets where they served country ham for Sunday brunch. We liked “real” country music: Willie and Ray Price and Ernest Tubb.
There was one other way we were Midwesterners, too: we’d had the four kids in only six years.
We’d created a very big family very fast and were still at it, thinking how wonderful it would be if we had a little girl … or how terrific it would be if we had our own basketball team … or
baseball
team.
None of this West Coast family planning nonsense for us! We didn’t give a
fuck
about the world’s overpopulation problem! My global consciousness was limited to certain globes of Naomi’s body.
There wasn’t a whole lot to do in the dead of winter in the Midwest. Sometimes
it
was even hard to leave the house and get out on the road, so people stayed inside and enjoyed indoor activities and had gigantic families. Not cool, California-style “extended” families, but the real, sweaty, intercourse-created thing.
We’d been staying inside and growing our family in the dead of winter in California even … the size family we could grow as Midwesterners
actually living in the Midwest …
seemed unlimited to us.
Within this intimate context, the fact that I was Hungarian-born was relevant, too. A Reuters wire story said, “Forget Latin lovers—horny Hungarians are now the most active between the sheets, leading a charge of Eastern Europeans in the global sex charts. Condom maker Durex’s annual global sex survey showed that Hungarian lovers enjoy sex 152 times a year. The French—fiercely proud of their sexual prowess—only manage 144 performances a year. The Italians and Spanish lag even further with scores of 119 and 123 times a year, while American make love an average of 118 times a year, Germans 120 and Australians 125.”
Naomi told me a story: “When I was a little girl we lived on Mifflin Lake and each year we waited for the ducks to come. They were the same ducks each year, led by a glorious-looking, strutting mallard. All the other ducks were always fluttering around the mallard, but he only had eyes for one scroungy-looking little duck, always after her, just her, always
loving her
. One day as he was loving her, a snapping turtle took one of her legs off. That didn’t stop the mallard. He kept loving her, just
her
. One year the ducks came and the mallard was there but the scroungy little duck he loved wasn’t. I knew that little duck was dead. And I knew that mallard had
loved her to death
.”