Authors: Joe Eszterhas
I found myself atop a church next door to a sorority house where I knew a girl who wouldn’t sleep with me.
I was hanging on to the cross on the roof of the church, bare-chested, a bottle of Jack Daniel’s in one hand, a big cigar in the other.
I was yelling very loudly so the girl I knew in the sorority house could hear me.
I was yelling, “Father, forgive them, for they know not what they do!”
At the time I went to the White House and got a million dollars’ worth of publicity for Ohio University, I was on disciplinary probation for:
Thanks to all the publicity I got at the White House, the university quickly took me off disciplinary probation, but …
I never did graduate.
I spent the thousand dollars I was awarded not on my further education but on a used car: a three-year-old blue Ford.
Two years later, in Dayton, Ohio, where I was working as a reporter, I
crashed
the car into a light post after drinking too many beers. I pretty well demolished my car and broke two fingers on the steering wheel.
I parked it on the street in a no-parking zone and the police towed it the next morning.
I was making so little money as a beginning reporter … even one who’d been awarded a brass medal at the White House … that I couldn’t pay either the towing or the fix-it costs.
I let the Dayton police department keep my blue Ford.
I had no medical insurance and I didn’t have enough money to go to a doctor, so I let my two broken fingers heal on their own.
Almost forty years later, they still hurt sometimes.
X
I went to Hollywood for the first time in the early seventies while I was a writer for
Rolling Stone
magazine, then in San Francisco. I was on assignment to meet two priests of a satanic cult called the Process.
I don’t know why my devilish priests picked Hollywood as the site of our meeting but they did.
While I was waiting for them, I checked out Grauman’s Chinese Theatre and the Hollywood Roosevelt Hotel. I saw a used-car lot with caged reindeer atop its office. I bought an autographed photo of Zsa Zsa Gabor for $3. I stayed in a motel on Hollywood Boulevard and shared some lines of cocaine and his girlfriend with a bass guitarist from Miami who was staying at the same motel.
The devilish priests called me at the motel and switched the meeting site to Palm Springs, so I took a Greyhound over there and waited for them at the old Biltmore, ramshackle and falling apart, but once the meeting place for Hollywood stars sunning in the desert.
I waited three days for Satan’s helpers to show but they stood me up. Meanwhile, I read a worn paperback of Mailer’s
The Deer Park
, the best book ever written about Hollywood.
I took the Greyhound back to Hollywood, thinking I’d had a total Hollywood experience: Satan, Zsa Zsa, cocaine, a shared bimbo, sun, and Mailer’s doomed characters.
· · ·
Except for Zsa Zsa Gabor, I was now Hollywood’s most famous or infamous living Hungarian.
Through the years, Hollywood had experienced many other famous or infamous Hungarians: Ivan Nagy, Heidi Fleiss’s boyfriend; Mickey Hargitay, Jayne Mansfield’s muscleman husband; Adolph Zukor, Jolie Gabor, Thomas Ince, the Korda brothers, Vilma Banky, Ilona Massey, Eva Gabor, George Cukor,
Cornel
Wilde, S. Z. Sakall, Magda Gabor, Ernie Kovacs, Joe Pasternak, Tony Curtis, Leslie Howard, Bela Lugosi, etc., etc.
There had even been a sign at the cash register of the MGM commissary that said, “It’s not enough to be Hungarian, you still have to pay for the chicken soup.”
Through the years, people in Hollywood had gotten to know Hungarians and said these things about us:
Yet even as I was becoming famous or infamous, for many years I kept resisting the town, happy to take Hollywood’s money but keeping Hollywood at arm’s length, dealing with Hollywood people over the phone or during hurried trips to L.A. but keeping myself aloof from …
From what, exactly?
Well, from everything I had heard and read about the place—to put it more exactly: from everything I’d read and heard had happened to writers there.
Writers got fucked there, they got their hearts broken there, they had their balls cut off there, they got screwed, blued, and tattooed.
Look at Fitzgerald, writing his scripts out there, broke, drinking full glasses of gin, taking notes from studio moguls, sleeping with a gossip columnist …
dying
there, between her legs, it was said. So tawdry, so
Hollywood
—Fitzgerald
dying
there
between the gossip columnist’s legs
—please God! no—think Philip Roth atop Leeza Gibbons or Saul Bellow atop Rona Barrett.
Or look at Faulkner in Hollywood, doing his rewrites at Howard Hawks’s beck and call, taking Hawks’s notes, slugging bourbon from the silver flask in his tweed coat’s pocket, falling down drunk, flat on his face, during a script meeting—William Faulkner sleeping for years with a script girl, a secretary from the studio’s pool—but at least he went back to Mississippi after many years of screenwriting, at least he didn’t die between the secretary’s legs.
What Hemingway said made a lot of sense: a writer, he said, should get as close to Hollywood as the Nevada-California border. He should take Hollywood’s money at the border and turn right back around and head east.
And when he left Hollywood and drove back to Mississippi, Bill Faulkner,
screenwriter,
actually stopped at the California state line and got out of his car.
If it were up to him, he thought, he would erect a sign for travelers going into California: “Abandon hope, all ye who enter here!”
I stayed away from Hollywood for seventeen years while I was working there—
seventeen years
of commuting from Marin County for meetings with studio executives and studio heads,
seventeen years
of dinners at Morton’s and stays at the old Beverly Wilshire and the Westwood Marquis.
Even though I always had the feeling deep inside … (deep, deep inside, in the refugee camp part of me, in the blackest part of my heart) that I had nothing to fear, that the studios couldn’t fuck
me
or break
my
heart. That I’d do the fucking and the nut-cutting, thank you. That I was a hunkie from Cleveland, made not out of Fitzgerald porcelain or Faulkner oyster shell but out of some rusted, red-hot bastard metal—like …
Mailer
.
Yes, that was it, Norman
Friggin
’ Mailer!
Mailer, who’d gone to Hollywood, had his ass kissed by the whole town, banged Shelley Winters, and left, his only seeming regret that he hadn’t been able to nail Marilyn (how it would obsess him that it was that long string of intellectual spaghetti, Miller, who’d done it).
Oh, well, never mind, if not nailing Marilyn was your only regret, that was good enough for me—Mailer, the tough guy from Brooklyn, would be my role model.
I didn’t know then that I’d create my own Marilyn and that
I’d
nail
her
. But that nailing her would pale in comparison with the havoc that her presence would wreak with my life.
I’m glad I nailed her, though. Not because I nailed mine (as Paddy Chayefsky had nailed his) and Mailer didn’t nail his. Not because nailing her felt all that good (it was okay). But because as a result of Sharon Stone’s presence in my life, I met and married Naomi, my one true love.
I didn’t attach too much significance to my one-night stand with Sharon.
I had done other one-night stands in Hollywood and so, I guess, had she. So I didn’t think Sharon had attached much significance to it either.
I figured that since I had written the biggest hit of her life for her, she was just saying thank you.
I knew most screenwriters would have felt
overwhelmed
… Paddy Chayefsky never did get over Kim Novak!
And I knew that Sharon thought she was flattering me that night, but still …
Basic Instinct
had been the number one box office hit of the year
… in the whole world!
I felt I deserved her.
Robert Evans had stirred this unholy brew with Sharon and me by getting me to agree to write the screenplay for Ira Levin’s novel
Sliver
.
That’s how I met Bill and Naomi Macdonald.
That’s how I could introduce my friend Sharon to my friend Bill.
That was the only way, the shrinks would say … outside of homicide … that I could have Naomi for myself.
Naomi was the real (subconscious) reason I introduced Sharon and Bill.
Such a devilish concatenation of events, no wonder that Evans’s favorite movie was
Rosemary’s Baby
, a movie about the devil also written by Ira Levin. No wonder that as an actor, Evans had played
The Fiend Who Walked the West
.
The only reason I’d agreed to write
Sliver
was that Evans was broke and down on his luck, curled up in the fetal position much of the time, staring into space, humming.
He had been suspected of murder and had been convicted of possessing cocaine. He adored women but was living off handouts from his brother, Charlie, and Jack Nicholson.
Evans defined Hollywood and the movies to me. His films, either as producer or studio chief, included
The Godfather
and
Love Story
and
Rosemary’s Baby
and
Chinatown
, and Ali MacGraw and Phyllis George and Camilla Sparv and hundreds, maybe thousands of gorgeous women were always hanging around his house.
I loved movies and, may God forgive me, I liked Evans a lot, too.
It’s only fair, too, that I put my hand on the Bible and state this about Evans: All the lies ever told anywhere about Robert Evans are true.
The script I wrote for
Sliver
was somehow a part of this evil mix.
In my script, Sharon discovered that Billy Baldwin was a murderer and didn’t care—because she loved him and was convinced he loved her. She married him. That’s how
my
script ended.
And that’s what caused that secretary in Evans’s office wearing the Blessed Virgin Mary T-shirt to flip out and say I had written a script on the side of evil.
That was the ending which Evans had liked so much that he sent the human telegram wearing only the mink coat over to my hotel.
According to that secretary in the Blessed Virgin Mary T-shirt, then—my script was sympathetic to the devil.
And the fact that it was sympathetic to the devil is, of course, what made
Evans,
the real devil, like it so much.
When I met him, the devil had just finished making a documentary about Pope John Paul II.
He had done the documentary by court order, part of his sentence for possessing cocaine.
XI
I’d always loved movies. My parents and I arrived in America from the refugee camps in 1950 and went to Cleveland shortly afterward. We lived above the printing shop of the newspaper where my father had just been hired as editor. We lived on Lorain Avenue, a blue-collar “strudel ghetto” made up of the ethnic poor.
I was in love with movies before I ever saw one.
My father went to the Lorain Fulton, the theater down the street from us, once a week and I couldn’t wait until he got home. I’d kneel at the window of our apartment overlooking the street, excited to see his roly-poly figure shuffling in the darkness through the snow. He kept a box of popcorn under his coat so it would still be warm and handed it to me as soon as he came through the door.
I ate the popcorn slowly, kernel by kernel, licking my fingers.
· · ·
Pretty soon he was taking me with him to see movies like
Open City
and
Paisan
and
Bicycle Thief
and
Bitter Rice
. I was seven years old. My mother was too religious to come with us: she stayed home to say the Rosary, which was broadcast on WERE, in English. She was combining learning this new language with her belief in God.
The Lorain Fulton was playing Italian-made neorealist classic movies because the theater was in an ethnic neighborhood where most people couldn’t speak English anyway so they didn’t mind the subtitles.
Also, many of the immigrants living on Lorain had picked up bits and pieces of Italian in the refugee camps so they found it easier watching Italian movies than American ones.
Also, these movies were about World War II and most of these immigrants were here on Lorain Avenue
because
of World War II, so it made sense to the theater owner probably that they would feel right at home with the subject matter up there on the big screen.
I felt right at home
… with that bombed-out building up on-screen—it was just like the one we’d been in that was bombed out in Szombathely: and those soldiers rolling around with that naked girl in the grass on-screen, why that was just like the naked woman I’d seen …
I munched my nice hot popcorn. I was watching scenes I’d already experienced. At age seven, I was already educating myself, without even knowing it, without even speaking English—to be an American screenwriter. (A critic who didn’t like
Showgirls
would say, years later, “it’s obvious English is his second language.”)
Sitting in the dark munching hot popcorn, my dad next to me, watching girls rolling around naked in the grass, I liked movies a lot!
The very first movie I saw alone was
High School Confidential!
with Russ Tamblyn.