Joe Eszterhas - Hollywood Animal

CONTENTS

About the Book

He spent his earliest years in post-World War Two refugee camps. He came to America and grew up in Cleveland stealing cars, rolling drinks, battling priests, nearly going to jail. He became the screenwriter of the world-wide hits Basic Instinct, Jagged Edge and Flashdance. He also wrote the legendary disasters Showgirls and Jade. The rebellion never ended, even as his films went on to gross more than a billion dollars at the box office and he became the most famous or infamous screenwriter in Hollywood.

About the Author

Joe Eszterhas is also the author of American Rhapsody and Charlie Simpsons Apocalypse, which was nominated for the National Book Award. His screenplays include Basic Instinct, Flashdance, Jagged Edge, Telling Lies in America, Showgirls, Sliver, Jade, Music Box, Betrayed, F.I.S.T., and An Alan Smithee Film: Burn Hollywood Burn. He lives in Bainbridge Township, Ohio, with his wife and four sons. He is also the father of two grown children from his first marriage.

For Steve, Suzi, Joey,

Nick, John Law, Luke

and Naomi, Sunlight

If freedom is truth and love,

then love is truth and freedom.

Istvn Eszterhs,

The Last Poem

CHAPTER 1

The King of Point Doom

KARCHY

I wanna show off the car. I wanna show you off.

DINEY

Why do you have to show off all the time?

KARCHY

I aint got that much to show.

Telling Lies in America

I

MY GREAT-GRANDFATHER GREW up a poor kid in a tiny village in Hungary. He was about to be drafted into the Austro-Hungarian army and he fled to America. He worked as a miner in Pennsylvania for a while but didnt like the work. He went out to the American West and became a stagecoach robber. He became wealthy. He rode with Black Bart and Jesse James.

I grew up a poor kid in the refugee camps of Austria and on the West Side of Cleveland, Ohio. I worked as a furniture mover, a disc jockey, and a newspaper reporter, but I didnt like the work. I went out to the American West and became a screenwriter.

I rode with a whole lot of famous hombres.

I sold screenplays in Hollywood for record amounts of money.

My agent, Guy McElwaine, referred to these sales as bank heists.

My wife, Naomi, wore a leather strap of silver bullets around one of her cowboy boots when I met her.

And when she knew she had fallen in love with me, she gave me the strap of silver bullets and tied them around one of my cowboy boots.

The day I married her, I wore her silver bullets.

My great-grandfather took his fortune and went back to the village in Hungary where he had grown up. Old crones wearing black babushkas said they saw him through the cellar windows of his castle playing cards by candlelight with the devil.

He had sold his soul to the devil in the American West and was trying to win it back now.

When I was a screenwriter in Hollywood, the Los Angeles Free Press wrote that I had sold my soul to the devil.

A columnist in South Dakota wrote that I was in the devils employ.

A Canadian magazine wrote that I was a devil living in Malibu.

My hometown newspaper, the Cleveland Plain Dealer, wrote about me with a headline that said, EszterhasOrdinary Joe or Satans Agent?

A cartoon in Entertainment Weekly showed the devils hand on my shoulder and these words: December 31, 1999The Devil Takes Formal Possession of Joe Eszterhas Soul.

A secretary at Paramount who liked to wear Blessed Virgin Mary T-shirts had a vision of me.

I was ascending from the putrid steam of a black-water pond.

And shortly after her vision, during the making of the movie Sliver, the actor Billy Baldwin and I were walking down Melrose Avenue in Los Angeles heading into a bar owned by the actor Tony Danzas brother.

A bag lady approached us, took one look at me, made the sign of the cross, and turned around and ran in the other direction.

Wow! Billy Baldwin said, maybe you are the devil.

That secretary who liked to wear Blessed Virgin Mary T-shirts and said I was the devil worked for the producer Robert Evans.

My friend Robert Evans, as everyone in Hollywood knows, really is the devil.

Evans, the producer of Sliver, liked my Sliver script so much that he sent a voluptuous redhead wearing only a mink coat over to my hotel. She pulled a note out of a certain intimate body part.

Best first draft Ive ever read, the note said. Love, Evans.

The note smelled fantastic.

That mink coat she wore, I later discovered, belonged not to her but to Evans. He dressed all the girls in that same mink coat on the occasions when he was dispatching them as fragrant human telegrams.

II

Our house in the part of Malibu known as Point Dume overlooked the sea.

Wolfgang Pucks Granita, just down the road on the Pacific Coast Highway, catered our dinner parties. We bought our air-shipped white truffles at the Trancas Market, where Tom and Nicole shopped. We bought clothes for our four boys at Ninety-Nine Percent Angels, where Demi roamed with her team of nannies.

Sean Penn and Charlie Sheen and Emilio Estevez and Jan-Michael Vincent used to hang out at our neighborhood bar, the Dume Room. A few blocks south of us was a ramshackle little seafront house where William Saroyan once lived, collecting stones. So many stones that when he moved away, he needed two houses to store them.

Naomi and I and our little boys lived in our house by the sea. We had a swimming pool behind the house, a hot tub, a guesthouse.

We lived right across the street from Bob Dylans house. Bobs roosters woke us each morning. His mastiffs left great heaping mountains of dog doo in front of our gate.

Buzz magazine picked Naomi and me as two of the scariest people in Los Angeles and as the scariest couple in Los Angeles. Other scariest people were Michael Jackson, Barbra Streisand, Val Kilmer, Heidi Fleiss, John Tesh, and my producer pal Robert Evans. There were no other scariest couples nominated. Naomi and I won that category unanimously.

Naomi is part Polish and part Italian. She is the most beautiful woman Ive ever met. She is also the smartest. She told me she will hunt me down and kill me if I ever cheat on her.

I will never cheat on her because she is my best friend and my wondrous lover. Also because I love her more than my children and I love my children more than anything in the world.

Naomi and I have four little boys: Joey, nine, Nick, six, John Law, four, and Luke, two.

Dicks, Naomi said to me recently. I wake up in the morning and all I see in every direction I look are dicks.

I have two grown children from my first marriageSteve (also known as LaMon, also known as D. J. Rogue) is twenty-eight. Hes a white African-American. Hes the only white African-American member of the family, although Suzi, twenty-six (also known as Mo), spends a lot of time in Africa, photographing wildlife.

I think Suzi prefers wildlife to human beings.

I think she felt that way even before I left her mother, Gerri Javor, my first wife.

Even before we met, Naomi had spent months studying my face. She was a talented graphic artist and her boyfriend had given her a photograph of me and asked her to make a drawing of me as a Christmas present.

I thought her pencil portrait remarkable, especially my eyes. Naomi had drawn me with sad, wounded eyes.

You must understand why Naomi is the love of my life.