Hollywood Animal (17 page)

“Jesus, Barry,” I said, “you asked me to come down to L.A. to tell me this? Couldn’t you have done it over the phone?”

“Unless—” Barry Hirsch smiled. His blue eyes were ice.

“Unless what?”

“Unless they think you’re so crazy and out of control that you’ll do something rash.”

“Like what?”

“Like telling them that you’ll call Jimmy Hoffa’s son to tell him that this script became more and more about Jimmy Hoffa as it went along.”

“You mean blackmail them?” I said.

“I wouldn’t use that word,” Barry said and smiled.

“How do I convince them that I’m out of control?”

“You call them up and yell and scream.”

“Who would I call?”

“UA. Marcia’s your closest person there. I’d say you should call Marcia.”

“You mean,” I said, “I call the person who got me into movies, whom I’m very fond of, and call her a bunch of names—”

“She won’t take it personally anyway. She’ll figure out this is business.”

“—and threaten to blackmail her company by getting Jimmy Hoffa’s family involved in this?”

“It’s up to you,” Barry said, “you want the money or don’t you?”

“Are you sure she won’t take it personally?”

“She’s been around,” Barry said. “This kind of thing happens all the time in this town. She’ll forgive you. It’s in her interest to forgive you. She wants to work with you again.”

“But I will have hurt her,” I said.

Barry smiled.

Barry said, “She won’t allow herself to feel any pain.”

I made the call from Barry’s office with Barry sitting next to me, although I didn’t tell Marcia that. I called her a bunch of terrible names, used a lot of obscenities, and pretended to have Jimmy Hoffa’s son’s phone number in my hand and then hung up before she could say too much.

“That was great.” Barry smiled. “I’ve never seen anybody make that kind of phone call better.”

“Now what?” I said.

“Now.” He smiled again. “We wait for the phone to ring.”

It rang no more than ten minutes later, Marcia Nasatir for Barry Hirsch. I sat there as Barry took the call.

I heard Barry say that yes, I was obviously a man out of control—he was doing his best, but … Then I heard Barry not saying anything for a while and he finally said, “Seventy percent—his way.”

Barry listened for a long time again, I could hear Marcia’s voice loud and upset, and then Barry said, “Sixty would be fine.”

They hung up shortly after that and Barry turned to me and said: “Sixty percent of $400,000 is $240,000, that’s what you’re getting for the novelization.”

We laughed a bit and celebrated and Barry said, “Call her tomorrow and apologize.”

“Won’t she find that a little suspicious? That I’m under control so fast?”

“She knows what it’s about,” Barry said. “She
likes
you. She’ll appreciate the call.”

I called Marcia the next day and apologized. She accepted my apology graciously, called me “honey,” and said she was pleased we were “one big happy family again.”

That left the matter of screen credit to deal with—or so I thought.

Lynn Nesbit informed me that Dell, publishing the novelization, intended to use a picture of Sylvester Stallone on the jacket cover.

I said, “So?”

Lynn said, “So we have a big problem. Stallone has to approve the cover art. If he doesn’t approve the cover art, Dell isn’t publishing the book.”

I called Barry Hirsch and told him. He said he’d call Jake Bloom, Stallone’s lawyer.

Barry called me back the next day. Jake had spoken to Sly and Sly said he’d be happy to approve the cover art.

I said: “That is fantastic!”

“If,” Barry Hirsch said, “you don’t take the credit issue to the Writers Guild and agree to give Stallone co-screenplay credit.”

“Let me get this straight,” I said to Barry. “We manage to get $240,000 by blackmailing UA and now if I don’t agree to Stallone’s blackmail, I don’t get any of the money.”

“I wouldn’t use that word,” Barry Hirsch said. “We made an arrangement with UA. We’ll just make another arrangement with Sly.”

We did: I got the $240,000, from which I was able to buy my family our first house. Sylvester Stallone was very cooperative with Dell Books and approved the cover art.

The credit of
F.I.S.T
. reads—Story by Joe Eszterhas, Screenplay by Joe Eszterhas and Sylvester Stallone.

The check for $240,000 from Dell Books arrived via Special Delivery mail at the house we were renting in Mill Valley. I kept staring at it. It was more money than my father had made in the twenty-five years he’d been in the United States. I lit up a joint and kept staring at the check. The zeroes seemed to be dancing around the living room.

The next morning Gerri and I drove into San Francisco for a meeting with a team of accountants that Barry Hirsch had recommended. It was an entire roomful of suits and I still felt a little stoned.

This money, I soon learned, was a big problem. We had IRS payments to consider, California tax payments, insurance policies, trust funds for the kids, stocks and bonds, real estate maybe. I kept saying all I wanted to do was buy us a house.

One of the suits said, “It might be smarter to put it into windmills. They’re a better investment now.”

“I don’t want a windmill,” I said, “I want a house that’s ours for the kids.”

“A house may not be the best investment you can make,” another suit said.

“I don’t care about it being a good investment,” I said, “I just want to live in it. I want to eat and sleep in it. I want to go to the bathroom in it.”

“We can get you a great deal on a limited partnership for some windmills outside Palm Springs,” one of them said.

The meeting went on interminably. We had all kinds of forms to sign. We were setting up checking accounts, savings accounts, we were setting up a company.

“A what?” I said.

“A company. We can get you a real tax break by setting up a company and having you paid not to you but to the company.”

“But this check here”—I kept looking at the zeroes—“This isn’t made out to a company, it’s made out to my name.”

“We’ll send the check back,” one of them said.

“Dell would be happy to make it out to a company once we set one up,” another one said.

“Of course we’ll have to redraw the contracts,” said a third.

“No,” I said.
“No!
I am not sending this check back! Do we all understand that? We are not sending this check back! We are
cashing
it!”

“
Cashing
it?” one of them laughed. “You can’t just
cash
a check like that—you have to put it into an account of some kind.”

“Fine,” I said, “we’re putting it into an account, but we ARE NOT SENDING IT BACK!”

I was exhausted when we got home. The check was no longer in my hands, the bastards had put it away into some kind of an account. I couldn’t see the dancing zeroes on the ceiling when I lit up that night’s joint.

I slept restlessly, my head full of windmills and tax payments and redrawn contracts. When I woke up in the morning, I felt like my heart was going to blow out of my chest. My breathing was funny.

We called the paramedics—by now I thought I felt my left arm starting to hurt. They put me into an ambulance and headed for Marin General Hospital.

On the way there, a construction crew held up traffic. I jumped out of the ambulance with the paramedics running after me and started screaming at the head of the construction crew. He wore a hardhat with the name “Brinkerhoff” stenciled on it.

“I’m having a heart attack, goddamnit,” I yelled at Brinkerhoff, “you’ve got to let us through.”

He took one look at me and started shepherding his guys off the road.

At Marin General, they told me that I was not having a heart attack.

My doctor came over and said I’d had an anxiety attack. He told me to stop drinking coffee and to stop smoking dope.

“Have you been under any stress lately?” he asked.

“Well, no,” I said, “everything’s cool. As a matter of fact, I’ve just gotten a lot of money.”

“Well, shit,” he said, “that’ll do it every time. I’ve seen quite a few cases of guys having anxiety attacks after they made a lot of money.”

I thanked him and he offered to drive me home.

“By the way,” he said, “what did you make the money on?”

“On
F.I.S.T
.,” I said.

“Oh, that’s the thing Stallone wrote, isn’t it?” he said.

Meanwhile, I was still throwing up every morning. It had begun when I had actually begun writing the screenplay and it was still with me now. I was beginning to think that this was just part of being a screenwriter.

I woke up, thought about the writing I had to do that day, and then I threw
up,
I had some orange juice and an English muffin, and then I sat down at my typewriter and worked on my script. Part of it, I knew, was that I was afraid I didn’t know what I was doing and, with the babies in the house, there was a lot of pressure.

Gerri was concerned about my health and I went to see doctors and specialists. Invasive and humiliating tests were performed on various private parts. The doctors said I was in perfect health.

“Is it perfectly healthy to be throwing up every morning?” I asked my doctor. It was the same doctor who’d told me he’d seen many cases of sudden money leading to anxiety attacks.

“Did this ever happen to you when you were poor?”

“No. I was hungry when I was poor but I was never nauseous.”

“There you go,” he said. “It’s part and parcel of the same big-gift package.”

Approaching release,
F.I.S.T
., Norman told me, had “a terrific buzz.”

“What’s a buzz?” I asked him.

“An advance word of mouth.”

“That’s great,” I said.

“It doesn’t mean anything.”

“It doesn’t? Why not?”

“Because very few people have seen it.”

“How can there be a buzz if few people have seen it?”

“It beats me,” Norman Jewison said, “but it happens in Hollywood all the time.”

“Well,” I said, “it still sounds good. Maybe we’ll have a hit movie.”

“Don’t buy the mink coat on it yet.” Norman laughed.

Stallone, meanwhile, Norman told me, had set up a punching bag and written the name “Eszterhas” on it. He’d had himself photographed while punching it.

Jewison thought that was funny. “It’s getting a lot of press,” he said. “It’s like the Hatfields and the McCoys now. The whole town thinks it’s a great publicity stunt.”

“It’s not a publicity stunt,” I said, “the goddamn guy—”

“Yeah, I know.” Norman was laughing. “Save it for the reporters.”

I was invited to the movie’s premiere. It would be a big Hollywood gala, the opening of Los Angeles’s Filmex film festival. There would be red carpets and photographers and television coverage. Stallone would be there.

My father, at the age of seventy-one, was flying out from Cleveland. My wife was shopping for an evening gown. I had to rent a tux. We were on our way to our first Hollywood premiere—and the studio was picking up all the costs.

There was a suite waiting for us at the Beverly Wilshire. A limousine would meet us at the airport and would stay with us until we flew back. None of us had ever been in a suite or a limousine before.

We got into the limo at LAX and there was a chilled bottle of Dom Pérignon in the back seat, courtesy of United Artists. I popped the champagne open and sprayed it all over myself.

When we checked into the Wilshire, an attractive assistant manager led us up to our suite.

“Why is she coming with us?” my father whispered to me in Hungarian.

“She’s taking us to the room.”

“Does she want money?”

“I don’t know.”

“She must want money, that’s why she’s coming.”

“I’ll give her some money.”

“Why should you give her money? We didn’t ask her to come.”

“It’s okay, Pop.”

“Will the studio give it back to you?”

“I don’t know, Pop.”

“Can you call them to find out?”

The suite had two bedrooms and was magnificent. There were vases of flowers everywhere.

I thanked the assistant manager and offered her a $5 tip. She smiled and took it and left.

“How much did you give her?” my father asked me in Hungarian.

I told him.

“
Five dollars?
You gave her
five dollars
? All she did was open the door.”

My wife was checking out the flowers: cards were attached from Norman and Marcia and Gene Corman.

I wanted this to be a Hollywood day for us. We trooped back into the limo and went to Scandia for lunch. United Artists had made the reservation for us. Scandia was the best seafood place in town. A bottle of Dom Pérignon was waiting for us when the maître d’ led us to our table, courtesy of United Artists.

We looked at our menus and ordered.

My father said to the waiter, “Corn beef sandwich.” He spoke with a thick accent.

The waiter said: “Excuse me?”

“Corn beef,” my father said, louder now.

The waiter looked at me. “I’m sorry,” he said, “I’m having difficulty understanding—”

“My father would like a corned beef sandwich,” I said.

“We don’t serve corned beef sandwiches, sir,” the waiter said to me a little haughtily.

I told my father in Hungarian that they didn’t have corned beef.

“
No corn beef
?” my father said, acting as though he’d been insulted.

“What kind of place did you bring me to?” he said. “This is the biggest place in Hollywood and they don’t have a corn beef sandwich?”

When we got back to the hotel, my father decided to take a nap before the night’s festivities. Gerri was getting her hair done and I had an interview in the hotel bar with another reporter who wanted to do a story about my feud with Sylvester Stallone.

While I was passing through the lobby on the way to the bar, a receptionist suddenly stopped me. “Mr. Eszterhas,” she said, “I have a phone call for you.”

I stepped to the phone and heard my father on the other end.

“Get up here!” he said in Hungarian. He sounded very upset.