Hollywood Animal (18 page)

“Where are you?”

“Where do you think I am? I’m upstairs!”

I hurried up. I couldn’t imagine what was wrong. I’d left him seconds earlier and he was fine, still grumbling about having to eat herring and sour cream instead of a corned beef sandwich.

When I got off the elevator at the seventh floor, I saw him. He was at the end of the hall with his back to me. He was crouched over the hall phone. He was wearing only his boxer undershorts. I hurried to him.

“What are you doing out here in the hallway in your
gotchis
, Pop?” I asked him.

“I locked myself out.”

“How did you lock yourself out?”

“There are too many rooms in there,” he said. “I was going from the bedroom to the living room and I found myself out here.”

That night, when the limo pulled up to the theater—there were spotlights in the sky, flashbulbs going off, policemen everywhere—I thought we all looked good. My father and I had our rented tuxes on. Gerri was wearing her new evening gown and new shoes.

We got out of the limo and started walking down the red carpet as photographers were snapping and flashing away. Gerri was in the middle, her arms crooked into my father’s and mine.

“Who the hell is that?” one of the photographers yelled.

“The screenwriter,” another photographer said.

“You’re kidding me,” the photographer said, and stopped wasting his film.

· · ·

Halfway down the red carpet, Gerri suddenly stopped.

“Oh my God,” she said.

“What’s the matter?”

“I lost my shoe.”

I glanced back. I saw her shoe about five feet behind us on the red carpet. The three of us turned, arm in arm, and she very gracefully stepped into her shoe.

There were
F.I.S.T
. belt buckles and yellow
F.I.S.T
. trucks on the tables at the ABC Entertainment Complex’s largest banquet hall. I noticed that we were seated very far away from the main tables, far in the back. As a matter of fact, I didn’t even know some of the others at our table.

Norman walked the half mile from his table to ours and asked if I wanted to come over and meet Sly. The twinkle in Norman’s eye was pulsing.

“Aw come on,” I said.

But Gerri and I followed Norman across the vast hall and we finally got to Stallone’s table, which was surrounded by bodyguards. The bodyguards turned and stared at me as I approached.

Stallone got up with a big grin and stuck his hand out. I’d never met him, of course, and what struck me was that he was short standing next to me.

“Hey,” he said. He drew the word out.

“How ya doin’,” I asked.

I introduced Gerri. Stallone put his hand out to shake hers.

And Gerri hit him. Playfully, sort of, but hard enough. With her fist. Right in the gut. Stallone wasn’t expecting the sucker punch. He groaned a little, then turned it into a laugh.

“She hit you!” Jewison yelled. “
She hit you!
”

Everybody laughed and we went back to our table, where someone had stolen our yellow
F.I.S.T
. truck. (We wanted it for the kids.)

There was another premiere we were invited to days later—this one in Dubuque, Iowa, where the movie was filmed. Stallone was not attending this one. Studio rumors said that the father of one of those cheerleaders was very mad at him.

Our flight connected through Chicago and at the Chicago airport, I found the new issues of
Time
and
Newsweek
, which had reached the stands an hour earlier.

Time’s
review said “J.U.N.K.” and
Newsweek’s
said “Sylvester Hoffa.” The reviews were scathing.

“We’re dead meat, kid,” Norman said when I saw him in Dubuque.

I couldn’t believe what he was saying to me so casually: three years of
work
… “great buzz” … a red-carpet L.A. premiere … the hottest star in the business … and we were
dead meat
?

“Are you sure?” I said.

“I’m sure.”

“Now what do we do?”

He laughed. “We smile till our faces are sore.”

The studio sent me out on a publicity tour during the movie’s opening week. Marcia told me it was the first time they’d ever sent a
screenwriter
out on tour, but my Hatfields and McCoys act with Stallone had attracted so much attention from the press—
Esquire
had even done a long feature on it—that they thought it’d be worthwhile.

It wasn’t. Nobody in any of those cities—Cincinnati, St. Louis, Pittsburgh—knew what to do with me.
A screenwriter for Christ’s sake?
Most of the people interviewing me had never even
met
a screenwriter before.

I was a relief to the young PR woman who had been assigned to squire me around. Her previous tour had been with James Caan. James Caan, she said, did most of his interviews in his hotel suite with a towel loosely wrapped around him.

In Pittsburgh I met a salt-of-the-earth white-haired old exhibitor who insisted on showing me the real Pittsburgh. He took me to every good kielbasa place in town and drove me to the airport when I left.

“You’re a good kid,” he said, as I got out of the car, “but that goddamn piece of shit movie you wrote—I had eight people in my two theaters last night!”

In St. Louis, the last stop of the publicity tour, I met a young married woman who was at the Park Chase Hotel attending an emergency room nurses convention. She told me she had seen my movie
F.I.S.T
. a few days earlier and hated it but allowed me to escort her up to my suite anyway.

She called her husband from my suite while, naked, she knelt on the floor in front of me.

She told him how much she missed him and loved him and then she hung up and got busy with me.

When she was finished with me, she told me in great detail how the screenplay of
F.I.S.T
. should have been changed to make it a better movie.

Many years later, I put that hotel room scene at the Park Chase Hotel in St. Louis into my screenplay for
One Night Stand.

I’ve often wondered if that no-longer-young woman saw the movie and recognized herself kneeling on the floor naked and telling her husband how much she loved him
.

· · ·

F.I.S.T
. was a complete critical and commercial stiff and when that was clear, Sylvester Stallone apologized to me. He did it publicly, in
Us
magazine.

“I feel like a man who’s been burgling Joe Eszterhas’s house for the past year and a half,” he told
Us
and went on to say that he’d done no real work on the script: it was
all mine
.

I called Norman and said, “Well, what do you know? He’s a stand-up guy. He admits that he lost his bearings with all those magazine covers. How many times have you seen a big star actually do a public apology?”

“You schmuck,” Norman said. “Don’t you get it? The movie failed. All he’s doing is washing his hands: he’s saying
your
script is to blame. Not his—
yours
. He didn’t apologize when the movie had great buzz, did he?”

The day after
Us
magazine appeared on the stands, Sly’s manager, Herb Nanas, called and said Sly wanted to get together for lunch “so bygones can be bygones.”

We had lunch at the Universal commissary. Sly was working on
Paradise Alley
, a movie which he’d really written, and was in the middle of a blazing affair with his co-star, Joyce Ingalls.

A gigantic blowup of Joyce Ingalls and other Universal stars faced us as we ate. He wore a black T-shirt and black jeans and looked very
cut
. He was having vitamins and sprouts for lunch and I was eating a cheeseburger and French fries. He’d sneak his hand over every couple of minutes and steal some of my French fries.

“That woman is hot,” he said, staring at Joyce Ingalls’s blowup. “She’s driving me crazy. Certifiable, you know what I mean? Not as bad as Melinda Dillon on the movie, though. One night she just took off and started driving. She was in about the next state when they finally caught up with her.”

We talked about our feud.

“Did you really say I fight like a sissy?” he said.

“Yup. I sure did. Maybe I was stretching things a little, though.”

He looked at me and smiled.

He said, “Uh-huh.”

“Well, listen,” Sly said, “I’m sorry I said that stuff. My life has been so insane. This stuff just—like happened overnight to me. It doesn’t matter, though. Everybody in town knows it’s your script.”

“Yeah,” I said, “but the movie failed.”

“That fucking Jewison,” he said. “I told him. He wouldn’t listen to me. The public doesn’t want to see me die. I’m Rocky Balboa. You kill Rocky Balboa and there’s gonna be a price to pay.”

“You were supposed to be Johnny Kovak,” I said.

“Johnny Kovak is nothing compared to Rocky Balboa. He’s just a character you made up.”

“But isn’t Rocky Balboa,” I said, “just a character
you
made up?”

“Not anymore,” Sly said. “Rocky Balboa is an American myth now. He’s Superman with heart and vulnerability.”

He ate some more sprouts and he said, “Yo, Adrian,” and started to laugh.

“You know what I told Jewison? I said—Break this thing into two movies and release them a month apart in the theaters.
F.I.S.T
. I and
F.I.S.T. II
. The first one ends on a high—Kovak wins against the bad guys. Rocky Balboa triumphant. The audience would have eaten it up. Then, a month later, you put the other one out and get into
The Godfather
stuff.

“It would have worked,” Sly said. “I’m telling you it would have worked. But no—Jewison won’t listen to me. Directors, God help us. I’m gonna direct all my stuff from now on.”

A group of Universal executives sat down in the roped-off area near us and all nodded or waved to Sly, who grinned and waved back.

He ate some more of my French fries and shot them a glance.

“Those smiling motherfuckers,” he said. “They’ll spit me out like bad meat if I ever stop being hot. They think I don’t know it.”

He took me upstairs after our lunch and showed me his offices, furnished with expensive antiques, and took me over to the Moviola to show me some footage from
Paradise Alley
, which he had also directed.

He was watching himself on film and smiling and when Joyce Ingalls came onto the film his smile turned to a leer.

“Look at her,” he said, “just look at her.”

“You think she’s going to be a big star?” I asked.

“I don’t know,” he said. “Who knows? Who the hell knows anything in this town? Probably not, but she is sweet. She … is … sweet!”

These were his final words: “You tell Jewison we could’ve had a hit movie! Two parts would have done it! We could’ve had
two
hit movies!”

When I saw Marcia Nasatir that same afternoon, she told me that my novelization of
F.I.S.T
. had also badly failed. (The editor who had agreed to pay the record $400,000 price was in danger of losing his job.)

Marcia and I went for a walk around the studio backlot, our conversation echoing around blocks of false facades.

“Jesus, Marcia,” I asked her, “what’s going to happen now? Is my screenwriting career over?”

“Not a chance, honey,” Marcia told me with a smile. “You wrote a brilliant script—everybody in town read it. Sly Stallone is going to be a very big star. Norman Jewison will go on to direct many other movies.”

“You mean,” I said after a while, “there is no responsibility?”

We stopped and were staring at one of the false fronts—a huge brick wall with nothing but air behind it.

“When you called me on the phone and called me all those names …”

She let the sentence dangle and wasn’t looking at me. Our eyes were on the false facades.

I said—“Yes?”

“Did I make you take responsibility for saying those horrible things to me, calling me those vile names?”

I said—“No.”

We looked at each other then and she slowly smiled.

“It’s just Hollywood, honey,” Marcia said.