Hollywood Animal (22 page)

At noon the next day the teenager gave himself up and we were allowed to get off the floor of our spare bedroom.

Steve and Suzi went back to bed and slept for twenty hours.

I drank a half bottle of Tanqueray gin and Gerri and I talked about how awful it was that our children could be so horribly traumatized in such a peaceful place.

The teenager went to a psychiatric facility for a month, came home, and blew his brains out.

His older brother, we discovered, had killed himself a decade earlier by jumping off the Golden Gate Bridge.

Some months later, the teenager’s parents made a complaint to the Humane Society that one of our dogs was keeping them awake at night barking.

I responded that the dog had been traumatized by all the shooting which their dead son had done.

The Humane Society ruled that their complaints about our dog were without merit.

There had been strains in our marriage before and Hollywood did nothing to ease them. Gerri never wanted to come to L.A. on my commutes, sensing that
the
world there was a very different place from Marin, then noted for its rustic and harmonious vibes.

Hollywood in the seventies was movie excess—coke on silver platters at all the parties, “chicks” ready and willing to do anything and everything to somehow get involved in the business. I’ll never forget a famous director at a party one night, on his hands and knees on a thick white shag rug. He was trying to snort up the coke he had dropped, a very difficult business with a white shag rug.

When my son Steve was six years old, he fell in love with
Jaws
. He watched it over and over again. Then he watched the sequels over and over again. He learned all the dialogue in
all
of them.

He walked around the house wearing a shark tooth all the time. Then he started collecting shark teeth and shark jaws.

Steven Spielberg called one day and Steve picked the phone up and introduced himself to Steven as the little boy in
Jaws
who died.

I met a young woman who was an assistant to one of the more powerful producers in town. He was wooing me to do a script for him so it seemed I spoke to her incessantly: the guy would call all the time and insisted that we meet whenever I was in L.A.

I liked her. She was from a small town in Texas and had a raunchy and lively sense of humor. She liked to drink and had a seemingly inexhaustible stash of coke. She also had a cynical wisdom about the business and had a Dallas Cowboys cheerleader body and face. It began with drinks and then a dinner and before I knew it we were having an affair.

I realized I was compartmentalizing my life—there was Hollywood and then there was Marin County, schools, and pediatricians—but it was difficult to compartmentalize this affair simply because she’d call three times a day, placing the calls for her boss but managing to have very personal, sometimes intimate conversations with me before she put her boss on. After a while I realized she was getting too involved and decided to end it.

I saw her for dinner in L.A. and tried to tell her it was over but we had both had too much to drink and wound up back at my hotel. We got into the coke then and I wound up breaking the news to her at four o’clock in the morning.

She flipped out and called me a bunch of names. I agreed that they were all accurate. She went home to her apartment in Westwood.

She called me about an hour later and said, “I can still smell you.”

I said, “Take a shower.”

She hung up and called me back in ten minutes and said: “If you don’t let me come back there right now I’m calling your wife to tell her what’s been going on.”

I knew she had my home number and I knew from the sound of her voice that she meant it.

“Come on over,” I said.

She came back and after a while I managed to calm her and she fell asleep. I went into the living room of the suite and called her boss. It was five o’clock in the morning.

He kept saying, “Oh my God, Oh my God,” and asked if he could come over and talk to her.

He arrived forty-five minutes later, went into the bedroom, and they left together.

She called me later that day and apologized. Her producer boss called shortly after that.

“Did she call you to apologize?” he asked. I said that she had and thanked him for cooling her out.

“I didn’t cool her out,” he said. “I told her she’d
never work in this town again
unless she left right now and called to apologize to you.

“Hey,” he said, “you owe me one. You gonna do that script for me now?”

I did not write the script for him but she called me about a year later and asked me to recommend her for a job she was applying for at a studio. I recommended her and she got the job.

I had known Jim Morgan since we were both reporters at the police beat in Cleveland. I worked for the
Plain Dealer
and he worked for the
Cleveland Press
.

He left the
Press
and went to Germany to edit an army publication, the
Overseas Weekly
. He came back with his wife, Karen, a high school sweetheart, edited the
Overseas Weekly
in California for a while, and then started to freelance. He was having a tough time making a living; Karen, an executive secretary in the corporate world, essentially supported him.

We became the best of friends. We had writing and backgammon in common, as well as Cleveland. When I started writing screenplays, Jim got interested, too, and I started telling him my Hollywood adventures.

He came to me one day with an idea for a screenplay that he thought we should write together. It was about a blue-collar guy who worked in the service department of a car dealership, an ordinary sort of all-American husband and father who winds up getting into politics because the streetlight in front of his house goes out and nobody wants to fix it.

I thought it sounded like a fun idea and we started working on it without telling anyone. Jim did a draft and then I did one and then he did one and after about three months we had a screenplay:
City Hall
, by Joe Eszterhas and Jim Morgan.

· · ·

I called Guy McElwaine and told him I had written a new screenplay with my friend and Guy was not happy.

“You don’t write scripts for nothing,” he said.

“It’s not for nothing, I’m hoping you can sell it.”

“But when you wrote it, you weren’t being paid to write it, were you?”

“No. But I will be if you sell it.”

“That’s not the point,” Guy said. “The point is that only amateurs write for nothing in this town. By the time real screenwriters sit down at the typewriter, they have money in hand.”

I tried to tell him that I had fun writing this with Jim. I didn’t have to have any inane discussions with studio executives about it, I didn’t have to listen to their innocuous ideas. As a matter of fact, it was the most fun I’d ever had writing a script.

“Only unknown writers write spec scripts,” Guy said. “They do it as a writing sample so they can get hired on real jobs.”

But he agreed to read it. We sent it down to him and he said, “Okay, I can sell it but don’t ever surprise me like this again.”

What Guy planned to do was to send it out to several financiers and try to get them to bid against each other. He singled out Warner Brothers, Universal, Paramount, and MGM.

The day of the auction was the final game of the World Series between the Kansas City Royals and the Philadelphia Phillies. Jim and I were at my house. He was so nervous he kept walking around my dining room in crazed dizzying circles. He kept pouring himself shots of vodka.

At two o’clock in the afternoon, Guy called and said Warner Brothers was offering $200,000. Jim literally started jumping up and down.

I said to Guy, “What do you think?”

He said: “I think there’s more.”

“Have we heard from any of the others?”

“Universal and MGM passed.”

At 2:30 Guy called to say that Paramount had also passed.

“What do you think?” I said.

“I still think there’s more, from Warner’s,” Guy said.

“They’re bidding against themselves.”

“Yeah,” Guy said, “but they don’t know that.”

At three o’clock Guy called to say that Warner Brothers had upped their bid to $300,000 with this codicil: we had to accept it by the seventh inning of the World Series game or they would withdraw their offer. The game was now in the third inning.

Jim kept pouring the vodka as he listened to my side of the conversation.

“What do you think?” I said to Guy.

He laughed this time. “I think there’s more.”

He called them when the game got into the seventh inning and rejected the offer.

“What did they say?” I asked him.

“They said fine, they were out,” Guy said.

It hung there between us.

“
They’re out
,” I said.

Jim hung his head between his hands, slumped on the dining room table.

“That’s what they said,” Guy said.

Jim and I sat down in my living room and watched the conclusion of the game—without saying much to each other, both of us slugging the vodka now.

I was walking Jim to my front door when the phone rang.

“I just got home,” Guy said. “Frank Wells [one of Warner Brothers’ top executives] was waiting for me in my driveway. I’m sitting with Frank in my living room now. Warner Brothers will pay you and Jim $500,000 for the script.”

I raised five fingers up to Jim and he started pounding his chest like he was having a heart attack.

“What do you think?” I said to Guy.

“No, no, no, no, no,” Jim started telling me in the background, “don’t ask him that!
Take the deal!
”

Guy heard Jim in the background and said, “I think we should take the deal.”

It was the highest amount of money ever paid for a spec script in Hollywood. We had the check three days later—before, of course, any contracts had been signed.

I stood with Jim at a bank in Marin County as he deposited his half into a checking account that had $89.22 in it. When we left, he started war-whooping up and down the streets of San Rafael.

Two weeks later, Frank Wells and John Calley, who had bought the script for Warner Brothers, left the company. The new head of production was an exagent named Robert Shapiro who had had nothing to do with the purchase and who’d read it only the morning of the day Jim and I met with him.

“Well, what are we going to do with this piece of shit?” Robert Shapiro said as we shook hands.

Jim and I glanced at each other. We had sold a script for the most money ever paid in Hollywood and the new studio head was calling it a piece of shit.

He had some ideas what to do with it, though.

“I think it would be perfect for Dolly Parton,” Robert Shapiro said.

“You mean for the hero’s wife,” I said. “Isn’t she too big a name? It’s not that big a part.”

“Not for the wife,” Shapiro said, “for the hero.”

“The hero’s a guy who works in the service department and is married,” I said.

Jim said not a word—it was his first Hollywood meeting and he was taking it all in.

“Change him. Change him to Dolly Parton.”

Jim started to laugh.

Robert Shapiro looked sharply at him and said, “Did I say something funny?”

“You sure did,” Jim said.

We tried to change Shapiro’s mind but he was adamant—
City Hall
would become a Dolly Parton movie.

As we were leaving, I opened the wrong door: it was Shapiro’s bathroom door instead of his front door.

“That’s the john.” Shapiro laughed. “But you can use it if you want.”

“Considering your taste,” I said, “it must be a mistake you make all the time.”

Neither Jim nor I was interested in turning our script into a Dolly Parton vehicle, so Shapiro was bringing other writers in. But the script had circulated around town and was getting rave reviews. I told Jim that he could get other screenwriting jobs off of it and Guy agreed to help him.

We went down to L.A. together a couple months later on the morning shuttle. Jim was knocking the vodka and orange juice back on the flight. He had meetings scheduled with two producers and I had a meeting with Richard Gere.

Jim Wiatt at Guy’s agency, ICM, was going out to lunch with Jim. Wiatt was an up-and-coming young agent who had worked for Senator John Tunney.

When I came back from my meeting with Richard Gere, Guy told me what had happened. Jim and Jim Wiatt had gone to lunch. Jim had had so much to drink that he couldn’t make his meetings and was now sleeping it off in the ICM conference room.

Jim and I took the same flight back to San Francisco and he could hardly talk. He apologized the next day but said he didn’t think he’d want to have any more meetings with “those assholes down there.”

Every time I saw him after that, he was drunk. His wife was desperate. He was spending the money indiscriminately. A Porsche for himself and a matching Porsche for Karen. Drinks for the house when he’d walk into a bar. He decided on a whim to fly to Tokyo for a weekend with Karen and spent most of the time in his hotel room drinking.

“Did you have anything from the minibar, sir?” they asked him when he checked out.

“Everything,” Jim said. He wasn’t kidding.

I found the name of a good detox place in Napa and went to see him. I said I’d made the reservations and was paying for everything. All he had to do was get in the car with me.

“There’s nothing wrong with me,” he said, “I’m fine.”

He was knocking down a quart of vodka a day, Karen told me. He had had two incidents of esophageal hemorrhage and had been ambulanced to the emergency room.

“Jim,” I begged him, “you’re going to die.”

“I lost my porn collection,” he said.

I asked him what the hell he was talking about.

“I had a great porn collection I started collecting when I was in Vietnam, all kinds of Asian stuff. When I had my hemorrhage, I thought I was going to die and didn’t want Karen to find it. So I put it in the garbage before the ambulance came. When I got back from the hospital, the garbagemen had taken it away.”