Hollywood Animal (62 page)

My father shook his head and looked like he wanted to say something, but didn’t. My mother looked away. We got into the car, my father behind the wheel, my mother between us. We drove in utter, absolute silence.

My father honked and honked and at an intersection an American driver gave him the finger. My father stared grimly ahead, but my mother smiled suddenly and waved at the American with her middle finger.

I started to laugh. I couldn’t help it. She kept waving happily with her middle finger. My father, without looking at me, started to laugh, too. I laughed harder and so did he as my mother kept waving her finger.

Offended, my mother said, “What’s so funny? I can be American, too.”

I read about the movie
Psycho
in the
Plain Dealer
. It was an American sensation. There were long lines for the movie in every city. I asked my father to take me to see it. He agreed, and my mother said she wanted to come, too.

“It is very violent, Mária,” he said. “You wouldn’t like it.”

But she kept insisting and he finally agreed.

It was the most exciting movie I had ever seen. Not just because of Janet Leigh in the shower but because of how frightening so many scenes were. At each frightening scene, my father laughed, I stared, and my mother softly said, “
Jaj
.”

When we walked out, she said, “I am never going to a movie again.”

“I told you it wasn’t for you,” my father said.

“Then why did you bring me?” she said.

“Because you insisted, Mária.”

“No,” she said. “You brought me because you knew it would upset me. I am upset. Are you satisfied now?”

“I thought it was really good,” I said.

“You have corrupted the boy,” my mother told my father.

A famous Hungarian actress named Zita Hamori was appearing at a Hungarian theater on the East Side. I saw her picture in the Hungarian daily, the
Szabadsag
.
She
was an attractive blonde. All the Hungarians who came to my father’s office were talking about her.

My father said he had known her in Hungary and she was asking him now to introduce her at the start of her program.

“I’m not going,” my mother said.

He pleaded with my mother, but she refused to go.

“She wants to see
you
,” my mother said to my father, “not me. She’s
your
friend, not mine.”

“For God’s sake, Mária,” he said, “we were friends, that’s all.”

I wanted to see Zita Hamori, too, but the day of the event, he said, “I don’t like leaving your mother here alone. Maybe it would be better if you stayed home with her.”

When he got back from the East Side that night, it was very late. I was asleep. My mother’s screams woke me.

She was screaming at him. She was calling Zita Hamori a painted
kurva
and she was calling him a pig.

“We were friends, that’s all,” he yelled at her. “We’re friends,
friends
.”

She came out of the bedroom, slammed its door so hard it shook the floor, and went on into the kitchen. I heard her crying.

“Go to sleep, Jozsi,” my father said from behind the closed bedroom door. “Everything is fine.”

He said the word in English:
fein
.

CHAPTER 18

[Naomi’s Journal]

In the Fetal Position

SLADE

You think you’re really something, don’t you? You twist everything around, don’t you? You don’t care who you hurt.

Jagged Edge

August 28, 1992

Bill and I sit waiting to take off for San Francisco for a visit with Joe Eszterhas. He’s offered to let us stay in his new Stinson Beach house. Joe came into town this week and met with Evans and said it is grossly unfair that the studio is attempting to cut Bill out of a credit on
Sliver
, especially since Bill was responsible for Joe’s prompt delivery of the script.

Thank God Joe is on Bill’s side.

August 31, 1992

Joe and Gerri were wonderful and generous as usual. I confided to them about how vicious the movie business has been for Bill and they offered sage advice. Watch your back and don’t take any of it too seriously. Joe showed us the letter he is sending to John Goldwyn to make sure Bill will get a credit on
Sliver
. We are most grateful for his friendship and support.

September 1, 1992

Bill came home at 1:30 this morning, exhausted after a grueling day. Sharon Stone walked off
Sliver
, but she’s back on. It promises to be a stormy few months.

September 28, 1992

Joni, Bob’s secretary, has lost her mind. She came into the office on Monday and announced that she had made an earthshaking discovery. She had spent the weekend reading and rereading the
Sliver
script and had discovered that—

Even Evans, insane as he is, turned to Bill and said, “She’s lost her mind, hasn’t she?”

Others at Paramount claim they have seen an actual ghost roaming the halls in one of the old buildings on the lot.

This has resulted in a group of Jerry Falwell’s fanatics meeting in Evans’s office when he wasn’t there. Bill walked in to take a meeting and discovered there were religious fanatics there whispering in hushed tones to the professed “ghost sighters.”

Bill discovered that Joni had conducted a séance in Bob’s office last Friday night to try to communicate with the restless ghost.

Joe gave Bill his copy of his original
Sliver
script and signed at the bottom of the first page—“To Bill Macdonald, without whose friendship and support this script would never have been written.”

Bill had tears in his eyes when he showed it to me. We’re going to have it framed.

Bob is now desperate for cash because the latest bank loan failed because he failed his physical. They found cocaine in his blood.

October 27, 1992

Bob shrieked at Bill today, “Can’t someone find me some money?”

October 29, 1992

Bill had a screen test for a part in
Sliver
. The casting agents thought he’d be perfect for the part of Sharon Stone’s boss, who, much to Bill’s dismay, is described as “40ish, balding, and tweedy.”

Joe Eszterhas told the casting agents that if they use Bill they could cast every movie he makes in the future. Guess he loves Bill.

November 4, 1992

Bill and Joe were chatting with Sharon Stone on the lot yesterday. Of course she took an immediate liking to Bill. As they chatted and laughed, Bill discovered she is very well read and very bright. Joe says that he has never seen her open up as quickly to anyone as she did to Bill.

She finally said to Bill, “What do you do?” completely unaware that Bill is actually a co-producer of
Sliver
.

Bill, in his typical way, answered, “Well, I’m in the import-export business.”

She said, “What do you import and export?”

And he said, “Everything but drugs and arms.”

Stanley Jaffe walked by. Bill said he was thrilled that Stanley saw him standing there with Sharon and Joe.

November 6, 1992

At around 4:00
P.M
.
yesterday, Bill said he went in to watch
Sliver
dailies. He was alone. Then Stanley Jaffe himself walked in. Bill said he then spent the next forty-five minutes with Stanley Jaffe, talking about
Sliver
and
Jade
, the next Eszterhas script for which Bill just finalized the deal.

Stanley said, “What do you think of Sharon in the dailies?”

And Bill said, “Well, for one thing, I think she’s wearing too much makeup.”

Stanley Jaffe wholeheartedly agreed, Bill said.

November 11, 1992

Bill went onto the
Sliver
set yesterday and Sharon Stone was calling him “buddy.”

Evans has entered into a deep depression and has not returned anyone’s phone calls. He is doing massive amounts of cocaine and takes Nembutal suppositories at night to bring himself down. He told Bill he is “in the fetal position.”

Joe Eszterhas wants to really stick it to Paramount and Bob for what he considers horribly unjust treatment of Bill. Joe’s idea is to let everyone, including Sherry Lansing and Stanley Jaffe, call him and beg him to do
The Saint
rewrite. He will say no.

Then Bill will talk to him and he’ll agree to do it. Only Joe could come up with such a plan—or should I say only Bill and Joe, since those two devious minds seem to flourish together.

November 16, 1992

Bill and Joe have been on the phone constantly, plotting a joint production company tentatively called “Renegade.”

Joe said, “It sounds like you should get up here and we should talk.”

Evans is still “in the fetal position,” still not returning phone calls.

November 23, 1992

Bill arrived at Joe’s only to find that two cameramen who were shooting locations for
Sliver
in Hawaii were trapped near a volcano. Another disaster.

Sharon Stone is apoplectic because she says she’s being forced to direct herself since Noyce is so weak. And Evans is in Acapulco in the fetal position.

November 24, 1992

Bill came home from Joe Eszterhas’s birthday bash—at a small place on Sunset—at 3:30 in the morning. Sharon Stone was at the party.

She told Bill that he looked “world-weary” and that she bet he was thirty years old when he was ten. He filled her in a bit on his background (God only knows how much, he was pretty drunk when he got home).

She said she wants to tell Bill something the next time she sees him. She wants to “formulate it” in her mind first.

I comfort myself with the knowledge that
at least
she’s my age.

November 27, 1992

Bill and Joe keep talking about Renegade, the production company they’re thinking about setting up. The company logo on their films will show a skull and crossbones and say “Renegade Presents.”

Then the screen will go black and silent, only to be shattered by the sound of a gun firing, leaving a bullet hole in the black screen. It’s too perfect for Bill.

December 2, 1992

The studio, which Evans always calls “The Mountain,” has decided they very much want Joe Eszterhas to rewrite
The Saint
, so Bill is meeting this morning with Evans, Goldwyn, and Sherry Lansing.

Sliver
is $700,000 over budget and still shooting. The studio wants to cut three days’ shooting from the script.

They approached Joe and he said, “No way. I’m not cutting any pages. It’s a thirty-million-dollar movie, what’s another seven hundred thousand? If you cut any pages, you’ll really screw the movie up and it’s already pretty screwed-up.” The studio backed off.

December 4, 1992

Evans wrote a letter to Sherry Lansing that says he can get Joe to rewrite
The Saint
, which we all know is hogwash.

December 5, 1992

Joe heard about Evans’s letter and said, “Fuck him.”

December 6, 1992

Bill told “The Mountain” he was meeting with Roger Moore to appease him and quell his apprehensions about the lack of direction for
The Saint
. Bobby Jaffe, who’d never read
The Saint
contract and didn’t know that Roger is contractually bound to be in the movie, said, “Why do you keep bothering with Roger Moore?”