Hollywood Animal (77 page)

The words blurred in front of me as tears filled my eyes. Gerry held his head in his hands as he read the pages. I couldn’t even begin to fathom what he must have been feeling … this proud and strong Jewish man, my dear friend, who had lost so many family members in the Holocaust.

A government investigator had this opinion of
Nemzet Politika:

“It slanders the democracies, most of all the United States, and insists that a dictatorship is the highest form of efficient government; it incites to murder against the Jews and advocates ‘radical methods to silence the Jews forever.’”

A United States immigration affidavit that my father signed said:

“I have never advocated or assisted in the persecution of any person because of race, religion, or national origin.”

My father was still staring out the window.

“Is it bad?” he asked me.

“It’s bad,” I said.

“I wrote it so long ago,” he whispered.

“But you wrote it.”

“I must have,” he said. “If it’s there. I didn’t remember.”

“I don’t believe you,” I said.

He looked at me, tears flooding his eyes too now, then he looked away.

I said, “It’s filth. It’s shit. You’ve smeared your whole life with this shit. You’re smearing my life with this shit. How could you have written this filth?”

“I was young,” he said. “I was so young I even forgot about it.”

I said again, “I don’t believe it!”

· · ·

Gerry Messerman and I spent much of the next week questioning him in preparation for the hearings … grilling this old and sometimes feeble man who had raised me to be the man I was, who had supported me when I needed support, who had somehow made me believe in myself.

He kept denying that he’d been a part of the Propaganda Ministry, insisting, even, that his job with the Prime Ministry was so innocuous that he’d written his novels at the office while on the job.

Gerry and I both felt that he was lying over and over. He denied things or
said
he couldn’t remember.

“I’m eighty-three years old,” my father said. He waved his age like a flag.

At the end of our days grilling him, Gerry and I were depressed and badly shaken, as exhausted as my father.

As I drove him home one night, my father said, “You don’t have to act so cold to me.”

I didn’t respond and he said, “You’re my son. I’ve never loved anyone or anything in my life as much as you.”

“Why did you write these horrible things?” I asked.

“I never hurt any Jews,” he said. “I didn’t hit anyone or kill anyone.”

“But others may have struck them or killed them after reading the things you wrote.”

“It was a different time,” he said. “I was poor. I was ambitious. Everybody hated the Jews.”

“So you wrote these things, this filth, for your career?”

“I never hated Jews,” he said, “like so many did. I’ve never been a strong man. I’ve always been weak. I’m not like you.”

“Don’t!” I said. “Don’t try to manipulate me! Please!”

“This wouldn’t be happening,” he said, “if we wouldn’t have lost the war.”

“
You
,” I said. “Not
we
. Not
me. You
. If
you
wouldn’t have lost the war.”

“Yes,
me!
” he said bitterly. “You don’t know. What do you know? You, the American! My American son! What do you understand? You don’t know what it was like in those days.
Everybody
was crazy then. Hitler on one side, Stalin on the other. We were such a small country. We were too small to survive alone. We
had
to go to one side or the other. We tried Communism with Béla Kun in 1919. There were dead people hanging off the lampposts everywhere. Nobody wanted to go through that again.”

He said, “Good night, my American son!” when we got to his house, “I love you.”

I watched him go slowly up the porch steps in his heavy overcoat and Hungarian peasant hat.

I went back to my hotel those nights and played a tortured game with myself. I tried to figure out what I had known as a child.

I realized my father must have been in constant fear in the forty years he’d by then lived in America. Fear of being uncovered. Fear of being deported.

Was that why he had stayed so close within his Hungarian world in America? Was that why he’d worked so long for paltry wages for the openly anti-Semitic Franciscans? Was that why the Franciscans had
chosen him
to edit their
paper?
Because they knew of his anti-Semitism?

Why then did I see him arguing with the Franciscans and other Hungarians who wanted to write anti-Semitic articles for the newspaper? Was that because he was afraid those articles would come to the attention of Americans who would then look into
his
background?

And I thought about my mother—my pious and religious mother. She must’ve known about his writings. Did she agree with that filth?

Did she, too, live in terror of being deported? How much did all that have to do with her illness and her paranoia?

Was her paranoia the result of her fear that my father’s activities in Hungary would be uncovered?

I remembered some things my mother had said to my father when I was a child:

“You are still fighting your war. We lost it! We lost it!”

And: “I have always known the truth, haven’t I?”

And: “Did you forget the bad things that you learned in Hungary?”

And: “Liar! Liar! I believe not a word anymore! I have heard all the lies! I have seen through all the lies! I know what you are!”

And: “A murderer! Your son! Like you!”

I knew, of course, that many of the things she had said were a manifestation of her schizoid madness. I knew my father wasn’t a murderer or torturer, literally speaking. He didn’t kill or torture Jews with his own hands.

But did the words he wrote and said cause those who read and heard them to murder and torture Jews?

The only honest answer to that, it became evident to me, was … Yes, that was possible.

I remembered what Father John Mundweil had said about my mother and father: “I know more than you know about your parents. They are good people. Human. Like you. Like me. But
good
people. Both of them.”

I said to myself: Maybe Father John knew some things about them, but he didn’t know
enough
.

“You’re my friend,” I said to Gerry Messerman one day. “But I would understand if you told me you don’t want anything to do with this case.”

“I’ve thought about it,” he said. “I never imagined that
I
would defend anyone on these charges. And I know he doesn’t deserve me defending him.”

“Then don’t,” I said. “Please. You’re right.”

“I think your father is the most manipulative man I’ve met in all my years as an attorney and I’ve met some pretty manipulative people. I don’t care about your father, but I care about you.”

“You’re going to defend him because of me?”

“That’s right,” he said. “Do you know what would happen if this case went to trial? Do you know what the media would do with this? You’re the guy who wrote
Music Box
, about a war criminal and his child. You’re Hollywood’s most high-profile screenwriter. How would people out there feel in the future about paying millions of dollars to the son of an alleged or proven or deported war criminal? I’m going to do everything in my power not to let this go to trial and go to the press.”

“It’s more ironic than
Music Box
, Gerry,” I said. “A dad commits war crimes. He raises a kid who abhors any kind of bigotry. The kid becomes good friends with a prominent Jewish attorney. When the dad’s war crimes are discovered, the prominent Jewish attorney defends him against the war crimes—not because of the dad but because of the kid. The fact that the attorney is Jewish is key to helping the dad get away with what he did to other Jews. By raising a kid who loathes any kind of bigotry, the dad planted the seeds of his own escape.”

“That’s all occurred to me.” Gerry nodded. “I’ll trade you an irony. The dad has been a professional anti-Communist his whole life, partly to obscure the fact that he’s pro-Nazi. Then one day Communism falls. That’s the cause the dad has devoted his whole life to—the Fall of Communism. And
that
’s what causes him to be uncovered. Because for the first time, the Justice Department has access to records
back there
. The dad never would have been uncovered had Communism not fallen.”

I told my father that Gerry Messerman had agreed to represent him at the hearings.

“I will thank him,” he said. “It is a wonderful thing to do for me.”

“He’s not doing it for you,” I said. “He loathes what you did. He’s doing it because of me.”

My father seemed surprised.

“Oh,” he said.

And then, after a moment, he said, “But it will be very good for me to have a Jew representing me in this situation, no?”

He saw the scorn in my eyes as I turned away from him. I heard him say, “But it’s true, no? Why are you so angry?”

Gerry gave my father a list of questions to answer. Among them:

Q—Did you see the movie
Music Box?

A—Yes I did.

Q—How did you respond to it?

A—I told Joe I am proud of him. I congratulate him. I told him the drama
is
a perfect literary piece.

Q—Do you have some feeling about the effect that the investigation of you might have upon Joe?

A—Yes I do. I am deeply sorry. Maybe those Hungarians planned this who were angry with
Music Box
. Maybe they went to Justice Department to get me to get Joe. And they accomplish maybe what they planned. I am sorry.

Q—What are your feelings?

A—I told one Hungarian who was complaining against Joe: I love Joe because he is my son. I respect Joe because he is a talented writer. That means that I respect my son and love what he is doing. The
Music Box
tells the truth.

Q—Did Joe read any of your books?

A—You have to ask that from Joe.

Q—Did you ask him to read your books?

A—We are both writers. Perhaps not in the same category—he is, thank God, greater than me. But anyway we are writers. And a writer never ask another writer if he has read his book.

Q—What are your feelings about any of Joe’s work?

A—I am proud of Joe. His most important characteristic is the sense of justice. He hates crime against humanism, and he loves everybody and everything which is human. And that is the great gladness of my life after all the injustice I have seen.

I dreaded the start of the hearings. I was ashamed of what we already knew my father had done and was afraid, never mind his steadfast denials, of what else we’d find out.

Gerry had convinced the Office of Special Investigations not to hold the hearings in the federal building because of my high profile. They would be held, instead, in the conference room of his law office.

I told my agents in L.A. that I would have to be in Cleveland for an extended time because my father was ill.

I waited with my father in Gerry’s office as the OSI people filed into the conference room and then the three of us went in.

Neal Sher, the head of the OSI, was there with his top man, Eli Rosenbaum. I knew who these people were because I’d researched the OSI for
Music Box
, but I’d never met or spoken to them.

I admired their dedication to this cause and as I watched them, sitting there next to my father and Gerry Messerman, I thought to myself:

I’m sitting on the wrong side of the table
.

With them was a Hungarian historian named Judith Schulmann. She had difficulty even looking at my father and I was sure she had lost relatives in the Holocaust.

I knew her aversion to my father’s face wasn’t directed at me, but
I
felt ashamed.

My instinct was to go to Judith Schulmann and
beg
for her forgiveness, even though I knew this was irrational: I’d done nothing wrong.

My father stared stonily at all of them.

Neal Sher questioned my father under oath:

Q—Mr. Eszterhás, you said earlier that you’ve come to believe, while in the United States, that what you wrote in the book about the Jews was bad and was wrong?

A—Yes.

Q—Precisely when or what event triggered you to rethink that?

A—Well, I have seen that I am wrong earlier, too. When they take out the Jews from Hungary.

Q—And that was in 1944?

A—I think so, yes.

Q—The Jews were put in a ghetto?

A—Yes.

Q—And they were deported to Auschwitz?

A—I have seen a march of old women they take to the station, railway station.

Q—And deported?

A—Yes.

Q—And that was very near the end of the war?

A—Yes.

Q—1944?

A—Yes.

Q—So at that point, when you saw what was happening to the Jews, it made you feel bad about what you had written in 1934?

A—Yes.

Q—And you have felt bad about it since?

A—Yes, it was always stronger and stronger.

Q—During the period you were in the refugee camps in Europe—before you came to the United States—you had a recollection of what was in your book; you knew generally that you were advocating—you had advocated the persecution of Jews, am I correct?

A—I know that—that I was an anti-Semitic and so I advocated. It was a general feeling that it was wrong and I was among the people who did wrong.

Q—So you knew then, while you were still in Europe, before you came to this country, that you had advocated anti-Semitism?

A—Yes.

It was one of the longest days of my life. They asked my father a question and he either denied something or said he couldn’t remember. Then they provided documented evidence of what they were alleging.

I learned that … my father had indeed worked in the Propaganda Ministry … had written hundreds of vicious anti-Semitic editorials … had even edited government-funded anti-Semitic publications … and had even organized a book burning.

I sat there looking at the evidence, listening, my head down.