'Animal' instinct
All hearts are turned to Stone in a memoir by Joe Eszterhas.

By Susan Gerhard

YOU ARE DRINKING three or four bottles of white wine a day, plus some gin or tequila or bourbon, plus maybe a couple of beers. You are remembering your glamour days in Hollywood, when a famous producer stays in the picture by sending a congratulatory note over to you packaged in the vagina of a beautiful young woman. You are remembering the words one bad mofo superagent mouthed to you about getting you offed if you left him for another agent. You are remembering a psychedelic incident in a hotel room, shortly after Basic Instinct came out, when you got it on with a stranger, who later wrote a good-bye note on your mirror that she'd just given you "AIDS" (which, by the way, she apparently did not). And you are remembering that you knew nothing, nothing at all, about your father being a Nazi-sympathizing propagandist in the employ of the Hungarian government when you wrote the screenplay for Music Box, about the daughter of a war criminal who defends her father against charges that he was a war criminal, only to later learn that he actually was a war criminal. You are Joe Eszterhas, and you never consider just how unreliable your memory might be. You wait until page 703 of a 736-page book to let us know that Hi, your name is Joe, and you are an alcoholic.

All those films some of us had to be paid to watch, you had to get wasted to write, and perhaps directors had to get wasted to sign on to, just as viewers had to get wasted to bear. You're sober now, which is good, because you'll never drink lunch in this town again.

Then again, I may never picket a flick in this town again. Eszterhas will always hold a special place in my film critic's heart. Basic Instinct was the first major film I covered. It's hard to remember the time when panties could be bunched around the danger of presenting a bisexual serial killer on-screen. But Vito Russo's memory was still strong, and I was there, just outside the red carpet of the Dorothy Chandler Pavilion, when Queer Nations San Francisco and Los Angeles joined forces to denounce The Silence of the Lambs Oscar nomination. When friends of friends of mine got their hands on the script for Basic Instinct, staged daily protests during the shoot, and developed a brilliant spoiler campaign to keep people away from the film by giving away the ending in signs that read, "Catherine Did It," I was there too, notebook at the ready. But when I actually sneaked past the picket and into the theater, I quickly realized how completely wrong we all were. Catherine was the sexiest sort-of lesbian to ever make it onto the screen, and she was fully realized, appealing and, best of all, frightening to men in a way even Russo might have admired. I left the screening, in which Sharon Stone emasculated Michael Douglas, and was happy. Catherine did it!

But the drama was so much more sordid than we ever knew.

I disagree with the critics who've said Hollywood Animal is only as good as its celebrity gossip. (Plus there's delicious subcelebrity gossip: Eszterhas broke the heart of the former governor of Ohio's daughter, for god's sake! He reprints pages supposedly from the journal of his new wife. But where are the photo spreads?) The plot – also an act of hubris, giving this ungainly collection of material narrative shape – thickens around Eszterhas's relationship with his father. Interspersed between recollections of bimbos (Eszterhas's word) great and small are chapters about growing up Hungarian American with a schizophrenic mother and a mysterious father in ass-kicking Cleveland that climax in the discovery of his father's self-penned anti-Semitic writings. We can understand just how much a famous son would want to untangle himself from his father's fascist tendencies, particularly after the scary, and unpublicized (incredibly), visit from the Justice Department.

What we can't understand is why his real anger seems to be directed not so much at the war criminal as at ... Sharon Stone. Early on in the book, Eszterhas writes that "every movie needs a McGuffin, a smoking gun, a clue that ties the killer inextricably to the crime." He got the McGuffin concept wrong – it's not a smoking gun but a misdirection – but he utilizes the McGuffin in this book like no one since Hitchcock. Who cares about war crimes when you have crimes of passion on your mind; apparently, Stone committed one of the greatest of all time. She wrecked the home of a woman, Naomi Macdonald, who would eventually become Eszterhas's new life partner. Stone stole Macdonald's husband before Eszterhas stole Macdonald's wife.

And now he has set the record straight. Eszterhas, self-mythologizing hero – facing down throat cancer, surviving the mucous pump and alcohol-cigarette detox that went with his surgery, discovering his father was a war criminal, and returning to unglamorous Cleveland to raise his four new kids – has one last score to settle. His wife's. And he settles it playground style, with the worst epithet one can sling at an aging Hollywood star: he calls her fat! It's genius, in its way. But in the notoriously unreliably narrated realm of the Hollywood tell-all memoir, this one detail sticks out as the least reliable of all. A corpuscular man who sits and writes for a living finds an extra ounce to squeeze on Sharon Stone? (At least she let him get close enough to squeeze it.) Naomi, I hope you're smiling.

If you can measure the potency of the poison by the volume of the regurgitation, then this vintage was strong. Eszterhas is clearly a man obsessed. In retrospect, he claims he introduced Stone and his producer and would-be business partner Bill Macdonald not because they'd be working together, but because he wanted Bill's wife, Naomi, for himself. In retrospect, Eszterhas's musings on Stone's misdeeds have stretched over multiple chapters of his multiple books. We saw the vindictiveness take shape in his 2000 book, American Rhapsody, in which he uses President Clinton's sexual misadventures as a template to reflect on his own. Well, reflect is perhaps a strong word. Rehash, as in what alco- and sexaholics do when they no longer do what they did. In Rhapsody Eszterhas castigated Stone for talking to the president of the United States without facing him – but he initially tempers the hate before lowering the boom. "I felt a kind of bemused proprietary interest when I heard about the friendship between Sharon and Bill. I had created her. I had voted for him. Her career had gone nowhere until my screenplay made her a global star...."

But in that same book, in the chapter titled "Sharon and Bill" (the other Bill), Eszterhas goes on – and on. He tells the first version of one wild night with Stone in three paragraphs that end with "We drank more Cristal and wound up on the rug next to the dollhouse again ... and then I went back to my hotel, happy that I'd created her." Well, the crazy night gets even craaaazier the second time around, when Eszterhas finds two pages of Hollywood Animal in which to re-create the scene with his "creation." Stone breaks out the Cristal again. But this time Eszterhas concludes the evening not just with pleasant thoughts about being a Creator but also with new ones on his creation. "I discovered that her body was doughy, too much peanut butter and Wonder Bread maybe. And then I went back to my hotel...." Stone, he claims, was later running down the street with a butcher knife in her hand.

It's just a little bit pitiful. Sharon Stone broke all our hearts, Joe, but she's gone – from your life, your wife's ex-husband's life, San Francisco. Did it have to end this way? Me, you, Phil Bronstein, we're all crying in our beer.