Informed
readers picking up Joe Eszterhas’s new book,
Hollywood Animal, know what to expect from the screenwriter
who gave the world Basic Instinct and Showgirls:
equal doses of outrageous Hollywood gossip and over-the-top,
testosterone-fueled narcissism. After all, Eszterhas’s
previous Hollywood-themed book, American Rhapsody,
offered up enough Hollywood dirt to make most people’s
short list for Best Guilty Pleasures when it appeared
in 2000, and its swaggering voice suggested nothing
so much as a steroid-raging WWF wrestler.
Hollywood Animal
certainly delivers the guilty-pleasure goods again,
although some of the stories are looking a little
shopworn at this point. (Does the man ever honor
the sanctity of private conversations—or tire
of telling the same story about Farrah Fawcett?)
But Eszterhas is up to something
more, this time out. In between the dirty stories
about perennial Eszterhas favorites Robert Evans
and Sharon Stone, he tells us the story of how he
came from post-World War II refugee camps to Cleveland,
Ohio, and watched his parents struggle to survive
in an environment often hostile to outsiders. A
lawyer and published writer in Hungary, his father
could find employment only as a low-paid editor
for a Hungarian-language Catholic newspaper, and
they lived in diminished conditions in poor ethnic
neighborhoods. The fact that Eszterhas’s parents
made little effort to learn English or assimilate
into American culture didn’t help their cause.
Eszterhas’s account
of life in Cleveland in the 1950’s is a beautifully
presented piece of memoir writing driven by three
powerful elements: his (possibly inevitable) maturation
into a working-class street tough (culminating in
his stealing cars, rolling drunks and even hitting
an unsuspecting enemy in the head with a baseball
bat); his tender relationship with his father (who
was understanding enough to let himself get talked
into buying a red convertible as a ‘family’
car); and his equally awkward relationship with
his mother (whose growing mental illness didn’t
help her accept her son’s transformation).
If Eszterhas had given his
readers simply this childhood memoir, it would have
been a powerful little book, and it would have helped
replace the boorish, misogynistic role he’s
perceived as playing with some of his louder screenplays.
(In fact, Eszterhas has also written some beautifully
gentle screenplays; they simply didn’t make
the critical splash that Showgirls and
Basic Instinct did.)
Instead, he sandwiches the
Cleveland chapters in between gossipy tidbits and
the story of how he rose to the status of being
Hollywood’s highest paid screenwriter. Ultimately,
it isn’t satisfying as a whole; it’s
too lumpy and piecemeal. Without question, an editor’s
firm and aggressive emersion in the text would have
yielded a better book (although I pity the editor
who goes up against Eszterhas with nothing but his
red pencil). The baggy-monster braggadocio accounts
of his putting a variety of agents and producers
in their place gets so redundant at times that readers
may think they’re turning pages backwards
and rereading earlier chest-thumping passages over
and over again.
But Eszterhas is getting
somewhere with the Hollywood sections of the autobiography
because, he tells us, just as he and his second
wife decided to move back to Ohio and raise their
sons in a traditional setting, he was diagnosed
with cancer and, in the process of recovery, he
stopped drinking and smoking and even found God.
Eszterhas is now, he tells us, a churchgoer who,
like George W. Bush, believes fervently in prayer
and exercise.
He also reveals a stunning
fact about his father—but while it’s
an element that lifts the book neatly up into a
tidy story arc, I won’t spoil the surprise
by telling it here.
Eszterhas wants us to marvel
at his conversion from a wild-man devil to conservative,
Midwestern family man. But even with the tiresome
Hollywood bragging, we still see his end in his
beginning, and his ability to show that to us is
the strongest element of Hollywood Animal.
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