Malibu & Hollywood, 1981-82
After having been tossed from the AFI’s directing program for backing the wrong side in a palace coup, I moved on to screenwriting to attempt to make a living. Three trying years later, Clint Eastwood read a script that I and my friend Wendell Wellman had written, and we were hired to adapt “Firefox,” a novel about a British-American plot to steal a highly-advanced Soviet jet fighter, as something for Clint to star in and direct, and my prospects were suddenly looking up.
I had moved from a house in the Venice canals to my girlfriend Linda Stewart’s spacious, wood-beamed unit on Big Rock beach. Built on pilings sunk into the rocks forty feet below, the waves at high tide would crash and rush up under our neighbor’s unit on the lower level. That is, until the El Nino of winter 1982, when giant storm surf destroyed the place. If you were around then, you’ll remember the TV news snapshot of Southern California that year: hot tubs literally floating away on the Malibu tide.
But this story starts one year before that winter, when I was in the prime of my screenwriting career, 33 and no doubt full of myself. And smoking weed, snorting cocaine and drinking hard, habits which definitely affected my career until I (mostly) cleaned up in 1989.
That Christmas day Linda and I had modest plans until we got a call from my friend Larry Gagosian, later of international renown as arguably the world’s biggest art dealer. He had a couple of friends from New York with him who he wanted to show Malibu, so our plans expanded to include them for dinner. One of them was a young graffiti artist that Larry had signed by the name of Jean-Michel Basquiat. The other was a girl Jean-Michel was interested in who went by a single name I had never heard of. She was short and kind of ratty, with runs in her black stockings, runs in her black eye makeup, and a tough Jersey accent. Larry whispered that she was going to be famous soon, and when I asked for what, he shrugged. “Everything.” That was my introduction to Madonna.
As the two of us did some lines in our bedroom, Jean-Michel asked me privately if I had any condoms, or if there was a drugstore open somewhere nearby. I just shook my head and said there wasn’t anywhere for miles—this was 1981, and virtually everything was closed tight on Christmas day back then. I never knew how they fared later that night.
Jean-Michel and I became occasional friends for the next several years, especially when Larry offered Linda and me a bedroom in his giant Venice loft while we tried to recover from the shock of seeing our beach house fatally wounded and our lives upended. Watching Jean-Michel paint in Larry’s downstairs studio was mind-blowing—I thought he was the greatest artist of his generation, if not of the last fifty years. The only problem was his predeliction for all manner of drugs, his nights almost always ending up by “chasing the dragon,” the precursor to his shooting heroin a few years later. I was ten years older and a quasi older brother figure to him, but my words of warning never lasted long, and we eventually grew apart as he became famous and began hanging out with fellow celebrities. His overdose death in 1988 was, sadly, not a surprise. What a waste. And I never understood Madonna’s appeal; to me she was the shallow nadir of the 80s.
My friendship with Gagosian ended as well when he became hugely successful. I had been a close friend who knew many of his secrets, like the cons he ran on collectors to stay afloat. Since he regularly ran out of cash, I had to convince our mutual friend Bruce Marder not to banish him from the West Beach Cafe, where young Hollywood and Westside hipsters hung out nightly, and allow him to run a tab. Having someone who knew his shadowy past apparenty made Larry uncomfortable, and now that he was strictly flying private and hanging out with the richest people in the world, he stopped returning my phone calls. He was one of the most colorful personalities I have ever known, and I regretted our friendship’s end.
In predictable fashion, my relationship with Eastwood also came to a bad end. He wanted Wendell and me to write a film for his then girlfriend, Sondra Locke, to star in and direct. I would have written anything for Clint, but I didn’t think Ms. Locke was talented at anything besides wrapping the much older Clint around her little finger. It was clear to everyone around them, but he was blind to it, and they broke up acrimoniously after the film was in the can. Once I turned down his offer, he never spoke to me again.
“Firefox” turned out to be a lumbering mediocrity, sadly. I cried silent tears at the premier, knowing that all the hard work on what was a raved-about script was for naught; and all the heat that had been building for the last year was now gone. Clint was too cheap and impatient (he was famous for shooting one take and then moving on) to direct a complex ballet of Cold War action and visual effects that a younger, sharper director could have brought to the screen. But Clint was the 800-pound gorilla, and no one would ever say anything to his face.
Like many a writer before me and many after me, I was down…but not yet out.