Hugh Davies reports from London. Joe Eszterhas is a big, bearded, intimidating mountain of a man, with a Hell's Angel biker mindset. Spending time with him in Los Angeles is as edgy as a night in Aspen with his fellow escapee from the Tom Wolfe School of New Journalism, Hunter S. Thompson, without the latter's penchant for firing a .44 Magnum. I'm a big man, physically, but the media describes me as macho, and fierce, and I'm not like that at all in my mind, or the minds of people I love. I take a great pride in being gentle, and have taught my children to treat people compassionately.
Manners count for a lot.
I absolutely believe in grace, in treating people courteously even in moments of disagreement. While Eszterhas lets his imagination rip about Clinton and George W Bush, August's talk magazine illustrates with book excerpts that the non-fiction aspects will rock Hollywood, especially if, as rumoured, he talks about Michael Douglas, Richard Gere, Warren Beatty and Farrah Fawcett. The manuscript sizzles with memories of film sets, like his most notorious scene in Basic Instinct when Sharon Stone uncrossed her legs. Stone, he recalls, fought to get the part of the ice-pick wielding Catherine Tramell. The writer claimed that Stone, now 42, once straddled him while bereft of underwear, giving him a sensual back massage in front of an astonished Phillip Noyce, the director, to get a sex scene re-written.