by John Irving
"Lawrence said I was too pretty?" Jack asked, holding the door for her.
"Lawrence is a fink and a liar. You can't be too pretty in this town," Myra Ascheim said. "Or too successful."
The issue of how successful, or not, Myra Ascheim had ever been was never made clear to Jack--or, to his knowledge, to anyone else. No one had either corroborated or repudiated the Hollywood legends attached to Myra, all of them stories about who she used to be. Was she once an agent whom I.C.M. wooed away from William Morris, or did C.A.A. woo her away from I.C.M.? Was she eventually fired from all three agencies, or did she go off on her own of her own volition? Did she once represent Julia Roberts? Was it Sharon Stone she was supposed to have "discovered," or was that Demi Moore? And was Myra truly the first person to refer to Demi as Gimme Moore?
Jack later ran into Lawrence at the bar of Raffles L'Ermitage--not Jack's favorite hotel in Beverly Hills, but a watering hole Lawrence loved. Lawrence told Jack that Demi Moore's nickname of "Gimme" was his idea, not Myra's. But Myra was right--Lawrence was a fink and a liar. And whether or not Myra Ascheim ever represented Julia Roberts, Myra had maintained her contacts with casting directors--almost all of whom liked her. Even if Myra no longer represented anyone, casting directors still returned her calls.
Bob Bookman, who was Emma's agent at C.A.A. before he became Jack's, told Jack a story about Myra's identifying baseball cap. She wasn't an Anaheim fan--she didn't even like baseball. She liked the A on the hat, but she detested the halo. "It's an A-list hat, but I'm no angel," she liked to say.
According to Bob Bookman, Myra bought an Angels cap every year and removed the halo with a pair of fingernail clippers. "I saw her do it over lunch," Bookman said. "Myra snipped off the halo while she was waiting for her Cobb salad." The Cobb salad made the story ring true; aside from breakfast, a Cobb salad was all Jack ever saw Myra eat.
Alan Hergott--who became Jack's entertainment lawyer--said that Myra always left the same message on his answering machine. "Call me back or I'll sue your pants off." That sounded like Myra.
"In this town, you get tired of hearing something you already know," Alan told Jack. "You're supposed to sound or at least look interested, but you know more about the story than the guy who's telling you the story does. Myra's different. She always knows something you don't know. True or not--it doesn't matter."
In Hollywood, there were as many Myra Ascheim stories as there were stories about Milton Berle's penis. And to think that Jack Burns met her because his schlong was small, or smallish--and only because he met her porn-producer sister, Milly, first! In fact, if it hadn't been for Lawrence, Jack might never have met the Ascheim sisters, and he met Lawrence only because the fink wanted to bang Emma. (Knowing Emma, she probably had an instinct that steered her away from Lawrence--maybe his schlong was all wrong for her, or she knew that Lawrence would never relinquish the top position.)
"Actually, I'm no longer an agent," Myra told Jack over their breakfast at Marmalade. They were sitting at a kind of picnic table--communal dining in Santa Monica. "My sister and I have created a talent-management company." This information confused Jack, given his limited (albeit specific) knowledge of the other Ascheim. But he would make a point of never trying to grasp how the industry worked. From the beginning, Jack Burns realized that his job was getting a job. He already knew how to be an actor.
A man had spread a newspaper over one end of the picnic table; he sat on the bench beside Jack, muttering, as if he bore a lifelong grudge against the news. At the other end of the table, nearer to Myra than to Jack, was a family of four--a young, harried couple with two quarreling children.
Like Rottweiler, Myra Ascheim had plucked Bruno Litkins from Jack's resume. "The gay heron," as Jack had called Bruno, was the only marketable name among Jack's earliest supporters. "I don't suppose you are a transvestite--you just know how to look like one," Myra said.
"I just know how to look like one," Jack concurred.
"I'll let you know, Jack, when I sense a surfeit of transsexual roles."
The children at Myra's end of the table were bothering her. A little boy, maybe six or seven, had ordered the oatmeal with sliced bananas; then he picked all the bananas out. He wanted some of his older sister's bacon instead, but she wouldn't give him any. "If you wanted bacon, you should have ordered it," the children's mother kept telling him.
"You can have my bananas," the boy told his sister, but the bacon was not negotiable--not for bananas.
"Look--there's a lesson here," Myra said crossly to the little boy. "You want her bacon, but you've got nothing she wants. That's not how you make a deal."
In the movie business, Jack was learning, meeting people was an audition. You didn't even have to know which part you were auditioning for; you just picked a part and played it, any part. Jack looked at the little girl who had the bacon. She was nine or ten; she had three strips of bacon. She was his audience of one, for the moment, but Jack was auditioning for Myra Ascheim, and Myra knew it.
In Blade Runner, Rutger Hauer plays the blond android--the last to die. He holds Harrison Ford's life in his hands, but Rutger is dying; he'd rather have someone to talk to than die alone. "I've seen things you people wouldn't believe," Rutger Hauer says. That was the moment Jack had in mind.
That was the tone of voice Jack adopted when he spoke to the girl about her bacon. "I have a younger brother," Jack-as-Rutger-Hauer began. "He was always asking me for my stuff--he wanted my bacon, just like your brother wants yours. Maybe I should have given him the bacon, at least one strip."
"Why?" the girl asked.
"I was in a motorcycle accident," Jack said. When he touched his side, he winced; his sudden intake of breath made the little boy squish one of his banana slices. "The handlebars went in here--they went right through me."
"Not while we're eating," Myra Ascheim said, but the children and Jack-as-Rutger-Hauer ignored her.
"I thought I was going to be okay--I lost only one kidney," Jack explained. "We have two," he told the little boy. "You have to have at least one."
"What's wrong with the one you've got?" the little girl asked.
Jack shrugged, then winced again; after the handlebars, apparently it hurt to shrug, too. (He was thinking of the way Rutger Hauer says, "All those moments will be lost in time, like tears in rain.") Jack said: "My one remaining kidney is failing."
" 'Time to die,' " Myra Ascheim said, with a shrug. (Those are Rutger Hauer's last words in Blade Runner. Myra obviously knew the movie, too.)
"Of course I could ask my brother for one of his kidneys," Jack went on. "Only a brother's body-part would work inside me--only a brother's or a sister's, and I don't have a sister."
"So ask your brother!" the girl said excitedly.
"I suppose I better ask him," Jack agreed. "But you see the problem. I never gave him my bacon--not even one strip."
"What's a kidney?" the boy asked.
His sister carefully placed a strip of bacon beside his bananaless bowl of oatmeal. "Here--take this," she told him. "You don't need a kidney."
"I'll let you know, Jack, when I sense a surfeit of Rutger Hauer roles," was all Myra Ascheim said, but Jack knew he'd nailed the audition.
The girl sat watching her brother eat the bacon; Jack could tell she was still thinking about the accident. "Can I see the scar, from the handlebars?" she asked.
"Not while we're eating," Myra said again.
Jack had been so focused on his audience of one, he'd not noticed when the man with the newspaper had left. In any performance, even a good one, somebody always walks out. But after breakfast, out on Montana, Myra was critical of Jack's audition. "You lost the newspaper guy. He didn't buy the handlebars, not for a minute."
"The girl was my audience," Jack said. "The girl and you."
"The girl was an easy audience," Myra told him. "You kind of lost me with the handlebars, too."
"Oh."
"Lose the 'Oh'--it's a meaningless exclamation, Jac
k."
Jack realized that he wasn't sure what a talent-management company did, or how what Myra did was different from what an agent did. "Don't I need an agent?" he asked her.
"Let me find you a movie first," Myra said. "A movie and a director. The best time to get an agent is when you don't really need one."
Jack would often think how his career, and his life, might have turned out differently if Myra Ascheim had found a different movie from the one she found for him--or at least a different director. But he knew that one thing you were powerless to change was your first break, and you could never calculate the influence of that initial experience on what happened to you next.
Every young actor imagines there is a special part--a groove in which he or she is a perfect fit. Well--Jack's advice to young actors would be: Hope you never get the perfect part. The groove that Myra Ascheim found for Jack Burns (his first film) became a rut.
"Principiis obsta!" Mr. Ramsey would write to him, quoting Ovid. "Beware the beginnings!"
21
Two Candles, Burning
Ultimately, Jack Burns owed his success to William "Wild Bill" Vanvleck, who was also called The Mad Dutchman and The Remake Monster--the latter for his deplorable habit of stealing his stories from classics of the European cinema and crassly reinventing them for American movie audiences.
Hence the brilliant Knife in the Water, Roman Polanski's first feature film, which was made in Poland in 1962, was remade by Vanvleck in 1989 as My Last Hitchhiker--about a couple with a troubled relationship who go off for a weekend of skiing, not sailing, and pick up a transvestite hitchhiker. Jack Burns was born to be that cross-dressing hitchhiker.
William Vanvleck was both a screenwriter and a director. Variety once wrote that The Remake Monster never knew a film or a gender he couldn't change for the worse. But if Wild Bill was a rip-off artist, he had a survivor's abundance of common sense; he stole only good stuff. And Vanvleck brought a European kinkiness, if not art, to American sex and violence--always with a lavishness of deceit or duplicity that Bill, and many movie audiences, loved.
For example, there was a section of Route 40 between Empire and Winter Park, Colorado--a steep road with lots of S-turns, it climbed over Berthoud Pass. In the winter, they closed the road when they blasted avalanches, and you could see back-country skiers and snowboarders hitching rides to wherever they parked their cars.
In the opening shot of My Last Hitchhiker, we see a pretty female skier wearing a backpack, her skis over her shoulder; she's hitching a ride on Route 40. As everyone would find out, it's not a real girl--it's Jack Burns, and he looks fantastic.
The reason Jack got the part was not only that he had the Bruno Litkins, transvestite-Esmeralda connection; The Mad Dutchman also liked the idea of the hitchhiker being an unknown.
The couple in the car take a good look at Jack-as-a-girl. (Almost anyone would.) "Keep driving," the woman says.
The man brakes, stopping the car. "My last hitchhiker," he says. "I promise."
"You promised before, Ethan," she tells him. "It was a pretty girl the last time, too."
As Jack is putting his skis on the roof rack of their car, they take a closer look at him. Ethan stares at the pretty girl's breasts; the wife or girlfriend is more interested in Jack's dark, shoulder-length hair. When Jack gets into the backseat, Ethan adjusts the rearview mirror so he can see the hitchhiker better; the woman notices this, with mounting irritation.
"Hi--I'm Jack," he tells them, taking off the wig and wiping the mauve lip gloss off his lips with the back of his ski glove. "You probably thought I was a girl, right?"
The woman turns to watch Jack put the wig in his backpack. Jack unzips his parka, which fits him like a glove, and removes (to Ethan's horror) his breasts, putting the falsies in his backpack with the wig. Granted, it's a B-movie--inspiring a cult of followers--but it's a great opening.
"Hi--I'm Nicole," the woman in the front seat says to Jack; she's suddenly all smiles.
Justine Dunn played Nicole; it was her last movie before her disfiguring, career-ending car crash--that famous five-car smash-up where Wilshire Boulevard tangles with the 405.
In the movie, when Ethan sees that Jack is a guy, he tells him to get out of the car.
"You picked him up, Ethan. Give the guy a ride," Nicole says.
"I didn't pick up a guy," Ethan tells her.
Jack is looking over his shoulder, out the rear window, at the S-turn behind them. "This isn't a very safe place to stop," he says.
"Get out of the car!" Ethan shouts.
A quick cut to the inside of a black van navigating the S-turn; some stoned snowboarders are passing a joint around. (Nicole's line--"If he gets out, Ethan, I'm getting out with him"--plays as voice-over.)
Back on Ethan and Nicole in their stopped car: he prevents her from undoing her seat belt. The hitchhiker has already taken his skis off the roof rack; he taps on the passenger-side window, which Nicole lowers. Suddenly all-guy, Jack says: "I'm sorry for the trouble, but I catch more rides as a girl." Then he steps back from the car. Here comes the black van!
The van skids past the stopped car in a four-wheel drift--one of the stoned snowboarders frantically giving Ethan and Nicole and Jack the finger. Ethan and Nicole are visibly shaken by the near-collision, but Jack never even flinches.
The movie went downhill from there. When they showed film clips from My Last Hitchhiker, they always showed those first two close-ups of Jack.
When the film was released, Jack was twenty-four. Justine was twelve years older--an attractive older woman to Jack's transvestite hitchhiker.
They have one really hot scene later in the movie. Jack-as-a-girl is in the women's room at a ski-resort restaurant, fussing with his makeup in the mirror. Justine-as-Nicole comes out of a stall, straightening her dress. They both look pretty good, but Justine is thirty-six, and it's no secret who looks better.
"What ride are you trying to catch now?" she asks Jack.
"It's called dinner," he replies.
"Do you buy your own lift tickets?" she asks.
"Skiing is an expensive sport," Jack says, with a shrug. "I try not to buy my own dinner."
Justine is looking Jack over when she says, "And what do you do after dinner?"
"I talk him out of it," he tells her. "What do you do after dinner?"
At this point in the film, Justine-as-Nicole is still with Ethan--and she's not happy about it. "I try to talk him out of it," she admits, a little sadly.
That's when Jack kisses her on the lips. It's disturbingly unclear if he's kissing her as a woman or as a man. But what does it matter? My Last Hitchhiker would wind up being a favorite of Justine Dunn fans. After she was so tragically disfigured and disappeared from the big screen, Justine gathered an army of fans. Crazies, for the most part--the kind of moviegoers who made heroes out of people killed or maimed in stupid accidents.
As for Jack, it was the start of something he felt powerless to stop. As an ex-wrestler, he knew how to lose weight, and how to keep the pounds off--he had kept himself small. He was a lightweight, a former one-thirty-five-pounder; he had a lean-and-mean look, as Michele Maher (the real one) had observed.
"Androgyny seems to suit you, Jack," Myra Ascheim would tell him, after Wild Bill Vanvleck had made Jack an aberrant sex symbol--a sexy guy who was, if not to every taste, arguably more sexy as a girl.
Jack's role as the transvestite hitchhiker was three years before Jaye Davidson's debut as Dil in The Crying Game--and though Neil Jordan was a first-rate writer and director, and everyone knew Wild Bill Vanvleck was not, Jack Burns did it before Jaye Davidson did.
Granted, it was not a role Jack could count on growing old in. (Hollywood didn't exactly have a plethora of parts for foxy but graying Mrs. Doubtfires.) Nevertheless, it was a good start. Jack wasn't as famous as Emma, whose first novel had been a New York Times bestseller for fifteen weeks before My Last Hitchhiker opened in "select theaters." And Emma was far more famous in To
ronto, where there was no one more famous than a natural-born Canadian who made it big in the United States. But to hear Jack's mother talk, not to mention Mr. Ramsey, you would have thought that Jack Burns had eclipsed Jeff Bridges (as a transvestite, anyway) and was even bigger box office than Harrison Ford.
My Last Hitchhiker was an awful movie, but Jack's two close-ups caught on--the parody on Saturday Night Live didn't hurt--and the candlelight vigil outside the UCLA Medical Center, where Justine Dunn lay in a coma from her awesome wreck, made a talk-show celebrity out of Wild Bill Vanvleck, who spoke glowingly of Jack Burns.
Of course he did. Myra Ascheim had committed Jack to making another movie with The Mad Dutchman. By singing Jack's praises for what had been less than a supporting-actor role, Wild Bill was promoting his next film, which, alas, would not achieve the cult-classic status of My Last Hitchhiker. Although Jack was the male (and female) lead in this one, his second B-movie for The Remake Monster, there was no Justine Dunn counterpart--no celebrity actor or actress who suffered a well-timed car crash and lasting, career-ending disfigurement. (No unmerited publicity, in other words.)
Meanwhile, before his follow-up appearance as a cross-dresser in another Vanvleck remake, Jack was the beneficiary of Emma's publicity for The Slush-Pile Reader, which was considerable. A People magazine piece, in which Emma referred to Jack as her roommate, included photographs of them looking cozy together--these in addition to that familiar movie still of Jack transforming himself from a woman to a man, the telltale smudge of pale-purple lip gloss lending to that corner of his pretty mouth the wanton look of someone who's been roughly kissed.
"It's platonic love," Emma was quoted as saying. "We're just roommates." In another interview, Emma said: "I like taking pictures of Jack. He's so photogenic." (This was published with a photograph of Jack, asleep.)
Maybe only Alice and Mrs. Oastler believed that Emma and Jack weren't lovers, and Jack knew that Leslie had her doubts. Lawrence, that fink, had his doubts, too. Emma told Jack that she ran into Lawrence having lunch at Morton's. Lawrence had lost his job at C.A.A., but not to hear him tell it; he bullshitted Emma about starting his own talent-management company and wanting to be "unencumbered." (Like Myra Ascheim, whom he'd so confidently called a has-been.)
