(2005) Until I Find You

by John Irving

  “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, Jack.”

  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 Toronto, 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.)

  Lawrence was “unencumbered” at lunch, Emma observed; he was just a liar who was out of a job. Morton’s—the enduring and expensive celebrity hangout on Melrose, in West Hollywood—was not a place where you wanted to be eating lunch alone. No deals were going down for Lawrence, Emma concluded; maybe that’s why he got a little crude with her. “Do you still claim you’re not banging your boyfriend?” he asked, meaning Jack. “Does Jack go on dates as a girl?”

  Emma knew she could kick the crap out of him, but she let it pass. “You’re such a loser, Lawrence,” was all she said. It was sufficiently gratifying to her that Lawrence didn’t seem to know he was in one of the least prestigious booths.

  Emma had resigned from her studio job as a script reader a couple of months before The Slush-Pile Reader was published. “Screenplay development just isn’t for me,” she’d told them, but one of the studio execs got hold of a set of her galleys. There was a kind of code in Hollywood, too vague and virulently denied to be a rule: you were not supposed to call an asshole an asshole, not in writing. It was the dim understanding of this studio exec that Emma had violated the code. To punish her, the exec copied Emma’s script notes and distributed them to the rejected writers’ agents. But the punishment backfired: once you start making copies, everyone sees them. The execs at other studios read Emma’s notes; after all, many of the screenplays in question were still making the rounds.

  A few of those scripts were now films in production; a couple were in post-production, meaning they’d miraculously been shot, and one had recently been released, to tepid reviews. Naturally, the reviews weren’t as insightful or well-written as Emma’s notes on an earlier draft of the screenplay. Even the rejected writers’ agents liked Emma’s notes—two of them offered her a job.

  A celebrity talk-show host at an L.A. radio station asked Emma’s permission to read some of her script notes on the air. “Sure,” Emma said. “Everyone else has read them.” (More publicity for The Slush-Pile Reader—not that Emma needed it.)

  This didn’t win Emma many friends among screenwriters, but what really insulted the industry was that Emma said she wasn’t interested in writing a screenplay herself—especially not an adaptation of The Slush-Pile Reader. In the novel, she’d already made the point that the story was one third porn film; no one would attempt to make a serious movie out of that material. To virtually assure herself that no one would, Emma entangled the film rights to her novel with the kind of approvals never granted to writers—not to first novelists, anyway. She again asserted that she had no interest in adapting The Slush-Pile Reader herself, yet she insisted on retaining script approval, should anyone else be enough of a fool to write a screenplay, and she insisted on having cast approval and director approval—even final cut. The Slush-Pile Reader couldn’t be made as a movie under those outrageous terms.

  When Emma showed up at all the usual places—she took Jack with her, more and more—it was widely assumed that she was doing research for another Hollywood novel, but Jack didn’t know (at the time) that this was the case. He thought she just liked to eat and drink. But Emma saw herself as a specter sent to remind the studio execs that there was such a thing as a script reader who could write.

  In the movie business, they were already speaking admiringly of The Slush-Pile Reader as “not makable,” which could be quite a compliment in the industry—provided you didn’t make a habit of it.

  Jack worried about Emma. She had bought the house they’d been renting in Santa Monica, for no good reason. The move from Venice had irritated her; she said she didn’t want to move again. But if the house in Santa Monica was no prize to rent, it was just plain stupid to buy it.

  It was a two-story, three-bedroom house on the downhill end of Entrada Drive—near where Entrada ran into the Pacific Coast Highway. You could hear the drone of traffic on the PCH over the air-conditioning. Furthermore, as if Emma and Jack were permanently drawn to the perfume of restaurant Dumpsters, the driveway of the house intersected the alley behind an Italian restaurant. It wasn’t sushi they smelled—it was more like old eggplant parmigiana.

  But they were living on Entrada Drive when Emma’s first novel was published, and she became what she called (with no small amount of pride) “a self-supporting novelist.” Her revenge on having wasted her time as a film major was complete; she had made it in the industry’s hometown by writing, of all things, a novel. Staying in the house on Entrada, even buying the stupid place, was another way of thumbing her nose at the industry. Emma had come to L.A. as an outsider; it meant a lot to her to stay an outsider.

  “I’m not moving to Beverly Hills, baby cakes.”

  “Yeah, well—we sure do a lot of eating there,” Jack reminded her.

  It was a lot of late-night eating, for the most part. Jack didn’t drink, so he was always the driver. Emma could drink a bottle of red wine by herself—usually before she finished her dinner. She had a special fondness for Kate Mantilini in Beverly Hills.

  “Kate Mantilini is quite a distance to travel for a steak sandwich and mashed potatoes,” Jack complained; he didn’t eat bread, not to mention mashed potatoes. But Emma loved to eat at the long bar that ran the length of the restaurant. The industry c
rowd all knew her and asked her how the new novel was coming.

  “It’s coming,” was all Emma would say. “Have you met my roommate, Jack Burns? He was the chick in My Last Hitchhiker—I mean the hot one.”

  “I was the hitchhiker,” Jack would explain. Despite Myra Ascheim telling him to lose the stubble, he was usually growing a little something on his face—anything that might mitigate his androgynous first impression.

  Monday nights, Emma and Jack went to Dan Tana’s in West Hollywood. You could watch Monday Night Football on the TV at the bar, yet the waiters wore tuxedos. There was a mostly hip Hollywood crowd—people in the biz, or trying to be, but in the curious company of assorted gangsters and hookers. There were red-vinyl booths and red-and-white-checkered tablecloths, and the items on the menu were named for film-industry celebs.

  “You’re gonna have a lamb loin named after you one day, honey pie,” Emma would tell Jack. She usually ordered the Lew Wasserman veal chop. After Wasserman died, Jack felt funny about eating there—as if the veal chop in his name were a piece of Lew himself. Emma also liked the steak à la Diller, but Jack ate light—often just a salad. He was back on iced tea big-time, as during his days cutting weight as a wrestler. With a half-gallon of tea on an empty stomach, Jack could dance all night.

  Emma liked late-night music, too. She was crazy about a place in West Hollywood on Sunset Boulevard—Coconut Teaszer. It was a bit sleazy—lots of rock ’n’ roll and fast, sweaty dancing. Very young kids went there. Emma would occasionally pick up a boy and bring him home. Jack made an effort not to watch them making out in the backseat. “Listen,” she would always say to the kid. “You gotta do exactly what I tell you.” Jack tried not to listen.

  He also tried not to imagine Emma in the top position. He didn’t like to think about her vaginismus, but he would remember the night he found her in tears in the bathroom—doubled over in pain. “He said he wouldn’t move,” she was crying. “He promised he wouldn’t—the little fucker!”