Authors: John Irving
“It
only
matters when you win,” Milly corrected her.
“Well, we gotta go—there’s another party,” Emma said. “A
younger
one.”
“Nice hickey,” Mildred Ascheim told Emma.
“Thanks,” Emma said. “Jack gave it to me—it’s a real doozy.”
Mildred shifted her examining gaze to Jack. “He’s cute, isn’t he?” Myra asked her sister. “You can see what all the fuss is about.”
Jack could tell that Milly Ascheim was thinking over the word
cute.
In her world, Jack knew,
cute
didn’t cut it. “I think he’s cuter as a girl,” Mildred Ascheim said; she was scrutinizing Emma again, ignoring Jack. He thought that Milly was weighing whether or not to expose him.
That was when Myra said, “You’re just jealous, Milly, because I met Jack first.”
Uh-oh—here it comes,
Jack thought. But Mildred Ascheim surprised him. She gave Jack a withering look, just to let him know she remembered how small his schlong was; yet she didn’t give him away. It was not a reassuring look—on the contrary, Milly wanted Jack to know that she hadn’t forgotten a single disappointing detail of his
audition
in Van Nuys. This just wasn’t the time for her to bear witness.
“For Christ’s sake, Myra, it’s Oscar night,” Milly told her sister. “We oughta let these kids enjoy it.”
“Yeah, we gotta go,” Emma said again.
“Thank you,” Jack told Mildred Ascheim.
Milly was looking at Emma once more; she just waved to Jack with the back of her hand. He anticipated that Milly would say something as he and Emma were walking away, a parting shot. (“So long, small schlong”—or words to that effect.) But Milly held her tongue.
“Mark my words, Mildred—Jack Burns has a world of money shots ahead of him,” Jack heard Myra Ascheim say.
“Maybe,” Milly said. “I still say he’s cuter as a girl.”
“Don’t let those old bitches bother you, baby cakes,” Emma told him when they were back in their limousine.
They were drifting in a sea of limos. Jack didn’t know or care which party they were going to next. He always let Emma be in charge.
After a night like that, Jack would have expected to hear from everyone he ever knew—even though he lost. (Maybe especially because he lost.) But not that many people reached out to him. Caroline Wurtz called Alice, though. “Please tell Jack I think he should have won,” Miss Wurtz said. “Imagine giving an Oscar to someone for
eating
people!”
When Jack and Emma got back to their place in Santa Monica, Mr. Ramsey’s was the first message on the answering machine. “Jack Burns!” he cried. That was all; it was enough.
Jack’s old wrestling friends contacted him more slowly. Coach Clum, from Redding, wrote: “
You made the right call, Jack. Cauliflower ears wouldn’t have worked on a girl.
”
Coach Hudson and Coach Shapiro sent Jack their congratulations, too. Hudson said he hoped that Jack wasn’t taking any of those female hormones, and that Jack’s boobs hadn’t been implants—just falsies. Shapiro was curious to know what had become of the Slavic-looking beauty, whose name he had forgotten; he’d been hoping to catch a glimpse of her at the Academy Awards.
Coach Shapiro meant Claudia, of course. Jack didn’t hear from her. Not a word from Noah Rosen, either—not that Jack expected to hear from him. And not a sound from Michele Maher, who had vanished without a peep. Herman Castro thought she’d gone to medical school, but after that he’d lost track of her. Naturally, Jack heard from Herman, but it was just a note.
“Way to go, amigo—you got to the finals.”
Yes, it felt like that—he had gotten to the finals and lost, no contest. There was no telling if or when he might get there again; maybe the Oscar opportunity had been a one-shot deal.
Both
Terminator 2: Judgment Day
and
The Naked Gun 21⁄2: The Smell of Fear
did much bigger box office than
Normal and Nice,
but that little film and the Academy Award nomination gave Jack Burns a face that was recognized everywhere. As a man
or
as a woman, maybe; as a man, without a doubt. (Jack hadn’t, as yet, tried going anywhere as a woman—except in the movies.) He was a celebrity now.
Emma seemed determined that he take the utmost advantage of his fame. To that end, she persuaded Jack to say he was writing something—though of course he wasn’t. “Keep it nonspecific, baby cakes. Just say you’re
always
writing.” This amounted to a conversation-stopper in many of Jack’s interviews. It sounded vaguely sinister, as if the alleged something he was
always
writing were an exposé. But of
what
? “It makes you more mysterious,” Emma told him. “It adds to your
noir
thing.” Did she mean that being a writer somehow enhanced his sexually ambiguous reputation as an actor?
Some interviewers
only
wanted to talk about what Jack was writing; it drove them crazy that he wouldn’t say. For this reason alone, it seemed worth repeating. “I’m not interested in settling down, getting married, having kids—not right now,” he would usually begin. “Now’s the time to concentrate on my work.”
“You mean your acting?”
“Well, sure.
And
my writing.”
“What are you writing?”
“Something. I’m just
always
writing.”
Even his mother wanted to know what Jack was writing. “Not a memoir, I hope!” Alice said, laughing nervously.
Leslie Oastler regarded Jack with regret—as if, if she’d known he was going to become a
writer,
she wouldn’t have shown him her Rose of Jericho.
Emma said her mom never stopped asking her if she’d read any of Jack’s writing. Emma thought her lie was very funny. Not Jack. He didn’t see the point of it.
When Myra Ascheim died—Jack read her obituary in
Variety;
no one called him—Bob Bookman said that Jack didn’t need a talent manager, anyway. Having an agent at C.A.A. would suffice. Jack already had an agent
and
an entertainment lawyer—Alan Hergott. “You need a
money
manager, not a talent manager,” Alan told him.
Because he wanted to support his mother, Jack found a money manager in Buffalo, New York—Willard Saperston. Coming from Buffalo, Willard had connections in Toronto. Jack was getting killed by Canadian taxes. For starters, Willard told him that he had to become an American citizen, which Jack did. He also became an “investor” in Daughter Alice; that way, his mom wouldn’t pay “taxes up the wazoo” for every U.S. dollar he gave her.
It crossed Jack’s mind that his mom might just sell Daughter Alice and stop being a tattoo artist; it also occurred to him that
if
his mom’s relationship with Mrs. Oastler was based on Leslie’s financial support, which he’d once thought it was, Alice might leave Leslie.
But Jack’s mother felt at home in the tattoo world—it was her one area of expertise—and whatever Jack had once believed were Alice’s reasons for moving in with Mrs. Oastler, he’d been wrong to think that his mother wasn’t Leslie’s willing partner. They were a couple who would go the distance. As Tattoo Ole had first indicated, Jack’s mother
was
Daughter Alice; she was both an old hippie and a maritimer, and she’d lived up to her tattoo name.
Jack might have spent more time in Toronto if he could have made peace with that—that and the fact that his missing father would never be a topic of conversation between him and his mom.
That Jack Burns was the son of a tattoo artist, and that he’d never known his father—well, anyone could imagine how these things would figure in various interviews and profiles of the successful young actor. The movie media never tired of an exotic childhood; nor did entertainment journalists release their grip on every bone of dysfunction in a celebrity’s life. In the words of one reporter, Jack had a “tattooed past.” (The latter observation was made all the more intriguing by the fact that neither Jack nor his mom was tattooed.)
Canadian television always asked to interview Jack and his mother in Daughter Alice. And soon after the American media published a picture of Jack with this or that date—except for Emma, they were never Canadians, and Emma (also for tax purposes) had become an American citizen—there would be someone from CBC-TV in Daughter Alice, asking Alice if she knew the woman Jack was “seeing” and if the relationship was “serious.”
“Oh, I don’t bug Jack about his personal life,” Alice would say with the unhurried insouciance of the perpetually stoned. (Bob Dylan would be yowling away in the background.) “And Jack doesn’t bug me about mine.”
Jack met a meat heiress in New York. Samantha was an older woman; she liked dressing Jack in her clothes. (Not to go out—he never once went out as a woman in New York, and he wasn’t with Samantha very long.)
He had a fling with an older woman in London, too—Emma’s English publisher. Corinna was fascinated that Jack was writing something; naturally, he never told her what it was. For a publisher, she had very sexy clothes, but Jack wasn’t with her for long, either.
Both of these older women were jealous of his enduring relationship with Emma, and Jack felt he wasted too much time flying from London and New York to L.A. Emma basically refused to leave their crappy house on Entrada, and Jack missed her too much when he was away.
Besides, by not moving from Santa Monica, Emma and Jack could afford to buy a really good car. They bought a silver Audi with gunmetal-gray leather seats, the same model Jack had once driven as a parking valet in his brief employment at Stan’s. Emma understood the symbolism of it. “Just so long as it doesn’t come with a kid in the backseat, baby cakes.”
Having a car like that made Jack glad he didn’t drink—not that he drove appreciably faster. According to Emma, Jack was as irritatingly slow and overcareful a driver as ever. But Emma wasn’t slow or overcareful. “It might have been
safer
to buy a
house
in Beverly Hills,” Jack used to tell her. He meant that Emma might have done less driving.
So they went out, and they came home (or not)—and, of course, they met people. Jack was never “with” someone for more than a month or two, at most. There was no one Emma was “with”—not for more than a night, like the pretty boys she met dancing at Coconut Teaszer.
Jack kept his hair long, almost shoulder-length, which made his occasional cross-dressing more natural—if only in the privacy of a boudoir. As a guy, he still favored a little stubble; he stayed lean and mean, because that was his job.
Jack’s roles didn’t always require him to transform himself from a man to a woman, but the potential remained obdurately a part of his character—an element of his
noir
thing, as Emma called it.
On-screen, Jack was “with” just about everyone: Elisabeth Shue before she did
Leaving Las Vegas;
Cameron Diaz in a stupid chick flick; Drew Barrymore in a Stephen King screamer. He was Nicole Kidman’s
slowly
dying husband—it took three quarters of the film for Jack to die. Nicole Kidman was much taller than Jack Burns, but that wasn’t evident from the movie, in which Jack never got out of bed.
Jack was the guy Julia Roberts wisely didn’t marry. He told the lie that made Meg Ryan leave him. He suffered as a smitten waiter, the one who spilled the vichyssoise down Gwyneth Paltrow’s back.
Bruce Willis kicked the crap out of him. Denzel Washington arrested him. And Jack was, albeit briefly, a Bond girl—the one who was killed by a poisonous dart from a cigarette lighter when 007 deduced Jack was a guy.
Myra Ascheim had been right: a world of money shots lay ahead of him. If Jack had to pick a favorite, it would be that bit with Jessica Lee. “The almost cross-dressing moment,” some critic in
The New Yorker
called it.
Jessica is a beautiful heiress. Jack is a thief, and he’s just slept with her. She’s taking a shower while Jack is alone in her bedroom, taking inventory of her assets. There’s pricey stuff everywhere. He’s just wandering around her bedroom in his boxer shorts while we hear Jessica singing in the shower.
When Jack comes to her wardrobe closet, he is enraptured by her clothes. It’s an inside joke—Jack Burns fingering through a closet full of women’s clothes. Not even the jewelry has attracted
this
much attention from the thief in his boxers. It’s clear that Jack loves her clothes. He’s so mesmerized that he doesn’t hear the shower shut off; Jessica has stopped singing.
When the bathroom door opens, and Jessica is standing there in that terry-cloth robe—her wet hair wrapped in a towel—her image is reflected in the mirror on the wardrobe-closet door. It’s a great shot: Jessica appears to be standing beside Jack when he holds up her dress to his half-naked body and takes a look at himself (and at her) in the mirror.
He is one cool thief. “Boy, I’ll bet this looks great on you,” Jack says to Jessica Lee. In the film, Jessica’s character is completely taken in. (Because that’s the story: she’s in love with the thief.) But they had to shoot that scene ten times. Jessica herself wasn’t taken in. The first time she saw Jack Burns holding up a dress to his body, Jessica turned pale. It wasn’t in the script. She saw something she didn’t like—something about Jack. It took her ten takes to get over whatever it was she saw; it took Jack a few takes, too.
“What was it? What did you see?” he asked her later.
“I don’t know what it was, Jack,” Jessica said. “You just gave me the willies.”
Jessica Lee’s
willies
notwithstanding, the final take was a keeper. In any retrospective of Jack Burns, his collected film clips, there was that one of him and Jessica in the mirror. He’s holding up the dress and saying, “Boy, I’ll bet this looks great on you.” She’s in the doorway to the bathroom, smiling that smile. Jessica’s smile is wide enough to fall into, big enough to consume you. But Jack could never see that clip without remembering the
first
look she gave him. Jessica wasn’t smiling the first time, and she wasn’t acting.