by John Irving
The mornings after Emma brought home some kid from Coconut Teaszer were the only ones when she wouldn’t get up early to write her next Hollywood novel. (“Number Two,” as she would refer to it—as if that were the title.) Emma was disciplined, even driven, but the pressure was off; she’d published her first novel and seemed confident that someone would publish the second.
To a lesser degree, the pressure was off Jack, too. That he had made his first film with William Vanvleck—and worse, was under contract to make another movie with him—didn’t impress anyone at C.A.A. (Or at I.C.M. or the William Morris Agency.) Perhaps, when Jack was free of any future obligation to Wild Bill, one of those agencies would consider representing him. But for now, Myra Ascheim was looking after him—he was instructed to call Myra his manager.
When Jack quit his job at American Pacific, there were no hard feelings; he’d slept with only two of the waitresses, and one of them had quit before he did. Even working for The Remake Monster beat being a waiter.
Emma wanted Jack to read her fan mail before he showed it to her. She had no tolerance for anything negative; Jack was under orders to throw the criticism away. “And don’t show me the death threats, Jack—just send them to the F.B.I.” There weren’t any death threats; most of Emma’s mail was positive. The worst of it, in Jack’s opinion, was how many of her readers insisted on telling Emma their life stories. It was amazing how many dysfunctional people wanted her to write about them.
Emma read Jack’s fan mail before he saw it, but he read all of his mail eventually—good and bad. He didn’t get a twentieth of the mail Emma received, and most of his was both vaguely and not so vaguely insinuating. Letters, always with photographs, from transsexuals—“chicks with dicks,” according to Emma—and letters from gay men, inquiring if Jack was gay. There was only the occasional letter from a young woman—usually, but not always, stating that she hoped he was straight.
Jack was more interested in Emma’s mail than he was in his, because he kept thinking that Michele Maher would write to her—demanding to know why Emma had used her name. But there was no letter from Michele Maher about The Slush-Pile Reader.
It killed Jack that he knew nothing about Michele; worse, he imagined she had seen My Last Hitchhiker and found his performance as a transvestite to be resounding confirmation that he was “too weird.”
“Just wait till Michele sees the next one, baby cakes—talk about too weird!” They’d both read Vanvleck’s screenplay, which had prompted even Emma to say: “Words fail me.”
It was a magical but unknown movie that Wild Bill had ripped off this time; he’d stolen a little gem from a fellow Dutchman, Peter van Engen, who died of AIDS shortly after his first and only feature film was made. Called Lieve Anne Frank (in English, Dear Anne Frank, as you might begin a letter to the dead girl), it won a prize at some film festival in the Netherlands—and it was dubbed for distribution in Germany, but nowhere else. Outside Holland, almost no one saw it; yet William Vanvleck had seen it, and he’d traduced Lieve Anne Frank to such a degree that poor Peter van Engen couldn’t possibly have recognized his own movie—not even from the all-seeing perspective of his grave.
“Lieve Anne Frank,” the voice-over begins. It is the voice of a young Jewish girl, living in Amsterdam today; she is about the same age Anne Frank was when Anne was caught by the Nazis and taken to the death camp.
Emma and Jack saw the original Dutch film in William Vanvleck’s home screening room. The Remake Monster had an ugly mansion on Loma Vista Drive in Beverly Hills. Wild Bill liked whippets; they ran free in the mansion, slipping and falling on the hardwood floors. Vanvleck had his own chef and his own gardener—a Surinamese couple, a child-size woman with a similarly miniature husband.
“ ‘Dear Anne Frank,’ ” Wild Bill translated for Emma and Jack; he had a smoker’s cough. “ ‘I believe that you live in me, and that I have been born to serve you.’ ”
Rachel is her name. Weekdays after school, and on weekends, she works as a tour guide in the Anne Frank House—Prinsengracht 263. The house is open, as a museum, every day of the year except Yom Kippur.
“The Anne Frank House is beautiful in a sad way,” Rachel says to the camera—as if we (the audience) were tourists and Rachel our guide. We see samples of Anne’s handwriting, facsimiles from her diary, and many photographs. Rachel has cut her hair to look as much like Anne as she can; she despises contemporary fashion and dresses herself, whenever possible, in clothes Anne might have worn.
We see Rachel shopping in flea markets and secondhand clothing stores; we see her at night, hiding from her parents in her bedroom, imitating poses and expressions we recognize from photographs of Anne.
“They could have gotten away,” Rachel keeps repeating. “Her father, Otto, could have stolen a boat. He could have steered a course from the Prinsengracht, the canal, to the Amstel—a river, broader than the canal. Not to the sea, of course, but somewhere safe. I know they could have gotten away.”
By this point in the film, nothing had really happened, but Emma was already in tears. “You see—it’s good, isn’t it?” Vanvleck kept asking. “Isn’t it great?”
Rachel is obsessed with the idea that she is Anne Frank come back to life; she believes she can rewrite history. On Yom Kippur, when the Anne Frank House is closed, Rachel unlocks the door and lets herself inside. She dresses herself as Anne—transforms herself, actually, because the likeness is more than a little creepy—and the next morning, when the tourists are waiting to get in, Rachel-as-Anne simply walks out of the Anne Frank House as if she were Anne Frank. Some of the tourists scream, believing she’s a ghost; others follow her, taking her picture.
She goes to the canal, the Prinsengracht, where her father, Otto, is waiting with a boat. Absurdly, it’s a kind of gondola—more suited to Venice than to Amsterdam—and Otto is a most unlikely, un-Italian-looking gondolier. Anne boards the boat, waving to her admirers.
There’s a beautiful shot from the golden crown of the Westerkerk of the boat passing on the Prinsengracht—crowds of well-wishers run to the bridges, waving. There’s a shot of the little boat entering the broader water of the Amstel; more crowds, more cameras clicking.
How the fantasy dies is almost entirely done with sound—the sound of soldiers’ boots on the cobblestone streets; the sound of the boots on the stairs of the Anne Frank House, which we see is empty. Some furniture has been tipped over; Anne’s writing has been scattered here and there. She hasn’t escaped.
Emma was bawling her eyes out. As Jack sat there in that tasteless mansion on Loma Vista Drive, the sound of The Mad Dutchman’s whippets dashing everywhere was somehow intercut in Jack’s mind with the sound of the storm troopers’ boots. He couldn’t imagine what a mess Wild Bill Vanvleck was going to make of Dear Anne Frank.
As it turned out, The Remake Monster’s screenplay would leave Emma and Jack depressed for days.
“I think I’ll go to the gym,” Jack told Emma when he first read it.
After she said, “Words fail me,” Emma took a deep breath and announced she was going back to work. “I should have known when we saw the movie,” Emma told Jack later. “There was no way you were gonna be Anne Frank.”
But that day they read the remake, which was their first understanding of what would become of Dear Anne Frank, all Jack could do was go to the gym and punish his body; all Emma could do was go back to work on her next Hollywood novel. The Mad Dutchman’s screenplay was god-awful.
Being successful had made Emma even more of a workaholic. She usually got up with the rush-hour traffic on the PCH and drank several cups of strong coffee, sometimes with her eyes closed but always with the music playing—something too loud and metallic for Jack’s taste, although it was a welcome change from the generally uninspired music out on the highway.
Emma wrote all morning—the coffee was what she called her “appetite suppressant of choice.” When she was famished, she drove herself out to lunch. She didn’t drink at lunch,
although she was a big eater—both at lunch and at her late-night dinners.
She liked Le Dome on Sunset Strip. It had a stodgy, Old Hollywood feeling, but it was still a happening place for executives and agents and entertainment lawyers. Emma also liked Spago in West Hollywood—the original Spago, up the hill on Sunset Boulevard. And while it was too expensive even for the most successful of first novelists, Emma needed a weekly fix of The Palm on Santa Monica Boulevard, where she said there were more agents than steaks and lobsters.
She was burning the candle at both ends, because she’d go to the gym after lunch and lift weights most of the afternoon. After the weightlifting, when she said she had “digested,” she would do a hundred or more crunches for her abs. Nothing aerobic. (Dancing and whatever sex she could manage in the top position were Emma’s aerobics.)
It was a lot for a big girl to put her body through, and Jack didn’t like to think of her driving—not even in the daytime, when she hadn’t been drinking. Emma was a fast driver, but the speed was only a small part of what bothered Jack.
Emma loved Sunset Boulevard. Even in Toronto, as a schoolgirl at St. Hilda’s, she used to dream of driving on Sunset Boulevard. Emma tried to drive everywhere on Sunset—out to Beverly Hills and West Hollywood and Hollywood, all on Sunset.
It was when she was driving back to Santa Monica that Jack worried about her. He knew she’d had a big lunch and had crazily worked it off, or not, in the gym. He worried about the curves on Sunset. And when Emma took that left on Chautauqua, just before the Palisades, it was a steep, twisting downhill to the PCH. You had to get into the far-left lane and make what amounted to a U-turn on West Channel.
It would be late afternoon, rush-hour traffic, and Emma was drained from her workout in the gym—two or three liter-size bottles of Evian later. With the traffic barreling down Chautauqua, into that last long curve, Emma would be three quarters of the way through the turn before she could see the ocean. Jack knew Emma, even her driving. She wouldn’t be watching the cars—not when she could see that first, dazzling-blue glint of the Pacific. She was, after all, a Toronto girl. L.A. affected you in direct proportion to where you came from; there were no views of the Pacific in Toronto.
Jack would wait in the Entrada house for Emma to come home. Then she would write. That was when Jack went to the gym. (He never told her he occasionally went to Gold’s.)
It was a good time to work out; mostly the nondrinkers, and a few noneaters, were there. Jack met some pretty pumped women doing free weights, but the ones on the cardiovascular machines were the ultra-skinny girls, and at dinnertime, many of the skinny girls were anorexics. One girl—she spent an hour every night on the stair-climber—told Jack she was on “an all-smoothie diet.”
“How’s your energy?” he asked her.
“Berries, teaspoon of honey, nonfat yogurt—every third day, a banana. Just put everything in the blender,” she told him. “Your body doesn’t need anything else.”
She fell off the treadmill one night and just lay there. One of the yoga instructors speculated that her colon had collapsed on itself. Jack would remember a bunch of bodybuilders standing outside the gym; when they saw the ambulance, they waved it down with their towels.
Jack was on his usual diet—mostly proteins, maybe a little light on the carbs for all the time he spent on the cardiovascular machines. He was taking it easy with the free weights: nothing heavy, just lots of reps. He wasn’t trying to bulk up. His job, meaning getting one—the next role, and the role after that—depended on his staying lean and mean.
Jack was lightheaded with hunger by the time he left the gym every night, when he went back to get Emma and they drove out again to eat—and his stomach was falling in on itself every morning. You could say that Jack was burning the candle at both ends, too—but not like Emma.
One night, when she was wolfing down her mashed potatoes at Kate Mantilini, Emma noticed that Jack hadn’t finished his salad. He’d stopped eating and was watching her eat; his expression was one of concern, not disgust, but Jack should have known that Emma would have found his disgust more acceptable.
“Are you thinking I’m gonna die young?” she asked him.
“No!” he said, too quickly.
“Well, I am,” she told him. “If my appetite doesn’t kill me, the vaginismus will.”
“The vaginismus can’t kill you, can it?” Jack asked her, but Emma’s mouth was full; she just shrugged and went on eating.
22
Money Shots
Batman and Lethal Weapon 2 were among the top-grossing movies of 1989, but the Oscar for Best Picture would go to Driving Miss Daisy. Jack’s second film with William Vanvleck was called The Tour Guide; it wouldn’t win any awards.
The Anne Frank House has been reinvented in Las Vegas. A tacky shrine to a dead rock-’n’-roll star clearly modeled on a prettier Janis Joplin—that would be Jack—draws morbid fans of the late sexpot, who, earlier in the movie, chokes to death on her own vomit following a drunken binge. The dead singer’s name is Melody; her group, Pure Innocence, gets its start in the beatnik haunts of Venice and North Beach in the early 1960s. They abandon their folk-jazz-blues roots for psychedelic rock, finding an audience and a home for themselves among the flower children in San Francisco in 1966.
Everything in a William Vanvleck remake was stolen from something else; Pure Innocence and Melody’s leap to fame coincides with when Janis Joplin started singing with Big Brother and the Holding Company. Melody’s first hit single, “You Can’t Handle My Heart Like It Was Somethin’ Else,” sounds suspiciously like Big Mama Thornton’s “Ball and Chain.” Jack didn’t sing it half badly.
Jack-as-Melody promptly dumps Pure Innocence and goes solo. By ’69, Melody’s albums have gone gold and platinum and triple-platinum. She returns to being a blues singer with her last hit single, “Bad Bill Is Gone,” an ode to an abusive ex-boyfriend—the former lead guitarist in Pure Innocence, whom the tabloids allege Melody once tried to kill by lacing his favorite marijuana lasagna with rat poison. (That “Bad Bill Is Gone” sounded like “Me and Bobby McGee” couldn’t be a coincidence.)
Jack-as-Melody dies passed-out drunk and choking on his-as-her puke in a Las Vegas hotel room, following a concert there—hence the shrine to Melody’s short life and intense fame opens as yet another rock-’n’-roll museum, this one at the Mandalay Bay end of the strip. The crass display of Melody’s less-than-innocent underwear is out of place and easy to overlook among those casinos and hotels on the strip, but The Mad Dutchman had always wanted to make a movie in Las Vegas, and The Tour Guide was it.
Certainly Wild Bill could have found a better singer for Melody, but maybe not a hotter girl. (“You were hot, baby cakes,” Emma told Jack. “Your singing lacked a little something, but you were hot—I’ll give you that.”) Jack wasn’t bad as the guy, either—the eponymous tour guide himself.
“Let’s keep it simple,” Wild Bill Vanvleck told Jack. “Let’s call the tour guide Jack.”
Jack-as-Jack is a devoted fan of Pure Innocence, in the group’s short-lived Melody years. Jack is still in college when Melody splits from the group; he has only recently graduated when the singer dies. His adoration of Melody is deeper than the after-her-death kind. (In the film, Jack appears to be dancing when he walks—“Bad Bill Is Gone” or “You Can’t Handle My Heart Like It Was Somethin’ Else” is pounding in his head.)
The sleazy manager of the Melody Museum, as the shameless shrine is called, hires Jack-as-Jack as a tour guide, but Jack is disapproving of some of the displays, which he sees as exploiting Melody—not that the slut singer didn’t do plenty to exploit herself. Her collected musical instruments are innocent, as are the photos of her tours and the music itself. But there are “compromising” photographs—of Melody consorting with the lead guitarist who beat her, of Melody drunk and passed out on various motel-room beds. And there are her clothes, especially her “intimate apparel”; no one should see or paw over her underwear, J
ack believes. Jack also disapproves of the collection of empty wine bottles; some of the dates on the labels indicate that Melody died before the wines were bottled.
The manager, a precursor of the Harvey Keitel character in Holy Smoke, tells Jack that the wine bottles are for “atmosphere”; as for the displayed underwear, a pink thong, among others—these items are “essential.”
Just as Rachel imagines that Anne Frank could have gotten away, Jack convinces himself that Melody didn’t have to die. If only he’d been around and had known her, he could have saved her. Jack believes that the shrine to Melody is a betrayal of her; the seedier of her collected things are mocking her.
One night, when the Melody Museum is closed, Jack lets himself in—he has a key. He brings a couple of empty suitcases and packs up the items he considers too intimate, or too damaging to Melody’s reputation; the latter, apparently, is sacred only to him. Two cops in a patrol car see lights in the closed building and investigate. But Jack-as-Jack has transformed himself into Jack-as-Melody. Dressed as the dead singer, he carries the suitcases past the stunned policemen—out onto the Vegas strip. (Not every guy can get away with emerald-green spangles on black spandex.) It is The Mad Dutchman’s sole directorial touch of genius: until the scene when Jack-as-Melody walks out of the Melody Museum, toting the suitcases, the audience has never seen the strip at night in its garish neon splendor.
Inexplicably, the cops let Jack-as-Melody go. Do they think he’s Melody’s ghost? (They don’t look frightened.) Do they know he’s a guy in drag? (They don’t look as if they care.) Or do the cops—like Jack, like the audience—recognize that the Melody Museum is a twisted place? Do they think the shrine ought to be robbed?