Until I Find You

He tells her where the limo is parked. It's not far--nor is it parked within sight of the entrance to The Peninsula. He says he'll come find her.

When Johnny-as-a-hooker leaves The Peninsula, he makes sure he's noticed. Johnny has used a little bottle of bourbon from the minibar in Lester's hotel room as a mouthwash. He struts up to the front desk, where he-as-she seizes a young clerk by his coat lapels and breathes in his face. "There's something you should know," Johnny-as-a-hooker says in a husky voice.

"Lester Billings has checked out. I'm afraid he's really left his room a mess." Then Johnny-as-a-hooker releases the young man and sways through the lobby, leaving the hotel. He and Carol drive home to Marina del Rey, where they change into their regular clothes.

At the end of the novel, they've stopped for the night in a motel room off Interstate 80 somewhere in the Midwest. They're on their way back to Iowa to find normal jobs and live a nice life. Carol is pregnant. (Maternity Leave, as an escort service, might have been wildly successful, but Carol wants no part of the business--not anymore--and Johnny is through with driving movie stars.)

In the motel room off the interstate, there's an old Lester Billings movie on the TV--an authentic Western. Lester is a cattle rustler; he dies in the saddle, shot dead on his horse.

Normal and Nice turned out to be a better movie than a novel, and Emma knew it would be. The film was already in production while the novel was still on the New York Times bestseller list. Many book reviewers complained that the novel was written with the future screenplay in mind. Naturally, Emma wrote the screenplay, too; among film critics, there was some speculation that she might have written it before she wrote the novel. Emma wouldn't say.

Jack didn't know the details of the deal she made with Bob Bookman at C.A.A., but while Bookman didn't normally represent actors, he agreed to represent Jack. Whether it was in writing--or something that was said over lunch, or in a phone call--it was understood that Emma and Jack were attached to the movie that would be made from Normal and Nice. Emma would write the script and Jack would be Johnny. Of course Emma had Jack in mind for the part from the beginning--a sympathetic cross-dresser. And this time his shoulder-length hair would be real, not a wig.

Mary Kendall played Carol--as innocent an escort as you'd ever see. Jake "Prairie Dog" Rawlings played Lester Billings--his first role in a long time, and his only screen appearance not in a Western.

When Mary Kendall and Jack are holding hands in that Interstate 80 motel room, just watching TV, they have no dialogue. In the same scene in the novel, watching Lester Billings get shot, Carol says, "I wonder how many times he got killed in his career."

"Enough so he wasn't afraid of it," Johnny says.

But Emma thought it was better if they didn't say anything in the film. It's more of a movie moment--to just see them watching the old cowboy die. Their dreams, to be movie stars, have died, too; something of that is visible in Carol's and Johnny's resigned expressions. That green or blue-gray light from the television screen flickers on their faces.

But Jack would have liked to say the line. ("Enough so he wasn't afraid of it.")

"Maybe you'll get to use it later," Emma told him, "but not this time. This time, I'm the writer."

Emma was more than that. She was the architect of Jack's future in film, the reason he would make the leap from Wild Bill Vanvleck to more-or-less mainstream. Of course Jack Burns was still best known in drag, but suddenly he was serious.

It was quite a surprise when Jack was nominated for an Academy Award; he hadn't thought of the cross-dressing limo driver as being that sympathetic a part. It was no surprise that Jack wouldn't win that year. It was Mary Kendall's first Oscar nomination, too, and she wouldn't win, either. But they were both nominated, which was more than they'd ever imagined.

The Silence of the Lambs would win Best Picture, and Jodie Foster and Anthony Hopkins Best Actress and Best Actor, respectively--it was their year.

Emma wasn't nominated. Screenwriters were nominated by screenwriters; Emma's famous script notes still rankled. Emma went to the Oscars as Jack's date, which made it fun. They generally agreed who the assholes were; identifying the assholes was an important activity at an event like that.

Billy Crystal, again the host, made a joke about the evening being delayed--"because Jack Burns is still changing his bra."

Emma had a very noticeable hickey on her throat. Jack had given it to her, at her request. She hadn't gone out with anyone in a long time, she thought she was ugly, and she hated her Oscar dress. "At least make it look like someone's kissing me, honey pie."

Mrs. Oastler spotted Emma's hickey on TV in Toronto. "Couldn't you have put a little concealer on it?" Leslie asked Emma.

It was March 30, 1992--the first time Mrs. Oastler and Alice stayed up to watch the entire Academy Awards show, although Jack told them not to bother. He knew Anthony Hopkins was going to win Best Actor, but Leslie and Alice stayed up to watch Jack not win, anyway.

They always showed a film clip of the nominated actors. Jack knew the shot he wanted them to use for him. It's his face at the wheel of the limo--Jack-as-Johnny glances once in the rearview mirror at his wife, Carol, who's all alone in the long backseat of the stretch. Carol is trying to put her hair and lipstick in order; she's looking a little messy from a hotel-room groping by an overeager tourist at the Beverly Wilshire. Jack's eyes go briefly to the rearview mirror, then back to the road. It's a look between stoic and noir; he was proud of that close-up.

But with marketing, there's no such thing as too obvious. The film clip they showed instead was the call-girl shot: Jack-as-a-hooker is breathing bourbon into the face of the front-desk clerk at The Peninsula Beverly Hills. "There's something you should know," Jack-as-a-hooker tells the clerk in that husky voice. "Lester Billings has checked out. I'm afraid he's really left his room a mess."

"The money shot," Myra Ascheim called it, when Emma and Jack ran into her at the Oscar party at Morton's. It had taken ages to get in; the limos were backed up on Robertson as far as they could see.

Jack was unfamiliar with the phrase. "The money shot," he repeated.

"He's Canadian," Myra explained. Jack saw that she was sitting with her sister, Mildred.

"Two tough old broads in a power booth," Emma would say later.

"In a porn film," Milly Ascheim explained, without looking at Jack, "the money shot is the male-ejaculation moment. You don't get it, you got nothin'. Either the guy delivers the goods, or he can't."

"What's it called when you don't deliver, or you can't?" Emma asked the porn producer.

"Crabs in ice water," Milly said. "You gotta deliver the money shot."