Finally, Johnny has a suggestion: Carol should have her own listing in the Yellow Pages. The best thing Carol ever has to say about a client is that he was “nice.” Nice means “normal”—hence Carol calls her escort service Normal and Nice.
Emma writes: “She might have attracted more customers with a service called Maternity Leave. Who calls an escort service for normal and nice?”
Johnny starts pimping for Carol. He has some regular limo clients, people Johnny feels he knows—movie stars among them. “You’re probably not interested,” Johnny says to the outwardly nicer of the gentlemen he drives around in his stretch, “but if you’re ever tempted to call an escort service, I know one particularly nice woman—normal and nice, if that’s what you like. Nothing irregular, if you know what I mean.”
The first time Johnny says this to a famous actor, it is heartbreaking. The reader already knows that, instead of becoming a movie star, Johnny is driving them. Now Carol is fucking them!
It seems that only older men are interested; most of them aren’t movie stars, either. They’re character actors—villains in the great Westerns, now with ravaged faces and unsteady on their feet, old cowboys with chronic lower-back pain. As children, Carol and Johnny had seen these classic Westerns; they were the movies that made them want to leave Iowa and go to Hollywood in the first place.
At home, in their half of a tacky duplex in Marina del Rey—close enough to hear and smell the L.A. airport—Carol and Johnny play dress-up games, their roles reversed. She puts her blond hair in a ponytail and dresses in his white shirt and black tie; this prompts Johnny to buy Carol a man’s black suit, one that fits her. She dresses as a limo driver, then undresses for him.
Johnny lets Carol dress him in her clothes; she later buys him his own bra, with falsies, and a dress that fits him. She brushes out his shoulder-length hair and makes him up—lipstick, eye shadow, the works. He rings the doorbell and she lets him-as-her in; he pretends to be the escort, arriving in a stranger’s hotel room. “This is their only opportunity to act—together, in the same movie,” Emma writes.
A veteran cowboy actor is in town to promote his new film—what Emma calls a “nouvelle Western.” Lester Billings was born Lester Magruder in Billings, Montana; he’s an actual cowboy, and nouvelle Westerns offend him. It’s a sore point with Lester that Westerns have become so rare that young actors don’t know how to ride and shoot anymore. In the so-called Western that Lester is promoting, there are no good guys, no bad guys; everyone is an anti-hero. “A French Western,” Lester calls it.
Johnny sends Carol to Lester’s hotel room—after Lester confesses to a hankering for a nice, normal woman. But Lester really is a cowboy; he climbs on Carol. (“There was nothing too irregular—at first,” she assures Johnny.) Then, while they’re proceeding in the regular way, Lester puts a gun to his head. It’s a Colt .45—only one chamber of the revolver is loaded. Lester calls this cowboy roulette.
“Either I die in the saddle or I live to ride another day!” he hollers. As Lester pulls the trigger, Carol wonders how many girls in L.A. escort services have heard the click of that hammer striking an empty chamber, while Lester lived to ride another day. Not this time. It’s Lester’s day to die in the saddle.
In the midafternoon, there aren’t many guests in The Peninsula Beverly Hills to hear the gunshot. Besides, the hotel doesn’t cater to an especially youthful crowd; maybe the guests in nearby rooms are napping or hard of hearing. Emma describes The Peninsula as being “sort of like the Four Seasons, but with a few more hookers and businessmen.”
Because the hotel is adjacent to C.A.A., possibly an agent hears Lester Billings blow his brains out, but nobody else. And what would an agent care about a gunshot?
Carol calls Johnny. She knows that no one noticed her crossing the lobby and getting on the elevator, but what if someone sees her leave? She is understandably distraught; she believes that she looks like a hooker. She doesn’t, really. Carol has always dressed like a studio exec having lunch; in keeping with normal and nice, she doesn’t look like a call girl.
Johnny saves her. He comes to Lester’s hotel room with the requisite changes of clothes, for Carol and himself. The limo driver’s suit for Carol, together with the dress and bra and falsies Carol bought for him; by the time Carol has applied his makeup and brushed out his shoulder-length hair, Johnny looks a lot more like a prostitute than Carol ever has.
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.”