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.