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.
Moments like that made Jack even more of an outsider. When you know you’ve spooked someone, you learn to be careful. What Emma called Jack’s noir thing was a bit creepy. Bankable, yes, but likable?
Jack Burns had found a close-up all his own; it was more disquieting than Toshiro Mifune’s scowl. Jack couldn’t really see himself, only his effect on others. Was it a sexually disturbing look? Yes, definitely. Was it more threatening than noir? Well—it was beyond mischievous, anyway.
“It’s unpredictable, honey pie—that’s your look.”
“That’s just acting,” he told her. (That’s just keeping my audience of one on his toes, Jack thought.)
“No, that’s you, baby cakes. You’re unpredictable. That’s what’s scary about you, Jack.”
“I’m not scary!” he insisted. Jack thought that Emma was the scary one.
He would remember where they were when Emma said he was scary. They were on Sunset Boulevard in the silver Audi. Jack was driving. They were in Hollywood—Château Marmont territory, where John Belushi died—and Jack was trying to figure out what it was that had scared Jessica Lee. “Maybe the dress was all wrong for me,” he said to Emma. “I wish I could just forget about it.”
“Boy, am I sick of the Bar Marmont,” was all Emma said.
Because Jack was famous, he was always admitted to the Bar Marmont, which was adjacent to the hotel. It was big and noisy, a scene—lots of fake boobs and aspiring talent managers, very trendy, ultra young. There were usually about thirty people outside, being denied entrance; on this particular night, Lawrence was among them. Emma looked the other way, but Lawrence caught Jack’s wrist.
“You’re not a girl tonight? You’re just a guy? How disappointing to your fans!” Lawrence cried.
Emma caught him in the nuts with her knee; then she and Jack went inside together. Lawrence was lying in a fetal way, his knees drawn up to his chest in a kind of birthing position—not that anything was forthcoming. Jack would remember thinking that if he’d kneed Lawrence in the balls, there would have been a lawsuit, but Emma could get away with it. (That’s why he thought she was the scary one.)
The Château Marmont—the hotel itself—was another story. Jack didn’t go to that lobby to be with a crowd, but he often saw actors having meetings there. Jack would have a bunch of meetings in that lobby—the lobby was really a bar.
He preferred to have his meetings, when he could choose, in the bar at the Four Seasons Hotel in Beverly Hills. In Jack’s opinion, this was where the classiest meetings happened. He was convinced that famous ghosts would one day haunt the Four Seasons in Beverly Hills—actors whose meetings went awry. But, for Jack, it was the only place where he felt like an insider.
For the most part, like Emma, he was still an outsider; they were notoriously uncool. The U.S. wasn’t their country. L.A. wasn’t their town. Not that they were Canadians, either. Toronto didn’t feel like home.
Redding had been the first and last place Jack had fit in. Somehow he and Emma knew they would never fit in in L.A. It wasn’t a matter of being famous; that was only what other people saw. With the money they’d made, Emma and Jack could have moved from Entrada, but Jack was more and more persuaded by Emma’s determination to remain an outsider. For them, Los Angeles was a working town; whatever else they were, Emma and Jack were workers. L.A. was their job.
Being seen—being spotted—was part of the job. (Part of Jack’s, anyway; Emma didn’t care who saw her.)
In their own way, they were gods, Emma and Jack—uncool Canadian gods in the city of angels. And like the gods, they were remote. They didn’t see themselves all that clearly; typical of the movie business, they registered their performances by how they were received. But in his heart, Jack Burns knew that Donald, that prick maître d’ at Stan’s, had been right. Donald had seen through him: Jack was a hick from Toronto via New Hampshire. Yes, he was a U.S. citizen and a legal resident of Santa Monica, California, but Jack wasn’t truly living anywhere—he was just biding his time. (At least he knew how to do that. He’d done it before, with Claudia.)