There were always a lot of parties prior to the Academy Awards. As a nondrinker escorting his third-grade teacher, a woman in her sixties, Jack didn't think that he and Caroline were in step with the bacchanalian behavior of many of his colleagues in the industry. But they went to those parties where Jack's absence would have been resented, even if they spent much of the time talking quietly to each other.
Having calmly described so many of the painful passages in his life to Dr. Garcia, Jack found that he was in better control of himself while recounting to Miss Wurtz those discoveries he made in his return trip to the North Sea--beginning with the Ringhof family tragedy that Alice had engendered in Copenhagen, which Jack was able to relate in a deadpan narrative more closely resembling the written word than conversation. Not once did he raise his voice, nor did he shed a tear; Jack didn't even blink.
"Goodness!" was all Miss Wurtz had to say in reply.
They were at an outdoor luncheon at Bob Bookman's home. The screenwriters who were Jack's (or Emma's) principal competition in the Best Adapted Screenplay category that year were there--in addition to Jack, Bookman represented three of his fellow nominees. But there Jack was, in Bob Bookman's garden, with his third-grade teacher--his father's former lover--and Jack was back in those North Sea ports of call, telling Miss Wurtz what he had learned.
"Don't downplay what happened in Stockholm, Jack--I mean just because it wasn't as bad as what happened in Copenhagen," Miss Wurtz would tell him later that same weekend. "And even if you had sex with someone in Oslo, please don't spare me any details."
He didn't. (Dr. Garcia had taught him not to spare her any details.) Jack found that he could actually talk his way through it--at least to as sympathetic a soul as Caroline Wurtz. Jack doubted that he would have been able to tell the North Sea story to Leslie Oastler and her unfriendly blonde--not without shedding a tear or two, or indulging in a little shouting. But he told Miss Wurtz everything about Copenhagen and Stockholm without batting an eye. He didn't even hesitate when he got to Oslo. He didn't want to be over-optimistic, but Jack thought that Dr. Garcia's therapy was working.
32
Straining to See
The Weinstein brothers were backing more than one Oscar-nominated film that year. The night before the Academy Awards, Miramax had a party at the Regent Beverly Wilshire. The anti-pornography people were protesting The Slush-Pile Reader outside the hotel. The film had an R rating; it wasn't pornographic, but it was offensive to the anti-pornography people that Jack's character (Jimmy Stronach, the porn star) was sympathetically portrayed. Those other characters in the film who were part of the porn industry were also sympathetic--chiefly Hank Long and Muffy; and Mildred "Milly" Ascheim made a cameo appearance as herself. Worse, from the point of view of the anti-pornography people, all the porn stars were portrayed as having normal lives--to the degree that so-called L.A. dysfunctional is normal, and Emma believed it was.
There were fewer than a dozen protesters outside the hotel, but the media gave them undue attention. There were usually the same small number of zealots every year--some of them protesting what Jack's mother would have called "the deterioration of language" in movies in general. The anti-profanity people, the anti-pornography people--there would always be complainers with too much time on their hands. Jack thought that the best thing was to pay them no attention, but the media tended to inflate their importance and their numbers.
Miss Wurtz hadn't noticed the protesters. When Wild Bill Vanvleck was ranting at the Miramax party about the anti-pornography people, Caroline clutched Jack's arm and said anxiously: "There are protesters? What are they protesting?"
"Pornography," Jack said.
Miss Wurtz looked all around the room, as if there might be pornographic acts under way in their very midst and she had somehow mistaken them for more innocent forms of entertainment. Jack explained: "You know, Caroline--my character, Jimmy Stronach, is a porn star. I think that's what they're protesting."
"Nonsense!" Miss Wurtz shouted. "I did not see a single reproductive organ in the film--not one penis or one female thingamajig!"
"A what?" Wild Bill said, looking shocked.
"A vagina," Jack whispered to him.
"You shouldn't say that word at a party," Caroline said.
It soon became clear that The Wurtz had seen too many films in too short a period of time--as many as three a day for the past several weeks, or so she'd told Jack. Miss Wurtz had never seen so many movies in her life; they were all a blur. And this year's films were mingled with movies she'd not seen since she was a child. To her, the recognizable celebrities at the party were not movie stars but the actual characters they'd played. Unfortunately, these movies had overlapped in her mind--to the extent that she'd merged the plots of several different films into one incomprehensible epic, in which virtually everyone she "recognized" at the Regent Beverly Wilshire had played a pivotal role.
"Oh, look--there's that envious young man who killed those people. One with an oar, I think," she said, indicating Matt Damon, who was Tom Ripley in The Talented Mr. Ripley. Not that The Wurtz made any distinction between Tom Ripley and the character Tom Cruise played in Magnolia that year. And she had convinced herself that Kevin Spacey was trapped in a bad marriage, which he periodically escaped by lusting after young girls. "Someone should be assigned to watch him," Miss Wurtz told Jack, who understood that by watch, she meant control him.
Seeking to change the subject, Jack said he admired how thin Gwyneth Paltrow was--to which The Wurtz replied: "She looks in need of intravenous feeding."
When you've seen too many movies, time stands still; no one grows old or dies. Miss Wurtz mistook Anthony Minghella for Peter Lorre. ("I thought Peter Lorre was dead," Caroline would tell Jack the next day. "He hasn't made a movie in years." To which Jack could only think to himself, True!)
Looking worriedly around, The Wurtz announced that a party of this size--and with so many celebrities--should have more than one bouncer; she thought that Ben Affleck was the sole bouncer.
Judi Dench was there, which prompted Caroline to confess to Jack that she'd always thought Judi Dench would be an inspired choice to play Mrs. McQuat--should anyone ever make a movie about The Gray Ghost.
"A movie about Mrs. McQuat?" Jack said, stunned.
"You know she was a combat nurse, Jack. The trouble with her breathing was because she'd been gassed--I'm not sure with what."
Thus Jack was doomed to think of Judi Dench as The Gray Ghost, gassed but come back to life--a troubling thought.
Jack kept giving Wild Bill Vanvleck the eye--the eye that meant, "Isn't it time to leave?"
But Wild Bill was nowhere near ready to go. He was back in Hollywood, reborn as the director of an Academy Award-nominated film. Jack didn't begrudge The Mad Dutchman his triumph; The Remake Monster had admirably restrained himself in directing The Slush-Pile Reader. Jack had always trusted Vanvleck as a craftsman, and Wild Bill had stuck to the craftsmanlike part of his business; this time, he'd left the parody alone.
After they finally left the Miramax party, Jack and Miss Wurtz went out to dinner with Richard Gladstein and his wife and Vanvleck and his much younger anchorwoman, whose name was Anneke. Outside the Regent Beverly Wilshire, the protesters were still chanting and holding up posters of male and female reproductive organs--penises and thingamajigs galore. Miss Wurtz became incensed all over again.
"If you don't like pornography, stop thinking about it!" Caroline said sharply out the window of the limousine to a baffled-looking man in a lime-green short-sleeved shirt; he was holding a poster depicting a naked child, above whom the intimidating shadow of a grown-up loomed.
It was a good thing The Wurtz wasn't riding in the limo with Hank Long and Muffy and Milly Ascheim. Jack found out later that Milly had put down her window and shouted at the protesters: "Oh, go home and watch a movie and beat off! You'll feel better!"
"Goodness, it's already Sunday morning," Miss Wurtz declared, when she and Jack
were having breakfast at the pool at the Four Seasons in Beverly Hills. "And your story has bogged down in Oslo, as I recall. It's probably best not to try to imitate Ingrid Moe's speech impediment. Just tell me what she said the way you would normally say it, Jack. The speech impediment is too distracting."
Not surprisingly, Jack would elect to tell the story in this fashion when he told it to Dr. Garcia, too. He made no effort to render an approximation of Ingrid's awful affliction. (Knowing Dr. Garcia, she would have referred to any effort on Jack's part to re-create the speech impediment as an interjection.)
Thus Jack described Ingrid Moe's vision of Hell as if it were his personal account of an actual visit to the place. He paid particular attention to Ingrid's lack of forgiveness for his mother, which stood in such dramatic contrast to the fact that his father forgave his mother for everything--even the Amsterdam part of the story, which Jack was a long way from getting to on that Sunday morning in Beverly Hills. He felt certain that he and Miss Wurtz wouldn't get to Amsterdam--at least not before the Academy Awards, which would commence later that afternoon.
Having been to the Oscars once before, Jack knew they were in for a long night. Miss Wurtz, wearing a wide-brimmed straw hat and smeared from head to toe with more sunscreen than a naked newborn, was pressing Jack for details about Helsinki. She was clearly impatient with Oslo and Ingrid Moe, although William's appearance at the Hotel Bristol had thrilled her. The Wurtz was especially pleased to learn that William had not cut his hair.
"William had beautiful hair. You have his hair, Jack," Caroline said, taking his hand. "I'm so glad you haven't cut your hair short, the way everyone else does nowadays. Frankly, it doesn't matter whether long hair for men is in or out. If you have good hair, you should grow it."
The Helsinki part of the story took what remained of their private time that Sunday. Erica Steinberg had thoughtfully arranged for someone to come to the hotel to do Miss Wurtz's hair. "Whatever do means," The Wurtz whispered to Jack, before she went off with Erica after lunch. "I'm keeping it gray--that's all I know. It's too late for me to be a blonde--not that there aren't enough blondes already, especially out here."
Jack went to the gym, which was next to the pool. Sigourney Weaver was there. (He came up to her collarbone.) "Good luck tonight, Jack," she said.
That was when he began to get nervous; that was when he realized that it meant everything to him to win.
"It's just possible, Jack," Dr. Garcia would tell him later, "that winning the Oscar was some small consolation for what you've lost."
She didn't mean only his father. She didn't mean only Emma, either. She meant Michele Maher, notwithstanding Dr. Garcia's assessment of the "unrealistic expectations" Jack had heaped upon Michele; she meant Jack's false memories, the childhood his mother had fabricated for him, which he'd lost, too. (Dr. Garcia also meant his mom, of course.)
Erica rode in the stretch limo with Jack and Miss Wurtz to the Shrine Auditorium. They saw the protesters from the night before--the same righteous faces, the identical posters. The limo was moving so slowly that, this time, Jack could count them. There were nine anti-pornography people altogether--not that this would prevent Entertainment Weekly, in its post-Oscar issue, from describing the "scores" of protesters ringing the auditorium.
Miss Wurtz looked wonderful. She wore a long, slender gown with a Queen Anne neckline; it was the same silver color as her hair. Jack's all-black Armani, which included a black shirt as well as the black tuxedo and the black tie, made him resemble a shrunken gangster. He'd lost the twenty pounds he'd put on for the Jimmy Stronach role--he was looking lean and mean, as Michele Maher had once observed.
They weren't on the red carpet more than twenty minutes before Erica steered them in the direction of the obligatory Joan Rivers interview. Jack was dreading Miss Wurtz's answer to Joan's predictable question regarding "who" she was wearing. But rather than say, "Jack's father gave it to me when we were lovers," Caroline answered: "The dress is personal, a gift from a onetime admirer." That was perfect, Jack thought.
Joan Rivers knew all about the third-grade connection in advance; it seemed that everyone in the media knew. "What sort of a student was Jack?" she asked Miss Wurtz.
"Even as a child, Jack was as convincing as a woman as he was as a man," Caroline answered. "He just needed to know who his audience was."
"And who is your audience, Jack Burns?" Joan Rivers asked him.
"My father is my audience of one," he told her, "but I suppose I've picked up a few other fans along the way." Jack looked into the camera and said, for the first time in his life: "Hi, Dad." He noticed that Miss Wurtz was smiling shyly at the camera.
After that, Jack couldn't get off the red carpet fast enough. He was a wreck. (He almost called Dr. Garcia.)
"Calm down," Caroline said. "It's not necessary for you to say anything to William. He just wants to see you--he wants, more than anyone, to see you win."
There was a lot of waiting at the Academy Awards. Erica took Jack and Miss Wurtz inside the auditorium, where they waited for an eternity. Jack drank too much Evian and had to pee--this was before Billy Crystal was carried onstage like a baby by a motorcycle cop in sunglasses and a white helmet, and the evening officially began.
Jack had a sixth-row aisle seat. All the nominees had aisle seats; Richard Gladstein sat in the aisle seat in front of Jack, and Wild Bill Vanvleck had the one behind him. Miss Wurtz was seated between Jack and Harvey Weinstein. Caroline didn't remember who Harvey was--Jack had introduced them twice at the party the previous night--but she knew he was someone important because there was a television camera pointed at him from start to finish. For reasons that would remain unclear to Jack, Miss Wurtz deduced that Harvey was a famous prizefighter--a former heavyweight champ. (Quite possibly she'd overheard someone saying how much Harvey enjoyed a good fight. Jack could think of no other explanation.)
The Best Supporting Actor award was announced fairly early in the program. When Michael Caine won, Jack knew it would be a long wait for the writing awards, which were near the end of the evening. Almost no one sat through the entire program--especially not if you'd had as much Evian as Jack. But you had to pick your pee-break pretty carefully; they would let you leave or go back to your seat only during the TV commercials.
Miss Wurtz became enraged at those award-winners who overspent their allotted forty-five seconds for their acceptance speeches. Pedro Almodovar really pissed her off; in accepting the Oscar for Best Foreign Language Film for All About My Mother, Pedro went on for so long that Antonio Banderas had to pull him offstage.
"Buenas noches!" Miss Wurtz called out to Almodovar.
They took their pee-break--that is, they took Jack's pee-break, since he was the one in dire need of it--during the presentation of the Irving G. Thalberg Memorial Award. This year it went to Warren Beatty. Caroline was cross with Jack for causing her to miss it. Miss Wurtz had once had a crush on Warren Beatty. "Nothing compared to what I felt for your father, Jack, but it was a crush just the same."
By the time they were back in their seats, Jack had to pee again. He whispered to Miss Wurtz that if he didn't win, he would have to pee in his Evian bottle. (Jack was counting on there being a men's room backstage--if he could get there.)
Finally, the writing awards came; thankfully the Oscar for Best Adapted Screenplay preceded the award for Best Original Screenplay. Kevin Spacey was the lone presenter. Annette Bening was supposed to join him onstage, but she was arguably too pregnant to risk the short trip from her seat. Spacey made a joke about how she was "due to go into production herself." He said further: "I could not ask her to climb stairs, unless of course she wins the Oscar. Then she'll climb up here on all fours."
Jack took this as an unfavorable omen for his chances to win. Given his night in Helsinki with the pregnant aerobics instructor, the very idea of Annette Bening on all fours in her condition filled him with remorse. But it was only seconds after that bad moment when Kevin Spacey said, "And
the Oscar goes to--" Jack didn't hear the rest because Miss Wurtz was shrieking.
"Think of how happy William is for you, Jack," she shouted in his ear, between kisses. Of course the camera was on them, and Jack was aware of The Wurtz looking past him to the camera; she knew exactly where the camera was because it had been pointed at Harvey Weinstein, the former prizefighter, all night. Jack was on his feet--Richard was kissing him, Wild Bill, too. Harvey crushed Miss Wurtz and Jack in one embrace. When Jack stepped into the aisle, he saw Caroline blow a kiss to the camera--her lips forming the name William as she did so.
Jack took the Oscar from Kevin Spacey and spoke for only thirty-five of his allotted forty-five seconds; in a small way, this made up for Pedro Almodovar thanking the Virgin of Guadalupe, the Virgin of La Cabeza, the Sacred Heart of Mary, and all the rest of the living and the dead. Of course Jack thanked his third-grade teacher, Miss Caroline Wurtz, because he knew that the camera would go to her if he did. He thanked Mr. Ramsey, too, and naturally he thanked Richard, and Wild Bill, and everyone at Miramax. Most of all, Jack thanked Emma Oastler for everything she'd done for him, and--largely because he knew how angry it would make the blonde--he thanked Leslie Oastler for her contributions to the screenplay. Lastly, Jack thanked Michele Maher for staying up late to watch him. (In his heart, he hoped Michele's sort-of boyfriend was watching, too. Hearing Jack thank Michele might make the boyfriend jealous and lead to their breaking up.)
Jack might have used the full forty-five seconds if he hadn't had to pee so badly. When he left the stage with Kevin Spacey, they passed Mel Gibson coming on--Mel was the presenter for the Best Original Screenplay award, which would go to Alan Ball for American Beauty. Tom Cruise, a fellow former wrestler, tried to wrestle the Oscar away from Jack backstage; the way Jack had to pee, that bit of friendly fooling around could have ended badly. Clint Eastwood spoke to Jack. (He said: "Way to go, kid," or words to that effect. Jack knew he couldn't trust his memory of moments like that--the ones that mattered too much.)