In Melody's voice, Jack says: "It's a good job to lose." (Jack Burns's contribution to Vanvleck's god-awful script--he was right about that line having legs.)
The Tour Guide was by no means the worst movie of the year. (Or of the following year, which produced Teenage Mutant Ninja Turtles and Die Hard 2.) And the shot of Jack Burns in drag, when he's saying, "It's a good job to lose"--well, everyone would remember that. The film may have been forgettable, but not that shot--not that line.
At the 1991 Academy Awards, Billy Crystal was the host. He was good, but he may have been a bit too fast with one of his jokes. It was a pretty knowing audience at the Shrine Civic Auditorium, but most of them missed the joke. Not Jack, who was watching the show on TV; he got it, but that's because it was his line.
Billy Crystal was talking about the possibility of being replaced as the host of the Academy Awards. The audience groaned in protest at the very idea; most of them then missed Billy saying, in a pointedly feminine way, "It's a good job to lose."
That was when Emma and Jack knew he had made it. "Shit, did you hear that, baby cakes?" They were in Mrs. Oastler's house--Emma and Jack were back in Toronto, visiting their mothers--but Alice and Leslie were whispering to each other in the kitchen;
they missed Billy Crystal's homage to Jack's famous end line in The Tour Guide, and they would go to bed before Dances with Wolves won the Oscar for Best Picture.
Jack had not only heard Billy Crystal's joke; he was genuinely impressed by Billy's imitation of Jack-as-Melody. "Christ," he said.
"No more Mad Dutchman, honey pie," Emma said. "I can't wait for your next movie." Jack and Emma were on the couch in the grand living room of what he used to think of as the Oastler mansion. (That was before he'd seen some of those real mansions in Beverly Hills.) If Jack looked over Emma's shoulder, he could see the foyer at the foot of the main staircase, where Mrs. Machado had landed her high-groin kick with such devastating results.
Emma had sold her second novel for big bucks. She'd taken the manuscript to Bob Bookman at C.A.A. before she submitted it to her publisher. She had no intention of making the film rights unsalable this time. Bookman got her a movie deal before the novel was published, which was just the way Emma wanted it.
Called Normal and Nice, Emma's second Hollywood novel was about what happens to a young couple from Iowa who go to Hollywood to fulfill their dreams of becoming movie stars. The husband, Johnny, gives up his dream before his wife, Carol, gives up hers. Johnny is too thin-skinned to make it as an actor; a couple of rough auditions and he packs it in. Besides, he's a real clean liver--a nondrinker, an overall straight arrow. With boyish charm and a spotless driving record, Johnny gets a job as a limo driver; soon he's driving a stretch.
Given Emma's knack for irony, Johnny ends up driving movie stars. His lingering desire for the actor's imagined life is reflected by his ponytail, Johnny's sole emblem of rebellion among limo drivers. His ponytail is neat and clean, and not very long. (Emma describes Johnny as "attractive in a delicate, almost feminine way.") Long hair suits him; Johnny feels fortunate that the limousine company lets him keep the ponytail.
His wife, Carol, isn't so lucky. She goes to work for an escort service--much to Johnny's shame but with his reluctant approval. Carol tries one service after another, in alphabetical order--Absolutely Gorgeous, Beautiful Beyond Belief, and so on.
Johnny draws the line at Have You Been a Bad Boy? But it doesn't matter; as Carol discovers, they're all alike. Whether at Instant Escorts or Irresistible Temptations, what's expected of her is the same--namely, everything.
At one escort service, Carol might last a week or a month or less than a day. It all depends on how long it takes for her to meet what Emma calls an "irregular" customer. Once Carol starts refusing to do what a client wants, her days at that particular escort service are numbered.
Not unlike The Slush-Pile Reader, Normal and Nice reveals Emma's sympathy for damaged, deeply compromised relationships that somehow work. Carol and Johnny never stop loving each other; what holds them together is their absolute, unshakable agreement concerning what constitutes normal and nice behavior.
Carol does outcalls only. She always phones Johnny and tells him where she's going--not just the hotel but the customer's name and room number--and she calls Johnny again when she gets to the room, and when she's safely out. But irregular requests are commonplace; Carol loses her job at one service after another.
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.