Until I Find You

Jack realized that he wasn’t sure what a talent-management company did, or how what Myra did was different from what an agent did. “Don’t I need an agent?” he asked her.

“Let me find you a movie first,” Myra said. “A movie and a director. The best time to get an agent is when you don’t really need one.”

Jack would often think how his career, and his life, might have turned out differently if Myra Ascheim had found a different movie from the one she found for him—or at least a different director. But he knew that one thing you were powerless to change was your first break, and you could never calculate the influence of that initial experience on what happened to you next.

Every young actor imagines there is a special part—a groove in which he or she is a perfect fit. Well—Jack’s advice to young actors would be: Hope you never get the perfect part. The groove that Myra Ascheim found for Jack Burns (his first film) became a rut.

“Principiis obsta!” Mr. Ramsey would write to him, quoting Ovid. “Beware the beginnings!”

21. Two Candles, Burning

Ultimately, Jack Burns owed his success to William “Wild Bill” Vanvleck, who was also called The Mad Dutchman and The Remake Monster—the latter for his deplorable habit of stealing his stories from classics of the European cinema and crassly reinventing them for American movie audiences.

Hence the brilliant Knife in the Water, Roman Polanski’s first feature film, which was made in Poland in 1962, was remade by Vanvleck in 1989 as My Last Hitchhiker— about a couple with a troubled relationship who go off for a weekend of skiing, not sailing, and pick up a transvestite hitchhiker. Jack Burns was born to be that cross-dressing hitchhiker.

William Vanvleck was both a screenwriter and a director. Variety once wrote that The Remake Monster never knew a film or a gender he couldn’t change for the worse. But if Wild Bill was a rip-off artist, he had a survivor’s abundance of common sense; he stole only good stuff. And Vanvleck brought a European kinkiness, if not art, to American sex and violence—always with a lavishness of deceit or duplicity that Bill, and many movie audiences, loved.

For example, there was a section of Route 40 between Empire and Winter Park, Colorado—a steep road with lots of S-turns, it climbed over Berthoud Pass. In the winter, they closed the road when they blasted avalanches, and you could see back-country skiers and snowboarders hitching rides to wherever they parked their cars.

In the opening shot of My Last Hitchhiker, we see a pretty female skier wearing a backpack, her skis over her shoulder; she’s hitching a ride on Route 40. As everyone would find out, it’s not a real girl—it’s Jack Burns, and he looks fantastic.

The reason Jack got the part was not only that he had the Bruno Litkins, transvestite-Esmeralda connection; The Mad Dutchman also liked the idea of the hitchhiker being an unknown.

The couple in the car take a good look at Jack-as-a-girl. (Almost anyone would.) “Keep driving,” the woman says.

The man brakes, stopping the car. “My last hitchhiker,” he says. “I promise.”

“You promised before, Ethan,” she tells him. “It was a pretty girl the last time, too.”

As Jack is putting his skis on the roof rack of their car, they take a closer look at him. Ethan stares at the pretty girl’s breasts; the wife or girlfriend is more interested in Jack’s dark, shoulder-length hair. When Jack gets into the backseat, Ethan adjusts the rearview mirror so he can see the hitchhiker better; the woman notices this, with mounting irritation.

“Hi—I’m Jack,” he tells them, taking off the wig and wiping the mauve lip gloss off his lips with the back of his ski glove. “You probably thought I was a girl, right?”

The woman turns to watch Jack put the wig in his backpack. Jack unzips his parka, which fits him like a glove, and removes (to Ethan’s horror) his breasts, putting the falsies in his backpack with the wig. Granted, it’s a B-movie—inspiring a cult of followers—but it’s a great opening.

“Hi—I’m Nicole,” the woman in the front seat says to Jack; she’s suddenly all smiles.

Justine Dunn played Nicole; it was her last movie before her disfiguring, career-ending car crash—that famous five-car smash-up where Wilshire Boulevard tangles with the 405.

In the movie, when Ethan sees that Jack is a guy, he tells him to get out of the car.

“You picked him up, Ethan. Give the guy a ride,” Nicole says.

“I didn’t pick up a guy,” Ethan tells her.

Jack is looking over his shoulder, out the rear window, at the S-turn behind them. “This isn’t a very safe place to stop,” he says.

“Get out of the car!” Ethan shouts.

A quick cut to the inside of a black van navigating the S-turn; some stoned snowboarders are passing a joint around. (Nicole’s line—“If he gets out, Ethan, I’m getting out with him”—plays as voice-over.)

Back on Ethan and Nicole in their stopped car: he prevents her from undoing her seat belt. The hitchhiker has already taken his skis off the roof rack; he taps on the passenger-side window, which Nicole lowers. Suddenly all-guy, Jack says: “I’m sorry for the trouble, but I catch more rides as a girl.” Then he steps back from the car. Here comes the black van!

The van skids past the stopped car in a four-wheel drift—one of the stoned snowboarders frantically giving Ethan and Nicole and Jack the finger. Ethan and Nicole are visibly shaken by the near-collision, but Jack never even flinches.

The movie went downhill from there. When they showed film clips from My Last Hitchhiker, they always showed those first two close-ups of Jack.

When the film was released, Jack was twenty-four. Justine was twelve years older—an attractive older woman to Jack’s transvestite hitchhiker.

They have one really hot scene later in the movie. Jack-as-a-girl is in the women’s room at a ski-resort restaurant, fussing with his makeup in the mirror. Justine-as-Nicole comes out of a stall, straightening her dress. They both look pretty good, but Justine is thirty-six, and it’s no secret who looks better.

“What ride are you trying to catch now?” she asks Jack.

“It’s called dinner,” he replies.

“Do you buy your own lift tickets?” she asks.

“Skiing is an expensive sport,” Jack says, with a shrug. “I try not to buy my own dinner.”

Justine is looking Jack over when she says, “And what do you do after dinner?”

“I talk him out of it,” he tells her. “What do you do after dinner?”

At this point in the film, Justine-as-Nicole is still with Ethan—and she’s not happy about it. “I try to talk him out of it,” she admits, a little sadly.

That’s when Jack kisses her on the lips. It’s disturbingly unclear if he’s kissing her as a woman or as a man. But what does it matter? My Last Hitchhiker would wind up being a favorite of Justine Dunn fans. After she was so tragically disfigured and disappeared from the big screen, Justine gathered an army of fans. Crazies, for the most part—the kind of moviegoers who made heroes out of people killed or maimed in stupid accidents.

As for Jack, it was the start of something he felt powerless to stop. As an ex-wrestler, he knew how to lose weight, and how to keep the pounds off—he had kept himself small. He was a lightweight, a former one-thirty-five- pounder; he had a lean-and-mean look, as Michele Maher (the real one) had observed.

“Androgyny seems to suit you, Jack,” Myra Ascheim would tell him, after Wild Bill Vanvleck had made Jack an aberrant sex symbol—a sexy guy who was, if not to every taste, arguably more sexy as a girl.

Jack’s role as the transvestite hitchhiker was three years before Jaye Davidson’s debut as Dil in The Crying Game—and though Neil Jordan was a first-rate writer and director, and everyone knew Wild Bill Vanvleck was not, Jack Burns did it before Jaye Davidson