John Irving - Until I Find You

It killed Jack that he knew nothing about Michele; worse, he imagined she had seen My Last Hitchhiker and found his performance as a transvestite to be resounding confirmation that he was “too weird.”

“Just wait till Michele sees the next one, baby cakes—talk about too weird !” They’d both read Vanvleck’s screenplay, which had prompted even Emma to say: “Words fail me.”

It was a magical but unknown movie that Wild Bill had ripped off this time; he’d stolen a little gem from a fellow Dutchman, Peter van Engen, who died of AIDS shortly after his first and only feature film was made. Called Lieve Anne Frank (in English, Dear Anne Frank, as you might begin a letter to the dead girl), it won a prize at some film festival in the Netherlands—and it was dubbed for distribution in Germany, but nowhere else. Outside Holland, almost no one saw it; yet William Vanvleck had seen it, and he’d traduced Lieve Anne Frank to such a degree that poor Peter van Engen couldn’t possibly have recognized his own movie—not even from the all-seeing perspective of his grave.

“ Lieve Anne Frank, ” the voice-over begins. It is the voice of a young Jewish girl, living in Amsterdam today; she is about the same age Anne Frank was when Anne was caught by the Nazis and taken to the death camp.

Emma and Jack saw the original Dutch film in William Vanvleck’s home screening room. The Remake Monster had an ugly mansion on Loma Vista Drive in Beverly Hills. Wild Bill liked whippets; they ran free in the mansion, slipping and falling on the hardwood floors. Vanvleck had his own chef and his own gardener—a Surinamese couple, a child-size woman with a similarly miniature husband.

“ ‘Dear Anne Frank,’ ” Wild Bill translated for Emma and Jack; he had a smoker’s cough. “ ‘I believe that you live in me, and that I have been born to serve you.’ ”

Rachel is her name. Weekdays after school, and on weekends, she works as a tour guide in the Anne Frank House—Prinsengracht 263. The house is open, as a museum, every day of the year except Yom Kippur.

“The Anne Frank House is beautiful in a sad way,” Rachel says to the camera—as if we (the audience) were tourists and Rachel our guide. We see samples of Anne’s handwriting, facsimiles from her diary, and many photographs. Rachel has cut her hair to look as much like Anne as she can; she despises contemporary fashion and dresses herself, whenever possible, in clothes Anne might have worn.

We see Rachel shopping in flea markets and secondhand clothing stores; we see her at night, hiding from her parents in her bedroom, imitating poses and expressions we recognize from photographs of Anne.

“They could have gotten away,” Rachel keeps repeating. “Her father, Otto, could have stolen a boat. He could have steered a course from the Prinsengracht, the canal, to the Amstel—a river, broader than the canal. Not to the sea, of course, but somewhere safe. I know they could have gotten away.”

By this point in the film, nothing had really happened, but Emma was already in tears. “You see—it’s good, isn’t it?” Vanvleck kept asking. “Isn’t it great ?”

Rachel is obsessed with the idea that she is Anne Frank come back to life; she believes she can rewrite history. On Yom Kippur, when the Anne Frank House is closed, Rachel unlocks the door and lets herself inside. She dresses herself as Anne —transforms herself, actually, because the likeness is more than a little creepy—and the next morning, when the tourists are waiting to get in, Rachel-as-Anne simply walks out of the Anne Frank House as if she were Anne Frank. Some of the tourists scream, believing she’s a ghost; others follow her, taking her picture.

She goes to the canal, the Prinsengracht, where her father, Otto, is waiting with a boat. Absurdly, it’s a kind of gondola—more suited to Venice than to Amsterdam—and Otto is a most unlikely, un-Italian-looking gondolier. Anne boards the boat, waving to her admirers.

There’s a beautiful shot from the golden crown of the Westerkerk of the boat passing on the Prinsengracht—crowds of well-wishers run to the bridges, waving. There’s a shot of the little boat entering the broader water of the Amstel; more crowds, more cameras clicking.

How the fantasy dies is almost entirely done with sound—the sound of soldiers’ boots on the cobblestone streets; the sound of the boots on the stairs of the Anne Frank House, which we see is empty. Some furniture has been tipped over; Anne’s writing has been scattered here and there. She hasn’t escaped.

Emma was bawling her eyes out. As Jack sat there in that tasteless mansion on Loma Vista Drive, the sound of The Mad Dutchman’s whippets dashing everywhere was somehow intercut in Jack’s mind with the sound of the storm troopers’ boots. He couldn’t imagine what a mess Wild Bill Vanvleck was going to make of Dear Anne Frank.

As it turned out, The Remake Monster’s screenplay would leave Emma and Jack depressed for days.

“I think I’ll go to the gym,” Jack told Emma when he first read it.

After she said, “Words fail me,” Emma took a deep breath and announced she was going back to work. “I should have known when we saw the movie,” Emma told Jack later. “There was no way you were gonna be Anne Frank.”

But that day they read the remake, which was their first understanding of what would become of Dear Anne Frank, all Jack could do was go to the gym and punish his body; all Emma could do was go back to work on her next Hollywood novel. The Mad Dutchman’s screenplay was god-awful.

Being successful had made Emma even more of a workaholic. She usually got up with the rush-hour traffic on the PCH and drank several cups of strong coffee, sometimes with her eyes closed but always with the music playing—something too loud and metallic for Jack’s taste, although it was a welcome change from the generally uninspired music out on the highway.

Emma wrote all morning—the coffee was what she called her “appetite suppressant of choice.” When she was famished, she drove herself out to lunch. She didn’t drink at lunch, although she was a big eater—both at lunch and at her late-night dinners.

She liked Le Dome on Sunset Strip. It had a stodgy, Old Hollywood feeling, but it was still a happening place for executives and agents and entertainment lawyers. Emma also liked Spago in West Hollywood—the original Spago, up the hill on Sunset Boulevard. And while it was too expensive even for the most successful of first novelists, Emma needed a weekly fix of The Palm on Santa Monica Boulevard, where she said there were more agents than steaks and lobsters.

She was burning the candle at both ends, because she’d go to the gym after lunch and lift weights most of the afternoon. After the weightlifting, when she said she had “digested,” she would do a hundred or more crunches for her abs. Nothing aerobic. (Dancing and whatever sex she could manage in the top position were Emma’s aerobics.)

It was a lot for a big girl to put her body through, and Jack didn’t like to think of her driving—not even in the daytime, when she hadn’t been drinking. Emma was a fast driver, but the speed was only a small part of what bothered Jack.

Emma loved Sunset Boulevard. Even in Toronto, as a schoolgirl at St. Hilda’s, she used to dream of driving on Sunset Boulevard. Emma tried to drive everywhere on Sunset—out to Beverly Hills and West Hollywood and Hollywood, all on Sunset.

It was when she was driving back to Santa Monica that Jack worried about her. He knew she’d had a big lunch and had crazily worked it off, or not, in the gym. He worried about the curves on Sunset. And when Emma took that left on Chautauqua, just before the Palisades, it was a steep, twisting downhill to the PCH. You had to get into the far-left lane and make what amounted to a U-turn on West Channel.