he met top officers of the Border Patrol Police, who said they'd heard McQueen was fat, a side effect to cancer treatment that Bob didn't know anything about. Jack then took Frankenheimer to meet the prime minister, who gave the director permission to use the former U.S. air base in U-tapao, from which much of the bombing of Vietnam had been staged. Then McQueen revealed that he did have cancer and the part was offered to Clint Eastwood, who liked the script but didn't want to go to Thailand, so the movie was never made.
Impressed by Jack's access that went all the way up to the prime minister's office, Rosen returned to Hollywood and when he signed on to produce Prophesy, a horror movie, and he needed a chief of security, he invited Jack “to come and do something stupid.” His job: keep anyone outside the camera crew from seeing the monster.
Bob called Jack again when he made The Island, Peter Benchley's follow-up to Jaws. This film, which was shot in Antigua, told the story of a band of modern pirates–the descendants of real pirates from three-hundred years before–who preyed on yachts. Centuries of inbreeding had resulted in a band of “freaks,” so only the truly deranged and handicapped were cast. Jack's job was to keep them in line.
Ironically, he also was charged with keeping them sober. By then, Jack was methodically drinking himself to death. Rosen said he finally talked Jack into coming to the States to dry out. For three months, Jack lived with the Rosen family in Seattle, experiencing what Bob called an “amazing” recovery.
Back in Bangkok, he met a young Thai girl named Pen–in time, he would marry her–and for a while he dutifully drank the Klausthaler he had learned to hate. In time, he returned to the real thing and Pen accompanied him back to Seattle to dry out again. “His liver was pretty shot,” Bob Rosen said, “but, again, when he stopped drinking, he got better.” Bob said he also tried at this time to get Jack to make peace with Tony Poe, but when he called Tony in San Francisco, it wasn't long before they were threatening to kill one another.
Rosen was so entranced by Jack, he hired a screenwriter to write a treatment for a film based on his life. The way Bob tells the story, John Frankenheimer showed some interest for a while and so did novelist Joseph Heller, but at the time the project was presented, the CIA was “all short haircuts and James Bond, and to do Jack's story right, it had to be about a guy who drank too much and fucked up. In other words, a human.” Other friends say Jack didn't like the treatment because Tony Poe played a role in the story that diminished his.
Unlike Tony–whose alcohol-fueled violence eventually led the Thai government to deport him (in 1991)–Jack was an amiable drunk. He enjoyed meeting new people, laughed a lot, and always deferred to anyone of superior rank or standing. When William Colby, the former head of the CIA, was in Bangkok and addressed the Foreign Correspondents Club, one of Jack's friends– a former university professor–tore into Colby verbally, attacking some of his tactics and policies. Next day, when the friend told Jack what he'd done, Jack was aghast, accusing his friend of a breach of authority and propriety.
For the media, however, he held only the highest disdain, blaming them for “losing the war at home” and for calling America's efforts in Laos a failure. “Tell me,” Jack asked, “how was a handful of CIA with a bunch of Air America pilots going to win against the goddamned Vietnamese army? We weren't the U.S. Army! We were a supportive side action to the main war. We kept tens of thousands of Vietnamese soldiers tied down in Laos, damaging the enemy's effectiveness in South Vietnam. We cut into their movement of supplies down the Ho Chi Minh Trail and we kept the commies from moving into Thailand. We never lost Laos by a military action. It was signed away by treaty after the fall of Vietnam!”
That more bombs were dropped on Laos than on Nazi Germany, and that the CIA left behind a country full of bomb craters, amputees on crutches and antipersonnel bomblets that still kill hundreds every year, was beside the point. Jack believed the cause was just. His hands were untainted, his conscience clear.
“Some people don't realize the CIA was created to do the things the country couldn't do out in the open. Absolutely nothing we did was legal,” he said. “I don't feel bad or any remorse whatsoever about zapping those guys. It didn't feel any different than shooting all those deer.”
As the drinking continued, in 2002, Pen thought a move two hours away to Pattaya might help, by distancing him from his drinking buddies. It didn't even slow him down. Nor did a big sign that was hung in his favorite bar: “ JACK 1, COMMUNISTS 0... SINGHA 1, JACK 0.” Now he visited Bangkok only to see his doctor. Yet, his health continued to fail. He started talking about cremation, calling it “my barbecue.”
The “barbecue” was held in Pattaya in April 2003. Nearly two hundred friends came to the send-off, including an emissary sent by Thailand's royal family, bearing the flame to light Jack's pyre in gratitude for his work on Thailand's behalf. He was seventy-six.
Jumbo Shrimp
I started hearing stories about a man called Patrick “Shrimp” Gauvain long before I moved to Thailand, and I'm still hearing them. Complete strangers seem anxious to pass along the lurid anecdotes in the fashion, I suppose, that tall tales were once spun about figures in ancient epics and myths.
Had I heard, I was asked in near worshipful tones, about the time that Shrimp paid the bar fine for fifty bar girls and had them delivered in a fleet of taxis to a friend as a birthday present? Or the time he took a dozen home for himself?
Then there was the time that he somehow dipped his penis into Kurt Waldheim's drink when the German diplomat wasn't looking. Or so I was told, but years later he corrected me, saying “actually, it was dipped into the soup of the lady sitting next to me at dinner, the Korean wife of a well-respected English expat who inquiringly asked, ‘Is this the inter-course?'”
Another time, someone said, Shrimp saw a woman without arms selling flower garlands at an intersection, bought all of her flowers and took her home.
And, a friend asked, did I know that Shrimp kept a John Wayne outfit at the Eden Club, a big hat and chaps worn without jeans or knickers beneath?
Somebody else said he'd been detained once for “mopeny.” What's that? I asked. My informant said he wasn't sure, but didn't it sound like something Shrimp would do?
More realistically, had I heard about the time he was driving a hundred kilometers an hour down a highway when a cop by the side of the road waved at him? Shrimp glanced at his watch, saw that it was nearly noon and knowing that the police were poorly paid, he figured the guy was just looking for money to buy lunch. He asked a friend who was in the car with him to give him all his small bills, knowing that the first cop would call another ahead of them. Sure enough, the second officer stood in the middle of the highway, his gun pointed at Shrimp's car. Whereupon, Shrimp held a fist full of money out the window as he approached and, as the cop deftly stepped aside, Shrimp released the packet of bills into his car's backwash.
As the stories piled up, my only tangible contact with the contemporary Dionysus was through the purchase of the wall calendars he sold in the bars: lubricious tributes to local beauty that proved to our buddies back home that we weren't lying about Bangkok's extraordinary citizenry. I finally met Shrimp and if we didn't exactly become bosom buddies, we ran in the same circles and became friends.
Still, it was years before I asked him about these tales and his story poured forth as if I'd opened a zipper on a rain cloud. “I was born in Malaysia,” he said. “My father was Henry Gauvain. He was the king's physician and he also took care of the general who was in charge of the British Army in Malaysia. He was sort of a naughty fellow. He liked the booze and he liked the women. He got court martialed for crashing the general's car and generally misbehaving, and was transferred to some comfortable diplomatic position somewhere.
“My mother divorced him. She was having a few flings with the young studs in Penang anyway, so we all went back to the U.K. where she married ‘the Milkman,' one of the gentlemen who ran United Dairies. Not long after that, she divorced him and married another person, also military. She liked men in uniforms.” The memory inspires a smirk and Shrimp adds, “I kind of like girls in uniforms, too.”
All this, Shrimp says, occurred before