Limo, page 2
“Eloise said something else,” Cooper said. “She said she’s been out with a lot of big shots in her time and you don’t give good enough head to get away with flirting with a dirtyleg while in the company of a lady.”
I said I didn’t remember Eloise saying that.
“You were already out of the limo by then and heading into Clarke’s with Julia,” Cooper said.
Two fuzzy little Yorkshires rushed into the room yapping like a herd of nuns. They jumped onto the bed. I had given the dogs to Marcie for Christmas. The kids named them Dump and Ling. Marcie gave Dump and Ling back to me right after I moved out of the house. Brought them to Gotham herself and straight up to the penthouse and shut them in the bathroom where they ate the five-hundred-dollar hairbrush that was presented to me by the West Coast news department when I left CBS.
Marcie said since I was going to be spending the night with a lot of dogs from now on anyhow, I might as well have this pair that would lie down and roll over without me having to shove hundred-dollar bills at them.
I could swear my prize hairbrush smelled like liverwurst when I finally trapped Dump and Ling out on the terrace and stopped them from pulling it in different directions. Rotten, low-minded, scum-level paranoia is what Marcie called the notion.
She said she had shut Dump and Ling in the bathroom so they wouldn’t piss a map of Indonesia on my carpet like they had on hers.
While I was trying to remember what had made Eloise act like a bad sport, Dump and Ling scrambled under the covers, and the big orange tabby cat who had been sleeping under there spoke straight animal talk which made them flee onto the terrace. André, the cat, was my all-time favorite animal. That cat understood everything I said, could leap eight feet off the ground, and loved to watch television and movies with me on the eight-screen lashup in the den of the penthouse.
If André stayed with your show all the way to the end, you had a quality piece. But maybe not a hit. André was not a Nielsen cat.
I heard the shower. I got out of bed and started putting on my warmup suit and my red Pumas. Cooper looked at me from the bathroom door.
“You ain’t got time to run no laps,” he said.
“What do all those Tanzanian fuckers do the mile in?” I asked.
In the mornings I ran two miles around the reservoir in Central Park. Unless I was some place like Beverly Hills or London, of course. I had tracks laid out everywhere, and I always tried to do two miles a day. Some days I would get to staggering and taste the chili coming up and have to quit and lie down. But usually if I kept on running I would break through the sour part, even on the really bad days, and just run right on through it and out the other side.
It was your normal lap around the reservoir. I passed a wino asleep in a hedge, then a teenage couple sprawled in a flowerbed, then four black dudes who tried to trip me with a tire chain, then a group of twelve-year-olds who offered me a joint. That was in the first half-mile.
The scenery always made me think of tour guides. Welcome to our garden island. Have you been to the fern grotto?
Have you visited the lookout over the canyon? Have you driven through the river valley?
I overtook two young girls riding English saddle. Their expressions told me their fathers paid an apartment maintenance on Fifth Avenue that would feed an emerging nation for a month.
On the reservoir path, even though I zigzagged around two chows on a leash, an old lady’s purse caught me with a solid blow—and my elbow rang for the next one hundred yards.
Near the end, I was gaining on a younger guy who looked like a track-man. He was either a serious NYU strider or a backgammon ace who had just left the Regency Club and was running off the $6,000 he had dropped.
I put on a hard burst, which wasn’t entirely easy, and passed him. I kept going and his gray sweatsuit fell back in the distance. He couldn’t have been a trackman. His shoes were too new and I thought I got a whiff of Old Spice Lime.
I still felt good about passing him until I came onto a group of guys with film cameras behind some trees. They said I’d ruined a good take of the commercial they were shooting.
The silver Rolls was waiting in front of the building when I came down from showering and slipping into my Saturday outfit: suede jacket, pigskin pants, and boots. Cooper was wiping the hood of the limo with a soft cloth. Chester, one of the doormen, was watching Cooper and admiring the car.
“I’ve been meaning to ask what you’ve got to do to get one of these,” Chester said.
Cooper said, “There ain’t but one auto-mobile like the Silver Goblet. To get it, you got to be Frank Mallory.”
Chester opened a rear door of the limo for me as Cooper slid in behind the wheel. Chester then imitated a golf swing and held the pose on the follow through, watching the flight of an imaginary ball.
“Fine morning to knock out some whaps, Mr. Mallory,” he said.
“Can I tell you something about that swing, Chester?” I said. “Don’t take it out of town.”
I sat back in the limo and opened up the New York Times, then, to see if I had been fired or promoted.
2.
YOU COULD HEAR IT SAID among almost any group of coal miners that a man did not need a silver Rolls limo to be happy. You could probably hear that a man did not need one with four television sets arranged in a wood panel in the back seat. A coal miner would say that a man did not need to be able to watch CBC, NBC, ABC, and CBS—all four networks—at once. Riding in a car.
A man might not need a bar and liquor cabinet in his limo. Or a built-in oven and hot plate. Or two phones. Or the leather seats and carpeting that mine had.
Or the round clock set in the middle of the TV sets to tell whether everybody’s shows were getting on and off the air on schedule.
He might not need to have the limo stocked every morning with the Times, Daily News, Women’s Wear, Billboard, Variety and a few other publications so he could keep up with mankind and Hollywood.
I happened to have all this because I asked for it. And just like the penthouse, the salary, the stock, and the paid-up life insurance policy, the Chambers Corporation came up with all of it. The lures were dangled in a lot of directions to jolt me away from CBS.
I was more than satisfied at CBS and I had all the challenges I could handle, having worked my way up near the top of network news. And if I might just sneak this in, the old network was a place where I had seen my share of Emmys and Peabodys, which are awards they give to executives instead of the technicians who deserve them.
In some ways, television is a game to see which network executive can get the best toys. I negotiated for as many toys as I could get before I left CBS to go to Chambers. I wasn’t going to leave a winner and move to a network basically noted for its decline in everything but sports and soaps without all the stripes I could stitch on my sleeve.
Anyhow, that’s why I had the Rolls.
While Cooper and I often giggled about the absurdity of having a limo like the Silver Goblet, we also enjoyed the hell out of it. And as much as anything, I enjoyed the fact that it made somebody like Herb Grant want to drive nails into my hands.
Herb Grant had somehow slithered up as close to the Big Guy as anyone could get. Grant was Group President of Chambers Communications. In other words, he presided over TV, radio, film, books, records, cassettes—all communications divisions. And Grant reported only to the Big Guy, a fact he seldom allowed you to forget.
He was a man of whom it was said around the merry corridors of Madison Avenue, where Grant came from, that if the Big Guy ever got constipated, Herb Grant’s head would shrink up to the size of a pinto bean.
As for the meeting in Greenwich on Saturday, I knew only that I was supposed to be there with Herb Grant and Stanley Coffman. Stanley Coffman was president of the television network. He was my direct boss and the man most responsible for hiring me at CBC.
After a procession of programmers who had risen out of the sales division, CBC had slowly dug itself into a deep hole as the fourth network in prime time. The Big Guy ordered Stanley Coffman to do something about it, even if it was drastic.
I was drastic. A news man.
In the office on Friday I had asked Stanley if he knew what the Greenwich meeting was about.
“He probably wants to discuss our oversupply of paper clips and rubber bands,” Stanley said of the Big Guy. “Or maybe he wants to ask why we changed the fucking logo—which was two years ago.”
Stanley and I had been friends before I joined CBC. I had known him from around bars, which is where most TV people are introduced to each other. I first met him in the Polo Lounge in Beverly Hills. Stanley was sitting in a booth with his arm around a starlet talking long distance to his wife in New Canaan.
“Bernice,” Stanley said into the phone that night. “Don’t pay the ransom. I just escaped.”
The day Stanley made the big pitch to hire me, he said, “Look around the business today and what do you see? Broads are running daytime. Punks out of college are doing late-night humor. Entertainment guys are in charge of sports. Why can’t a news guy bring something to prime time?”
No reason, I said.
“Besides,” Stanley said. “You’re more fucking expensive than Israel.”
So there I was. Drastic. Expensive. And on my way to a mystery luncheon with the Big Guy.
If the meeting was going to involve a problem with programming, I didn’t need it. I already had several, and one of them rang on the phone in the limo as we were sailing up the Merritt Parkway and I was buttering my English muffin.
It was Melvin, a director of specials, calling from the Coast. Melvin Gottlieb. Always a nervous man, he now sounded exhausted. Hearing Melvin’s voice, I could envision him sitting on his bed, fully clothed, since he’d been up all night. He would have a compatible girl-child in freaky denim on the floor at his knees in the hotel suite, and they would be taking snorts of coke, using a coffee spoon for a scoop.
“Frank, listen,” Melvin’s voice said. “I got something I want you to hear.” I didn’t hear anything.
“Hear that, Frank?” Melvin said. “That’s my heart, Frank. Know who made it sound like that? Peggy did it. I’m sorry, Frank. Peggy has to die.”
I looked at my watch and checked it against the limo clock. New York time was 9:31 a.m., which meant Melvin had just survived another apricot sunrise in California.
“She can’t sing or dance, so what use is she to us alive?” Melvin said. “You get the drift?”
There was a noise over the phone like a hog wading into dinner.
“I overdid it that time!” Melvin said. “Knew I’d do it sooner or later. Want to hear a heart explode, Frank? Go off like a goddam skyrocket. Got any curiosity about that?”
I told Melvin to take it easy. In his condition I might as well have told him to swim to Catalina.
I expected from directors, actors, and writers a certain amount of what Marcie described as self-destructive behavior. But I didn’t think they were self-destructive so much as they were vulnerable to attacks of fear. They were terrified that people would decide they really didn’t know what they were doing, and probably never had.
The old bravado would crack, and out would come a frightened baby monster that would try to arrange it so we could all fall in the same pile. Whether a director, for example, ordinarily knew what he was doing or not didn’t matter while the fear was showing. That was especially true in Hollywood, where nobody was sure of anything until after it had happened.
If you brought in all the nuts from the county farm, dressed them up in Guccis and things from the men’s department in Giorgio, and put them to running Woolworth’s, you would get a pretty good picture of how Hollywood works.
I told Melvin to swallow a couple of Valiums and go to sleep.
“Just as soon as the black bitch is dead,” he said.
Melvin got me about halfway nervous. The Peggy Hanley special was my first big personal production in the new job. I had already handled, or tried to fix, a number of shows I had been stuck with when I took the job. And I had some pilots shooting for the fall, which Herb Grant hated.
But the Peggy Hanley thing would be the first show of my own I’d had time to get on the air. I saw Peggy do some songs and a comedy skit one night at the Improv, caught her in a dramatic role at a theater in the Village, and when she turned up as the singing and dancing surprise of a Broadway musical, where she was on stage for a total of seven minutes and made the first paragraph of every critic, I signed her for a special.
Then I signed Melvin Gottlieb to direct it.
Marcie had often suggested that I was capable of error.
I told Melvin it was in his contract that he was forbidden to bruise the star.
“I’ll stick a hot wire in her ear. Won’t leave a mark on her,” he said. He cackled and coughed and sounded as if he might be involved in a scuffle of some sort. You may wonder why I did not fire Melvin at that moment. The reason was that Melvin was an excellent director when he was sane, and occasionally brilliant when he was crazy. And the taping, which would be in front of a live audience, was less than a week off. And Herb Grant would inquire why I ever hired Melvin in the first place, and I did not want to say that I was capable of error at that point.
Melvin was assured I would take care of the situation.
“Peggy has a beautiful ass,” he said, calmly and slowly. “I would like to drag her through the grass on it.”
I had already picked up the other phone and called my secretary, Arleene. When I hung up on Melvin, Arleene was waiting. Arleene was wonderful, kind, patient, and intelligent. She should have been a psychiatric nurse.
“Call LA and tell them to send someone who is physically very powerful over to the Beverly Wilshire and make Melvin swallow a fistful of Valiums, even if the fist has to be stuck down Melvin’s throat,” I said. “This same person is to keep an eye on Melvin day and night until after the taping.”
“Right. One babysitter for Melvin,” Arleene said.
I turned on the hot plate, glanced out of the window at the trees rushing past, and asked what was happening around the network that morning. Arleene said I was due for a call from News.
“They want to pre-empt tonight for an hour on the earthquake in Peru. Grant was in earlier and he said nobody wants to see dead babies in prime time on Saturday night,” Arleene said.
I said the news guys must have some great footage to ask for an hour.
“Your basic fire and rubble and a better-than-average tidal wave,” Arleene said. “Also the writers on Satan Sucks want a conference with you.”
“What about?”
“You know how writers are. Either they won’t tell you anything, or they tell you too much. This was their day for secrets.”
“Put them down for Monday afternoon,” I said.
“Satan Sucks,” as Arleene named it, was a movie of the week that I had been unable to cancel. The real title was “Satan Takes a Bride.” My predecessor as head of prime-time programming had signed contracts for it that could only be broken at terrific expense. Instead of squandering a fortune on lawyers, I had spent a few thousand on new writers who were supposed to transform “Satan Takes a Bride” into something we could enter at Cannes.
“A woman named Eloise called. She said she had decided to do the lead in some new play in London, last night was goodbye, and she hoped you dehydrated in your sauna. The rest of the messages are nothing you need to think about while you are on your way to have lunch with the Big Guy. Your horoscope for today says you should strive for internal peace and be close to your loved ones.”
When Arleene was off the phone, I looked through the magazines and papers, glanced at the cartoon shows on the four TVs in the back of the limo and drank some coffee.
“Do people live in these things? I don’t ever see nobody,” Cooper said. We were passing through an area of big homes and wide, green lawns.
“I guess everybody died trying to pay the bills,” Cooper said.
I said some of the corpses kept going back and forth on the New Haven. Made me think of the Flying Dutchman, I said. Cooper said he never heard a tune by the Flying Dutchman. I said it was a ghost ship.
“Goddam, I think I saw it one time when I was in the Marine Corps. If it was a big deal with sails on it, I saw it go in a fog bank and not come out. Did seem kind of peculiar,” he said.
When Cooper was in the Marine Corps in Korea—fighting, he said, for my right to go to what he called Texas University—he got a commendation from the General. Cooper drove the General in a jeep from Pusan Harbor up to the Yalu River, which took a while, and then walked out with the General in the snow after the Chinese came in. I read the commendation.
The General said he was amazed at how Cooper never got tired. The General said Cooper was ever vigilant and had such incredible eyesight he could spot enemy targets where nobody else in the entire Marine Corps could see them. The General said Cooper could spot enemy targets that even the radar couldn’t see. The General gave Cooper a Silver Star for that. Of course the General had never heard of amphetamines.
Cooper got his Purple Heart from being sprayed by a white phosphorous grenade while he was walking in the snow with the General. That’s how Cooper got the scars on his back. He said he saw the enemy up there heaving the grenade, all right, but he was too cold to do anything about it.
“I found me a place,” Cooper said as he steered the limo into the country club driveway. “Down at Park Avenue South and Fifteenth Street. Small dance floor. Bar up front. Got a bunch of labor coming in there Monday to start fixing it up.”
“You sure Gotham needs another shitkicker nightclub?” I said.
“Hell, Gotham could use a good one,” Cooper said. “There’s nine radio stations around here that don’t play nothing but shitkicker music. You might not be hip to that, because a radio don’t have a picture in it.”
