Limo, page 7
I moved my chair back as if to stand up.
I said to Sally, “Are you anything whatsoever like . . . reasonably easy to find some time?”
Her spiral notebook had reappeared and she wrote something in it. Those few seconds of madness passed when I thought she might be giving me her unlisted phone number.
“What kind of a piece are you working on?”
“A thing for New York,” she said. “I do a TV and movie column twice a month.”
Lowering her voice out of the hearing of Grant and his friends, she said, “It’s sort of an offbeat piece on what kind of jerks buy participations on shows for their clients.”
“You didn’t know these people until tonight?” I said.
In the wildest of circumstances, she said, that wouldn’t have been possible.
“I introduced myself to Mr. Grant on the phone and he arranged the evening. Actually, it’s been very fertile.”
I grinned and said, “It was definitely wrong of me, then, to assume that you and Styve had been lovers on a Club Med holiday.”
She howled at that idea.
“You haven’t answered my earlier question,” I said.
Sally Hawks, writer, gave me a smile to remember, and said, “I live on a small island in the North Atlantic. Manhattan.”
8.
THE FIRST TIME in my apartment most people did an obligatory glance at the spectacular view of Gotham. Then their heads snapped around and they stared at one wall of the den, and they said something like, “Holy shit, what is that?”
I would say, “Oh, that’s my TV. Would you like to see it?”
By then they would have turned their backs on Gotham entirely and trotted into the den, where they would gape at eight television screens—a quartet of four-foot Sonys and four smaller nineteen-inch Sonys, all set into the dark wood paneling—and at the large clock with the second hand advancing around the dial in sudden regular jumps.
If the guest was somebody like Julia, you could walk up behind her, lift her dress and stick your hand down inside her panties, and she would just keep on staring at the TV wall. It beat the hell out of etchings.
What you could then do with your free hand was switch on the control box beside the big leather chair. For example, you might put four TV channels into action on the small Sonys, show a movie on one big set, a tape of an earlier program on another big set, a cassette of Olympic highlights on a third, and a Pete Smith specialty on the fourth.
If the visitor was somebody like Julia, she might start to wiggle at that point. She might notice the Sony color videotape camera on the tripod. She might suggest that she whip off her dress and you shoot some tape of her and show it on one of the big screens so she can see what she really looks like naked.
In fact, that is exactly what Julia said. Then we heard a door slam and knew Cooper had come in.
Behind the kitchen downstairs there used to be four small bedrooms and a large bath. When I moved out of Pelham and Cooper moved into Park Avenue, we tore the walls out of the bedrooms and turned the area into a private suite for Cooper. Also downstairs were the living room, the dining room, another bath, and the TV den. We used the dining room only to look out the big picture window at glorious sunsets over far New Jersey. Upstairs in the duplex was my bedroom, which was enormous, and a guest bedroom for when the kids stayed over or some old pal showed up from out of town. There were four fireplaces and five terraces. It wasn’t an apartment that would necessarily cause the Queen of England to swoon with admiration, but she would probably go a little whacko at the sight of those TV screens.
Julia said, “Your driver will see us.”
I said, “He won’t come in here.”
Which was true. When I had a guest like Julia, Cooper never popped in unexpected. If he had to talk to me, he buzzed me on the intercom.
Julia was playing with the control box. Before long, she had the same Abbott and Costello movie on all eight screens. She clapped her hands like a happy little girl on Christmas morning.
“You know something?” she said. “You’re not a bit like my husband.”
“Which husband?” I said.
“The husband I was with at Elaine’s Friday night when you came over to our table,” she said. “The man with the mustache? You knew him. At least, he knew you. He introduced us.”
“Your husband didn’t want to go to Clarke’s with us that night, either?”
“My husband won’t go to Clarke’s. They were rude to him in there.”
“They’ve never been rude to him in Elaine’s?”
“Of course not. Nobody is rude to my husband above Eighty-Sixth Street,” she said.
“Why is that?”
“He’s a gangster. His territory starts at Eighty-Sixth on the East Side.”
I said, “Oh? Where is he tonight?”
“At the trotters,” she said.
“Where does he think you are?” I said.
“With you.”
I removed my hand from Julia’s panties.
“You don’t have to stop,” she said.
“I believe I’ll have a cocktail,” I said.
I put a stack of records on the stereo and made us a couple of drinks at the bar in the den. A ghost chased Costello across eight TV screens. Every time Abbott showed up, the ghost disappeared, and Julia laughed. I gave Julia her drink.
“Would you rather see a good movie?” I said.
“This is a good movie,” she said. “I’ve seen it before.”
I opened a cabinet beside the fireplace. Hundreds of discs and cassettes were neatly filed and labeled in there. Arleene came up and did that for me now and then. I had a collection of the classic movies. If a new film sounded interesting, I would get a black-market tape of it from a lab in LA and would see the final cut almost as soon as the director did.
It was kind of expensive, but a good way to check up on the talent. Cooper knew some guys who arranged for the tapes. Most of them, I didn’t keep. But I had every Fellini, for instance. I had the Marx Brothers, W. C. Fields, Capra, Bergman, Hayworth, Gable, Grant, Wayne, and so on.
I was admiring my movie library when Julia unzipped my pants.
“I’m not too sure if we ought to keep doing this, Julia,” I said.
She said, “Don’t worry about my husband. He’s queer.”
“A queer gangster?” I said.
“Gangsters have feelings just like other people,” she said.
Julia unbuckled my belt, undid the button, and knelt on a cushion.
“Tony knows the kind of sex he prefers, and he’s man enough to get it,” she said.
Julia took my shoes and socks off and tossed my trousers aside.
She was making some clever little noises when I said, “Why don’t you quit watching Abbott and Costello, damn it?”
A few minutes later I knelt beside her and helped her remove her dress.
“I have to wear a bra because my tits hurt if I don’t,” she said.
I unsnapped the bra and her tits flew into my face.
“The funny movie’s over,” she said. “Do a movie of me now.”
“My camera is busted,” I said.
I lied. But what did I need with Julia telling Tony the gangster that I had nude pictures of his wife? I doubted if he was queer enough to laugh off that kind of news.
“What can we do then?” she said, disappointed. “I mean, you’re all printed out, aren’t you?”
I pulled down her bikini panties.
“Oh, that’s wonderful,” Julia said. “Could we see some kind of movie while we’re doing this?”
I got up and put a cassette on one of the large Sonys. I turned off the other sets. Julia mounded up the cushions on the floor by the fireplace and lay back so she could see the screen. She spread her legs and reached up to me with her arms to guide me down to her.
I settled in the way Julia wanted, being an incurable old fantasist.
After a while, up on the screen, Bogart was saying, “Ilsa, I’m no good at being noble. But it doesn’t take much to know that the problems of two little people don’t amount to a hill of beans in this crazy world.”
9.
AT A TABLE in A CONFERENCE ROOM on the twentieth floor of the Chambers building there were ashtrays, notepads, pens, and coffee cups which Arleene had supplied for about fourteen people. I arrived in the middle of some laughter and a Stanley Coffman monologue.
“I turned it down on the basis that nobody gave a damn about watching a private eye operate out of a ski resort,” Stanley was saying. “Who was the guy gonna investigate? Some Nazi who sold oversized stretch pants to Chicago vacationers? Jesus. Some fucking innkeeper who drove his Sno-Kat too fast? Well, the fucking thing’s only been syndicated in forty-four different countries now. How the hell did I know they’d think up an avalanche every week.”
Stanley glanced at me and lowered his voice to the others.
“Okay, cheese it, guys. Here comes Captain Success.”
This was going to be a production meeting. No Big Guys or Herb Grants were invited. These were the people who were going to be primarily responsible for seeing if “Just Up the Street” could cost fewer lives than the eruption of Krakatoa. Except for Stanley. Network presidents don’t get involved in actual productions, but they are kept informed of a show’s progress so they can worry more.
Stanley was sitting in, as they say.
Among the people I’d called together was a fellow named Jack Nathanson. He was going to produce and direct “Just Up the Street.” I’d thrown the whole project at Nathanson because he was the best News guy I’d ever worked against when I was with CBS. I wanted to go with a News guy on this instead of someone from Entertainment. I didn’t need an artistic genius who edited singers and comedians on tape. Or a series director who knew how to shoot a Pete Stern gunfight in only two takes. It had to be someone accustomed to working live. We wouldn’t have the luxury of even two takes. A good director from Sports might have been all right, but Nathanson was the best man I could think of in our building.
When I first talked with Jack there wasn’t much I could tell him. The Big Guy wanted three continuous live hours showing real people in their homes. God knows what they’d be doing. Watching themselves watching television was a good guess.
“Well, first, we’ll have to find a large family,” Nathanson said. “A large family that isn’t camera shy. A lot of people would give you subjects to cut back and forth with. Unless the intent of the show is to actually put the audience to sleep, which I’m not sure it isn’t. Be nice if we could find some real Waltons who could get busted on cocaine during the first hour.”
“Then John-Boy could get caught going down on his English teacher, and Mary Ellen could come clean that she’d been a hooker since the sixth grade,” I said.
He said seriously, “What if we got two different families in two different homes? That would give us places to leave and go back to. It would at least create a sense of action. Is this all going to be in one town?”
“It’s your baby, Jack. You rock it,” I said.
Not long after that, Jack asked me to join him for lunch at Mike Manuche’s on Fifty-Second Street so he could try something on me. What if we set up remote units in two different cities, he said, and we found some lively families and we simply let our best announcers go into their homes and interview them?
I calmly took a memo from my pocket that I had just received from the Big Guy and handed it to Nathanson. It read:
TO: F. M.
FROM: H. O. C.
SUBJECT: J. U. T. S.
I must tell you about the wonderful thing I saw last night on another network. I saw a pretty little girl on a show about a pick-aninny. She was doing her homework and everybody sat around happy until the forest fire. I hope your show, J. U. T. S., can capture this wholesome atmosphere live with real little girls. Remember, I do not want interviews. They would be interruptive. It will be so much better if our cameras could sneak up on little Nancy. We can be there when she asks her Mommy, “Mommy, who blew up the bridge at Dorgenhorst?” We can be there when Mommy turns off her vacuum cleaner and says, “Why, I think it was the Second Armored, dear.” Our cameras could even be there when Daddy asked for another dish of custard. I am very excited about the potential of your show, Frank.
Jack Nathanson said, “I wonder if it’s possible that he thinks our cameras sneaked up on those Apollo space shots?”
“You’ve known him longer than I have,” I said.
Jack said it was possible.
Then he said, “I gather money’s no consideration on ‘Just Up the Street’?”
None, I said.
“Let’s just get drunk today and let me get back to you,” Jack said.
Now we were back.
Everyone sat down at the conference table with me at one end and Stanley at the other. Besides Nathanson, there was a unit manager, an engineer in charge, some other directors and producers, and Arleene. Arleene liked production meetings. She got to do needlepoint.
Stanley said, “I sat in on a production meeting at that fucking bowl game we did last December. Jesus, who’s that producer we’ve got in Sports? That guy who carries his clipboard with him to the toilet? He said, ‘Heads up now, men. Remember not to zoom in close on the anthem.’ We had this fat cunt who was gonna lip sync the anthem, right? Then he said, ‘Don’t forget. On rockets red glare we cut to the jets overhead. Then we go to the balloons coming out of the floats. Then we go up to the booth to you, Kenny.’ After that, he goes into this crap about the halftime and how we'll handle the majorettes who’re gonna come out and jerk off the nigger band or something. He doesn’t say anything about the game. Jesus, is this some fucking business?”
I asked Stanley if he would mind, terribly, if we got started.
“Sorry, guys,” he said. Then he looked at Jack Nathanson and broke into a grin.
“Okay, Jew,” he said. “Tell the little Wasp how you’re gonna keep this from being a real piece of shit.”
Nathanson explained how “Just Up the Street” would not be technically difficult. You simply would have remote units out there near the homes with directors sending the best pictures they had into the New York control room where Jack would select what he wanted to put on the air. A normal remote.
As far as getting cameras into the homes, that would require laying some cable and building some mounts in some corners of their rooms, he said. But if the families were eager enough to be on television in the first place, then they would permit the work to be done and the network of course would pay for restoring things to order.
We would probably need to use at least one guy with a mini-cam in each home. Just to let him roam around and pick up things our mounted cameras would find out of range.
We could “mike” the homes, he said, but we would surely have a lot of trouble with the audio gains and levels and we would lose words if not whole chunks of dialogue when the people moved—provided, of course, we found people who could talk.
Nathanson suggested we also use “RF” mikes on the people. An RF mike—for radio frequency—is a tiny button on a wire attached to a battery pack and worn somewhere on a person’s body. The battery pack might be in a man’s hip pocket, for example, with the wire running up inside his shirt and the button, the mike, hidden near the collar or at the chest.
“When you’re wearing a battery pack in your hip pocket, it makes you feel like your diaper’s full, but you get used to it,” Jack said.
Without all this preparation, he said, and without spending some rehearsal time with the families to let them get comfortable with the mikes and the cameras, the show was impossible to do.
“We can’t just send a housebreaker with a mini-cam around to some neighborhood where the lights are on and get much more to televise than a guy calling the police,” Nathanson said.
To do a show that is going to be on the air for three solid hours, we had to have cameras, lighting, and audio, he said. The people would be able to move freely about, doing whatever they do, but we could manage it where we could both see them and hear them pretty well. We could put cameras in every one of their rooms, he said, only we probably wouldn’t want to put one in any of the johns.
“Jesus, Grandma,” said Stanley. “Come see this goddam turd. It looks like a fucking nuclear sub.”
Nathanson said we wouldn’t coach the people on what to do or say, naturally. But we would plan various ways for them to be more at ease. The hope would be, he said, that they conceivably could even forget they were wearing the RF’s and wouldn’t worry in excess about the cameras. We’d tell them that there will be a lot of time during the show when they won’t be on. Just relax.
“If we’re very lucky,” Jack said, “we’ll get some spontaneous conversation and some movement around the houses. Somebody doing something. The Big Guy may think we’ve sneaked in there to get it, but we’ll have busted our asses for about two weeks beforehand.”
Nathanson said, “I hope research can come up with two reasonably interesting families somewhere.”
“Four,” I said.
“Four?” Jack said.
“Makes it better,” I said. “With four households and plenty of people in all of them, you won’t have to devote more than, say, forty-five minutes of the three hours to each family. Gives you even more ways to throw it around. More illusion of activity.”
“Absolutely, Frank,” said Stanley. “When the fucking aunt answers the phone and says she can’t make it to the Business and Professional Women’s weekly meeting because of her virus, Jack can cut to the kitchen where some kid with acne is having a Twinkie spasm.”
Stanley leaned back with a sigh.
“Jesus, I was happy as a station manager on the Coast,” he said. “Had the Mercedes, the Bel Air membership. Guys begged to buy any shit you put in the window. Rich station. Ran itself. Guys couldn’t find you. New York never knew what fucking time it was in LA."
I said, “I think, too, we’ll need on-the-scene commentators. They can stroll around out in the yard or in the neighborhood and we can go to them now and then, and they can talk about whatever is interesting about the family. We’ll use our top News guys. They’ll make it look important and they can vamp better than anybody.”
