Natural Causes (12 page)

"That's typical. Most agents look on us as the
enemy.

They foment an adversarial relationship with
management just to give themselves alibis for collecting their ten
percent. It's ridiculous. If a writer was smart, he'd deal directly
with the production company and save himself a lot of money. What
else did he say?"

"That Helen was to blame for 'Phoenix's'
problems."

"Helen doesn't write the show. She produces it.
Sure she can be difficult. I told you last night--she's got a live-in
identity crisis. But, believe me, once she gets in the studio, she's
all pro. She leaned over backward to give Quentin the benefit of the
doubt. She put her neck on the lin--and the show, to boot--to help
snap Quentin out of it."

"Sugarman seemed to think that he would have
snapped out of it. That it was mostly his health and Marsha that were
bothering him."

"You don't snap out of a quadruple bypass,"
Moon said. "And if you don't believe me, ask his doctor. Or his
druggist. You don't snap out of a rotten marriage, either. I don't
think Quentin had any intention of dumping on Marsha. He was dried
up, I'm telling you. There was nothing left inside."

"No inner resources," I said to myself.
"What do you know about Dover's financial situation?"

"Just that he was making half a million dollars
a year. Why?"

"Sugarman said something about bad investments."

Jack shrugged. "You'd have to talk to Marsha or
to Connie about that. Or to Quentin's lawyer, maybe. As far as I
knew, he was doing all right. Which is to say that he was only
spending about twenty-five percent more than he earned. Like most of
them out here, Quentin didn't know the meaning of the word 'enough'."

Jack looked up suddenly. "Here they come--Olivia
and Malvolio."

"What does that make you?" I asked him.
"Sir Toby?"

"That was Quentin's role," he said dryly.
"I am the Prince."
 

14

Helen Rose and Walt Mack walked over to our table.
The woman was wearing a red blouse and dark blue skirt. Walt Mack was
dressed in red and blue, too. He had on a dark red, kid leather
sportscoat, a salmon-colored shirt with a thin black tie knotted at
the collar, and blue jeans.

"I don't think you two have met yet," Helen
said, squeezing in beside me. "Harry Stoner, this is Walt
Mack--our new head writer."

"Congratulations," I said, holding out a
hand.

Mack said thanks and shook with me. He was very thin
and tan, medium height, moustached, nice-looking in a clean-cut,
collegiate, Tony Perkins-like way. If I hadn't already been told that
he was gay, I wouldn't have guessed. He had none of the usual
mannerisms. The other surprising thing about him was his age. I'd
expected a man in his late thirties--like Dover himself. But Walt
Mack couldn't have been more than twenty-six or twentyseven.

"Let's order quick," he said as he sat
down. "I'm starving. And I've got to get back home by two."
He turned to Helen. "Did you see the scene I wrote for Carlotta,
the one in the bar?"
Helen smiled.

"Notice what she was drinking?" Mack said.
"A double martini with an olive. I put that olive in for you,
sweetie."

The woman laughed loudly. "She's got my booze. I
wish I had her thighs. Did you see her in that bikini on the remote,
Jack?"

Moon nodded. "Did you see Hal Walker? Christ,
we've got to keep his clothes on, Walt."

"His and a few others," Helen said, raising
an eyebrow.

"It's unattractive," Jack said.

"I still wish I had Carlotta's thighs. They look
like they're made of steel. And that ass!"

"I hear she's been spreading it around some,"
Mack said.

"No," Jack said, looking hurt.

Helen nodded at him. "I'm afraid so. She's been
shtupping Paul List, and she's six weeks pregnant. She came in last
week and told me. It's supposed to be a secret," she said,
glancing at Walt.

He grinned.

"Jesus," Jack said. "What are we going
to do about that?"

"I'll handle it in the breakdowns," Mack
said. "Don't worry, Jack. It's a blessing in disguise. We'll
just have Hal rape her, as well as beat her up."

"Yeah, but Carlotta's the Bitch." Jack
looked at Helen. "Do we want a pregnant Bitch?"

"I'm thinking about it," Helen said. "I'm
thinking I love it. But then what do we do about Hal and Cecily?"

"Who cares about Cecily?" Walt said. "I've
been telling you for months--she's boring. You saw the results of the
test groups. Nobody likes her. I think we should pull a Danny
Meeghan."

They all laughed and I said, "What's a Danny
Meeghan?"

Mack smiled at me. "Excuse us, Harry. We're just
used to talking shop. Danny Meeghan was a character on one of the
soaps back in the mid-sixties and he has since become apocryphal. He
was a popular young character for a while, then he started to
fade--fast. The writers decided to write him out of the show. Usually
that's easy enough to do. You send the guy out of town on a business
trip or something."

"Far out of town," Jack said.

"But in Danny's case, that wasn't possible. He'd
been crippled in a car accident in the backstory--so he was
housebound. He could have been sent to a hospital; but that would
have meant writing a long bit about him getting sick, and then there
would have had to have been bits about how the other characters
reacted to his illness. It would have taken forever, and the writers
wanted him to go fast. So one day they had somebody wheel Danny
upstairs to his room. And he never came back down."

I stared at him. "He never came back down?"

"Nope," Mack said. "He's been up there
for the last fifteen years."

"Didn't anybody miss him?"

"Only his agent," Mack said. "You can
do just about anything you want on a soap, Harry. The audience has
got an astonishingly short attention span. That's why we do two or
three minutes of prologue at the start of each show--to remind them
of what they're watching."

"He just disappeared, huh?"

"It's a tough world," Walt Mack said. "They
disappear all the time."

"About Cecily?" Helen said. "What kind
of guarantee does she have?"

Jack said, "I think she's two a week. But she's
up for renewal at the end of September."

"How fast can we get rid of her?" Helen
asked Walt. "Like that!" He snapped his fingers.

Helen laughed. "Be serious, Walt. Is she worth
renewing for another thirteen at a guaranteed two?"

Mack groaned. "I think it's a mistake. She's
boring; the audience hates her; and so do I. I think we should get
rid of her right away. A car hits her, and that's it!"

"You've got to learn that you can't have
everything your own way, babe," Helen said a bit sharply.

"You may hate her, but I've got a feeling that
we're going to get a lot of mail if we give her the fast shuffle.
That so-called audience sample has been wrong before."

Jack laughed. "We interview a few ladies every
other month, Harry, to get feedback on the show."

"I'm still willing to take the chance on
Cecily," Mack said.

"And I'll remember you said that," Helen
told him. "All the mail goes to your office, Walt. Jack, make a
note--Walt gets all the Cecily mail."

A waitress came over and took our orders. Then the
three of them started talking about the show again. I was beginning
to get an amusing sense of the group's dynamics, and Walt Mack was
clearly its star. He was a fast, articulate, enthusiastic talker. And
while I didn't always understand the reasons for what he said, he
clearly had a reason in mind. If he had an obvious weakness, it was
his reluctance to concede any of his points. He only had a few of
them, which he kept coming back to, again and again, rephrasing the
ideas each time, as if the objections that the other two had raised
were merely matters of semantics. Next to him, Jack appeared to be a
very deep thinker, indeed. He didn't say much, and when he did speak,
it was usually to a question of fact. Helen was the most changeable
of the three. She was, by turns, amused, touched, irritated, and
intimidated by Mack's enthusiasms. In that respect, she was no
different than she'd been the night before. But because I'd seen her
at the end of an evening, I had a clearer sense of what was going on
behind those changes. For all the passion he put into arguing his
position, Walt Mack seemed uninterested in 'Phoenix' compared to
Helen Rose. The only sense of involvement I got from him was with his
own ideas, as if, to Walt, the whole conversation was a matter of
hoarding your points and conceding as little as possible to anyone
else. It made him seem his age or younger; jejune, vain, and a little
stupid in the way that bright, young men seem stupid when they act as
if a thought of their own, any thought, is precious because it could
be their very last one.

I wanted to jump into the conversation myself and ask
Mack a few things. Like why he'd apparently been spreading the rumors
about Dover that had led to me being hired. And why he'd claimed that
he'd been "carrying" Quentin for the past two years. But
there just didn't seem to be any room for me to edge in.

Helen and Walt argued before lunch about something
called a "crossover set." And as soon as lunch ended, they
started again.

"We need it, Helen," Mack said. "You've
been on my back for two years about the number of sets in the
breakdowns. "

"And you know why," she said. "We're
running fifty grand over budget as it is, Walt."

"All the more reason to build a crossover set.
It'll end up saving us money, Helen--that's my whole point--by
cutting down on the number of sets we have to use."

She laughed unhappily. "I gave you Cecily. I
gave you Carlotta. What more do you want, Walt?"

"I want it all, sweetie." He'd meant it to
sound funny, but it didn't come out that way. Walt ducked his head
and said, "Right now I want a crossover set. In town. Convenient
to everyone. A place to meet. A restaurant. A bar. A gift shop.
Something. Do you know what we have to go through to get people
together now? Jesus, it takes two or three days to arrange a meeting
and at least that many sets."

"I know," Helen conceded. "Let me
think about it, O.K.?"

Walt raised his hands-palms up-as if he were
surrendering. "That's all I'm asking, Helen. Just that you think
about it."

Moon shook his head disgustedly. "Sure," he
said under his breath.  Mack glanced at his watch. "Christ,
I've got to get going. It's a quarter of two."

"And we've got to meet the network," Helen
said dismally.

Jack looked at me. "Jesus, Harry, I'm sorry. You
didn't get a chance to ask Walt any questions."

Mack smiled graciously. "If you want to talk to
me, Harry, you're welcome to come over to my place. It's only a few
miles from here. I've got a call to make, but after that I'm free for
the afternoon."

"If it wouldn't be too much trouble," I
said. "I'll take you up on it."

"No trouble at all," he said. "Tell
you what, I'll go collect the car and you can meet me in the lot.
I've got a blue Porsche 928."

Mack got up, kissed Helen on the cheek, and left.

"What a pain in the ass!" Jack said once
he'd walked out the door. "It's going to be like this from now
on, Helen. The Walt Mack Hour."

"Maybe he'll change," she said without
conviction. "I gotta go, too. Are you coming, Jack?"

"Just a minute. I'll pick up the tab."

Helen left and Jack went up to the register to pay
the bill. As we were walking out of the bar, I asked him, "How
come I got invited home?"

He smiled. "Well, Harry, either Walt's got an
interest in you or he wants to appear cooperative to the right
people. That boy knows which side his butt is buttered on, and it
wouldn't do to upset the United brass. Jesus, to hear him in there
you would have thought he was Quentin Dover reborn."

"Dover was like that?"

"A little slower, a little more considerate, a
little more adept at hiding his ego. But he always had an answer just
like young Walt. Hell, they worked together for two years. I guess it
would be surprising if he didn't show a family resemblance."

"See you tonight?" I said.

"Yeah. After six at the Marquis."

Jack veered off to the left, down the pathway that
led to the south quadrangle, and I continued on through the lobby and
out to the lot.
 

15

It took Walt Mack about fifteen minutes to get to his
house by the beach. We drove down Sunset Boulevard to the Coast
highway, then due south for a few miles to Pacific Palisades. Mack
parked the Porsche in a little turnoff above a cove, then we walked
up a flight of railed, salt-whitened stairs to a fenced compound.
Walt unlocked the gate and said, "Watch your step. It's slick."