Show Business Kills (34 page)

He told me there had been a noticeable shift in the way people were treating him, a disrespect for what he’d brought to the
television business, for his writing style. That he was somehow being perceived as too old-fashioned to be a part of what
was happening in the business at that moment.

I didn’t know what to say. The complaining made me uncomfortable. By the end of the lunch, just because he was Manny, and
being funny was what he did best, he was making jokes about it, and I was relieved. I didn’t want to sit around with some
kvetchy old guy over pickles if it was going to be depressing.

I had a lot of work to do and didn’t want to interrupt a writing day to hear about how stupid the network executives were.
That was a given. In fact it seems to me, I was so busy with my own assignments that I had to cancel what Manny called “our
constitutional” once or twice. So the next time I saw him was a few months later. I was pulling my Mustang into the parking
lot at Jerry’s, and Manny was waiting for me, sitting on the hood of the old Cadillac he drove.

“Hey, kid,” he said every time I pulled into the parking lot of Jerry’s Deli. That day there was something distracted about
the look in his eye. In fact, I remember as he stepped forward to meet me, he was almost hit by a woman in a Mercedes who
was backing out of the space next to the one I was pulling into.

I knew from a few phone conversations we’d had that recently Manny had been doing something very tough for him, which was
calling up comics he’d worked for in the past, and
if he got them on the phone, saying, “Listen to this joke.” Then he’d try the joke out on them, in the hope that they’d like
it and buy it from him.

Most of the time they did like it, and bought it, because Manny’s jokes are topical and very funny. And when someone tells
you how witty some of those big stars are, it’s usually because Manny told them, or should I say sold them, what to say. But
you can’t really make a living or a life out of selling jokes door to door, and that’s why Manny was more depressed than the
last time.

“So what’s new?” I always asked, hoping that today he’d light up and say, “I sold a pilot idea to NBC, and I’m starting to
write it.” But instead, that day he fogged up and said he was going to tell me something, but I couldn’t tell a soul. I promised,
but he still didn’t tell me what the secret was, until we were at our usual table, which is outside on the sidewalk, where,
at no extra charge, as you eat your soup, you can inhale the fumes from the buses that go by on Ventura Boulevard.

“I’m working the night shift at Kinko’s,” he told me. I was sure it was a joke, since comedy writers love using words with
the letter K in them, because for some reason the sound of the letter K is supposed to be funny, ergo his choice of Kinko’s,
which is the name of a chain of copy and printing stores. “I have to do it if I want to eat,” he said. “So far, I’ve added
a little humor to a couple of guys’ business reports. But that’s as good as it gets.”

When I realized he wasn’t kidding, the enormity of what he was saying hit me. Not that there’s anything wrong with working
at Kinko’s. All of the people who have helped me there, to get a manuscript Xeroxed, are sweet and nice and
courteous. But for Manny Birnbaum to be working there, to support himself, was like Walter Cronkite selling freeway flowers.

“Why Kinko’s?” I asked.

“Because after all the pages I’ve Xeroxed for myself, I know how to do it real well for other people,” he said. Then he added,
as if to reassure me, “I’m on the midnight-to-six shift at the one in Reseda, because I don’t know anyone in Reseda, and there’s
very little chance that at that hour, in that location, Brandon Tartikoff is gonna walk in there and spot me.” There was no
disguising the shame Manny was feeling, and instead of being the selfish little brat I’d been the last time, it occurred to
me that I had to hear him out and help him because I owed him in spades.

“What can I do to help you?” I asked him, thinking it felt like such a short time ago when I stood in my family living room,
looking at the black-and-white screen, when the television was still an exciting new toy for our family, thrilling to the
sight of Manny Birnbaum’s name. But it really had been a long time, and instead of being venerated and consulted and revered
by an industry he’d helped to make successful, Manny was out on his ass.

“Nothing, maidelah,” he said. “But thanks for asking.”

The next day I got on the phone and called John DiMaggio. John was a writer I knew from when we were both on the Writers’
Guild show committee. He was a sweet, funny man who had a hit comedy series that had been on television for five years.

We chatted for a while, and I knew he knew I wasn’t just calling him to shoot the breeze. Pretty soon I could tell if I didn’t
get to the reason I called, he was going to hang up, so
I said, “Listen, I’m calling to tell you that if you need someone really strong on your writing staff, you’ll never guess
who’s available. Manny Birnbaum!”

John was quiet for a little while, and then he said, “No kidding? Boy, was I a fan of his. Remember that routine he wrote
for Tim Conway and Carol Burnett about the fat couple? A classic.”

“I’m telling you,” I said hopefully. “He’s the greatest.”

“Yeah,” he said and then sighed. “Thanks for the tip, Rose. You’re nice to call,” and I thought maybe I’d pulled it off. Made
John DiMaggio think I was offering him a hot property, and that maybe he had a job for Manny. I was about to give him Manny’s
phone number, when he said, “Because I remember you telling me that he’s an old friend of your dad’s. Gotta hop,” and he hung
up.

Meanwhile, you know how fickle the business is. Well, things were starting to slow down for me, too. I was falling into some
tough times myself, and though I’d been going around to a lot of meetings, I wasn’t getting any assignments. I had a meeting
one day with some producer who was looking for a writer to adapt a novel, and before the meeting, I took the novel apart and
made a zillion notes on how I’d do it, and after my big enthusiastic pitch, the producer shot down every idea I had.

Now I remember that day as if it was yesterday, feeling down about that meeting as if it was the most important thing in the
world. Driving home over Mulholland thinking I had to get a job soon or my eligibility for Writers’ Guild health insurance
would be threatened. And when I got home, I saw Allan’s car in the driveway, and I wondered with this very odd foreboding
why he wasn’t in the office. Somehow I
knew with a sinking feeling that the reason he was at home was going to be something terrible.

My father, I figured it had to be about my father. That my father was dead, and someone had reached Allan at his office, and
he had come home and was waiting to tell me the news. It was something awful like that. I knew it. I hurried into the house
and I looked at Allan’s beautiful face, and there was, without a doubt, doom in his eyes.

He said, “Baby, sit down. I have to talk to you about something important,” and I could feel my heart in my throat because
I knew it was going to be very bad. But I couldn’t imagine how bad, until he told me the doctor thought he had cancer, and
he was going in for surgery the next morning.

Everything else fell away after that. For the longest time nothing mattered but the results of Allan’s surgery, the bad news
about how aggressive the disease was, bringing him home for a few weeks, then taking him for more tests, more treatments,
more surgeries. And somehow making it through those days with the horrifying realization that our love story was ending.

One day when I had a quiet moment, I looked at our financial picture and it was pretty bleak. So while Allan slept, I tried
to write, tried to come up with ideas to pitch, and had some halfhearted meetings in which I knew before I opened my mouth
to pitch them that my ideas were dull.

It was a few months after the first surgery, and I was getting into my car after a bad meeting at Warner’s one day, needing
to hurry home and make lunch for Allan, though he was hardly eating anything by then, when across the parking lot I saw Manny
Birnbaum.

I waved, and he came over and hugged me a big fatherly
bear hug, and I cried in his arms. From exhaustion, from pain, from frustration. He said it was ironic that he was bumping
into me that day, because he’d been entertaining an idea that he wanted to try out on me. He said there was a new comedy show
coming on, on ABC, that was “staffing up.” They were looking for writing teams, and maybe he and I should go in and try to
get the job together.

“We’re perfect for the show because it’s about a young married woman who lives with her father, so we bring both characters’
points of view to the party.” When I didn’t answer, he sold a little harder. “Listen, with your characters and my jokes, maidelah,
we could be a hit.”

He was so sweet and so hopeful to a dishrag of a person whose husband was dying and who thought she’d never have another creative
notion for the rest of her life. Write a show with Manny. A comedy. Obviously he needed me to average out the age problem
he was having at the network. And I needed him, because I was sure the right side of my brain was gone forever.

“Yeah?” I joked, and where I found humor at that moment I’ll never know. “But what if it ends up having
your
characters and
my
jokes?”

“Then we’re dead in the water,” he said, grinning.

“Manny,” I said, wiping my eyes, thinking what an angel he was, and how he didn’t need the additional burden of someone as
crazy as I was then. “You don’t want me as a partner. I’m in the worst emotional shape I’ve ever been in. I cry at the drop
of a hat, I can barely think straight most days.”

But Manny dismissed my excuses with a wave of his hand, and soon we were meeting at my house during the
hours when Allan napped. And mostly the meetings were about Manny getting me up to speed so that if we could get a meeting
for that ABC show, I’d appear to be “a comic entity,” or in the worst case, they wouldn’t think I was a complete moron.

We read the pilot, and a breakdown of the characters, and talked them and worked them for days. We knew we were ready for
the meeting when we had what we thought were ten strong story ideas. And I’d be lying if I didn’t admit that the lion’s share
of the work was Manny’s. His genius came shining through. He had heart and warmth and trickery, and on top of that he could
find something funny about everything.

The truth is, though I contributed a little, I knew that essentially I was Manny’s front. Like Woody Allen in the movie with
Zero Mostel. Manny could write the script in his sleep, and he didn’t really need anything from me but my presence in the
meeting. It was a thought that ordinarily would have awakened me in the middle of the night, feeling awful, but in those days
I was awake all night anyway. Putting the blanket back over Allan, crooning to him to get him back to sleep as he lay in a
hospital bed in our bedroom.

You can imagine how comedic I felt on the day of the meeting when I tell you that I knew a few hours later I was taking Allan
into the hospital for what I suspected was going to be his last visit there, or anywhere.

“We killed ‘em,” Manny said, giving me five when we got into the elevator after the meeting. And I guess he was right, because
the three jerky producers of the show laughed at everything we said in our very rehearsed, highly controlled, created-by-Manny
pitch. “Those little stiffs were pishing in
their jeans,” he said happily. “And you were a trooper,” he said, realizing my attention was only halfway there, and pulling
back a little on the high.

That night Allan was admitted to Cedars, and I stayed with him until midnight, then went home to get some sleep, and at nine
in the morning when the phone rang, it woke me. I jumped to grab it with fear that Allan had taken a bad turn during the night.
It was my agent. “They want you,” he said, “but they don’t want him.”

“That’s impossible,” I said. “He’s the one. He’s the brains, the talent, the ideas. I’m completely incapable of doing that
show without him. It’s a comedy.”

“They say they want rich characters, which they can get from you, and they can fill the jokes in later.”

“That’s not how it works. The jokes and characters have to be written by the same person, otherwise they’re not organic,”
I said, knowing I was quoting Manny. “Why don’t they want him?”

“Because he’s old, his ideas are old, his jokes are old-school shticky. They don’t understand him, Rose.”

“They’re incompetent dunderheads,” I said, enraged.

“You want to hear what they’re offering you?” my agent asked.

At the foot of the double bed where Allan and I had slept locked in one another’s arms for so many years was the as yet unreturned
hospital bed, with the IV pole next to it, a cold, awful reminder of the past months, and what I had yet to face. Not just
the expense, but the head-ringing, hospital-sitting nightmare that might last for the next six months. At least if I had a
project, something not only to do, but that could bring in some income…

“What are they offering?” I said, hating myself for asking.

The number was ludicrously high, as so many television salaries were in those days. “But more than that,” my agent said, “I
told them your situation, and they told me you don’t even have to come in, you can work wherever you want and send it over
to them.”

The hospital. I could stay near Allan, be where he needed me to be, and still have a writing job, a high-paying writing job,
and extend my health insurance benefits for a long time to come. A writer is someone on whom nothing is lost, so you can bet
the irony of what was happening, if I let it, was not lost on me.

When Allan came out of surgery that afternoon and was “resting comfortably,” I called Manny and asked him if he could meet
me at Jerry’s Deli at four o’clock. I saw by the look on his face when I drove in that he knew why I wanted to talk. I got
out of my car, and he stepped forward and took my hand.