Authors: Douglas Kennedy
‘Your writing life?’ she said with the sort of sarcastic edge that went way beyond withering. ‘Don’t talk crap.’
Naturally, this triggered one of those thermo-nuclear marital disputes, in which years of built-up resentments, enmities, and domestic frustrations suddenly scorch the earth beneath both pairs of feet. She said I was self-absorbed, to the point of putting my going-nowhere writing career in front of Caitlin’s welfare. I countered that besides being a model of domestic responsibility (well, I was), my professional integrity was still intact.
‘You’ve never sold a single script, and you dare talk to me about being a professional?’ she said.
I stormed out. I drove all night and ended up just north of San Diego, walking the beach at Del Mar, wishing I had the recklessness to continue south across the border into Tijuana, and vanish from my disaster of a life. Lucy was right: as a writer I was a failure . . . but I still wasn’t going to abandon my daughter on a furious whim. So I went back to my car, pointed it north, and arrived home just before sunrise. I found Lucy wide awake, curled up on the sofa in our cluttered living room, looking beyond forlorn. I collapsed into the armchair opposite her. We said nothing for a very long time. Finally she broke the silence.
‘That was awful.’
‘Yes,’ I said. ‘It was.’
‘I didn’t mean what I said.’
‘Nor did I.’
‘I’m just so damn tired, David.’
I reached for her hand. ‘Join the club,’ I said.
So we kissed and made up, and fed Caitlin her breakfast, and got her on the school bus, and then both went off to our respective jobs – jobs that gave us no pleasure whatsoever, and didn’t even pay well. By the time Lucy arrived home that night, domestic detente was re-established – and we never mentioned that malignant fight again. But once things are said, they are said. And though we tried to behave as if things were on an even keel, a chilly undercurrent now ran between us.
Neither of us wanted to confront this, so we both stayed busy. I knocked out a thirty-minute pilot for a sit-com called
Selling You
. It centred around the tangled internal politics at a public relations agency in Chicago. It was peopled by a
group of smart, edgy neurotics. And yes, it was ‘darkly comic’. Alison even liked it – the first script of mine she had praised for years . . . even though it was still a little too ‘darkly comic’ for her taste. Still, she gave it to the head of development at FRT. He, in turn, handed it to an independent producer named Brad Bruce, who was starting to make a name for himself as a generator of edgy, out-there sit-coms for cable. Brad liked what he read . . . and I got that phone call from Alison.
Then things began to change.
Brad Bruce turned out to be that rare species – a guy who believed that irony was the only way to cope with life in the City of Angels. He was in his late thirties, a fellow Midwesterner from Milwaukee (God help him) and we hit it off immediately. Better yet, we quickly established a fluid working style. I responded positively to his notes. We riffed well off each other. We made each other laugh. And even though he knew that this was the first script I’d managed to sell, he treated me like a fellow veteran of the television wars. In turn, I worked hard for him because I knew that I now had an ally . . . though I also understood that if the pilot didn’t get made, his attention would move elsewhere.
Brad was a forceful operator, and he actually got the pilot made. What’s more, it was everything a pilot should be: tightly acted and directed, stylishly shot and funny. FRT liked what they saw. A week later, Alison rang me.
‘Sit down,’ she said.
‘Good news?’
‘The best. I just heard from Brad Bruce. He’ll be calling you in a nanosecond, but I wanted to be the messenger. So listen to this: FRT are commissioning an initial eight-episode
series of
Selling You
. Brad wants you to write four of them, and be the overall script supervisor on the series.’
I was speechless.
‘You still there?’
‘I’m just trying to pick my jaw up from the floor.’
‘Well, keep it there until you hear the numbers on offer. Seventy-five grand per episode – that’s 300k for the writing. I figure I can get you an additional 150k for supervising the other episodes, not to mention a “Created By” and between five and ten per cent equity in the entire show. Congratulations: you are about to become rich.’
I quit Book Soup that night. By the end of the week, we had put a down payment on a delightful little Spanish vernacular house in mid-Wiltshire. The geriatric Volvo was traded in for a new Land Rover Discovery. I leased a Mini Cooper S, promising myself a Porsche Carrera if
Selling You
made it to a second series. Lucy was dazzled by our change in circumstances. For the first time ever, we were awash in material comforts. We could buy proper furniture, spiffy appliances, designer labels. As I was under extreme deadline pressure – I had only five months to deliver my four episodes – Lucy took over the decoration of the new house. She had also just started training an entire new platoon of telemarketeers – which meant that she too was working twelve-hour days. The only free time we had was devoted to our daughter. This was no bad thing – because as long as your days are ultra-full you can continue to gloss over the telltale cracks in a structurally damaged marriage. We both kept busy. We talked about the wondrousness of this lucky break, and acted as if everything was back on track between us . . . even though we both knew that this
was hardly the case. And there were many melancholic moments when I often found myself thinking, far from making things better between us, the money has pushed us even further apart.
Nearly a year later, when the first episode of
Selling You
was screened and became an instant critical hit, Lucy turned to me and said, ‘I suppose you’ll leave me now.’
‘Why would I do that?’ I said.
‘Because you can.’
‘It’s not going to happen.’
‘Yes, it will. Because it’s what the success scenario demands.’
Of course she was right. But it didn’t happen for another six months, by which time I had traded my Mini Cooper for that Porsche I had promised myself. Not only had the show been renewed, but I suddenly found myself the subject of considerable public attention – as
Selling You
had become the hip, cutting-edge, must-see show of the season. The reviews were fantastic.
Esquire
ran a 500-word story about me in their ‘Guys We Like’ section, which referred to me as ‘the Tom Wolfe of cable television’. I didn’t exactly object. And I didn’t say no when the
Los Angeles Times
asked to interview me for a piece which detailed my long years in professional purgatory, my extended stint at Book Soup, and my sudden ascendancy into ‘that small select league of smart LA writers who don’t do Generic’.
I had my assistant clip this story and messenger it over to Alison. Attached to it was a Post-It, on which I’d scribbled, ‘Thinking of you generically. Love and Kisses. David.’
An hour later, a messenger arrived at my office with a padded envelope from Alison’s agency. Inside was a small gift-wrapped box, and a card: ‘Fuck you . . . Love, Alison.’
Inside the box was something I had coveted for years: a Waterman Edson fountain pen . . . the Ferrari of Writing Instruments, with a list price to match: $675. But Alison could afford it, as the deal she’d closed for my ‘creative participation’ in the second series of
Selling You
was worth just under $1 million . . . less her fifteen per cent of course.
Alison was quoted in that
LA Times
profile of me. Per usual, she was deeply droll, telling the interviewer that the reason she never dropped me as a client during all the bad years was because ‘He knew when to not call – and believe me, there are few writers in this town with that skill.’ She also surprised me by saying something touching: ‘He’s living proof that talent and extreme perseverance can sometimes triumph in Hollywood. David kept at it long after many another aspiring writer would have folded. So he deserves everything: the money, the office, the assistant, the recognition, the prestige. But most of all he’s now getting his phone calls returned, and I’m fielding constant requests for meetings with him. Because everyone who’s smart wants to work with David Armitage.’
As I was deep in the planning stage of the second season of
Selling You
, I was turning down most requests for meetings. But, at Alison’s urging, I did go to lunch with a young executive at Fox Television named Sally Birmingham.
‘I only met her once,’ Alison said, ‘but everyone in the industry is earmarking her for the big time. She has a big war chest at her disposal. And she absolutely adores
Selling You
. In fact, she adores it so much she told me that she would be prepared to give you a quarter of a million for any thirty-minute pilot of your choice.’
That made me pause for thought.
‘250k for one pilot?’ I asked.
‘Yep – and I’d make certain it was pay or play.’
‘She knows I couldn’t even look at any new projects until the new series is wrapped?’
‘She anticipated that. And she told me she’s willing to wait. She just wants to sign you up for the pilot now – because, let’s face it, it would also up her market value to have snagged David Armitage. Think about it – all going well, you’ll be taking six weeks off between series two and three. How long is it going to take you to knock out a pilot?’
‘Three weeks max.’
‘And the other three weeks, you sit on a beach somewhere, if you can actually sit still so long, thinking to yourself that you just made a quarter of a million in twenty-one days.’
‘All right – I’ll do the lunch.’
‘Smart guy. You’ll like her. She’s super-bright and beautiful.’
Alison was right. Sally Birmingham was super-bright. And she was beautiful.
Her assistant had called my assistant to set up the lunch date at The Ivy. Thanks to the usual tailback on the 10, I arrived a few minutes late. She was already seated at a very good table. She stood up to greet me, and I was instantly captivated (though I worked damn hard not to show it). Sally was tall, with high cheekbones, flawless skin, cropped light brown hair, and a mischievous smile. At first, I pegged her as the sort of dazzlingly patrician product of East Coast education and high-end breeding who undoubtedly had
her own horse by the age of ten. But fifteen minutes into our conversation, I realized that she had managed to undercut the Westchester County WASP background with a canny mixture of erudition and street smarts. Yes, she had been raised in Bedford. Yes, she had gone to Rosemary Hall and Princeton. But though she was ferociously well read – and something of a cinephile – she also had an astute understanding of Hollywood in all its internecine glory, and told me she actually delighted in playing the ‘player’ game. I could see why the big
cojones
at Fox Television so valued her: she was a class act, but one who spoke their language. And she also had the most amazing laugh.
‘Want to hear my favorite LA story?’ she asked me.
‘I’m game.’
‘All right – I was having lunch last month with Mia Morrison, head of corporate affairs at Fox. She calls the waiter over, and says: ‘So tell me your waters.’ The waiter, a real pro, doesn’t blanch. Instead he starts listing them: ‘Well, we’ve got Perrier from France, and Ballygowan from Ireland, and San Pellegrino from Italy . . . ’ Suddenly, Mia interrupts him: ‘Oh, no, not San Pellegrino. It’s too rich.’
‘I think I’ll steal that.’
‘“Immature poets imitate, mature poets steal.”’
‘Eliot?’
‘So you really did go to Dartmouth?’ she asked.
‘I’m impressed by your background research.’
‘I’m impressed by your knowledge of Mr Eliot.’
‘But surely you’ve picked up the references from “Four Quartets” throughout my show?’
‘I thought you’d be more of a “Waste Land” kind of guy.’
‘Nah – it’s too rich.’
Not only did we have instant rapport, but we also talked widely about just about everything. Including marriage.
‘So,’ she said glancing at the ring on my finger, ‘are you married or are you
married
?’
Her tone was light. I laughed.
‘I’m married,’ I said. ‘Without the italics.’
‘For how long?’
‘Eleven years.’
‘That’s impressive. Happy?’
I shrugged.
‘That’s not unusual,’ she said. ‘Especially after eleven years.’
‘You seeing someone now?’ I said, trying to sound nonchalant.
‘There was someone . . . but it was a minor diversion, nothing more. We both ended it around four months ago. Since then . . . just flying solo.’
‘You’ve never taken the conjugal plunge?’
‘No . . . though I could have done something disastrous – like marrying my boyfriend at Princeton. He certainly pushed the issue – but I told him that college marriages usually only have a two-year life span. In fact, most relationships burn out when passion turns prosaic . . . which is why I’ve never lasted more than three years with anyone.’
‘You mean, you don’t believe in all that “there is one person meant for you” destiny crap.’
Another of her laughs. But then she said, ‘Well, actually I do. I just haven’t met the guy yet.’
Once again, the tone was blithe. Once again, a glance passed between us.
But it was only a glance, and we were quickly back in our conversational whirl. I was astonished by the way we couldn’t stop talking, how we riffed off each other, and shared such a similar world-view. The sense of connection was astonishing . . . and a little terrifying. Because – unless I was reading things very wrong – the mutual attraction was enormous.
Eventually, we got down to business. She asked me to tell her about my proposed pilot. My pitch was a sentence long:
‘The harassed professional and personal life of a middle-aged female marriage counsellor.’
She smiled. ‘That’s good. First question, is she divorced?’
‘Of course.’
‘Troubled kids?’
‘A teenage daughter who thinks that Mom is a serious jerk.’