Temptation (27 page)

But I still couldn’t believe that my moment was now in the past tense. Surely Sally wouldn’t be so mercenary as to abandon me right now. Just as I had to believe that, somehow, I would be able to convince Brad, and Bob, and Jake Dekker at Warners, and any other interested production company in this damn town, that I was worthy of their trust.

Come on people – I’m David Armitage! And I’ve made you all money!

Yet the more I tried to put an optimistic spin on my situation, the more I thought: the worst sort of bullshit is the bullshit with which you bullshit yourself.

So I opened a bottle of Glenlivet Single Malt and started watching it disappear. Somewhere after the fifth finger trickled down my gullet, I had a supremely moronic interlude, during which I entered a mood of introspective inspiration. I decided to bare my soul to Sally, to put it all on the proverbial table, and hope that she would, in turn, respond tenderly to this
cri de coeur
. So I staggered over to my computer, and wrote:

Darling

I love you. I need you. Desperately, in fact. This is a bad business; an unfair business. Please, please,
please
don’t give up on me; on us. I am desperate. Please call me. Please come home. Let’s get through this together. Because we
can
get through it. Because we are the best thing that ever happened to each other. Because you are the woman with whom I want to spend the rest of my life, with whom I want to have children, whom I will still love when, years from now, we enter that
twilight zone of decrepitude. I’ll always be there for you. Please, please,
please
be here for me now.

Without reading through the thing again, I hit the Send button, and tossed back another two fingers of Glenlivet, and careened into the bedroom, and went down for the count.

Then it was morning, and the phone was ringing. But in those few bleary seconds before I answered it, a sentence floated through my head. Not a sentence, actually . . . a phrase:
the twilight zone of decrepitude
.

And then the rest of the ludicrous contents of that e-mail came back to me . . . in all its grisly, beseeching glory. And I thought: you
are
an idiot.

I reached for the ringing phone.

‘David Armitage?’ a very awake voice asked me.

‘I’m afraid so.’

‘Fred Bennett,
Los Angeles Times
.’

‘What the hell time is it?

‘Around seven-thirty.’

‘I don’t want to talk.’

‘Mr Armitage, if I could just have a moment?’

‘How did you get my home number?’

‘That’s not the hardest thing in the world to find.’

‘I’ve made a statement.’

‘But have you heard about the motion tabled in front of the Screen and Television Writers Association last night?’

‘What motion?’

‘A motion to publicly censure you for plagiarism, to strip you of your Association membership, and to recommend that you be banned from all professional work for a
minimum of five years . . . though some committee members were pressing for a lifetime ban . . . ’

I put the phone back in its cradle, then I reached down and yanked the plug from the wall. Immediately it began to ring in another room, but I ignored it. Instead, I pulled the covers over my head, willing this day to vanish from view.

But sleep was now impossible, so I eventually staggered to the bathroom, and popped three Advil in an attempt to quell the jack-hammer currently excavating the inside of my head. Then I went into the living room and faced the computer. My e-mail box had twelve messages, eleven of which were from assorted journalists. I opened none of them. The twelfth was the one I was dreading . . . an e-mail from Sally:

David:

I hate the situation you’ve found yourself in. I too hate the fact that your career has been devastated by these revelations. But this is a situation of your own making; that, for reasons best known to yourself, you decided to be the architect of your own undoing. This is what I can’t fathom. It makes me wonder if I really even know you . . . a concern exacerbated by your deeply worrying e-mail. I realize that you are distressed by what has happened. But there is nothing so unattractive as someone begging for love – especially when they have undermined the trust needed to sustain love. Though I appreciate the fact that you are under severe emotional strain, that still isn’t an excuse for heart-on-the-sleeve prose. And let’s not even get into that ‘twilight zone of decrepitude’ line.

All this has left me even more confused and baffled and sad. I think a few more days apart might bring some clarity to our situation. I’ve decided to head off to Vancouver Island for the weekend. I’ll be back Monday. We can talk then. In the meantime, let’s agree not to communicate over the weekend, just so matters don’t get further confused. I do hope you will consider, in the meantime, getting some professional support. If your e-mail was anything, it was an enormous cry for help.

Sally

Wonderful. Just wonderful.

The phone started ringing again. I ignored it. Then my cellphone joined the cacophony. I reached for it and glanced at the incoming number on the display. It was Alison. I answered it immediately.

‘You sound terrible,’ she said. ‘Were you drinking last night?’

‘You’re a very perceptive woman.’

‘Have you been up long?’

‘Ever since an
LA Times
hack rang me to let me know that SATWA was planning to ban me for life.’

‘What?’

‘That’s what he said – a special meeting of the Politburo last night.’

‘This thing has gone ga-ga. And it’s about to get worse.’

‘Tell me.’

‘Theo McCall’s about to be interviewed live from LA on the
Today Show
.’

‘On the subject of
moi
?’

‘It would seem that way.’

‘Jesus Christ, this guy is relentless.’

‘He’s like any gossip columnist – completely ruthless. You’re just a commodity to him. A very lucrative commodity right now, in terms of getting his name known nationally and appearing on
Today.
’

‘He won’t be satisfied until I’m drawn and quartered.’

‘I’m afraid that’s about right. Which is why I decided to wake you so early and tell you about his
Today Show
appearance. I think it’s best if you watch it, just in case he says anything so outrageous or slanderous we can nail his vile little ass.’

Actually, there was nothing ‘little’ about Theo McCall. He was in his early forties – a Brit who’d crossed the Atlantic around ten years ago, and had one of those accents in which plummy rounded vowels mingled with Southern Californian nasality. He was also fat. His face reminded me of an oozy slab of Camembert which had been left for too long in direct sunlight. But he was shrewd about his size, in that he compensated for it by dressing like a dandy – a dark grey chalk-stripe suit, a spread-collar white shirt, a discreet black polka-dot tie. I sensed that, given the low-rent nature of
Hollywood Legit,
it was his only suit. But I had to grudgingly admire the way he was selling himself to the world – as an Anglo-American dandy, with the inside dope on Hollywood bad behavior. No doubt, he had dressed carefully for this interview, considering it an audition for the upscale gossip positions he was desperate to inhabit.

But Anne Fletcher – the journalist interviewing him from New York – wasn’t totally buying his T.S. Eliot meets Tom Wolfe journalism act.

‘Theo McCall, many people in Hollywood consider you to be the most feared journalist in town,’ she said.

A slight pleasurable smile crossed McCall’s fat lips.

‘How flattering,’ he said in his best plummy voice.

‘But others consider you to be nothing more than a scandal-monger, and someone who doesn’t think twice about destroying careers, marriages, even entire lives.’

He blanched a little, but recovered quickly.

‘Well, of course, certain people
would
feel that way. But that’s because, if there’s one great rule about Hollywood, it’s that they protect each other . . . even when serious wrongdoing is involved.’

‘And you think that the plagiarism that got David Armitage fired from the FRT show he created was “serious wrongdoing”?’

‘Absolutely – the man stole from other writers’ work.’

‘But what did he really “steal”? A gag from one play, and a couple of one-line jokes from others. Do you really think he deserves losing his career for a couple of minor offenses?’

‘Well, Anne, to begin with, I didn’t decide on the punishment he received. That was the decision of his bosses at FRT. But, as to your question about whether I think plagiarism is a serious offense – well, theft is theft . . . ’

‘But what I asked you, Mr McCall, is whether such a petty misdemeanor like borrowing jokes . . . ’

‘He also lifted a plot line from Tolstoy . . . ’

‘But Mr Armitage did explain that his unproduced play was a deliberate reinterpretation of the Tolstoy story . . . ’

‘Of course, Mr Armitage would say that now. But I have a copy of his original script here . . . ’

He held up the dusty playscript of
Riffs
. The camera zoomed in on the title page.

‘As you can see here,’ McCall said, ‘the title page reads:
Riffs
, A Play by David Armitage . . . but there’s nothing that says “Based on
The Kreutzer Sonata
by Tolstoy”, even though the entire plot is completely lifted from the Tolstoy story. And this raises an even bigger question: why did a man of David Armitage’s talent and ability need to steal from other people in the first place? It’s the one question that everyone in Hollywood wants to know: how he could have been so self-destructive, and so desperately dishonest. It’s well known, for example, that as soon as
Selling You
was a hit, he walked out on his wife and child for a high-flying television executive. So this pattern of cheating which sadly ended up engulfing his career . . . ’

I hit the off button, and flung the remote control at the wall. Then I grabbed my jacket and raced out the door. I jumped into my car, I revved the motor, I raced off. It took around a half-hour to reach the NBC studios. I was gambling that the slob would loll around the hospitality suite after his interview and spend time getting his face wiped clean of make-up. My gamble was spot-on, as McCall was just coming out the door and heading to a waiting Lincoln Town Car as I pulled up. Check that: as I roared to a halt right by the door, slamming on the brakes so hard that they shrieked, startling McCall in the process. Within seconds, I was out of the car, running towards him, screaming:

‘You fat Limey fuck . . . ’

McCall stared at me wide-eyed, his corpulent face registering terror. He looked as if he wanted to run, but was
too paralyzed with fear to do anything. Which meant that I was all over the shithead within seconds, grabbing him by his chalk-striped lapels, shaking him forcibly and screaming an incoherent stream of invective, along the lines of: ‘Trying to ruin my life . . . calling me a thief . . . shitting on my wife and child . . . going to break every fucking finger on both your hands, you ugly slob . . . ’

In the middle of this discordant rant, two things happened, neither of them auspicious for me. The first was that a local freelance photographer – waiting in the NBC lobby – came running out when he heard my uproar, and took a bunch of rapid shots of me yanking McCall’s lapels and doing an in-his-face harangue. The second was the arrival of a NBC security man – a tall muscular guy in his late twenties, who immediately waded into the fray, yelling, ‘
Hey, hey, hey . . . enough!
’ before hauling me off McCall and getting me into a half-nelson.

‘This guy assault you?’ the guard shouted at McCall.

‘He tried,’ he said, backing off.

‘You want me to call the cops?’

McCall stared at me with amused contempt . . . a nasty little ‘I’ve got you, you sonofabitch’ smile crossing his lips.

‘He’s in enough trouble as is,’ McCall said. ‘Just throw him off the lot.’

Then he turned and started talking to the photographer, asking his name, asking for his card, asking: ‘So you managed to get all that?’

Meanwhile, the guard strong-armed me towards my car.

‘That’s your Porsche?’

I nodded.

‘Nice car. Now, sir, I’m gonna offer you a special one-off
deal. You get in your car and get lost, and we’re going to forget this whole damn thing. If you come back . . . ’

‘I won’t come back.’

‘I’ve got your word on that?’

‘I promise.’

‘Okay, sir,’ he said, slowly releasing me from his grip. ‘Let’s see you act on that promise and leave quietly.’

I opened the car door and slid in behind the wheel and started the engine. Then the security guard tapped on the window. I rolled it down.

‘One last thing, sir,’ he said. ‘You might want to think about changing your clothes before going anywhere else today.’

It was only then that I realized I was still in my pajamas.

THERE IS NO
escaping the laws of cause-and-effect . . . especially when a photographer is present to record you assaulting a journalist while dressed in your pajamas.

So it was that – two days after I made the front page of the
LA Times –
I found myself back in the news . . . with a photograph on page four of its Saturday edition, showing me berating Theo McCall. My face was contorted into an expression of deranged wrath. I was clearly clawing his suit. Then there was the matter of my nighttime attire. Outside the bedroom, pajamas conjure up images of the loony bin. Worn by a clearly unsettled individual in the parking lot of the NBC Studios during daylight hours, they indicate that the gent in question might have a few psychological
issues
worth exploring under professional care. Certainly, had I been able to study the photograph with critical detachment, I would have reached the following conclusion: this guy has clearly lost it.

Beneath the photo was a short item, under the headline:

FIRED
SELLING YOU
WRITER ATTACKS JOURNALIST IN NBC PARKING LOT