Turn of the Century (80 page)

“Burbank?”

“Well, yeah, and the Hummer too, but I meant, you know, killing himself. I talked to Timothy Friday night. He called and was all ‘Supercalifuckingfragilistic show, homeboy.’ Completely normal. He asked about little business things, in his normal, stupid, excited way, like why Ben Gould owns the rights to some Robertson Davies novels Mose wants Timothy to turn into a miniseries. Wanted. Is there a note?”

“Nope. And they say he wasn’t sick.”

“My God.” He sighs. “My God.” He pauses. “You and I should get together sometime, Emily.”

“Yes? All right.
I
liked it, George. The show. It’s what you wanted. Right?”

“Yeah, it was. Thanks.”
And fuck you, you backhanded harpy, with the stressed
“I”—
as opposed to everyone else, you mean, who hated the show?

“So. We’ll connect.”

Nothing like a suicide to harsh a mellow. On their third date, Lizzie had actually said to him, “You’re sort of harshing my mellow.” It made him wonder if she might be stupid, and not just young. The only other person he has ever heard use
harsh
as a verb or
mellow
as a noun is Featherstone, in Las Vegas last January, when George was trying to decline to put Sandi Bemis’s room and rental car on the
NARCS
expense account.

The phone rings again.

“Emily?”

“No, George, this is Dora, in Mr. Mose’s office. There’s a meeting at nine-thirty this morning in the small conference room on Fifty-nine. Can you make it?”

“Sure. Of course.”

After moving one mile in twenty-five minutes (“FDR is
crippled
from the Twenties on, northbound, use alternate routes, Shadow Traffic, 1010 WINS!”), George has the driver get off at Thirty-fourth Street. He doesn’t stop the guy from turning up Third Avenue, even though the extreme east side in the Thirties and low Forties is to George the saddest piece of Manhattan, sadder than the scroungiest blocks of Harlem or the Lower East Side, sad in some permanently modern Diane Arbus way instead of a Jacob Riis way—not poor, but bright and blasted and hopeless. The few old stores and buildings aren’t old enough to be charming, and the new “luxury” apartment towers are not just undistinguished but grotesque, freakishly tall stacks of cheap diarrhea-colored brick with views of the First Avenue hospitals and each other (and for the fortunate few, Queens). The streets are peopled by lonely menopausal flight attendants, cut-rate Donald and Ivana Trumps, unusually crabby Korean shopkeepers, single mothers clinging to the first or last rung of respectability, contagiously unhappy people. Poor Timothy Featherstone.

There’s a meeting
, Dora said. The vagueness, the passive voice, and the fixed time all sound to George like a post-Timothy briefing. Not
Does ten work for you?
Or
Harold would like to see you
. Mose will say how shocked and saddened he is by Timothy’s demise; that Laura Welles will fill in as interim acting president of the Entertainment Group; that Timothy would have wanted us to persevere because
there’s no business like show business. Of course, George’s particular obsessive-compulsive disorder requires that he repeat to himself, between sensible speculations,
They’re going to fire me
, even though he doesn’t really believe that. Mose can’t “fire” him, anyway, since George is an employee of Well-Armed Productions. And they don’t cancel shows after one week on the air. Tuesday and Thursday did not get spectacular numbers, but 5.4 and 5.9 are higher than the average MBC rating. The newspaper opinion pieces were nearly all antagonistic, but who didn’t expect that? Even the damning reviews, which ranged from querulous to curious to bewildered, called the show dangerous, not lousy. Maybe Mose has notes. Mose might have smart notes. Or maybe, he thinks, they’re going to ask him who should run MBC News now that Stengel’s gone. Maybe they’re going to ask him to run News. And he’ll say, “That’s very, very flattering, but …”
Or else they’re going to fire me
. Maybe they want him to pitch in on the search for Timothy’s replacement.

His new phone is on its third ring before he recognizes the straight beep. Ben is calling.

“You really hold a grudge, George, don’t you?”

“I have no idea what you mean.”

“Hey! Bucky Lopez! You gutted the guy! The show was good, by the way—but George, the thing on Bucky was brutal.”

“It’s the business we have chosen. That’s what you taught me to say. What grudge?”

“Remember how you got it into your head that Bucky dissed you somehow at my party in Vegas?”

“That isn’t a grudge.”
Perhaps you sensed a fleeting desire on my part to assassinate him, but that’s merely a private quirk of mine, nothing serious
. “I thought the guy was a honking asshole, but I wasn’t angry at him. Our piece isn’t going to destroy him.”

“So, are you the conquering hero over there now? Did they love the show?”

“I guess. I hope. I’m on my way to a meeting with the big boss.”

“Hey! You reported high, right?”

George looks outside, and smiles. When Ben uses Wall Street–speak in real life, he isn’t trying to be funny. Ben forgets that not everyone talks that way all the time. The car has just passed the mammoth Nike-town store and the mammoth Warner Bros. store and dead ahead,
across Fifth, is the new James Bond Casino Royale (which is a restaurant, bar, shops, and mammoth video arcade, not a casino).

“I guess,” George replies.

“Definitely! The smart-money trade for the last month was to be short George Mactier, right? With all the stories and columns saying you’re Moloch. You beat expectations. You reported decently, so now you’ll soar. Watch.”

“Ben, you’re not trying to produce a movie or TV show based on a Robertson Davies novel, are you?”

He doesn’t answer at first. “No.”

“This guy at the network said he heard you were.”

“I’m not making any movies, or any TV shows. That I promise. The open’s in ten minutes. Got to go.”

“Okay. I’m at MBC, anyway.”

It’s nine-twenty, so he’ll go straight up. He walks past his regular elevator bank and hooks around to the hidden opening for Fifty-nine. The guard finds his name on the computer list, touches the screen with his pinky to make
GEORGE MACTIER
disappear, and waves him into the elevator. Its interior, the only one like it in the building, consists of alternating strips of cherrywood and sandblasted glass. (The insides of the regular elevators in the Mose building are striped green-and-gold laminate with two-inch-by-two-inch cherrywood veneer “accents.”)
It’s possible they’re going to fire me
. Now that George has successfully launched two prime-time shows in one year, he wonders if maybe they want to extend and enrich his deal. His market price is rising. Mose must have seen last week’s story in the trades about Time Warner giving the executive producer of
Hero
a new, ten-year, $55 million contract with Warner Bros. TV, and letting him develop a Time Inc. monthly magazine that
Variety
described as “true-life stories of good triumphing over evil.”

The security man on Fifty-nine gives George the usual hard, blank stare, but the woman at the reception desk recognizes him and smiles. As she says hello, she pushes two different buttons, one to unlock the glass door and the other to notify the next gatekeeper down the line, but does it so subtly that George doesn’t notice.

Dora’s assistant, Lucy, meets him at the next turn, and leads him to the conference room.

Hank Saddler and Laura Welles, Featherstone’s deputy, are already here. Fifty-nine-style greetings are exchanged, even more self-serious than usual. George carefully lays his briefcase on a counter near the window, next to Hank’s and Laura’s things. It’s clear this is going to be an executive-suicide trauma-coping exercise, one of those harmless events that the profession of human resources was invented to stage. He wonders who else is coming. Laura is looking back and forth between her hands, and out the window, toward downtown. She seems nervous, unaccustomed to life here in Mose Media elysium, inside the abode of the blessed on Fifty-nine. The mood in the room is funereal. Poor Timothy.

“Harold so much wanted to be here personally, George,” Saddler says, “but he had to leave Teterboro at nine for Sun Valley. The Herbert Allen event. Then we’re off to Asia!”

“Ah.” Mose isn’t coming. So they’re definitely not going to talk to him about taking Stengel’s or Featherstone’s job, not that he expected that, or wants either one.

“Also, George, before the meeting gets started? I don’t want you to feel
any
culpability whatsoever over Timothy’s death. Like they say, guns don’t kill people.”

Welles looks at him.

“I’m sorry, Hank,” George says to Saddler, “what do you mean?”

“The gun. The suicide weapon? I thought you knew. It was the smart gun the gentleman in your story sent to Timothy on Friday.”

“My God. Really?
Jesus
.”

Saddler gives one of his pastoral nods. “It almost makes you think certain shows are, you know,
cursed
, doesn’t it?”

George thinks of Timothy alone in his military vehicle, turning the Wise Weapon to his head, and then having to utter his scripted, obligatory last words, “Ready to fire.”

Arnold Vlig walks in with another, younger man carrying a brown accordion file. George has met Vlig only a few times before. The permanent pained expression and thin black hair combed straight back from his sloping forehead remind George of a Slavic Richard Nixon, Nixon homelier and physically fit. Maybe they are going to offer him some big job after all. But no: Laura Welles wouldn’t be here.

“George,” Vlig says, and shakes his hand. “You probably don’t know Stan Snyder. He’s one of our outside counsels.” Snyder nods as he sits.

“We’re all so sad about the show,” Saddler says. “I guess the whole
Larry Sanders, Truman Show, EDtv, Lateline
Zeitgeist is just … well, like Laura says, ‘very two years ago.’ ”

In the floor beneath him, he hears wood creak and the clatter of a latch opening
.

“I don’t know what you mean, sad?” George asks.

Saddler is suddenly upset. He looks at Laura Welles and back to George. “No one sent you a hard copy of the new testing? You were supposed to be faxed overnight.”

Now Laura Welles is upset. “Timothy’s office was handling it,” she says to Saddler, “but yesterday … I guess it slipped through the cracks. Here’s an extra,” she says, glancing as briefly as possible at George as she slides an inch-thick report across the table.

It’s called “The MBC
Real Time
Post-Premiere Testing,” and it’s dated today, July 17, 2000.

“What is this?” George says. “What post-premiere testing?”

“Well, of course we tested,” Saddler says. “In fact, we used a new outfit, the best. Very intensive focus grouping last week, in real time (no pun intended), and then all day Saturday in Tucson, Charlottesville, and, and …”

“Omaha,” Laura Welles says.

“
Omaha
, as well as New York and Burbank. And—well, I’ll let Laura summarize. She speaks the language.”

“Do I? I mean …” She looks from Saddler to Vlig.

Vlig nods once.

“George,” she says, “the bottom line is, I’ve never seen such negative test results. Across the board. And it’s not just indifference. It’s deep confusion and active dislike. The viewers who didn’t mind the Friday show (and that was very CBS, very over-fifty) absolutely despised the Tuesday and Thursday shows. The viewers least unfavorably disposed to Tuesday and Thursday were very uncomfortable with the half-hour drama form. And they were generally unable to distinguish between the fictional and nonfictional components. And they
despised
the news program. In two of the focus groups, leaders had to pay participants bonuses just to stay and watch the Friday show all the way through.”

Saddler is doing a slow, continuous nod. Vlig stares at George. Stan Snyder is riffling through his own stack of multiply tabbed papers.

The drop is a shock, and he sees the trapdoor dangling as he rushes past, down, down into the murk
.

Welles flips to a tabbed page on the report. “Women and men over thirty-four can’t stand Francesca.” She flips again. “Men don’t like Jess at all, especially over-thirty-fours, blue collar and white collar. As soon as the gay thing was brought up on the Thursday show, we saw
tremendous
viewer turnaway in the testing. On Friday, North Korea was a big turnoff.” She looks up at George. “As we knew it would be, from the advance research.”

Rather than falling, the sense is now of midair suspension, pitching and yawing upside down and sideways in the dark, nauseated and half dead but almost gloating about it—I told you so, I knew it, I told you so
.

Welles doesn’t look up as she continues. “Viewers didn’t understand the point of the gun-control story.”

“The point?”

“Whether it was pro or con.”

“It was neither. It was about a conflict of interest. It was about politics.”

She looks up. “Exactly. As we knew from all our pre-air testing, politics is death among the under-fifties, especially women, which was your only major audience segment still showing signs of life after Tuesday-Thursday.” She returns to her tabbed pages. “Viewers found Bohemian Grove ‘elitist,’ and they don’t want to hear another thing about Bill Gates or Sexgate. Big turnoff.”