Turn of the Century (84 page)

She considered quitting. She didn’t consider it very seriously. (A trickle of true guilt, but only a trickle.) If she quit, it would contractually permit Mose Media Holdings to cancel the acquisition of Fine Technologies, which they may do if she leaves the company voluntarily during the next six months. Then she wouldn’t be rich, not even on paper. Her only out is the change-of-control provision in her contract, which would allow her to quit in the event of a sale or takeover of her
division. But otherwise, if she told Mose “Fuck you,” she
(they
, George and she) would forfeit the hoard of fuck-you money. And then she would go back to running Fine Technologies alone, a prospect that, to her surprise, she finds almost unbearable to contemplate. She has moved on. For better or for worse. For richer or … whatever.

Anxiety is keeping her awake (despite a virtually real bed, sheets fancier than the ones at home, a down pillow), but it’s not because she feels
guilty
in the sense of deserving blame. She feels rotten, not culpable, slightly heartless for flying off to Asia with Harold Mose and missing their anniversary, but definitely not treacherous.

Her husband may abominate her, and she can sense on the phone that the children blame her for some of his misfortune. But her other family members, the eighty-odd child-men and women at Fine Technologies, seem to have accommodated themselves to corporatization and her semiabandonment. She wonders if her employees’ antipathy is related inversely to her physical presence. The animal-rights protesters declared victory and withdrew after she sold to Mose and decamped uptown, which has allowed life on West Eighteenth Street to tranquilize. The newspaper boors of the left and right have climbed back onto their more familiar hobbyhorses. (She saw in yesterday’s
San Francisco Chronicle
, however, that Molly Cramer couldn’t resist using the
Real Time
cancellation as a pretext for rehashing all her previous columns about George and Lizzie. The self-composting obsessiveness of hack ideologues like Cramer makes Lizzie wonder: do they finally write one last column that weaves together every previous column, but even more shrilly, and then drop dead?) The mania on Eighteenth Street also subsided, of course, after Warps was finally done. Alexi said on the phone yesterday that it feels like summer for the first time in his three years there: half the staff gone (Bruce in the new Terraplane office on the Bowery, Fanny and her two Germans at the annual Def Con hackers’ convention, Karen off selling Wiccan Ware disks at Renaissance festivals), those still around working at half speed, and Lance Haft acting as if he’s
in charge
, like a summer-school teacher. Lizzie assumes that the stock deal she cut for the staff as part of the acquisition helped mellow the mood, too. And with that peaceful moment of George-free thought, enveloped in the white noise roar of the BMW—Rolls-Royce turbines at fifty-one thousand feet, she finally sleeps.

Of course he’s flying first class. He has no income, no job, and no show. Fuck it, why not go all the way? He’s wearing dark glasses. He’s drinking a bullshot. He’s listening to a CD (Cowboy Junkies), and he’s reading
Variety
.

Jack Delancey’s piece on the cancellation is all right. He uses George’s “It’s only television” quote. He connects (sloppily, without real evidence) the
Real Time
alternative-medicine story to the transformation of Mose’s Winter Channel into Reality Channel, and he connects the Farley Lyman story, even though it wasn’t broadcast, to MBC’s possible deal with Derek Dreen for
The Illionaire
. He quotes George saying, “I’m not in the series business anymore,” and mentions “a frenzied flurry of studio interest in the prod’s pitch for a retro comedy pic about teen antiwar assassins that Mactier would pen and possibly helm.” For a long time, George has had an idea for a screenplay set in the sixties about college students plotting a political murder. Now, given this frenzied (albeit entirely fictional) flurry of interest in letting him direct it as a feature film, he plans on fleshing out the idea, and pitching it to people other than a
Variety
reporter. The worst quote is from an anonymous MBC executive who alludes to the network’s “very real and longstanding philosophical qualms” about what
Variety
calls the “edgy journo-entertainment crossbreed concept” of
Real Time
.

But not bad, all in all, he thinks, reading the story again, and again, and skimming it a fourth time before turning the page, where his eye is yanked directly (if not extrasensory perception, what?) to a story headlined
IS A WALL STREET WHIZ CORNERING THE LIT BIZ
? The article reports that “Bennett Gould, head of the boutique financial firm Bennett Gould Partners, also known as ‘$,’ is said by sources to have quietly bought a studio’s worth of pic and TV rights to ‘multiple’ bigname contemporary fiction and legit works. Authors purchased are said to include A-list biggies Bellow, Updike, Roth, Salinger, Brit bad boy Martin Amis, movie-legit scribe Tom Stoppard, and
Doonesbury
creator Garry Trudeau, as well as lesser-knowns William Gaddis, Walker Percy, Don DeLillo, Laurie Colwin, David Foster Wallace, Lorrie Moore, Robertson Davies, GOP speechwriter Mark Helprin, and porn-lit scribbler Nicholson Baker. From his Long island summer
home in literati-laden East Hampton, Gould declined to comment on his alleged buying spree.”

Ben lied to me
, George thinks.
He lied
. And then he remembers Ben’s friendship with Bucky Lopez, and the
Real Time
story about Lopez’s handgun conflict of interest.

As long as he’s known him, Ben Gould has said, “Mactier, you are so naïve.” And George has always teased Ben that he’s Exhibit A in the case for cynicism and romanticism as black-and-white flip sides of the same wrong idea. Staring out at the clear blue sky over America, George realizes that naïveté and paranoia have just the same sort of consanguinity.

It’s George who made a doctrine out of befriending cheerful rapscallions, the Zip Ingrams and Ben Goulds, “as long as they’re smart and loyal rapscallions.” It’s George who told her how smart Harold is. And she’s not even his friend, besides—she’s his employee (and shareholder). How deep does any vein of loyalty run between employer and employee, or vice versa? Canceling
Real Time
was not an act of disloyalty, but rather one of those gut-wrenching executive decisions, those tough calls, those hard choices for which bosses are gravely celebrated and paid their magnificent salaries.

“May I give you more jackfruit marmalade, sir?” asks the Cindy Crawfordesque flight attendant.

“No thanks, my dear, but another Rose’s and Pellegrino would be superb, when you have a chance. Elizabeth, anything else for you? Another brioche?”

She shakes her head.

Hank Saddler has retreated to the other side of the plane to call people who’ve left him messages—“This is Henry Saddler returning,” he says into the phone again and again, performing the executive-secretarial trick of making the transitive verb grandly intransitive. Back in the media area, Randy has booted up the DVD golf simulator, and has conscripted the black Pamela Anderson flight attendant to play eighteen holes of Augusta with him.

“Harold,” Lizzie says across the breakfast dishes, “this is uncomfortable, but we’ve got to get it on the table. It’s the monster in the room. We need to have a conversation.”

“Absolutely correct,” he says, pursing his lips, removing his napkin
from his collar, taking off his glasses (new ones yet again—tiny brushed-brass circles that look eighteenth century) and sighing heavily.
“Real Time.”

“Was it honestly just the test results that made you decide to cancel it? I mean, after one week of shows … ?”

“Elizabeth, it was the toughest decision I think I’ve ever had to make as an executive. I know that’s a cliché, and I know it doesn’t make it one whit easier on George, but it’s true. Now, as to the audience testing,” he says, shaking his head and turning his palms up, “I know it was the most extensive we’ve ever performed, but I frankly am not aware of the details, or any of the rest of it. At the end of the day, it was Laura Welles’s decision to cancel
Real Time
. And it was a decision I reluctantly accepted.”

Push.
Push
. “George said Arnold Vlig used the budget overruns as a pretext—”

“We knew the program was going to cost a fortune going in, Elizabeth—quite frankly, more than we could rationally justify. ‘New Network for the New Century’ is something I’ve genuinely believed in, as you know, and I jawboned Arnold and the rest of them into taking a leap of faith on
Real Time
. But one-point-six million a week was already stretching it, and one-point-eight, one-point-nine … we were looking at a hemorrhage, quite frankly. A hemorrhage that was not getting good critical and editorial reaction, and a hemorrhage with essentially no back-end revenue.”

Lizzie nearly nods along. Harold Mose does believe his own bullshit, and makes the people around him want to believe it too.

“Which we can particularly ill afford,” he adds, tipping his head down a little, “given the internet losses we’re projecting through ‘02. If I had insisted, for the sake of my vanity, on overruling Arnold and Laura and letting the show run for nine difficult months, what then? Do you think George would have been happier seeing the thing canceled after he poured in nine more months of his heart and soul? Isn’t the more humane act to quit the game after a single end rather than play all ten and never get a stone anywhere near the center of the house?”

She’s grateful for the curling analogy. It makes it easier to resist any show of assent.

“I have another question,” she says.
Do I personally bear any blame at all?
“What about—well—I know it was under my purview, and—”

“Charles Prieve,” Mose says. “I know the Fifty-nine scuttlebutt you must’ve heard about Charles Prieve’s blackmail gambit …”

“I, no, I—”

“And in fact, yes, one of his letters did mention you and George and
Real Time
in extremely ugly terms. But that threat, I assure you, had no bearing whatsoever on the cancellation. None.”

“I was actually wondering about the Manson digital-insert trick—did that play a big part in the decision about the show? In the end?”

Mose sits back, relaxing visibly.

“Oh, good heavens, no.
No
. Quite the contrary. In fact, I meant to tell you how pleased I was to discover you’d given George the go-ahead on that. Laura was astonished at how beautifully the effect worked! After we got burned on using it in News, she and Timothy were a little nervous about trying it out on the entertainment side. But George proved it can be a
fantastic
weapon in our arsenal.” He pauses. “If there’s ever the opportunity, please thank him for me.”

The flight attendant has reappeared.

“May I clear the table?”

Anxiety drains from Lizzie. The cancellation was not her fault, not even a little.
Quite the contrary
. She finds herself not guilty.

“Are we finished?” Mose says. “Can we get back to
our
businesses?”

She asks him if what she read in
Variety
was true, about the Winter Channel becoming some kind of New Age channel, and he looks at her a little oddly and says yes, possibly, what does she think of the idea? She says she thinks it could be huge, that she’s in the lunatic demo herself, that literally half the people in America now inhabit shiatsu, herbal, acupuncture, yoga households, and he asks if “Reality Channel” is better than “The Healing Channel.”

“Reality Channel,” she says.

“And you know this fellow Edward Ingram, correct?”

“
Sure
. I adore Zip. He’s one of our closest friends. Why?”

“Timothy and I talked with Zip about running News after Barry Stengel. But now it looks as if there’ll be no more News to run. So we’re talking with him about Reality Channel. He’s going to be in Sydney next week, as it happens. We’ll have a bite.”

Since the other job is moot, and she adores Zip, she does not say that Zip Ingram running a network news division, even MBC’s, would have been ludicrous, dangerous, an outrage. Mose asks what is finally to be
done with “our FCC boondoggle,” the new free digital channels. They discuss the pros and cons of acceding to the wishes of the Microsoft lobby and turning the channels into twenty-megabit PC connections, versus Timothy Featherstone’s “extreme entertainment” plan—Feath-ervision, Timothy had called it, in which each channel would become a serially obsessive, hypermarketed, microniche medium—nothing but old Burt Reynolds movies and TV shows for a month, then all
Flipper
, then all Monkees, then Jacqueline Onassis for a couple of months, and so on and on. Mose wonders if there’s “some way to play around digitally with our existing brands,” and Lizzie laughingly mentions two of her son’s fevered and repulsive ideas—R-rated versions of regular TV series distributed in DVD format (
Ally McBeal
with nude scenes,
Homicide
with viscera) and 3D celebrity-transformation software, with which a computer user could do anything imaginable with a famous person, living or dead, on screen—have sex with them, assassinate them, surgically transform them. “This is a ten-year-old?” Mose says. “Maybe your son should run the entertainment division.” He frets about his backward local stations that aren’t broadcasting digital pictures, but she says it doesn’t matter, since only one in a hundred homes has a digital TV. He reminds Lizzie of her hypoglossal canal analogy. She replies that MBC may not have the capital resources to become the
first
ape to turn himself into a talking human. Smile, sip, smile, smile, and sip.