by Gina Fattore
Not that Fanny actually had those expectations.
She always claimed in the pages of her diary that her heart was safe, that she didn’t love the Honorable Stephen Digby. Still, she must have thought about what she would do if he proposed. How it would change her life. When you’re twenty-two and Thomas Barlow doesn’t hit your fancy, you turn him down. But when you’re thirty-eight and you’ve spent the preceding three and half years trapped in a castle with a mad King, a passive-aggressive Queen, and a tyrannical German boss, you probably give the matter some serious thought. You probably think to yourself…
FANNY (V.O.)
Sure, I could marry that gouty, depressive widower with the four kids and the missing front teeth. No biggie. No big whoop.
Basically, he was all she had at that point.
His friendship.
His conversation.
His concern for her well-being.
It’s important to keep that in mind.
Sure, back in the real world—outside the palace walls—Fanny had tons of friends and family members who cared about her, but once they all rallied together and convinced her to take the glamorous, super high-paying job working for the Queen? Well, basically then she never got to see any of those people again. She was super busy, of course—that always cuts into your social life. But working at court isn’t like a regular job. You can’t just leave at the end of the night and drive home in your Volkswagen Beetle convertible. No, once you accept the job, you’re basically stuck.
For life.
Without parole.
Fanny knew that going in, but she didn’t know she’d have to answer to a bell and get up at six every morning and spend years of her life—years, mind you—playing piquet with her horrible boss, Mrs. Schwellenberg. Also, when she took the job, she had no idea the King would go mad. No one could have predicted that turn of events, or that Digby would jilt her for Miss Gunning and her 10,000 pounds. Oh, wait—shit.
Sorry.
That last one’s not true.
Basically, any reasonable person hanging around the court of King George III in the late 1780s could have predicted that the Queen’s Vice Chamberlain, the Honorable Stephen Digby, was eventually going to marry Miss Gunning and her 10,000 pounds. As early as February 1788, rumors were flying all over court about it. The courtiers knew. The servants knew. Even the mad King knew: he raved about it in one of his deliriums.
True, Fanny didn’t see it coming.
But I guess sometimes when you’re extremely close to a situation, you just don’t see things that other people see. Like when I’m Journaling for Anxiety™, I’m probably missing out on a lot of crucial stuff that’s happening around me, like stuff about Dave or the shoe girls or why the set is constantly on the brink of mutiny. That’s why I get so annoyed with Fanny’s biographers (especially the super bitchy and judgmental one who shall remain nameless). Sure, Fanny should have seen it coming—the jilting, the heartbreak. After all, the exact same thing had happened to her before, had it not? You know, with that evil bastard of a clergyman. Yet, still, she didn’t see it coming. For some strange reason, you can’t see these things coming when they’re coming directly at you.
You just can’t.
You can only see them when they’re about to smash into other people. Like back when I was a struggling, twentysomething assistant-girl, I remember my boss—the same one I just heard on the radio—making this random comment about how maybe I was taking my whole “spinster” thing too far. At the time, I really didn’t get what he meant by that. I think I was probably sitting at my desk reading The House of Mirth when he said it to me, and since he went to an even more famous Ivy League school than I did, he probably knew that The House of Mirth didn’t end well for the main spinster involved. Or I guess it’s also possible that I was sitting at my desk reading some book about the eighteenth century because—drum roll, please—back when I was a struggling, twentysomething assistant-girl, I was already somewhat obsessed with Frances Burney, Mother of English Fiction.
Yes, it’s true.
I wasn’t crazy obsessed. I had not yet begun working on my ill-fated, six-part miniseries, but I would often spend my Saturdays downtown at the Central Library checking out books about Fanny or Mrs. Thrale or Dr. Johnson or even Boswell’s London Journal (even though Fanny and Boswell only crossed paths in a tangential way) and then, because I couldn’t afford to actually buy these books, I would bring them in to work with me and Xerox all the pertinent parts for free.
You know, in between other late-twentieth-century-style tasks like answering the phone and keeping the minifridge stocked with Mango Snapple.
And whenever I would get bummed about my place in the universe or feel put-upon or start to fear that I would never actually get ahead in the entertainment industry, I would think about Fanny and all the horrible shit she had to endure when she was working for the Queen.
How from 6 a.m. to midnight every day, her time was never her own.
How she had to walk backward in the presence of royalty.
How she wasn’t allowed to wear her spectacles in company.
Plus, Fanny was already thirty-four years old when she got that job and the most successful female novelist alive on the planet; I was only twenty-seven when I was a struggling, put-upon Hollywood assistant, and obviously my duties weren’t so oppressive because they left me tons of free time to work on my NewsRadio spec script, read Boswell’s London Journal, and make conversation with all the people who were constantly hanging around my desk waiting to talk to my boss. To be honest, I don’t really remember much of what we would talk about day in and day out—although I suspect that some of them got treated to stories about Frances Burney and her career difficulties or stories from Boswell’s London Journal—even though, like I said, Fanny and Boswell didn’t really interact that much. They knew each other, but they weren’t, like, super close, and when he came to see her at Windsor Palace circa 1790 to ask if he could use some of her personal letters from Dr. Johnson in an innovative new biography he was writing, she totally blew him off—which I know makes her sound like a pill, but obviously the book did okay even without her help; if not in sales, then at least in world historical terms.
Of course, nowadays things aren’t like that.
Nowadays, whenever I’m stuck in an office conversation, it’s generally about the romantic difficulties of some girl in her early thirties—her attempts to find “The One” and so on and so forth—and that leaves very little time to talk about Fanny or Boswell. This is a definite sign of progress: it shows that lady writers are finally muscling their way into the industry! Back when I first started out, there were hardly any of them, and as I believe I’ve mentioned before, guys who work on TV shows don’t generally spend sixteen hours a day talking about their romantic difficulties.
Especially not guys who work on animated TV shows.
Some of them barely talk at all. They tend to be really shy, and I hate to generalize, but the ones who aren’t really shy, are mostly just focusing really hard on getting ahead in the entertainment industry, and that’s fine. I’ve got no beef with people trying to get ahead in the entertainment industry (after all, they are my people), but back then, this impulse of theirs was a giant pain in my ass, because in their mad rush to get ahead in the entertainment industry, they were constantly hanging out at my desk reading my boss’s trades, and if I didn’t watch them like a hawk, they would frequently steal his trades, and then I would be in trouble later on when my boss went looking for Daily Variety and couldn’t find it.
But whatever.
I’m over it.
This story happened ages ago, and all the principals involved have gone on to enjoy at least moderate success in the entertainment industry, so there’s really no point in holding a grudge. Obviously, they weren’t all bad, all these male TV writers I worked with back then. Some of them were quite nice, actually. There was even this one who gave me a ride home a couple times when my car was i
n the shop, and he bought me a book.
Or maybe he just gave me a book.
You know, like after he had finished it and didn’t know what to do with it. I’m not sure about that part, but it meant a lot to me at the time, because back when I was a struggling, put-upon Hollywood assistant, I didn’t have tons of disposable income to spend on books. I couldn’t just walk into a bookstore and buy any old book I wanted, which is what I do now, and it’s obviously what that guy was doing because he was probably like ten years older than me and already a much bigger success in the entertainment industry than I’ll ever be. He had great credits, this guy.
Seriously.
He’d worked on some amazing television shows, and even though career success and writing ability don’t always go together, he also happened to be a really great writer and, now that I think about it, possibly a functioning alcoholic of some sort. That’s something the younger writers were always trying to get me to believe about this guy. According to them, he often smelled like alcohol, and even though I never smelled the alcohol myself, I can see how this legend got started. He had this look about him, this vaguely unhealthy look, like a tubercular, nineteenth-century literary genius. He was tall and thin with sort of a sunken air, and he did have a tendency to show up late looking rumpled and dissolute. That never bothered me much, except when he didn’t show up at all—then I’d have to make a bunch of phone calls all over town looking for him because back then, people didn’t have cell phones so much. I suppose it’s entirely possible, looking back in a clear-eyed way at the situation, that the reason I never smelled alcohol on the Tubercular Genius and everybody else did, was that I had a bit of a soft spot for the guy.
You know, that I had some type of crush on him.
But then it’s also possible—and Brain Surgeon #1 swears this could be true—that from the time I was born, I already had a small, barely noticeable subfrontal midline meningioma pressing on my olfactory nerve, and this naturally would have made it harder for me to sniff out the functioning show-biz alcoholics in my midst. I do remember the Tubercular Genius sitting across from me at my desk one lazy afternoon and telling me a story that involved him falling asleep by his pool and accidentally sleeping outdoors all night. At the time, I was so impressed that a really great TV writer was talking to me—and, bonus, he had a pool!—that I failed to pick up on how much sleeping outside all night by your pool sounds exactly like the sort of thing an alcoholic would do.
Of course, now that I have lived in LA for more than a decade and met a zillion people who have their own pools, I totally get that nuance. Most of them aren’t falling asleep outside on any kind of a regular basis.
But circa 1997, the Tubercular Genius was always doing these things that I found adorably absentminded and writerly, like falling asleep by his pool and asking me what his own phone number was, and it never occurred to me back then that these were bad things.
Which again seems to point in the general direction of my having had a soft spot for the Tubercular Genius.
He did, after all, give me a book, one that was set—or at least partially set—in the late eighteenth century, which is either a really huge coincidence or else the Tubercular Genius had put some thought into the matter and noticed a common theme to my reading material. I think it even occurred to me back then that the Tubercular Genius might have given me this book because he was interested in me in some sort of romantic or sexual way. I don’t think that nuance had to be explained to me way after the fact, as it usually does with these types of scenarios. Like here’s an example of that phenomenon…
Senior year in college, I’m watching TV with my friend Julie when my phone rings. I get up to answer it, and it’s this boy who always sits next to me in my comp lit seminar. Since it’s 1990 and we’re the sort of college students who take comp lit seminars, we talk for a while about Twin Peaks, and then he asks me if I want to go to a movie. I tell him I can’t because I don’t have any money. Later, when I rehash the gist of this conversation to Julie, she informs me in no uncertain terms that Comp Lit Guy was “asking me out.” At the time, I refused to accept her analysis of the situation, although in later years I have come to see that her side of the argument might have had some merit.
Of course, I still have no idea what Comp Lit Guy himself was actually thinking, and at this point, I think it’s safe to say I never will. What’s kind of a fucked-up coincidence is that very same Comp Lit Guy randomly moved to LA last December and took me out for Korean food right before I found out about my brain tumor, and even though it was nice to see him again and all that, it’s not like he tried to kiss me or even walked me to my car, so in a way I think my original assessment of the situation was probably accurate.
I think he really was just looking for someone to go to a movie with.
With the Tubercular Genius, the possibility that he might have been interested in me was a lot more obvious because the flirting—if that’s technically what it was—was centered on books and happened to replicate a very famous incident from the first act of Hannah and Her Sisters: the part when Michael Caine “accidentally” runs into Barbara Hershey and buys her some e.e. cummings and tells her to read the poem on page 112, and truly you’d have to be a complete idiot not to understand what that scene’s about.
It’s about sex.
And actually now that I think about it, so was the book the Tubercular Genius gave me. Not in any kind of obvious way. I mean, it wasn’t pornographic or anything, but it was written by Milan Kundera, and isn’t everything Milan Kundera writes basically about sex? This particular book—I swear I still have it some-place—was all about the art of seduction and how they went about practicing it in the eighteenth century versus how people go about doing it nowadays, which is obviously way up my alley. So again, hats off to the Tubercular Genius for figuring this out about me—and hats off to me for actually having the GirlWorld smarts back then to consider the possibility that the Tubercular Genius may have meant something by this gesture. After all, back then I did happen to be in possession of the two main attributes the men of contemporary, twenty-first-century LA always seem to find so alluring in a female companion…
I was still in my twenties, and I made a lot less money than he did.
So, yes, it did occur to me back then that the Tubercular Genius might have been interested in me in some sort of romantic or sexual way. That thought did occur to me at the time, although I guess it didn’t occur to me that if I played my cards right, I could end up being Mrs. Tubercular Genius, which is what Jill swears the shoe girls are thinking all the time as they’re going about their daily lives. And I quote…
JILL
Every time they meet a man, the first question they ask themselves—the very first thing that pops into their minds—is “Is this my husband? Is he The One? My soulmate? My destiny?”
And that right there is very instructional to me. Because when I meet a man, mostly what I am thinking is…
ME (V.O.)
Please don’t let this person hand me some sort of spec script I’m going to have to read.
See? That’s interesting, right? Quite revelatory. In fact, now that I think about it, there was this one morning when the Tubercular Genius showed up way early at the office, which meant we were alone, and I remember there being this strange tension in the air, but it’s not like the Tubercular Genius leapt across the room and kissed me like Michael Caine ultimately winds up doing in Hannah and Her Sisters, thus moving the plot forward in an incredibly elegant, efficient manner that’s also really funny when the record gets scratched and Daniel Stern and Max von Sydow walk back into the room arguing about puce.
No, I’m pretty sure what actually happened was that the phone rang, and since it was my job back then to answer the phone, I’m one hundred percent certain that I answered it. I didn’t just let it ring and go to voicemail, which is probably what the girl in this story would have done if she had been super focused on becoming Mrs. Tubercular Genius
. Whereas a girl who is super focused on getting ahead in the entertainment industry—well, that girl is probably going to pick up the goddamn phone because if it’s ringing at that hour it’s probably her boss, so that’s why it’s not a very good story, the one about me and the Tubercular Genius.
Shoot.
Now I’m sorry I wasted all that time Journaling for Anxiety™ about it. It’s a real non-starter of a story, isn’t it? Way worse than the one about Fanny and her too-handsome cousin, the portrait painter. Basically, the whole thing just ends in some weird, anticlimactic misunderstanding. Obviously, I should have stuck with the story of Fanny getting jilted by the not-so-Honorable Stephen Digby, i.e., Part Five of my six-part miniseries. That at least had some stakes to it, some potential to be entertaining and, heck, I could go on forever and ever about all that heartbreaking stuff. About how Digby didn’t even have the guts to tell Fanny in person that he was jilting her for Miss Gunning. Nope. Instead, she had to hear it from her spinster colleague Miss Planta, and even then she didn’t actually believe it until two days later, when Miss Planta informed her that the Princesses had publicly wished Miss Gunning joy in the drawing room.
Or, I could go on and on about the good times.
About the time Digby made her laugh by asking her how much ribbon she had in her bonnet. Or the time he picked up Pope’s Essay on Man and read charming passages till the clock struck ten. Or the time he looked at her and suddenly exclaimed out of nowhere…
DIGBY
How amazingly well you have borne all this!
I could keep Journaling for Anxiety™ about all that stuff and more, but the good news is that I won’t. I’m tired. I’ve had a rough day…
Week.
Month.
Year.
But there’s really no point in going on and on about this stuff anymore. No point in trying to research and untangle a bunch of eighteenth-century creative struggles, lurking fevers, financial woes, and romantic difficulties. You see, when I got back from my holiday travels on December 30, I had a letter waiting for me from the BBC. Turns out they have rejected my proposal for a lavishly produced, six-part miniseries about Frances Burney, Mother of English Fiction. They get a lot of submissions etc., etc., &c., and they just didn’t feel like mine had any merit. So I guess the good news is I don’t have to wonder about what I would do if they had accepted my proposal and made all my dreams come true. Now I can just move on and—what? Giving up doesn’t seem like an option. It did hurt when I got home from my holiday travels and found that letter waiting for me. It wasn’t a very pleasant way to end the year—you know, having all my hopes and dreams officially dashed—but since the year started with finding out I had a brain tumor, it wasn’t shaping up to be one of the absolute best of my life anyway. Plus, the script for Episode 16 was due in three days, and I signed the contract and so on and so forth, so basically I had no choice. I just had to keep writing. That’s what Fanny would have done.