by Robin Green
I loved Harold Hayes—loved, worshipped, feared. Feared, because he was a tough, sharp-witted, no-bullshit kind of guy who ran California editorial as he had Esquire’s, as a fierce competition among editors (all male, surprise, surprise) for ideas, space, dominance. I existed pretty much apart from the competition, though, putting together a monthly column Harold had created for me to suit my ironic bent, a California-ized version of the Dubious Achievement Awards he’d instituted at Esquire.
In time, I was trusted with other stuff too, enlisting budding playwright Robin Baitz, who would go on to be nominated for two Pulitzers but was then just nineteen years old, to write a back-page “Westword,” commissioning another “Westword” from a cartoonist whose syndicated strip Life in Hell, running in the LA Weekly, I’d admired: Matt Groening, in his pre-Simpsons, pre-five-hundred-million-dollar-net-worth days. Matt came to the office and I liked him as much as I’d liked his work. His father had been a literary man in Portland and from him Matt knew who Harold Hayes was and spoke of him and to him with deference and respect—unlike a lot of writers and editors in LA who thought of Harold as an antiquated has-been.
He was no has-been. He was very much a still-is, and if writers and editors didn’t like him, it was usually because his standards made him hard on them. Or maybe I just thought that because (1) he liked my writing, and (2) I almost always agreed with his opinion. For instance, the time the editorial group attended a private, pre-release screening of David Lynch’s Blue Velvet at the Dino De Laurentiis offices in Beverly Hills, and Mr. De Laurentiis himself popped in to pay his respects to Harold Hayes. The senior editors at California wanted to put Blue Velvet on next month’s cover. Harold didn’t. He hated the movie and so did I. The beginning of the thing was, like, a metaphor, Lynch showing a beautiful suburban lawn, then zooming down and into what lay beneath the grassy surface—darkness and creepy bugs and whatnot. Get it? If you didn’t, the movie then proceeded to show one human example after another of the bad stuff suggested by the metaphor—murder, drug and sexual abuse, and so on. After ninety minutes of this, it ended pretty much where it began. A little birdy appeared, only now you were onto him. Plus worn out from having to watch the whole thing.
That’s what I had to say about it. Harold’s argument was considerably more erudite, invoking ancient Greek standards of stasis as regards art, its being the opposite of what art should be. But the editors held their ground; they thought the movie was a masterpiece. And as it turned out, they were right, at least according to the hip-oisie who embraced the movie, which was to become a huge cult favorite.
Maybe Harold was behind the times. The magazine’s publisher, the crass little Gordon Gekko wannabe Alan Bennett, certainly thought so, or certainly thought so when, after two years, Harold’s remake of California, though it had initially spiked circulation, wasn’t seeing any further rise. Harold was fired; the publisher had decided he himself could do a better job of editing. Which meant I was now working for the little cretin.
Meantime, though, my life outside the magazine was stabilizing. Through a friend from Berkeley, I was introduced to a wild-haired young woman who had just been lured south to become the editor of the LA Times restaurant section. She gave me a chance to try out as her second-string restaurant reviewer and sent me to Lawry’s, a much-beloved LA institution on La Cienega Boulevard.
The place was an easy target, a corporate roast-beef theme park, complete with a gift shop full of Lawry’s mugs and aprons and, of course, bottles of Lawry’s special seasoning, dinner itself an overproduced rigmarole including a spinning salad—iceberg lettuce in a glass bowl set in ice that a hypercheerful waitress spun with one hand while pouring viscous pale orange liquid from a bottle held on high of, you guessed it, Lawry’s Salad Dressing—and, finally, what I called the Steaming Theater of Meat. It resembled a silver casket on wheels as it lumbered toward you up the aisle, obscuring everything else when it arrived at your banquette, the solemn Hispanic in chef’s whites, the medallion around his neck reading MEAT CARVER, flipping open the lid and tripping a light inside that illuminated more roast beef than you have ever seen, or wanted to see, tableside, two entire rib sections of steer propped vertically and sweating. On my short stay in London, I’d taken myself to Simpson’s in the Strand, seen the dignified waiter lift a silver dome from a single roast of beef and carve my thin slice. I sensed what I learned was true, that Lawry’s founder had heard about it and re-created what he’d seen in his imagination, the Hollywood-extravaganza version.
After the piece was published came a hue and cry, furious letters to the editor. Who was this annoying smart-ass? He or she should be ashamed of him- or herself. Fired.
Instead, I was hired and in the next few years I wrote fifty-some second-string restaurant reviews, my night job while I worked at California. It was great fun; I wrote and wrote, some of the best and funniest writing I’d done, and I could take everyone I knew out for dinner on an expense account. But even all that paled in comparison to what happened as a result of those reviews: they reminded John Falsey, my friend from Iowa, of my existence, prompting him to call me at the magazine one day and ask if I’d be interested in writing a script for his new television show.
That first script was the beginning of a twenty-five-year career as a TV writer in which I rose from staff writer to story editor to co-producer and on up to executive producer on The Sopranos and finally co-creator with Mitch of my own show, Blue Bloods, now in its ninth year and in syndication around the world.
I bought a glass-walled, midcentury house in the Hollywood Hills above Sunset Strip with a killer view of the LA Basin and, on clear days, the distant Pacific all the way down to Catalina Island. I acquired an agent, a money manager, and my first new car, a Kalahari Beige Metallic four-door BMW, and also a jet-black half–German shepherd, half-Lab dog that Mitch named Al.
Mitch had come back into my life, if not to live in my house, then to be often in my bed, and I in his. We had started writing and producing TV as a team and began to live together again only when we moved to New York City to do a new HBO show just starting up, The Sopranos. We worked on that show for its first five and a half seasons and would have stayed to the end of the sixth and final season except that the show’s creator, David Chase, fired me, ostensibly for “not understanding the show.” He said Mitch could stay if he wanted, which he didn’t.
“The time has come for us to part company” was what David said in my office that fateful day, parroting exactly what I’d once recounted in The Sopranos’ story room (where I was, for all but four months of my time there, the only girl at the table with David, Mitch, Terry Winter, Frank Renzulli at the beginning, and Matt Weiner at the end), telling them apropos of some story we were working on what my LA Music Center boss had said when she fired me years before. I remember at the time seeing David register the phrase as he watched me with what had become by then his customary hate-rays, for while we’d begun as friends when I’d worked for him my second year in TV, sometime during the run of The Sopranos he started to regard me with a distaste previously reserved for his mother.
I’d never had my heart broken, not really, but it did when he came into our office at a time when he knew Mitch would be away on the set and fired me; it broke my heart, and I reacted like I imagine a spurned lover would react. I didn’t want him to see my face, and I turned my back on him and stayed that way until he left.
I haven’t talked to him since, though, like a spurned lover or a person with an unhealthy obsession, I’d look for him everywhere. Even so, soon after my dismissal, I did not see him at James Gandolfini’s father’s wake, though Mitch told me he’d been not ten feet from us, a lapse my brother posited could have been some kind of self-protective psychological mechanism. In time, I did see him—him and his wife in the back seat of a Town Car pulling up to a restaurant just as Mitch and I were leaving—or hear from the gossipy maître d’ of a place we frequent near our house that he and she had been in the very night
before.
There were other sightings, once way ahead on a freezing cold Midtown picket line during the Writers Guild strike in ’08, but he didn’t see me. Weeks later I saw him again at a strike rally in Washington Square Park. This time our eyes did meet and again I turned my back on him. But it wasn’t, like the first time in my office when he fired me, an unwilled act of the body. This was now the act of a drama queen, a gesture meant to insult and wound him. As if.
Oddly, the first time I laid eyes on him was during another WGA strike in ’88 in LA. We weren’t supposed to take meetings during the strike (that’s what they call it in Hollywood, “taking meetings”—or do they say that in other businesses as well?), but we did. We met at an Italian restaurant on Ventura Boulevard in Studio City near the studio where David had a development deal. He had a show that he was staffing that he’d co-created with Larry Konner, a Hollywood writer now known as the father of Jenni Konner, co-runner of HBO’s Girls.
My agent had sent me a few DVDs of shows that were interested in hiring me, but David Chase’s Almost Grown was the one I liked. It starred Tim Daly and Eve Gordon, a divorced couple who still seemed to love each other and flashed back to moments in their past that were cued by practical music—meaning that it came over car radios or some such and not sound tracks. It was charming and funny and had heart.
I was already seated when I saw a sour-faced man come in and be directed back to the table. David remained unsmiling and dour as we made our way through introductions—he liked my writing, I loved his show—but within half an hour we were laughing to the point of tears, sharing horror stories about our mothers and how they drove us crazy.
I was hired and given a nice office in a bungalow on the Universal lot, right across from Robert Redford’s private bungalow. I saw Robert Redford one day slipping through his door. I had never seen such a magnificent head of hair on a man, except maybe on Jack Kennedy so many years before.
We didn’t have computers in those days; we typed on Selectric electric typewriters with white delete ribbons and carbon paper for copies. I couldn’t proceed with a page, though, unless the typing was clean, so I’d end up typing the same page a dozen times, maybe more, until I had a perfect page. I wrote three episodes of the fourteen-episode order, finishing the last one even though the show had been canceled because I liked writing it so much.
By that time, David and I had become friends. He was a different boss than John Falsey and his writing partner Josh Brand had been the previous year, my first year in the business. Josh had made clear that life and work were to be separate.
“I have a family,” he’d announced. “I have friends.”
But David Chase was different. He came into my office one day early on, dramatically threw himself on the black leather couch like a fainting Victorian lady, the back of his hand resting on his forehead, and declared, “I’m so depressed.”
My heart melted and stayed that way for years.
David had a reputation in the industry. He argued with what he called the Universal suits, the ones who worked in the lot’s Black Tower where the business offices were housed. “Fucking pygmies,” he’d call them when he came back from a meeting. “Network standards?” I heard him yell, presumably into the telephone, through an office wall when we later worked in adjoining rooms at Lantana in Santa Monica, the writing offices of Northern Exposure. “You’re nothing but censors, that’s what you are! How do you live with yourselves? How do you sleep at night?”
I thought he was wonderful. I never imagined one day he’d feel the same way about me as he did about the suits. I saw his temper trained on me only once that Almost Grown year. We were headed to lunch or a meeting somewhere and we were in the parking garage on the way to his car and I asked him what his wife did.
He turned and snapped at me. “She raises our child,” he said. It was almost a snarl.
He was devoted to his wife, whom he had loved since high school, and their daughter. He seemed so basically unhappy, though, that I was sure I could make him happier. One day, after the show had been canceled and I was writing something else, I invited him to take a walk around Lake Hollywood with me. I had vague notions of seducing him somehow. But about halfway around the lake, he began to piss and moan about his aching back and I realized that this man was a full-time job. He was better off with his high-school sweetheart.
If he had any of that kind of feeling for me, I saw it just once. We’d all been drinking champagne to celebrate something or other in the loft that held The Sopranos offices at Silvercup Studios in Queens, a big, dramatic space, one side of which was a wall of windows looking out onto the East River and the Queensboro Bridge, beautiful in the daytime, even more so lit splendidly at night. We toasted and drank and then filed outside to wait for Teamster vans to drive us home.
We were out on the sidewalk, just Mitch, David, and the line producer, Ilene Landress. David, a little high on bubbly, walked into me, cockeyed. I don’t know how else to describe it. I was just standing there and he walked into me, into my body, and then seemed to come to himself and backed off. It was just a moment. Maybe half a moment. But it happened. Mitch saw it too, so I wasn’t imagining things.
We had had times, especially that first year on Almost Grown, when we talked and talked. I shared my bungalow with another writer, but it was just David and me one day, sitting on the couch in the bungalow’s common room. He was going on about his mother, who had just been out from New Jersey for a visit, the outrageous stuff she said, how she belittled him, how small and angry and at the same time guilty she made him feel.
He was early–Woody Allen–movie funny, so droll and neurotic. I told him that’s what he should write about, about his mother, their relationship, because here he was, this powerful man, to me, anyway, my boss, taking on studio suits and the network, and yet his mother could reduce him to, in his own words, a gibbering little gerbil.
He’d told me once, in the years before he began to hate me, that he remembered that conversation and that it had planted a seed, though in interviews with him I read later, he said it was his wife who had told him to write about his mother—and I’m sure she had.
There was much more involved, of course, in the genesis of The Sopranos. David had been nearing the end of a development deal with the Brillstein-Grey Company and nothing he’d written had made it, though he’d let me read his scripts, one a wonderful half-hour single-camera comedy about a superhero called Ultimo who was depressed and angry at the stupidity of mankind and who was always being sued for the collateral damage he’d caused to property and persons in the course of saving the world. Ultimo was David himself, of course, in tights and a cape and it was, like him, hilarious.
Lloyd Braun, who was a principal at B-G, told David one day that he knew he had a great TV show in him. Was there anything else gathering dust in his drawer? David thought about the pile of unmade movie scripts at home. He told Lloyd he had a treatment for an offbeat Mob movie he hadn’t been able to sell. He said he’d see if there was something there for a TV show.
* * *
Chapter Sixteen
Television 101
The new TV show that John Falsey had called me to try out for in 1986 was A Year in the Life, which he’d created with Joshua Brand, a former New York playwright he’d met working on The White Shadow and partnered with to create the Emmy-winning medical drama St. Elsewhere. A Year in the Life had begun as a miniseries starring Richard Kiley (Man of La Mancha), Eva Marie Saint (who starred opposite Marlon Brando in On the Waterfront), and talented newcomers Sarah Jessica Parker and Adam Arkin (son of Alan), among other actors, and it beat out the classy miniseries Winds of War, a World War II saga starring Robert Mitchum and Ali McGraw, for the Emmy in its category that year—that’s how good it was.
NBC subsequently ordered a twenty-two-episode series that was to be, like Hill Street Blues and a few other shows that preceded it, a new kind of TV, what came to be known as quality TV, this one a subtle and realis
tic drama about what happens when the wife and mother of an upper-middle-class Seattle family dies in a car wreck. Well, good-bye, Eva Marie Saint, but there was still plenty to be excited about as I drove my sputtering Chevy Vega over the 101 to the Lankershim exit, then to the gatehouse at Universal Studios, where I’d been told the guard would have my name.
He checked my ID against a list, gave me a map, pointed out where to park, then lifted the gate, and in I went, onto the studio lot, vast and hushed paved acres that seemed as magical in the LA glare as it did later in La La Land—soundstages in giant hangars, electric carts whizzing importantly around.
Josh and John were housed in a swank suite in a swank, low-slung, landscaped office building in a shady part of the lot near the guard gate. Their pretty blond secretary showed me into Josh’s office, where John introduced me to Josh, an avuncular young man, a first-generation Russian-American Queens Jew to Falsey’s Darien, Connecticut, pretty-boy WASP (actually Catholic but passing for WASP), who said he’d really liked the restaurant review John had shown him, the lede of which said that the first thing you noticed about Prezzo on Ventura Boulevard in Sherman Oaks was that you couldn’t find it.
“That’s exactly what happened to me!” he said, as if it were the most remarkable thing in the world.
But the room turned serious and that was pretty much it for chitchat as they got down to the business of laying out the episode that I was going to write for which they’d already worked out the stories—an A story (twelve scenes, or “beats”), a B story (eight beats), and a C (four)—and melded them together into a four-act format, six scenes to an act.
John stood half in, half out of the sliding door to their sunny balcony, dragging on a cigarette and blowing the smoke out into the studio lot, and he and Josh ran through every scene, acting things out, throwing out dialogue, laughing, and relishing the whole thing while I frantically wrote everything down like a secretary taking dictation. It began to seem as if the work was being done for me. How hard could this be?