by AnonYMous
“NEEDY DIVA WANTS A ROCK—BUT TAKES A KNOCK!” gloated ShowBiz.
A handwritten note from Teddy was delivered to Bibi’s suite at the Four Seasons that same morning. (I discovered this among the exhibits in a lawsuit filed between them, along with transcripts of several emotional telephone conversations.)
It read:
B,
I am your family.
I am your best friend.
Let me adore you.
Forever,
T.
Ten minutes later, Teddy was once again getting ten percent of everything Bibi earned (expenses not included). His first piece of advice? “Take the call from Ed at Rabbit. Be a judge on Project Icon. Your fans will see your humanity, your tears, your compassion. Plus, it’s a fuckload of money, with endorsements up the wazoo.”
Bibi agreed.
But Teddy didn’t go the easy route. Of course he didn’t. Instead of calling Ed Rossitto, he leaked a story to ShowBiz “revealing” that Bibi was in talks with Nigel Crowther to join the judging panel of The Talent Machine. Then he quickly issued an official denial, saying, “At this time, Bibi Vasquez is focused only on her family.” All this was enough to prompt a second call from Rossitto, who by now was wondering if things were going on at Rabbit that he didn’t even know about. An increasingly strained back-and-forth ensued, culminating in one of Teddy’s assistants finally delivering a list of “Artist Requirements” to The Lot:
Artist to be paid sixty million dollars a year.
Artist to be provided with customized, four-thousand-square-foot dressing compound to accommodate hair, make-up, and wardrobe personnel.
Artist’s body to be insured with one billion dollar policy in case of injury. (Breasts/buttocks to be valued at one hundred million dollars each.)
No fewer than five promotional Artist videos to be broadcast by Network.
Network to offer promotional-rate advertising deal to Bibi Beautiful Cosmetics.
Crew to be forbidden to make eye contact with Artist (and Manager) AT ALL TIMES.
Artist to be provided with chauffeur-driven limo for duration of season, available 24/7. Limo to be Rolls-Royce Phantom, white. Artist to select driver (male, under twenty-five) from head/torso shots.
There were seventy-eight pages of this in total—the last twenty devoted entirely to the requirements of Bibi’s “dressing compound,” including a lengthy addendum to promote “a deeper understanding of the tastes/preferences of the Artist, with regard to beverages and snack items.”
When Ed Rossitto had finished reading the document, he slammed down the lid of his laptop, stabbed the case repeatedly with a letter opener, then threw it off his office balcony into the bunny-shaped lake below. (Or so I heard from Len.) Then he logged on to another computer, retrieved Teddy’s list of demands from his e-mail, and forwarded it to Chaz Chipford, the ShowBiz reporter. Within minutes, the entire unedited file was available on the magazine’s website as a downloadable PDF.
That afternoon, Bibi called Teddy while her assistant took notes.
“You’re an asshole,” she told him.
“That’s why you employ me,” he replied.
“I don’t employ you.”
There, the transcript ends.
6
Sanity Check: The Sequel
I STOOD OUTSIDE JOEY’S dressing room in a hot panic. The run-through was so far behind schedule now, there was no conceivable way that the press conference could start on time.
This was ridiculous.
How the hell could I… lose the judges? They had to be around here somewhere. “Think, Sash, think!” I said to myself. But I could think of only one thing: Len’s face when he realized the biggest news event in Project Icon’s history would have to be delayed because his assistant producer couldn’t find the panel.
With no better ideas, I checked the catering area, the conference facility, the public bathrooms, the hallway that led to the parking lot, and then—in rising desperation—the janitor’s storage closet. (You never know with Joey Lovecraft.) All empty. Shit. So I returned to the backstage lounge area, where a couple of crew members in black T-shirts were standing around, looking confused.
“Hey—shouldn’t this thing have started by now?” asked one of them, in an accusatory tone.
I offered him my very best shut-the-fuck-up face.
He was right, of course: The judges should have been on stage two minutes ago. A few more minutes’ delay wouldn’t be so bad, I kept telling myself. Even ten minutes—well, we could just about pull that off. Any longer, however, and we’d be charged an extra half-day for the venue and crew—not to mention all that wasted bandwidth for the live streaming—which would put us into overtime rates. It could add up to a few hundred thousand dollars, easy. Len had already been hospitalized twice since returning to Icon, due to a peptic ulcer and a burst appendix. A bill of that size could send him right back to the ER again.
Come to think of it, though… why hadn’t Len called me already? It wasn’t like him. Under normal circumstances, he would have threatened me with some kind of medieval torture at least three times by now. Unless… oh God, please no… unless he was already front of house with Sir Harold, waiting—and waiting—for “The Reveal” to begin. I could just picture him now: cheeks ablaze, nostrils flaring, the Merm quivering with fury. And in his eyes, two words, written in flames:
KILL BILL.
Sir Harold had blown twenty million dollars on the new Project Icon panel—and it all came down to this moment. Indeed, Big Corp’s newlyissued “earnings guidance” for the next year depended heavily on Joey and Bibi (even JD Coolz, I suppose) keeping the show viable for one last season. Sir Harold had granted an interview to the Monster Cash Financial Network that very morning on the subject—I’d watched it with Mitch and a few others in the Roundhouse’s canteen. Jesus, what a disaster. The anchor had started out with a long, ass-kissy intro about Sir Harold’s upbringing in South Africa—all that stuff about his English merchant-banker father and Nguni housemaid mother, the national scandal of their marriage, and how the young Harry had literally inherited a gold mine at age seventeen, fought the apartheidera government to hold on to it, then used the profits to build the world’s largest media empire. Standard life story, basically. And then, just as Sir Harold was beginning to relax—or grow bored (hard to tell the difference)—out came the Gotcha Question: “Wouldn’t you agree, Sir Harold: Project Icon without Nigel Crowther is a zombie franchise, with only three ways to go—down, down, and down.”
The anchor’s smug attempt at humor was a bad idea. The mogul’s great face trembled. His sun-spotted lips gathered into a sneer. Then he slapped down his hand with such force on the coffee table in front of him, it made the TV camera shake. For a few seconds, the studio looked like the deck of the Starship Enterprise under Klingon attack.
“Let me tell you something, boy,” Sir Harold rumbled, adjusting his steel-rimmed glasses. “We could lose HALF our audience, and we’d still be number one. And who do you think owns The Talent Machine, eh? WE DO. So when it goes live next fall, we’ll have ANOTHER number one show. Big Corp is always number one!”
The interview was over at that point. The anchor tried to ask a follow-up question about the German televised bingo market—apparently there’d been some major development over there recently—but Sir Harold stood up, unhooked the microphone from his ten thousand dollar suit, and peered directly into the camera, until the Big Corp CEO’s unmistakable turret of white-silver hair filled the frame.
“Number one!” he reiterated, poking a bony finger into the lens. And with that, he shuffled off the set.
Sir Harold’s confidence in Project Icon should have been reassuring, I suppose. But from what I’d seen over the last few months, it was practically a miracle that season thirteen had even gotten this far. And no matter how much money Sir Harold still hoped to wring out of the franchise, no one doubted for a second that he would pull us off the air if the ratings didn’
t hold up. One fuck-up, that’s pretty much all it would take. One fuck-up, and the world’s most popular TV show—a format that ShowBiz magazine once said had “revolutionized prime time, creating an entirely new genre of programming in its wake”—would be gone, never to return. Hence, it was of such vital importance that this morning’s press conference go flawlessly, with no delays, budget overruns, or—God forbid—missing judges.
Yeah, it was all working out just perfectly.
There was nothing left for me to do. I had to call Len.
Oh, wow, this was going to be ugly. “Oh, er, hi there, Len. No biggie—but you know how we were due to start fifteen minutes ago? And how the future of an entire billion dollar TV franchise depends on all this whole press conference thing going smoothly? Well, about that… Oh, Sir Harold’s sitting next to you? Cool. Anyway, uh, just wanted to let you know: I’ve been running up and down hallways for, oh, at least twenty minutes now, and I can’t seem to find the people we paid twenty million dollars to be here today.”
At least it wouldn’t the first time the new judges had caused us any problems, I reassured myself. I mean, the entire hiring process had been one bang-your-skull-against-a-rock moment after another, each more outrageous—and exhausting—than the last.
And to think how straightforward everything had seemed when Rabbit first made the decision—after an eight-hour board meeting on The Lot—that Joey and Bibi were the only candidates famous and qualified enough to make up for the loss of Nigel Crowther. Ed made Bibi an offer that very same day, in fact. (By then, she’d reconciled with Teddy, who’d issued a statement to the press, saying, “It is a measure of Bibi’s extraordinary humanity that she has offered me a second chance—I pledge to work tirelessly to help my client achieve her career goals of a billion record sales and the eradication of hate.”) As for Joey: although Ed had found him to be “functionally stable” after his emotional monologue under the piano, Rabbit wanted to bring him in once more, just to make absolutely sure. So a week later, back to the batcave we went, for Sanity Check: The Sequel, as Joey himself described it. This time, there were two other executives in the room: Ed’s boss, David Gent—another Brit, and so close to Killoch, he doesn’t need a title—plus the gargoylesque, three-pack-a-day smoker Maria Herman-Bloch, CEO of Invasion Media, the production company that handles studio rental, crew logistics, and other tedious backstage aspects of the show.
“Make no mistake,” Len warned everyone beforehand. “Gent can take a shit on Sir Harold’s behalf. And chances are, that shit will land on one of our heads.”
We all knew from reading ShowBiz that Gent’s real job was to find a replacement for Icon—and that he’d personally signed off on Crowther’s deal for The Talent Machine. So it was hard to know what to expect. If Gent loved Joey, would he steal him for Crowther? And what if he thought he was a liability? Would he let us hire him anyway, so the show could go out in a bonfire of its own negative PR?
No one knew.
The meeting began calmly enough. Joey turned up on time—in lederhosen and moon boots—and leaned down to greet Ed like one of his oldest friends. As for Gent, he seemed like an okay guy. I knew from his bio that he was ex-military (wing commander, Royal Air Force), but he was making an effort to disguise it, what with his herringbone shirt, navy blazer, and wispy brown college-professor hair. In fact, it was hard to believe this was a man who had penetrated the very highest levels of Big Corp and had a policy of automatically demoting employees if they asked for business cards—titles being a sign of complacency and (a far more serious offence at Big Corp) “box-inward thinking.”
“So, Joey, tell me: Why do you think you can do this job?” was his opening question, after a round of handshakes. “You’ve never even watched our show, have you?”
In an instant, the temperature of the room seemed to drop ten degrees. I swear Mitch groaned.
“It’s true… I’ve never seen it,” Joey answered. “But, y’know, I’ve heard about it plenty.”
A seriousness had descended over Joey’s face that I’d never seen before. There was also a tone in his voice I didn’t recognize. Not so much anger. More like petulance.
“I’ve heard that your ratings have been falling by ten percent a year,” he went on. “And I’ve heard that you made a giant fuck-up with your panel last season, ’cause you hired a chick who can tell you how to bake a cake”—he was almost yelling now—“but can’t tell the Rolling Stones from her FAT TALK SHOW HOST ASS.”
“Easy, Joey,” urged Mitch.
Joey ignored him.
“I mean, if it were me,” he continued, “and I had a show about MUSIC that made a billion bucks a year, I think I’d be looking to hire someone who knew a little about MUSIC. Maybe someone whose mom was trained at the Royal fuckin’ Academy, maybe someone who grew up under a grand piano, who plays five instruments, who taught his band everything they know, who can fuckin’ sing, man. And I mean SING—not blow into a goddamn computer. But what do I know, huh? I’m just a rock star! I’m just someone who’s sold one and a half billion records during my career! But if it were up to me—li’l old me, who doesn’t know shit and belongs in the crazy house—I’d want to give the job to someone who actually KNOWS WHAT THE HELL HE’S TALKING ABOUT.”
Joey sunk back in his chair. He looked spent. The rant had clearly been forming for some time.
Gent was smiling.
“I share your sentiment entirely, Mr. Lovecraft,” he said. “Just so you know: We’re also talking with Ms. Bibi Vasquez. How would you feel about working with her?”
For a moment, Joey looked bewildered—as though he were halfway through a gig and had just realized he was at the wrong venue, in the wrong city, playing with the wrong band. Then he showed the room his magnificent teeth.
“Man,” he said, pointing at Gent and drumming his feet. “You had me there! You had me, man!”
“So what about Bibi?” asked Gent again.
“Bibi?” Joey replied. “Just saw her in a movie. Mitch, what was that thing we saw on the plane?”
“Nannyfornia,” answered Mitch.
“There you have it,” Joey confirmed. “Nannyfornia.”
“And how did you like it?”
“Can I be honest?”
Gent looked surprised. “Of course,” he said.
“As long as I have a face,” said Joey. “Bibi Vasquez will always—always—have a place to sit.”
I thought we might have to call an ambulance for Len, he choked so hard. Mitch studied the carpet. Gent said nothing—he just stood up and offered Joey his hand. Sanity Check: The Sequel was over, and Joey had surely passed. Ignoring Gent’s outstretched arm, he moved in for a hug, only to pull back in frustration: The Brit had tensed instinctively, unused to such man-on-man contact.
“Hey, don’t fuckin’ hug me like that, man!” Joey scolded, loudly. “Hug me like you hug your wife.”
They tried again.
I couldn’t watch.
So that was that: Bibi and Joey were hired, terms to be agreed on. Which left only JD Coolz, who no one ever doubted would accept whatever scraps were thrown in his direction to stay on the show. “Coolz is well aware that he is the luckiest man alive—or at least the luckiest man to have ever been paid more than a million dollars a year to appear on TV,” as Len once put it, after a record-breaking lunch at Mr. Chang’s that lasted from 10:45 a.m. until early evening. “His talents, such as they are, amount to saying ‘booya-ka-ka!’ a thousand different ways.”
Ed Rossitto hadn’t been much more diplomatic.
“I like to think of Joey as the devil on this new panel,” he told JD, during one of those early batcave sessions. “And Bibi—well, she’s the angel, of course. And you? You’re the American everyman, JD. Fat and ordinary. And I mean that as a compliment.”
Poor old JD. Raised out in Bakersfield, California—a.k.a. The Most Boring City on Earth. White kid, black neighborhood. Subject of ridicule from an early age due to his fondness fo
r the deep-fat fryer. By his twelfth birthday, losing weight meant getting back down to two hundred pounds. But with JD’s size came a certain presence. He moved slow, wore a lot of jewelry, communicated only in fist bumps and monosyllabic slang. On the whole, people found him… reassuring. There was a calmness to JD. A Great Dane–like lovability. And so, when he turned eighteen and moved to LA—after teaching himself how to play bass guitar—he soon became a fixture in the weed-smoking rooms of all the major recording studios. “Oh, that’s JD: He’s cool, man,” went the standard introduction. Which is how Jason Dee, son of a Bakersfield agricultural inspector, became JD Coolz, multiplatinum session player.
If I’d been JD, I would have picked up Rossitto by his tiny legs and dangled him out of the window until he apologized for the “fat and ordinary” comment. But JD is Mr. Nice. He just kept mumbling “yo” and “I get it” before asking plaintively if there was anything he could do to help with the recruitment of Joey. (JD had once toured with Honeyload, in the days before Icon’s success made earning a living from music unnecessary.) The meeting ended with Rabbit offering JD what it described as “a generous offer,” which turned out to mean a fifty percent salary cut. He accepted right there in the room, no complaints.
If only Bibi and Joey’s negotiations had been so easy.
With Bibi, the problem was Teddy. It was simply impossible to communicate with Bibi unless you did so via Teddy, and even then, you could never quite be sure if you were getting through. “It’s like being at a fucking séance!” I once heard Rossitto yell into his speaker phone. And in spite of Teddy’s claim to have changed his ways since the whole ShowBiz leak debacle, his original sixty million dollar demand for Bibi remained the same—minus the “dressing compound” that had been ridiculed so mercilessly on the late night talk show circuit.
So when Rabbit made its first offer to Bibi—a mere ten million—Teddy’s response was… no response. He just ignored it. It was such a derisory sum, in Teddy’s eyes, that it qualified as no sum at all.