Selling Out

by Dan Wakefield

  Ned Gurney was wearing a tweed sport coat with suede patches at the elbows, a button-down shirt, and rep tie. He gave Perry a quick once-over, with a look of slight curiosity, and then the two men shook hands, politely, formally.

  The initial meeting of producer and writer was like the first encounter of a couple of dogs of different breeds, cautiously circling, sniffing each other out.

  Gurney was a handsome man in his early fifties with longish gray hair that curled up at his neck, and studious, horn-rimmed glasses that matched his ivyish style. He had an air of thoughtfulness about him even as he walked, with hands behind him, head slightly bent, as if studying the atmosphere, so when he commented on the weather it did not seem merely obligatory conversation-filler, but a matter he had actually pondered. The day was brisk, he mentioned, but not like autumn or winter in the East, rather like cool, high mountain air.

  When they got to the studio commissary and opened the door, they were struck by the usual clash and clang of silver, as well as the heavy odor of institutional gravy.

  Gurney winced, and said, “God, it always reminds me of a hospital.”

  Perry smiled.

  “Or a high school,” he said.

  “Come on,” said Gurney, “let’s get out of here. You game?”

  “Delighted. Lead the way.”

  Gurney drove them out of the Valley, smoothly and efficiently, without the idiosyncratic flair or urgency of Archer Mellis. Perry relaxed, enjoying Gurney’s driving style, as well as the comfortable dark-blue Cadillac Seville, not a chic car in this world of Mercedes and sleek foreign sports jobs. They went to a restaurant in Westwood that reminded Perry of Boston.

  “It’s kind of like the Copley Plaza,” Perry said.

  “The food’s all right, nothing gourmet, but what the hell, it’s civilized.”

  Whatever Gurney really liked he conferred on it the judgment of “civilized.”

  He loved Perry’s script, he thought it was really a rarity for television because it was not only funny and warm and real, it was “civilized.”

  “You can’t believe the drek they send me to read,” he told Perry over the glass of white wine each had. “What’s already on the tube is bad enough, but this stuff is poor imitations of it. Nothing original. Hell, I’m tired of sitting on my can waiting for this feature to get put together, but I’d rather be bored than do drek. When Archer Mellis called me and said he had just the thing for me, I’d heard it all before, but when he mentioned your name I perked up.”

  Perry perked up himself.

  It turned out Gurney had read one of his stories—in the Hudson Review, of all places!

  “You really read the Hudson Review?” Perry asked.

  “What the hell,” said Gurney. “I’m a civilized man.”

  Perry agreed. He also agreed with the producer’s few suggestions for changes in the first hour of the script.

  “It’s the second hour that’s got me stymied,” Perry confessed. “I hadn’t even thought about expanding the story that way till a couple days ago, and I was kind of waiting to talk it over with Archer today, hoping he could help me come up with something.”

  “What if—” Ned said.

  Aha. He too was a “what if” man. Perry leaned forward, intently.

  “What if,” Ned continued, “instead of Laurie and Jack resolving that little squabble and falling into each other’s arms as you have it now, the argument escalates and Laurie splits.”

  “She leaves him? Then there’s no show.”

  “Only for a while. Only till she realizes how much she loves him and comes back. In the meantime, Jack is stuck with living with his in-laws, and he and they are blaming each other for Laurie’s leaving.”

  “That’s marvelous! My God, I can’t wait to start writing it.”

  “The sooner the better. I hope to get the director I want approved tomorrow, and begin casting right away for Jack and Laurie.”

  “Casting? My God, man, I can’t get the second hour written overnight!”

  “We don’t need that for casting. It’s still Jack and Laurie’s story in the second hour, isn’t it?”

  “Well, sure, but—”

  “And you’re not going to change their looks or personalities, are you?”

  “Of course not.”

  “So, we can start casting them.”

  “You sure don’t waste any time,” Perry said admiringly.

  “I’m learning that in television we don’t have any to waste,” Ned said. “Decisions on new pilots are made by the networks in May. This is February. We’re already running late.”

  Perry slugged down the rest of his coffee as Ned waved for the check.

  “You’re going to love this guy we got for executive producer,” Perry proudly told Jane when he called her that night in Vermont.

  “What’s he like?” she asked.

  Perry thought a moment.

  “He’s civilized,” he said. “He’s truly a civilized man.”

  “I can’t wait to meet him.”

  “I can’t wait for you to get back. Can you make it any sooner, you think?”

  “I don’t see how I can do everything in a week as it is. Especially with this god-awful weather.”

  It was ten above zero in Haviland. A big snow had fallen just the day before she arrived, and the roads had been cleared just in time for her to get through. If it hadn’t been for Al Cohen’s tramping over to the house in snowshoes to get the furnace going again, the pipes would have surely frozen.

  From the half-open window above the bed where Perry lay with the phone a soft evening breeze wafted in, scented with sea air and oleander. Jane’s voice sounded so immediate and close it seemed as if she might be calling from the corner, or from a booth at the Hamburger Hamlet, yet the words she was saying, the talk of roads blocked by snow, gave Perry the weird sensation she was speaking not just from across the country but from some other world, one of those sci-fi creations of Isaac Asimov or Ursula K. LeGuin.

  Nor was it only the weather she described that seemed so oddly unreal and otherworldly. The people who only a month ago were familiar figures in Perry’s daily life, the students and faculty, now seemed almost as remote, as Jane spoke their names and concerns—the books and classes, Al Cohen filling in for old Bozeman, who had suffered a mild heart attack, a basketball game canceled with Bowdoin, in Maine, because of the weather.

  “I love you,” Perry said. “Are you sure you’re all right?”

  Being in such different climates made him feel farther from her than he really was, gave him a bit of a panic.

  “I’m fine, and I love you, too,” she assured him. “I’ll come back as soon as I can.”

  That night he dreamed of searching for her over ice floes.

  It wasn’t just the weather that was different in Southern California. Time was different, too.

  It was faster.

  Perry had imagined that, if anything, time out here at the edge of the vast Pacific, under the palm trees and constant sun, would probably be slower, lazier, than back in the brisk climate of the East. Like everyone else, Perry had read about the famous laid-back atmosphere of L.A., the mellow attitude of the natives of the region, whose casual clothes and morals were suited to the slow, sensual rhythm of surf and sun. Maybe that was true for some beach bums and bunnies, but it bore no relation to the full-throttle freeway race of show business. If Rome were the set for a TV movie, it surely would have been built in a day.

  Overnight, literally, Perry’s script had been transformed from the ethereal realm of imagination to the real world of production, even before he’d finished writing the second hour.

  “The First Year’s the Hardest” was not just a story any more, it was a company, with its own office. Of course the office was just another of the old, anonymous-looking motel-like buildings on the sprawling Paragon lot that happened to be vacant at the moment because the last production it sheltered was finished, either by completion or failure, leavin
g no trace of its character, leaving only the building, the shell, the office, ready to receive and be filled by the energy and spirit, the furniture and flesh of a new enterprise.

  “The First Year’s the Hardest.”

  That’s what the secretary said when she answered the phone in Ned Gurney’s office.

  She said the name of Perry’s story, Perry’s show, as if it were General Motors or Lord & Taylor or Standard Oil.

  As if it were real.

  As if it were a regular business with typewriters and desks, secretaries and executives—and it was, it was all that.

  Perry felt a little like a combination of Henry Ford and Rudyard Kipling—a literary man of action, an empire builder.

  “You can pick your own office here in the building,” Ned Gurney told him, “but don’t feel you have to be here if you prefer to write back at your hotel. Whatever suits you best.”

  “Oh, I think I’d prefer to be right here now,” Perry said.

  Prefer, hell; you couldn’t have kept him away from the place with armed guards.

  This was where it was happening, the center of the action.

  He selected an office on the second floor, right above Ned’s; it was only a dingy cubicle, really, with some Salvation Army—vintage furniture, and a small window looking out on another identical building, but it seemed to Perry quite splendid. It was near a watercooler in the hall, and he could quickly run down to Ned’s office and show him the latest pages that had just come out of his typewriter. Likewise, with an interoffice buzz on his phone, Ned could summon Perry down for important consultations, as he did later that very first afternoon.

  “If you have a moment, Perry, there’s someone here I’m anxious for you to meet.”

  He was a round, cherubic-looking young fellow. Perry realized at once he must be Ned’s choice to play the part of Jack. He was even dressed for the part, sloppy collegiate, with baggy old jeans and a faded sweatshirt, tousled blond hair that he had to brush up from his eyes. He wasn’t precisely the person Perry had imagined for the role, but the important thing was he didn’t look like some slick Hollywood star. If anything, he looked a bit young for the part.

  “Perry Moss, I’d like you to meet Kenton Spires, our director.”

  The pleasant, pudgy fellow blushed and shook hands, and Perry tried to hide his shock and disappointment.

  How could he be a director? He was only a kid.

  “Your script is the first really brilliant piece I’ve been shown for television,” Spires said quietly.

  Well, at least he was a smart kid.

  Kenton had won an Obie and directed several prize-winning dramas for PBS, yet he’d been languishing out here for almost a year without getting a break because he didn’t have what Ned called “schlock time,” or commercial TV experience. But Ned made it a condition of his own involvement in “First Year” that Kenton direct the pilot, so Archer had gone out on a limb and raised hell to get the network’s reluctant approval for him. Perry was soon delighted.

  As the three new colleagues continued their discussion of the project over sandwiches and beer, the young director seemed not only as civilized as Ned, but also a fellow artist, a kindred spirit; hell, a buddy. It was as if time in L.A. moved faster in professional friendships, too, like an old-fashioned film run fast forward, so that what in the ordinary pace of life and relationships would require whole years was accelerated and experienced in a matter of hours.

  By the time Ned and Kenton dropped Perry off at the Marmont late that evening it seemed as if the three of them had been best friends in high school and had just got together again to produce this show.

  There was a couch in the room where Perry sat in on his first casting session, an old lump of Salvation Army furniture covered with faded brown slipcovers of some tired, nubby material. He figured this must be the infamous casting couch of Hollywood legend, but the actresses reading for the part of Laurie didn’t even sit on it. Ned and Kenton sat there, while the young women stationed themselves in chairs by the window.

  The faculty wives back at Haviland would have no doubt been relieved—or perhaps secretly disappointed—to find the symbolic casting couch was nonerotic and businesslike, as were the sessions themselves. After three or four readings, and the quick exchange of glances and comments afterward between Ned and Kenton, it was obvious that any other consideration than the actress’s talent and suitability as Laurie was not only irrelevant, but annoying. Had some aspiring bombshell swiveled in and performed the most erotic disrobing since Salome, the reaction would have been that it was not the sort of thing Laurie would do.

  At the end of two hours and eleven readings, Ned suggested they all get on with their other work for the rest of the day and “look at more Lauries” tomorrow.

  “My God,” Perry said, with a sudden sense of the neophyte’s panic, “what if we don’t find her—the right Laurie?”

  “We’ll find her,” Ned told him.

  Alton Saxby, the casting director, whose job was to send in a steady stream of potential Lauries until the right one was chosen, placed a reassuring hand on Perry’s shoulder.

  “We’ll find her even if we have to make a search of graduate schools all over America.”

  Driving back from the studio that evening, Perry imagined a nationwide search to find the right Laurie, the 1980s version of the legendary quest to discover Scarlett O’Hara. Perry, of course, as creator of the character, was asked to lead the talent hunt, conducting interviews in grad schools all over America, where bevies of eager, gorgeous young women finagled their way into his hotel suite in imaginative attempts to seduce him into selecting them for the role.

  At a stoplight on Cahuenga Boulevard, Perry was mentally in Madison, Wisconsin, where a voluptuous anthropology major who had just been elected Miss Dairyland tricked her way into his suite by identifying herself as Room Service. After pushing him onto the bed and ravishing him mercilessly, the aspiring star whispered in Perry’s ear: “I’m Laurie,” to which he replied, “I’m sorry, Laurie would never have done it that way.”

  Perry laughed at himself, and decided to stop off for something to eat at the Hamburger Hamlet, a mile or so down from the Marmont on Sunset. Usually he hated to dine alone in public, especially after dark, when being by yourself meant you were not only alone but lonely. Out here he didn’t feel that way. Out here he felt that although he might be by himself he was not really alone, for he was part of the mystical fraternity of show business, to which everyone else either belonged or aspired to.

  The dream was not impossible. Though the Schwab’s drugstore on Sunset with the counter where Lana Turner was discovered no longer existed, there were real and hopeful actors, actresses, directors and producers, camera people and set designers, in every luncheonette and coffee shop and drugstore in Hollywood, and for the price of that day’s Variety or Hollywood Reporter, you could talk the language of the trades. You could speak of the latest deal and in the next breath talk of your own deal that might be tomorrow’s box office boffo smash and you the producer or writer or star. And like the Megabucks Lottery back in Massachusetts, somebody’s number eventually did come up, and everyone had hopes of hitting the next jackpot.

  Perry sat at the counter and ordered the bacon and avocado sandwich on toast (anything with avocado reminded him with a pleasant rush he was out here in exotic Southern California). Though he was by himself, Perry was elated by the knowledge that he was one of the blessed at this or any other counter in Hollywood for he had his own show, not only “in development,” but soon to be “in production.”

  Those magical terms, along with other stock phrases of show business, spoken like ritual incantations, were floating now as always in the very atmosphere of the room. A couple of places down from Perry a bald man was telling a tall young woman with an orange streak in her hair that he had just optioned a surefire property he was going to develop for a feature.

  An option!

  It was one of the magic words,
one of the magic deeds. Everyone had options. Anyone could have options. For a dollar, you could take an option on your neighbor’s laundry list, if he didn’t already have it in development for a feature or perhaps for a pilot for a series!

  Perry noticed a young woman alone, reading a paperback novel instead of the trades over her custard pie and coffee. Could be she was some kind of misplaced intellectual? She was hardly beautiful, with close-set eyes behind thick glasses, a long, aquiline nose, and stringy hair. Yet there was something appealing about her, a kind of wistful quality, an innocence.… She might be—Laurie!

  Perhaps Perry himself was destined to be the one to discover her, the one who happened by chance onto just the right woman when all the pros had failed to produce her. All he had to do was go up and explain who he was, why he was interested in talking with her. It sounded like the oldest cliche in the books—“Excuse me, young lady, but I can get you into show biz!” He felt himself flush red at the awful corniness of it, and yet it was true. It could happen. It wasn’t likely, but it was damn well possible.

  Perry began to feel dizzy, almost disoriented. He found it hard to discern what was real and what fantasy. It was a little like being on the edge of the “twilight zone” and not knowing what thought or deed would make you cross over from daily life into some other dimension of experience. He concentrated on his sandwich. That was real. In rising anxiety he gobbled it down, slurped the rest of his coffee, and paid the check.

  He hurried to his room and called Jane in Vermont, holding his breath as the rings came, hoping and muttering a prayer she was home. It was not just that he missed her, as he always did the few times they had been apart in the past five years, it was not just his desire for her companionship and lovemaking and talk and intuitive understanding. What he longed for now was her reality, her tangible, solid, commonsensical flesh and blood presence to remind him who and where he was, to keep him from slipping off into the “twilight zone” of show biz fantasy.