Selling Out

by Dan Wakefield

  Stu Sherman, the suave accountant whose office in one of the towers of Century City on the Avenue of the Stars reminded Perry of an elegant art gallery, served Perrier in fluted glasses while discussing the new client’s overall financial picture.

  Perry was grateful that Ravenna had come along to literally hold his hand. She helped translate. When Stu wanted to know if he had his liquid assets in T-Bills or money market or stocks and bonds, Perry looked blankly at Ravenna, who, through a series of gentle questions, was able to ascertain that Perry had $53,000 from his earnings in television thus far in a savings account in his local bank. Perry realized this was like admitting he had put the money in an old sock and hid it under the bed.

  “Don’t worry, darling,” Ravenna reassured him, “Stu will get into something useful right away.”

  Stu thought the most important thing was to get Perry into a nice little condo that would serve as a shelter against taxes as well as the wind and rain.

  “Can I afford that?” Perry asked.

  “You can’t afford not to,” Stu advised.

  “We’ll see Clarice von Grebhart right away,” announced Ravenna.

  “Perfect,” Stu Sherman said.

  “Who’s she?” Perry asked.

  “The best realtor in Beverly Hills. And the most adorable.”

  Clarice was an absolute dream, a puckish, gaminelike, long-legged creature with short, charmingly mussy hair, clad in a thrift-shop Girl Scout uniform and high-heeled red sandals and intriguing dark glasses. She looked more like a movie star than a realtor, but Perry was beginning to observe that many of the women who worked here in everyday jobs, secretarial and sales and clerical, perhaps in defensive reaction, looked more glamorous than most of the actual movie actresses he met.

  Clarice, gunning her cute little red convertible all over town, found Perry a terrific little bargain—not in Beverly Hills, of course, which he hardly could afford, but near the little place he and Jane had rented for the summer in the flats of Hollywood. It was a new high rise, a good investment property, and Clarice was able to get the owner down a little so that Perry could pick up a handy little one-bedroom for $249,000. Ravenna whipped out her pocket calculator and figured it would mean Perry would be paying about $3200 a month for his mortgage, but with all his prospects this was quite within reason, especially since it was a tax write-off.

  Clarice buzzed them over to the Polo Lounge and they had Mimosas to celebrate. Perry panicked for a moment, realizing he had no furniture and didn’t want to spend the time—that was now more important than the money—to go out and buy it, but Ravenna assured him that was no problem, he could get whatever he wanted through Abbey Rents.

  It was easy.

  Everything here was easy.

  He wondered if Clarice and Ravenna were easy to have, but the truth was Perry was quite happy being with them, being seen with them, without any desire to go to bed with them. In fact, the show was still taking up all the energy he might ordinarily have for sex, which was just as well. That made everything easier, too.

  X

  At first Perry didn’t notice anything.

  He had come in late to the office after stopping at the escrow company to sign the papers for purchasing his new condo, and was so absorbed in thoughts of his burgeoning personal empire that it wasn’t till he nosed his car into his parking space that he realized something was wrong.

  People were running.

  Perry’s immediate fear was that the building must be on fire, but as he swung out of his car and looked around he saw no evidence of flames, or even smoke. Besides that, people were not only running out of the building, others were running inside. Everyone looked purposeful but grim, evidently exercising control over some kind of generalized panic.

  What the hell could have happened?

  Had the series been canceled even before it went on the air?

  Had Archer Mellis resigned his post at Paragon in order to take over the Chrysler Corporation?

  Had additional restrictions from the network’s Department of E. and A. provoked Ned Gurney into threatening the life of Stu Sturdivant?

  Damn. You couldn’t leave the lot for an hour without missing out on some life-or-death crisis. Striding toward the building, but restraining himself from running until he knew what the hell was going on, and whether such panic was only an overreaction, Perry swore to himself he would never again stray off on his personal empire-building business during working hours. Just before he got to the building the cute little ten-year-old actress who was playing a neighbor of Jack and Laurie’s burst out of the building and started to dash past him, her pigtail flying. Maybe some tragedy had occurred on the set! Perry yelled after the little girl and grabbed her arm.

  “Hey, what’s going on?” he asked.

  “Christ, man,” the precocious tot piped up, “didn’t you read the trades this morning?”

  “No, I didn’t,” he admitted shamefully to this one-year-old who had probably memorized the entire contents of Variety and the Hollywood Reporter over her Cocoa Pops that morning. “Why? What did they say?”

  “We’re going on Friday night against ‘Dallas.’”

  “You mean this show? ‘The First Year’s the Hardest’?”

  “I don’t mean ‘The People’s Court,’” sighed the little girl, as she turned to run off toward the set.

  “That’s impossible!” Perry yelled after her. “We’re an eight o’clock show!”

  “Read it and weep!” the little tyke called back over her shoulder.

  This was absurd. The kid must be pulling some kind of sick joke on him. Perry stood watching her receding pigtail a moment, then turned and ran full tilt toward the office.

  “Where’s Ned?” Perry demanded in a kind of shout-screech, as he saw that the door to Gurney’s inner office was flung open and the room was empty. Ned’s secretary, looking so pale it seemed she had lost her suntan, said, “They’re all at Archer’s.”

  Perry took off in a sprint.

  It looked like rehearsal for a new Samuel Beckett play, or a civil defense emergency room. Ken Spires was lying on his back on the floor, with his feet propped up on a chair at a forty-five-degree angle. Ned Gurney was sitting in a corner with his legs drawn up close to his body and his head resting on his knees, murmuring in a trancelike chant, “It’s genocide, it’s genocide, it’s genocide …” Archer was pacing the room with the cordless phone cradled in his neck, saying, “Tell him I’ll be there anyway. I’ll be in his office waiting for him. If he’s not in his office I’ll be at his home. If he’s not at home I’ll be at his club. If he’s not at his club—”

  Archer’s voice was extremely calm and modulated, and it was only his contrasting garb that seemed out of kilter. He was fitting gold cuff links into the starched striped dress shirt he wore with a regimental tie while he kept the phone receiver locked against his neck with his chin, but below the waist he had on only bikini undershorts, knee-length yellow sweat socks, and a pair of his hand-tooled cowboy boots. When his secretary rushed in with his darkest London suit, still in a cellophane cleaning bag, and a pair of highly polished black wing-tip shoes, Archer, still speaking into the phone receiver, hopped onto the edge of his desk and stuck out his legs. His secretary pulled off his cowboy boots, peeled off the yellow sweat socks, and handed him his black shoes and socks just as he was finishing his phone conversation—or rather, what seemed more like his monologue-edict to whomever he was speaking.

  “You’ll never find him,” Ken Spires moaned fatalistically from the floor. “He’s hiding from you.”

  “I’ll find him,” said Archer, slipping on the heavy trousers with the quick, certain facility of Clark Kent transforming himself into Superman in a phone booth.

  “Find who?” Perry asked, drawing the first slight notice to himself from the others.

  “Max Bloorman,” groaned Ken from the floor. “Who else would put us up against Dallas?”

  “It’s genocide, it’s genocide,
it’s genocide …” Ned continued chanting.

  “What the hell happened to Amanda LeMay?” Perry shouted, hearing his voice crack. “She said the network was going to ‘nurture’ us.”

  The word nurture seemed to snap Ned Gurney out of his trance. He uncoiled from his fetal crouch in the corner, sprang to his feet, and waved both arms in the air.

  “Nurture!” he yelled. “I’ll show you what they mean by ‘nurture’!”

  He grabbed Perry by the arm and led him to Archer’s desk, pointing to an empty spot on it.

  “Look there. Imagine there’s a fly sitting there. OK? Now, we’re going to ‘nurture’ that fly. Just watch how we do it.”

  Ned raised his right hand, sticking out the thumb, like a weapon, and, gritting his teeth, smashed the thumb down on the imaginary fly, pressing and grinding until it would have surely been obliterated into dust.

  “We have just ‘nurtured’ that fly!” Ned exclaimed, then cackled wildly before returning to resume his crouch in the corner.

  “But what about Amanda?” Perry persisted. “I really thought she cared about us. About the show.”

  “That may have been her downfall,” said Ken.

  “You mean she’s been demoted?” Perry asked incredulously.

  “She’s gone into independent production,” Archer said, buttoning up the vest to his suit with sure, determined steadiness, like a knight putting on his armor.

  “You mean she left us in the lurch to produce her own shows?” Perry asked with indignation.

  A harsh, wild laugh came from Ken, who was still in his shock position on the floor.

  “It means she’s been fired, you rube,” he said.

  Perry didn’t even mind the put-down from the usually gentle Ken. In fact, he felt it fit. Who else but a rube would have sunk all his cash into a new condo with a mortgage of $3,000 a month, assuming his new series was going to be that one-in-a-million hit before it even went on the air—before it even had a specified time slot?

  Not even live coverage of the Second Coming could compete against “Dallas” on Friday night at nine.

  Perry slumped to the floor, joining his colleagues.

  “Poor Amanda,” he said, for some reason finding it less painful to think of someone else’s ill fortune.

  “Don’t worry about Amanda,” said Ned. “She’s swamped with offers.”

  He moved out of his crouch and stretched out full length on the floor.

  Only Archer Mellis was grimly functional. He poked his arms into the suit jacket his secretary held for him, grabbed his attaché case, and swung toward the door, glancing back to point a pistol-like finger at his fallen troops.

  “I’ll try to get us shifted to a better slot,” he said, “but in the meantime, we’re on Friday night at nine, and let me remind you that J. R. Ewing is not just lying around on his butt right now. Let’s go!”

  Like boxers trying to rise before the count of ten, the three men dizzily struggled to their feet.

  “Don’t think poor.”

  Ravenna was squeezing Perry’s hand and staring into his eyes like a hypnotist.

  When he frantically called her to lament, with quivering voice, the terrible news of his show being matched against “Dallas” and ask if it was too late to get out of his purchase and sale agreement for the condo, Ravenna ordered him to calm down and meet her for dinner. She wielded her growing influence to get them a reservation at Le Duc, the newest and suddenly most chic French restaurant in Hollywood, whose cachet was matched only by its prices.

  “Dallas” was all that Perry could say, as if that explained everything.

  Perry felt a sudden lust for a double martini, straight up, as dry as the most malevolent Santa Ana wind in history. Luckily, when the waiter came to take their order for drinks, Ravenna shot a glance at Perry’s troubled countenance and ordered for both of them.

  “Bring us each a Kir Royale,” she said with a sparkling smile and a wink to the waiter, as if they were there to celebrate some amazing stroke of fortune.

  It was of course just the right thing—zippier and more festive than a plain glass of wine, and yet keeping Perry to his pledge of staying off the hard stuff. It was made of crème de cassis and that magical potion Perry still associated with the glow of his first happy days out here with Jane, that greatest of all elixirs, champagne.

  By the end of the second drink, Perry realized he was crazy to even consider backing out of the condo deal. Ravenna reminded him that if the very worst happened and the show was canceled, he would simply move right onto the big deal for a feature film of his next story, produced by the powerful and popular Vardeman.

  Perry’s only danger, Ravenna clearly showed him, was in panicking, in imagining any kind of defeat, in even allowing himself to think of a circumstance in which he had to worry about such minor matters as a $3,000-a-month mortgage. Defeat was self-fulfilling; think poor, become poor.

  The food was reassuringly rich. After the morels, flown in fresh from France, after the Volaille à la Vapeur de Truffles et Puree de Christophines, after the Sorbet Maison aux Fruits Exotiques, Perry felt much more optimistic. When the coffee and brandy arrived, so did an impeccably dressed, slim gentleman named Scotty Shearson, whom Ravenna had invited to stop by and join them for a drink. Scotty had done some acting off and on, but now he had his own business, in the area of personal public relations, which involved getting his clients’ names mentioned by the right people, in the right way, in the right places—newspaper columns, for instance, even radio and television shows that dealt with the world of entertainment and its personalities.

  A “personality,” Perry gathered, was someone who, with the right professional attention, might become a “celebrity.” He of course admitted to no such self-seeking aspiration for his own sake, but Ravenna pointed out that any public attention that came his way right now could only help the show—just when it needed all the help it could get. Furthermore, Perry was impressed with the positive way in which Shearson viewed what only hours before had seemed the unmitigated disaster of the scheduling of his fragile new program.

  “I love it,” said Shearson. “It’s the old David-against-Goliath plot—and you know who won!”

  As if to help celebrate the upset victory in advance, the restaurant owner himself sent a round of cognacs to their table. Scotty raised his glass in a toast to Jean Paul, evidently a close friend, which explained how Ravenna had been able to secure this choice table at the last moment in such a hot new dining spot. Among Scotty’s many services, he aided his clients in securing the right tables at the right places, so they could be viewed by the right people and later be reported in the right columns as having been seen there. As if all this weren’t enough, Scotty revealed (sotto voce of course) an exclusive bit of info he had heard from sources deep inside the network, so dangerously new that its reverberations had not yet even been reflected in the ratings:

  “‘Dallas’ is slipping.”

  Ravenna gave a squeeze to Perry’s knee.

  “And you, darling,” she whispered, “are on the way up.”

  Perry went home feeling like a million dollars, justifying his addition of a personal public relations counselor to his growing staff with the age-old logic that it takes money to make money. Besides, Shearson’s retainer was only a token $250 a week, and it was, anyway, as Ravenna pointed out, tax deductible, which in Perry’s thinking had come to seem like the same thing as free.

  “Welcome to kamikaze time,” said Ned.

  He was holding a beer, trying to seem jaunty. Perry was glad that Ned at the last minute had invited the “First Year” inner sanctum to gather at his home to have dinner and watch the show, as they had done for the pilot, but this of course was quite a different circumstance. Instead of excited anticipation there was simply nervous tension, a sense that if you accidentally bumped into someone you might get a nasty little electric shock. Kim, who looked bleary-eyed and bedraggled in baggy blue jeans and one of Ned’s old butt
on-down dress shirts, had not made one of her wonderful curries but ordered out an assortment of deli stuff from Greenblatt’s—sandwiches, deviled eggs, chicken wings. Instead of a snappy, red-coated bartender there was simply a variety of bottles arrayed on a card table, but most people seemed to be taking cans of beer from a big cooler on the patio.

  The cast of guests was different, too.

  The main difference for Perry was that Jane wasn’t there. He had waked that morning missing her more than usual, feeling her absence like an ache. He thought how nice it would be to have her comfort, her hand-holding, her support. He had called her, hoping to get some of that on the phone, but he realized at once it was a mistake. She didn’t seem to understand the do-or-die nature of the coming evening’s crisis. She actually complained that Perry hadn’t asked how she was doing herself, how things were going in Vermont. (Vermont?)

  Oh well. Kenton Spires’s wife was missing, too, off on some therapeutic shopping spree in New York. Perry was just as glad. They wouldn’t have to put up with her whining over how she missed Bloomies.

  Unexpectedly, Kim’s buddy Liz Caddigan, the actress, was there, looking crisp and fresh, perhaps because she had nothing to do with “The First Year’s the Hardest.” Perry was a bit unnerved to see her, feeling this gathering should have been limited to “the family,” those directly involved with the show, as if tonight’s airing were a private and intimate affair. Against “Dallas,” it might in fact be just that.

  Watching was pure agony, knowing that at the same time, just a channel away, the flash and flesh of “Dallas” was being offered. “The First Year” seemed now too slow, too gentle, too wispy to survive in this real world. If only they had known, if only they had designed it for sophisticated, late-night viewing! If only the censors hadn’t prevented them from at least having that last scene of lovemaking in the kitchen!