“All these actors,” George says to Ben. “They’re hired just for the grand opening? Or are those Reservoir Dogs boys and the babes all part of the entertainment every night?”
“No! No! That’s what I thought too, like the Kens and Barbies next door, but I asked,” Ben says, whispering, but so excited that his voice assumes its hoarse castrato pitch. “These are all just people off the street, people from L.A., from the sticks, from I don’t know where. The place was loaded with guys and dolls like this last night too! They’re ordinary people, George. Theme it and they will come! I said it was fucking sick, didn’t I?”
Jackie pokes his head close to Ben. “Mr. Gould? The program in the J and B Theater-in-the-Round is about to begin.”
“Holy smokes, come on!” As Ben speed-walks off toward an invisible, unmarked exit, George carefully sets his half-finished third bourbon down on a flashing Money Honey and with a slight zero-to-five lurch turns to rush after him.
Inside the former coffee-and-chocolate counting house, 168 years old, nothing is pretending to be old. Three floors down, the thunder of the oil burner stops, and Lizzie hears the sudden quiet. Outside and above her, a little east and a little north, she notices for the first time since she sat down the soft, chronic Doppler purr of traffic speeding up and down the FDR Drive, coming and going across the Brooklyn Bridge. There’s a pause in the titter-tatter of her fingers on the keyboard as she stares at the spiral of tea steam rising from her mug and listens to the sounds from the top floor—a scream chopped off before it finishes, a group chant, dogs barking, the same scream repeated in full, Barry Goldwater speaking about extremism and virtue, snatches of the Supremes. Sarah’s staying up way too late to edit her civil rights video, another rules violation of which Lizzie approves. She returns to her Harold Mose memo, staring at the screen, writing as fast as she thinks. Rereading the first part of her memo on the advisability of Mose’s acquiring TK, Penn McNabb’s online video software company (“PROS: high-profile name, Silicon Valley presence, potentially good product; CONS: overpriced shares, product delays, undermanaged company”), she decides it isn’t too flip. Now, in the next sections, she’s worried she’s getting into realms she barely understands, dispensing advice not just about video and content, but about TV and journalism—subjects in which she is an expert-by-marriage, at best.
4. Web presence for News. Disney has spent $100 million on ABCNews.com during the last three years. For what? With AP, Reuters, CNN, MSNBC, and a dozen smaller products already online, it’s a practically invisible and completely inessential product. Unless you’re willing to spend at least that much or more, you run the risk of reinforcing what George says is the perception of MBC News as a second-rate
She sips her tea. No. Click, slide, delete.
Unless you’re willing to spend at least that much or more, I doubt you’ll enhance the “brand image” of MBC News. In effect, you will have overpaid for PR, spending on a vanity web site a sum that would, for instance, pay for permanent full-page MBC ads in the Times and the Journal every day of the week.
Precisely as George said when he complained to her a couple of years ago about how much ABC was spending on its web site.
So yes, in other words: on second thought and even on third thought, my earlier advice stands.
5. Online video, broadband, and “convergence.” As you know, aside from the issue of whether or not you ought to buy TK, this is your $64 zillion convergence question.
Too cute? Too familiar, maybe. What does it matter? He asked for it. Mose isn’t her boss.
Over cable modems and DSL, you’re right, it is now almost as good as regular TV. But penetration is still tiny, 2 million or so total after three years. The average person’s internet connection speed is still slow. Online video is still like a parrot: the fact that a bird talks is pretty interesting, at least when you first get it home, but do you really want to listen to it say anything? And I can imagine a scenario in which online video or TV-set web browsing, as they finally do become widely used, might well increase the tendency for TV news to
Fuck the equivocation, she thinks, deleting words with one hand, hefting her mug with the other.
And online video is only going to make TV news even more of a commodity. If regular people really are going to grab a minute or two of digital video news before they run to lunch or pick up the kids, they’ll just want to see the clip of the guerilla POW camp in Los Platanos, or the clip of Giuliani shoving the black minister–no commentary, no analysis, no “branding.” And they will not care one whit who provides
She stops, pulls her bathrobe closed, and reties the belt, gulps the tea, and wonders why she’s up at 11:26, after a cranked-up day dealing with her own digital business and drinking too much wine with Polly, advising a man she barely knows about how to conduct his multibillion-dollar business. Because he’s George’s boss would be a plausible answer. But Mose Media Holdings is a big company. Because he asked me would be another, me and not some eager-beaver young Excel asshole in suspenders up on West Fifty-seventh Street.
And news consumers won’t really care, or necessarily know, who’s providing them the video. Yes, make your deals with the portals to provide them news video and show clips. Your strategy should be to not get shut out. Your entertainment programs are a whole different question, as we talked about, but online is still going to be a tail your TV dog wags for a while. As far as that goes, if the numbers work for you, I’d recommend doing the deals with WebTV and with RealNetworks, if both companies will let you. Use Microsoft paranoia–their paranoia about everyone else, and everyone else’s paranoia about them–to your advantage.
Print. “It’s so much easier to give advice,” Mike Zimbalist, world-class dispenser of advice, has always said, “than to take it.” It’s a ritual self-deprecation, the only one in which he indulges. She looks again at the time on the upper right corner of her computer screen—11:32—and decides it’s too late to call him.
In the bedroom closet, way up behind the filched carton of News Corporation stationery she’ll never use (like father, not quite like daughter), she feels for the crushproof box, finds it, and flips it open, guiltily as ever. Maybe they’re mass murderers, Philip Morris, but at least they still spell it Marlboro Lights, not Lites. If they ever do that, Lizzie might quit completely and for good. She fires up the cigarette, the sixth of the day, and tucks the ovoid silver matchbox from Zero into the cigarette pack. Well, she thinks, filling her lungs, at least I’d switch brands.
“Mommy?”
Lizzie exhales her smoke jet toward the top and back of the closet. “What is it, Sarah?” She drops the lit Marlboro on the floor, grinds it out with her new deerskin slipper, shuts the closet door behind her, and practically leaps the seven steps across the bedroom toward the hallway.
“Can you watch my UAH video?” UAH is short for Unfortunate American History. “It’s only eleven minutes. We’re supposed to show it to our executive producers this week and get their notes.”
Thank heaven for adolescent self-absorption. One of the little kids would have busted her for sure. “Your executive producers?”
“One of the media studies teachers. Each production is assigned to an executive producer. Mine and Penelope’s is Ms. Perez-Morrison. What’s burning?”
“Penelope’s and mine.” Lizzie sniffs. “Maybe I left the stove on when I made tea? I’ll go down and check.” The sniff is over-the-top, Lizzie thinks, absolutely shameless. “I’ll watch it, I promise,” Lizzie tells Sarah. “With Daddy. I’m really beat, Sarah. I have to go to bed.”
“I don’t really want George to see it before the premiere.” Lizzie is too tired to feel bad about Sarah calling George “George,” but she is grateful, retroactively, that Sarah didn’t call her biological father “Dad” or “Daddy” when they saw Buddy in L.A. “He’ll be too critical. He said using music from 1969 was an anachronism. I told him this is entertainment, not like a documentary. He suggested Joan Baez. Joan Baez is so
… whiny.”
“Whiny, huh? She’s not the only one.”
“Yuk, yuk. Anyhow, we’re not supposed to take notes from parents. Only from the executive producers, the UAH teachers, and the kids in the first test screening. So, whatever.” Sarah turns to go back upstairs.
“What’s wrong? Did your test screening not go well?”
“No, they liked it. Except they laughed at the close-up of Sir’s face when he’s beating Penelope with the flashlight. Mom?” Sarah crosses her legs at the ankles and raises her left arm above her head, bends it and grabs a shock of her very short dark hair. It is her Anxious Quizzical Pose. “Do you think I’m a lesbian?”
Lizzie has the urge to retrieve the Marlboro Light from the floor of the closet.
“Well, no, I don’t, Sarah. Why? Do you?” She pauses. “It’s okay if you do.”
“No. Shelly Wheeler says that if you masturbate more frequently than five times a week, the odds are that you’re a lesbian. She says there’s a scientific study from Harvard that proves it. And she told somebody that, last year when Shelly and I were friends, that I told her I masturbate every day. And I didn’t. Tell her that. She’s lying. She’s the one who has all the Indigo Girls’ records.”
Lizzie smiles and shakes her head, prompting Sarah to come to her senses and smile too.
“Night-night,” she says to her daughter, kissing her. She watches Sarah walk down the hall, wearing only panties and a T-shirt with NO MAS spelled in dripping blood-red letters on the back. “By the way? I’m sure there’s no such scientific study. And certainly not from Harvard.”
“You’re such a snob, Mommy. Good night. Check the stove.”
He doesn’t feel tired now. A little woozy, but not sleepy. He figures it was stress plus desert heat plus introspection plus air travel plus liquor that made him nod off during the BarbieWorld theatrical gala, 1960, that Ben commissioned for the grand opening. George was awake when three of the four Monkees first came onstage, their exposed skin thickly covered in gray makeup, to lip-synch “I’m a Believer,” but he missed, Ben told him, “the entire merengue part of the show with Roger Clinton and Jennifer Jason Leigh.” He enjoyed the effect of the clouds of colored gas coalescing into the forms of go-go girls, and he saw William Shatner and Parker Posey leading the parade of Miss America first runners-up from the sixties, which was a little sad, but then he fell asleep again until the very end, when the standing ovation for the writer-director of the piece, Robert Wilson, woke him up. The adrenaline of embarrassment has given him a second wind.
Because hotel 1960 is not yet open, and there are no suites big enough for Ben’s after-party anyway, he tells everyone he sees to come back to his floor at the Venetian. Ben is driving a green 1959 Thunderbird from hotel 1960’s themed car-rental operation, RetroRent, and George has been supplied with a fresh Jack Daniel’s for the road. After Ben told George that Philip Johnson was a consultant on hotel 1960, George started an architecture argument.
“Uh-uh. You’re wrong.”
“Ben, I promise you, it’s real marble. They contracted with some ancient quarry in the Veneto. I think I read it in the same Times Magazine millennium issue that mentioned your antique jukeboxes—”
“Slot machines. You’re shitfaced, George.”
“—slot machines, fuck you, and this guy at the Venetian is using real Italian stone. I’m positive.”
“Bullshit. It’s fake.” Ben looks in his side mirror, then turns all the way around. “Man! That is pretty cool.”
George turns to look. Behind them on the Strip is a two-block-long ad hoc caravan—all the white stretch limos with the windblown heads and torsos of various Kens and Barbies sticking up through sunroofs, the real celebrities’ black limos, and maybe a half dozen other cars from RetroRent, including a lemon-yellow 1964 Mustang, another vintage Thunderbird, and three huge, black forty-year-old Lincoln Continental convertibles. A pair of motorcycle cops, their headlights flashing, speed along on either side of the caravan.
“Police escorts?” Ben squeals. “This is extreme.”
As the cop on the left pulls up even with their T-bird, Ben cranks his window open—rolling down car windows, another dead twentieth-century domestic art, along with shifting gears, dialing rotary phones, using carbon paper, smoking unfiltered cigarettes. Motorcycle cops: very mid-century.
“You’re headed up to the Venetian, sir?” the cop shouts. She’s a woman, some exquisite Benetton hybrid of Latin America and South Pacific.
“Yes, ma’am!” Bennett shouts back.
She swerves away and signals her partner with a cool cowboy hand gesture, circle and point. (Like a cowboy in a movie, of course, since neither George nor Ben nor either cop has ever seen a real cowboy on horseback giving hand signals to a buddy on the far side of the herd.) The motorcycles converge smoothly directly in front of them and speed up. Ben steps on the gas.
George takes his drink from between his legs and sips it. “Just passed the grassy knoll,” he says. “How much farther to Parkland Memorial?”
As they turn off the Strip, riding along the Grand Canal and into the driveway, George feels their mobile microtheme clashing with but then blending into the Venetian’s macrotheme. When he sees the photographers and video crews jostling at the hotel entrance, a spontaneous hybrid minitheme snaps into focus—’59 roadster, Italy, cameras: La Dolce Vita. Twist together enough elements and, kaboom, spontaneously, unpredictably, the fake becomes real. Alchemy! He is a little shitfaced.
“Bwo-no seer-ah!” says the tanned little dirty-blond valet, whose twangy Gary Gilmore intensity makes his blue-and-white-striped shirt read more as inmate than gondolier. He sees the limos and vintage cars pulling in behind and grins. “Well! Now! It looks like you gentlemen are anticipating some significant partying this evening. Have a sweet one.”
George follows Ben into a small, darkened loggia off the main entrance. Ben, looking around, reaches into his pants pocket and pulls out a Swiss Army knife. He hands it to George.
“Blood brothers?” George says. “Or are we going to reenact O.J.?”
“That carved area up there is real marble, right?” Ben is pointing to the blocks above the columns.
George looks up, almost stumbling backward. “The frieze? Yeah. I think so. Yes.”
“Okay, Mr. Architecture, I’m not tall enough. Stab it.”
“It’ll ruin your knife.”
“No, it won’t. Go ahead.”
George reaches up as high as he can and stabs, hard, into the stone just beneath the frieze. The knife sinks all the way in, squeaking as it goes.
“Case closed,” Ben says. “Let’s go.”
George stands on his tiptoes and, wobbling slightly, stabs again, higher. Again, the knife goes right in.
“Come on, psycho,” Ben says, “let’s go upstairs.”
Then George, leaping toward the wall, grunts like a Marine—“Yahhhh!”—and stabs the smooth gray block above the frieze. The knife goes in. On his way down, it cuts a jagged six-inch slice in the wall.
“Polyurethane foam, polyiso foam, and polystyrene,” Ben says.
“You prick,” says George, breathing a little hard, handing the knife back to Ben. “You knew. You hustled me.”
“I knew? Of course I knew. Your shirt is untucked, George.”
As they step out onto the sixteenth floor, Ben’s floor, they encounter two Secret Service agents, both with their hands clasped at crotch level, staring at the elevator. One of the men acknowledges Ben. George raises his glass slightly in their direction as he and Ben walk by, a winky soused-guy toast, as if driven by some atavistic need. He is suddenly reminded of … what? He can’t quite make it out. How pathetically middle-aged, he thinks—intense but foggy memories, memories both stirred up and then unrecognizably muddied by booze.
“Those guys are part of Bucky Lopez’s detail,” Ben says. “I guess he’s been held up at a rally in L.A.” Buckingham Lopez, the former Houston Astro and second-generation M
exican-American businessman, is this election cycle’s quixotic, self-financed, ultra-long-shot candidate for president. The pundits call him “the Hispanic Ross Perot” and “a Forbes 400 Jesse Ventura.” He talks a lot about “wealth creation,” and calls himself both “a pro-gun-control conservative” and “the no-bullshit spic,” an epithet that The New York Times for the first few weeks of the campaign rendered as “the trademark vulgarism Mr. Lopez employs to depict himself as a no-nonsense Hispanic.” One of his privatization ideas, auctioning off the right to name individual tropical storms each year, has already been adopted by the current administration; the TV producer Aaron Spelling was the high bidder, at $1.7 million and $1.6 million respectively, for hurricanes beginning with the letters A and C.
“Bucky Lopez is a pal of yours?” George asks.
“I was the biggest investor in his IPO. And I’m on his finance committee. I love Bucky. Bucky’s an honest guy.”
At the door of the party suite, the blonde and the redhead George saw at Swank City are thinking about leaving. Tuesday Weld—Tuesday Weld from around 1972, not girlish but still thin, just starting to wrinkle and thicken—smiles at George.
Now, after stifling heat plus liquor plus hotel plus Secret Service plus presidential politics plus high-strung blonde, George recollects the fogged-over memory. The summer of 1988, New Orleans, the sweaty last night of the Republican convention, after Lizzie got on the plane back to New York, after Bush the Elder’s read-my-lips acceptance speech, a huge table at the Napoleon House with a dozen people from New York and Washington, journalists and campaign workers, including a brazen young, skinny, blond, right-wing woman. This was a full decade before cable news channels turned brazen young, skinny, blond, right-wing women into a recognizable pundit commodity. She was not pretty, really, but she did have many of the standard signifiers of pretty (young, skinny, blond, brazen), which in the course of a night of Pimms cups become attractive enough and then became, after everyone else left, sometime after four-thirty, since he was not married or even formally engaged to be married, inevitable. And which, of course, he regretted the next morning—but sincerely regretted, in the bathroom, in the hallway, in the elevator, and in the lobby, even before he was spotted by his mother, who was with her delegation checking out of the Napoleon House at that very gruesome moment. “George!” Edith Hope had said, “you look absolutely overworked, honey. Aren’t you finished? Haven’t you—what do you call it?—put everything to bed?”
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