Turn of the Century

by Kurt Andersen

  “If your show works,” she says, “I’m betting they shit-can NewsNight 2000 by Christmas. Maybe Labor Day. Why do you think Barry is so scared of this? Your wife killed dot-com, now he’s afraid you’re going to sink his flagship. By the way? If acting experience is an issue, I’ve never done chewing-gum commercials, but I’ve acted—I was in The Chicago Seven Conspiracy Trial and Inherit the Wind for a whole summer in Ottawa.”

  “Incidentally, I was discussing the show with Francesca at that bar. Period. We were not ‘canoodling.’ ”

  “Yeah? What’s your definition of canoodle?”

  “I’m serious. She went back to work, and I went home. It was absolutely professional.”

  “Save the alibi, I’m teasing. I know it was nothing. You’re not her type.”

  Hey, wait a second! We were flirting. There was definite a sexual edge! She told me I’m her hero! “What do you mean?” he says with the hint of a chuckle, as if he’s amused.

  “I don’t think Francesca canoodles with boys. Before Marie and I got together, when Marie still worked at the Pentagon, she and Francesca had a thing. Francesca Mahoney is ambitious, but even she’s not enough of a whore to pretend to have the hots for you to get a job. I don’t think.”

  George tells Jess he’s completely shocked and excited that she’s interested, which is true. He’s also confused and anxious. Francesca would probably be better than Jess as an anchor, but Jess would probably act the non-news scenes better. Francesca is more fuckable, in the TV-Q sense, but is that what this show needs? (He thinks of the LuLu question: Is that a good thing or a bad thing, Daddy?) Hiring Jess, a real journalist, might win him points with the pundits, or it might piss them off even more—the infotainment Beelzebub seducing one of their own.

  “Shall I try Emily again in the car?” Daisy asks.

  He sighs. “Let’s wait until she’s on a land line.” George is serious (although he started using “land line” humorously last year after a couple of conversations with Mike Ovitz in which Ovitz, worried about eavesdropping, used the phrase repeatedly). Ever since the Real Time meetings at MBC in L.A., Emily has been a shade harsh, totally business. The morning after her man came in fourth in the Texas primary, she admitted that she was still upset about George’s “Fuck Al Gore” comment during the meeting with Featherstone, Stengel, and Burnham. The phrase she used was “deeply, deeply disturbed.” George simply cannot understand the arousal of deep political passion, pro or con, by Al Gore. Gore is a placebo. George W. Bush and Elizabeth Dole are placebos as well. They look real enough, and they make Democrats and Republicans feel as if they’re taking their prescribed medications. They’re nontoxic, but they contain no active ingredients. Any effects produced are entirely in people’s minds. George apologized to Emily for his anti-Gore crack, but when she grumbled something about how the vice president “made Lizzie’s company” and how George was giving aid and comfort to the enemy, he reminded her that they are planning to put on a prime-time news show. And she has remained chilly whenever they talk about Real Time.

  “Messages,” Daisy says. “A woman called Rusty phoned, she said on behalf of Barry Stengel. She sounded dodgy. She’s calling about your, quote, ‘freezing MBC News out of the liver-transplant story.’ Do you want her?”

  George shuts his eyes. He’s about to tell Daisy yes, to charge straight up the hill into the enemy fire—be a man, clear the air, earn this week’s $16,575—when he stops himself.

  “No, first get me Glenn Murkowski.”

  “Glenn Murkowski.” She says unfamiliar American names as if they are self-evidently amusing, like Engelbert Humperdinck or Mortimer Snerd. She’s even worse about all the freshly concocted African-American names that contain sh. Daisy joked to George the other day that she was considering changing her own name to Dayshara. “Mr. Murkowski is on the Rolodex, I presume?”

  “I presume. He’s at The Wall Street Journal.”

  27

  George was yelling at her when she left home, and Sarah was crying about the music in her civil rights video. Now Alexi is crying about the “Worst Downtown Workplaces” story in today’s Voice, and Bruce is about to come in and yell at her. The Voice has declared that it’s launching “a tough but fair-minded investigative war” targeting the “so-called ‘hip capitalists’ and ‘alternative entrepreneurs’ who abuse the cachet and informality of the so-called ‘New Economy’ to exploit young and non-native North American workers.” Lizzie, described as a “member of a glitzy Wall Street and millionaire media crowd,” is accused of brewing $10.95-a-pound Starbucks for herself, but serving $7-a-pound Chock Full o’Nuts to her staff. She is also, apropos of the woman who peed in the reception area, accused of “sadistic callousness” toward “employees seeking help for substance abuse problems and special psychiatric needs.” She is accused of contributing money to a “Republican-dominated Washington group lobbying to increase the number of H1-B visas to allow more foreign workers into cyber-sweatshops like Fine Technologies.” She is accused of “pressuring non-native-English speakers to speak English” despite an “informational warning letter” from the ACLU Language Rights Project. She is accused of “willfully ignoring” an “off-gassing e-mail alert” from the Occupational Safety and Health Administration concerning an employee’s complaint about fumes the new office carpet was allegedly emitting. And she is accused, finally, of refusing to allow employees’ “animal companions to accompany them for any part of the workday.”

  “Pull yourself together, Alexi. I’m not a fascist because I wouldn’t let Reginald bring his fucking ermine into the office last winter.” There is a trace of déjà vu. “This is bullshit. And, Alexi? Why don’t you start buying Starbucks for everybody?”

  “I’m so sorry, Lizzie. Shall I send a memo to the staff saying it was my decision? Or a letter to the Voice?”

  “Neither. Ignore it. Forget it.” The thing in the article that bothers her is the toxic carpet business. For one thing, she worries it could make her insurance go up. It is also wrong—she was delayed in responding to OSHA because Max accidentally deleted the e-mail, but she has not “ignored” it. All the other charges are factually correct. “Leezy?” asks Markus, one of the German programmers, as she walks to the bathroom this morning, “is it correct that you are aligned with the Republican party?”

  Forty-eight hours ago, Lizzie felt charmed. Forty-eight hours ago, Fine Technologies’ public relations challenge was whether to give the news of her Microsoft acquisition to the Times or to George’s friend Greg at the Journal. Forty-eight hours ago, her major legal problem was figuring out how best to share some of her Microsoft profits with her employees.

  “Forty-eight hours ago,” Bruce declares, “you told me you had a completely open mind about doing a deal with Buster Grinspoon. And that evidently wasn’t so.” His weirdness is all of a piece: Bruce with the door closed, Bruce raising his voice, Bruce in brand-new jeans and T-shirt.

  “Come on. I did have an open mind. I did. Sit.” She wants to convince Bruce. So she pushes her luck. “That was also before the Microsoft deal died. I no longer have a few million extra in the bank to pay for five years of AI R and D.”

  Lizzie knows she’s revising the truth, since the Microsoft offer was jerked away the morning after her dinner with Buster Grinspoon. She hopes Bruce won’t notice the chronology problem.

  And Bruce doesn’t, because he thinks he’s caught her in a larger lie. On Tuesday afternoon, while she was away, he went into her office looking for an Industry Standard article about web gaming. Buried under a stack of paper on her desk, he happened to see the furious Post-it note she wrote weeks ago, reminding herself to tell Bennett Gould about the original Microsoft lowball: “2/28/00 BG—NO $!” Bruce, however, believes BG is Buster Grinspoon. He believes that “2/28/00 BG—NO $!” means Lizzie decided against a deal with Buster on February 28, long before Bruce put together his proposal.

  “Lizzie, don’t lie to me. You were just humoring me about Buster. I kno
w that. And I suppose in some sense I do appreciate that.” He doesn’t.

  “I wasn’t humoring you.” She was.

  “Well, in any event,” he says, “the time has come for me to light out for the territories.”

  “No. Bruce. No.”

  “Buster and I talked on the phone all night after you told him he was crazy. And most of yesterday.”

  “I didn’t tell him he was crazy.”

  “Well, anyway, we’re starting a company, Lizzie. I can fund it for a couple of years. And you won’t be able to make fun of me for owning my ‘ridiculous empty piece of shit building on the Bowery’ anymore. It’s going to be the corporate headquarters of Terraplane.”

  Bruce smiles. She shakes her head.

  “You’re serious.”

  “Lizzie!” It’s Alexi’s voice on the intercom. The intercom! More weirdness. “Molly Cramer is on two, and says she needs to talk with you. On deadline.”

  Molly Cramer is the weaselly right-wing syndicated columnist and TV commentator; she must be doing an attack on the Voice attack on downtown businesses. Lizzie is eager to tell her side of the story to a sympathetic conservative, and she’s dismayed by her eagerness. The day is dismaying. (Weaselly: it wasn’t déjà vu before, Lizzie realizes, it was Reginald’s ermine companion and this crazy weasel motif—ermines are weasels. If George wasn’t being such a nincompoop, she’d call and tell him.)

  Bruce stands. “It’s your fault,” he says, still smiling, “you’re the one who convinced me running a business can be fun. Don’t worry. I’ll stay until we move Warps to beta.”

  “I’ll take it!” she shouts to Alexi, and then says to Bruce, “See how fun?”

  As Bruce opens the door, she notices the tiny oval XL sticker on his new T-shirt. Terraplane. The company name, she figures, is a Buster Grinspoon idea, another stupid, made-up sci-fi word like Compaq or Intel or Microsoft. Not only is Bruce leaving her, he’s disappointing her, which makes the abandonment a little easier to take. In fact, “Terraplane Blues” was Robert Johnson’s first hit recording, his signature tune, but Lizzie has no idea. She doesn’t know anything about the blues.

  George sits in shirtsleeves on an old warped granite step of the broad front stoop of St. Andrew’s School, flipping through a copy of the Entertainment Weekly for Kids he picked up from the stack in the lobby. He notices a double-page spread comparing four young blond actresses—Dominique Swain, Melissa Joan Hart, Reese Witherspoon, and Becky Tipton, the actress who plays Little Jo on Bonanza: The New Generation (and who, he reads, is about to start shooting a “teen noir” Nancy Drew film). He also wonders if all the stories in the monthly EW for Kids are simply repackaged from the regular EW for adults. When he and his Journal friend Greg Dunn, who is black, were at Newsweek in the eighties, they used to joke about proposing to their bosses a brand extension called Newsweek for Negroes.

  “Hi,” Lizzie says. “I’m late.”

  He stands. They don’t kiss.

  “Hold on,” she says, “I want to smoke a cigarette before we go in.”

  George looks at her, but not in a charmed or charming tsk-tsk-you-rascal way.

  “Yes,” she says, “I bought a pack. In Seattle. I’m bad.”

  “I saw the Voice piece,” he says. “Not so horrible.”

  She gives a minimal one-shouldered shrug, lighting her Marlboro and squinting down the street toward the bright disk of sun behind the clouds.

  In her twenties, Lizzie gave up reading short stories. Right now she remembers why. They all felt just like this moment.

  “So,” she says, tossing the match into the rhododendron, “what exactly does canoodling mean? Alexi showed me ‘Page Six.’ ”

  George smiles. “I guess it can cover pretty much anything from a friendly job interview to fucking under the cocktail table.” George is glad she’s caught him by surprise. Otherwise, if he’d been expecting it, his smile would have that nervous, frozen tilt. “In my case, it was the former.”

  “What’s the thing about Las Vegas? ‘Heavy petting’?”

  For the record, dear, ‘semi-heavy petting’ is the phrase the Post used. “An actress at Ben’s party who wanted a part on the show. Some crazy white-trash girl. She tried to pick me up, and she was kind of all over me—I mentioned it to you on the phone the night it happened. I didn’t kiss her or anything.”

  “Ah.” Lizzie takes a last drag on her Marlboro Light. “You didn’t tell me about Mike Milken, either. What’s that about?”

  George rolls his eyes and checks his watch. “We can continue this, but we should get inside. Rafaela’s saving seats.”

  Lizzie flicks her cigarette into the gutter, hefts her tote bag, turns away from George, and heads up the stairs toward the door.

  “I have no idea what Milken wants,” George says. “But don’t I have the right to consult with an attorney? And if I can’t afford an attorney, won’t one be appointed for me?”

  Lizzie doesn’t smile.

  “Emily is being extremely unpartnerlike,” he says.

  She looks at him. “Hey, it’s synchronicity!” she says, her tone for that instant all rancid pseudo-glee, making him wonder if she means their marriage. Fortunately, no. “Bruce is leaving me to start his own company with that jerk from Seattle, the cat telepathy guy.”

  George holds open the door for Lizzie. He’s not even aware that he makes a point of holding open doors for people, men as well as women, since he doesn’t do it as a matter of antifeminist chivalry.

  “What’s Emily’s problem?” she asks.

  “Real Time. She thinks it means she’ll have to abdicate as the princess of the Hollywood liberals.”

  The entrance hall is empty but for the security guard, so they walk faster toward the chapel, which is what the school still calls its auditorium.

  “Do you think it has anything to do with the Mose stock price going down? You know, because of the announcement of the show?”

  “No,” he says. “No.” And then, “How’d you know about the stock thing? Ben says it isn’t dropping because of Real Time, by the way.” And then, as they approach the big double mahogany doors, he asks again, “How did you know about the stock price, Lizzie? And about Milken calling me?”

  “Iris told me about Milken. She called to tell me”—as he opens the door, she lowers her voice to a whisper—“that she’d try to talk her PETA chapter out of putting me on their Most Wanted list for my crimes against ermines.”

  They scan the pews full of parents, searching for Rafaela and the children. Lizzie’s sudden good humor, as well as the polite twitches required by wholesale acquaintanceship (quick nods, arched eyebrows, little shrugs, a few mouthed “Hi”s), almost make George forget that she never answered his question about Mose’s stock price and Real Time.

  Rafaela went home right after the last Unfortunate American History video. George has chatted briefly with a few parents, including the Williamsons (who referred to their son as Flip, which must be the public compromise between Philip and Felipe), and now stands alone in a corner, sipping ginger ale with Max. Louisa is hanging on to Sarah, who is talking to Ms. Perez-Morrison. Lizzie is somewhere in the crowd.

  Noticing all the the dark-skinned baby-sitters standing in their corner as he watches LuLu and Sarah, George remembers the moment, the horrible moment, last summer, when the grinning innkeeper on Martha’s Vineyard asked if “your au pair will be occupying her own room.” They had no baby-sitter on the Vineyard; the man had assumed Sarah, unsmiling dark-haired olive-skinned teenage Sarah, was paid to look after the two little blond Mactier children.

  George found Felipe Williamson’s video remarkable and moving. He intercut shots of several Manhattanites and their Upper East Side travel agents discussing fancy Cancún and Puerto Vallarta vacation plans with interviews of Mexican and Salvadoran busboys and waiters at the Viva Zapata Taquería discussing the current Zapatista insurrection. George also praised Sarah and Penelope’s video, 1964, which was about what you’d
expect from fourteen-year-olds, although he regretted that he couldn’t tell Sarah how much her soundtrack “mistake” pleased him. The old songs they finally used—“I Dreamed I Saw Joe Hill Last Night,” “We Shall Overcome,” “Amazing Grace”—are instrumental versions by the Ray Conniff Orchestra, saccharine and ridiculous in a way that seems intentionally unsettling.

  “That wasn’t the kind of movie I really like,” Max confides.

  “Too … newsy?”

  Max shakes his head. “No. Too TV. You knew everything that was going to happen before it happened. The good people were all so good and the bad people were so like completely bad.”

  George cannot, of course, tell Max that his critique is exactly right. “I thought they did a fine job.”

  “Do you think my movie is good?”

  On his computer, Max has downloaded hundreds of video clips from which he’s stitched together a ninety-second trailer for a nonexistent feature film in which the running joke is the hero inexplicably vomiting small animals—a kitten, a gopher, and a pigeon—at inopportune times.

  “I think your movie is brilliant.” The last time Max fished for this compliment, George called it “Buñuelian,” and Max stayed up most of the night looking at hundreds of the thousands of pages on the web that mention Luis Buñuel.

  “Dad?”

  “What?”

  “Can I go talk to Griffin B.?” He waits, then says, “Will you be okay?”

  May I hug you first, Max, squeeze you and kiss you, and then fall to my knees and sob? That wouldn’t embarrass you, would it, son? “Sure, go ahead,” George says. “If you see your mom, tell her it’s time for us to go talk to Mr. Hoff.”

  Griffin B. is Griffin Bisette, Penelope’s little brother. George has been amazed to discover that there were two Griffins in Max’s class this year, who are called Griffin B. and Griffin L., like bacterial strains. But Griffin is precisely the kind of name that’s in vogue among parents who send their children to nonreligious private schools called St. Andrew’s, who buy forty-dollar-a-gallon Martha Stewart paint and fifty-dollar doll-size American Girl butter churns made of solid chestnut. One of Max’s classmates is named Huck—not Huckleberry, Huck—and in LuLu’s class there is a Truman, a Chester, a Sawyer, three Benjamins, two Coopers, a Walker, and a Hunter (Hunter Liu), as well as multiple Amandas, Lucys, and Hopes, and even a Gwyneth. In Sarah’s class, there is a black kid named Van Blount, short for Vantrel (“which we discovered is also a type of rayon,” Vantrel’s mother informed George at a parents’ night, laughing and unembarrassed). Blissed Henderson (a girl Sarah’s age who changed her name to Bee in fourth grade, then back to Blissed in eighth) is the only child in their kids’ classes with an over-the-top, movie-star-offspring name. Yet another of George’s stories the ABC News brass hated: how show business parents have taken up where hippie parents left off, inventing novelty names for their children—the Dakotas (Don Johnson and Melanie Griffith), the Deni Montanas (Woody Harrelson), the Jetts (John Travolta and Kelly Preston), and the Maya Rays (Uma Thurman and Ethan Hawke). George didn’t learn until after the story ran that one of his semi-bosses at Disney had a son named E. (for “Eternal”) Frontier and a daughter named Angel Fire.