Turn of the Century

by Kurt Andersen

  “Martha?” he says to the head show writer on his way back to his office for a sandwich. “The Francesca and Cole B-story scene in the opener just sits there.”

  Cole Granger is one of Real Time’s three star correspondents. As an actor, he had a recurring role as a columnist on Lou Grant, but from 1990 on he’s been working as a TV news reporter in San Diego, where he’s won several local Emmys.

  “I’ve been assuming that after Cole gets back from Tennessee with his Al and Tipper interviews,” Martha says, “we’ll work references to whatever happens there into that scene, and then pay it off on the Friday show when we run the interviews. Also, George—we are going to do the Deep Throat story during shakedown?”

  “Write for now as though Deep Throat is in,” he tells her. “But leave open the possibility that it won’t run.” George pauses. “In other words, the actual situation.”

  “Will we know about Deep Throat before the table read of the Friday show on Friday?”

  “A table read? Fridays are news, Martha. Jess and Francesca can just read the Friday show off the TelePrompTer. We don’t want it to look overrehearsed.”

  The Deep Throat story is based on the revelations of Sylvia Boudreau Shepley, a well-connected Georgetown woman who claims she knows the identity of Deep Throat, from Watergate. Mrs. Shepley, who’s sixty-nine, has become a devotee of a new, extreme Quaker sect whose animating idea is its motto—“No secrets, no lies.” Her new spiritual devotion to absolute truth, she says, has obliged her to spill the beans about the reporting of Watergate, “even though Bob and Carl will be upset.” Mrs. Shepley says Deep Throat was (in whole or in part, she’s not sure) George Bush. If Jude McAllister and his producer can corroborate it before the first Friday show, which happens to be the day before the anniversary of the Watergate break-in, it would be the perfect, killer story for the premiere week. So far, Bob Woodward and Carl Bernstein have both refused to confirm or deny to McAllister that Bush was a source. Woodward laughed when George called him, but Bernstein, George thought, sounded a little nervous. “I know Carl,” Featherstone told George when he briefed him on the show, “from when I worked with Liz Taylor. Why don’t we just drop a hundred thousand or so on him to play along? I’m sure Carl could use the cash.” “If Bernstein were going to sell out Deep Throat,” George replied, “he could’ve gotten a couple of million from some book publisher a long time ago.”

  “Your lunch, Mr. Mactier,” Daisy says, handing him a paper bag as he passes by without stopping, and into his office.

  “One of the writers said they’re all Quaked and Daikatana’d out. Video games? He asked me to ask you,” he hears her saying, “if in the interests of writer harmony and productivity you could possibly nick a prerelease copy of Warps for them to play.” He knocks the door shut with his foot.

  “No,” he says.

  The only live music she ever hears these days is on sidewalks and subway platforms, thirty seconds of steel drums here, a snatch of cello or a capella gospel there. This guy, sitting right under one of the 14TH STREETS spelled out in tiles, playing bluegrass on a slide guitar, is new to the station. He looks fifty, with the smooth, lightly roasted skin of a drunk (the kind of tan that once made tans unfashionable) but he’s probably younger than Lizzie is. He looks alert but stunned, as if he was badly startled months or years ago, like a face in a Mathew Brady photograph. As she passes him, a dozen smiling white teenage girls and boys bound out of the turnstiles toward her, each one wearing a white T-shirt with the logo MISSION 2000! As her train thunders into the station, she glances again at the teenagers (the backs of the T-shirts say KNOXVILLE SAVING NEW YORK!), who now look a little startled themselves by the sight of a white derelict in New York City playing beautiful country music.

  What does Harold Mose want now? she thinks, sitting and staring at the cover of her Business Week (HELLO: THE GOLDEN AGE OF TELEPHONY) on her way uptown.

  Such a shitty day, and not just Monday shitty, either. The fax about Chas Prieve that came in over the weekend from the Malaysian Ministry of Energy, Telecommunications and Posts seemed amusing (“Informing you officially of seizure of pornographs allegedly distributed by your MR. PRIVE, who is under ministerial investigation for violation of national and provincial antipornography statutes”), but then she learned from a wholesaler in Hong Kong that the Southeast Asian distribution deal for Warps that Chas claimed to have closed before she fired him (“A 100 percent done deal, Lizzie”) has been undone, partly because of the Malaysian pornography problem. None of the morning’s papers mentioned the company or her personally, which is a good thing. But the front-page story in the Journal assessing last week’s collapse of the market for high-tech IPOs is a bad thing. (“Although the BeMyFriend.com pricing debacle may have no lasting impact on ‘blue chip’ internet stocks,” the article in the Journal said, “analysts agree that the 83% plunge in KillerWare’s share price within minutes of the open on its second trading day may be a paradigmatic event for the software sector.”) Nancy McNabb’s phone call to Lizzie at home was meant to be reassuring and upbeat. “Timing! Timing! Timing from hell!” Nancy cackled as soon as Lizzie said hello. “I won’t say that if we went out three months ago like I wanted, you know what—but, Elizabeth, just sit tight, and by first quarter ‘01 it’ll be like none of this ever happened.”

  Lizzie’s staff, unfortunately, does not read The Wall Street Journal. They read the Post, which reported last Friday morning that she was about to get very rich at their expense. “Although her employees may be left out in the cold,” the Post story said, “politically incorrect limousine liberal Lizzy Zimbalist will be laughing all the way to the investment bank after prestigious superfinanciers Cordman, Horton take her Silicon Alley software firm public this summer. A source close to the deal told the Post that the flamboyant Zimbalist stands to personally net $70 million.” Even Karen, worshipful Karen who defended Lizzie so passionately during the private-coffee-cache scandal in April, has gone over to the other side. “If you want people to stay c-c-c-c-c-committed, Lizzie,” Karen said too loudly at Bruce’s going-away party on Friday, waving her Dos Equis like a pike, or a villager’s torch, “then you need to start running the company open book. I mean, hello? Transparency? D-d-d-d-democracy?” In other words, let every employee know how much every other employee is paid. She told Karen and a half dozen bystanders that she’d have to think about going open book (no fucking way is what she was thinking), and assured them that she had not even decided whether to take Fine Technologies public, that some of the wealth would be shared if it did happen, and that she would get only a tiny fraction of $70 million in any event. “Kudos, my Mother Courage,” said Willibald, one of the German programmers, raising his beer in a toast. Aside from Bruce, who made her sob and laugh at the end of the party (by assuring her that she’s not “flamboyant” as he hugged her goodbye), only Alexi, Fanny, Willibald, and his pal Humfried still seem to trust her. She’s not sure if it’s actually resentment over the putative IPO money, or if the money is the trigger for latent hysteria about animal rights, or if what’s going on is some surge of post-Warps spring-fever Parisian-barricade sentiment. But it sucks. She loathes it.

  “Excoose me, pliz, mees, one second, pliz?” A slightly lost-looking older man holds his big old-fashioned cellular phone toward Lizzie.

  The Metropolitan Tower doorman has already opened the door for Lizzie to enter, and frowns, irritated on Lizzie’s behalf.

  “Pliz, mees? I cannot be understand,” he says, handing her the phone. “You spik, pliz? I must spik to him,” he says, pointing with his thumb to a name and phone number written on an LOT Polish Airlines ticket folder. “Meester Vallayce Gonshaleez. Pliz?”

  She puts the phone to her ear. “I’m afraid I don’t understand what you’re saying,” a recorded female voice says, sounding a little stern, flaunting her own perfect, plummy, prerecorded American. “Please try again. Speak in a normal voice. Otherwise, I’m afraid I won’t understand.”

&
nbsp; Lizzie gets the problem. To the speech-recognition software at the other end of the line, this man’s Polish-accented English might as well be gibberish, all noise, no signal.

  “Wallace Gonzalez,” she says into the phone slowly and firmly, a normal American voice, but not hers.

  “Thank you!” the recording replies, now sounding like an old friend. “One moment and I’ll connect you.” She hands the phone back to the man, wondering if lines of Fine Technologies’ software code are buried somewhere inside the huffy computer.

  She plunges from the unseasonably hot blare of Fifty-seventh Street into the quiet air-conditioned dim, wondering if the Golden Age of Telephony is a good thing or a bad thing. And wasn’t 1900 the true Golden Age of Telephony? Isn’t this more a Late Mannerist Age of Telephony?

  The concierge is using three at once, one land line ringing through to Mose upstairs, another to a car service that has him on hold, and a third, his own wireless phone, to someone he knows. “Momentito, Cordelia,” he says into the wireless, and lays it on one of the stacks of five different Asian newspapers on his black marble desk.

  What does Harold Mose want? It’s urgent enough that his assistant, Dora (actually, Dora’s assistant, Lucy), called Daisy to get Lizzie’s wireless number after they couldn’t get through on any of the regular Fine Technologies voice and fax lines. Hundreds of friends of animals and people for the ethical treatment of animals have been calling since Friday as part of their organized “education and lobbying” campaign, keeping every line permanently busy with their sermons, their photographs of butchered puppies, and their death threats. In their single real conversation this week, after George reminded Lizzie that Charlie the caretaker had possibly murdered cats and definitely killed weasels on their land at Lake Marten, he added with an unfunny grin, “Don’t worry, honey, I won’t snitch on you to PETA.”

  At Mose’s door, his Filipino manservant—that is the word—informs her that Mr. Mose will be just a few minutes, then takes Lizzie to a room that has no obvious function, a rarity in Manhattan. There is a single huge upholstered chair (or a very small love seat) and no TV set. Although there are a few shelves of books (Like, Cold: An Oral History of the Canadian Beatnik Movement, The Zen of Curling, Moderation Miracle, CanadaPop: From Anka to Alanis, Hail Salmon! and 101 Rather Unusual Things to See in the New Province of Nunavut), it is too small to be the library. On a red quilted-bubinga-wood table is an open laptop with a screen saver (a tiny MBC logo grows to fill up the screen, then tastefully disintegrates as NEW network for the new century scrolls across, the two NEW’s alternately throbbing), but the table is too cramped to work as a real desk. Except for a Karsh portrait of Mose himself, and his framed 1997 U.S. citizenship certificate, the walls are hung with a dozen medieval maps of the heavens. Gloria Mose, she decides, calls this the sitting room.

  She stands. Examining the computer, a limited edition Intel 1000 (only a thousand 1000-megahertz machines made, given as gifts last Christmas to a thousand “planetary leaders”), she idly taps a key. The screen saver blinks away, revealing the ticker symbol for Mose Media Holdings and the current price, ME 51⅛, and below that a graph charting the stock price since January second. The graph bears an uncanny resemblance to the southern border of Texas, Lizzie notices. (The Times has been running a lot of maps lately of the Mexican border). At the beginning of the year, Mose’s stock price was 47, around El Paso, then meandered south along the Rio Grande, jagged up some in March, then turned south again, hitting Brownsville, its bottom, in early April, before heading steeply north-northeast as it has done ever since. It snaked through Corpus Christi and then during the last few weeks flattened out and turned east near Houston. The price, Lizzie notices, just has ticked up a teeny to 513⁄16. A teeny: since the Stock Exchange sliced price fractions from eighths of a dollar down to sixteenths a few years ago, Lizzie has enjoyed imagining Ben Gould and the testosteroned louts on Wall Street shouting teeny all day long.

  “I want that up.” Harold Mose has appeared, wearing a gray suit, pink shirt, no tie, and red velvet slippers covered with golden stars and crescent moons. If men still wore ascots, he would have one on. He has new glasses—the round red plastic frames have been replaced by rough black steel ovals.

  “Hello!” Lizzie turns her cheek for the kiss.

  “I can’t tell you grateful I am. For popping up here on such short notice. Your plate is full, I know, overflowing. But I’ve got to be at Teterboro at two, and we absolutely had to talk before I leave. Did Luis get you whatever you wanted?” He directs her toward the living room, and a bright purple Sottsass couch with, of course, a view of the park.

  “L.A., and then Tokyo, your assistant said?”

  “Correct. And very quickly downhill from there—Singapore, Moscow, and Kiev, where they’re desperate to pay me to buy their television and telephone company. As if I could do anything with their boatloads of hryvnias. It may shock you,” he says, sitting down in an old Frank Gehry corrugated-cardboard armchair across from Lizzie, “but the Ukrainian hryvnia is a somewhat illiquid currency.” He can’t help glancing outside. A cloud shadow is drifting over the Time Warner—CBS construction site on Columbus Circle, about to darken acres of trees and grass on its way toward Fifth Avenue.

  “Astounding view,” she says. Rich people spend a lot of time contemplating Central Park. Some of them half believe they own it: my view, my park. Or is it the unattainability—someday all this will never be mine—that makes the view such a luxurious fetish? No matter how many millions may drift into her possession, Lizzie believes, she will never be a rich person.

  “Last week was a bit of a bummer for we digital revolutionaries, eh?”

  “Well,” she says, “MyBestFriend-dot-com was dead from the start, because of the porno piece. I know their spin, the sex business is only part of it, it’s ‘a relationship community,’ all that. But ‘the market’ is still just a bunch of straight guys from Chappaqua and Evanston. Committing the firm’s and clients’ capital to live video feeds of anal inter-course—we’re not there yet. Quite. And the KillerWare pricing was just crazy.”

  “So we’re not seeing the beginning of the end of the web? More of the bubble bursting?”

  “Nah. Anyway, it’s not a bubble. It’s more like foam. In foam, individual little bubbles burst all the time, but new ones form, and the foam doesn’t go away. Some little bubbles shmoosh together into bigger bubbles. You know?”

  He’s smiling. What does Mose want? Maybe he’s delivering a speech in Europe and wants to steal some ideas duty-free from her.

  “The novelty of the web isn’t wearing off?”

  “No, people your age, baby boomers—”

  “Thank you.” Mose is almost sixty.

  “—starting with baby boomers, the big idea is getting whatever you want right this second. Now. TV twenty-four hours a day, sex, drugs, all of that. Earnings growth this quarter. So the web delivers in spades—books now, CDs now, flowers and groceries now, stocks, data, letters, anything I want I can get now, all the time, by tapping a button.” She’s surprising herself with her conviction. She feels like an evangelist. It’s so much easier than running an actual business.

  Mose turns his head to let the uniformed manservant address him.

  “Mr. Featherstone has arrived,” Luis informs his master. “In the sitting room.”

  Mose nods. If George were here, he would want to hum the opening “Goldfinger” bars. She does miss George.

  Mose asks her, “Do we think interactive entertainment is going to make anyone any money?”

  “Well. If by interactive entertainment you mean video on demand, ordering up any movie or show when you want it, right now, that’ll be great. Throw away the VCR. But I guess I don’t know how that makes money for anyone but the Intels and the movie studios. And game playing. But if interactive entertainment means most people will do anything but sit on the couch and stare at Monday Night Football and Baywatch? No.”

  “The couch p
otatoes will continue to bake.”

  “It’s the lazy-sex paradigm,” Lizzie blurts, regretting it.

  Mose tilts his head and squints.

  “Oral sex became the easy default mode, just like dishwashers and microwaves. Given a choice, people would rather be performed on than perform. That’s why they’re going to keep watching TV for a long, long time. Just watching it, not ‘interacting’ with it.”

  Happily, Mose does not dwell on her metaphor. “Any film now, any TV show now,” he says. “What’s the tipping point there, do you think? We can’t get enough bandwidth to send your husband’s program to an individual viewer whenever she wants, but until she sees how that works, she’s not going to demand the bandwidth. You need to build the pipe to get the business, but you need the business to pay for the pipe. Catch-22. How the Heller do you get around it?”

  Pipe, bandwidth, tipping point. The man is a connoisseur. His Joseph Heller pun was lame and labored—but “she,” the she was slick. “I don’t know, you see the predictions. Five years? Maybe. Who knows?”

  “But you don’t doubt it will happen?”

  “It’ll happen. I’ve bored you with my hypoglossal analogy already, haven’t I? In one of the memos?”

  “If you did, I very carefully paid no attention.”

  “The hypoglossal canal is the hole in the bottom of your skull where the spine connects to the brain,” she says, touching the back of her neck. “It holds all the nerve fibers that run from the brain down to the muscles in your tongue. In chimps and gorillas, the pipe, the hypoglossal, is really small. A million years ago, humans had little chimpsize ones too. But over the next half million years or so, the hypoglossal canal expanded, doubled in size. So more nerve fibers could run up to the tongue. And so then, finally, humans could talk. And here we are.”