Turn of the Century

by Kurt Andersen

  He’s looking at her with his mouth slightly open, as if she may have just told him an elaborate joke.

  She blushes. “I wrote my college thesis on this. Biological anthropology.”

  He takes a deep breath. “I must have you for myself, Elizabeth.”

  Lord. Her blush spreads, and she tries to look amused.

  “I’m serious,” he says. “I need you.”

  She looks away, toward the reservoir and Harlem. Her frozen smile jitters. “Harold? No.”

  “If Mose Media Holdings is ever to be more than just some pipsqueak poseur—what did the columnist call us last month, ‘UPN on steroids, PBS on acid, NBC wannabe, and Fox putting on airs’—I’ve got to get a serious digital strategy. We’ve bought all these crazy little dot-coms and TK Corporations, but I need someone to stitch it all together. Make convergence happen. You’ve got to come work for us. President of Mose Media Holdings, Digital. And executive vice president of Holdings itself.”

  “It’s completely flattering, really, but—”

  “Stop.”

  “—but we’re not going public, not this year anyway. I can’t just walk away from the company. I couldn’t.”

  “Correct. I know the IPO’s off, and of course you can’t cut and run.”

  “What?”

  “Fine Technologies would be the final purchase in my ‘digital shopping spree.’ The jewel. I’m proposing that you shmoosh your little bubble into my bigger bubble. You and your shareholders get a couple of million shares of Mose Media Holdings, and I get the hottest computer game of next Christmas, plus ShowNet—synergy!—as well as your telephone-robot software, what was it? Speak Memory. Plus the Y2K thingamajig. As a write-down, anyway. And you. Most important, I get you.”

  A couple of million. Ten minutes ago, two million Mose Media Holdings shares were worth $102 million. One hundred and two million dollars.

  She’s flattered that he is serious enough to have had someone dig up the name Speak Memory.

  She’s flattered and disconcerted that he already knows her IPO is off.

  She finds the number, the nine-figure purchase price, dizzying. And flattering.

  She thinks of how she’s ridiculed executives with multiple titular incarnations as “corporate Shivas,” president of one entity, executive vice president of another, vice chairman of something else.

  She remembers what George told her a long time ago, when she almost took a job at a publishing company as “senior change agent and executive vice president at large,” about the folly of being a general with no troops. “Everybody salutes you,” he said, “but you can’t launch an attack. And you get shot at anyway.”

  “Look, I can probably strategize and deliver opinions as glibly as any other MBA,” she says. “And I’m not saying you aren’t serious about new media and digital, but I really have no interest in being a glorified consultant. Half my business school class became consultants, and it was the half I didn’t like.”

  “No! Absolutely not! Ask Timothy,” he says, nodding toward the front hall, “how often he’s briefed or been debriefed by some three-thousand-dollar-a-day MBA fuckwit. Never. Consultants are my bane. And my McKinsey and Booz-Allen.”

  He grins—bane, Bain, get it?—expecting a smile back, which she gives, even though she finds all punning slightly repugnant, like an old-fashioned salesman with a loud suit and bad breath. (Mose’s breath is sweet, of course, and his suit is perfect.)

  “What I need,” he goes on, “is someone to integrate TK Corporation and MotorMind and TurboSearch and all of the new properties into Mose Media, someone who understands that … mind-set, to run them for us. If you’re worried that you’d be an admiral without a fleet, no: the operating heads would report to you.”

  She must take this seriously.

  “Are the existing managements at the acquired companies,” Lizzie asks, “you know, faits accomplis?” She is asking if she can fire people freely—such as Penn McNabb, Nancy’s stupider and prettier brother, whose financial success in the software business offends Lizzie.

  “Entirely up to you. There are a few employment contracts. But nothing an egregiously large severance check couldn’t resolve in about thirty seconds.”

  She nods, but she refuses to smile. This sort of clubby, callous boardroom talk Lizzie has always found creepy, somewhere between boys frying ants with a magnifying glass and a Judenrat planning session. But at this instant, Mose’s hypothetical cruelty on her behalf, with the spectacular green of Central Park below and $102 million in mind, gives her a dirty aristocratic thrill. All that relentless Mose wit might get exhausting. But it could also be a refreshing change from George’s current autistic despond.

  “You sure you would want a greedy vivisectionist working for you? Wouldn’t I be terrible for Hank Saddler’s popularity quotient?”

  “Media Perception Index. Hank is all for you, Elizabeth. When you told him no on the software for the Army, he got scared of you—or, should I say, began to respect your astute public relations judgment and decisive management style. Hank is a bit of an S-and-M’er. As for our MPI, getting these motley web businesses shipshape will drive up the ‘visionary-slash-reinvention-slash-cutting-edge scores.’ So Hank reckons. And hiring a very senior, very high profile young woman also gets us MPI points, for ‘progressive-slash-enlightened.’ Where I’m shockingly low.”

  Transparency, Lizzie thinks. This is transparency, not in Karen’s young-Maoist Animal Farm sense, but true transparency, jolly candor about every mixed motive. She likes Mose. She likes Zip Ingram. She likes amusing scoundrels, as long as they’re honest and loyal to her.

  “Remember,” Mose adds, “I’m Commodore Slave Ship.” He’s referring to his involvement in the Classical Galley Circuit. The CGC is a very rich man’s hobby in which a dozen 150-foot-long wooden boats, imaginary replicas of ancient vessels powered by double-decked galleys of 150 oarsmen, compete in weeks-long races six times a year on six different seas and oceans. Mose owns one of the boats, the Sic Transit Gloria, and co-owns with the Chopper Channel the TV rights to air the CGC spectacles. Lizzie has never watched a race, but she did see the famous catapult-accident clip, from The MBC MegaSports, which occurred during last winter’s Mumbai-to-Djibouti run.

  “Well,” she says, shifting to a more upright, predeparture posture. “This is a pretty astounding offer, Harold. I’ll need to think about it.”

  “Of course. And I apologize, but unfortunately I can only give you the rest of the day. The shareholder meeting’s tomorrow in Burbank. If we’re going forward, my crack team of investor relations advisers say we need to go forward now. At least agree in principle.”

  Mike Zimbalist’s seat on the Fine Technologies board has not been filled, and she has his proxy. If she wants to do this, she requires the agreement of only one other board member, George or Ben or Bruce. She needs to double-check the price. She wants to say, By ‘a couple of million’ shares of stock, do you mean two million?

  Instead she asks, “You’re proposing an all-stock deal?”

  Mose nods. “Two million shares. Two million shares, I should point out, at their fifty-two-week high, and which every analyst in America rates a buy or strong buy.”

  Lizzie nods and says dead seriously, “Well, I’d better get back downtown and begin having some conversations with my board.”

  On her way out, glancing into the sitting room, she sees Featherstone. Silent, and unsmiling, he looks like a different person. He spots her, smiles weakly, and gives her a thumbs-up. In the lobby, on her way out, she doesn’t even notice the FedEx driver dumping a dozen packages on the concierge’s desk; buried among them, in a trim envelope the size of a paperback book, is a computer disk from Chas Prieve. As she hits the sidewalks, she feels like walking the two miles back to the office, despite the heat (she likes hot city days, particularly wandering home through Chinatown, pretending she’s in Shanghai), but she does need to get back as quickly as possible, right now, and begin having convers
ations with her board.

  “Please. Talk to her. The lady just doesn’t get it. She needs to understand that Angela Janeway does not want to be in the series business anymore. End of story. Angela Janeway is transitioning to the news business, the broadcast journalism business. Plus feature films, of course. You know we’re up for the Driving Miss Daisy prequel, in the Jessica role?”

  “I don’t produce NARCS anymore, I haven’t talked to Emily in weeks.” The last time he talked to her, in fact, was when she called about an actress, a day player named Shawna Switzer who said she knows George well. He told Emily to go ahead and hire her, but that he couldn’t vouch for her.

  “I’ve got my own show, Sandy, which goes on the air in about ten seconds.” It’s the beginning of shakedown week. Real Time premieres in eight days.

  “Please. Call her.” Sandy Flandy ostensibly phoned about his new client, Francesca Mahoney (she needs George’s permission to go on the road to emcee The Gap Presents the New Lilith Fair this summer), but wheedling on behalf of his other big MBC client is Flandy’s real agenda. Barry Stengel’s firing removed the only drag on Real Time, and the main obstacle to Jess Burnham becoming George’s star anchor-woman. Stengel also was deadset against trying out Angela as an MBC news correspondent (“We will not, repeat not, put some actress on our air!”), so his departure has permitted Angela’s real dream to come true—during the NARCS summer hiatus, she’s coanchoring News-Night 2000. Already the ratings have moved up. And now her agent wants George to persuade his former partner to let his former star out of her NARCS contract, so that she can become permanent coanchor of NewsNight 2000, and complete her transmutation into Angela R. Murrow.

  “Will you do it for me, George?” Flandy says. “For the Flan Man?”

  George isn’t sure whether losing Angela Janeway would help or hurt NARCS. He can imagine the write-out episode: Cowboy Quesada (Lucas Winton) kills Jennie O’Donnell (Angela Janeway) by mistake as they’re storming a crack factory. SEASON PREMIERE. He ought to want the show to succeed. He created it, and he’ll still get a quarter of any profits it throws off. (He is, his new agreement with Emily affirms, “a passive royalty recipient in perpetuity,” which makes him feel like he is signing a contract for a slot in a mausoleum.) George used to pride himself on his disinclination to schadenfreude, but now he wants Emily Kalman to fail, a little, with NARCS—not cancellation failure, but painful, bad-buzz failure. He wrote the season finale, and it got a 7.9 rating and 15 share. But because Emily changed the depraved Kahuna character from a charming, liberal senator to a thuggish conservative manufacturer (played by Stephen Baldwin) of a mind-reading “mental modem,” the show’s positive reviews didn’t wholly please him.

  “Emily’s stubborn,” George says, “and I know she thinks I’m the cause of the problem, by hiring Jess and opening up the slot for Angela in News. But I’ll talk to her.”

  “George?”

  “Yeah?”

  “I love you,” Sandy Flandy tells him. “I really mean that.”

  He’s going to be late for Featherstone, his first lunch out in weeks, maybe a month, but Daisy stops him as he tries to shoot past her, holding up two fingers, like a peace sign.

  “One,” she says, “Lizzie phoned again. It’s important but nothing bad, she said. Two, your very loud friend, Mr. Gould, is holding, and he also says it’s important.”

  George grabs the receiver off Daisy’s desk.

  “I’m late, Ben. What?”

  “Pat and Mike! What do you think of Lizzie’s news?”

  “What news?”

  “Uh-oh. I’m not going to spoil it by telling you. I wish she hadn’t told me.”

  “Am I going to wish she hadn’t told me?”

  “No, it’s positive. It’s great for you guys. But it screws up my trading. Call her.”

  “We did,” he says, glancing at Daisy. “It’s constantly busy.”

  “Call the wireless number, dummy. The animal nuts are flooding the phone lines. She’s using her cell.”

  Daisy punches the speed-dial button for George, who’s still standing by her desk. He’s looking out over the office, over the plain of four-foot-high green partitions and the tops of human heads, with the folders and papers and books scattered everywhere like mulch. His secretary watches him as he waits for his wife to answer.

  “It’s me,” Daisy hears George say into the phone.

  He listens, staring, saying nothing for half a minute. Daisy has never seen his face do this, tighten and darken, almost change shape. He shuts his eyes for a moment and takes a deep breath.

  “Yes,” he says finally in a careful, flat-line bass, like a POW. “No,” he says, and then with a flicker of rage, “No, as me. Not as a member of your ‘board.’ ” Seconds pass. “Where?” His whole body seems to deflate. “No,” he says after a while. More seconds pass. “No. It’s your life.” He flips the receiver away from his mouth as he takes another deep breath. Then: “Congratulations. I’ll see you.”

  PART THREE

  June

  July

  August

  September

  October

  32

  She finds evidence every day of George’s occupying the house, his residue—wet soap, ripped dry-cleaning stubs, holes in the newspapers, coffee dregs—but she goes days without seeing him in the flesh. “It sounds more like forensics than marriage,” Pollyanna said. Lizzie knows couples who live this way all the time. Creating the show, as George says (said, six weeks ago), is “a fucking monster.” But since she’s taken the Mose job, his absences seem deliberate as well as unavoidable. The two of them are ships passing in the night, but he is now on an obviously calculated harbor-traffic schedule. He was home by seven the nights she was in San Jose and Burbank, the kids told her, and he stays around to help Rafaela get them off to school the mornings that Lizzie leaves early. (“Daddy wouldn’t answer my question,” LuLu told Lizzie after one of those mornings. “I asked if him working for you was a good thing or a bad thing.”) Lizzie hasn’t had dinner with George in a month, including weekends. The weather was still cool when they last ate breakfast together, at the table out back. The last time they had sex wasn’t long after the memorial service for Rafaela’s children, where Lizzie bled through her dress, in April. It is almost July. The weather is sweltering.

  He was gone as usual by the time she got up this morning, and the ReadyAim system went haywire. The kids have been out of school for two weeks, but every minute beginning at seven-fifteen, the phone rang, each time with the same recorded message: “Your child’s transportation will be waiting at the designated location in zero minutes, zero seconds! Got milk? Got milk? Got milk? Got milk?” After the fifth call, Lizzie left the phone off the hook.

  Because she’s been putting in an appearance at Eighteenth Street for a couple of hours each morning before going up to MBC, and because it’s gotten hot, she capitulated a week ago and started taking the car service to work. She still calls Go! Now! herself each morning to order the car, though. A standing reservation would be like buying a whole carton of cigarettes. Today, though, since she gave the Fine Technologies staff the day off (it’s the beginning of the long Independence Day weekend, Warps is nearly finished), she’s heading straight for Fifty-seventh Street.

  As she swings around the horn, and the FDR turns into the West Side Highway, Lizzie looks out at the Hudson, trying to catch glimpses of the three- and four-masted schooners, antiques as well as fake antiques, sailing past the buildings of Battery Park City.

  “I take you before,” the driver says suddenly, glancing at her in the rearview.

  “Oh,” Lizzie says. “Hmmm.”

  “You work with Microsoft, yes?”

  She doesn’t remember the driver. But she can’t imagine that she ever discussed the Microsoft deal with him.

  “No. Not really,” she says, baffled, eager to end the conversation.

  “Yes. And a dill to do with booster grime-spawn?”

 
“Nope. Sorry. It wasn’t me.” Whatever the fuck you’re talking about. She hunkers down into her Wall Street Journal. In the month since she agreed to become a corporate executive, she has started reading the boring stories in the Journal.

  “Booster grime-spawn, his brain cheap? Yes?”

  She doesn’t look up. “Nope.”

  She’s forcing herself through a story about American companies buying up Asian companies since the crash in ’97, utterly bored (“Although companies like Microsoft have benefited from this anomalous trend in the ringgit-yen exchange rate …”) until she comes to a paragraph that mentions Mose Media Holdings. “Some U.S. investment banks are scrambling to take advantage of the Asian economic comeback before prices get too high. ‘There’s still misery and chaos over there, which continues to present fabulous opportunities for client companies,’ says Nancy McNabb, senior managing director at Cordman, Horton, which, sources say, is scouring East Asia for acquisition bargains on behalf of Microsoft, Chase-Citigroup, and Mose Media Holdings.”

  Nancy is amazing. Three weeks ago, after accusing Lizzie of slandering her brother and her brother’s company to Harold Mose (true) and thus lowering the price Mose Media paid, she took credit for convincing Harold to offer her two million shares for Fine Technologies (possibly true). At the end of the conversation Lizzie had, in any event, agreed to let Nancy handle the deal, out of which Cordman, Horton will get a fee of one million dollars. And, evidently, new business from Harold Mose.

  Coming back to midtown every day reminds her of being young, but now that she’s executive vice president, Mose Media Holdings, as well as president, Mose Media Holdings, Digital (“I guess that’s like being a wife and a mother,” Pollyanna said), working in a tower on Fifty-seventh Street makes her feel middle-aged. The giant metal letters on the sidewalk out front, THE MBC, slick and swaggery, are so mid-town. Because the logo is italic, the letters look like they’re tipping over. A smiling tourist dad is framing a digital snapshot of his teenage tourist son cowering just to the right of the C, clowning, as if he’s about to be crushed. “Ein bisschen mehr ängstlich,” the man commands his son, and the boy puts on a look of terror.