Then there was the call from Ben, not the first, wonderful, screaming one at the office Monday afternoon (nobody is better at loyal apoplexy than Ben Gould), but the second one, early Tuesday morning here at home. At first George listened, a good audience as usual, amused but unsure where Ben was going with his line about Calvin Klein (“Who would have thought you could double the price of Jockey shorts by printing the name of some silly guy from the Bronx on the elastic?”) or his calculation that the two of them personally know one in every five hundred regular buyers of Häagen-Dazs and Ben & Jerry’s ice cream. “Two words, George,” Ben said. “Black Dog.” George is familiar with his claims to being the first person to take Bill Clinton to the Black Dog restaurant on Martha’s Vineyard, before he was president. Now Ben wanted to confect chic, eccentric businesses like the Black Dog from scratch. “These are truffle businesses,” he said, “but I want to figure out how to cultivate truffles.” The trick, he said, is to go into towns like Sag Harbor and Aspen and Malibu, invent the right bar or ice cream parlor or bait-and-sporting-goods store (or bar-and-bait-and-ice-cream shop) that reeks of quirky local authenticity, then roll each one out to a few other resort towns (“five physical locations, tops”), and finally launch them into direct-mail and web-commerce brands. Black Dog had turned into a retailing phenomenon unintentionally, even reluctantly, and that took them a decade. Ben said that, with the right ideas, and capital, and focus, they could accomplish the same alchemy by 2003. “If RJR and Philip Morris and AT&T can go fake-funky and sell Red Kamel cigarettes and Red Dog beer and Lucky Dog phone service, why can’t we do it for leisure retail, pardon the expression? You know? And let’s move beyond dogs, and the color red. Hey, what do you say? Ben and George’s. (I’m not serious about the name.)” George did not reply, “I’m a journalist, Ben,” or “I’m a television producer, Ben,” or “I want to write and direct films, Ben,” or “I’ve never heard such a depressing proposal in my life, Ben.” It’s one thing to enjoy his friend’s sick, splendid business ideas from afar. But it shocked George that Ben would try to enlist him in one of his schemes. He said, “I don’t want to start a chain of yuppie ice cream saloons.” Which pissed off Ben. “You’re part of the natural aristocracy, I guess? You want to live like a prince, but actually making money is just too tawdry for the refined sensibilities of George Mactier?” “Maybe my brother-in-law would like to do it,” George said. “He sure would,” Ben replied, pushing the salt grains deeper into the exploded tissue, “but I wanted to offer it to you first.”
This morning, Sarah breezed off to work at her web site in a T-shirt that says PUSSY POWER in pink letters. What would Lizzie have done? What would he have done a week ago? But he didn’t have the strength to discuss it. (What exactly do you mean by PUSSY POWER, honey? And when did you stop wearing a bra?) At least the letters are small. At least it doesn’t have an exclamation point, or an illustration.
The rich get richer; the bleak get bleaker. It depresses him to bump and scoot past Rafaela during the day, as if they’re both intruding. At lunch it depresses him when Max and LuLu insist that he fry up the precut carpaccio he buys from Balducci’s. It depresses him to see the half-used bottle of Rose’s lime juice in the refrigerator—the Harold Mose mixer. Ordinarily, it pleased him to pound meat thin with the huge cartoony wooden mallet, his single favorite kitchen task. But beating the chicken breasts tonight makes him recall the Sunday he and Tuggy Masterson used two stolen Butterball turkeys for .22 target practice, which depressed him in 1967, and does again now.
Before dinner, lying on the Biedermeier couch in the living room (their first joint Christmas present to themselves; doubly depressing), he’s reading the biography of Jean Cocteau that he asked Daisy to get for him during one of his misunderstood-genius rants a few weeks back. He’s in the middle of a passage describing the May midnight in 1913 when Cocteau watched Diaghilev, Stravinsky, and Nijinsky sobbing and keening together in the Bois de Boulogne, disconsolate over the spectacular failure of their ballet. George is just forming the thought, Is it too ridiculous to imagine that a century from now …, when LuLu leaps onto his lap suddenly and says, “That man on your book looks like you, Daddy. Is he dead?” Then, looking at the cover, realizing that he’s trying to use a child’s random observation to talk himself into a link between Le Sacre du Printemps and Real Time, he is overcome by a sense of his own spuriousness.
Of course, today, July 20, is also their tenth wedding anniversary, which would be depressing enough, but it turned excruciatingly so when her gift, a photo of the whole family floating and grinning in Lake Marten last year, arrived by UPS. “Have a good evening, Mr. Zimbalist,” the UPS guy said. He hasn’t opened the note that came with it.
And now, sitting outside on a rich, cool July evening with all three real live children, finishing a dinner of fried chicken salad by candlelight, his sadness is so exquisite it’s breathtaking.
“I talked to Francesca today,” Sarah tells him, apropos of nothing but the standard family dinner-table download.
“Really?” George says. “Why’d you call her?”
“We talked at you guys’ party about 1964, and I sent the tape to her last week, and she said she thought it was awesome. She says there’s some new, like, teen documentary series this fall on MTV, The Good Fight? That it would be perfect for. Francesca thinks.” Sarah smiles, proud of herself. She shrugs hopefully.
“That’s terrific, honey.” Now he feels professionally envious of his fourteen-year-old daughter. How depressing. Max catches his eye. George assumes the boy is thinking, Dad, you think her video is as corny and confused as I do, don’t you?
“She said she thought we should give it a new soundtrack. You remember it, right? What do you think would go best—ska, rap, electro-acoustic, ambient, garage, gothic, psychedelic, noise, or twee-pop?” Except for rap, ambient, and psychedelic, and (maybe) ska, George doesn’t know what any of those sound like. That’s depressing.
“Ambient might be cool,” he says, depressing himself by sounding like some ponytailed, middle-aged asshole.
“Is it okay with you if I go up and work on the computer?” Max asks.
Requesting special permission to leave the table, to abandon his poor old man: how unbearably sweet. “Sure it is, Max. You’re not up there spending a jillion bucks on ten-dollar-an-hour web gaming, are you?” His anti-video-game crack reminds George of Lizzie.
“Nope,” the boy says as he heads inside.
George asks Sarah if she’s packed for her trip to France, and she says yes, mostly, and asks him if he’s ever been to Nice, and he says yes, remember, a year ago last spring when he went to sell NARCS to foreign TV buyers (with your mother, he doesn’t say), and she asks if she can borrow Lizzie’s Japanese shawl, and he nods, barely. LuLu asks about the single firefly flitting around the backyard (“Is he lonely, Daddy?” she says, as if a midsummer’s line has been written for her), and then about what kind of music they play in hell, and what kind in heaven.
Sarah, of course, professes her disbelief in heaven and hell.
“Ambient, maybe,” he says, “in heaven,” to which Sarah gives a tiny sympathy smile. No smile at all would have been less depressing.
“Maybe,” LuLu says with a pixie preperformance smile as she dips her index finger into the dregs of her father’s sauvignon blanc, “it’s this.” She begins running the wet fingertip around the rim of his glass, three circles every two seconds as he’s taught her. He’s always pleased that she’s enchanted by such a sad, serious, beautiful noise. It’s dark enough now, he hopes, that his daughters can’t see his eyes. “Just tears,” he remembers LuLu insisting a few weeks ago (only a few weeks), “do not count as crying. They don’t.”
39
She’s struggling to keep in mind the distinction between guilt and sorrow. The plane makes it harder, since flying on private jets always gives a vestigial frisson of guilt, about ten stretch-limo-rides’ worth. Exchanging small talk with Harold and Hank and Ra
ndy just now as they all boarded, the mere fact of chat, has also provoked a guiltlike sensation.
But she has not betrayed George. She is not betraying him. They canceled his show because it was expensive and the test audiences hated it. She didn’t cancel his show. She didn’t have any idea they were going to cancel it.
What if the show were still on the air, and they’d fired her? Would George resign from Real Time in some grand act of solidarity? Exactly.
She considered quitting. She didn’t consider it very seriously. (A trickle of true guilt, but only a trickle.) If she quit, it would contractually permit Mose Media Holdings to cancel the acquisition of Fine Technologies, which they may do if she leaves the company voluntarily during the next six months. Then she wouldn’t be rich, not even on paper. Her only out is the change-of-control provision in her contract, which would allow her to quit in the event of a sale or takeover of her division. But otherwise, if she told Mose “Fuck you,” she (they, George and she) would forfeit the hoard of fuck-you money. And then she would go back to running Fine Technologies alone, a prospect that, to her surprise, she finds almost unbearable to contemplate. She has moved on. For better or for worse. For richer or … whatever.
Anxiety is keeping her awake (despite a virtually real bed, sheets fancier than the ones at home, a down pillow), but it’s not because she feels guilty in the sense of deserving blame. She feels rotten, not culpable, slightly heartless for flying off to Asia with Harold Mose and missing their anniversary, but definitely not treacherous.
Her husband may abominate her, and she can sense on the phone that the children blame her for some of his misfortune. But her other family members, the eighty-odd child-men and women at Fine Technologies, seem to have accommodated themselves to corporatization and her semiabandonment. She wonders if her employees’ antipathy is related inversely to her physical presence. The animal-rights protesters declared victory and withdrew after she sold to Mose and decamped uptown, which has allowed life on West Eighteenth Street to tranquilize. The newspaper boors of the left and right have climbed back onto their more familiar hobbyhorses. (She saw in yesterday’s San Francisco Chronicle, however, that Molly Cramer couldn’t resist using the Real Time cancellation as a pretext for rehashing all her previous columns about George and Lizzie. The self-composting obsessiveness of hack ideologues like Cramer makes Lizzie wonder: do they finally write one last column that weaves together every previous column, but even more shrilly, and then drop dead?) The mania on Eighteenth Street also subsided, of course, after Warps was finally done. Alexi said on the phone yesterday that it feels like summer for the first time in his three years there: half the staff gone (Bruce in the new Terraplane office on the Bowery, Fanny and her two Germans at the annual Def Con hackers’ convention, Karen off selling Wiccan Ware disks at Renaissance festivals), those still around working at half speed, and Lance Haft acting as if he’s in charge, like a summer-school teacher. Lizzie assumes that the stock deal she cut for the staff as part of the acquisition helped mellow the mood, too. And with that peaceful moment of George-free thought, enveloped in the white noise roar of the BMW—Rolls-Royce turbines at fifty-one thousand feet, she finally sleeps.
Of course he’s flying first class. He has no income, no job, and no show. Fuck it, why not go all the way? He’s wearing dark glasses. He’s drinking a bullshot. He’s listening to a CD (Cowboy Junkies), and he’s reading Variety.
Jack Delancey’s piece on the cancellation is all right. He uses George’s “It’s only television” quote. He connects (sloppily, without real evidence) the Real Time alternative-medicine story to the transformation of Mose’s Winter Channel into Reality Channel, and he connects the Farley Lyman story, even though it wasn’t broadcast, to MBC’s possible deal with Derek Dreen for The Illionaire. He quotes George saying, “I’m not in the series business anymore,” and mentions “a frenzied flurry of studio interest in the prod’s pitch for a retro comedy pic about teen antiwar assassins that Mactier would pen and possibly helm.” For a long time, George has had an idea for a screenplay set in the sixties about college students plotting a political murder. Now, given this frenzied (albeit entirely fictional) flurry of interest in letting him direct it as a feature film, he plans on fleshing out the idea, and pitching it to people other than a Variety reporter. The worst quote is from an anonymous MBC executive who alludes to the network’s “very real and longstanding philosophical qualms” about what Variety calls the “edgy journo-entertainment crossbreed concept” of Real Time.
But not bad, all in all, he thinks, reading the story again, and again, and skimming it a fourth time before turning the page, where his eye is yanked directly (if not extrasensory perception, what?) to a story headlined IS A WALL STREET WHIZ CORNERING THE LIT BIZ? The article reports that “Bennett Gould, head of the boutique financial firm Bennett Gould Partners, also known as ‘$,’ is said by sources to have quietly bought a studio’s worth of pic and TV rights to ‘multiple’ bigname contemporary fiction and legit works. Authors purchased are said to include A-list biggies Bellow, Updike, Roth, Salinger, Brit bad boy Martin Amis, movie-legit scribe Tom Stoppard, and Doonesbury creator Garry Trudeau, as well as lesser-knowns William Gaddis, Walker Percy, Don DeLillo, Laurie Colwin, David Foster Wallace, Lorrie Moore, Robertson Davies, GOP speechwriter Mark Helprin, and porn-lit scribbler Nicholson Baker. From his Long island summer home in literati-laden East Hampton, Gould declined to comment on his alleged buying spree.”
Ben lied to me, George thinks. He lied. And then he remembers Ben’s friendship with Bucky Lopez, and the Real Time story about Lopez’s handgun conflict of interest.
As long as he’s known him, Ben Gould has said, “Mactier, you are so naïve.” And George has always teased Ben that he’s Exhibit A in the case for cynicism and romanticism as black-and-white flip sides of the same wrong idea. Staring out at the clear blue sky over America, George realizes that naïveté and paranoia have just the same sort of consanguinity.
It’s George who made a doctrine out of befriending cheerful rapscallions, the Zip Ingrams and Ben Goulds, “as long as they’re smart and loyal rapscallions.” It’s George who told her how smart Harold is. And she’s not even his friend, besides—she’s his employee (and shareholder). How deep does any vein of loyalty run between employer and employee, or vice versa? Canceling Real Time was not an act of disloyalty, but rather one of those gut-wrenching executive decisions, those tough calls, those hard choices for which bosses are gravely celebrated and paid their magnificent salaries.
“May I give you more jackfruit marmalade, sir?” asks the Cindy Crawfordesque flight attendant.
“No thanks, my dear, but another Rose’s and Pellegrino would be superb, when you have a chance. Elizabeth, anything else for you? Another brioche?”
She shakes her head.
Hank Saddler has retreated to the other side of the plane to call people who’ve left him messages—“This is Henry Saddler returning,” he says into the phone again and again, performing the executive-secretarial trick of making the transitive verb grandly intransitive. Back in the media area, Randy has booted up the DVD golf simulator, and has conscripted the black Pamela Anderson flight attendant to play eighteen holes of Augusta with him.
“Harold,” Lizzie says across the breakfast dishes, “this is uncomfortable, but we’ve got to get it on the table. It’s the monster in the room. We need to have a conversation.”
“Absolutely correct,” he says, pursing his lips, removing his napkin from his collar, taking off his glasses (new ones yet again—tiny brushed-brass circles that look eighteenth century) and sighing heavily. “Real Time.”
“Was it honestly just the test results that made you decide to cancel it? I mean, after one week of shows … ?”
“Elizabeth, it was the toughest decision I think I’ve ever had to make as an executive. I know that’s a cliché, and I know it doesn’t make it one whit easier on George, but it’s true. Now, as to the audience testing,” he s
ays, shaking his head and turning his palms up, “I know it was the most extensive we’ve ever performed, but I frankly am not aware of the details, or any of the rest of it. At the end of the day, it was Laura Welles’s decision to cancel Real Time. And it was a decision I reluctantly accepted.”
Push. Push. “George said Arnold Vlig used the budget overruns as a pretext—”
“We knew the program was going to cost a fortune going in, Elizabeth—quite frankly, more than we could rationally justify. ‘New Network for the New Century’ is something I’ve genuinely believed in, as you know, and I jawboned Arnold and the rest of them into taking a leap of faith on Real Time. But one-point-six million a week was already stretching it, and one-point-eight, one-point-nine … we were looking at a hemorrhage, quite frankly. A hemorrhage that was not getting good critical and editorial reaction, and a hemorrhage with essentially no back-end revenue.”
Lizzie nearly nods along. Harold Mose does believe his own bullshit, and makes the people around him want to believe it too.
“Which we can particularly ill afford,” he adds, tipping his head down a little, “given the internet losses we’re projecting through ‘02. If I had insisted, for the sake of my vanity, on overruling Arnold and Laura and letting the show run for nine difficult months, what then? Do you think George would have been happier seeing the thing canceled after he poured in nine more months of his heart and soul? Isn’t the more humane act to quit the game after a single end rather than play all ten and never get a stone anywhere near the center of the house?”
Turn of the Century Page 61