Ritz Harper Goes to Hollywood!

by Wendy Williams

  Adam Renfro was tall, with a healthy olive complexion and short brown hair. He was a modern James Dean, and the second attractive white guy that Ritz had bumped into today.

  “Ritz Harper,” Adam announced as he reached for Ritz’s hand. “I’m happy to see that you had the fortitude to stop by, given the recent events.”

  He pulled out a chair for Ritz.

  For Ritz, the meeting was starting on the right note; people knew her.

  “What do you mean?” she asked.

  “Your producer’s attack, and the suicide, it’s all over the news,” Adam said.

  “Oh, wow. Yeah, that was something.” Ritz was stunned that the other media outlets had picked up the hot gossip. “That has really disturbed me, but not enough to stop the show.”

  Adam smiled. “That’s the spirit. Let me introduce you to the others, this is Taha…”

  The petite, black guy nodded.

  Adam continued, “And this is Piper.”

  The youngish white girl briefly smiled. She was wearing stylish wide-rimmed glasses and a tight blouse.

  But for now, they were the Jennifers to Ritz.

  “Welcome, Ms. Harper,” Piper spoke first. “This is a general, or a meet and greet. We must stress that many NAG members think that what Ian has given them is a contract to produce a show. Actually, what Ian gives you is a form that states you are entitled to a First Look Deal.”

  “I think mine is a little different,” Ritz added.

  Adam assured Ritz, “This is just preliminary ground rules that we must recite on behalf of the Big Four. We will definitely comb through your agreement at a later time. Not to worry.”

  “Thank you, Adam.”

  “Let me buzz in for a second,” Taha said. “A First Look is just that, we get to meet you and see if what you’re pitching is something we’re interested in. So if this First Look goes well, and we think you have element…”

  “Element is ‘star power,’” said Piper. “It’s the credibility to carry a project.”

  “Sure. Of course,” Ritz said, taking it all in.

  “Now, if we like your vision, we will green-light your project for production,” Adam said. “Do you have any questions for us, Ritz?”

  She smiled. “No, I understand. And I’m confident that you will like what I’m pitching.”

  Adam took the lead. “Great. So, Ritz, tell us about your television ambitions.”

  “Well, I want to host a talk show where I can discuss issues pertinent to our generation.”

  “Which generation is that?” Taha asked.

  “Well, demographically, I am thinking about young urban professionals, the hip-hop community, grassroots activists, progressive, hip whites, you know, the active audience members.”

  Adam placed his hand underneath his chin. “Generation Hot. We get it.” He smiled. “So, you’re looking at daytime talk, or nighttime?”

  Ritz was stumped. She hadn’t thought of that.

  Piper said, “I’m thinking midafternoon, so definitely daytime, right, Ritz?”

  Ritz nodded in agreement.

  “Because nighttime would be more of an entertainment show, heavy on comedy and music,” Taha added.

  “Tell me specifically,” Adam said slowly as if in deep thought, “what kind of topics would you like to cover on your talk show?”

  “I would talk about everyday issues, hot news items, relationships, fashion, gossip, and celebrity-driven segments as well,” Ritz said confidently.

  “Your radio show put to television, right?” Piper asked. “That’s an interesting concept.”

  “Absolutely,” Ritz said. “But I wouldn’t just want to film the radio show. I am going for originality in content for television. People tune in to radio and television for very different reasons. I want to make certain that the TV show is on target.”

  Adam and the others smiled politely, but with little enthusiasm.

  The brief silence was deafening; Ritz wished Aaron was on the scene to liven things up with a sound effect.

  Adam glanced at his watch and scribbled a few more notes. He rose and extended his hand. “It was very, very good to meet you. We’re going to kick this around a little more and we’ll be in touch.”

  Oh no, she thought. It can’t end this soon.

  “Do you think you really have a grasp of my concept?” Ritz stalled.

  Piper extended her hand. “Oh, yeah, we get the gist. It’s promising.”

  Taha smiled and nodded in agreement. He rose to shake Ritz’s hand. Taha’s handshake was weak and soft. She was hoping to feel a handshake that was a little more confident.

  Ritz collected her purse.

  “You know, that’s a great blouse,” Taha whispered. “Chanel, right?”

  Ritz smiled. “Nothing is more endearing than a man who knows his fashion.”

  Taha leaned in close. “And a man who knows another man.”

  Ritz was startled. “What?”

  “I mean the bow, the blouse, you’re concealing an Adam’s apple, right? I mean, if you’re a woman, you’re beautiful, but if you’re a guy-to-girl, well, that’s really hot.”

  “Taha, I’m a woman. And I’m insulted!”

  He was apologetic. “I am so sorry. This is Hollywood…you never know what’s going on underneath other people’s clothes. Please forgive me, it was meant to be a compliment.”

  With that, Ritz thanked the executives and exited the room. She pulled the door behind her and lingered long enough to hear the chatter.

  “I think this breaking news has her Q rating all over the map, but when this dies down, I don’t see anything promising,” Adam said.

  “But you know what?” Taha said excitedly. “I’m thinking that’s a great format for Paris Hilton, or Lindsay Lohan.”

  “Oh my gosh, yes!” yelled Piper. “But we’d have to get one of them on the radio first.”

  “So, do we have to do anything more with her? She is from Ian—”

  “No,” Taha said. “Just meeting with her satisfies the affirmative action quota. On that note, I’m black, and don’t hate me for saying this, but this affirmative action program has run its course. I mean, come on. Why do you need a diversity program for Hollywood? You need a leg up for Hollywood? That’s an insult.

  “Halle, Jamie, Denzel, Forest Whitaker, Morgan Freeman, Whoopi, hell, even Jennifer Hudson has an Oscar. I mean jeez!”

  Ritz’s hands were shaking. Those fucking Jennifers. She was tapping her foot. Don’t cry, girl. Don’t cry. Hold it together.

  Hearing Taha, the lone brother, repitching her show idea with white actresses and then attacking affirmative action was the last straw to cap off a long weekend of disappointments. She headed to the elevator.

  Tears pooled in Ritz’s eyes. She felt the sting of mascara. If she blinked, the tears would fall. Do not blink, girl. Do not blink! She didn’t have to blink. The tears began to fall uncontrollably. She put on her sunglasses.

  The elevator doors opened to reveal a very pregnant blonde with a network badge dangling from her neck. She exited the elevator but paused and smiled at Ritz.

  “Hey, what are you doing on this floor?” the blonde asked Ritz.

  Ritz entered the elevator and returned the smile. “Nothing much.”

  The elevator door closed. The blonde turned the corner and caught Piper, Taha, and Adam leaving the pitch room.

  “Oh no, the fuck you didn’t!” she yelled.

  “What, Meredith?” Piper questioned.

  “Don’t you ‘what’ me!” Meredith said. “You just signed Ritz Harper and a FOX rep wasn’t at the meeting?”

  “What did you say?”

  “I said I’m calling Rutger. You motherfuckers signed Ritz Harper, the Queen of Radio, behind my fucking back? What do you think, I’m stupid? You think I’m out of commission because I’m pregnant!”

  “Holy shit!” Adam said, turning red. “I thought we just had to meet her to make the AA quota.”

  “Ma
ke the quota? That woman has been on every station around the clock,” Meredith said. “She is the biggest fucking story since the presidential election. Have you lost your minds!”

  “Meredith, she came through Ian. We thought it was one of the NAG generals,” Piper explained.

  “Really? Just a general? And Ian sends her on a fucking Monday? Give me the paperwork.”

  Meredith scanned it, then held it up to Piper’s face. “Those big-ass glasses and you still can’t read? Ritz Harper was supposed to be in a green-light meeting with me and my team, not a First Look with you basement morons. It’s right here, Piper, in bold. Rutger will hear about this insubordination in sixty seconds. And if I were you, I’d start pitching my résumé!”

  The angry pregnant blonde waddled off leaving a trail of expletives behind her.

  28

  Too WHOT to Handle

  Ernest Ruffin, aka Ruff, was the station manager for WHOT, and for the past twenty years the single force keeping the radio station together. But in this new age of technology and instant celebrity, Ruff’s rapid transformation from a top-level management hotshot to an aging tortoise had made him bitter and desperate for the golden days of radio. Ruff managed people, forecasted industry trends, and never allowed himself to get caught up in the shady side of working in radio. Until now.

  The old-school radio legend unleashed every trick in the book to dethrone Ritz Harper. With an army consisting of journalist Michelle Davis, Abigail Gogel, Chas James sympathizers, and a city of disgruntled Ritz Harper Excursion folks behind him, the Queen of Radio was scheduled to be out of a job in less than twenty-four hours.

  Ruff had all the bases covered, save one: the Spiritual Tsunami, Tracee Remington (soon to be) Jordan.

  29

  MONDAY, 12:52 P.M.

  LOS ANGELES INTERNATIONAL AIRPORT (LAX)

  UNITED AIRLINES TERMINAL

  Ritz hated airport terminals because they were filthy, and LAX was the worst. Well, not the worst, but when you despise germs, and especially untraceable, contagious, international germs, LAX was the worst.

  So Ritz sat in her public seat trying desperately not to eat or drink anything that would force her to use the public toilet. She’d rather go on the plane, where there was an element of cleanliness, at least between flights.

  Flight 924 had a connection at Washington Dulles International Airport, before landing at Newark Liberty International Airport in New Jersey. Factor in the time change, and Ritz wouldn’t make it home until midnight.

  That would be cool, except for the circumstances behind the travel. This upcoming meeting with the Three Suits scheduled for early Tuesday couldn’t be good. Still, Ritz was surprisingly in a good mood. While her pitch meeting had turned into a disaster, she’d managed to pull it together and was proud of the way she’d handled herself with grace and dignity in the midst of the storm. And she wasn’t going to give up. If anything, those Three Stooges, aka the Jennifers, made her want to prove them wrong. She wasn’t going anywhere. They will see me again, she thought. And when they do, they’ll be sorry.

  Ritz was going back to New York. She was going to reclaim her throne and make everything right in radio land, have a couple of off-the-chart ratings books, and watch the TV people come for her. Yes, she would probably be needing a new producer, but Ritz was ready to face that challenge, too. She decided she would take Tracee’s advice and start planting her Go-Getter garden.

  Ruff was ready, too. He had been planning his attack. He had been meeting with his army, making sure they all had their marching orders and were ready to do their particular parts. He was fighting this war against Ritz Harper on many fronts. He knew it would not be easy to derail the Ritz Harper Excursion. But that’s why plans were necessary. This could not be an overnight venture. It was years in the making. A few days after Ritz was shot, Ruff had pulled Chas’s coat about his plan. He told Ritz’s producer that while WHOT was number one in the afternoon drive-time ratings, it wasn’t secure in that spot. It was only bolstered by the shooting, which had people tuning in, the way folks hold up traffic rubbernecking after an accident. The ratings weren’t real. And before the shooting, Ritz was on the decline.

  But he had an answer that would shake up the industry—FOX News reporter Michelle Davis.

  Michelle, the honey-baked, early-thirtysomething newswoman, landed the gig as Ritz Harper’s seat-filler, and Ruff’s plans were firmly in motion.

  When it came to crossover, Michelle had all the bases covered. Men loved Michelle because she spun old-school R&B, blended with blue-eyed soul, and she was a sports fanatic. Michelle had carved a niche for herself, the “Between the Beats” segment, where she interviewed music and sports stars during the drive. Not the typical studio shock-jock antics, either; Michelle knew how to interview. She would gently coax the subjects into breaking news on her show. She was a journalist.

  The women loved Michelle because she gossiped and kept it real about her own drama. In her “Don’t Mess with Him, Girl” segment, women could call in and blast out some man who had done them wrong. Women could keep it going on the Web site that Michelle had created that had the names of these creeps, their offense, and their pictures because she didn’t want any other sister getting played out.

  Michelle played the educated-corporate-hottie role to the hilt and stayed on the streets mixing it up with her listeners. And her voice—Michelle purred with an intoxicating blend of the Queen’s English and ride-ordie bitch prose when she was on her soapbox. During her time warming Ritz’s seat, she caught fire. Michelle’s ratings bested the best of Ritz’s. That was all Ruff needed to see. He was sold. Ritz had to go.

  Ritz was still number one, but her act was growing stale. People were onto her, and she had to play cat and mouse to get stars to fess up. And if stars didn’t give up the dirt, Ritz would blast them and kick them out of the studio. It made for good Internet buzz, but how long would this format last?

  In the beginning, Chas worked diligently to keep Michelle out of Ritz’s seat and away from her time slot. But when Ruff explained why Ritz was going down and taking the station with her, Chas knew, too, that he had to come up with another game plan.

  Ruff and Chas were having coffee, going over the trades and reeling at how the fans were forcing the music industry and the radio industry to morph into the land of the open source.

  “Look at the landscape,” Ruff said to Chas. “The artists and the listeners are learning to collaborate without the radio and record-label middlemen. The artists release new music directly to the fans. The fans control and promote the content by downloading the songs, creating their own playlists and blasting the music everywhere. The artists are keeping more of their money. The listeners are hearing the music before we get it. The blueprint of radio doesn’t necessarily include us anymore. And the iPod has all but killed us!”

  Chas nodded. He knew Ruff was right.

  “The format, as we know it now, isn’t stable for us,” Ruff continued, referring to people such as him and Chas. “Personalities will have their parachute, always. But you and me, not so much.”

  “So what are you saying?” Chas stammered.

  “Having the hottest show in New York, and securing syndication in other markets, that’s good for Ritz, but it’s not for you. She’s complacent, and she’s sabotaging her career. Her sabotaged career is your murdered career.”

  Ruff had more, much more, to say. Every coffee break with Ruff was purposeful; he didn’t believe in wasting conversation.

  “And Ritz has no right to be complacent right now,” Ruff said. “Billboard published an item about Michelle’s ratings inching into Ritz’s territory. Abigail is a little too happy about that.”

  But Ruff shared an even more ominous vision: “You know, urban doesn’t mean ‘black,’ and black doesn’t mean ‘hip-hop,’ and the whole format is shifting. Look around. There’s an imminent whitening of all the urban stations. The first phase is to buy the black radio-station owners out. The
Three Suits have done that already. Abigail doesn’t own shit but her last name. We know this.

  “The second phase is to take the strongest black voices off the air and replace them with commercial, more palatable white and brown voices. The third phase—which the Three Suits are actually fighting—is to manipulate the urban ratings. The long view is that we’re all about to get jacked.”

  Chas was bewildered and scared. “What would be the purpose of fucking with the ratings? We’re making money for the Three Suits. And the urban shows are capturing the crossover market; most of them are younger listeners, who stream the shows on the Web. And that’s good for us, you know, that broadens the listening base, increases our ratings. So how could they jack us?”

  Ruff grabbed a napkin and wiped the sleep out of his eyes. This phase haunted him the most.

  “This business goes through cycles where it just cannibalizes itself,” he replied. “It’s a shady business. SoundTron invented these personal electronic radio monitors that report who listens to what in real time. The old ratings measuring method, where people reported what they listened to in their diaries, is gone. The diaries were fairer to urban formats and, in some instances, helped our ratings. But now SoundTron’s electronic monitors are skewed against urban radio stations from the jump because very few urban listeners are carrying the damn things around! More whites have them, and when they’re at home, in the car, or even if they walk into a store and the lite FM shit is playing in the background, that station is clocked and gets a boost in the ratings.

  “No one is clocking what the urban listeners are listening to, and when the SoundTron report is released next month, our ratings will drop. When the ratings drop, the advertising rates drop, too. The advertisers are in bed with SoundTron. They have been waiting for a measuring tool to justify lower rates and paying us less money. Urban stations across the board will lose money. Every station will be fighting for national syndication in major markets. Ultimately, those shows that are syndicated will put a locally produced show—even if it’s high in ratings—out of work. You are in thirty markets but not the big markets. And you can kiss your show good-bye.”