Mumbo Gumbo

by Jerrilyn Farmer

  What to do…I was being ordered around by Chef Howie’s psycho mother. Something inside of me just wanted to resist. But I shouldn’t. I knew that. I did. I knew it.

  Old bat Finkelberg held my gaze, a slight smile playing at her lips. Stella felt the need to fill the silence, explaining, “Madeline is just getting the hang of things around here, Fate. We’re trying to fill her in.”

  She looked nervously at Nellie, who chimed in with, “That’s true!”

  What terrifically weird dynamic ruled this world? I hated this sort of power play. I tilt at windmills. I tilt at Chef Howie and his mom! This desire I have to oppose idiocy is one of my weaker people skills. It’s a very good thing that I am my own boss in my own event-planning company, I realized. But I was not my own boss now. And the truth was, I needed this particular job. With that in mind, I used what little maturity I could scrape together and struck a nonresistant pose. Alas, my act of restraint was not a complete success. I couldn’t keep my honest eyebrow from arching a fraction of an inch higher than its more mature mate. Ms. Finkelberg, taking note of my absent apology and my uneven brows, smiled to herself and turned quickly, following Howie out of the room.

  “Chef Howie’s mom does not love me,” I said as soon as the door closed.

  Susan Anderson broke into a delighted smile. “Madeline!”

  “You are perfect!” Stella said.

  “Perfect,” Nellie said.

  Susan’s eyes twinkled. “Fate Finkelberg is not Chef Howie’s mom.”

  “She’s his wife,” said Nellie.

  Oh, man. The handsome young chef and the driedout old showgirl with the fist of iron—there had to be some terrific story behind this bizarre Hollywood marriage.

  The door to Greta’s office opened and in walked Greta Greene herself.

  “Greta!” Stell said. “Oh good!”

  “Thank God you’re back,” Nell said. “We have got to talk.”

  “Look at the time,” Stell said, seamlessly taking over. “We’ve got a major contestant problem. We are terribly late getting today’s contestants to the set, but—”

  Greta interrupted her. “I know. I know. Everything’s running late today. I need to talk with Madeline first. Then I’ll come find you two and we’ll straighten out your contestants.”

  Nell still looked worried. “We’re running so far behind, I’m—”

  Greta gave them both a sunny smile. “It’s just that kind of day. I’ll be by later, okay?”

  What could the two contestant coordinators say? Even Susan, who was standing by, waiting her turn to ask Greta a question, seemed surprised. It was rare for Greta to seem so little concerned at being behind schedule. Nell and Stell, no less baffled, left the office.

  “Susan,” Greta said, looking down at her notepad. “How many scripts are out now?”

  “How many have I handed out to our crew today?” Susan asked. “Nineteen, why?”

  Greta pantomimed, spreading her arms out and then scooping them up again.

  Susan tensed, like she had just been pinched by a sudden, but very familiar, pain. “Changes?”

  “We’ll talk later, okay?”

  Scripts were distributed to the show’s director and all the behind-the-scenes technical people in the morning on tape days. Any changes made after that distribution were issued as separate pages, each subsequent version a new color so everyone could keep track of the fact that the green copy of page eleven was fresher than the pink one, and so on. The only reason scripts were collected outright, like Greta was now requesting, was when major revisions were in the works. And on the day of a taping, such an ominous move signaled a fight-against-the-clock workload for the head PA.

  “Let’s gather them all quickly, please,” Greta said, and added, “I’ve got Advil or Tylenol, take your pick.”

  “I’ve got my own,” Susan said, across the office and reaching for the door. She was a veteran of these wars and had already donned her professional face. Before she left the office she turned and added, “Chef Howie and Fate were looking for you. So you may want to save those painkillers for yourself.” Then she quietly left the room.

  Greta sat down behind her desk. “Maddie, is it hot in here or has the stress just pushed me into menopause?”

  “What happened to Tim’s office? Have you figured it out?”

  “Not yet,” she said. “I’ve been too busy working out what to do with our schedule.” She tapped a gold pen on her notepad. “I have an idea, but I’m going to need help.”

  I nodded.

  “We have to be very careful how we handle this. It will only bring the dogs of hell down upon us if the staff hears about what happened in Tim’s office.”

  Did no one in this line of work consider understatement?

  “I mean,” Greta said, rubbing her hands together as if to get warm, “we don’t actually know what did happen, do we? In all that mess, we can’t even be sure it was the show material they were after.”

  Maybe she was right. Maybe someone was angry with Tim. I thought it over.

  “You see, Maddie, we are living in a fishbowl. The tabloids are looking for dirt. We’re vulnerable here.”

  It was a particularly fetching picture, us the fish, our brewing scandal the crud at the bottom of the bowl, and what, I wondered, was the little statue of Neptune with his tiny trident? No matter. Greta, a great one to offer up metaphors, was on to another one.

  “It’s like we’re Mr. Clean but sometimes there is just too much dirt for even Mr. Clean to, um, clean. We work so damn hard to keep our show beyond reproach, to earn our good name.”

  While the jaded among us might question whether a game show might indeed have a “good name” in need of protection, I admired Greta and her desire to salvage the good name of hers.

  “You’re afraid of what Entertainment Tonight will do with this story?”

  “Of course I am. I’m embarrassed. I’m worried. We’re the Titanic, Maddie. And out there are icebergs.”

  “Like this office break-in,” I suggested.

  “Right. News of our office break-in would be disastrous. Food Freak is big, but we could sink. It happened on my watch, after all. And Artie would just about die if this show went down.” Greta’s voice got softer as she toted up the potential damage. “And the network would take a lot of flack. And the whole genre of game shows would appear to be untrustworthy, again, like ocean liners were back in the old days. Can you imagine?”

  Almost seasick with symbolism, I shook my head in sympathy.

  “And I’m afraid,” she continued, even more kindly, “it wouldn’t be at all comfortable for you, Madeline. It was the office you were assigned to that was vandalized.”

  Of course, she was right. I couldn’t even remember if I’d heard the damn door click shut. “I’m so sorry, Greta.”

  “Don’t blame yourself,” she said, but her tone of voice reminded me of what one might say to the poor underpaid fool up on deck whose job it was to watch out for ice.

  I did blame myself. In only my first week of working on the country’s most popular TV show, ladies and gentlemen, I had made quite a contribution. I might have destroyed the network’s biggest asset by failing to pull a lousy door a quarter of an inch tighter. “Well,” I said, hoping for some hope, “where do we actually stand? What is missing from Tim’s office?”

  Greta sighed. “It will take hours to go through that mess. I don’t know what exactly Tim kept in the office to begin with, so I can’t know what might be gone now. I’ve tried to call Tim, again and again, but there is still no answer on any of his phones.”

  “It might not be so bad,” I suggested.

  Greta looked resigned. “As long as the script for today’s show was there, we’re in deep trouble. We’ll never know if they looked at it or not. We have to scrap that show.”

  “The script,” I said, thinking of all that work now gone completely to waste.

  “The script,” she echoed. “Anyone could have seen the que
stions and the menus and the secret recipes we had planned to spring on the players in today’s taping.”

  I nodded. In Food Freak, the teams could earn bonus advantages by correctly answering questions about gourmet cooking. In the second half of the game, they had to cook special surprise recipes. If one team had the questions in advance, they could easily win all the extra bonus ingredients. And if they knew in advance what recipes they’d have to prepare, they could plot out their strategies ahead of time.

  Greta looked miserable. “I’m really royally screwed here,” she said, shaking her delicate head. “Think Queen Victoria. Wasn’t she the one who had eleven children?”

  “I believe she had nine,” I said.

  “Still, I made my point,” Greta said. Then she checked her notes and went on. “But I think we may just have a chance to get through this without it all hitting the fan. Will you help?”

  “Of course.”

  “First, you’ll sign the 509 form immediately, which will take care of the show’s obligations to adhere to all the federal regulations, okay?”

  “Of course.”

  “And, clearly, we can’t tell anyone we had a break-in.”

  I looked around Greta’s corner office. It was decorated in beautiful, classic furniture. The art on the walls looked expensive. She had earned the right to call the shots on a big television series, I knew, and she also had a lot to protect.

  “What will you do about today’s taping?” I asked.

  “We have to cancel it,” she said, shaking her head. “I can’t really believe I’m saying this. It’s unheard of. We never cancel.”

  “The show must go on.”

  “Do you know why?” she asked, instructing me kindly.

  “Tradition?” I guessed. “There’s no business like show business?” I was pretty sure there was a classic show tune that had this sort of thing explained.

  She smiled. “No, it’s the budget. To cancel a taping at this point will add about seventy thousand dollars to the cost of this season, damnit.”

  Poor Greta.

  “There’s studio time. Then there are salaries. Our production crew gets paid union wages and this will add another day. Same goes for talent, warm-up, craft services, meals…”

  I watched as she ticked off the items on her notepad.

  “Well, we have no choice,” Greta said, more to herself than to me. Deep creases etched her pretty forehead. “We have to write another show’s worth of new material and reschedule the taping. Damn.”

  Greta seemed extremely disturbed, but then, so was I. There went my pesto recipe. Poof. There went my Confetti French Toast, too. Damn.

  “We will not break any laws,” she assured me. “We won’t take any risks. But we need to give everyone a good, convincing reason for why we are canceling today’s taping, a story that won’t invite suspicion. Can you think of anything?”

  “I’m good at cover stories. There are always last-minute disasters in the party business and always a great need for discretion.”

  Greta smiled back in a distant sort of way.

  I continued, “Like the time we threw a launch party for a new CD. One of my waitresses found the drummer of this terrifically famous British band stoned out of his mind, dancing naked in the ladies’ lounge.”

  “Really?”

  “To hear her tell it, old tattoos on old drummers do not make for the most pleasant viewing. Anyway, we needed a polite way of getting the guy out of there.”

  “You didn’t tell his record company?”

  “No, no. The problem was, the drummer wasn’t inclined to put on his jeans and go home. But my friend Holly had a great idea. She told him reporters from Us magazine wanted to do a feature on the sexiest men of rock and roll…and they were waiting to interview him—with his clothes on—back at his house in Holmby Hills.”

  Greta said, thinking of her own problems, “We need a clever story like that.”

  I do love to solve problems. It’s just that in my normal line of work, I usually know something about all the variables before I try shuffling them. Here, I was lost.

  “I’m particularly worried that Fate Finkelberg will get wind of the truth and get herself in a ferocious snit. That woman. If she suspects we’ve got a real problem with the production, she could hold up our negotiations with Chef Howie for his next contract. Damnit.”

  I had seen Greta deal with difficult problems all week, managing the large operation. The problems weren’t growing any smaller.

  “Are you okay, Greta?”

  Her hand found the box of tissues on her desk, and whether she had a speck of dust in her eye or a tear, I couldn’t say for sure. “I can handle it,” she said, her voice still strong.

  “I know you can.”

  Greta Greene looked up and asked aloud, “Where is Tim? Why can’t I find him? He should have been in contact with someone on the staff by now, even if it was just…”

  “When someone is missing…,” I started, but I couldn’t finish it. The not knowing is the worst feeling in the world. Any kind of final answer would be better than wondering and worrying and tearing yourself apart inside. I knew that. I had felt that when I was a child. Someone missing was a terrible thing.

  Greta said, “I don’t want to give in to panic. I don’t. But why was Tim’s office searched? Is there something worse than stealing scripts going on?”

  We were finally talking about the real issue that was causing Greta so much grief. “You’re worried about Tim Stock.”

  “I don’t know. He’s just disappeared. What if he—”

  She was interrupted by the ringing of her phone. As she answered it, I thought about the problem of the missing head writer. What if all the troubles had not started with today’s office break-in? What if the troubles stemmed from the man who had occupied that office for the past six months?

  Greta hung up her phone with a tight frown. “Fate and Howie. He’s waiting for me and I just can’t get to him right now. If Tim were here, I’d send him. But he’s gone. He’s gone. So now you are officially our ‘acting’ head writer.”

  “You’re kidding, right?” You have to love this television business, really. A man is missing, a production is in crisis, seventy grand has just flown out of the window because a door is left ajar. If you screwed up badly enough here, you could very quickly wind up running this town.

  “Greta, I don’t think this is such a good idea,” I said. “Fate and Howie were here a few minutes ago. I am not Fate’s favorite staffer. Not at all her cup of tea, to tell you the truth. Really. She’d rather stomp on me with her silver platform boots than listen to me.”

  “This show is my life,” Greta said, finding perhaps one more speck of dust in her eye. She dabbed. “I know how pathetic that must sound, but this show is all I have. I have worked so hard, so hard to get a hit series. And here it is, Maddie. I just need a little time. I need your help.”

  I’d gotten us into this mess and now Greta was counting on me, however misguidedly, to get us out. But what was really going on here in Game Show Land? The head writer of the show was seriously missing, his office was turned into a rubbish heap, and what about that Post-it note that read: “Heidi and Monica might have to die.” Were these events connected?

  “Greta, about Tim Stock—”

  “Oh, don’t worry about Tim,” she said, her face pale. “Forget what I said. He’ll turn up. I know it. But I honestly don’t think I can handle one more thing going wrong right now. Once the Hindenburg has crashed, it’s down, you know? Will you go see Howie for me? I need a miracle, here. Maybe some little white lie to stall him while I think of a way to cancel today’s taping that won’t arouse suspicion.”

  “I’ll try my best.”

  With all the backstage drama swirling around Food Freak, I had a lot of questions. Another visit with the show’s charismatic star might lead to some answers. And that sent me searching for Chef Howie. And Fate.

  Chapter 6

  A favorite
TV show is like a pal. It is an intimate relationship. You invite it into your living room or den in the evening and it tries hard to entertain you.

  To the people who package those half hours and send them to your house, however, time stretches out. It takes a week of days and nights to produce each twenty-two-minute package of fun, minus the commercials. And while it may seem like we’re in your bedroom or your family room, we’re not. We’re on some hot soundstage in some dusty studio in an industrial-looking neighborhood of Los Angeles.

  Arthur Herman Productions leases office space in the old part of Hollywood, east of Highland. Food Freak is made on what is now the KTLA lot, located at the corner of Sunset Boulevard and Bronson. Here, a scattering of eighty-year-old buildings covers twelve acres of studio space, all enclosed like a medieval fortress by high, barbed-wire-topped walls that go on for blocks. The guards on duty are not so much occupied with fighting off medieval dark knights as they are mostly busy painting over the rude spray-canned markings of those knights’ present-day equivalents. Sentries posted at the entrance gates keep out the passersby, mostly neighbors, recent arrivals from El Salvador or Guatemala or Mexico who live in the surrounding dusty apartment buildings. Only those who are employed on one of the productions that are shot at this studio are admitted into this small kingdom, or those lucky ones who have business here and have had their names left at the gate, a pass waiting.

  When I worked as a caterer, arriving with dinner for casts and crews at studios like this one, I’d often have a pass waiting. But now, for my tiny stint as a writer on Freak, I actually belonged here. I ran down the dozen stairs from our second-floor offices, and opened the exterior door, exiting our building onto a private alleyway. It might not look like much, but I loved being on this lot. Like many transplants to Los Angeles, I have a crush on Hollywood. I enjoy its strange history.

  And this particular studio on the low-rent side of Hollywood, ragtag as it appears today and obscure to tourists, has more history than most. Not many folks know that this very lot was the original Warner Bros. movie lot, built in 1919. Although the nine old soundstages have gone through half a dozen owners since that time, it remains one of the oldest production studios in continuous use in this town.