Temptation

by Douglas Kennedy

‘Brad, I lifted nothing . . . ’

  ‘Hear me out. This is what McCall writes: “The repartee in question can be found in the Selling You episode – ‘Shtick Happens’ – for which Armitage won his Emmy. In it, Joey – the fast-and-loose dogsbody for Armitage’s fictitious PR agency

  – runs smack into a police van while driving a big-deal client (a mega-egoistic Soul diva) across town for a taping of The Oprah Show. He then comes staggering back into the office to inform Jerome – the company’s founder – that their diva is in the hospital, screaming police brutality. In Armitage’s script, there is the following exchange:

  JEROME You actually ran into a cop car?

  JOEY What can I say, boss? It was an accident.

  JEROME Were any of the cops hurt?

  JOEY I didn’t stick around to find out. But you know what happens when you hit a cop car. They all roll out like lemons.

  ‘“Now compare and contrast this clever banter with the following dialogue from The Front Page, in which Louis – the henchman of wheeling-dealing editor, Walter Burns – races into the newsroom to tell his boss that, in the course of whisking the future mother-in-law of ace reporter, Hildy Johnson, across town, he’s collided with a van filled with Chicago’s finest:

  WALTER You actually ran into a police van?

  LOUIE What can I say, boss? It was an accident.

  WALTER Were any of the cops hurt?

  LOUIE I didn’t stick around to find out. But you know what happens when you hit a cop van. They all roll out like lemons.”’

  ‘Oh, Jesus . . . ’ I whispered. ‘I never . . . ’

  ‘You better listen to McCall’s final paragraph: “Without question, this virtual reproduction by Armitage is one of those unintentional examples of what the French call an ‘hommage’ . . . better known in plain English as being a copycat. No doubt, this is the only example of plagiarism in the Armitage ‘oeuvre’. But it’s clear that this clever, talented writer has, in this instance, embraced that famous T.S. Eliot diktat: ‘Immature poets imitate; mature poets steal.’”’

  Long pause. I suddenly felt as if I had just walked into an empty elevator shaft.

  ‘I don’t know what to say, Brad.’

  ‘There’s not much to say. I mean, to be blunt about it, he caught you red-handed . . . ’

  ‘Now wait a damn minute. Are you saying that I deliberately lifted that dialogue from The Front Page?’

  ‘I’m saying nothing. I’m just looking at the facts. And the fact is the dialogue he quoted from your script and from that play are one and the same . . . ’

  ‘Okay, okay, maybe the dialogue is the same. But it’s not as if I sat down and opened the script of The Front Page and copied . . . ’

  ‘David, believe me, I’m not accusing you of that. But you have been caught with the smoking gun in your hand . . . ’

  ‘This is trivial stuff . . . ’

  ‘No, this is deeply serious stuff . . . ’

  ‘Look, what are we dealing with here? A joke from a seventy-year-old play that somehow ended up, by osmosis, in my script. But we’re not talking about an intentional case of literary theft. We’re talking about my inadvertent use of someone else’s joke, that’s all. Who doesn’t purloin jokes? It’s the nature of the game.’

  ‘True – but there’s a difference between using some guy’s “take my wife . . . ” gag, and having four lines of dialogue from a famous play pop up in your script.’

  Long pause. My heart was pounding, as the realization hit me: I am in big trouble here.

  ‘Brad, you’ve got to know that this was completely unpremeditated on my part . . . ’

  ‘And David, you’ve got to know that, as your producer, I am going to go to the wall with you on this one. Of course, I know you would never do anything so insane and self-destructive. Of course, I can fully understand how a couple of lines from someone else’s work can be unintentionally absorbed into your own work. And, of course, I know that every writer has, at one time or another, been accidentally guilty of this petty misdemeanor. The problem is – you got caught.’

  ‘But it’s a minor-league offense.’

  ‘And so say all of us. But . . . I’ve got even more bad news. You know Tracy Weiss . . . ’ he said, mentioning FRT’s head of public relations.

  ‘Of course I know Tracy.’

  ‘Well, at nine-thirty last night, she got a call from this Variety journalist, Craig Clark, who wanted an official comment from FRT. Thank Christ Tracy knows Clark pretty well. Because she convinced the guy to hold on the story until today . . . on the understanding that he’d get an exclusive statement from FRT and from you . . . ’

  ‘Great.’

  ‘Listen, we’re into damage control mode. So anything we can do to lessen the shit storm . . . ’

  ‘Understood, understood.’

  ‘So when Tracy called me last night . . . ’

  ‘If you knew about this last night,’ I said, ‘why did you wait to call me until now?’

  ‘Because Tracy and I knew that, if you’d been told last night, you wouldn’t have slept. And we both decided that, given what you’re about to face into today, you definitely needed a good night’s sleep.’

  ‘So what am I facing into today, Brad?’

  ‘You need to be at the office by eight, no later. Tracy and I will be there. Ditto Bob Robison . . . ’

  ‘Bob knows?’ I said, sounding edgier.

  ‘Bob’s the Head of Series. Of course, he knows. What Tracy’s hoping for is that we can all craft a statement in which you admit that this was an unpremeditated goof; that you regret the mistake, and that you’re simply guilty of telling a good joke twice. Anyway, after we figure out the statement, you’re meeting for ten minutes with the Variety hack . . . ’

  ‘I have to go face-to-face with this guy?’

  ‘If you want a sympathetic hearing, there’s no other way around it. And what Tracy’s banking on is that, if he gives you the benefit of the doubt, we can get our side of the story out there simultaneously with McCall’s turdy column, and cauterize this thing fast.’

  ‘And if the Variety guy doesn’t buy my side of the story, what then?’

  Once more, I could hear my producer take a slow, steadying inhalation of breath.

  ‘Let’s not go there yet.’

  Long pause. Then he said, ‘Look, I know this is bad . . . ’

  ‘Bad? It’s much ado about nothing.’

  ‘Exactly. And that’s the way we’re going to play it. Which is why I know we’ll get through this. But David, I just need to ask you one thing . . . ’

  I knew what was coming. ‘No,’ I said, ‘I have never, ever intentionally plagiarized anything. And no, to the best of my knowledge there are no further unintentional paraphrases or quotes from other people’s work, in any of my Selling You scripts.’

  ‘That’s exactly what I wanted to hear. Now get your ass down here fast. It’s going to be a long day.’

  In the car on the way to the office, I called Alison at home.

  ‘That is the slimiest thing I’ve heard in my life,’ Alison said after I paraphrased McCall’s column, ‘and I’ve encountered a lot of slimy stuff.’

  ‘Any way you look at it, it’s bad . . . ’

  ‘It’s petty bullshit, dressed up as scandal. Fucking journalists. They all have the morality of a tom cat. They’ll spray anything that moves.’

  ‘What am I going to do?’

  ‘Whatever happens, you’ll live.’

  ‘That’s very reassuring.’

  ‘What I’m saying here is: don’t panic. Get yourself safely to the office in that Hun-mobile of yours. I’ll meet you there. And believe me: I won’t let them fry you, David. I won’t even let them sauté you. Hang in there.’

  As I edged my way through traffic, my mood vacillated from fear to belligerence. All right, my subconscious had possibly betrayed me . . . but I had done nothing deliberately wrong. More to the point, this creep McCall was taking a few inconsequent
ial lines and transforming them into a burning-at-the-stake offense. As far as I was concerned, the only way to combat such malicious journalistic behavior was to come out of the corner, swinging.

  ‘That’s exactly what we won’t do,’ Tracy Weiss said when I proposed this take-no-shit approach at the start of our meeting. We gathered in Brad’s office, sitting around the circular ‘ideas table’ where we usually brainstormed stuff for the series. But this morning, I was greeted by Brad, Tracy and Bob Robison with supportive words and edgy faces which betrayed their fear – and which also let it be known that, ultimately, this was not going to be a communal we’ll share the guilt together situation. On the contrary, from the moment I faced the three of them around that table, I realized that – though this was, corporately speaking, their problem – I was the defendant here. And if punishment was meted out, I’d take the brunt of it.

  ‘The fact is, David,’ Tracy said, ‘though McCall may be, at the best of times, a vindictive scumbag, he still has you by both cojones. Which means that, like it or not, we’ve got to soft-pedal this thing.’

  Alison, seated next to me, lit up a Salem and said, ‘But McCall is trying to hang David for jay-walking.’

  ‘Cut the melodrama, Alison,’ Bob Robison said. ‘The guy’s got evidence. And – take it from an ex-member of the California bar – evidence is all you need to convict someone. Motives count for shit if you’ve been nabbed in the act.’

  ‘But there’s a difference here,’ I said. ‘The alleged plagiarism was subliminal . . . ’

  ‘Big fucking deal,’ Bob Robison said. ‘You didn’t mean to do it, but you still did it.’

  ‘That is a big fucking deal,’ Alison said, ‘because half the time, writers don’t know where their stuff comes from.’

  ‘Unfortunately,’ Robison said, ‘Theo McCall worked that one out for David.’

  ‘I didn’t mean this to happen,’ I said.

  ‘My sympathies,’ Robison said, ‘and I mean that. Because you know how highly I rate you. But the fact remains: it happened. You plagiarized. You may not have intended to plagiarize, but you still plagiarized. Do you see the point I’m trying to make here, David?’

  I nodded.

  ‘And once again,’ Brad said, ‘I want both you and Alison to know that we are completely behind you on this. We will not abandon you.’

  ‘That’s very touching, Brad,’ Alison said dryly, ‘and I hope I never have to quote that promise back to you.’

  ‘We are going to fight this,’ Tracy said, ‘but in a way that doesn’t seem either aggressive or defensive. The idea is to close down any further lines of argument – or inquiry – by issuing a statement in which David admits accidental culpability . . . ’

  ‘Good phrase,’ Robison said.

  ‘. . . but in which he also doesn’t prostrate himself. The tone is going to be very important. So too is the tone you bring to the interview with Craig Clark.’

  ‘Do you think he’ll be sympathetic?’ Brad asked her.

  ‘First and foremost, he’s an entertainment journalist. And a story like this . . . well, my hope is that he has enough insight into the business to understand how something like this could unwittingly happen. At the same time, he’s not a malicious creep like McCall. We’ll be giving him exclusive access to David, and he does love the show. So let’s hope that he decides this story is a sidebar, nothing more.’

  We spent the next hour working on the FRT statement – in which the company acknowledged that I had inadvertently transposed a few lines from The Front Page into my script, that I greatly regretted this ‘undevised error’ (Tracy’s words, not mine), and had been genuinely appalled when it was pointed out to me. There was a quote from Bob Robison stating that he fully accepted my explanation for the ‘transposition’, and that they completely supported me – to the extent that, as widely reported in the entertainment press last month, they had just signed me for the next series of Selling You. (It was Alison who insisted that they put this line in the press release – just to remind everyone they weren’t just sticking by me, but would continue to ‘further our relationship’.)

  Finally, there was a quote from me, in which I sounded contrite as hell, but also genuinely bemused as to how this could have happened in the first place:

  ‘Writers are like sponges – they soak everything up, and then recycle it all again . . . sometimes without even realizing it. Certainly this was the case with the four lines of dialogue from The Front Page which managed to end up in an episode last season of Selling You. I’ll admit it: The Front Page is one of my favorite plays, and one which I acted in during college. But that was in l980, and I haven’t seen or read it since then. How then did a handful of Ben Hecht and Charles MacArthur’s peerless lines find their way into my script? I honestly don’t know. That doesn’t excuse this accidental transposition [Tracy’s words again] – which has caused me acute embarrassment, as it would any writer. I have never intentionally used another writer’s words. This is a once-off error – and all I can plead is mental misadventure; pulling a joke out of the jumbled filing cabinet of my brain, and not remembering where I’d heard it in the first place.’

  We talked at length about this confessional statement. Bob Robison wanted it to be a flat out mea culpa (well, he is a Catholic). Alison wanted me to strike a quasi-apologetic, yet still defiant pose – pointing out that this was small beer . . . and, for God sakes, don’t other people’s jokes always end up in other people’s material? But it was Tracy who encouraged me to balance contrition with wit.

  ‘This is also the tone you need to strike with Craig Clark,’ Tracy said after we finished writing my quote. Sorry, embarrassed, yet also ‘ironically knowing’ . . . whatever that meant.

  As it turned out, Craig Clark was decent enough for a journalist. After ushering the others out of Bob’s office, Tracy discreetly sat in a corner while Craig fired questions at me. He was in his early forties – slightly stocky, slightly harassed in demeanor, but wholly professional and (I was relieved to discover) relatively sympathetic.

  ‘Let me say from the outset that I’m a huge fan of Selling You.’

  ‘Thank you,’ I said.

  ‘I really do think it’s a breakthrough in television comedy; a total original. Which is why this . . . uh . . . disclosure must be so hard for you. Just to kick things off, can I ask you this: do you think most writers at one time or another have accidentally borrowed someone else’s lines?’

  Praise the Lord! The guy was in my corner. He didn’t want to eviscerate me, or to wreck my career. He asked a couple of tough questions – about whether even an accidental crib was a forgivable offense (to which I replied, ‘No – it’s not,’ in the hope that the I’m making no excuses for myself approach would impress him), and if I deserved severe censuring from my fellow writers (‘Probably,’ I said, maintaining the I’ll take my punishment like a man tone). I also made him laugh – saying that if I had to accidentally borrow from something, thank God it was The Front Page and not Gilligan’s Island. I also said that, as penance, I was going to write the next Jackie Chan movie. In short, I seemed to strike the okay sorry, but this isn’t a federal offense tone which Tracy wanted from me. At the end of our twenty minutes (Tracy let it overrun, as Clark appeared to be enjoying himself), he shook my hand and said, ‘Well, I do hope this turns out to be a minor glitch on your career chart.’

  ‘Thanks,’ I said. ‘And I really appreciate the thoughtful interview.’

  ‘You gave good copy.’

  I reached into my pocket and took out a little notebook, and wrote my home and cellphone numbers on a page. Then I tore it out and handed it to him.

  ‘If you need to ask me a few more questions, just give me a ring at either of those numbers. And once all this dust has settled . . . maybe we can have a beer.’

  ‘That would be great,’ he said, pocketing the paper. ‘I . . . uh . . . have written a couple of spec television comedy scripts . . . ’

  ‘Let’s ta
lk.’

  He shook my hand again. ‘You’re on,’ he said.

  Tracy opened the door for him and said, ‘I’ll walk you to your car.’

  As soon as they were gone, Alison came back into the office.

  ‘Tracy gave me the thumbs up on the way out. You happy with how it played?’

  I shrugged. ‘Right now, I feel numb.’

  ‘You’re about to feel even number. While I was sitting in your office, Jennifer took a call from Sally. She said it was urgent.’

  Oh, wonderful. She’d found out . . . before I had a chance to tell her.

  I went to my office and called Sally. Her assistant put me straight through. Her first words were, ‘I’m stunned by this.’

  ‘Darling, can I –’

  ‘And what’s hurt me the most is the fact that I found all this out second hand.’

  ‘But I only found out myself just before seven.’

  ‘You should have called me immediately.’

  ‘But I knew you were doing breakfast with Stu.’

  ‘I would have taken your call.’

  ‘And the thing was, I had to race straight down here, and I’ve been in crisis meetings ever since, not to mention an interview with some guy from Variety.’

  ‘Variety knows already?’ she said, sounding anxious.

  ‘Yeah – but Tracy Weiss, the head of PR here, got a call last night from this journo who writes for Variety and she decided . . . ’

  ‘So she knew about this last night . . . ’

  ‘Yes, but, believe me, I was only told this morning. And to get our side of the story out, she decided to offer this hack an exclusive with me . . . ’

  ‘It’s in tomorrow’s Daily Variety?’

  ‘Absolutely.’

  ‘And have FRT issued a statement?’

  ‘Yeah – with a contrite quote from me.’

  ‘You’ll get them to email it to me?’

  ‘Of course, darling. But please, don’t go all cold and professional on me. I need you right now.’

  ‘If you needed me, you should have called me immediately. I am supposed to be the love of your life.’

  ‘You know you are. It’s just . . . oh Christ, Sally, this is just a little overwhelming.’