Temptation

by Douglas Kennedy

  ‘Can they?’

  ‘I’ve just spent the last half-hour on the phone with my lawyer. He’s going to look carefully at the contract tonight. But his gut instinct is . . . yeah, they can make this one stick.’

  ‘So there’ll be no compensation?’

  ‘Worse than that . . . they have also informed me that they plan to sue you for the writing fees for the three episodes in which you allegedly plagiarized.’

  ‘What are they trying to do? Disembowel me?’

  ‘Absolutely. Because, let’s face it, the money involved is serious. If they get rid of your creator fees, they’re saving themselves around three hundred and fifty thousand per season. And if, as expected, the show runs a couple more seasons . . . well, do the math. For each of the three episodes, you are due one hundred and fifty thousand. Add it all up . . . ’

  ‘Surely we can fight them on that point . . . ’

  ‘Again, my lawyer guy says they have you on the clause in which the writer guarantees all work in the script is his alone. But the way I figure it, we can probably negotiate a settlement price . . . ’

  ‘Which means I have to pay them back?’

  ‘If it comes to it, yes. My hope – and it is a hope – is that, in a few days, when everything cools down, they’ll forget chasing you for the three episodes, if they know they’ve won the creator fees argument.’

  ‘You’re going to let them win that?’

  ‘David, when have I ever let some shithead studio or network win anything against one of my clients? But we have a situation. Legalistically, you are perceived to have broken the terms of your contract. And if my $375-an-hour guy – who knows every damn loophole in the Hollywood legal book – tells me they’ve got you hog-tied, we’re into the realm of trying to minimize the wreckage as much as possible.

  ‘But I will get a second – and maybe even a third – legal opinion before talking to FRT’s shysters again . . . let alone their slimy counterparts at Warners.’

  ‘Can I have another Scotch?’

  ‘I think that’s a good idea,’ she said, ‘because I have some other difficult news.’

  I poured myself a double. ‘Go on,’ I said.

  ‘Some legal eagle from Warner Brothers was just on to me. They’re putting Breaking and Entering into turnaround . . . ’

  ‘You mean, the meeting with Nagel is scrapped?’

  ‘I’m afraid so. But it gets worse. They want the entire signature fee back.’

  ‘That’s insane. How can they do that?’

  ‘They’re screwing you on that John Cheever line you borrowed . . . ’

  ‘Come on. I was just trying the line out. In a first draft . . . ’

  ‘Hey, you don’t have to sell me your position. The problem is that, like FRT, they’re using that line to beat you over the head with the “writer guarantees all work in the script is his alone” clause. The other problem is, they’ve got corroboration . . . even though most of those assholes don’t even know who John Cheever is.’

  ‘Well, at least the Fleck script will cover those debts.’

  She lit up another cigarette, even though there was one already burning in her ashtray.

  ‘I’m afraid Fleck’s lawyer called me this afternoon . . . ’

  ‘Please don’t tell me . . . ’

  ‘“With regret, Mr Fleck cannot proceed with any further negotiations, owing to the current state of Mr Armitage’s professional reputation.” That’s an exact quote, I’m afraid.’

  I stared down at the floor. And said, ‘Then there’s no way I can pay back the two hundred and fifty grand to Warners.’

  ‘Is it already spent?’

  ‘A lot of it, yeah.’

  ‘But you’re not broke?’

  ‘I may be dumb, but I’m not stupid. I’ve got around half a million invested with my broker. The problem is, half of that is owed to Uncle Sam. And if FRT and Warners want all their money back . . . then I am broke.’

  ‘Let’s not go to the abyss just as yet. I will play hardball with the bastards. I will get them to lower their demands on the payback. Meantime, you better talk to your broker and your accountant about how best to maximize what you still have invested . . . ’

  ‘Because I’m washed up in this town, right?’

  ‘It’s going to be difficult finding you work.’

  ‘And say this thing doesn’t blow over? If I’m permanently tainted by it, what then?’

  ‘Honestly?’ Alison asked.

  ‘Absolutely.’

  ‘I don’t know. But, once again, let’s see how the next few weeks play out. More to the point, you need to make a statement, in which you defend your corner, but also regret what’s gone down. I’ve called Mary Morse – a PR gal I know. She’s going to be over here in about ten minutes, to work out the statement with you, and to get it out to all concerned, so at least they have your angle on everything. If things don’t improve in a few days’ time, we’re going to have to find a sympathetic journalist, who can tell your side of the story.’

  ‘Well, that guy from Variety is definitely out of the frame, now that his career is fucked too. And poor Tracy . . . ’

  ‘That wasn’t your fault.’

  ‘Yeah, but if it hadn’t been for this mess of mine . . . ’

  ‘Look – they’re both professionals, and they should have known that their past involvement might go public if . . . ’

  ‘She was just trying to protect me.’

  ‘True – but that was her job. You can’t beat yourself up over their problems as well. You’ve got more than enough trouble on your plate.’

  ‘Don’t I know it.’

  By the next morning, the entire world knew about it as well. McCall’s accusations hit the streets. So too did FRT’s press release, announcing (with regret, natch) my dismissal from the series. All the major national papers carried it on their arts and entertainment section, though the LA Times put the story on its front page. Worse yet, the tale also merited coverage on NPR’s All Things Considered, Entertainment Tonight, and most of the early morning talk shows. Yes, everyone quoted from my statement – where I apologized for the upset caused to FRT and everyone involved in Selling You, and again said that I really didn’t think I could stand accused of theft because of a mere couple of lines. ‘The worst thing a writer can be accused of is theft,’ I wrote in the statement, ‘and I certainly don’t consider myself a thief.’

  That night, on HBO’s Real Time, the host, Bill Maher, noted during his monologue:

  ‘The big news in Hollywood today is that Selling You creator, David Armitage, used the famous Richard Nixon I am not a crook defense, after FRT sacked him for plagiarism. When asked whether everything he wrote was 100 per cent original, he said: “I did not have sex with that woman . . . ”’

  Maher got a big laugh with that one-liner. I watched his show alone in the loft. Sally was in Seattle, at an address unknown, as she hadn’t left the name of her hotel, nor had she phoned me all day. I knew that she usually stayed at the Four Seasons when visiting the Seattle set, but I feared that if I phoned her, I’d be appearing far too needy, far too desperate. Right now, my one hope was that, once the initial blitzkrieg of bad publicity died down, she’d remember all the reasons why we fell in love with each other in the first place, and would . . .

  What? Come running back to me, telling me she’d stand by me, no matter what? Like Lucy? She’d stood by me . . . begrudgingly sometimes, but she was always there nonetheless. For all those years, when I was nowhere, and she was forced into telemarketing when her acting career failed and we needed to pay the rent. How did I repay her steadfastness? By doing the predictable mid-life, post-big-breakthrough thing. No wonder she so despised me. No wonder I was so scared now. Because I was finally admitting what I had known within months of moving in with Sally: her love for me was predicated on my success, my status within the entertainment community, and (in turn) the way it enhanced her own position within that High School With Money called Hol
lywood.

  ‘Everyone has their moment,’ she said just before I won the Emmy Award. ‘This is ours.’

  Not anymore, babe.

  Could everything I’d achieved in a few fast years be asset-stripped from me in a matter of days?

  Come on people – I’m David Armitage! I felt like shouting from the nearest rooftop. But, then again, once you’re on a rooftop, the only destination is down. Anyway, in Hollywood (as in life) all talent is ephemeral, expendable. Even those at the top of the pile were subject to this law of replication. No one out here was unique. We all played the same game. And the game operated according to one basic rule: your moment lasted for as long as your moment lasted . . . if, that is, you were lucky enough to have a moment at all.

  But I still couldn’t believe that my moment was now in the past tense. Surely Sally wouldn’t be so mercenary as to abandon me right now. Just as I had to believe that, somehow, I would be able to convince Brad, and Bob, and Jake Dekker at Warners, and any other interested production company in this damn town, that I was worthy of their trust.

  Come on people – I’m David Armitage! And I’ve made you all money!

  Yet the more I tried to put an optimistic spin on my situation, the more I thought: the worst sort of bullshit is the bullshit with which you bullshit yourself.

  So I opened a bottle of Glenlivet Single Malt and started watching it disappear. Somewhere after the fifth finger trickled down my gullet, I had a supremely moronic interlude, during which I entered a mood of introspective inspiration. I decided to bare my soul to Sally, to put it all on the proverbial table, and hope that she would, in turn, respond tenderly to this cri de coeur. So I staggered over to my computer, and wrote:

  Darling

  I love you. I need you. Desperately, in fact. This is a bad business; an unfair business. Please, please, please don’t give up on me; on us. I am desperate. Please call me. Please come home. Let’s get through this together. Because we can get through it. Because we are the best thing that ever happened to each other. Because you are the woman with whom I want to spend the rest of my life, with whom I want to have children, whom I will still love when, years from now, we enter that twilight zone of decrepitude. I’ll always be there for you. Please, please, please be here for me now.

  Without reading through the thing again, I hit the Send button, and tossed back another two fingers of Glenlivet, and careened into the bedroom, and went down for the count.

  Then it was morning, and the phone was ringing. But in those few bleary seconds before I answered it, a sentence floated through my head. Not a sentence, actually . . . a phrase: the twilight zone of decrepitude.

  And then the rest of the ludicrous contents of that e-mail came back to me . . . in all its grisly, beseeching glory. And I thought: you are an idiot.

  I reached for the ringing phone.

  ‘David Armitage?’ a very awake voice asked me.

  ‘I’m afraid so.’

  ‘Fred Bennett, Los Angeles Times.’

  ‘What the hell time is it?

  ‘Around seven-thirty.’

  ‘I don’t want to talk.’

  ‘Mr Armitage, if I could just have a moment?’

  ‘How did you get my home number?’

  ‘That’s not the hardest thing in the world to find.’

  ‘I’ve made a statement.’

  ‘But have you heard about the motion tabled in front of the Screen and Television Writers Association last night?’

  ‘What motion?’

  ‘A motion to publicly censure you for plagiarism, to strip you of your Association membership, and to recommend that you be banned from all professional work for a minimum of five years . . . though some committee members were pressing for a lifetime ban . . . ’

  I put the phone back in its cradle, then I reached down and yanked the plug from the wall. Immediately it began to ring in another room, but I ignored it. Instead, I pulled the covers over my head, willing this day to vanish from view.

  But sleep was now impossible, so I eventually staggered to the bathroom, and popped three Advil in an attempt to quell the jack-hammer currently excavating the inside of my head. Then I went into the living room and faced the computer. My e-mail box had twelve messages, eleven of which were from assorted journalists. I opened none of them. The twelfth was the one I was dreading . . . an e-mail from Sally:

  David:

  I hate the situation you’ve found yourself in. I too hate the fact that your career has been devastated by these revelations. But this is a situation of your own making; that, for reasons best known to yourself, you decided to be the architect of your own undoing. This is what I can’t fathom. It makes me wonder if I really even know you . . . a concern exacerbated by your deeply worrying e-mail. I realize that you are distressed by what has happened. But there is nothing so unattractive as someone begging for love – especially when they have undermined the trust needed to sustain love. Though I appreciate the fact that you are under severe emotional strain, that still isn’t an excuse for heart-on-the-sleeve prose. And let’s not even get into that ‘twilight zone of decrepitude’ line.

  All this has left me even more confused and baffled and sad. I think a few more days apart might bring some clarity to our situation. I’ve decided to head off to Vancouver Island for the weekend. I’ll be back Monday. We can talk then. In the meantime, let’s agree not to communicate over the weekend, just so matters don’t get further confused. I do hope you will consider, in the meantime, getting some professional support. If your e-mail was anything, it was an enormous cry for help.

  Sally

  Wonderful. Just wonderful.

  The phone started ringing again. I ignored it. Then my cellphone joined the cacophony. I reached for it and glanced at the incoming number on the display. It was Alison. I answered it immediately.

  ‘You sound terrible,’ she said. ‘Were you drinking last night?’

  ‘You’re a very perceptive woman.’

  ‘Have you been up long?’

  ‘Ever since an LA Times hack rang me to let me know that SATWA was planning to ban me for life.’

  ‘What?’

  ‘That’s what he said – a special meeting of the Politburo last night.’

  ‘This thing has gone ga-ga. And it’s about to get worse.’

  ‘Tell me.’

  ‘Theo McCall’s about to be interviewed live from LA on the Today Show.’

  ‘On the subject of moi?’

  ‘It would seem that way.’

  ‘Jesus Christ, this guy is relentless.’

  ‘He’s like any gossip columnist – completely ruthless. You’re just a commodity to him. A very lucrative commodity right now, in terms of getting his name known nationally and appearing on Today.’

  ‘He won’t be satisfied until I’m drawn and quartered.’

  ‘I’m afraid that’s about right. Which is why I decided to wake you so early and tell you about his Today Show appearance. I think it’s best if you watch it, just in case he says anything so outrageous or slanderous we can nail his vile little ass.’

  Actually, there was nothing ‘little’ about Theo McCall. He was in his early forties – a Brit who’d crossed the Atlantic around ten years ago, and had one of those accents in which plummy rounded vowels mingled with Southern Californian nasality. He was also fat. His face reminded me of an oozy slab of Camembert which had been left for too long in direct sunlight. But he was shrewd about his size, in that he compensated for it by dressing like a dandy – a dark grey chalk-stripe suit, a spread-collar white shirt, a discreet black polka-dot tie. I sensed that, given the low-rent nature of Hollywood Legit, it was his only suit. But I had to grudgingly admire the way he was selling himself to the world – as an Anglo-American dandy, with the inside dope on Hollywood bad behavior. No doubt, he had dressed carefully for this interview, considering it an audition for the upscale gossip positions he was desperate to inhabit.

  But Anne Fletcher – the journalist
interviewing him from New York – wasn’t totally buying his T.S. Eliot meets Tom Wolfe journalism act.

  ‘Theo McCall, many people in Hollywood consider you to be the most feared journalist in town,’ she said.

  A slight pleasurable smile crossed McCall’s fat lips.

  ‘How flattering,’ he said in his best plummy voice.

  ‘But others consider you to be nothing more than a scandal-monger, and someone who doesn’t think twice about destroying careers, marriages, even entire lives.’

  He blanched a little, but recovered quickly.

  ‘Well, of course, certain people would feel that way. But that’s because, if there’s one great rule about Hollywood, it’s that they protect each other . . . even when serious wrongdoing is involved.’

  ‘And you think that the plagiarism that got David Armitage fired from the FRT show he created was “serious wrongdoing”?’

  ‘Absolutely – the man stole from other writers’ work.’

  ‘But what did he really “steal”? A gag from one play, and a couple of one-line jokes from others. Do you really think he deserves losing his career for a couple of minor offenses?’

  ‘Well, Anne, to begin with, I didn’t decide on the punishment he received. That was the decision of his bosses at FRT. But, as to your question about whether I think plagiarism is a serious offense – well, theft is theft . . . ’

  ‘But what I asked you, Mr McCall, is whether such a petty misdemeanor like borrowing jokes . . . ’

  ‘He also lifted a plot line from Tolstoy . . . ’

  ‘But Mr Armitage did explain that his unproduced play was a deliberate reinterpretation of the Tolstoy story . . . ’

  ‘Of course, Mr Armitage would say that now. But I have a copy of his original script here . . . ’

  He held up the dusty playscript of Riffs. The camera zoomed in on the title page.

  ‘As you can see here,’ McCall said, ‘the title page reads: Riffs, A Play by David Armitage . . . but there’s nothing that says “Based on The Kreutzer Sonata by Tolstoy”, even though the entire plot is completely lifted from the Tolstoy story. And this raises an even bigger question: why did a man of David Armitage’s talent and ability need to steal from other people in the first place? It’s the one question that everyone in Hollywood wants to know: how he could have been so self-destructive, and so desperately dishonest. It’s well known, for example, that as soon as Selling You was a hit, he walked out on his wife and child for a high-flying television executive. So this pattern of cheating which sadly ended up engulfing his career . . . ’