Alexandra Waring (4 page)

“Does Alexandra want to follow in her footsteps?” Mrs. Waring said, repeating the reporter’s euphemistic way of asking if Alexandra was after that prominent newswoman’s job. Mrs. Waring shook her head slightly. “I’m afraid Alexandra would sooner freeze in a snowstorm than follow in anyone’s footsteps. She’s been that way since she was a little girl.”

So—” the reporter started to say.

“So if I were you,” Mrs. Waring said, taking hold of the reporter’s arm and speaking confidentially (the First Lady of the Farm Belt—as Mrs. Waring had been called in her Washington days—was very comfortable around the press), “I wouldn’t waste much time looking at the beaten track—I’d be looking at the wide-open spaces.”

The gossip network in TV news was the fastest news and information service in the world. Linking every major newsroom in the country, the A-wire (as it was called) was utterly without fact checking and was considered by many to be the only fun thing left in the industry. Six bulletins were issued, one right after the other, and were so hot as to threaten to melt the A-wire altogether. The bulletins were:

1. Alexandra Waring was sailing with Ted Turner in the Gulf of Mexico.
   
2. Alexandra Waring was circling Central Park in a limo with Don Hewitt.
   
3. Alexandra Waring was strolling East 52nd Street with Steve Friedman.
   
4. Alexandra Waring was eating Cuban-Chinese food in Harlem with Roone Arledge.
   
5. Alexandra Waring was landing at an East River helipad with Barry Diller.
   
6. Alexandra Waring was marrying Geraldo Rivera.
   

So everyone was very disappointed when Bitsy Boumer announced in her column that Alexandra hadn’t even set foot outside her home since she got out of the hospital. “She can’t move very well,” Gordon Strenn was quoted as saying. “Not until she gets the cast off. It goes over her shoulder and then down across her chest.”

When asked how Alexandra’s spirits were, Strenn told Bitsy to imagine a tiger in a straitjacket. “She can’t even bathe by herself, which drives her crazy,” he added. Bitsy then reported to her readers that when she asked Gordon who it was that helped Alexandra to bathe, “He would only smile like the gentleman he is.” And then when she asked him where, for heaven’s sakes, it was that Alexandra was going, he said, “There are a few people Alexandra would like to tell first, in person, before making an announcement.”

“Well, there you have it, folks,” Bitsy then wrote to her readers, “Alexandra is definitely going
somewhere
.

On Friday, February 26, the chairman of The Network was standing in his office, looking at a sheet of paper with the handwritten notations:

Our Last Offer [it said]

—$7,500,000 Package

—$1,500,000 a year over 5 years.

—Bonus scale (see back)

—Anchor weekend evening news.

—One feature biweekly on evening news.

—Second substitute for Clark Smith.

—Four documentaries a year.

“Nice work if you can get it,” one of the chairman’s secretaries said, reading over his shoulder. “I bet everyone’s going to start getting shot at around contract time now. You watch.”

The chairman grunted, stuffing the paper in the pocket of his jacket. “I’ll get the price down,” he said, rubbing his eyes. “She’s a reasonable girl.” He lowered his hands and sighed. “Those knuckleheads downstairs—christ, we pay
them
enough.” He looked at his secretary. “Are you old enough to remember “Give Me Some Stouthearted Men”? The song?”

His secretary was twenty-two, so it was possible that not even her mother was old enough to remember it. The chairman proceeded to mumble one or two lines—about stalwart men who would fight for the right—and his secretary smiled very pleasantly until the phone buzzed and she had to answer it. She listened, nodded and hung up. “She’s here.”

The chairman looked across the expanse of his office to the grandfather clock. As he did so, it struck the half hour. He smiled. “Go get her,” he said.

When Alexandra was shown in the chairman walked around his desk and held out both of his hands in greeting.

“Hello,” she said, smiling warmly, extending her right hand to him. (She could only extend the one hand since her left arm was in a sling—a sling made of an Hermes scarf, but a sling all the same.)

“Hello, my dear,” the chairman said, taking her hand in both of his. After a long moment he released it and gestured to a chair. “Please.”

“Thank you.” She sat down, crossing her leg at the knee.

“I trust you are well enough to be flying up here today,” he said, settling down in the chair opposite her.

“Oh, I’m much better, thank you. Certainly well enough to see you. It was very important to me that I did.”

She was wearing a simple navy-blue dress and he thought she had never looked more ravishing. “You should get shot more often, my dear,” he said. “It agrees with you.”

Her eyes, as always, were brilliantly beautiful, and her wide mouth, as always, was full of subtle promises. Her posture was so very good (he had always liked that about her—Alexandra’s tendency to appear much taller than she was, a trick he himself had learned at an early age) and her movements were graceful, unobtrusive. There was the energy, too, that was ever present with her, a kind of drive one could sense coursing just beneath the surface.

He liked the sling best though. Wounded, she seemed possible.

She leaned forward slightly in her chair, eyes looking earnest. “I wanted to explain to you personally why I’m leaving.”

The chairman looked at her. This was going to be a little tougher than he had expected. He raised his hand to signal that she was not to continue. He patted his breast pocket, then extracted a pair of reading glasses and put them on. “About this figure of seven million,” he began, retrieving his notes from his pocket, “I must say I’m a little surprised at you, Alexandra. I pegged you as a journalist, not a movie star.”

Her face fell. “They haven’t told you anything, have they?” she said. She closed her eyes, shook her head slightly and reopened them. “It’s not the money.”

“You listen to me, little miss,” the chairman said, pointing a finger at her. “I’ve got men almost twice your age out there working for me and do you know what they make over five years? Do you?”

Alexandra didn’t say anything but the chairman could have sworn he heard her say, “Thirty-one million dollars?”

“I think it’s a disgrace for a young girl like you to use Clark Smith as an excuse to cause such trouble,” he said.

“Please,”
Alexandra said, leaning forward in her chair, wincing and then retreating back, bringing a hand up to her shoulder. “Please listen to me.”

The chairman waited.

“If I wanted to work within the traditional structure of network news,” she said, “there’s no question that this is where I’d want to work. No network is bigger, no one has as many resources, and certainly no one has as much power as this one does.” She paused, running her tongue lightly over her lower lip (and then waiting for the chairman’s eyes to come back up from her mouth). “But that’s the problem, that’s why I have to leave. The Network is simply too big, too complex and too powerful to let me do the things I want to do.”

Despite himself, the chairman smiled. He loved it when adjectives like “big” and “complex” and “powerful” were used in connection with his network.

“So it’s the structure I’m leaving,” she said, “not the people here. Not you, certainly. You’ve been very kind ever since I—”

“Damnation,” the chairman suddenly said, mouth dropping open.

She looked a little startled.

“Don’t tell me you were serious the whole time,” he said. “Don’t tell me you’re really leaving.”

Alexandra, looking a little confused, nodded.

“Oh, shit, I don’t believe this,” the chairman said, getting out of his chair. “I’m going to kill that knucklehead, I swear. Tells me he’s been working on this negotiation for weeks,” he continued, crumpling up the notes and throwing them on the floor. “And now he’s got me wasting time on you as well,” he muttered, moving around his desk.

Alexandra stood up.

“Traitor,” the chairman said, not looking at her.

Alexandra did not move.

“I don’t care what we did or didn’t do—I don’t want to talk about it!” he said, slamming his hands down on the edge of the desk. “Do you hear me? I don’t want to talk about it!” He sighed, letting his head droop, and reached around behind him, groping for his chair. He found it and sat down heavily, plunking his hands down in front of him and staring at his gold pen and pencil set. After a full minute, his face slightly less red, he looked up at her, said, “Well?” and made little motions with his hand to indicate that Alexandra was now to shoo.

“I’ll never forget your kindnesses,” Alexandra said quietly. And then she turned around and walked to the door.

As she opened it the chairman said, “So where are you going, anyway?”

Still holding the door, she turned. “With Jackson Darenbrook.”

“Darenbrook!” the chairman yelled, bouncing in his seat. “Jackson Darenbrook! What the hell are you going to do with that yahoo?”

“Build my own network,” Alexandra said.

2
Jackson Darenbrook

“Uh-oh,” Jackson Darenbrook said.

He was sitting in the back of his limousine, reading the papers in front of the Plaza Hotel in New York, waiting to take Alexandra to her first day of work.

“
ALEXANDRA WARING TO LAUNCH DBS NEWS
” the headline of the article said, but that was not the source of the “uh-oh.” Nor was wonderful head shot of Alexandra or the first part of the article, which pretty much ran along the lines of their press release: Alexandra’s departure from The Network, Darenbrook Communications’ venture into broadcast television with DBS—the Darenbrook Broadcasting System, Alexandra’s work history
…
(“What New Yorker can forget Miss Waring’s short tenure here in local news? While anchoring the nightly news for WWKK, she won the hearts of critics by changing their format emphasis from soft news to hard and combining their six and eleven o’clock newscasts into an hour during prime time. But it was with her gorgeously hypnotic eyes and affinity for the medium that Miss Waring won the hearts of viewers and succeeded in almost tripling the news ratings for WWKK.”)

And then the “uh-oh.” The article quoted “one of the most prominent figures at The Network who wished to remain unidentified.” The figure, Jackson had no doubt, was Alexandra’s old nemesis, Clark Smith. “Frankly, we’re just glad she’s gone. Her being such an intimate friend of the chairman’s was a problem. We don’t go for that kind of thing here—but apparently Darenbrook does. She is a fairly good-looking girl after all.”

And then Jackson winced, reading on to find that the newspaper had asked Regina Baxter—a network correspondent known for her bitchiness—what she thought about thirty-year-old Alexandra being paid what was rumored to be well over a million dollars a year. “I think,” she said, “someone should tell Jackson Darenbrook that what goes for a million dollars in Hilleanderville, Georgia, can be bought for about two hundred dollars a night in New York.”

Jackson threw the newspaper down on the floor of the car.

Jackasses. Jealous, petty, neurotic, self-serving jackasses.

He should know, he had been reviewing the work and reputations of television newspeople for months now in his search for
her
—she who would become the symbol of DBS News, she who would gamble her career on what many said was the foolhardy venture of the decade.

Another broadcast TV network? With ABC, CBS, NBC, PBS and Fox broadcasting already? With CNN and the other cable networks, other cable franchises, superstations, pay movie channels and the video cassette market steadily draining viewers from broadcast programming? Was Jackson Darenbrook now as crazy as the rest of his family, the loony-tune Darenbrooks of Hilleanderville, owners of the Darenbrook Communications media empire?

Oh. Just a part-time broadcast TV network. So Jackson was just part-time crazy, was that it?

“Good grief, Mr. Darenbrook,” the lady at the Media News Associates had said to him back in May of 1987, when he began his search. The lady had been Ms. Dee Rendelhoffer, the account executive assigned to help him in his—as the file said—”secret search for unspecified anchorwoman for unspecified television newscast probably airing in the fall of 1989.”

(Media News Associates spent a great deal of money sending people to motel rooms around the country to make videotapes of local newspeople. As a result, someone looking for talent could come to them and say, “I need an anchorman of Yugoslavian descent,” or, “We’re looking for a Greek movie reviewer, preferably female,” and MNA could provide tapes of every Yugoslavian anchorman and every Greek female movie reviewer who had been on the air in America in the last year.)

In any event, Ms. Rendelhoffer had read a piece of paper that Jackson had given to her and was evidently surprised by it. Lowering it to her desk, she smiled and said, “You realize, of course, that this list is extremely ambitious.”

“
Ambitious
,” Jackson repeated, smiling too. (His drawl tended to pull a little farther south with any hint of resistance in the air.) “You told me to write down ten people I was looking for.”

“I asked you to write down ten
qualities
you were looking for, Mr. Darenbrook,” Ms. Rendelhoffer said. She glanced down at the list. “Surely you can’t expect to hire Diane Sawyer.”

“She’s from Kentucky,” Jackson said, bringing his knee up to hold in his hands, “and people from Kentucky tend to do noble things. Take Abraham Lincoln.”

Ms. Rendelhoffer blinked.

“You know, the President,” Jackson said.

“Yes, I know Abraham Lincoln,” Ms. Rendelhoffer assured him.

“Well now,” Jackson said, smiling.

“I don’t mean I know him-know him,” Ms. Rendelhoffer hastened to say. Mr. Darenbrook was grinning at her now, blue eyes twinkling.

Jackson Darenbrook, at forty-seven, was a man with considerable attractions. He was very tall, about six foot three. But though he had a full head of brown and gray hair, wonderful cornflower-blue eyes and terrific white teeth, like most staggeringly wealthy men, he was only said to be very handsome when clearly he was not. He was charming and rather dashing, though, and as the very fit, athletic type he was, even if he had grown up to be a clerk in a shoe store, rare would be the woman who didn’t note his body with a slight inner smile. But he was not a clerk in a shoe store; he was the chairman of Darenbrook Communications, the private conglomerate made famous by its newspapers, and Jackson Darenbrook was said to be personally worth something in the vicinity of one hundred million dollars.

But more important, at least to Ms. Rendelhoffer, was the fact that Jackson Darenbrook had been a widower for seven years, which in her eyes did something toward redeeming his dreadful reputation as a ladies’ man. (He was always in one of the tabloid newspapers. “
VIVA LA COCONUTS
,” the caption beneath the photo would begin. “Media tycoon Jackson Darenbrook looks like he has his hands full with Elissa Zamborina, shortly after she was crowned Miss Coconut by the World Coconut Growers Association last week in Honolulu.”)

“About Diane Sawyer,” Jackson said.

“Yes,” Miss Rendelhoffer said.

“Now, imagine if she had been born and raised in New York instead of Kentucky,” Jackson said. “You know she’d never have turned out the way she did, not in a million years. She’s really A
mer
ican and that’s what I’m looking for.”

“What?” Miss Rendelhoffer said.

“I want a real A
mer
ican,” Jackson repeated.

“I beg your pardon,” Ms. Rendelhoffer said, sitting up straighter, “but I was born and raised in New York and I certainly consider myself a real American.” (She was rapidly coming to the conclusion that maybe she should have been dreading this account instead of looking forward to it with such gleeful anticipation.)

“Oh, I’m sure you are, don’t get me wrong,” Jackson said. “It’s just that the rest of the country probably wouldn’t think so.”

Ms. Rendelhoffer’s mouth fell open.

“This is New York,” Jackson said, gesturing to Miss Rendelhoffer’s window. “It’s like Los Angeles, like Chicago, or Philly. Most Americans only imagine what these huge cities are like, and some dream all their lives about what living in one of them would be like. But whether they fear or dream about the big cities, they
all
like nothing better than when one of their own takes on a big city—competes with the best in the world—and
wins
. “

Ms. Rendelhoffer swallowed. “Wins?”

“Wins,” Jackson said, nodding. “And that’s what I’m after, a winner that people can identify with, cheer on her success. But she’s got to have that whatever it is that makes big-city people like her too,” Jackson added, leaning forward. “I want even the worst Miss Havisham to say, ‘Why look, Estelle, that anchorwoman from Kentucky is even more sophisticated than we are.’ “He smiled again and sat back in his chair.

“I see,” Miss Rendelhoffer finally said. Her eyes went back down to the list and she read, “Linda Ellerbee.”

“Now see, if we can get somebody with even half her charisma and writing ability—” Jackson began.

“This is in addition to being from Kentucky?” Ms. Rendelhoffer asked him.

“Texas,” Jackson said, looking at Ms. Rendelhoffer as if something was seriously wrong with her mind. “Linda Ellerbee is from the great state of Texas.”

“Texas,” Miss Rendelhoffer said, noting this on her list.

“As coincidence would have it,” Jackson said, “I was born in Texas myself. At the airport, Love Field in Dallas. Company plane crash-landed and sent Mama into early labor. The doctor who delivered me was on his way home to Jacksboro and so Mama named me Jackson Andrew instead of Andrew Jackson.” When Ms. Rendelhoffer only looked at him, he added, “Mama was from South Carolina.”

“I see,” Ms. Rendelhoffer said slowly, eyes returning to the list. “Mary Alice Williams,” she read.

“Oh, wow,” Jackson said, “now see, there you have more of that whatever it is. She’s super smart, sophisticated and savvier than hell, but still reports every story as if she just can’t get over how fascinating the world is. I can’t leave the room when that gal’s on. I just think,
Well, Mary Alice, you’re right—this is the most interesting thing I’ve seen all day.
”

Ms. Rendelhoffer was blinking rapidly. “And you credit this to
…
?”

“Minnesota,” he said. “St. Paul is by no means a small city, but it sure doesn’t crank’em out jaded and cynical by the age of six like you know—where.” He winked.

“Minnesota,” Ms. Rendelhoffer repeated, making a notation on the list, wondering if she appeared to have been jaded and cynical since the tender age of six. “Okay, next is Judy Woodruff.” She looked up. “I assume we are to now discuss the merits of Georgia.”

“She’s from Oklahoma,” Jackson said. “You’re thinking of her Governor Carter years.”

“Oklahoma.” Ms. Rendelhoffer wrote this down.

“But Deborah Norville’s from Georgia and she’s on the list,” Jackson said, “so which do we want to talk about?”

“Let’s start with Woodruff,” Ms. Rendelhoffer suggested.

“But wait,” Jackson said, snapping his fingers, “I almost forgot. Write down Sylvia Chase, will you? She’s out in San Francisco now but she’s from Minnesota too.”

“Okay,” Ms. Rendelhoffer said, writing this down.

“And I’ve got Jane Pauley there, right?” he said.

“Yes,” she said. “And she’s
…
?”

“Indiana,” he said.

“Indiana,” she repeated, nodding, writing.

“Indiana, right,” Jackson said, leaning forward to watch.

“Now what is this?” Ms. Rendelhoffer suddenly said, sitting back and frowning at the list. “You’ve got written down, all in one entry, Brinkley-Brokaw-Cronkite-Gumbel-Moyers.”

“North Carolina, South Dakota, Missouri, Louisiana, Oklahoma,” Jackson said. “I’m just trying to draw you a map. See, if we just draw a line connecting all of these states, then we’d have the area outlined that we should be looking in.”

“Wait a minute, Mr. Darenbrook,” Ms. Rendelhoffer pleaded, covering her face. “I’ve never worked this way before,” she said from behind her hands, “I need a second to think about this.”

“Sure thing,” Jackson said, sitting back in his chair again and folding his hands.

After a moment Ms. Rendelhoffer lowered her hands. “Perhaps, Mr. Darenbrook,” she said quietly, pushing the list to the side and folding her hands, too, “in twenty words or less, you could just tell me what it is you are looking for.”

“Twenty words or less,” he repeated.

She nodded.

He looked at the ceiling for a moment and then leaned forward, folding his arms and resting them on her desk. “I want an anchorwoman,” he said, “from somewhere out
there
, who can survive life
here
, so she can be loved
every
where,
always
.” And then he winked. “That was twenty words, Ms. Rendelhoffer.”

MNA sent him no less than one hundred and twenty-six tapes to watch, but it was one of his own employees—Gordon Strenn, the producer in charge of their first miniseries—who led him to Alexandra. “Watch her reel and you’ll know if you want to meet her. Meet with her and you’ll know in a second if she’s what you want.” And so Jackson had watched her reel and he had wanted to meet her and, when he did, he knew in an instant he had found the star of DBS News. The young woman simply had it. Creeping crickets, Alexandra Waring
was
it.

As she walked across the lobby of the Ritz-Carlton in Washington, D.C. that September afternoon, Jackson’s heart had quickened in recognition of that elusive quality called class, that glorious all-American kind of class that wrapped confidence in humility, energy in grace and good spirit in good manners.

And she had been born and raised in Kansas.

She looked different than she did on TV though. She was thinner in real life, which didn’t surprise Jackson, since TV cameras added about fifteen pounds on him too—or anyone. But he was a little surprised at how Alexandra “traded up” on camera, being one for whom the camera’s slight distortion came as a gift, bestowing her with a kind of soft, low-glowing beauty on screen that she did not possess on her own. Oh, Waring was a head-turner all right, but she was more striking than beautiful off camera, more angular than soft. (
Well
, he reconsidered, glancing down at the rest of her,
soft enough in the right places
.)