Star Time (20 page)

He didn’t.

Paraphrased to him were surveys of viewer groups, psychological profiles, and most telling, a memo from a vice president that quoted a different vice president as having thought he overheard Barnett Roderick wondering why the woman character didn’t have a husband—at least the man
thought
Barnett was referring to Gus’s show.

“You know how brilliant the Chairman’s gut is, so we did some hurry-up viewer focus groups.” The Programming head turned to a young man in new-show research for a report.

“Roderick was absolutely on target,” the young programmer assured them. “Viewers said they liked soft, not hard women. The man is brilliant.”

“That’s why we have to give her a husband,” said the Programming chief.

The new directive appalled Gus. “But she’s a detective on the streets. She's left the rich guy who was keeping her in
Heritage Hall
to go back to police work, her first love.  Half the attraction of the show is that the men she meets and other cops are attracted to her and there’s always the possibility of a love affair. Do you want a married woman having love affairs?”

No, they didn’t want that. They put their collective heads together to brainstorm.

What had induced Gus Krieger to leave the production company for which he had written his last hit show was the chance to go independent and own his
series.
If it were successful, he would become rich. Not just salary-rich, but really rich, as episodes piled up that could be sold as reruns to local stations after the fourth year.  FBS promised him complete creative freedom. Gus believed, despite proof that ulcers were caused by bacteria, that his had resulted from wrangling with network executives over their ill-conceived requests for changes.

“What happened to my complete creative freedom?” Gus wanted to know.

“You have it, completely,” the head of Programming assured him. "But we can’t let just
anything
go out over the air. It might be obscene or really crazy. So we need to approve scripts, right?”

“And casting,” added Raoul
Clampton
, who was in charge of Dramatic Series Development. “But our hands are strictly off this baby. That’s why we brought in a genius like you.”

The dispute went on for two hours. When it was over, Gus found he had little alternative to a compromise if he wanted the show to get on the air. The woman cop would be separated, but devoted to her estranged husband and hoping to get back together with him. He would be a straight, mainstream guy who can’t understand why the sweet woman he loves and married wants to remain a cop. She can’t quite explain it herself, but her daddy was a cop and it’s in her blood.

Gus hated the changes. They were phony and trite and diluted the woman’s flinty, pungent character. His best hope, he decided, was to write her strongly enough to overcome the problems and maybe, just maybe, sneak by the network an early script that split husband and wife up for good. Maybe he could do better than that, he thought. Maybe he could have a robber kill the civilian husband, who is buying something in a store at the time, which would show that you can’t hide from the
problems of crime in this country. She could then track the killer down. Or was he just kidding himself that he could ever change the network’s mind?

Now, though, he had the unpleasant task of informing Sally Foster that the fierce, biting role for which she had left
Heritage Hall
had just had its teeth filed down and acquired a husband no one had known about over the five years of that show. Tonight he would have to write new scenes to be inserted into the pilot, and Sally would have to shoot them, so that her character would be softened in the very first episode. If she objected, he and the network would hire someone else to play the woman cop and would then reshoot
all
her scenes in the pilot.

But, of course, before any reshooting could be done, his pilot-script revisions would have to be approved by the network.

Greg’s life quickly assumed a kind of permanence he had never experienced with Chris. Diane depended on him for companionship far more than Chris had. Despite her job and her volunteer work, it seemed to him that she marked time without him. Half-orphaned at birth and an only child, she had waited all her life for a mate and missed Greg terribly when they were apart. Things she wanted to say to him filled her up to overflowing by day’s end. She was lively and funny, and he looked forward to their time together as well.

The hectic upfront selling period had just commenced, and he was putting in long hours. One night, she kept phoning his office until very late, leaving a new message each time for him to call her. The meetings broke well after midnight, and he arrived back at his apartment just before two in the morning. His phone rang five minutes later.

“You didn’t call me back,” she said as soon as he picked up.

“I just got home.”

“I’ve been trying you every few minutes.”

“The meeting ended so late I was sure you’d be asleep.”

“I’d never go to sleep before you called.”

Diane spoke the last line with an adamancy that suggested she considered herself in competition with the network for his allegiance and attention, as she had always considered herself for her father’s. She did not intend to share Greg.

Marian Marcus started in FBS’s Programming Department on the same day that she was graduated from UCLA and took her last, regretful glance at Derek Peters. Chris had introduced her to someone who had ultimately hired her.

News was too factual for Marian. Her affinity for weaving fantasies about her personal life was a part of a larger interest in fiction. She loved
entertainment and stories and thought she could sense what made them good and whether other people would want to watch them. She was a fan at heart, dazzled by the glittering images on the little screen. Half-consciously, she hoped proximity would compensate for her persistent plainness.

The other young people in the department, she found, were all good-looking and clever, “hotshots,” she called them in her thoughts. Ironically, her plainness proved to be an effective means of deflecting the jealousies and ambitions that pulsed like sine waves through the department. Hotshots rose and fell. Marian would slowly climb.

Her first task was to read scripts and comment on them. She worked under Raoul
Clampton
in Dramatic Series Development. He did not seem much older than she, but he was definitely a hotshot: clean features, good clothes, and a great smile. He was nervous around superiors and toadied to them, but could be callous to subordinates and producers who needed him. Now, he wanted to know what she thought of the scripts she had read.

“We have high hopes for Danny Vickers’s new show,” he told her. “Anything that man touches is gold.”

“Well, the script seemed an awful lot like
Law & Order
.
”

“It was supposed to.”

“Won’t people get bored with a show that’s just like a show they already watch?”

“In television people can never get enough of a good thing. What did you think of Gus Krieger’s script?”

She handed him the report she had written up. He skimmed it and turned white.

“The son of a bitch killed off the husband!”

Marian nodded. “It was very powerful. You really care about the wife after that and can understand why she’s a cop and so tough.”

“Tough? What kind of tough?”

“Well, tough.”

“Oh, God,
that
kind of tough.”

Raoul grabbed for the phone receiver and immediately called his boss.

“Chad, we’ve got a problem. I just read Gus Krieger’s new script. He killed our husband.” Raoul paused to listen,
then
spoke. “You’re absolutely right. He’s testing us. That’s the trouble with
geniuses,
they think they’re smarter than other people.”

Raoul glanced at Marian for confirmation of his observation.

“Absolutely,” he spoke into the receiver. “The husband stays. What’s the point of taking meetings otherwise? Let him kill off somebody else’s husband.
The sister’s.”
Raoul paused again. “Well, we’ll
give
her a
sister, maybe married to a really rich guy.
Great clothes.
You
know,
the ‘Dynasty’ look. The sisters could spend a lot of time together.
How about lunch?”
Raoul sensed confusion.
“No, you and me.”

They took several minutes to decide where to eat lunch. Then Raoul phoned Gus Krieger and told him that the woman cop now had a sister she spends a lot of time with. The two husbands are really close. It’s the sister’s husband who gets killed. Everybody is really devastated. The sister turns out to be as tough in her own social way as the woman cop is with criminals

“But a different tough, you dig? And naturally the sister is now really rich in her own right, head of her husband’s conglomerate. Big budget for clothes, you’ll love it.” His gaze was fixed on the clouds filling the upper half of his window behind the Hollywood Hills. “Gus baby, this is just off the top of my head, you understand, but maybe the rich sister’s really a bitch, always trying to seduce the good sister’s husband. I picture them kind of like Joan and Jackie Collins.” He thought a moment. “Or maybe the Olsen twins

if they were still doing TV. Hey, great casting idea! I'll bet they’d love it.”

Marian gave back the admiring nod Raoul seemed to expect and wondered if the Sally Foster character was still a cop.

Greg lifted Diane’s veil, and they kissed with deep commitment. Then, buoyant, they turned to face the expanse of illustrious wedding guests, parted by a carpet rolled down the middle like the Red Sea to permit the couple’s passage out to their life together. Greg was one of them now. He and Diane glanced happily at each other. He squeezed her hand. They would live happily ever after.

At the end of the year, when her contract expired, Stew
Graushner
offered Chris a higher salary and the job of co-anchor with Quinn Harris if she would stay on.

“No.” She was resolute.

“You’re doing this to me because of that fight we had during sweeps weeks—”

“No, I’m not, Stew.”

“—when I wanted to hype the ratings by having you follow that toilets series with The Great Bidets of Hollywood, right? That’s it, isn’t it?”

“No, Stew, it has nothing to do with you.
Or the bidets.
I just want to get away from this station and start fresh.”

“But we all love you here. Think of it: co-anchor.
The second-ranked news program in Los Angeles.”

“I’m not staying.”

He reflected gloomily, “This morning, when my medical exam turned up a clean EKG, I knew something really terrible would happen today.”

“Stew, I’m not leaving because of you. I’m just leaving.”

He shook his head, anxiety battering his brow. “Greg
Lyall
was smart to get out of here when the going was good. Nine months later, look at us. We’re almost number one! Maybe you’re right to get out. 
Nowhere to go but down.”

Chris vainly tried to comfort the inconsolable news director. Certain that he could not change her mind, he asked about her plans.

“I’ll talk to other stations in town, I guess. See if any want me.”

“They’ll want you, all right. You’ll bring ratings with you. Who’s your agent?”

Chris was confused by the question. She was in news, not show biz.

“We all have agents,” Stew informed her.
“Usually not the same ones who represent actors though.
Local news is becoming big business.”

“The idea repels me. Most of us find an agent helps.”

“Usually they work on a ten-percent commission.”

“Ten percent of what I earn? Just to make a deal I could make on my own?”

Stew said she was being shortsighted and gave her the name of a very good agent based in New York. She said she would think about it. But having someone negotiate for her offended her frontier directness; it violated her preconception of two people shaking hands over an honest bargain honestly arrived at.

She approached another network-owned station as the year drew to a close and was offered a hundred thousand dollars to co-anchor its local news broadcast. On an impulse, before she accepted, she telephoned Carl Green, the agent Stew
Graushner
had recommended.

The other end of the phone line erupted in an outpouring of friendly New York accent as soon as she gave her name. “Mass killing at a car dealership, maybe nine, ten months ago, right?
Mexican guy.
FBS.
You’re the hot reporter in L.A.”

“I am?”

Green assured her that she was and that he was glad she had phoned. He had wanted to call
her
for a long while. “You’re going to be a star.”