The Right Man (3 page)

‘Hello,
Neil m’dear. Listen, I’ve spoken to Marc Linsey and he agrees we should have a meeting
…

‘Oh no,
not another meeting… What’s the point of another meeting?’ Neil was getting bolshy
too. Unattractive, that.

‘I
know, meetings are a complete backside ache, but look, m’dear, I think if we
can get him to come up here to us this time…’

‘I hate
coming in to the West End, man.’

‘God,
so do I. So does your editor, for God’s sake. That’s the point. How about if we
have lunch?’

Being
the artiste, Neil was less fond of meetings than the rest of us. To me,
meetings should be an art form in themselves: where to have them, how long to
let them go on, how much to say or not say are things which have to be
considered and practised if one is to get a meeting right.

The
best meeting is one whose outcome has already been decided before the arranged
time, either by the possession of fresh information, to be ponged in at the
appropriate moment, or by separate and prior conversations with most of the
parties concerned. A well-designed meeting should be like a neat and totally
rehearsed one-act play, with everyone playing their role —room for a certain
amount of improvisation, yes, but preferably only from the party who has been
kept in the dark until the last moment; usually the one who will have actually
to write a cheque or OK a budget at the meeting’s conclusion. You have to know
more than your adversary does. It’s all very Zen. A deal is struck when all
parties can come away from a meeting feeling that their needs are being met. It’s
no good going into a meeting with the intention of making someone squirm — you
will not get the best out of them that way. Aggression should be used sparingly,
and even then only when dealing with those who are impressed by it, Americans
say.

‘Can’t
we make it the end of the day? I lose a day’s writing if. I come up to the West
End for lunch, and I’d have to get a new inner tube.’ Neil was very hot on
environmental issues, and political and gender issues. Well, any issues really.

‘I’ll
see what I can do. How’s tomorrow looking?’

‘You
should know, Guy, you’re my agent, man.’ I hate being called man.

‘OK. I’ll
call you straight back.’

The end
of the day for Neil means five o’clock, just around Grace time for me. Time to
go and relieve Liz of the adorable little devil before her brain turns
completely to jelly. In any case, I know there’s no way I’m going to get Marc Linsey
to come up to the West End at the end of the day — he lives beyond Wimbledon,
family man — and it’s important not to go and meet him on his home territory,
at his leathery board room in Kensington. Firstly, he’ll be overconfident there
and may call in the contract. And secondly, Neil always gets wound up by those
large designer buildings. He’s liable to smoke, or criticize the furniture or
something. He can be charming and funny with a couple of glasses of Chardonnay
inside him and I’ve got to keep it on a carefree wavelength. Got to let Marc
think all is going well. Nothing heavy, keep it light and wacky. It’s got to be
with food. We are over a year past the delivery date after all.

‘Hi,
Marc, me old mucker? It’s Guy! How the devil are you? How are Beccy and Sidney?’
These days the business has changed; one has to take an interest in the whole
person. Tough ‘lunch is for wimps’ talk is last week’s teabag, and a little
extra family chat is cost—effective.

‘Guy! I
was wondering when you’d call. I’m fine. Seem to be encrusted with children
these days. Just got back from Florida, of all places. Disneyed the little
buggers … I’ve done my bit for this year.’ The public-school drawl of the
publishing world.

There
followed a minute or two of nice caring stuff about Marc’s wife and kids, Beccy
and Sidney, whose names were punched up on my Psion in front of me, although I
didn’t need to look at them. I have a hard disk of a memory for names and phone
numbers when I need them. Unfortunately, it is only available to me when
necessary for work; it lets me down socially, much to Liz’s annoyance — I need
a larger power chip. I arranged a lunch for the next day at the Soho House and
called Neil back to tell him. Grudgingly, he agreed to come.

There
is a sort of code to the truth and lies in agenting. You can always lie
for
your
client but must never lie
to
your client. Would that things were so
clear in personal relationships. Now, technically speaking, I had just lied to
Neil. I told him the only time Marc could make was tomorrow lunch, when of
course I hadn’t actually asked for any alternatives. However, I justified it to
myself with the thought that I knew the weakness of Neil’s negotiating
position. He was a year late with the manuscript. It wasn’t the manuscript that
he had been asked to provide, it was a dark and depressing dirge, instead of a
light and frothy romp. It was about 6o,ooo words short, but most importantly,
he had already had the signing fee. I really didn’t want him to have to pay
that back.

A lunch
in the West End might just save his streaky bacon. So in this sense, although I
was not telling him the entire truth about the meeting time, I was undoubtedly
acting in his best interests. Lying both to and for my client, if you like — in
any case saving him from himself — and I liked Neil, even if he did need saving
from himself rather more than other folk I could mention. I found him when he
was doing his own sort of performance-art/mime thing, and after a fair amount
of input from me he’d become a more than adequate comic turn. When I say I ‘civilized’
him, I mean it purely in the television sense of the word, in that I feel I had
enabled him to make whatever he had to offer acceptable to a greater number of
people. There had been client satisfaction in that. He seemed to have foundered
on the rocks recently though. Gone all political. Too much navel-gazing. All
this self-awareness lark, v. bad for business. He had the required oodles of
talent but had started questioning everything, analysing his own motives. Risky
as hell in light entertainment. Blind talent or complete lack of talent are
easier to deal with. Certainly easier to exploit. I hate that word ‘exploit’
and I use it here strictly in its business sense: the exploitation of talent
for the benefit of all concerned. ‘Nurture’ sounds too New Age, but that’s what
it is. I suppose, as a good agent, I should invent a new term, more fitting
with the caring nineties, because it’s true that five years ago the word ‘exploit’
would have sounded perfectly alright. ‘Expand’, maybe, or ‘mine’, or ‘broadcast’,
even. Yes, that’s good. Thankfully, most of the eighties terminology is now
dying out. We no longer talk about ‘getting into bed together’ with a TV
company over a project, or ‘getting a director pregnant’ with the idea of
casting a certain actor, but vestiges of eighties-ism still remain. I must
remember to expunge them from my vocabulary when they come up.

It was
a shame about Neil. He was a funny man. Not Stephen Fry by any means, nor even
Hugh Laurie. But he’d had a certain amount of exposure — another horrible
eighties word. I should start making a list. His trouble was that he didn’t
quite fit into an easily identifiable image category. He hadn’t been to Oxford
or Cambridge and hence lacked their sublime diffidence and fogeyness. But
neither was he from Liverpool or Belfast or some chip-on-shoulder-worthy place.
He was middle-class, educated and — probably the worst attribute for a really stonking
career —he had a social conscience. And then he’d got this idea to write a
novel. In theory I’d been all for it: raise the profile — another horrible
expression for the list — possibly leading to a more broad-based career. And
there’s another one. He’d stopped doing stand-up gigs altogether and
concentrated on writing. I hadn’t been able to achieve one of those massive
TV-star’s-first— book advances for him, but he’d been happy with that, saying
that he didn’t like the idea of that kind of pressure, but also that he didn’t
want it to seem that he was only being published because of his television ‘visibility’.
That’s another obnoxious term and I’m sure he wouldn’t actually have used it.
Being Neil, he would probably have said something along the lines of ‘I’d
rather be judged on the merit of the work.’ Absolutely right sentiment but a
very difficult one to explain to the marketing department of someone like Hodder
Headline or Random House.

In the
meantime, I wouldn’t have to worry about what to do about Neil until tomorrow
lunchtime. I put his rather thin manuscript into next day’s script pile and
wrote the lunch down in my mini-Filofax. On the whole, I still prefer pens and
pencils and paper to the Psion, and wherever possible, I use my notebook or
little green diary, certainly when meeting clients. It looks more personal than
anything digital and people relax more when they see that you are human. Of
course, everything’s logged on an Apple at the office by Joan anyway, so we’re
covered.

At the
conclusion of this bit of business the thought of Saara Henderson and her three
little tartan boys came blowing back into my mind like the aching sough of wind
in high trees.

‘It’s
your favourite person on line three,’ Joan sniggered at me.

‘Oh,
not fucking Marcus Mortimer again,’ I said, putting the unhappy Hendersons on
my back burner where they couldn’t grind at the machinery of the day.

‘Uh uh.
Female.’ Tilda, who’d been going though radio schedules with me in my office,
raised her eyebrows suggestively and left the room, grinning to herself, and
through the glass I saw our accountant Tania’s eyelids drop swiftly back down to
the computer screen on her desk. She shared the joke with all the women in
office. It must be Susan Planter, Jeremy’s wife. Jeremy Planter. Yes, he’s one
of mine actually. Even Naomi thought there was something between me and Susan,
and in a way, I suppose there was. Something. Not sexual, as my female
colleagues would have it, but an understanding, a sympathy. I didn’t fancy her
at all but I did like her, do like her, and she likes me, I know. We can talk.
She’s interesting and, blessed relief, nothing to do with the business, unless,
of course, you count being married to Jeremy Planter, who was fast becoming
Mullin and Ketts’ top-earning client.

Terrible
bloody name, Jeremy Planter, terrible couple of names actually. As if Planter
wasn’t bad enough, to prefix it with a Jeremy should have been show-biz
suicide. Originally we advised him to change it but that was ten years ago and
we were wrong. Jeremy has had a Dr Faustus of a career for the last year or so.
After years of playing second or even third fiddle on other people’s shows,
there suddenly seemed to be nothing he couldn’t do. Mind you, he wouldn’t
attempt anything that he didn’t know he could excel in. He was a dream client
in that he knew his limitations. The total opposite of Neil: no two-year sorties
into the world of novel-writing for Jeremy. Nor months in Hollywood trying to
swim amongst the sharks without armbands like Doug Random, my little Brit-pack
movie star —cover of
Esquire
last month, by the way — which of course
has been the sinking of many promising careers. Not everyone has Doug’s ability
to deal with loneliness and American sincerity; Doug Random’s the exception.
No, Jeremy had a totally practical attitude to his talent, if you can call it
that. He was quick-thinking and, despite the generally awkward appearance —the
terrible physique and the speech impediment — hugely attractive. There are
those who say he is difficult to work with, and he can be, I’ve seen it, but he
is, to fan the embers of a cliché, a perfectionist, and has no qualms about
making someone’s life a misery until they get it right. It’s going to be his
reputation on the line at the end of the day after all and, since the cliché is
well and truly alight now, I might as well add, he doesn’t suffer fools gladly.
I’m very proud of what we’ve done for Jeremy. He’s virtually become a bloody
brand name, for Christ’s sake. In fact the other day I even heard someone on
Loose
Ends,
John Hegley I think it was, describe a certain way of pausing before
a punchline as ‘Planter-esque’. You can’t get much better than that. Funny to
think that the famous Planter timing actually comes from a stammering cure
programme which Jeremy was put through by his mother in his early teens. But he’s
amazing like that. He can turn even his worst flaws into advantages. The
millions of people who watch his game-show regularly have actually begun to
love him, I believe. They have taken him, or what they think is him, into them
by a sort of drip-feed. Maybe they can sense how much he needs their approval,
their adoration. And he really does need it, more than food, or sleep, or even
sex. I could go all analytical, as Sunday journalists have tried recently, and
make connections between his humble origins in a two-bedroom flat by the
railway at Mortlake, the fact that he was an only child abandoned by his
father, da di da di da and so on, but what would be the point? He was probably
making all that stuff up anyway, and who cares? Jeremy Planter is a phenomenon.
It must have been a nightmare for Susan being married to the bastard all this
time.

I
pushed line 3 and flicked the adjoining office door closed with my foot. A
pointless gesture, because any one of the women in the office could have
listened in on line 3 had they wanted, but it was all part of playing along
with the game.

‘Susan.
Sue. Hello, m’dear.’

There
was an un-Susan-like pause before she spoke.