Turn of the Century (24 page)

It’s dark and cold and quiet on Water Street as Lizzie signs the charge slip and they all pile out of the Go! Now! dial-car, Max carrying a Kellogg’s Frosted Flakes/World Wildlife Fund bag, Sarah grabbing a suitcase, Lizzie struggling with the duffel bag as well as the sleeping LuLu. The front stoop seems unusually well lit—it’s the neighbors’ new giant TV screen. By the bluish glow of a five-foot-high close-up of Agent Scully’s face, Lizzie picks out the keys to the front door.

Featherstone has folded his arms across his chest, and silently examining Francesca, he furrows his brow and twists his mouth thoughtfully, as if to signal that he isn’t about to say
Really excellent booty for an anchorwoman
, or
You think Kurt Loder gets to do her?
“George,” he says,
“has she paid enough dues yet to be considered the real thing in your, you know, journalistic community?”

Paid dues? The real thing? His journalistic community? George considers answering,
Timothy, are you aware that Geraldo Rivera is a senior NBC News correspondent and anchor?
But he glances at Featherstone, who shows every sign of being serious, and then back at Francesca. “I think she does have some Washington reporting experience,” he says evenly, “but I don’t know that she’s really on anyone’s radar yet, one way or the other,” realizing as the words leave his mouth that it’s not just ass kissing, this respectful new attitude around Featherstone—it is his old coat-and-tie newsman mode reasserting itself. Half of
Real Time
will be a real news program. Now that the show has a green light, George is reverting, in automatic atavistic anticipation, to the kind of self-serious conventional wisdom that journalism demands of its senior … players.

Francesca now stands about ten feet away from George and Ng and Featherstone, talking to a Spic-and-Span Super-Casual who is younger than George but wears oversize glasses with yellow-orange lenses, the kind that shellacked Hollywood big shots from the fifties and sixties wear when they get old. George, Featherstone, and Ng are in the background of Francesca’s E!
²
shot. After several glasses of champagne at his ABC News going-away party a year ago, George remembers joking to Peter Jennings that he should start just referring to himself simply as Peter, like Francesca. Jennings grinned that reticent anchorman grin and patted George on the back. George couldn’t decide if the tight smile and the back pat meant he was pissed off or saddened or confused. And at that merry instant, George didn’t care. In journalism, he had been the kooky kid, precocious and refreshingly irreverent. Now, in show business, he’s the graybeard intellectual, the grownup, seasoned and refreshingly substantial.

“By the way, last night was a
fantastic
episode,” Ng tells him as she steps away. “The flashback? Where Jennie remembers her cocaine binge in college? Was completely
incredible
. I was like, ‘Is this a feature
film?
’ ” No wonder Featherstone is so fond of her.

“The most excellent news,” Featherstone says, ignoring Ng, “is that you held on to more of the
Freaky Shit!
people last night than you ever did before. Maybe your twenty seconds of hip-hop is working.”

Freaky Shit!
, on at nine o’clock just before
NARCS
, is MBC’s highest-rated show, the one-line concept for which is “Howard Stern meets the Discovery Channel.” In print, the name is rendered as
Freaky S***!
, and on the air they call it
Freaky Shhh!

“And next week,” George adds, selling, selling, selling as he had never done until he became a boss, selling as he never imagined he would do, “we’re bringing back the kid, the handsome drug dealer from New Year’s. He’s on the cover of next month’s
Spin
. And we’ve written his girlfriend into the show, too.”

“The crying girl in the lingerie and the chamois trench?”

George nods. He has only heard shopgirls say the word
lingerie
. He has never heard anyone say
chamois trench
, ever.

“I loved that girl,” Featherstone continues. “With the starburst on her belly?
Fantastic
. Great look. Recur her, definitely. With that wardrobe as her signature look.”

“And we’ve got very strong scripts for the rest of the season.” Six out of the nine remaining unproduced shows are written. George has read three of those six drafts. Read two and skimmed one. And one of those two is definitely good. Plus, he intends to write at least one more script himself, maybe the final show of the season, if he can find the time. “I sent you the beat sheet for the last show of the season.”
The beat sheet
. He could have said
the synopsis
. During his decade as a print journalist he didn’t once call a magazine
the book
or talk about
putting it to bed
, and when he was in TV news he’d tried not to refer to
talent
being on
our air
. But the odds are only fifty-fifty that Featherstone would know what synopsis means, and George is still too much a show business newcomer to reject every bit of jargon. He’s happy to use the ones that provide real verbal economy, like MOW for movie of the week, or ADR for automatic dialogue replacement—a phrase for retaping lines of actors’ dialogue in postproduction that made George laugh out loud the first time he heard it.

“Yeah, Laura gave me her coverage on your final episode. Sounds very mondo.” George assumes
mondo
is good. “This joint is filling up,” Featherstone says, looking around. For a man of his age and station, he has an exceptionally short attention span, about which he seems exceptionally unembarrassed. “High school with money. You know?”
Featherstone continues scanning the crowd, finally concluding, “Serious M-A-W glut.”

“MAW?”

“Model, Actress, Whatever,” Featherstone tells him matter-of-factly, with no trace of a smile, eyeing one MAW after another.

George marvels at how thoroughly jokes and no-bones-about-it insincerity have sifted into ordinary discourse. Irony is now embedded in the language, ubiquitous and invisible.

Featherstone remembers something that excites him. “Did I tell you I happened to chitchat the other night with one of Alec Baldwin’s William Morris guys? And mentioned Alec guest-starring on the season ender. As Kahuna.” Kahuna is the internal
NARCS
nickname for the nameless, faceless, well-connected Washington political figure connected to a heroin-importing conspiracy. George had already called Tom Selleck’s agent about Selleck appearing as Kahuna. “Alec’s guy says Alec would definitely want the character to be a conservative Republican,” Featherstone continues. “But the guy is into it. I’d say we’ve got Alec semi-attached.”

George pauses, preparing to speak carefully and tentatively, doing his best to mask his alarm and anger. He already sees that, in entertainment television, it’s never one big concession that makes a show bad—it’s the two or three small concessions every week until you’ve forgotten what you were trying to do in the first place.

“But the back story so far,” he says, “has been that Kahuna is more in the Ted Kennedy, Jerry Brown neighborhood. You know? The Black Panther reference a couple of episodes ago?”

“If you’ve got Alec f-ing Baldwin semi-attached,” Timothy says in a friendly tone that suggests he is nevertheless on the verge of brooking no quarter, “I think you can custom-build. I mean, who cares about the character’s
political party
. Does making Kahuna a Democrat get us a number? I don’t think so.”

Does X get us a number?
tends to be a trump card in television, even in television news. In fact, when he was a news producer, George himself used a version of the line a couple of times—uttered in a mock-schlock producer’s voice to give it an ironic sugarcoating his staff understood, but it was seriously meant, and his staff also understood that. George knows a would-be anchor on a morning show who had
his network news career derailed by a single low-Nielsen guest appearance.
Because, Timothy
, he thinks of saying now,
making the villain a liberal burnout is a lot more interesting than making him some obvious right-wing gangster
. But George knows he’ll sound like a whiny writer pleading with a producer, and
he’s
the producer, paid to be tough-minded, to treat everything as fungible, to trade creative off against commercial. So he does not quibble.

Instead, he says, “Sure, absolutely, if we got Alec Baldwin, we’ll take his notes. Of course.” He figures on being saved by his careful subjunctive, the
if:
he has heard about Baldwin’s enthusiastic semi-attachments and quasi-commitments. George doesn’t like dissembling and conniving, but he has to protect the creative autonomy of his show. That’s also being a grownup. That’s being a boss, a leader.

Dissembling and conniving in order to defend one’s cherished freedom to cast Tom fucking
Selleck?
Is that believing one’s own bullshit?

It feels so fine to be home,
so
fine, such a relief. Even though one of the upstairs radiators broke sometime during the week. And even though dinner will be a buffet of Paul Newman popcorn, a bag of Le Gourmet baby carrots, Michael Jordan cottage cheese one day past its sell-by date, and a pint of Cherry Garcia. At least the carrots aren’t a celebrity brand, Lizzie thinks, staring at the microwave as the kernel pops accelerate. Up in the living room, Max and Louisa sit in the dark, watching Nickelodeon, Max flipping through every one of the seventy-six channels during every commercial break.

Again, the bright light. This time, he feels the heat. Ng, along with the Spic-and-Span Casual wearing the Lew Wasserman glasses and Francesca and thus the E!
²
video crew, have enveloped him and Featherstone.

“George, do you know Francesca?” Ng says, impressively. Among people who consort with the powerful and the celebrated, the flattering standard introduction is
Do you know
, never
I’d like you to meet
. We are all members of the international fraternal order of the somewhat famous. We’ve met before, haven’t we, in some green room or at some gala dinner? Or could have, certainly.
George, you know His Holiness the
Pope, don’t you?
And to certify celebrity, here is their very own TV crew, live from Los Angeles.