Selling Out (19 page)

It was thrilling.

It was show biz.

It was the opposite kind of work Perry had done all his life, that he had grown so bored with, so stale and stultified. Instead of mere contemplation, this was action. Instead of telling others how things had been done in the past, it was doing things now, in the moment, for showing in the future; and the audience, instead of a classroom, was a whole nation!

Instead of the leisurely pace of the academy, the Monday-Wednesday-Fridays of classes at ten, two, and four, with office hours nestled in between and a couple of faculty and committee meetings salted in, this was every day all day into the evening, and every moment meaningful, dedicated, dramatic, devoted to getting every single detail right in order to produce the most magnificent show ever seen on American television!

Perry felt so exalted by it all that he couldn't even share his deepest emotions with Ned and Kenton for fear of sounding like the star-struck schoolboy he knew in some delicious way he had become. Once, walking across the lot back to his office, passing other shows in production, a group of men dressed as Cherokees, a couple of beautiful women in the full regalia of Old Western dancehall girls, he smiled and waved and felt with a lump in his throat the inspirational lines from Wordsworth: “Bliss was it in that dawn to be alive, but to be young was very heaven!”

And he was young again. At forty-three, he had rediscovered his youth.

He woke every morning before the alarm and bounced out of bed and into the kitchen to make a pot of coffee, drinking it by the window of the living room with the first cool, moist air of morning wafting in, and took a fresh cup and a glass of orange juice to Jane, switching on the TV to “Good Morning, America” and humming along with the theme song.

Jane good-naturedly grumbled, marveling that this was the same, husband who at home she had to wake every morning herself, coaxing him from sleep as she would a drugged derelict coming out of a coma. He told her once way back then in that other life that waking each morning he felt as if he were reenacting the whole history of the human race, rising not just from the sleep of the previous night but from the protozoic slime, pushing upwards through aeons into the dawn of civilization and finally emerging, exhausted from it all, into the bleary new day.

His exhaustion now came at night. Where at home he was just getting into his stride around the cocktail hour, and hitting the sack around midnight or one o'clock, now after dinner he was bushed, done in, limp as a rag. In all ways. He couldn't even think about sex, except on Saturday night. Even then, he had to, as it were, “get himself up for it,” and even during the act he found his mind straying to thoughts of “The First Year.”

Nor was it any wonder Perry was distracted from everything in life not relating to the show. His position as story consultant for the series gave him a great deal of responsibility. It also gave him a lot of influence.

For the first time in his life, he had influence over the lives of others—not just in giving a passing or a failing grade to a student, but in affecting the careers and incomes of other adult human beings. What made this even more awesome was that these people were similar to him in talent, ambition, and sensitivity—even in vulnerability. They were writers.

They flocked to special screenings set up for groups of them at the studio. The word went out all over town, through the trades and the grapevine and calls to agents, that a new show was in the works, an hour drama series rumored to be that rarest of all birds, a quality prime-time network series. Since the show had not yet been on the air, potential writers had to see the pilot in order to know what the series was about. They had to know who the characters were and what sort of situations they might be involved in before they could pitch an appropriate story line for consideration. To inform themselves of these matters they dutifully trooped to screenings of the pilot, armed with notebooks and pencils and hope.

Those who were not invited to attend, who did not have agents to submit their names and samples of their work for consideration, called and sent in work on their own. The inundation of writers grew in geographic scope as well as variety of applicants and ideas when one of the wire services carried a small item about Perry, the college teacher and short-story writer who had originated a new television show.

Aspiring writers not only sent in scripts they had written, but poems and verse plays, biographies and musicals, comedy sketches and magazine articles, inspirational essays from religious publications and feature stories on beloved pets that had been published in small-town weeklies. There were telephone calls from writers who claimed to be old buddies of Perry's from college or the army or summers in the south of France or winters in the Alps or other such places where in fact he had never been in his life. There were those who swore they were best friends or sweethearts of people Perry had known in those or other places throughout his apparently teeming past, or friends of mysterious relatives who had allegedly assumed other identities.

Of the scores of inquiries and applications and supplications, the culmination came with the appearance of a wild-eyed man with a flaming red beard who gained entry to Perry's office posing as a window washer and claiming to be a psychic messenger of the late seer Edgar Cayce, dispatched from the logging camp where he had worked for five years solely on the sacred mission of writing an episode of “The First Year's the Hardest.”

Security guards and efficient secretaries accustomed to such entreaties disposed of most of the eager but uninvited applicants, but that still left nearly a hundred or so valid, working professional writers vying for what came down to three script assignments. Or two, if Perry chose to write the first episode of the series himself. As story consultant, it was his own choice. He was not used to all these choices.

Thankfully, the selection of the writers was not his alone; it was a decision made jointly with Kenton and Ned, and had to have Archer's approval, as well as the network's.

This eased a bit the gnawing sense of guilt Perry felt about sitting in judgment on other writers, and his uneasiness about the whole process of writers having to come and sell themselves.

In Perry's own career as a writer he had never been required to “take meetings,” but simply to write his stories and put them in the mail. The first and only meeting he ever “took” was the one at the network with Archer, but he luckily did not at the time comprehend its import.

Had he known then he was supposed to be selling himself as well as his writing, he would, have freaked out and stayed home. No matter how tough it was to gather rejection slips, opening envelopes from your own mailbox in the privacy of your own home was far less agonizing than actually having to talk a good game at a meeting or pitch your story in a way that would sell it. Then, how degrading to read the indifference of disappointment on the faces of those with whom you were taking the meeting.

Yet Perry could see how it was necessary; he did not want to find himself working with some writer who he might feel was a schnook, or a bore, or had bad breath, no matter how brilliantly he put words on paper. Still, it was awful, and he bled for those candidates who obviously would not get the call alluded to in the obligatory phrase “We'll get back to you.”

Perry quickly learned that writers with any success in the rugged field of television would not deign to do an hour of anyone else's series, for the form known as episodic television was lowest in pay and prestige (and the two always went together out here) of all the network script possibilities. So the writers who came seeking assignments for the show were basically the young ones who were breaking in and the old ones who were hanging in.

Perry's heart went out to the old guys, the veterans who in their forties and fifties were trying to make a living by knocking out some episodes for other people's shows, a “Hart to Hart” or a “Dynasty” or maybe now a “First Year's the Hardest,” while keeping the dream that one of their own original scripts would someday hit the jackpot.

This could be me
, Perry realized with chilling recognition when he saw the older applicants pitching a story.

Perry knew from reading their work that some of them were men and women of true talent, with unproduced screenplays or theater pieces that seemed to Perry every bit as good as or better than most of what was making it big, but who simply had not had the right combination of elements to make it happen—the star or director or producer or packager who could get the right pieces all to fit at the right time. Still, they hung in; they toiled and smiled and came to these meetings with new ideas, pitched their wares with humor and intelligence and decency, and then, with thanks for the chance, went off, to wait hopefully to hear a yes to something, anything.

“There's a term for it,” Perry explained to Jane after work one night, “when the writers have to come in and sell themselves. It's called ‘tap dancing.'”

“Ugh,” she said, making a face. “It's disgusting.”

She got up and started toward the house.

“Don't blame me, I didn't invent this system,” Perry said.

“I was just going to get a drink.”

“Oh. Would you bring me a glass of that good Chardonnay?”

Jane saluted in silence and went inside as Perry sank deeper into the hot tub. When he got down all the way to his chin and closed his eyes, letting the bubbling jets massage him, he almost didn't mind the deprivation of being without his own swimming pool.

“Here you go,” Jane said, coming back out and handing Perry a long-stemmed glass filled with an almost golden-colored wine.

“You're not joining me?” he asked.

“I still have to do it a little at a time,” she said, tentatively sticking a toe in the cauldron of water.

“I mean with the wine,” he said.

She was holding a can of Michelob.

“I'm thirsty and hot and I feel like a beer,” she said. “Do you mind?”

“Of course not,” he said, lying.

She had never been a big beer drinker until this summer, and he secretly suspected her sudden love of the suds was not as she claimed because the heat and smog gave her a thirst that wine didn't slake, but rather because she regarded his sudden connoisseurship of California wines as more affectation than appreciation, and refused to share his enthusiasm.

He also minded that she was wearing her old one-piece, flower-patterned swimsuit from home, instead of the brief Day-Glo spandex bikini he had bought her. If she felt her body couldn't bear comparison with the sleek beauties on the Southern California beaches, that was understandable, but her refusal to wear the sexy bikini even in the privacy of the backyard hot tub, he took as an act of defiance, a purposeful turndown of the simple turn-on he was asking for.

“Yiii—help!” she yelled, as she edged down into the boiling waters, squinting with pain and holding her beer can aloft.

Perry tried to ignore this childish to-do, closing his eyes and taking a sip of the golden Chardonnay. He swished it around in his mouth, ruminating on the flavor, then opened his eyes.

“Is this the David Bruce eighty-one?” he asked suspiciously.

“It's whatever you had in the fridge,” Jane said, hunkering down in the bubbling waters like some kind of refugee on the lam.

“Darling, I think that was the Simi Valley Cellars Sauvignon,” Perry said moodily.

“For all I know it was the Bob's Bargain Basement Burgundy,” she said, belting back a swig of her Michelob.

“Never mind,” Perry said, taking a gulp of whatever the hell he was drinking.

“I didn't mean to blame you about the ‘tap dancing,'” Jane said. “I know it must be tough on you, really, having to decide people's fates like that, and knowing how hard they're trying.”

“It's the worst with the older guys,” Perry said. “I feel for them, but when push comes to shove, I find myself wanting to go with the bright young faces.”

“Why?”

“The point is, you can't afford to be doing someone a favor out of some misguided notion of charity. Or sentiment. It's your own ass on the line.”

“But I thought you said some of the old veterans were really good writers.”

Perry took another sip of wine and shifted a bit in the tub, trying to get a jet of water in the itchy place in his back.

“Well, you begin to wonder, though, if they're really good, how come they're still doing episodes of somebody else's series?”

“You're not exactly a boy genius yourself, darling.”

“That's what makes it so painful when I feel myself edging away from some of these older guys.”

“Still, you find yourself doing it, huh? Going for youth?”

“Going for what's good for the show. That's the bottom line.”

Suddenly Jane pulled herself up from the tub and shook herself as if she were a dog drying off.

“What's wrong?”

“Nothing. I just can't stand being boiled alive any longer. I'm going in and read for a while.”

Perry made a grunting sound of acknowledgment and took another sip of his wine. He wondered if the mention of reading was a bit of a barb since Jane noted recently that Perry didn't seem to have time for it any more. She went every week religiously to some intellectual bookshop on Sunset Boulevard and in addition to new novels, came home with copies of the
New Republic
, the
Nation
, sometimes even
Hudson
or
Partisan Review
. Seeing those little intellectual publications lying around on the coffee table seemed odd to Perry, as if they were artifacts of his other life back East; these magazines that seemed familiar at home struck him as exotic out here, a cultural juxtaposition, like finding the latest
Good Housekeeping
lying around some bazaar in Tangiers.

Of course Perry hadn't stopped reading, he was reading just as much or maybe more than he ever had, it was just a different kind of material. In the search for writers he had read dozens, hundreds of scripts and books, and in addition to that, he was now reading everything he could get his hands on about young married couples and graduate students in order not only to get ideas for the show but to make sure that everything in “The First Year” would be authentic,
real
. He had even had Ned's secretary call Washington to get all the government statistics and studies on youthful marriage and couples in grad school. He wanted every scene of his show to be not only dramatically but sociologically valid. He felt he had a mission, not merely to entertain but to inform, to raise the educational as well as the entertainment level of prime-time television in America.