Selling Out (23 page)

“Mmmm,” Perry said with a nod of acknowledgment.

So that was it. Pru Vardeman had played the good hostess by getting Jane together with the one person in the whole glittery crowd who got her rocks off reminiscing about
Vermont
, for God sake. Well, he guessed it was harmless; better than introducing his wife to one of those well-tanned seduction artists among the sucessful-actor set.

“I loved ‘The First Year's the Hardest,'” Mona said. “It's the sort of thing that makes all of us proud.”

“Thanks,” Perry said, beginning to look around the lawn, trying to spot more stars.

“Maybe you and Mona could even work together some day,” Jane said. “She's read your stories!”

“I'm sure you have many fans out here, Perry,” Mona said, “but I hope you'll remember me as a genuine one of them.”

“Sure. It was nice to meet you,” he said, and pulled Jane away to the bar.

“You could at least have been polite,” Jane whispered at him harshly. “She's a wonderful person.”

“I'll vote for her,” Perry said, “for the Mother of the Year Look-Alike.”

He had bigger fish to fry than Mona Halsted.

Perry was on a roll.

When the final compilation of national Nielsen ratings came in, “The First Year's the Hardest” not only won the night it was aired, it was number one for the whole week, barely—but still, amazingly—beating out the highly touted “Frills,” a lascivious four-part miniseries about an orphaned transvestite who overcomes a crippling bone disease and ruthlessly rises to the top of a worldwide lingerie empire. Analysis showed that “Frills” was up against stiff competition, going head-to-head against “Dallas” one night and “Love Boat” the next, while “First Year” had only the hapless magic show special and the bottom-drawer baseball game to contend against, but still, number one was number one, no matter how you sliced it, and the creators of the new hit were enjoying their growing prestige and power in the Industry.

“We're number one for the whole damn week,” Perry intoned with slow emphasis when he called Jane the morning of the latest momentous news.

“Perry? Is that you?” his wife asked.

“Who else, love? Is Archer himself calling to tell you the ratings news?”

“No. It was just—you sounded kind of like Orson Welles.”

Perry roared. Like a lion.

Evidently his voice was getting even deeper. If his success continued at this accelerated pace, he would soon sound like James Earl Jones doing Darth Vader.

And why not? It seemed his work meant death to the opposition. In a few seasons, rival networks would tremble on hearing that a new Perry Moss show was going on the air.

“Do you feel like a traitor to the world you came from?”

Perry felt himself start to flush, then laughed expansively.

“You make it sound like I'm a visitor from another planet. Some kind of Isaac Asimov character.”

The reporter, who was working on his second Dos Equis, and had hardly touched his enchiladas, was obviously trying to bait him. Perry took a delicate sip of his Virgin Margarita, feeling cool and in control. The reporter was obviously hostile, probably jealous, which made it all the more essential for Perry to stay calm, aloof. He didn't want to look a fool in the Entertainment section of the Los Angeles
Times
.

“Aren't the values of the academic world some light years away from those of network television?” the reporter pressed.

Perry dabbed a napkin at the salt around the corner of his mouth and settled back in his banquette.

“I can only go by my own experience,” he said. “I'm lucky to be working with topflight people like Ned Gurney, Kenton Spires. And of course Archer Mellis, of Paragon, whose sole purpose in bringing us together was to try to do quality television. His faith has sustained us, and the network has loyally supported us.”

“So you're giving up teaching for television?”

“Oh no! I'm going back to Vermont for the fall semester. We'll have finished our current order of shows by then, and if we get picked up, I'll of course be in constant touch on a consultancy basis. If not, I'll still come back here during our holidays and our midsemester break in January. There's lots of other offers I've had, and lots of ideas of my own I'd like to develop. But I'll alternate that with teaching.”

“Don't you think trying to do both will make you schizophrenic?”

Perry smiled.

“I hope it will only make me like what so many people are becoming who commute from East to West—bi-coastal.”

The reporter flipped his notebook shut, and finished off his beer.

“I can't wait to talk to you a year from now,” he said.

“It's a date,” Perry said with a smile. “In the meantime, I really have to run back to the lot.”

At the very end of the interview-lunch at Casa Tio, a fancy Mexican restaurant, Perry had begun to experience uncomfortable feelings of shortness of breath and a beginning of trembling in his fingers. The anxiety was like he used to feel before his life with Jane when he was always hung over and trying to go a few days without a drink, but this time it was not because of any such envy brought on by the reporter's swilling of the Mexican beers, while he sipped his pure citrus Margarita without the tequila. That in fact gave him a sense of calm, and control, of superiority. Nor was it the reporter's aggressive questions, for though they were annoying they weren't really upsetting. The fact was, Perry now found he simply didn't want to be away from the lot. He suffered what felt like withdrawal pains whenever he had to leave it during the working day.

The damn lunch made him miss dailies. The only comfort was that it meant publicity for the show.

“How was your interview?” Ned asked him.

“The usual. A bore. The guy was all right, I guess. He just didn't understand—I mean, I knew I couldn't really explain to him what it's like, what we're doing, why I love it.”

“Of course not,” Ned said. “You never can, to civilians. Reporters are civilians.”

Yes
.

Perry understood that now. He had heard guys on the lot speak of anyone outside the business as “civilians” and it was true. They might be smart, and sympathetic, and curious, but they didn't understand the world you were working in, any more than people at home understood about the life of soldiers in combat. It was simply a different experience, a different life—more intense, exciting, adventurous, meaningful.

Perry was not a civilian any more, he was part of the army of entertainment, part of the elite troops. Maybe that was why so many of them wore shirts with epaulets on them, and semi-military jackets. They
were
an army, fighting the never-ending battle against boredom, against emptiness, against the threat of blank television screens or movie screens or stages all across America and the world. They were on a mission to make pictures, stories, images, symbols, to fill the gap, the maw, the waiting wandering attentions and hungry minds of a whole society.

He realized that was why he didn't want his best friend—or best friend from his other world—Al Cohen, to come and visit Not because Perry was a snob and didn't care for Al any more, not that he thought less of him, but the fact was, Al was a civilian. When you were fighting on the front lines, for the life of your cause (the show), you simply didn't want to be distracted by having civilians around, no matter how bright they were, no matter how you might care for them. He wrote to Al as graciously as he could, explaining it just wasn't a good time for him to come out, there wouldn't be any chance to talk or show him around the way he'd like to do, but anyway, he and Jane would be back in Vermont in just a few weeks, he'd explain everything then.

He had to tell Jane about turning down Al's request to come visit, since he knew she'd find out sooner or later. Naturally, she didn't understand.

“I'm not turning my back on my best friend, I'm not doing anything like that,” Perry tried to explain. “It's just that he wouldn't understand what I'm doing now, not because he's a jerk, for God sake, he's the most perceptive, brightest guy I know, but he's—well, dammit, he's a
civilian
.”

“Like me,” said Jane.

“I didn't say that.”

“But it's true, isn't it?”

“Even if it is, it doesn't mean I love you any less.”

“I know what it means,” Jane said.

Perry figured anything else he might say would only get him in deeper. He went to the bedroom to study a script.

IX

“We'll hold our fire till the end,” Archer commanded his men. He was bent forward over the wheel in determination, driving at breakneck speed through the high hairpin curves that led up out of the Valley and on to network headquarters. Perry was bending forward, too, not only to catch Archer's instructions over the booming sound system, but also because of the sense of urgency about this unexpected meeting. Ned Gurney was crunched onto the shelf behind the two seats of the tiny sports car, seemingly resigned if not relaxed.

“Ignorant bastards,” he murmured.

“Don't blow your cool, don't let them put you on the defensive,” Archer warned. “We have a beautiful script, and we're proud of it.”

“I thought they were too,” Perry said in genuine confusion. “I thought they loved it.”

Only a few days before, word had come down through channels from Archer to Ned to Perry (the writer being by tradition the last to hear any vital information, even about what he had written) that Amanda LeMay was simply gaga over Perry's first hour script to lead off the series, and even more amazing, though of course less verifiable, was the rumor from higher on high that Max Bloorman had scanned it himself in New York and was not displeased!

“This is purely an E. and A. problem,” Archer said.

Over the blast of the music, Perry thought he heard T. and A. Like any other sophisticated citizen who followed the media's inside accounts of the entertainment world, he knew that T. and A. was television code for tits and ass, a gross shorthand for the kind of show that appealed to the most base instinct of viewers by the most flamboyant possible display of the female anatomy. He understood that although one network in particular was most renowned for its belief in the foolproof lure of the T. and A. factor, there were executives at each network who felt that the addition of that lure could strengthen a weak show, just as there were some like Harry Flanders who thought that cars were the answer for bolstering any drama.

“My God!” he shouted in genuine shock. “You mean they want us to put in more tits and ass?”

Both Archer and Ned looked at Perry with alarm, as if they feared he had taken leave of his senses.

“Well,” he said defensively, “isn't that what T. and A. means?”

Archer dialed down the musical volume.

“Not T. and A.,” he said patiently, “
E
. and A.”

“What's that?” Perry asked, his mind reeling at the possible meaning of this new bit of TV esoterica. Elbows and Armpits? Elastic and Action?

“E. and A.,” Archer said patiently, “is the network Department of Ethics and Attitudes.”

“The censors,” Ned explained.

Perry felt like a real rookie. Of course he knew about the network censors, but so far he had been shielded from them. There was really very little of a controversial nature in the pilot story of his innocent young married couple, and the few issues of censorship had to do with the language, which Archer gently explained to him had to be a bit toned down for television. Perry had been realistically agreeable about removing a few harsh bits of dialogue to satisfy the censors, a couple of “Screw yous” and “Up yourses” that would have been perfectly OK in the pages of a magazine but would not do for the ears of millions on national television.

He also knew that although every network had its own censors, they were never officially called censors, which smacked of totalitarianism, of un-American practice. Rather, each network, as part of its keeping of the public trust, maintained boards or departments devoted to the protection of what it conceived to be society's accepted standards of morality, taste, and behavior. Each was called by a lofty title appropriate to this high function, such as, at Perry's network, the Department of Ethics and Attitudes.

“But what could they possibly object to?” Perry asked. “We don't even have any ‘damns' or ‘hells' in this script.”

“Don't even try to outguess them,” said Ned.

“And don't try to challenge them,” Archer warned. “Our best strategy is to see the problem from their point of view and try to accommodate them without losing any story point we feel is crucial.”

Before Perry could inquire as to how such a feat might be accomplished, Archer turned the music back up to an even higher volume.

Stu Sturdivant, chairman of the network's Department of Ethics and Attitudes, was a warm, jovial man in his fifties, the sort who in Perry's childhood would have been described in the terms of his father's generation as a hail-fellow-well-met. He wore a plaid sport coat, bow tie, bright slacks, cordovan shoes, and argyle socks.

“How
about
those Dodgers?” Sturdivant asked the group with a shake of the head and a wide grin, and though Gurney was obviously at as much of a loss about the local team's baseball fortunes as was Perry, Archer quickly responded with arcane talk about RBI's and ERA's, matching Sturdivant cliche for cliche as they batted back and forth observations on so-and-so's performance at “the hot corner” and the relative strengths of the “wings” of various starting “hurlers” of skipper Lasorda's “mound staff.”

Perry joined Ned in nodding and grinning and grunting through this seemingly interminable “warm-up,” till finally Sturdivant lit up a Dutch Masters cigar, and, amid billowing clouds of smoke, came to the point of his complaint about the script.