Star Time (15 page)

"Yale and Skull and Bones," she remarked to Greg as they moved on. "I'm impressed."

"I even know which knife to use with fish."

"No fork?" She clucked her tongue.

"You seem surprised I didn't attend
Wossamatter
U."

"I know very little about you. The night we met I babbled on about myself, which I still feel a little chagrined about. Probably bored you to death, but you were too much the gentleman to say so."

Greg conjectured that having once allowed him a glimpse beneath her perfectly charming, perfectly correct social
surface,
she felt they had formed some sort of bond.

"California, I admit, was one reason for my surprise," she continued. "The people I usually meet out there seem to have been created spontaneously; they suddenly just appear: no background, no family,
no
values, like plants popping up in the desert."

"Why is it that people from other places always
think
that about California?" Chris had thought that, too, he recalled.

"The people I meet there all just had a hit series or are building a company on some brilliant new computer program. You get the feeling they could disappear with the first bit of adversity. It's not the same in New York."

Although the sole talent of many around him had doubtless been to be born into the right families, Greg had himself been concluding that a good many others, whether renowned for pedigree or achievement, seemed to possess solid virtues; many from the their ranks whom he had known at Yale certainly did. Even a few of the newly rich with rapacious reputations appeared to appreciate that acceptance within this ultimate clique required compliance with its etiquette and, just as important, simulating accord with its enduring mores and morality. There was a reason, he understood, that they comprised the Establishment.

Diane took his arm. "I want Uncle Bill to meet you." She led him over to the ex-secretary of the Treasury, and they all chatted awhile.

"You seemed impressed," she remarked afterward, her tone disapproving.

"Did it show?"

"Actually, it didn’t.”

She was smiling as if this was simply light banter, but she was staring intently at his face. He knew she was attracted to him.

Book Two

PRIME ACCESS

APRIL 2001

When Greg joined Network Sales, FBS was riding a long crest of popularity that had put it at the top of the national ratings and, thus, able to command the highest prices from advertisers for its commercial time. Several months remained before June, when the "upfront" selling would begin. That was when advertising agencies, after examining the new shows and schedules, would negotiate to buy commercial time for their clients during the coming viewing year, which would commence in September. Nearly three-quarters of FBS's prime-time inventory and half of its other time periods would be sold during the
upfronts
.

The prices a network charged advertisers for commercial time were based on the purchasing habits of the particular audience attracted to specific programs and viewing periods. Advertisers wishing to sell beer and pickup trucks to men would have to pay more for popular weekend football games; those seeking to sell feminine hygiene and beauty products to women might buy time during daytime soap operas. The broadcaster guaranteed the size of each show's target audience in the package of shows the advertiser bought. If the actual ratings turned out to be lower, the network would "make good" by running additional commercials for the advertiser free of charge. If ratings ran higher, commercial time not yet sold or held back as possible make-goods could be priced high, producing greater network revenue.

Greg was assigned to sell the advertising spots on daytime programming that remained unsold in the weeks just before airtime, the so-called "scatter" or "spot" sales, where audience size was not guaranteed. Unfortunately, FBS lagged in the daytime ratings, and a lot of commercial time was still unsold. It was feared that scatter prices would soon have to be dropped. Greg decided that his best prospects as buyers at the established prices would be new advertisers, not the old standbys cannily holding back their orders in anticipation of prices dropping.
But how to find them?

If he had been more experienced, he would probably have relied on the written material that the Sales Planning people put
together from the Research Department's analyses of the Nielsen and Arbitron ratings reports. But because he was so inexperienced, he went downstairs to Research's offices to find someone who could explain the figures to him in more detail.

The department head was tied up, so he moved down the corridor until he came upon an open door. A thin oriental man about his own age, his shirtsleeves rolled up, was perusing a printout covered with tiny numbers.

Greg stuck his head in. "Excuse me, would you know anything about the daytime demographics?"

The man looked up. His eyes appeared enlarged in the disks of his spectacles. A wide forelock dropped across the top of the lenses like a valance.

"Sure," he said with a slight accent. "I do the analyses."

They shook hands. His left arm was held at an odd angle, the result of stray shrapnel from a mortar shell that had sliced into it when he was an infant in Vietnam. The young man's name was Jimmy Minh.

After he and his family emigrated, he won a scholarship to study math at MIT. He had a gift for statistics, and they entranced him. Demographics had personalities that eagerly whispered their secrets; they were men eighteen to thirty-five jauntily striding out to the home-improvement center because this year they could afford to build additions on their new homes; or young car buyers needing transportation to their first jobs; or higher-income retirement couples happily furnishing their new empty-nests in the Sun Belt.

Greg admitted he was new in Sales and asked for a lesson in deciphering the ratings. Jimmy beamed with delight. No one had ever come down to Jimmy's office to inquire personally about the numbers.

Reflecting the personality of its leader, FBS was a highly structured corporation run along traditional, hierarchical, organization-chart lines. Jimmy's superior insisted the department's reports be kept free of what he considered "guessing" or "bias." Yet, he seemed to have a bias of his own against displaying to the rest of the company his reliance on the skills of an Asian with a physical deformity. So, Jimmy labored in
obscurity and was forced to keep much of the intelligence he divined from the numbers to himself.

As Jimmy eagerly instructed, Greg became amazed that so much information could be discerned from the audience samplings. When he noticed that a higher daytime viewership seemed to exist than could be accounted for in the individual adult age groups, Jimmy grew excited.

"You saw that, did you? My boss wouldn't let me explain it." He drew an arrow between two numbers. "Our daytime shows skew young and urban, much more so than the other networks. You can see we're very high among young adult women in cities. I'm positive that also means we're pulling higher numbers among urban teenagers than show up."

Greg was not nearly so enthused. "Teenagers aren't consumers."

"But they are. A lot of them are latchkey children or older teenagers who stop off to buy the family groceries on their way home from school. They help out and maybe even cook the family supper because their mothers are working. Here, look at the correlation to households with working women."

Greg immediately grasped the import. "And the teenagers probably pick up more of certain items at the store than old
er
shoppers would.
Snack foods, say, or soft drinks."

"Exactly."

Now, Greg, too, was excited—and impressed. "Could you write up something for me right away?"

"If you gave my boss a written request," Jimmy replied with a conspiratorial smile, "I'd have to."

Greg’s own smile was as wide. "As fast as I can put it on paper. You've just given me something to sell."

Marian Marcus could scarcely breathe as she entered the newsroom for her first afternoon as an intern in the News Department at KFBS. The job paid nothing and would last only three months, until she was graduated from UCLA, but she considered it her ticket into television, an industry that exuded the glamour she craved—and personally lacked.

She was tall, but bent at the shoulders with the subconscious stoop of someone trying not to tower above shorter friends she had long ago shot past in height. Her face contained gray-brown eyes that were too small and an overly large nose that matched only an equally overlarge mouth. Her hair was the same drab brown as her eyes. Her enthusiasm, not her
appearance, had won her the internship, that and the intelligence demonstrated by her high grades. Vastly overweight, she refused to wear makeup and chose her mismatched bohemian clothing to make a statement about her nonconformity, aggressively militant about her plainness. She often looked like nothing so much as a colorful, giant balloon bobbing down Broadway toward Macy's on Thanksgiving Day.

At the back of the newsroom, Marian stared about her in wonderment, waiting for someone to take charge of her, afraid no one would.

Chris walked by at that moment and inquired if Marian was looking for anyone. Marian stared in awe. She was actually being spoken to by Christine
Paskins
, the woman who, night after night, stood up against landlords and other bullies. Marian explained that she had been hired as an intern, but no one seemed to have anything for her to do. Chris invited Marian to join her at the commissary for a quick lunch.

In need of research help and finding that Marian possessed a lively intelligence and an endearing manner, Chris appropriated the eager newcomer as her research assistant.

In every way but one, Marian was an astute and mature young woman. That exception was Derek Peters. The young woman's mind was fixed on only two things: her career and Derek Peters. She had first encountered him on a day at the university when her exuberance proved too great for her agility. As she bumped heavily into someone and turned to apologize, she found herself gazing at the most beautiful face she had ever seen. Disconcerted by her clumsiness and his beauty, she dropped her eyes. When they rose, he had already disappeared into the crowd pressing through the doorway out of their classroom. But from that moment on, Marian Marcus was unalterably and unrequitedly in love with Derek Peters. Friends in the Dean's Office tipped her off to the courses he was taking, and she managed to transfer into another of them, which met on different days, so that, now, four mornings a week, she was assured of being able to stare at Derek Peters. And at the many women who flocked about him. She never summoned the courage to say a word to him.

The first ten minutes after her arrival at the newsroom every afternoon were spent on the phone with a friend and devoted to what Derek Peters did or did not do that morning. On a morning of her second week there, she actually exchanged words with him as they happened to leave the lecture hall at the same moment. It happened because she became so flustered by their proximity that she dropped a book and he picked it up. She somehow emitted, "Thank you." He answered, "You're welcome."

"He said I was welcome," Marian gushed to Chris, too excited to restrain her breathless idolatry, both of Chris and of Derek. She was daunted by the reporter and ached for her classmate. Chris's enduring sadness at her separation from Greg seemed lighter after beholding one of Marian's paroxysms over a fixation that swung wildly between poignant and ludicrous, so comical in fact that Marian herself could joke about it. The younger woman pretended to be developing a plan to switch to a seat directly in front of Derek, which would block his view of the blackboard, so he would have to recognize her presence. When Chris induced her to go on a diet and her weight began coming down, Marian remarked that Derek's marks would now improve because he'd be able to see the more of the blackboard.

One day, Marian lamented that if only she had Chris's looks, she could have any man she wanted, Derek would be begging her for a date, she would be a happy woman. Chris confided what she had told no one else, that she had been living with someone she loved who had moved away to take a job elsewhere and she missed him desperately.

Marian did not inquire more deeply. From that moment on, however, she understood that her effusiveness about someone to whom she had barely spoken was unseemly.
And a
s if she had been awaiting a reason to let go of the doorframe out of childhood to which she had been clinging, she stepped fully into the unpredictability of a womanhood that obligated her to responsibility and threatened her with loss. Only once more did she mention Derek, and it was with an adult's wry self-mockery. She began to care about her appearance and to dress better. The two women began to seem more nearly contemporaries. A real friendship began to grow.

Diane could not get Greg out of her mind. Claiming that her original escort had become ill, she invited him to accompany her and her father to a ball to raise funds for a major ballet company and was overjoyed when he accepted. She then immediately withdrew a prior invitation to another young man with the excuse that her father had insisted she accompany an important business associate.