The Means (3 page)

Samantha says, “There's no one left to meet. He's the one who decides. Now either I get it or I don't.” She sips her martini, drawing the vodka up from the glass more than pouring it past her lips.

“You'll get it, Sam. You'll be the smartest, prettiest badass lawyer on TV.” Robin is the only daughter of a wealthy Boston family and she went to Andover, so admission to Harvard was not as significant as a rejection from Harvard would have been. She married a childhood friend and managing director at Goldman Sachs. She's the rare person who's taken advantage of an easy draw in life to be a happy person and not expect even more of the world.

“I may not get this one, but I'll get something.”

“When are you giving your notice at the law firm?”

“Tomorrow. I'm sad but certain about it,” says Samantha.

“Good, Sam. We get one go-around on the planet. Don't spend it filing legal briefs.” Robin plays tennis, goes to lunch, shops, manages two nannies for her two kids, and has the time to be a considerate friend. She carries the bigger part of the burden for nurturing the friendship and does it without real complaint because she loves Samantha. They have a curiosity for each other. There is the unusual combination of a separation of their lives mixed with institutional knowledge of each other's lives that makes them perfect confidants.

Call waiting beeps on Samantha's phone. She holds the phone back to look in case there's an emergency legal filing required of her at Davis Polk, which is probable. The caller ID says unknown.

“Robin, I need to take this. I'll call you later.” She presses to hang up and accept the incoming call. “Samantha Davis.”

“Samantha, it's David Mueller.”

“David, hi.” She pauses while her brain runs scenarios of why he could be calling and prepares her answers. Legal training. “Nice to hear from you.”

“Well, Ms. Davis. Do you always get what you want?”

“It feels like never, but that may be a neurosis of mine.”

“I'm calling to offer you a job.” Mueller knew he was going to hire her. He just wanted a few minutes to decide on the salary and terms. “It's a three-year deal. One fifty year one, one seventy-five year two, two twenty-five year three. General assignment news reporter based in New York.” Mueller had upped his number because he wants to put a condition on it. He knows there are still people smart enough at his competitors to hire her if they see the resume tape. “One more thing. I need to fill this spot, so you have forty-eight hours to accept.”

“Okay.” She decided earlier that she would take any offer without pushing a negotiation on terms. Now that she has an offer, her instinct to drive a better deal is kicking in. She knows she'll be a success. She can push either for more money or fewer years. “Is the three-year commitment negotiable?”

“We like three-year deals.” He pauses. “You don't have an agent.”

“No.”

“Friendly piece of advice. Get one.”

I tried, she almost says and doesn't.

“I've got a forty-eight-hour window for you, so it won't matter for this deal, but you should get one soon. He'll tell you that three years is standard.” He continues. “Today was a plane crash. That's newsworthy but not consistent. The only consistent news we do is politics. Are you political?”

“Not really.”

“Bone up. Get steeped in the news, especially politics. I'll email you a few websites that you should read every day, and watch cable prime time. Bounce between channels and start with ours.”

“Got it.”

“Alright.”

“David, I appreciate the call. Can I call you at close of business tomorrow?”

“Sure. One more thing I want you to think about. This is UBS News. You can work packages for the network morning show and for the network evening news. No show has bigger ratings. Bigger exposure. Nobody. I also have UBS-24. Twenty-four-hour cable news where you can do legal, political, and general news reporting. There's a lot of real estate to cover here. Nobody has more real estate than I do. That kind of opportunity for growth and exposure is an important thing for you to think about as you start your career in this business.”

He's selling me! I can't believe this,
she thinks. “I appreciate that, David. I also appreciate the opportunity.”

“Talk to you tomorrow, Samantha.” He hangs up.

“I got the job,” she says to her martini.

2

“Samantha, it's Megan Ruiz from booking.” Samantha has met Megan in person twice now and likes her. When meeting other female on-air talent, she always gets an up-and-down from them the way she would from a drunk guy in a bar. Whether it's from a place of competition or benign curiosity, it's second nature to them. Megan isn't that way. She doesn't preoccupy herself with things other than getting the bookings done. She seems like a nice, hardworking person.

“How are you?”

“Good, thanks.” She seems rushed, which she is. “
Sunrise America
wants to use you for a piece tomorrow. Their booker asked me to get in touch with you. A Bronx couple won the largest lottery payout ever, over one point two billion. We're going to roll a truck for you in an hour to do a pretape with them to air tomorrow at seven forty-five a.m. You need to be back on location tomorrow morning to intro the package and do some banter with Mike.”

“Great. Tell me where to go.”

“Stop by hair and makeup in studio if you want. You should have time. One of the show producers will get you and take you out.”

“Okay, thanks.”

“Samantha.”

“Yes?”

“You're doing good work. You're impressing people and they want to use you. That's a good sign for you. A package for the network morning show is a big deal.”

“Thanks, Megan.” I love compliments from other women, she thinks.

An hour later she's in a truck with six other people heading to the Bronx. She doesn't even know what they all do. The
Sunrise America
staff is huge, more than a hundred people.

She learns one of the guys is a writer for the show and he's giving her the story background. A retired mailman and his wife living in the Bronx claimed the single winning ticket for the $1.2 billion lottery three hours ago, making them the largest single-ticket lottery winners ever. They're active in the local church, have one son and one grandson.

“Yellow Ledbetter” by Pearl Jam comes on the radio and the driver turns up the volume. “Pearl Jam rules.”

Samantha laughs and says, “Don't say anything rules. You sound stoned or twelve years old. And anyway, they don't rule.”

“Then they dominate.” He smiles. He balances cocky and unoffensive.

“Don't tell me you're one of those surfer geeks who feels an obligation to love Pearl Jam. You realize how ridiculous that is?”

“Okay, old lady. Who's bigger, Pearl Jam or the Who?”

“The Who, by far.”

“Wrong. Please. I can tune my Sirius Satellite Radio to a Pearl Jam channel,” he says. “Can I do that with the Who? I don't think so. Case closed, Your Honor.”

Samantha's enjoying this. “You can't go by that.”

“Why not?”

“Because the passage of time and taste matters. To Sirius, that matters.”

“So what?”

“There's no Beethoven channel either. Anyone bigger than Beethoven? In his day. The Who was doing comeback tours in the eighties. Pearl Jam is still out touring with a following that tunes in to Sirius. You can't compare.”

“Elvis has a channel. He's dead.”

“I will stipulate that Elvis is bigger than the Who.”

“There's no arguing with lawyers.”

The van pulls up to a six-story white brick apartment building just as a GBS News van is pulling up across the street. It will be a race to get to the story first.

“How fast can you parallel park this thing, Ron?” the writer calls up to the driver.

“Screw that,” says Samantha and she opens the sliding side door while the van is still rolling. Ron hits the brakes and they come to a full stop. Samantha steps out onto the pavement and turns back and points in the van at the person she thinks is the cameraman. “Come with me. What's the apartment number?”

“Four G,” someone yells from inside the van.

“The rest of you meet us there.” Samantha looks at the GBS van and sees faces pressed to the side windows like kids at an aquarium. She and Alex, who is in fact the cameraman, jog into the lobby of the apartment building. “Stairs!” she yells.

Alex takes this like a jolt of adrenaline. He's no longer taping a package for a morning show, he's deployed to a forward position. He moves ahead taking stairs three at a time with only one thing in mind. Get to 4G first.

The elevation of the heels on Samantha's shoes won't allow her to take more than two steps at a time. As she rounds the third-floor landing she hears a knock on a door above her. As she makes the fourth-floor landing she hears the clamor of dropped equipment and shouting from the lobby below. Her team and GBS arrived to the lobby at the same time. She imagines a dozen people bouncing off each other and pulling each other back as they go up the stairs like football players after a fumble.

She looks down the hall in time to see the door of 4G swing open, and her colleague bends an arm to her like a waiter presenting wine. “This is Samantha Davis with UBS.”

A little, round, gray-haired man in a cardigan sweater and slacks is at the door with an arm around his wife's waist, who is of matching shortness. They both look to be early seventies. Her hair is nicely combed in a short perm and she's wearing a pink blouse. It's clearly her best and has been for twenty years. “A pleasure to meet you,” Samantha says during an exhale that she can't yet control.

“Come in, come in!” says the man. He's beaming. He's in the middle of a life-changing moment and a steady state of elation.

“I'm Alex Pierce,” says Samantha's colleague, and they walk in and the man closes the door.

“I'm Ned Prince. My wife, Frankie.”

Ned shuffles them into the living room where there's an emerald-­green felt sofa with three seat cushions and a matching one with two. “You two take the big one,” he says.

It's an old person's home. There could be more natural light than there is but for the blinds and the heavy green curtains that match the sofa and are far older than Frankie's pink blouse. There's no art on the walls but some old photographs and a few patterned plates with wire mounts. There are some table lamps that are too large for the tables they're on and a few limp potted houseplants that sell for $2.99 at Walmart. The whole thing is cute, thinks Samantha, though nobody under seventy would live this way.

As they sit, there is a knock at the door that is more urgent than it needs to be.

“Excuse me,” says Ned, and he walks back to the door.

He opens the door and about a dozen people push through, knocking Ned on his heels and to the side while they stream past him.

Samantha stands. “We're in the middle of an interview.”

Samantha's producer Ron turns to one of the GBSers. “You guys need to get in the hall until we're through.”

“We're on a timeline. You guys go ahead. I'll stay and the rest of my team will go to the hall while I set up for our shot for when you're done.”

This seems to be a producer-to-producer discussion. Ron doesn't like the idea of this guy sticking around but says, “Fine. Get the rest of your team out.”

All of GBS but one leave while Ron and his team set up. Samantha takes the interview on a journey from the Prince family's humble roots to the plans they have to stay in the community and put the money to good use. She learns that not only was Ned a mailman, but their son is a mailman and their grandson was a mailman for Halloween last year.

“Do you have a picture?” asks Samantha. This will go over great in the package, she thinks.

“I'm sure we do,” says Frankie, and she disappears to the next room. The UBS team working on the shoot doesn't notice the GBS producer follow Frankie out.

Ten minutes later Samantha starts to wrap up the interview. They have plenty of good material for a ninety-second package. Frankie has been back on the two-seater for several minutes and Samantha asks her, “Were you able to find a Halloween photo?”

“Oh, yes. I gave it to that gentleman there.” She points to the GBS producer who looks nailed to the floor.

Samantha stands and walks to him with her hand out.

He takes it from his shirt breast pocket and gives it to her though his expression is defiant rather than embarrassed, as though she should know he had to try it and it was a good effort and she should respect that.

“Asshole,” she says loud enough only for him.

Back at the van, Ron helps Samantha step up through the sliding door. She appreciates the gesture and notes that he hadn't done it on the way over. “You did a great job in there,” he says, and he holds eye contact and nods, trying to make sure she knows he's not just saying this but really thinks it.

“Thank you. That GBS crew is such a bunch of assholes.”

“It's not just that crew. That's GBS. That's how they are. You know how some basketball coaches will teach their players to step on a guy's shoe when they're on the free-throw line going for a rebound? It's dirty. That's how they coach them at GBS from the top down. That's why they're a culture of assholes. I know people who weren't assholes when they started working there but they're assholes now.”

“What do people say about UBS?”

Ron laughs. “Not as bad as GBS but none of the networks has a reputation for kindness and goodwill. It's a tough industry all the way around.” She's seated now and he's about to slide the door closed. “Try to find somebody who's honest and not in the industry and make a deal with them to let you know if you're ever becoming an asshole. So far, I can tell you you're not.” He smiles and closes the door.

The next morning Samantha is back outside the apartment building and ready for her live shot. She's with a smaller team this time. A producer, one cameraman instead of two. She's already been to the studio for the full hair and makeup treatment.

The line producer from back in the studio says through her earpiece, “Thirty seconds!”

Live TV is different from her childhood work. She's about to go live on the biggest show in the country and she doesn't know the names of the people around her. She misses her mother. An impossible feeling but she's having it. Her mother always made sure her makeup was good and they did her hair in the right way, that the lighting and camera angle were how they should be, that she had rehearsed her lines. Her mother was her team, doing all the blocking and tackling. Whatever the dysfunction, Samantha used to have someone protecting her, telling her she had talent and just had to let it shine.

Most child actors can't transition to real actors because at some point they become conscious of what they're doing. At seven years old an actor isn't trying to make it work. He just goes out on the set and it either works or it doesn't. It's unconscious. Soon an actor needs to treat acting like a craft and hone his talent. Many discover they never had any talent, they were just great at being unconscious.

She hears Mike Lord laugh at one of his own jokes then introduce the segment about the massive lottery winners in the Bronx. “Samantha Davis is in the Bronx this morning to tell us about it. Samantha?”

She sees the red light on the camera. She's live. On
Sunrise America
. Holy shit, don't freak out. “Good morning, Mike. I'm outside the Bronx apartment of Ned and Frankie Prince. Ned, a retired Bronx mailman, and Frankie, his wife of forty-seven years, have big plans for this local community and their new fortune.”

The program cuts to the pretape package. The cameraman signals they're off. “You're back in sixty seconds.”

Samantha waits for red. It pops on and she hears Mike Lord, “Wow, one point two billion. My lord. Samantha, what would you do if one point two billion dollars landed in your lap today?”

Without thinking she says, “Obviously, I would start with world peace, then I'd cure the common cold. If there's anything left over, I'd buy a private island and a case of rum and you'd never see me again.”

Mike laughs. It sounds like a real laugh that he's trying to stop so he can say something else. They're having a TV moment. It's a mini one, but this is the kind of thing that makes highlight reels and careers. “Well, that sounds great. You better save a little for a bathing suit. I'm sure you'll want that on your island.”

“I said it's a private island!”

“Well, this is a family show, but even so, I'm going to say that sounds like my kind of place. Thank you, Samantha. Reporting from the Bronx.”

The red light goes out. Wrap.

Back in the studio, they cut to commercial and the executive producer explodes down the open mic, “That woman is dynamite!”

This goes into Mike's ear but he doesn't respond other than to nod and say, “Book her on something tomorrow.”

The female coanchor and female newsreader are both watching Mike. Neither thinks this is good news.

*   *   *

Samantha can feel that she is being developed and knows that it is Ken Harper who believes in her. Harper runs all political coverage for UBS and has been putting Samantha on more political stories. Now he's introduced her to the network morning viewers. He's letting the UBS audience get to know her.

Ken Harper reports directly to David Mueller. He's more slick in appearance than Mueller. His hair is gelled and combed, his suit is pressed, and he makes an effort through the day to keep it all looking that way. He looks more like a PR guy. He has a constant busy energy that seems manic to people that don't know him well, and a high voice that sounds strained even when he isn't straining it.

Harper had called a meeting with Samantha three months earlier, where he had said, “Samantha, I'm going to give you two pieces of advice.” He raised his eyebrows and cocked his head to one side to make sure she understood he was about to deliver a gift. “Number one, it really is about hustling when you're not on the air. Develop relationships. Politics gets a lot of coverage, so pick politics. Meet with senators, governors, political advisors, lobbyists, pollsters. You name it, take them out to coffee. Get to know them, and eventually you might get access to something worth putting on the air. Over time, those relationships will be important. You're an attractive reporter at UBS. Most of those people I just mentioned are men. They'll meet with you. They may not say much at first, but they'll meet with you.”