Changing the Past (14 page)

“Look,” she said, “can I talk to you? This religious stuff is a bunch of shit, right? Say so, and I won't bother you.”

“No, it's real. It might sound phony, but it's real. I ran away from home when I was just a young kid. Everything I know I had to learn from life, most of it in gin mills full of lowlifes, I guess. But, hell, we're all human. They can't take that away.”

“I mean what's beyond that. We're talking about God, right?”

He was embarrassed. “I guess so.” But it didn't seem serious, in this studio corridor, people rushing by. Nor did she, with her bright hair and pale complexion.

She cocked an ironic eye. “This is crap, isn't it? Some comeback shtick?”

He was stung. “What do you take me for? Who are you? I was a headliner when you were loading your diapers. Fuck you.”

Sara touched his arm. “Wait a minute. I'm sorry. I apologize. Could we go someplace and talk? I'm being canceled.”

He was immediately sympathetic. “I know how that feels. Sure.”

They went to her apartment, on an upper floor with quite a view of the city from the terrace. He had to turn down every form of refreshment offered until she got to the mineral water advertised on the program and thus provided, by the case, for free.

Sara sat down next to him on a satin-striped couch. Her cat, whose hair was long and pure white, leaped into her lap. “My life is all fucked up,” said she, combing the cat's fur with her fingers. “I'm pretty tough, Jackie, but I've been taking it on the chin for a couple of months. Then my previous cat got out the door when my stupid shit of a housekeeper left it open, and he disappeared. I was going through hell at the time, on sick leave, just back from the clinic, on cold turkey—we won't go into that. This is confidential, it never got out, well, only a few rumors. Swear?”

Jackie raised a hand of affirmation. “Not that it would matter nowadays, you know?”

“My parents live in the middle of Iowa,” Sara said. “I'm a small-town kid.”

“So am I,” said Jackie. “I've had plenty of my own ups and downs, mostly downs, and yet I'm still kicking. You're young: there'll be other shows. Christ, you're not even thirty yet, are you? Everybody knows and loves you.”

“That hasn't saved the show,” she said mournfully. “The ratings are in the cellar.”

“It's probably that no-talent shmuck Basehart,” Jackie said, referring to her co-host. “He brings the show down. He don't have any sense of humor, and it's real pathetic when he interviews some politician and tries to act like he knows current affairs.”

She smiled at him. “You're sweet, Jackie.”

“It's true, isn't it? Nobody likes that guy.”

“If so, he's fucked me.” She raised her brow. “I don't mean literally.”

“They should of given you the serious stuff, the foreign-policy guests and so on, and let Doug do the light crap—like me.” He laughed, but then added solemnly, “It's because you're a woman.”

“Gee,” Sara said, “people'd never know from your act just how sensitive you can be when you're not on—though I always did hear you were a nice guy when you're not on. Of course, that can mean nothing: I've heard ‘em say the same thing about that mean motherfucker Tony Gamble. You know he slapped my face once and walked off the show? Fortunately, we were on a commercial at the time.”

“Yeah, I heard that. You were questioning his credibility in claiming to be a Buddhist, weren't you? Tony and me go back a long ways. We used to be real close, I admit. He really gave me one of my first breaks. I can't dump on him now—but I tell you, I haven't liked him for a long time.” He leaned forward. “I'll go so far as to say, just to you alone, I never did like him. But you got to be loyal to those who helped.”

They never did get around to talking about God. Which was just as well, for other than the obvious ethical issues, which were more or less the same for everybody with or without a formal faith, Jackie would not have known what to say on the subject. God really was that which could not be talked about. On the other hand, there was nobody who knew more about show business, of which he had been from one extremity to the other. He had even made a cameo appearance in a video with an Irish rock group, who as it turned out had been, as children, fans of his old TV sitcom, which in its day had played in a number of foreign markets.

He could, and did, advise Sara Neil how to handle herself. It was essential that she suggest in no way that the canceling of this local show was a setback, or to have anything but public praise for her co-host Bill Basehart. But in private she should lose no opportunity to discredit him with the gossip-mongers, some of whom were professionals with their own regular spots on TV news programs and/or columns. “In the old days, you coulda called him a fag, but then for a while they got more sympathy. Then came AIDS and a turn against them, but nowadays there's sympathy again with so many dying. You better stick with just straight professional grounds. The ladies are always eager to get some chauvinist thing to pin on any man, so your line should be that Basehart took all the hard news for himself while giving you the frilly stuff like couturier clothes for dogs, fad diets, et cetera.”

“Which he did, the little faergot,” snarled Sara.

“Then you oughta get speaking gigs: you know, colleges, women's groups: you build up a grass-roots following. You got a great delivery, but being on so early in the morning, and then just in this area, even though it's metropolitan, a lot of people haven't got a chance to seeya. But don't
ask
to get on talk shows: do the shitjob on Basehart. When that gets around, you'll be invited, and when you do, deny all the rumors that you and him never got along and give it to the people who like to make that sort of shit known for their own scummy motives. That way you do a lot more than kill two birds, and even Basehart probably won't hold a grudge. How could he, when it's you who will go someplace? He'll think maybe you'll throw him a fish someday. Main thing, the insiders will see you're a real pro, along with being smart.”

Between such sessions of advice, they sent out for Chinese and later on watched the issue-oriented shows of late afternoon, with their audience of females whom Jackie considered more pushy than intelligent, though he was careful not to reveal as much to Sara while assuring her that she could do a much better job in such a format than the current practitioners. In fact, he might suggest as much to Syd Stanger, a producer of such shows, with whom Jackie claimed to be close friends since Borscht Belt days.

After some more TV, interspersed with many phone calls to and from professional colleagues—like him, she seemed to have no actual friends; she had been married at eighteen and divorced six months later—Sara yawned. Jackie saw the time was only nine
P
.
M
. but remembered that she got up before dawn to begin her show.

“I'm outa here,” said he, standing up. He had nothing better to look forward to now but more television and then a night's sleep in a hotel bed, no thick red steak and oven fries and afterwards a nightful of booze, ending up with a half hour with a hooker and finally a sleep till midday. Now that he didn't drink any more, he had lost his sexual urge too, which was more depressing than losing it temporarily through a surfeit of alcohol: in that case, at least you knew what you wanted when you were next able to handle it. Now he had been sitting all day in the proximity of a good-looking young chick and had felt only avuncular.

“Jackie,” Sara said, “it really helped, talking with you. You understand me like nobody else I have ever known.” She touched his arm. “No, I mean it. But after you leave I know I'll be as blue as ever. This thing has really hit me, I'm sorry. I gave my all to the show, and then to have shit thrown in my face this way.” She spoke as if she might weep, but she did not follow through; she was a tough little cookie. Jackie liked that.

“You know what the English say: Keep your pecker up, kid. I did a command performance at the London Palladium once. Met the Boss Lady herself backstage. Told her, ‘Hey, you're the only queen I ever met over here who was female!'” He winked at Sara, in the unlikely case she would have believed him.

She took his hand. “Mister Show Business,” said she. “You can't buy that kind of experience. You've got to pay for it with your life.”

She understood him better than anyone ever had. He not only stayed the night; a couple of weeks later, they got married, astonishing everybody and giving much material to other comedians, Jackie being thirty-three years older than his bride and at least two inches shorter. The fact was that they never had sexual relations. They tried twice, but Jackie was simply incapable, and Sara seemed to have almost no urge, being passionate only about her profession, an emotion Jackie could understand and sympathize with—to the degree that, in the succeeding months, he performed less and less though the offers came in more frequently than they had during his decline, and the consensus was that his comeback had been successful. But he had begun to prefer Sara's career to his own, which had always been a thing of chance, helplessly subject to every wind of trend and whim of fate. But guiding her, he could exert a control of the kind he never could have taken over himself as a performer. For it's the person in the spotlight who is vulnerable. If he scores, then all around him share in the triumph. But if he flops, he flops alone.

Before long, Jackie ceased altogether to perform and became Sara's manager full-time, a move that not only kept a lot of commissions in the family but also employed faculties of his that he had never known he possessed. He had always simply assumed he was no good at business—without ever trying it. He had left that to the people who were paid to work for him, and he now realized what a bad job they had done. From the many millions he had earned his own share had been pathetically small. It was quite possible that he had been criminally cheated, could probably have sent people to prison, had he only been aware.

His most gratifying success came in those quarters where comics were ordinarily disdained: the news departments of the networks, the high-and-mighties who concerned themselves not with entertainment but with what they saw as their sacred obligation to inform and enlighten the public. Jackie the performer would have been scared of these pompous shits, but, representing Sara, he was fearless. Here was a young woman at the cutting edge of her generation, and therefore of the era, and at the same time her personal style had almost universal appeal. Polls (by an organization that guaranteed Jackie would get the results he wished) showed that she was also popular among the over-fifties, that segment of the society whose numbers were always increasing because of the advances made by medical science. When one network executive noted good-humoredly that these pollsters were the best money could buy, Jackie boldly said, “Aren't they all?”

Unlike many managers and agents, he never sucked up to the boys with the power. He performed as arrogantly as he had ever done onstage. In truth, he began to use the style that had characterized his act. “You're not really gonna wear that tie all day?” he asked the head of the news division at NBS, and at Continental he pulled an oldie on Ron Ferguson, the very young man whose revamping of their seven o'clock newscast had brought it, in six months, from a distant third in the ratings to a tie for the lead, asking Ron, who was currently dating top model Liza Welch, if he had any pornographic photos of her. “No,” said Ferguson, laughing already. “Wanna buy some?” Jackie punchlined, and though Ferguson's flunkies blanched, the boy wonder cracked up.

Now, Jackie never pretended that material from his old act was instrumental in Sara's subsequent rise to the top of her profession, the first woman ever to be sole anchorperson of an evening network news program, but he did believe his handling of her had made the difference. After all, when they first met, her local show was being canceled. Sara sneeringly rejected this theory, even more disdainfully in public than in private, and her lawyer did a much better job on the divorce than did his own.

Again he was on his ass both emotionally and financially, and this time he lacked all incentive to attempt another comeback. Some years earlier, when he was still performing, he had received, in care of the TV talk show on which he had lately appeared, a letter from Betty Jane
née
Hopper, of his high-school days, who had now, for decades, been married to another name from those far-off times.

Looking through some personal papers, Jackie came upon this letter, which he had never answered but had saved perhaps for some future sentimental use. After all, he was the father of the Riggens' first child. How rottenly ironic life was! Sporadically he wanted a kid, and there was the one he had already created and run away from, to become what he was…and whatever else he was, he was now about to check out of it all, without ever having seen so much as a picture of his offspring or knowing its name.