Selling Out (10 page)

“Hell, Pru and I have the same deal,” Vaughan said, “except we figure it's null and void when we're in different cities.”

“It really was great to meet you all,” Perry said, guiding Jane firmly toward the house, and their departure. “We'll be in touch!”

“Don't be strangers,” Pru called, “now that you know where we are!”

Thank God by the time they got to the airport Perry and Jane were giggling instead of fighting. They had a whiskey sour before the flight and then embraced, kissed, holding each other so tight that when Perry let her go he really felt part of him was being torn away. By the time the plane taxied down the runway for takeoff he was already missing her, wondering how the hell he was going to make it by himself for a whole week.

IV

Perry scanned both
Variety
and the
Hollywood Reporter
over a late, leisurely breakfast Monday morning at the Hamburger Hamlet, and at first was disappointed not to find any screaming headlines announcing that his hour pilot was so terrific the network was doubling its length and launching the series with a two-hour TV movie! He figured, however, the network probably wanted to keep the plans for its hottest new property under wraps, so the rival webs (as the networks were called in the trades) wouldn't frantically rush to start planning competitive shows about young married couples to try to compete with “The First Year's the Hardest.”

Perry smiled, enjoying the secret of his own success, which was too hot to even be reported yet and was unknown by all the other aspiring show business moguls who were poring over the trades that morning at the Hamburger Hamlet. Leaving a big tip and whistling as he walked out onto Sunset Boulevard, Perry decided to reward himself, and at the same time put his mentor on notice that he wasn't any longer the square academic who was fresh off the plane from the East. He sauntered into one of the hip men's clothing stores on Sunset Boulevard.

Perry casually strolled into Archer's office at noon wearing a magenta T-shirt emblazoned with a silver palm tree, and a pair of tight bright yellow beltless slacks, whose cuffless bottoms rode high over his shoetops, Michael Jackson—style, revealing quality argyles worn with old tennis sneakers.

Mellis himself was clad in the sort of three-piece London suit he had worn in New York when Perry first met him, though this one seemed, if anything, more somber, like something Brides-head himself would have found too grim, except perhaps for his own funeral.

Today, of all days, Archer was evidently taking him to some elegant Eastern-style restaurant to have lunch. Perhaps they were going to meet some top network executive, maybe even its president! Perry slunk down in a chair, crossing his arms over his silver palm tree.

Archer in his ponderous elegance paced regally while speaking on the phone about some other pilot, one evidently involving a group of terrorists posing as Parisian prostitutes. He acknowledged Perry with a wave as if from a long distance, or from the deck of a departing ship. Hanging up the phone, he flipped open the sleek attaché case on his desk and began slipping scripts and papers into it. He hardly seemed to notice Perry's presence in the room, much less his exotic new outfit.

“Are we going somewhere?” Perry asked.

“I'm off to Paris,” Archer said, snapping the clips of his attaché case shut. “Be back by the end of the week.”

Perry jumped up, trembling.

“I thought you wanted to get me started on the second hour immediately!”

“Exactly. Ned Gurney will be here to take you to lunch in a few minutes.”

“Who the hell is he?”

“Ever hear of
Spoons?
”

“You mean the Broadway play?”

“Won a Tony, ran for four years. Ned produced it, and he's been out here trying to get the movie off the ground, but it's run into some snags.”

“What's that got to do with me?”

“I heard he was willing to do some television if he found anything of quality. Of course he produced the Willa Cather for PBS, but I mean network. I gave him your script and he read it last night and loved it.”

Before Perry could ask what all this meant, Archer had swung around the desk, and was shaking his hand.

“Congratulations. Ned is coming aboard as executive producer. This adds real class to your project.”

“Wait!” Perry called after Archer, who was striding to the door. “What if I can't stand this guy? How can I work with him?”

“The man's a genius. He's worked with the very best.”

“What if I hate his guts?”

Archer stopped just before he went out the door, and leveled his gaze at Perry.

“Trust me,” he said.

Then he was gone.

To Paris. Leaving Perry to wait for this stranger who was now evidently in charge of his fate, his precious project, his sacred words. He felt as if he'd just been handed over to a new, unknown psychiatrist. Perry sighed and sat down, adjusting his tight new slacks that were riding up on his ass. Well, at least he wouldn't look like some academic hick from the East, not in his bright yellow pants and purple T-shirt with the silver palm tree.

Ned Gurney was wearing a tweed sport coat with suede patches at the elbows, a button-down shirt, and rep tie. He gave Perry a quick once-over, with a look of slight curiosity, and then the two men shook hands, politely, formally.

The initial meeting of producer and writer was like the first encounter of a couple of dogs of different breeds, cautiously circling, sniffing each other out.

Gurney was a handsome man in his early fifties with longish gray hair that curled up at his neck, and studious, horn-rimmed glasses that matched his ivyish style. He had an air of thoughtfulness about him even as he walked, with hands behind him, head slightly bent, as if studying the atmosphere, so when he commented on the weather it did not seem merely obligatory conversation-filler, but a matter he had actually pondered. The day was brisk, he mentioned, but not like autumn or winter in the East, rather like cool, high mountain air.

When they got to the studio commissary and opened the door, they were struck by the usual clash and clang of silver, as well as the heavy odor of institutional gravy.

Gurney winced, and said, “God, it always reminds me of a hospital.”

Perry smiled.

“Or a high school,” he said.

“Come on,” said Gurney, “let's get out of here. You game?”

“Delighted. Lead the way.”

Gurney drove them out of the Valley, smoothly and efficiently, without the idiosyncratic flair or urgency of Archer Mellis. Perry relaxed, enjoying Gurney's driving style, as well as the comfortable dark-blue Cadillac Seville, not a chic car in this world of Mercedes and sleek foreign sports jobs. They went to a restaurant in Westwood that reminded Perry of Boston.

“It's kind of like the Copley Plaza,” Perry said.

“The food's all right, nothing gourmet, but what the hell, it's civilized.”

Whatever Gurney really liked he conferred on it the judgment of “civilized.”

He loved Perry's script, he thought it was really a rarity for television because it was not only funny and warm and real, it was “civilized.”

“You can't believe the drek they send me to read,” he told Perry over the glass of white wine each had. “What's already on the tube is bad enough, but this stuff is poor imitations of it. Nothing original. Hell, I'm tired of sitting on my can waiting for this feature to get put together, but I'd rather be bored than do drek. When Archer Mellis called me and said he had just the thing for me, I'd heard it all before, but when he mentioned your name I perked up.”

Perry perked up himself.

It turned out Gurney had read one of his stories—in the
Hudson Review
, of all places!

“You really read the
Hudson Review?
” Perry asked.

“What the hell,” said Gurney. “I'm a civilized man.”

Perry agreed. He also agreed with the producer's few suggestions for changes in the first hour of the script.

“It's the second hour that's got me stymied,” Perry confessed. “I hadn't even thought about expanding the story that way till a couple days ago, and I was kind of waiting to talk it over with Archer today, hoping he could help me come up with something.”

“
What if
—” Ned said.

Aha. He too was a “what if” man. Perry leaned forward, intently.

“What if,” Ned continued, “instead of Laurie and Jack resolving that little squabble and falling into each other's arms as you have it now, the argument escalates and Laurie splits.”

“She leaves him? Then there's no show.”

“Only for a while. Only till she realizes how much she loves him and comes back. In the meantime, Jack is stuck with living with his in-laws, and he and they are blaming each other for Laurie's leaving.”

“That's marvelous! My God, I can't wait to start writing it.”

“The sooner the better. I hope to get the director I want approved tomorrow, and begin casting right away for Jack and Laurie.”

“
Casting?
My God, man, I can't get the second hour written overnight!”

“We don't need that for casting. It's still Jack and Laurie's story in the second hour, isn't it?”

“Well, sure, but—”

“And you're not going to change their looks or personalities, are you?”

“Of course not.”

“So, we can start casting them.”

“You sure don't waste any time,” Perry said admiringly.

“I'm learning that in television we don't have any to waste,” Ned said. “Decisions on new pilots are made by the networks in May. This is February. We're already running late.”

Perry slugged down the rest of his coffee as Ned waved for the check.

“You're going to love this guy we got for executive producer,” Perry proudly told Jane when he called her that night in Vermont.

“What's he like?” she asked.

Perry thought a moment.

“He's civilized,” he said. “He's truly a civilized man.”

“I can't wait to meet him.”

“I can't wait for you to get back. Can you make it any sooner, you think?”

“I don't see how I can do everything in a week as it is. Especially with this god-awful weather.”

It was ten above zero in Haviland. A big snow had fallen just the day before she arrived, and the roads had been cleared just in time for her to get through. If it hadn't been for Al Cohen's tramping over to the house in snowshoes to get the furnace going again, the pipes would have surely frozen.

From the half-open window above the bed where Perry lay with the phone a soft evening breeze wafted in, scented with sea air and oleander. Jane's voice sounded so immediate and close it seemed as if she might be calling from the corner, or from a booth at the Hamburger Hamlet, yet the words she was saying, the talk of roads blocked by snow, gave Perry the weird sensation she was speaking not just from across the country but from some other world, one of those sci-fi creations of Isaac Asimov or Ursula K. LeGuin.

Nor was it only the weather she described that seemed so oddly unreal and otherworldly. The people who only a month ago were familiar figures in Perry's daily life, the students and faculty, now seemed almost as remote, as Jane spoke their names and concerns—the books and classes, Al Cohen filling in for old Bozeman, who had suffered a mild heart attack, a basketball game canceled with Bowdoin, in Maine, because of the weather.

“I love you,” Perry said. “Are you sure you're all right?”

Being in such different climates made him feel farther from her than he really was, gave him a bit of a panic.

“I'm fine, and I love you, too,” she assured him. “I'll come back as soon as I can.”

That night he dreamed of searching for her over ice floes.

It wasn't just the weather that was different in Southern California. Time was different, too.

It was faster.

Perry had imagined that, if anything, time out here at the edge of the vast Pacific, under the palm trees and constant sun, would probably be slower, lazier, than back in the brisk climate of the East. Like everyone else, Perry had read about the famous laid-back atmosphere of L.A., the mellow attitude of the natives of the region, whose casual clothes and morals were suited to the slow, sensual rhythm of surf and sun. Maybe that was true for some beach bums and bunnies, but it bore no relation to the full-throttle freeway race of show business. If Rome were the set for a TV movie, it surely would have been built in a day.

Overnight, literally, Perry's script had been transformed from the ethereal realm of imagination to the real world of production, even before he'd finished writing the second hour.

“The First Year's the Hardest” was not just a story any more, it was a company, with its own office. Of course the office was just another of the old, anonymous-looking motel-like buildings on the sprawling Paragon lot that happened to be vacant at the moment because the last production it sheltered was finished, either by completion or failure, leaving no trace of its character, leaving only the building, the shell, the office, ready to receive and be filled by the energy and spirit, the furniture and flesh of a new enterprise.

“The First Year's the Hardest.”

That's what the secretary said when she answered the phone in Ned Gurney's office.

She said the name of Perry's story, Perry's show, as if it were General Motors or Lord & Taylor or Standard Oil.

As if it were
real
.

As if it were a regular business with typewriters and desks, secretaries and executives—and it was, it was all that.

Perry felt a little like a combination of Henry Ford and Rudyard Kipling—a literary man of action, an empire builder.

“You can pick your own office here in the building,” Ned Gurney told him, “but don't feel you have to be here if you prefer to write back at your hotel. Whatever suits you best.”