Selling Out (24 page)

“We don't mind him jumping on her bones in that last scene,” he said. “What the hell, the guy may be some kind of college teacher, but he's no pansy. Am I right?”

“You called it exactly, Stu,” Archer said approvingly.

“Our hero's a regular guy,” Ned said, nodding.

“When does he ‘jump' anywhere?” Perry asked in genuine confusion.

Archer slapped him on the knee in a seemingly friendly manner, then added a sharp squeeze that meant, keep quiet.

“You know, after the argument, they make up, and he ‘jumps on her bones.'”

“The lovemaking scene,” Ned whispered.

“Oh! Sure, right, you mean
that
,” Perry said heartily.

He tried not to grimace, pasting a manly smile on, trying to black out the mental image of a pervert pouncing on a skeleton.

“It's not what they do,” Sturdivant continued, “it's
where
they do it.”

The hour script was a low-key, familiar story of the married couple's arguments over money that led to a cooling of sexual ardor, that were finally resolved over a “budget meal” so funny that it broke the ice of the couple's hostility and led to a sudden, loving rekindling of passion right there on the kitchen floor. Of course the scene only suggested it would end in lovemaking, there wasn't even any nudity, but it was clear that they couldn't wait nor did they want to wait to get to anyplace more comfortable.

Amanda LeMay and the programming people had praised its humanness and tenderness and appealing spirit.

“You mean you don't mind if he jumps on her bones to show the argument is over,” Ned asked calmly, “but you don't like him jumping on them in the kitchen?”

Stu nodded, making a sour face.

“They can wait till they get to the bedroom, can't they?” he said.

“No!” Perry shouted, jumping to his feet. “That's the whole point!”

Archer pulled him back down.

“The charm is that they really love each other so much, and they see their arguments were so silly, they can't wait,” Archer said to Stu.

Sturdivant shook his head.

“The kitchen is kinky,” he insisted.

“Why, the kitchen is the most wholesome place in a household!” Ned exclaimed.

“It's for eating,” Stu insisted, “and I mean eating
supper
, in case you miss my point. Why can't they just kiss and then go off to the bedroom?”

“Then it's not spontaneous!” Perry exclaimed. “It ruins the whole feeling of it.”

“The public won't like it,” Stu said. “The people out there will think this young couple is a little bit on the weirdo side, if they have to do it in the damn kitchen.”

“It doesn't show they're weird, it shows they're human!” shouted Perry.

“There's nothing to get loud about,” Archer cautioned him.

Stu turned to Perry and stared.

“I understand you're from back East,” he said.

“I live in Vermont,” Perry admitted.

“In fact,” Stu went on, “all of you people are from the New York area, isn't that so?”

“As a matter of fact, I grew up in Minnesota,” Ned Gurney said. “Is that any better?”

Ned was getting hot under the collar.

“It isn't a matter of better or worse,” Stu explained. “It's just a fact that intellectuals from back East don't really understand how the
real people
feel about these things. And it's our job to see that we don't offend them.”

“My God, this is the nineteen-eighties!” said Ned. “You have everything on TV—you even have incest.”

“Not in the kitchen we don't!” said Stu, standing up.

“Besides, I understand this may be an eight o'clock show. That's a family hour. We have to be especially careful. We have a special responsibility to the children of this country.”

Archer stood up.

“We didn't know they were thinking of us for eight o'clock, Stu. We appreciate your concerns, and we'll of course cooperate in every way we can.”

Ned and Perry rose glumly, murmuring, and Stu got up to walk them to the door.

“Don't worry, boys. We're not prudes over here, we'll get along fine.”

He slung a comradely arm over the slumping shoulders of Ned and Perry.

“Say, you boys hear the one about the traveling salesman who stopped at the farm where the daughter kept a pet giraffe in the barn?”

Obediently, they listened.

Loudly, they laughed.

Outside, they cringed.

For the first time since he started working on the show, Perry wanted a drink. He did not have in mind a fine Chardonnay with a delicate nose and amusing bouquet. He was thinking more of a water glass filled with straight gin.

From the fuming looks of Archer and Ned, he figured they might for a moment forget their higher tastes and join him. It was only eleven in the morning, but maybe they could find one of those dark, anonymous, funky bars, air-cooled and stinky with last night's booze, and quietly tie one on. Maybe they'd decide to give it all up and go buy a small newspaper on the Cape.

They walked down the sterile hallway in stony silence, and once inside the elevator, Perry jabbed for the lobby button, anxious to get on the road to his imagined oasis. But Archer brushed his hand aside and poked the button for ten—the top floor, the executive floor.

“What are we going to do?” Ned Gurney asked, “jump?”

“We're going to get an explanation from Amanda LeMay,” Archer said grimly.

“You mean about why a young married couple can't make love in the kitchen?” Perry asked.

Ned snorted.

“I'm sure as far as Amanda's concerned, they could make it on top of the refrigerator. Or in the sink, for that matter. That's not the problem.”

Archer grunted as the elevator reached ten.

“The problem is,” he said, “we've given them a sophisticated, adult show, a quality show for an intelligent, educated audience, and now they're planning to shove it into a family-viewing slot. It's going to tie our hands behind our back, besides giving us the wrong audience. They're going to bury us.”

“We're going to nurture you,” Amanda said.

Her eyes were large and warm, almost moist from the intensity of her assurance. She stood up and moved from behind her desk toward where Archer, Ned, and Perry sat facing her. She was wearing a loose dress with long, puffy sleeves, but cut low in front, showing the ample breasts that now seemed to be rising and falling with her heartbeat, her emotion. She seemed like an earth mother, strong and protective.

“A show like yours,” she said, “is unique, special, a bit fragile. You need to be nurtured.”

She extended her arms, and for a moment Perry had the feeling she was going to come a little closer and bury his head against her heaving breast, and he averted his eyes in flushed embarrassment, fearing if she did what he fantasized, he would hurl his arms around her waist and clutch her to him, crying, “Mama, make it all right!” To his relief, however, she turned to Archer.

“Our strategy now is to put you on after the season starts, Sunday night at eight. You'll be against ‘Danny, the Golden Dolphin,' and ‘Little Asian Rascals,' a new sitcom about a group of Vietnamese orphans who live on a catamaran in Newport Beach, looked after by a retired Air Force general and his deaf-mute daughter. Danny's been on for four years and he's starting to slip. The new show is very iffy—we don't think the Vietnamese kids will draw in Middle America.”

“Still, that's traditionally a family hour,” Archer argued.

“Our testing has shown that you have a great appeal to teenagers,” Amanda said. “It's the old story of young people wanting to know what the big kids do—what they'll be emulating in only a few years. Research shows you can build a real following in this slot—a following that will grow up with your show, mature with it, and eventually move with it into a later time slot.”

“That's awfully far down the road,” Ned Gurney said uneasily.

“
Exactly
,” Amanda said. “That's how much faith we have in ‘The First Year's the Hardest.' We see it as a slowly building staple, something that will work itself into the American grain, like ‘The Waltons,' like ‘Happy Days.' That's why we're going to do all we can to
nurture
it.”

She not only smiled, she glowed, with the pride of a loving and dedicated mother.

Archer stood up.

“Thank you,” he said.

He shook her hand and Ned and Perry followed suit, smiling and nodding as they filed out of her office. Just at the door Amanda called out “Gentlemen!” They whipped around to see her give them a big conspiratorial wink.

“Watch the trades tomorrow,” she said.

Not only the trades had the story, it was the lead piece in the Entertainment section of the L.A.
Times
. It was the highly regarded annual report of Dexter, Schuman, Glass and McGillicuddy, evaluating the networks' new shows of the upcoming season, and predicting those that might be real winners in the race for the ratings.

“The First Year's the Hardest” was singled out as “fresh and appealing, the most original young domestic drama to come down the pike in many a moon.” The prognosticators especially praised the “crackling dialogue” of prize-winning story writer Perry Moss, the “sensitive, nuance-rich pastoral direction of former Off-Broadway firecracker Kenton Spires,” and credited the “mid-eighties aura” as well as the general high quality and production values of the show to executive producer Ned Gurney, another prestigious transplant from the East.

“This should be the first big feather in the otherwise bare bonnet of young Archer Mellis, whose blasts at the Industry earned him the top job at Paragon TV. If he can keep together the talented trio that produced the summer's smash-hit pilot, he might well have a long-running ratings-buster. It's already rumored that network executives, pleased with the early series material, may up their order from the safe three shows to something more substantial.”

Perry read the story to Jane as she drove him to work that morning, his voice sounding as profound and deep as a foghorn. When he finished, folding the paper on his lap and looking over at her, she said, without even smiling or looking over at him, “Oh shit.”

“Hey! What is it with you? Can't you stand to hear your own husband's show may be a big hit? Is that so awful?”

“They'll want you to stay,” she said.

“Don't be paranoid. They know I have to go back in September. It's all understood.”

“If the show's success depends on keeping the ‘talented trio' together? You think Archer's going to lose the ‘writer of crackling dialogue'? When his bonnet depends on it?”

“Love, you really are paranoid. I'm going to touch up the scripts from home. I'll still be officially Story Consultant, a part of the team. Hal Hagedorn will probably take over as story editor, and do the real day-to-day work out here. All the network cares about is that I'll still be officially connected to the show. ‘Put my stamp on it,' as Archer said.”

“That was before this article.”

“This article doesn't change any of that. My arrangement is all arranged.”

There was no time for the highly praised triumvirate to dawdle over their rave from the prognosticators, since the real news that Archer revealed when they arrived that morning meant that their efforts had to be accelerated at once.

As the advertising seers had so uncannily predicted (and by the very act of that prediction helped insure that it would come true), the network already—this morning!—had commissioned another three episodes of “The First Year's the Hardest,” thus doubling the original series order to a total of six hour shows following the pilot!

This meant the already frantic pace and elaborate planning of the production campaign for the new show now had to be doubled, and, like World War II fighter pilots scrambling to get airborne, the three leaders rushed out of Archer's office to get the logistics under way. But one of them was called back for a private high-level word with the commander.

“Perry!”

The writer turned, automatically straightening to attention.

“Sir?”

His young boss smiled, came forward, and gave him a comradely clap on the shoulder.

“Since when did you start calling me ‘sir'?” he asked.

Perry chuckled nervously.

“I guess it just slipped out,” he said.

“I know I've got to give orders sometimes, but remember,
amigo
—we're in this together.”

Archer was now hugging the writer so close to him, as he walked him slowly around the room, that Perry was dizzied by his after-shave cologne.

“Let's you and I slip away for a little lunch today,” Archer said. “Just the two of us.”

“You mean—off the lot?” Perry asked, both flattered and confused. On this of all days there was little time for such Eastern-style decadence. Perry had counted on wolfing down a container of yogurt while in conference with Ned and the writers, if in fact there was even time to swallow while working out a strategy for a whole new set of story lines. So much had to be accomplished in so little time, not only with the new order for shows but with Perry only having another week or so before retreating back to his consultancy position in the East.

“Sometimes we need to get away for a little perspective,” Archer said, giving him a squeeze and then releasing him. “Could you drop by at a few minutes after twelve?”

“Yes, sir,” Perry caught himself, then laughed nervously, blushing at the same time. “I mean—
muy bien, amigo
. And—
muchas gracias
.”

Archer winked.

“
Mon plaisir
,” he said.

The Bach Violin Partitas, as interpreted by Zino Francescatti, rang searingly, plaintively, through the quadraphonic sound system of Archer's car as he drove Perry to lunch, moving at a steady, almost leisurely pace along Sunset Boulevard. To speak would not only have been acoustically difficult, but would also have seemed, against that music, uncouth, almost irreverent. The contrast between the soul-stirring music inside the car, and the zany, superhype billboards and marquees of the bars and rock clubs and restaurants, motels and movie houses, rent-a-car lots and T-shirt boutiques, the whole glitzy agglomeration of the famous thoroughfare, which seemed even more hallucinatory in the smoggy glare of midday, gave Perry the disorienting illusion of traveling inside some kind of space capsule that preserved the essence of an ancient civilization while it slid through the fantastic surface of an alien star.