Selling Out (7 page)

“And I guess he keeps suggesting putting cars into every program, no matter what it is,” Perry said, displaying his new insider's knowledge.

“‘The people love 'em,'” Archer intoned, imitating the powerless old exec.

“That's him to a T,” Perry laughed.

“I wish I could have been a fly on the wall at that meeting!” said Phyllis Clare.

“You should have seen Archer's performance,” he told her. “The man is a true artist.”

“That's what he keeps saying all the time about
you
,” Phyllis purred.

“Hey, I'm going to expose you now,” Archer told his beautiful date, then pouring more champagne into all the glasses he spoke confidingly to Jane with the same sort of wink he had given Amanda LeMay at the network meeting. “It just so happens that Phyllis here is Perry's biggest fan.”

“Next to me, you mean,” Jane said. “And I have seniority—and tenure!”

Perry nudged her under the table. The adulation was getting a bit thick, he felt, even for a literary man from the boonies who privately believed he wasn't appreciated as much as he might be by the world at large.

“It's you who deserve the kudos tonight,” Perry said, raising his glass to Archer, and telling the women with a wink of his own, “His performance at the network meeting should have won him an Oscar—or should it be an Emmy, for television?”

“Better get that right,
amigo
,” Archer said. “That's the one you'll be collecting for your trophy case a year from now. The Emmy, for best original screenplay.”

“I'll drink to that,” said Phyllis Clare, beaming as she lifted her glass.

Perry shifted uneasily in his seat.

“I think we're getting ahead of the game,” he said. “I haven't put a word on paper yet.”

“Not to worry,” Archer assured him. “We'll get you under way first thing in the morning.”

“With that in mind, I think we better order now,” Perry said.

“What do you recommend here, Archer?” Jane asked.

“Let's find out what Dom is up to with the veal tonight,” the suave young host said, raising a finger that immediately drew a waiter, captain, and sommelier at the same time. The sommelier poured the last of the champagne from the bottle at the table and Archer gave him a brisk nod and snapped out a single-syllable directive:

“
More
.”

“So what did you think of the amazing Archer Mellis, boy wonder?” Perry asked, as he stumbled out of his pants later that evening and aimed for bed.

“Amazing,” said Jane.

“That's my adjective. Be original.”

Jane stopped rolling down her panty hose and pondered for a moment.

“Smooth,” she said.

“Smooth? I'd have bet you'd say ‘slick.'”

“I don't know,” Jane said, tossing her panty hose away, “I'm trying to convey his ‘operator' quality. I kind of like ‘smooth.' As in ‘a real smoothie.'”

Perry started to laugh, but a hiccup interrupted.

“‘Smoothie?' That's an oldie but goodie, all right. I like it.”

“It's closer to the mark than ‘slick,'” Jane said, snuggling into bed next to Perry. “That sounds a little too ‘oily,' too conniving.”

“Well, I'll find out for sure tomorrow. When we really get down to the script. The nitty-gritty. That's when we find out just how much of a con artist this character really is.”

“The only thing that matters is he can't con
you
.”

“Nope. I come equipped with what good ole Papa Hemingway said all real writers got—my built-in shit detector.”

“Mmm,” Jane said. “Lucky you. That way you're able to tell the difference between a sincere fan like me and a snippy little fake like Phyllis Clare.”

Perry smiled, turning out the light and pulling Jane close against him.

“Mmmm. I love you.”

“Mmmm. You top …”

The earthenware mugs of black coffee in Archer's office were so hot that steam came off of them. The strands of gray steam curled upward in the lemon-tinted light of the cool morning, making Perry think of Indian smoke signals, secret communications among conspirators. Archer told his secretary to hold all calls. There was a sense of purpose and subdued excitement like that feeling in college when a couple of like-minded friends get together and decide to start a magazine.

Was it all planned, a deluding illusion?

Archer was quiet, concentrating. He had taken off his combat boots and was pacing the room in stockinged feet, wearing a one-piece orange jumpsuit that seemed to be made of parachute silk. Occasionally he blew on his mug of coffee or took a quick sip of it, speaking in low serious tones of “essences,” of “values,” nodding approval of the few suggestions Perry made.

Still, there was not exactly a story.

Yet.

Archer suddenly pointed at Perry.

“
What if
—” he said.

“Yes?”

“
What if
—Jack and Laurie are, like many newly married couples, broke.”

“Yes? They would be. Sure.”

“And what if—to solve some of their financial problems, they decided to move in with their in-laws.”

“Which ones? His or hers?”

“Which would be more interesting? Create more problems?”

“Hers—because her father's a professor. He and Jack are kind of in competition.”

“Perfect.”

“Yeah—I mean, all kinds of things would happen. Funny. Sad. Real.”

“You got it.”

“Hey—this is not bad.”

There was a buzz, and Archer grunted into the phone and said, “All right, if it's urgent—I'll get back to him in two minutes.”

Archer turned and stared at Perry, seeming to look straight into him.

“This is your show,” he said. “I have total confidence.”

Perry stood up, feeling dizzy with panic.

“Listen, thanks, but—well, isn't there something more I should know? Some basic rules or something? About writing for television?”

Archer walked slowly up to Perry, coming so close their noses were almost touching. He uttered one word, like a command.

“
Don't
,” he said.

“What?” Perry asked, confused. “Don't what?”

“Don't try to ‘write for television.' Write the best damn thing you can. Don't think about ratings or networks or any other bullshit. Just write the finest script that's in you.”

Perry looked directly into Archer's eyes, trying to detect any sign of falseness, but the young executive gazed relentlessly back at him, back
into him
, it felt like.

“I hope you mean that,” Perry said.

“Try me.”

“I will.”

Archer stepped back and gave Perry a quick squeeze on the shoulder.

“Go for it,” he said, then turned away.

Perry walked out of the room, a slight smile playing on his lips as he savored the situation. All right, he'd been given free rein and he was going to take it. He was going to give Archer Mellis the classiest, most intelligent script that was in him. Then he'd find out just how much this character actually meant what he said about raising the quality of prime-time television.

III

Everything was new.

It was really the same old stuff, of course, the tools and totems Perry Moss had used on thousands of days over years and years. There was the beat-up old manual Royal portable typewriter with the beige body and green keys (including the “k” that always stuck), the solid ream-size package of plain white typing paper, the yellow pencils arrayed with sharpened points sticking up from the chipped souvenir Red Sox mug, the tiny steel toy locomotive whose smokestack was actually a pencil sharpener, the plug-in electric percolator brewing the black coffee that was strong enough to “corrode nails,” according to Jane, and, of most recent vintage, the color photo of Perry and Jane in the autumn flare of the mountains of Vermont that was taken by Al Cohen and given to Perry for a birthday gift in a plastic frame-stand. Perry had only planned to bring out the faithful Royal portable for this month-long stint but Jane had also prudently packed what she called “the essential toys” to insure his psychic ease and comfort.

The rituals were the same, also: the lighting of the pipe, sharpening of pencils, folding paper into halves to make notes and scribbles on, pacing back and forth across the room, moving in closer, then taking a deep breath and planting himself in the chair, down to business.

The words were the same, too. They were the ones he had always used, the ones that had served him so well. He had not had to learn some new vocabulary. Archer had even brushed aside his concern over mastering technical terms to put in the kind of stuff he had seen in some scripts like “pan to” and “dolly” and “angle on.” Directors liked to put those things in themselves, Archer explained, and writers didn't really have to worry about it.

Just write.

Perry wrote, using the old familiar words,
but
—and this was an exciting difference that made the whole process he was undertaking seem more exotic—he was putting the words on paper in a new and different way.

They looked like this:

INTERIOR—JACK AND LAURIE'S BEDROOM—DAY

LAURIE stirs, wakes, and yawns. She looks around the room, looks next to her in the bed, sees JACK, her husband. She smiles, and rubs her hand soothingly along his back.

LAURIE

Jack?

JACK groans, and moves away from LAURIE.

JACK

Huh?

Perry looked at the page and felt an odd tingle of excitement. These were his first words—at least the first words he had written that would actually be spoken, by real actors, in front of a camera, for an audience of millions. Suddenly he started to laugh, at himself, at the foolishness of pride in getting a couple of gruntlike sounds on paper, yet he sensed that something important had occurred.

He was doing it. He was writing a script. Stoking his pipe, he returned to the work with a feeling of heightened energy and elation.

Several hours later he stood up and stretched and walked around the room, humming to himself. He had written three pages. Of a
script
. He was doing something he had never done before, something completely new.

At age forty-three.

Who said you couldn't teach an old dog new tricks?

He not only felt he was
doing
something new, but that
he
was new. Or
re
newed, anyway. He felt refreshed, revitalized, by a feeling of command, of creation. Maybe that's why the writer's credit for a TV series didn't just say “written by” but “created by.”

Created
.

Yes.

This was different from writing a story. Maybe it was the knowledge that live actors would be performing it that made the whole thing seem more palpable, real. He had the sense that instead of just writing, he was creating a world and putting people in it, making them move where he wanted and say what he wished. He could see Jack and Laurie in their bed, waking and moving; he could hear the tone of their voices.

He cared for them, of course, they were his own creatures, from the time when he imagined and named them back in the creation of the original short story, and now, in this new incarnation, he cared for them even more, felt even more protective of them. It was his duty to maintain their integrity, and of course in so doing he would maintain his own.

Smiling, he went to find Jane to tell her how happy he was she had made him stay.

Perry had wanted to see his old friends the Vardemans ever since he first arrived on the Coast, but he hadn't yet been able to reach them. All he got was their answering service. Of course he understood they were snowed under now, socially as well as professionally, what with their amazing success in the movie industry as, respectively, top directors' agent and producer.

Still, his friendship went back to grad-school days, when he and Vaughan had been restless, rebellious students at Harvard, shared a grungy one-bedroom apartment, and dropped out together after the first year—Perry to devote himself to dishwashing and short-story writing, Vaughan to marry the brilliant Radcliffe student editor Pru Pinchel and move with her to New York when she landed her first job as a literary agent. He pursued his own literary dreams on her salary, writing book reviews that were published and novels that were not.

When they shifted to the Coast a decade ago to courageously crash the movie business, Perry enjoyed keeping track of their rise. Pru took on an unknown director and got him his first film job, and soon convinced Vaughan through her own experience that writing gave the lowest prestige and profit in Hollywood. She turned him to producing projects she packaged with her growing list of hot young directors. Perry kept in touch through late-night phone calls and postcards and funny letters, even the occasional drink or dinner when the Vardemans came back East.

“Look!” Perry exclaimed to Jane over a breakfast of Huevos Rancheros at the Hamburger Hamlet on Sunset. “Here they are!”

Well, not in the flesh, of course, but in the Society page of the L.A.
Times
. He passed it to Jane, folding the page to the picture.

There was Pru wearing one of her basic black Bonwit dresses with the simple string of pearls, and Vaughan in his tweed sport-coat from J. Press in Cambridge, the ultimate Harvard haberdasher. They still flew back East to buy their clothes, for stubbornly maintaining their Ivy League style amid the glitzy gold-chain culture of Hollywood had become a kind of trademark with them, a sign of principle that they carried into all areas of life, up to and including the culinary. Pru's popular New England Boiled Dinners were considered
the
social event of what the local press respectfully referred to as the “A List” of the Industry. No wonder then that Vaughan and Pru looked a little uncomfortably sheepish in this photograph, wearing Hawaiian-style leis around their necks—but the incongruity was explained in the headline over the picture: