Star Time (21 page)

“I’m a journalist.”

“Stars are the ones who attract the viewers. That’s the way the executives who hire you think. That’s who they pay the big money to.”

“You make the news sound like entertainment.”

“Don’t kid yourself. Everybody with any kind of fire burning in his belly wants to be a star.
From the guy working his way up at IBM to the one who’s an agent for newscasters.”
He chuckled.

“Andy Warhol’s fifteen minutes of fame?”

“I mean real stardom: money, influence, adoration, immortality.
The whole
piñata
.
Be honest with yourself: Why else did you decide to go on camera?”

Chris changed the subject. “You said you’d been thinking of calling.”

“A few months back I asked Stew
Graushner
if you had representation. He claimed you had another year and a half to go on your contract.”

“How could he do that? My contract’s expiring.”

“He figured your new contract would cost him a lot more if I was your agent.”

“I’m not staying with FBS. I have a very good offer to anchor at another station here in L.A. I’m sure I don’t need an agent.”

“How much?”

Reluctantly, she told him her salary and named the station. She did not like to talk about her money, especially such a large amount. It sounded like bragging.

“Give me till the end of the day to better it.”

“What?”

“If I can’t get you a lot more than a hundred thousand dollars by the end of the day, then you’re right, you don’t need an agent.”

Intrigued, Chris agreed. Her only condition: Under no circumstances would she stay with FBS.

Carl Green phoned her back in less than an hour. She could take her pick. A local network-owned station had offered her a quarter of a million dollars to co-anchor. The station that had already offered her a hundred thousand had now doubled that figure, and he thought he could get them to stretch to two fifty also. Did she want him to try?

Chris was dumbfounded. “That’s two hundred and fifty thousand dollars
each year?
”

“I know what the market is paying. You don’t,” he explained. “And I got one station to bid against the other.”

“That kind of money is obscene. In his best year my father probably never made a fifth of that.”

“Can he anchor?” Green cynically asked.

He briefly outlined the rest of the terms he had negotiated for her, points she had never considered. He had insisted any contract be for only two years—he wanted her to be free to move up to a network after that.

“You stick to reporting. Leave the negotiating to me. Like it or not, you’ve got what it takes to be a star.”

Chris told him which of the two stations she wanted to go with. “I guess I have myself an agent,” she concluded.

“Easiest twenty-five thousand I ever made.”

“For an hour’s work.”

“Less.”

“You sound very smug about it.”

“You’re going to love me.”

Barnett’s wedding present to his daughter and her husband was a twelve-room apartment on Fifth Avenue, several blocks north of his own. He released to her the first portion of her trust fund, which contained her mother’s fortune and a large block of FBS stock. The rest of the principal and stock would be distributed to her over the coming years until, at age
thirty,
all would be under her control. The added wealth did not contribute significantly to her life-style—she had been receiving the trust’s income since reaching twenty-one. During the months the apartment’s interior was under construction, she and Greg resided at the Carlyle Hotel. It would not have occurred to her to stop working. In her family one worked and one achieved. Public relations had been a good choice for her: Her knack for maneuvering people and events toward a desired result translated well into the talent to convince the public to buy whatever her clients were selling.

Diane and Greg soon came to be considered one of society’s glamorous young couples. Rich and chic, her style was impeccable, and she possessed a valued ability to attract money and luminaries to charity affairs she ran with enviable organization. Greg was proud of the way people gravitated toward her, and he admired how deftly she dealt with them. He soon recognized that she and Chris both sought the same goal: recognition. Chris wanted it as a professional in television news. Diane sought it socially, her professional success being a part of her larger advancement in society. He gradually discerned beneath her polished facade a more complex woman than he had appreciated when they married.

Greg sensed Diane was as proud of him as he of her. He was well-educated and well-mannered, charming, and fun to be with. His self-training in the rituals and manners of her social class had paid off; he epitomized the sophisticated males after whom he had patterned himself. No one, including Diane, suspected that his father had worked all his adult life in a steel foundry or that his mother was Jewish and alive. Diane declined to probe his hazily sketched parentage, which made it easier for her to circumvent possibly awkward questions from others and wearisome obligations to his family. In both their minds, he had entered fully into
her
family.

Yet, when he stood among the shimmering people, Greg sometimes glimpsed eyes he thought were dismissing him for traveling on his
wife’s social passport. At such moments he felt as excluded and as ravenous for acceptance among them as he had as a boy. He was surprised to discover that his father-in-law had won acceptance the same way as he.

Barnett Roderick was thirty-three on the late-summer afternoon in Newport that he met and fell irrevocably in love with Dorothy Mayfield. Beautiful and cordial, she was among the most sought-after of society’s young women, occupying a social position miles above his. The
Mayfields
had been members of American aristocracy since before the Revolution. A nineteenth-century shipping fortune had made them rich enough to support in fine style generations of genteel descendants with prudently small families.

Barnett had always considered women an easy commodity to obtain. Those who did not overtly pursue him invariably yielded to him almost as easily. But Dorothy Mayfield was different from other women. He courted her with a shameless lack of his considerable pride. Finally, her resistance melted, and she fell in love with the persistent suitor.

Acceptance into her elite class was the least of the wedding gifts she brought. Foremost was inexpressible happiness: Her sweetness, intelligence, and gaiety lifted the gloom he had worn since a car accident killed his
parents
years before. Barnett indulged her with every luxury she might wish for.

When she became pregnant, he was both thrilled and worried. She was so small-boned, so fragile. He had good cause for worry. She became gravely ill with gestation diabetes during pregnancy. Despite doctors’ warnings, she insisted on continuing to term. Dorothy died giving birth to Diane. She was twenty-seven years old.

All the love he had lavished on his wife Barnett transferred to the daughter she had wanted more than her life. Diane was raised by a succession of competent nannies,
who
could not help but be pale imitations of the loving mother she craved and needed. Barnett spent time with her each morning and, if he was home from the office in time, at night.

He remarried twice, the first time when Diane was fourteen. Both wives were well-born women whom he thought he knew thoroughly and whom he hoped would become mothers to Diane. She was so close to her father that the entrance of each new woman into the family frightened her; she feared he was abandoning her. But neither woman was able to fill for Barnett or Diane the gap that Dorothy had left. He quickly tired of them. After each marital breakup, father and daughter drew still closer, and his recollection of Dorothy floated higher toward saintliness.

Barnett’s rarest talent was an uncanny ability to divine other people’s desires, to foresee precisely what it would take to gain their capitulation. As
a broadcasting
executive the talent manifested itself as an intuition about the public’s tastes in new shows that, by the new millennium, made FBS the industry’s most profitable and its founder a legend. As a devoted parent, he was compelled to add to his daughter’s natural attractions whatever he sensed would win over the young man she had set her heart on. He was as determined as he had been with her mother that she not
want
for anything.

Greg and Diane did not know each other well when they married. His looks and poise had impressed her, but the way he stood up to her initial bullying was what captured her respect and, as a result, her interest. Her imagined ideal had been shaped in the image of her father. Greg was one of the few young men she had met with comparable inner strength and intelligence.

For his part Greg appreciated her style in public and took pleasure in having such a wife. When they were alone, just the two of them, over one of their rare suppers home or watching television or reading and making occasional comments to each other, she could be warm and playful, even endearing.

As with most newly married couples, the frictions in their relationship began to arise from what they had not yet discovered about each other.

One night Greg returned home very tired. By then he had been moved to Station Relations and had spent all day alternately imploring and browbeating executives at balky affiliates to clear their schedules for network offerings. The problem was a prime-time news hour on American foreign policy that Ray
Strock
had insisted on making as one of the “specials” guaranteed in his contract. The topic had been chosen to add depth to his image as a newscaster. Several large FBS affiliates were refusing to broadcast the program, indicating that they intended to preempt the hour to present their own entertainment programming that was sure to bring them higher ratings and more advertising income than would be lost in network compensation. The network’s concern was that fewer stations would reduce the special's potential audience and, as a consequence, its own ad revenues.

Greg sat down on the end of the bed. “Look, instead of going to this charity dinner or whatever it is we’ve got on tap tonight, how about we stay home and take it easy?”

Diane frowned. “Impossible. Everyone we know will be there.”

“Don’t you sometimes just want to get off the merry-go-round for a while? No raffles at the door or kissing at the air so makeup won’t get messed up.”

“This really isn’t the best time to start this.”

“Well, don’t you?”

“Would you like me to insult Holly by not showing up?” Unspoken was Diane’s belief that attendance at major benefits was an obligation traded back and forth that maintained their standing in society and the standing of what today passed for society in the American hierarchy.

“Maybe we could invite someone over, I don’t know, just for conversation.”

“Of all the times—” Diane’s eyes were blazing. “In exactly five minutes, I am going downstairs, getting into the car, and going to the St. Regis. And you’ll be ready by then as well unless it’s your intention to embarrass both of us.”

He stood up with tired resignation. “I wouldn’t want to do that.”

He began to dress. While he did, he mused over the firmness and inflexibility of Diane’s will. Apparently, as he, she had been on her good behavior before they married, compliant in order to avoid disputes that might end in a rupture. Only now, with months having passed and with both of them too tired after the workday for polite behavior, had enough provocation arisen for her anger to surface.

A few weeks later, Diane
asked
Greg to fly with her to Paris the following week. The trip had two purposes: One of her major clients was a couturier with a global clothing line and it would allow her to shop for next season’s wardrobe.

“There are important things coming up at work next week,” he argued incredulously. “Besides, we’ve already decided how we’ll use my vacation time this year.”

Having gotten married so she would have him as her permanent companion, she was exasperated by his stubbornness. “This would just be about taking a few days off.”

“No!”

“Daddy knows I always go to Paris this time of year. Sometimes he would go with me.”

Greg allowed his irritation to become visible. “You’re not going to mention any of this to your father. You’re never to say a word to him ever about my work.”

“You’re my husband, so you’re just like I am to him now.”

Greg discerned that their marriage had not shifted Diane’s primary allegiance. Her father was still the bulwark defending her inner security. How could Greg, a stranger with nothing, ever protect her like her father
did? To her way of thinking, the only change marriage had brought was that her father now cared for them both.

She and Greg argued a while longer, neither yielding.