Star Time (3 page)

"Christine
Paskins
," Greg announced, guiding her away.
"KFBS News."

"What did
Meachum
tell you?" someone demanded of her.

Her head inclined apologetically. "His voice was too low for me to hear. I won't know until we play back the sound bite in the editing room."

"Bitch!" the reporter closest to her enviously sputtered.

Greg hustled her into the mobile van. He would send people back later to pick up his and Chris's parked cars.

"Okay," Greg ordered, "what did
Meachum
say?"

"He's giving Bronstein and McNulty to the DA."

Greg's mouth opened. They were the most powerful men on the city council. McNulty practically ran the local Democratic machine.

"And he confirmed that?"

"He was so surprised I knew the deal that he just said 'yes.'"

Greg glanced at the cameraman, who smiled in confirmation.

"Miss
Paskins
," Greg said incredulously, "welcome to KFBS News. Did I ever underestimate Wichita! But don't you ever again go off on your own and put us on a limb like that."

"You were late getting in today," she reminded him.

Meachum
stayed in hiding all that day and the lawyers involved refused all calls from the press. Greg had sworn everyone involved in the story to secrecy, and kept one of the desk assistants scanning wire-service reports and listening to an all-news radio station, hoping fervently that the facts behind the plea bargain would not leak out before airtime. All the while Chris and he were cutting the piece with the video editor and writing the report she would record as narration.

As soon as her audio track was combined with the video, he played the piece for Stew
Graushner
. So far, no one else had broken the story.

"Maybe our luck is changing," Stew exclaimed as he viewed the piece, glancing heavenward, as if expecting divine retaliation for expressing optimism. He returned his attention to Greg. "But let's do it as an anchor package. Quinn does an on-camera lead-in to his tracked piece and then an on-camera tag at the end."

That meant Chris
Paskins's
picture and voice would be cut out of the piece, and Quinn Harris, the anchorman, would introduce it, narrate it, and then end it from the anchor desk. The sound track would contain only Harris's voice describing the visual material outside the courthouse and
Meachum's
sound bite, The impression would be that Harris himself had gotten the story, thus enhancing his image as an investigative journalist and ending for a while the phone-call complaints from his agent that his role needed to be expanded; Harris had an ego that was oversized even by anchorman standards.

"
Stew,
if you give Harris the story, you cut her feet out from under her on her very first day."

"There'll be other stories."

Greg pointed out the illogic of using the anchorman. "The key camera shot into the limousine shows her in one-quarter profile in the foreground asking the question and the commissioner looking right at her and answering. Harris is nowhere around."

Stew nodded in comprehension. "No way will it look like Harris's piece."

"It
has
to be her package. And it should be."

"You really think she's going to work out?"

Greg nodded. "I wish I could take the credit, but it was her scoop all the way." He allowed himself a smile. "She had me scared shitless."

Greg would make such an admission only to Stew, who had hired him at a TV station in Pittsburgh four and a half years earlier, just after Greg was graduated from Yale. The station had been short a news writer. Greg had never considered news as a career. He had simply possessed a burning desire to get into television.

Stew had mournfully opened the job interview by asking, "If viewers were really interested in what was happening in the world, would most of them be content to get their news in minute-and-a-half chunks from us?"

He had released a puff of pipe smoke as regretfully as if it had been hope. "You probably have too good an education for this business. But maybe an English major from Yale can write and just maybe he's smart enough to know what he's getting into. Should I give you the benefit of the doubt?"

"How about if we flip for it?"
Greg asked.

Stew thought the remark funny and confident enough to hire the young man to write copy for the early evening news broadcast.

Greg had learned quickly and was willing to work hard, and perhaps most important he thrived under the stress of deadlines as the clock hands moved toward six o'clock and the last edits and rewrites were feverishly locked into place. He was soon elevated to producer. No one
suspected that Greg's determination camouflaged working-class desperation.

When Stew's success in Pittsburgh caused him to be hired to invigorate the news operation at FBS's Los Angeles station, he asked Greg to come along as senior producer. That was seven months earlier. Greg was twenty-six.

"We still have to work up ways to enhance Harris's image," Stew said, fingering his beard and eyeing Greg thoughtfully. "It might become your headache. Trying to do two jobs, I'm not doing either well. I have three options: The first is going outside for an executive producer. The second is promoting Bosworth."

"You don't sound convinced."

Stew nodded. "Bosworth is okay at producing the late news since it's mostly stories from the six o'clock, but he doesn't exactly inspire faith as a creative thinker."

"You said it might become my headache. I hope I'm the third option."

Stew shrugged. "I'm considering it. You're young. I don't know whether you're too inexperienced . . . or whether you have . . ." His voice trailed off in thought.

"What?"

"There's a fine line between what will grab an audience and responsible journalism. I know you'll put together an entertaining broadcast—sexy story ideas, great visuals—but that's not the same as informing viewers about what's important to their lives."

"I think after all this time in news I understand the difference, Stew."

"Look, I'm not saying you have to be a fanatic, one of those types for whom news is some kind of a holy calling they'd die for. Put nine out of ten of those guys in charge of a broadcast and they
would
die

in the ratings.
So boring nobody would watch.
But you have to understand that with most people getting their news from us nowadays, we have a big responsibility, an obligation."

Greg knew that Stew liked to make a show of his dedication to journalism at a time when entertainment values in news production were being emphasized to attract viewers. But Greg also knew him to be a canny innovator who had
livened
the news presentation in Pittsburgh and again here in Los Angeles.

"If you're asking whether I have integrity," Greg replied, "I hope the answer is yes. If you're asking whether I'm interested in putting on a show people want to watch, the answer is also yes."

Stew's brow wrinkled with worry. "You said 'show,' not 'broadcast' or 'program.' "

"A slip of the tongue," Greg replied with a touch of embarrassment.

"One of those do-or-die news types would never have said 'show.' I wish I was as sure of your integrity as you are."

All afternoon word that News was working on a big story about the corruption trial spread around the station, although no one could learn what it might be.
As airtime approached people gathered in the back of the darkened control room as if driven to shelter by a tornado warning.
The director faced a wall of TV monitors, his assistant director on one side, and his technical director on the other.

At exactly six o'clock, graphics and music announced the early evening news, dissolving to a shot of anchorman Quinn Harris at the anchor desk.

He gazed sincerely into the cameras and began. "The corruption trial of city water commissioner Glenn R.
Meachum
ended with dramatic suddenness this morning when he pleaded guilty to a reduced charge. KFBS has obtained an exclusive interview. Our reporter, Christine
Paskins
, is here with the facts behind this startling turn of events."

Harris swung smoothly to Chris, seated at the end of the desk.

"Camera Three, go in on her," the director instructed a cameraman through his headset microphone.

"Ready sixteen," the technical director alerted a technician on another part of the floor who would be accessing the video from the network’s servers.

Without needing to be concerned now about continuity or timing, Greg could concentrate for the first time on the face of the young woman replicated on monitors across the control-room wall.
It was a fresh-scrubbed face, with the sort of American prettiness—a soft roundness below high cheekbones and straightforward, well-formed features—that brought cheerleaders a close-up between plays during college football games. The eyes, though, were special; a translucent blue, they projected authority with a directness that transfixed Greg and a likeability that evoked his trust. He remembered that he had glimpsed other qualities in them that morning: self-confidence, seasoned skepticism, and fierce pride. One could know her for years, he sensed, and never probe all there was behind them.

She's got it, he thought. Whatever you call it—magnetism, charisma, star quality, sex appeal—it comes right through the camera.

"Roll video," the director's voice sounded. The monitors displayed Chris's image at the entrance to the courthouse, and the story Greg had cut with her narration began to run.

After Harris shifted into the next story's intro, Greg slipped out of the control room to catch her.

"Was I okay?" she asked nervously.

"Terrific. Can I take you to dinner to celebrate?"

For a minute he was afraid she might misconstrue his welcome as a play for her. But her smile flashed with pleasure, and he relaxed.

A newcomer to the West Coast, Chris had never eaten Mexican food. Greg took her to his favorite Mexican restaurant. "They make the best margaritas," he told her, and ordered them. That was the sort of information he picked up automatically: the best steak house; the best tailor for the price; the best tailor regardless of price and thus to be noted for the future, when he could afford it; where to shop for shirts, for socks, for light fixtures, for low-priced used furniture.

A handsome and personable young man who had finally grown into his long skinniness, Greg had regular, somewhat sharply formed facial features, dark hair, and dark eyes. Instead of the casual, open-collar attire affected by nearly everyone working behind the television camera, especially in California, he made it a rule to wear well-cut suits, albeit with the jacket usually hung on the back of his chair and his shirt cuffs rolled carefully back. He dressed for his aspirations, not his circumstances, having early foreseen that higher-ups were more likely to promote him if he already looked the part.

Chris shrugged off her own jacket before they were two steps inside the restaurant, as if her on-camera garb was a costume to her, not clothing. She was taller than average, slender, and lithe. The right sort of body for a woman with her competitiveness, Greg thought.

During dinner they talked about the broadcast and how they might follow up with additional angles so as to keep this story KFBS's in the public's mind. She asked whether reporters at the station had regular beats or whether it was mostly general assignment.

It's been so confused the last month or two that whoever is closest to the door usually gets sent out on a story." Greg explained about the recent defections, many following the program’s executive producer who had gone over to another station. "So many people left last month, you'd think Payroll was sending out passports, not salary checks. We can use you."

He then asked her to fill him in on how she had gotten the scoop—events had been so rushed all day that this was their first chance to discuss it.

She had arrived at the newsroom around 6
a.m.
to get an early start. The overnight assignment editor informed her that she was covering the hearing. She read through the file, viewed video of the last several pieces the station had done on the trial, and then drove to the courthouse to see what she could learn. Male court workers had jumped all over each other to be helpful to the newcomer.

"They told me about the plea bargain and even what door they were going to sneak
Meachum
through," she recalled with a smile, "so I wouldn't mess up on my first day."

Her campaign to land a job in Los Angeles had begun months earlier, when she sent tape reels of her work to every L.A. station. During a quick trip in for interviews, Stew offered her a one-month tryout at KFBS. Deciding to gamble, she gave notice in Wichita and last night was back in L.A. with her belongings.