The Inheritors (9 page)

It was commercial all right. That was the one thing I was sure of. As each program was carefully leaked to the advertising agencies on Madison Avenue, the interest mounted. Already we had more unofficial commitments for billings than we had ever had before in our history. All that remained to firm it up was to have the pilots ready in time for the buying season. And that began next month. February.

Sometime in those weeks, each network would publicly announce its schedule for the coming fall and begin the rat race after sales. From then through April, the pilots would be shown and the juggling would go on as each of the networks played chess with its programs, moving one to one day, then to the other, to counter the opposition moves. Usually Sinclair was the last to announce its schedules.

This time was going to be different. This time we would be first. I was going to announce our schedule at the end of January. By the time the others should be set, they would have to chase after us. We should be all sold out. I hoped.

If I proved out wrong, thirty million dollars would go down the drain. And so would I. The only job I could get after that would be back at Mr. Lefferts’s radio station in Rockport and I doubted if even he would want me.

Even the second double martini couldn’t loosen the tightness in my gut. It was gray morning by the time we landed in New York and I still hadn’t slept.

Jack Savitt was at the gate when I came off the plane. “We got trouble,” he said, even before we shook hands.

I looked at him. He didn’t have to tell me. It couldn’t be anything good that got him out of bed to be at the airport six o’clock of a Sunday morning. Inexplicably the tightness in my gut disappeared. Whatever it was would be in the open now.

It was two words. Dan Ritchie. I had made one bad mistake. I had left his team intact. I should have canned all of them that first day. Silently I vowed never to make that one again.

“When did it start?” I asked.

“Wednesday morning. After you left for the coast. Joe Doyle called and said to hold everything. All deals were to be finalized out of Dan Ritchie’s office.”

Joe Doyle was business affairs VP for the network. I had found him extremely capable and he was one of those I planned to keep. “Why didn’t you call me?” I asked.

“At first I thought you knew about it,” he answered. “I knew you were up to your ears and I thought you pulled Ritchie in to help you out. After all, he had the experience. It wasn’t until Friday that I managed to get him on the phone and get the scam.”

“What did he say?”

“He was using his holier-than-thou voice. He said the board of directors was very concerned over the financial commitments you were making and that they wanted everything held up until there was time to study them.”

“That’s a crock of shit!” I exploded. “The board does what Sinclair tells them.”

“I know it and you know it,” Jack said. “But what good does that do us when I have to firm up all the contracts for the shows or I blow them and my clients? He must have put a bug in Sinclair’s ear.”

I was silent. None of it made sense. Sinclair wouldn’t have let me go this far if he had intended to pull the rug. He had to know it would cost him a fortune to buy out of some of those commitments.

It was eight o’clock when I walked into my apartment and the phone was ringing. It was Winant. His voice was shaking with anger.

“I thought I was doing a job for you,” he said.

“You are,” I said. New York, Chicago, and Los Angeles were on in color last night.

“So how come I got fired Friday night?” Winant asked.

I couldn’t keep the surprise out of my voice. “What?”

“I got fired,” he repeated. “Dan Ritchie called and told me I was through. He said something about my having acted improperly. That I did not get approval for the color program. I told him that you had approved it. He said that wasn’t enough. That I had been with the company long enough to know that board of directors’ approval was necessary for every capital outlay.”

“Okay,” I said.

“Now what do I do?” he asked.

“Nothing. You report to your office tomorrow morning and do your work as usual. I’ll take care of it.”

I looked over at Jack as I put down the telephone. “You heard?”

He nodded, the worry deepening on his face. “What are you going to do?”

For an answer I picked up the phone again and got Fogarty on the wire. “Can you get your girls together and meet me in the office in an hour?”

“Of course,” she said in a matter-of-fact tone as if it were commonplace to come in on Sunday.

“Good.”

“Mr. Gaunt.” Her voice was excited.

“Yes?”

“I saw the Jana Reynolds show last night. She was wonderful. Congratulations. And the movie afterward with Clark Gable was fantastic.”

“Thank you,” I said. “I’ll see you in an hour.”

I took a hot shower and got into fresh clothes. When I came out, Jack was drinking coffee liberally laced with brandy.

“Try some,” he said. “Best thing in the world to get you moving in the morning.” He held out a cup.

I took a swallow and it went right down to my toes. I could feel the zing. He was right. “Come on,” I said.

“What’s the script?” he asked, following me out of the apartment into the elevator.

I grinned at him. “What is it they say is the only way to fight fire?”

CHAPTER ELEVEN

I took a pill and slept late on Monday morning. Deliberately, I didn’t get to the office until almost eleven o’clock. By that time all hell had broken loose.

Fogarty had an unexpected sense of humor. “The explosion had to reach eight on the Richter scale,” she said as she brought in my coffee and the messages. “Mr. Sinclair wants you to call him.”

I glanced out the windows. “It looks like snow,” I said.

She knew what I meant. “If he calls again I’ll tell him you couldn’t find the dogsled.”

“The Nielsens come in yet?” I asked.

“Any minute. I have the first ARI reports. They look good.”

They were on top of the stack of papers. I looked at them. They were more than good. If they were anywhere near correct we had stolen forty-four percent of the audience with the Jana Reynolds show, forty-one percent for the first hour of the movie, and thirty-eight percent for the second hour. It had to be something of a record. Sinclair had never bettered seventeen percent of any Saturday night hour.

I began to breathe a little easier. It wasn’t over yet, but it was improving. I was glad now I had made personal calls to the presidents of the four major advertising companies. It was soft sell but hard truths. It was late yesterday afternoon when I began the calls.

“I’m sending you an advance copy of our fall schedule,” I said. “You’re getting it twelve hours before the papers have it and twelve hours before the rest of the street. I’m making the same call to each of the other three biggest agencies and the same offer to each of them. I’m holding twelve and a half percent of primetime across the board per week at a ten percent discount from the rate list for each of you. This offer is good until four o’clock tomorrow afternoon, after that it’s straight rates. You study the schedule and I think you’ll agree with me that Sinclair is the money network for next fall.”

Each came back with the same question. “What makes you so sure?”

To each I gave the same answer. “Check your Nielsens on Monday. If we don’t sweep Saturday night you can forget my offer. If you don’t buy Sinclair big for next year, you’re going to find it tough to explain to your clients.”

The first call came before I finished studying the ARI reports. It was John Bartlett, president of Standard-Cassell, one of the four men I had telephoned. “Steve,” he said jovially, “I decided not to even wait for the Nielsens. I got faith.”

He sure had. And it probably came from the same reports that I had. “Thanks, John.”

“One thing,” he said. “I want first pick on programs.”

“You got it,” I said. “On any program you buy fifty percent or better.”

“That’s a holdup,” he said. “But I’ll take it if you can fit me in now on Jana Reynolds and the movie.”

“I can place you on Reynolds and first-hour movie beginning next month. Second-hour movie I can do now.”

“You have a deal,” he said.

“Thanks, John. I’ll have Gilligan call your man to firm it up.” I put down the telephone. My hands were shaking. I never had sold thirty million dollars of television time in one deal before.

The phone buzzed again. “Mr. Sinclair wants to see you,” Fogarty said dryly.

“Tell him I’m in a meeting,” I said. “And have Gilligan of sales up here right away.”

The phone buzzed almost before I put it down. “Mr. Sinclair hopes that you won’t be too busy to attend a special board of directors meeting at two thirty this afternoon.”

“Tell him I’ll be there,” I said. I reached across the desk and poured myself some more coffee. It was flat and lifeless. I hit the signal and Fogarty came in.

“See if that bottle of Hennessy’s X O is still behind the bar.”

The brandy helped. I could feel myself lifting. It was snowing. I walked over to the window and looked out. The big soft flakes floated gently down. Gilligan came in. “You wanted me, Steve?”

“Yes,” I said. “Come over here and look out.”

He came over to the window and stood beside me.

“Somewhere down there, the snow is falling on people,” I said. “And from up here we can’t even see them.”

He had a puzzled expression on his face.

“Did you ever think that someday, Bob, you’d be above the snow? Somewhere where you could see it falling below you and it couldn’t touch you?”

I looked at him. He didn’t know what I was talking about. But the man upstairs knew, Sinclair knew the snow could never fall on him. That’s why we were all kept on the floors below. Nothing could touch him. We fought and scratched and scrambled and when it was all over, he walked away arm and arm with whomever was the winner.

Fogarty came into the office. She was smiling as she gave me the flash report. I looked at it. We owned Saturday night. We were eight points ahead of the next nearest network on the Nielsen. I gave the report silently to Gilligan and went back to my desk.

Almost before I sat down the phones got hot. We didn’t get out to lunch. By the time I walked into the directors’ meeting, all the advertising agencies had bought their quotas.

***

I was a few minutes late and Dan Ritchie was already seated in the chair next to Sinclair that I usually occupied. The only vacant seat was at the foot of the table. I walked over to it and sat down.

“Sorry to be late, gentlemen,” I apologized. “But I’ve been jammed.”

“So we gathered,” Sinclair said, his face expressionless.

Dan Ritchie couldn’t wait. “Are you familiar with the press release in front of you?”

I looked down at it, then back at him. “I should be,” I answered. “I issued it.”

“You realize, of course, you issued it without authorization, not having cleared it with the board of directors?” His voice was dry and cold.

I looked at Sinclair. “My understanding with Mr. Sinclair was that as president of Sinclair Television I had complete autonomy and authority to run the network as I thought best.”

“But you did know that all your actions to date had been approved by the board?”

I nodded. “I knew that. And I had been given no indication that there had been any change in procedure. Since previous actions were approved post facto, I assumed the same would apply to anything I did.”

Ritchie was silent for a moment while he picked up some papers and went through them. I tried to read something into Sinclair, but his face was an impenetrable as a block of granite.

“I have here a cost breakdown on the schedule you so precipitously announced,” Ritchie said. “Do you realize it will involve an expenditure on our part of better than forty million dollars?”

I nodded.

“And added to that will be another eleven million dollars to convert the network to color?”

“That’s correct,” I said.

“Do you feel the expenditure of so much money is economically sound for our company?”

“Yes,” I said. “If I did not think so, I would not have committed the company.”

“Do you also think it a proper action on your part to announce the resignation of certain officers of the company without prior consultation with them?”

“Yes. I have had their resignations in my desk ever since I came here.”

“You did not have mine,” he said. “But you announced it nevertheless.”

“An oversight,” I said.

“What do you mean, an oversight?” He was angry now.

I looked at him and kept my voice down. “I’m sure that before this meeting is adjourned, I will have your resignation.”

His face began to flush, but I didn’t give him a chance. I looked around at the table.

“I know you’re busy, gentlemen, so I will be as brief as I can. The estimated billings for primetime in the current season is one hundred sixty million, of which thirty percent or forty-eight millions were advance sales. I have at this moment confirmed sales for fifty percent of next season’s primetime amounting to one hundred twenty millions against projected total sales of two hundred forty millions. I could bore you with a percentage of increase over last year but I won’t bother. The changes in programming initiated this last week by the movie and the Jana Reynolds show will increase the current year by a projected twenty-five million. So much for sales and programming.

“As for color, gentlemen, it is here and we may as well face it. If we waited five years when we would have to do it it would cost us better than fifty percent more than now. Meanwhile, we get an advantage of twenty percent increase in rates.”

I looked around the table. “The increased costs will only result in greater billings and profits. Concerning personnel, I believe I have eliminated none but supernumeraries whose value to the company has long since disappeared.”

They were all silent.

Sinclair spoke quietly. “The chair will entertain a motion for a vote of confidence in Mr. Gaunt and full ratification of his policies and schedule.”