Turn of the Century (39 page)

“No, Barry, I’ll tell you what that is: it’s
innovation
,” says Featherstone, angrier than George has ever seen him, angry in a way—a passionate, appealingly phony way—that seems perfectly calibrated to shut Stengel up. “That’s out-of-the-box thinking. That’s keeping it real. And that’s how we make this the New motherfucking Network for the New motherfucking Century.”

George and Emily exchange a glance. Their spokesman and savior is America’s oldest living wigger now performing the Act Three soliloquy from
Mr. Doggy Dogg Goes to Washington
.

“And Barry,” Featherstone goes on, “I want to make sure you get this straight. From the top.
Real Time
is, sure as shinola, a ten-foot tent pole in this company’s new broadcasting … new … what is it?”

“Paradigm?” Emily says.

“Our new broadcasting
paradigm
. New paradigms take a little courage, Barry, and a little faith. Listen, if Harold didn’t believe strongly in George’s ability to pull this off with integrity, none of us would be here. And we’re here with you as a courtesy, okay? Out of respect. For you and Jess and the journalistic dream.
Not
to give you an opportunity to be the Blah-blah Old Paradigm News Bummer Guy. Entertainment is Mose Broadcasting’s core competency. News is your core competency. But George is lucky enough to have entertainment
and
news as his core competencies. He’s broadband beta. You’re a sea creature, he’s an amphibian. You’re different species, but you both like water, okay? The four-one-one is: Don’t go zero-sum on me. We are not about set-tripping. Play nice, respect others, and everybody wins. You have to make a decision, Barry, a choice: are you down with the program, or not down?”

George has never heard such deeply felt and stirring gibberish.

“Timothy, as the president and editor-in-chief of MBC News, I’m in charge of maintaining the whole network’s nonfiction standards and practices. And I think I have an obligation—”

“
Real Time
is a go project. Period. Okay? The light is
green
. You don’t have to work with George and Emily—”

“No,” Emily says.

“—but working against them is a no way José. Big time.
Capice?
”

No one says a thing. Jess Burnham shifts her weight in her chair, leaning away from Stengel, turning herself into a bystander.

“Barry,” George says, feeling suddenly magnanimous, “we’re only going to share your
facilities
.”

“
Not
the news
brand
,” Saddler says.

“We’re not taking any of your
air
away,” Featherstone says.

“Or any of your on-air people or producers,” adds George.

“My people? My people? I’m about to be downsized by seventy-eight people, thanks to you. Thanks to your brilliant wife. Who says our online news video is like a bunch of parrots squawking. Is that what you think too, Mactier?”

Not exactly—what George thinks, what he has been saying for years now, is that not just MBC but all video online is like a talking parrot, or as he says in certain situations, like Dr. Johnson’s female preacher—a novelty, amazing but not compelling. So Mose
is
dissolving MBCNews.com, as Lizzie suggested. George suffers one of those complicated moments when fresh emotions (curiosity, satisfaction, a kind of emasculated dismay) are at odds with one another and with the expression (triumphant pseudo-empathy) still frozen on his face.

“Barry, Barry,
Barry
,” Featherstone says. “We’ve been through that. You know we’re just trying to put all our wood behind one arrow. And hey, most of those online folks are getting lifeboated over to
Finale
.”

“The new obitutainment show,” Saddler whispers in George and Emily’s direction.

“Yeah,” Stengel says to Featherstone, “last week you told me we’d be staffing up with entertainment-division people, this week it all comes out of my own hide. Thanks so much, Timothy.”

“I don’t remember saying that. If I did—”

“You sure did,” Stengel replies, taking the offensive. “You absolutely promised me staff from
Freaky Shit!
”

George remembers hearing Stengel declare, somewhere, that he would refuse to work with staff from
Freaky Shit!
“But Barry,” he says, “I thought you said you’d be a laughingstock if those infotainment banana-brains ever worked on one of your shows.”

Stengel, stopped in his tracks, looks at George. He’s actually breathing hard.

“Yeah,” Featherstone says. “Right. That’s right.”

George, with a flash of panic, realizes where he’d heard Stengel’s “banana brain” remark: eavesdropping from his cell phone in Minnesota. Fortunately, Stengel, cornered, tangled up in his own apoplectic dither, moves on.

“And Emily,” he says, red-faced, looking back and forth between Emily and Featherstone, “what about your involvement with Gore? How’s it going to look for one of the guy’s biggest fund-raisers and major advisers to be producing a quote-unquote ‘news’ program? How the hell are you going to be able to cover Gore?”

“ ‘Major adviser’ is really an exaggeration,” Emily starts, “and certainly, if there’s any question of—”

“Fuck Al Gore,” George says, pronouncing each word with gusto, shocking his partner. “Emily’s not going to be involved in shaping any of the news coverage. And we can’t
wait
to be tough on him.”

At the center of Emily’s forehead, where she had collagen from a human cadaver injected during Christmas vacation in order to smooth out her first deep furrows, the muscles tense and bulge.

“Or Bush Jr.,” he continues. “Or Dick Gephardt. Or Dick Holbrooke, or Dick Armey, or—”

“All the Dicks,” Jess Burnham says.

Featherstone laughs enthusiastically (real but sweetened), and accompanies himself on conference table with a quick two-handed drummer’s rim shot.

“Or Bill Gates,” George says, thinking of Lizzie’s and MBC’s involvements with Microsoft, “or Michael Eisner or Katharine Graham or Rupert Murdoch,” he continues, thinking of everybody’s former employers, preemptively and gleefully full-disclosing, letting a hundred conflicts of interest bloom. “Or Mike Milken.”

Saddler looks at Featherstone, who’s still enjoying George’s performance.

“Or even,” George adds with a small smile, “Ted Turner.”

Stengel’s previous job was at CNN. When he left for MBC, he took a half dozen senior producers and correspondents with him. Turner, asked about the raid by an
Access Hollywood
reporter a couple of days later at the premiere of Warner Bros.’
Batman 5, Superman 5, Earth 0
, used the opportunity to refer to Harold Mose as “the Ho Chi Minh of broadcasting.” When Turner’s wife yanked on his arm, he stutteringly
amended his dis. “What I mean is, uhhhh, Mr. Mose is the
Saddam Hussein
of broadcasting. The gentleman doesn’t play by the same rules we observe in the civilized world.”

Jess Burnham sits up and looks at George, then at Emily. “I don’t entirely understand how your show is going to function. And it may be a slippery slope,” she says, shrugging in Stengel’s direction. “But I’ve got a house in Aspen.” She grins again. “I’m afraid I kind of
like
slippery slopes.” She checks her watch and stands. “You guys are going to have a gas. Let’s go, Barry. Time to go hear about nonmilitary military aid to noncombatant combatants in Chiapas.”

On the way back to his office, Featherstone does the talking. He congratulates George (“You literally rocked the house, man!”), and asks Emily if Gore’s youngest daughter is interested in a TV career (“She was at some fund-raising gig the other night at the Mondrian—
born
spokesmodel”). As they reach the top floor, they see the blond receptionist squatting in Featherstone’s office, evidently explaining a digital device to someone sitting just out of sight. She gestures out the door toward them, smiling a little nervously. The man holding the gadget leans toward her and cranes his neck to look. It’s Harold Mose.

“Hello,
chief!
” Timothy says with sudden startling fervor, abandoning in mid-sentence his solemn, sotto voce description of a “proposed multiphase reengineering” of Bill Rossiter’s on-air hairstyle. It’s as if a bolus of time-released methamphetamine just reached his cerebral cortex.

Mose stands briskly. He is wearing a blue turtleneck darker than navy, plush gray trousers, and black suede loafers. He has no jacket. Harold Mose is the only man whose clothes George regularly envies. (“Two words,” Featherstone said last year when Mose was named to the International Best-Dressed List. “Bespoke vicuña.”) George seldom wears a tie, but today, as on any weekday that he wakes up feeling wobbly, he’s put on the full executive costume, overcompensating, dressing the part of responsible adult. But now, in his unpressed gray suit and stained tie (a fresh dollop of room-service raspberry yogurt camouflaged, more or less, by maroon paisleys), George feels both under- and overdressed.

“Faith was showing me how she’s able to track your every move with her GPS gadget here, Timothy.” He looks over at George and Emily. “Orwellian, isn’t it?”

“Motorola,” Featherstone says.

“Do not
ever
tell Gloria about this thing,” he says, tapping the screen. Gloria is Mrs. Mose. “She’d have me wired up in five minutes flat.” He winks, then turns and heads back into Featherstone’s office. It is a silent command, somewhere between rude and informal, that they are to follow him.

George is experiencing not just a Featherstonian wave of alertness, his own automatic teacher’s-pet eagerness to please, but a glint of something else, like contempt, or fear. Maybe it’s the hangover.

Mose leans against the front of Featherstone’s desk, half sitting, his feet touching the floor, arms crossed low over his belly, casual but definitely proprietary. Featherstone leans against his black steel chiropractic arch, also half sitting, mimicking Mose as best he can. George and Emily, thus driven toward the couch, exchange a look. The bodies in the room have suddenly assumed a bad-news fait accompli arrangement, as if Mom and Dad are about to tell the kids about the divorce.

“So, my friends, what do you think of our schemes?” Mose says. “Are you both aghast?”

Neither has any idea what he’s talking about, although each has a reliable generic answer to that question, no matter what the subject—
Yes
for Emily,
No, not really
for George. When Mose sees they’re both baffled, his default wry smile disappears and he shoots a look at Featherstone—a sharp, hard look.
Thwack!
George’s moment of pleasure is not malice, but rather the same kick of relief he feels whenever he watches the man (always a man) at the dinner party knock over the giant goblet of red wine. Nasty luck; thank God it wasn’t me.

“I was just about to explain the whole megillah to them. You mean ABS, yes?”

“Correct.”

Featherstone is still leaning casually against his exercise rack, but he has unfolded his arms. His bright eyes seem suddenly too bright, his tail not just bushy but painfully horripilated. “You know, George was a hero over there just now, and Emily too, but, Harold, our meeting with Barry and Jess got a little more …” He glances at George with a hey-buddy half grin. “…  complicated than we expected.”

Mose stares silently at Featherstone for another instant
—thwack!—
then turns to George and Emily. “
NARCS
, as you both know, is on its way to being a very profitable business for Mose Media,” he says.

A very profitable business!
What a fine, lustrous, grownup way to describe a cop show, George thinks, and Mose didn’t even mean to flatter.
George Mactier, profit center
.

He continues. “You’re familiar with the basic idea of securitization? Asset-backed securities?” Before they have time to say no, he starts explaining. “Essentially, any revenue-producing asset can be turned into a security, like a company’s stock or a bond. Well, my bankers and I have an idea that we can do the same thing with our library at the MBC. With shows like
NARCS
.”

“Like the Bowie Bonds, remember?” Featherstone says. “Backed by all the future royalties from David Bowie’s songs?”

George knows they’re getting the
Junior Scholastic
explanation, but even as he resents being patronized, he also knows he would be out of his depth if Mose and Featherstone were not talking down. Unlike sports, the minutiae of which he’s sure he could understand if he spent the time, certain areas of finance are to George like theoretical physics or musical composition—simply beyond his ability to comprehend. He has had Ben Gould explain puts and calls and short-selling over and over, for instance, but he still can’t keep it straight.

George realizes he’s been tuning out Featherstone’s even more rudimentary recapitulation of Mose’s explanation when he registers Emily’s skeptical, almost huffy tone.

“Meaning?” she is saying sharply to Featherstone.

“Meaning, my sweet M&M, that Mose Media Holdings and Well-Armed Productions need to snuggle even closer together in bed. You know? Grandfather in our affair before the marriage, so to speak. Make it kosher SEC-wise and all that Howdy Doody.”

“In other words,” George says, “you need our approval in order to securitize your half of
NARCS?
” He is proud of pulling
securitize
out of the hat. Twenty years as a journalist made George good at simulating authority—cutting to the chase, jumping to a conclusion, summing up glibly. Or is it a knack for glib summary and faked authority that made him a successful journalist?

“Correct,” Mose says. “Precisely.”

“Ah,” says Emily, the hedgehog to George’s fox. “I see.” She understands one big-business thing:
leverage
. George sees her relax and go a little wide-eyed, as if some stupendous dessert had magically appeared before her.

“I’m sure it’ll be no problem,” George says, “but we’ll have to talk to our lawyers.”

His first flash of fear and contempt for Mose has simmered already into a congenial clubby chumminess. As a journalist, the only leverage he ever wielded was a not-unfriendly few columns in a magazine, or a two-minute interview on TV—theoretically wielded, since in journalism, explicitly exercising quid pro quo leverage seemed ignoble. But this is business. The horse-trading and self-interest are undisguised and unembarrassed. Shall we open the cognac? Light up the Cohibas?