Turn of the Century (6 page)

In fact, everyone in Verve, South Dakota, his grandparents’ hometown, could fit on one floor of any one of these buildings. And although by reputation New York is smelly, midtown doesn’t have much of a scent. All of George’s favorite places possess a special, ripe stench: the warm, fulsome reek of dehydrating alfalfa in Verve; tobacco smoke and diesel fuel in Paris; the herbal-cream-rinse breezes of the Hollywood Hills; the animal rot of old Manhattan (fish entrails on South Street and beef fat on Washington Street at dawn, human urine everywhere in August).

Out on the 20th Century Fox lot in Century City or even the Microsoft campuses in Redmond, one is aware, thrillingly and disconcertingly, of being on the reservation, an inhabitant of a particular dreamed-up place somewhere between Toontown and Alphaville. Infotainment Zone, however, to George’s regret, is mostly an abstraction. Midtown: so much power, so little fun.

But then, for the first time ever—passing Forty-fifth Street, Forty-fourth Street, the Gershwin Theatre, Viacom, the
Times
, the new Reuters and Condé Nast towers—George thinks: Infotainment Zone is actual at last. It’s as if the neighborhood has just achieved full self-consciousness. The renovation of the Viacom headquarters was the tipping point. At the end of last year the building was entirely reclad in a new type of quarter-inch-thick video-screen polymer that can be programmed to display hundreds of different moving pictures or—what George and Lizzie and the kids adore—a single continuous image bending and wrapping around the whole building, a kinetic cubist wonder of the world. Sometimes Viacom’s “image administrators” display a single phrase on the tower, such as a sideways fifty-three-story-tall
SOUTH PARK ON ICE
AT MADISON SQUARE GARDEN DOESN’T SUCK, with SUCK exploding into animated ice chips, or YOU WILL NOT BELIEVE THE NEW MTV, with BELIEVE morphing at high speed into dozens of different musicians’ eyes. At this moment, the building is covered by a moving image of Howard Stern, five hundred feet tall, walking in place against an impossibly meteoric Manhattan night sky, his head stretching from the forty-fourth to the fifty-third floors, his hair hanging down to the thirty-ninth, his boot tips almost touching the sidewalk. It’s only a billboard, a monstrosity, genius technical means applied to squalid, stupid ends; yeah, right, sure. But it is also quite beautiful. It is awesome the way new train stations and skyscrapers were a century ago.

Where has all the porno gone?
George wonders. Gone to online, every one, he figures. He had always enjoyed Times Square’s cluster of pornography shops and live-nude-junkie nickelodeons. The Giuliani law limiting smut stores to one every two blocks is antithetical to the deepest commercial traditions of New York, of course. The city has always been about specialization run rampant, cuckoo geographical over-concentration—not just the flower and fur and theater districts but the electrical-pump district, the coffee-machine district, the feathers-and-velvet-trim district. Suddenly the pornography district is no more.
George sees there’s a Steve Buscemi film festival playing this weekend at one of the old porno theaters.

He walks east on the downtown side of Forty-second, looking across the street and up, casually searching for the drone video cameras his friend Zip Ingram told him are up there somewhere, aimed down at Bryant Park and feeding the images twenty-four hours a day to web sites—yet one more amusingly profitless, vaguely Dada internet project. He sees one of the new postmodern brushed-steel Bell Atlantic kiosks and notices that displayed in its glass sides are giant black-and-white photos from the 1950s of earnest, crew-cut, gray-flannel white men talking on the phone and looking silly—the telephone company thereby satirizing what was until the day before yesterday its very ethos. Past Grand Central, where midtown gets tired—all postwar warp and woof—the lesser UN missions, the lesser media, the crummy simulations of crummy Irish bars, the immigrant coffee shops and boutiques too glossed-up to be interesting yet not actually classy. He is in the forgettable Manhattan of his first years as a New Yorker, his time as a reporter for the
Daily News
. When he phoned his mother after he decided to drop out of Columbia architecture school, to tell her about his job, she was not effusive. “It’s one of those … 
vertical
newspapers, is it, that you’ll be writing for?” she said. Edith Hope Cranston Mactier, whom everyone called Edith Hope, wouldn’t use the word
tabloid
, which in 1978 she thought was somehow vulgar, just as she wouldn’t use the word
stink
.

Zigzagging uptown again, west on Forty-fifth, north up Madison, George looks up at the old
Newsweek
building—3:03, the Microsoft/Time Out New York/New York digital clock on top says; he should get back to the office—and experiences a moment of eighties nostalgia. The magazine was his second employer. (“
Newsweek
?” his mother said when he called to tell her he was leaving the
Daily News
. “That’s the one that imitates
Time
, is it?”) In his twenties, in the 1980s,
Newsweek
seemed glamorous—the year in Bonn at the twilight of the Cold War, Gary Hart up for coffee, the hipsters snorting lines of coke off art-department light boxes, a day trip to Washington to chat with Ronald Reagan about the ivy plant on his Oval Office mantelpiece, chauffeured Town Cars caravanning from Madison Avenue out the Long Island Expressway at four A.M. on summer Saturday mornings at $160 a commute. To a twenty-six-year-old, the expense account itself was a druglike thrill.

George produced one very fine piece of work at
Newsweek
. In 1984 he spent a month and a half driving a station wagon down the Pan-American Highway from Texas to Guatemala, then through El Salvador, Honduras, and Nicaragua to Panama. The magazine sent along a British photographer, Edward Ingram, a jittery son of a thief who called himself Zip, and their big cover package on the several ongoing civil wars won magazine awards and then, reconstituted as an eight-hour PBS documentary miniseries that George took a sabbatical to help produce, won Peabody and Polk awards. So George found himself a TV producer.
(“Television
, George?” his mother said, as if she thought he was joking about the new ABC News job. “So you’ll write the … 
scripts
those anchormen read?”) As it happens, he is now eating a Sabrett sausage bought from a vendor outside the old ABC tower on Sixth Avenue. Swallowing the hot dog too fast, tossing the mustardy napkin wad in the garbage, he fixes on his new building’s six-foot-tall letters, in platinum italics—
THE MBC
. Already the sign seems dated, a little vestigial. Almost everyone calls the network MBC, although it is still officially
The
MBC. Since England has the BBC and Canada has the CBC, why shouldn’t America have the MBC, the founder and chairman asked his first executive team. “Because Warner’s beat us to it with the WB,” the former president of his Entertainment Group told him.
And because Mose, unlike Britain, is not the name of a sovereign nation
, no one said.

George pulls the Discman earplugs out just before he takes that final jump-step into the revolving door, and thinks,
As we approach the New York headquarters of the Mose Broadcasting Company and Mose Media Holdings, we have come to the end of “George Mactier, Infotainer: A Walking Tour.” Thank you. Please return your audio devices
. And now he realizes for the first time, connecting the dots, that each successive job has taken him farther northwest. (Thus, extrapolating: Lincoln Center in 2003, New Jersey around 2008?) And he also realizes, thinking again without grief or anger of Edith Hope Cranston Mactier, born 1918, died 2000, that in his own career, ontogeny has absolutely recapitulated phylogeny—from newspapers to slick magazines to TV news to docudramatic entertainment, the whole media century compressed into his last twenty years.
Jesus
, George thinks, stepping off the thirty-eighth-floor elevator toward Daisy’s sweet, skeptical smile,
that is so pat
.

“Hey, buddy! What up!”
Timothy Featherstone has arrived. He walks straight into George’s office as if he owns it. Which he does, more or less, since the MBC owns half the assets of Well-Armed Productions, George and Emily’s company, and the
NARCS
offices are in the MBC Building, and Featherstone is the acting president of the Entertainment Group. “T minus …”—he checks and taps his gigantic platinum Rolex, which he has customized to receive alphanumeric pages—“…  one hour forty-seven, and counting. Are we ready to rock? Are we ready to roll?” His left hand springs up, a high-five receptor. George never liked any of the elaborate cool-cat handshakes in the sixties and seventies, and his timing at high fives is inevitably half a beat late. But what choice does he have? He slaps Featherstone’s hand. “Mac Man!” Featherstone says—sings, really, to the tune of the theme song of the old Batman TV show—as their palms make contact. Although the over-amped bonhomie is that of a big guy, Featherstone is small and almost prissy, with facial hair like Beverly Hills shrubbery, insubstantial but intensively manicured. Since the last time George saw him, just after the first of the year, his long sideburns and goatee have been replaced by a kind of Philippe Starck handlebar mustache, with swoops that are
slightly, deliberately asymmetrical. He’s wearing a brand-new charcoal-gray cashmere Nehru jacket so beautifully made that it almost doesn’t look foolish. George is never sure whether Featherstone is a dork or affecting a version of dorkiness-passing-for-hip. He just turned fifty.

“Hey, Timothy.” He punches the remote control to mute the Coleman Hawkins on his stereo. MSNBC, already muted, is on the TV. “How was the flight?”

“Not too shabby. I ran into your partner getting off the plane—
business
class! Frugality! Love that!
Love
it. Where
is
Emiliana?” Featherstone calls practically everyone by special nicknames, often several different special nicknames, particularly people who have no nicknames, who’ve never had a nickname. No one else calls George Mac or Mac Man, and no one calls Emily Emiliana.

“She’s in a meeting.” She’s napping on a couch in an editing bay. “She’ll be back by quarter of.” He plans to wake her up as soon as Featherstone leaves. “Do you want to talk before we meet with Mose?”

“A quick huddle never hurts. Why don’t you and Emmy Lou drift up to my place on Five-Nine at”—he exposes and taps the Rolex, its face as big as an Oreo cookie—“six-fifteen? Yeah? Groovy.” He finally turns to go. Is that a retro, semi-ironic “groovy,” or an earnest, unthinking, post-retro “groovy”? “Hey,” he says, inspecting George’s computer monitor, “where’s your camera? No videocam? Get digital, bro! Official MBC policy! V-mail is the coolest, man, completely mad. I just got one from Ng this morning. Even Harold’s started sending them.”

“Yeah, I should get hooked up.”

“Hey,” Featherstone says, reminded, “you know the conversation we had in Vegas with Sandi?”

“Sandy Flandy, from William Morris?” Flandy is a Hollywood agent who represents two of the stars of
NARCS
. (Everyone repeats his full name—
Sandy Flandy?
—with a smile and a question mark the first time they hear it. Saying Sandy Flandy’s name absolutely straight-faced, George realized last fall, is one tiny measure of show business insiderdom.) George has no memory of encountering Flandy in Las Vegas. George and Featherstone did spend an evening together there in January at NATPE, the annual convention of the National Association of Television Programming Executives. It was George’s second NATPE, and one of those rich, ghastly contemporary spectacles—cigar aficionados,
Scotch breath, extreme tans,
winking
—that are highly entertaining once, tolerable another time or two, pretty much unendurable thereafter.

“Nooooo,
Sandi
, my
friend
, Sandi Bemis, the therapist.” Now George remembers. After dinner in Las Vegas, he consented to go to the Hard Rock with Timothy and Sandi, a woman who looked like a fortyish Cameron Diaz, and whom Featherstone introduced—seriously? jokingly? both?—as “the aromatherapist to the stars.” George figured she was somewhere in that fuzzy Hollywood sector between executive girlfriend and call girl, particularly after he learned that she was the aromatherapist to the stars’ pets, pet aromatherapy seeming like a plausible exit strategy out of high-end prostitution—
Wow, Sandi, your Shalimar really seems to calm down the border collies
. George’s attempt at conversation consisted of asking if she knew Buddy Ramo, his stepdaughter’s father, who made his living therapeutically massaging horses around Malibu; she didn’t. At the Hard Rock, Featherstone ordered her a nine-dollar-a-bottle granite-filtered, sorghum-infused microbrew lager from Montana, because he thought it was more her style than his other possible choice, a Washington State ale—which, he had added, wasn’t “really a craft brew, since the company produces, I think, like,
twenty-five thousand
barrels a year.” In the old days, prostitutes were obliged only to pretend to enjoy sex; now they have to pretend to be impressed by beer connoisseurship.

“You know, the girl who looked like the young Michelle Pfeiffer … the one
you
,” Featherstone adds with a smirk, “copped a Miata for. Back in the day, Jo-Jo, back in the day.” Now George remembers why he recalled her as a version of whore: Featherstone asked him, literally with a nudge and a wink, to charge Sandi Bemis’s car rental and room at the Venetian to the
NARCS
T & E budget. At first George had thought he was kidding, some kind of Rat Pack revival joke. But he was serious, and George handed over the Well-Armed Productions corporate Amex card when asked a second time. George’s problem with being an accomplice wasn’t so much ethical as aesthetic. Putting the girlfriend on his expense account—in Las Vegas!—is the cheesiest act he’s committed during his first full-time year in show business. Featherstone’s show of male bonding, the dirty grin four inches from George’s face, the mingled scents of Stephen Sprouse pour Homme and Tic Tac, made it even worse.