A Polaroid of Peggy

by Richard Phillips

  That seemed to perk Vince up. More like the old Legga.

  “Oh but we do, Andrew, we do. We put the call through to his agent last night – while Geoff’s on his knees with Mick Hudnutt – while you’ve fucked off who knows where – and Hattie says you could hear the fucking guy pissing himself all the way from New York.”

  Somehow that didn’t sound like the sort of thing that girls who went to Hattie’s school would say, but I didn’t pursue the point.

  “So, anyway,” said Geoff, picking up the reins. “Things really can’t go on like this.”

  The question hung heavy in the air. How would things go on?

  “Look mate,” said Vince, softening – apparently. “We know you’ve been under a hell of a strain lately.”

  “Divorce is never easy,” put in Geoff, “as I know only too well.”

  “So we think a bit of a rejig might be in order.”

  Now we were coming to it. And, as far as they were concerned, this is how it would be:

  First, I would become chairman of the company which wasn’t the promotion it might sound like, because we’d never had a chairman, never seen the need for one, thought it was a pointless, stuffy, needless title and had always taken the line that it would be much cooler and more modern and more shirt-sleevey, and would sound slightly more groovily collaborative if we made a point of not having a chairman.

  Second, I would take charge of overseeing our planned expansion into Europe. Planned? By whom? Nobody had ever mentioned it to me before.

  Third, and now we were down to the short strokes, I would relinquish the title of Executive Creative Director forthwith – while remaining a key creative role on some accounts, whatever the hell that meant – and Lucille would take over with immediate effect.

  My first thought was that they obviously hadn’t just been planning this since the meeting yesterday afternoon. My second was that if I wasn’t going to have the big creative job and that I was to be handed some meaningless title in its place, they’d soon – possibly already had – get round to the idea that my earnings should be commensurately reduced. With my massive maintenance expenses coming up, that did not sound like an attractive idea. My third thought, consistent, I think, with the first two, and which I spoke aloud, was, “Fuck you.”

  Perhaps, you will think, given the weakness of my general negotiating position, I should have been more diplomatic. They could, given there were two of them to one of me, simply outvote me on this and force the issue. And, thus far, I had not even touched upon my very pressing need to get some of my money out of the company, for which, of course, I needed their cooperation. So you might say I talked loudly and carried a small stick, which, I believe, is the opposite of what you are advised to do.

  “When I think of what I’ve done for you guys! Nobody had ever heard your fucking names before you got hold of me.”

  They looked at me and each gave me their take on the ‘yeah, well that was then, this is now’ look.

  I brushed down my trousers – no crumbs, force of habit, jeans actually, 501s – and stood, ready to leave the room.

  “Look, Andrew,” said Geoff, “this isn’t going to go away. And there’s another thing.”

  Another thing?

  “Hate to bring it up but you’re going to be fifty in a few weeks.”

  So. It wasn’t just about the meeting yesterday. Or even the last few months. Ageism was not yet a crime against humanity in 1999 or even a term anyone used but I, as ever, was in the vanguard of the trend.

  Geoff warmed to his theme.

  “Look it’s not being fifty per se that’s the problem, obviously.”

  Obviously.

  “But it marks a point doesn’t it?”

  “Well would you mind getting to it?”

  “The point is,” he continued, determinedly unruffled, “that we, BWD I mean, always need to look new and fresh. That’s what advertising is about, isn’t it? We’ve got to keep moving the business forward. You’ve got thirty per cent of it. You have a big interest in that.”

  “And Lucille, mate,” added Vince, “yeah, sure she had a few problems with Mick Hudnutt but who hasn’t? She’s got the right profile. New century coming up, mate, it’s a changing world. She’s young and she’s a woman.”

  “Yes, well, ‘shes’ very often are women,” I said, “and really, Legga, we all know your position on Lucille.”

  Cheap. But fair enough in the circumstances.

  “We want to do this in a civilised way,” said Geoff, having the final word. “So you can have a bit of time to think it through. If you don’t like the way we’ve put it, you’ve got two weeks to come up with a different version. Sorry, Andrew, but that’s it.”

  As he said, that was it. The fight went out of me. Not that it had been much of a fight – my pike to their nuclear warhead. All that was left to me was to try to make the best of things.

  I did have the presence of mind to realise that this was not the moment to discuss my need for the divorce money and to realise that I should wait and pick my moment. If I could force myself to be sufficiently charming I might be able to make them feel a little sentimental about the past ten years. Perhaps then, I could leverage a slightly better deal out of them.

  Out of those treacherous bastards? There was more chance of Jerry Seinfeld saying he’d do the job after all.

  *

  I sat in the Porsche, stuck on the Hammersmith flyover, not being soothed by something I couldn’t name oozing out of Classic FM. My first reaction on leaving Geoff’s office had been to call Donald McEwan to ask him if, by any chance, he could find time to see me. Being the thoroughly good egg he was, he’d said he could squeeze me in in an hour, and not feeling like sitting in the back of a cab twiddling my thumbs, I’d decided to drive myself. So now I was drumming my fingers on the steering wheel staring up the arse of a smoke belching artic from the Ukraine. Then the phone rang. And, just when you think things can’t get worse:

  “Hi, Mr Williams, Keith Lyons here. Mooneys. Um, look, drawn a bit of a blank I’m afraid. Heard from my colleagues in the States. Just not enough to go on.”

  “Oh. No luck with the school thing?”

  “Nah, no way – well, no legal way – of getting the info.”

  “NYU?”

  “And why me?’

  “Eh? Oh – no – NYU – New York University. She went there. I told you, remember?” (He obviously didn’t. Probably taken no notice in the first place.)

  “Sorry. Bad line. Didn’t catch you properly. Nah, same there. So, unless you’ve thought of something else …”

  It briefly crossed my mind that they might send a man to China to have a route around the Beijing hall of records but I just dispiritedly said, “No, nothing.”

  “Rightio then. I’ll send you the bill. We did actually go to four days so … with expenses … and VAT … that makes £2742 and two point … ah bollocks to all that … just call it two seven forty. If you could settle it within the fourteen days as per the terms of our contract.”

  How decent of him. A full two pounds taken off the bill. And thank you and goodbye. The artic hadn’t moved. The phone rang again.

  “Hello, Andrew? Harriet Braintree. Just spoken to your wife’s people. Not being very helpful I’m afraid. They’ll come down to the house plus a million and a quarter in cash but they won’t budge beyond that.”

  Like they always tell you – like I told you – the other side’s lot is always better than yours.

  “So, what do you think?”

  “Well, it’s still less than thirty-five per cent, and if we dig in, our bills …” – she meant her bills – “…are just going to, you know …” Yes, I did know. “So, I think, yup, let’s do it.”

  So, even more dispiritedly, I said yes. Then Colin came on the line. And you know what he wanted. (I cannot bring myse
lf to repeat the actual figures to you without bursting into tears.)

  The traffic in the lanes on either side of me started moving. Then a huge bloke appeared round the side of the artic, lumbered around to the back, opened a door, hauled his enormous backside inside and reappeared about a minute later carrying a sign which he clipped on to the back of the truck. He shut the door, turned to me and shrugged, then disappeared round the side again, leaving me with a clear view of a big red triangle. If your European Highway Code’s not up to speed, that meant, in any one of forty-seven official languages, that the Ukrainian artic had conked out.

  I checked my watch. I was now so late that even by my standards I was late. I called Donald, apologised – as ever, of course, not a murmur of criticism – and eventually found a slot in the passing traffic so I could pull out and eventually, when I reached the Hogarth roundabout, turned around and headed back. Oh, Donald did say one thing. He gently asked me if I could settle my bill which, I knew, was way overdue. By my soon-to-be ex-wife’s, by Harriet Braintree’s, and even by Keith Lyon’s standards, it was miniscule, but even so. There was only one thing for it: another session of ‘Seinfeld’, or more accurately, of Peggy/Elaine. (Jerry himself, I was beginning to have issues with again.) Back to the office and more of series seven.

  *

  Series seven, episode six is, as all ‘Seinfeld’ aficionados will know, seminal. Out of the one hundred and eighty episodes, all of which I have seen at least once – and at various Peggy/Elaine moments have stopped, fast backwarded, rerun, paused again, checked from screen to Polaroid for the particular signs of likeness that a certain camera angle in certain lighting will create, and then rerun again – it is possibly my all time favourite. Number two is ‘The Contest’, the story about masturbating, about which I have already waxed lyrical and which (American) TV Guide ranked number one on its list of ‘TV’s Top 100 Episodes of All Time’. Number three is the double header about ‘Schindler’s List’, the plot of which is just too complex to go into here, but, take it from me, is another masterpiece. And number one is series seven, episode six, ‘The Soup Nazi’.

  ‘The Soup Nazi’ is a story centred on a man who sells soup which is in such demand that he feels able to deal with customers who dare to question him in any way – by asking for instance, if they can have the free bread that the previous customer just got – by sending them away with a flea in their ear, and no soup. It is hard to imagine anyone behaving with such high handed arrogance in real life, except possibly the creative directors of advertising agencies – much like me. Realising that I might have been a Soup Nazi myself may have made me particularly fond of this episode. But the main reason it tops my list is something else, something only a handful of viewers, or possibly less, will have noticed, since the moment which I got so excited about is literally that, a moment, and it happens during the end credits.

  I first noticed it on the day I returned from not having been able to fight my way through the traffic to get to Donald McEwan’s. It was some time after one when I walked back into my office, and I immediately drew all available blinds – didn’t want Julia, Lucille or anyone else staring through the glass walls at me – and locked the door. Then I took out series seven and starting watching episode five, which is where I was up to. I may not even have given my full attention to episode five, as I was feeling so bloody sorry for myself. Not only was I beginning to realise how well founded Harriet’s advice to pay attention to my cloth cutting had been, but those one or two vestigial eternal optimist genes were being tested to destruction. The only tiny bit of flotsam I’d had to cling on to in my ocean of misery was the idea that I might somehow be able to track Peggy down, and now, following Keith Lyons depressing call, that too seemed to have drifted out of reach.

  And then I watched episode six, and they continued the gags into the title sequence as they always did in the later episodes. There was a little street scene running under the titles, not that the scene has anything to do with it. It was one of the titles themselves that caught my eye. For there, on screen, for about half the time it takes to blink, is a credit for the most minor of the minor characters. It says: man in soup kitchen – Miller Prince.

  The tiny piece of flotsam instantly floated back into my hand. Miller Prince – the Miller Prince. For surely, it must be he. I knew enough about the acting world to know there could be only one. If you are called Miller Prince and there is already a Miller Prince treading the boards, then you must, by union rules, call yourself something else. So this must have been him, and for once, the very thought of Miller Prince did not fill my throat with bile. Instead, as though I had been reintroduced to the twin brother stolen from our cot at birth, I felt a huge surge of goodwill towards him. For if Miller Prince had been in an episode of ‘Seinfeld’ made in 1995 – I checked the dates on the cover, and that’s when it was – then there was a good chance he was still at work – or trying to be – in 1999. And that meant that he would be a member of SAG – the Screen Actors Guild – and that there must be some way of tracing him. And Miller Prince had lived with Peggy Lee for two years had he not, so you never knew, he might, just might know what her real name was or have some other tiny clue as to where she might be.

  I reran ‘The Soup Nazi’ to try and work out what the 1995 Miller Prince looked like – out of shape, I hoped, and bald, not that there’s anything wrong with that – but there was no way of telling him from any other man in soup kitchen. Anyway, it mattered not. What I had to do was trace him. To get a number, to speak to him.

  “Julia,” I yelled. “I need you.”

  And I told Julia that I’d had a new idea for the non-chocolate chocolatey breakfast cereal and that I needed her to speak to our TV production department, and that I needed to trace a little known American actor called Miller Prince. By five that afternoon, they had the name and number of his agent in LA. The agent’s shocked tone of voice told me he was stupefied to receive a call enquiring after an actor who no-one had ever heard of, but he quickly recovered himself to tell me what an amazing talent Miller Prince was and how much sought after and all the usual bullshit. But after I had sat through that, and told him that I would need to speak to Miller personally before I could take the matter further, and refused to contemplate any alternative, he had finally relented, and said he would call Miller and ask if he was willing to give me his number. Twenty anxious minutes later and the agent called back.

  I took a deep breath and dialled Miller Prince.

  Chapter 20

  New York, 1979

  “I totally like you,” said Peggy, not, as you will recall, for the first time.

  We were squeezed onto the corner of a table in the same manically busy, deafening bar we’d been to on the day we’d first met in the elevator. Not the best place to have an important conversation, but looking back, it seems like an appropriate choice to have made.

  She said it, just after the waitress had brought us our drinks, in response to the question she had just posed herself.

  “Guess you’re wondering why I wanted to see you?”

  And when I nodded, she said that there were a couple of reasons, and I asked, as was expected in such an exchange, “Well what?”

  And she said, “Well, first…”

  And then she took a sip from her orange juice – she’d flatly refused anything alcoholic – before, once more, giving me the line which, on the day I die, will be engraved upon my heart. (Always assuming I have one – as yet unconfirmed.)

  The obvious thing at this point, you might think, would have been to enquire as to what the second reason might be. But I was so elated, so thrilled that the black clouds had just, totally unexpectedly, cleared and that the promised land had suddenly come into view, that I leaned across to kiss her and, in doing so, tipped her orange juice all over her.

  I looked around desperately for a napkin to wipe it off her tight floral dress – a strange choic
e, she usually wore her clothes looser – but, when I finally located one, she wouldn’t let me touch her, and it crossed my mind that that too was a bit odd, but then, when she took the napkin out of my hand and did it herself, I thought I was probably imagining it and put it out of my mind. In any event, my mind was already racing and full of the possibilities that Peggy’s return to my arms might present.

  “Well, I’ve got something to tell you,” I said.

  She looked up from wiping her dress, slightly alarmed.

  “Not like the other thing you told me, I hope.”

  “Er, no.” Somehow, in the euphoria of finding myself totally liked again, the girl with the green spiky hair had gone clean out of my mind. But now, she and all that she represented, was back. I knew there was no point in going on with the rest of what I had to say, unless I dealt with this.

  “Look, I am so sorry about all that. There was no excuse.”

  “Yeah, you said all that before.”

  “Yes, well, I meant it. Have you forgiven me?”

  “Forgiven you? No, I don’t think so. I haven’t forgotten it, so I don’t see how I could have forgiven you. Never understood how you could separate the two.”

  “Oh” I said, trying to get my head around all this. “But if you totally like—”

  “I guess I’ve decided not to think about it. Hoping we can just kind of move on. Might be a mistake, I don’t know, but in the circumstances—”

  I’d really stopped listening at the point when she said we were moving on. No, it wasn’t forgiveness, but neither was my stupidity to be held against me. Or, at least I was to be given a second chance, And as there was absolutely no danger of any repeat offence – I would confidently swear that on any future Lee-Williams’s life – I was very nearly, as good as, home-free. So having decided we’d put my infidelity to bed – so to speak – I carried on as though we’d never discussed it.

  “No,” I interrupted her, “this piece of news is nothing like that.”