The Love Machine

by Jacqueline Susann

  Austin was alone in his massive office. He came to the point immediately. How would Robin like to be the Head of Network News? He would also want Robin to bring in ideas for expanding the news department, and form his own team to cover the conventions in the summer. Robin liked the idea very much. But “Head of Network News”? The title was enigmatic. Morgan White was President of Network News. Randolph Lester was Vice-President. What, Robin asked, did “Head of Network News” mean? Well, it meant fifty thousand a year, more than double his present salary. And, as Austin put it, in answer to his question about the title, “Let’s leave it this way for starters, shall we?”

  It was one hell of a start. And when Austin learned Robin still had another year to go with his lecture contract, he simply made two phone calls, one to the lecture agency, the other to his lawyer, instructing him to buy out Robin’s lecture contract. It had been as simple as that—simple and secretive. Robin was to stay away from IBC for a week. He was also to keep his mouth shut about the assignment. On the following Monday he was to come in and take over in the new job. Gregory Austin himself would handle the announcement his own way… .

  He poured his coffee and lit a fresh cigarette. The weak wintry sun streamed through the hotel windows. A week from today he would be reporting at IBC for the new job. He took a long drag of his cigarette. Some of his good mood filtered away with the smoke. He ground out the cigarette. It conjured up the image of the girl with the orange lipstick. What was her name? Peggy? Betsy? Neither name hit a spark of recognition. But her name ended like that: Billie? Mollie? Lillie? The hell with it! It wasn’t important. He sat back and pushed the coffee away. Once when he had come to New York for a weekend while he was still at Harvard, he had seen a show, Lady in the Dark. There was something about a girl hearing part of a tune—she could never get past the first few bars. The same thing occasionally happened to him. Only it wasn’t a tune, it was a memory, a vision … He could never quite see it, but he sensed it. It was like being on the verge of an important recollection, and it left him with a sense of musky warmth, of happiness ending in panic. It didn’t happen often, but it had happened last night, in one fast flash—no, twice! The first time had been when the girl had slipped into bed with him. The feel of her body, vibrant and soft—her breasts were magnificent. He didn’t usually pay much attention to breasts—there was something childish to him about sucking a full breast. Why did men think of it as a sex act? It was a longing for Mama. There was something weak about a man who wanted to lay his head against a woman with big breasts. Robin dug blondes, clean and bright, slim and hard. There was a symmetry to their bodies that he found exciting.

  But the girl last night had been a brunette, with beautiful full breasts. Oddly enough he had found himself excited. It was coming back to him now. He had shouted something when he hit the climax. But what was it? He never shouted ordinarily, not with Amanda, or any girl he stayed with. Yet he knew he had shouted something, just as he knew there had been other times when he had shouted and could not remember his words afterwards.

  He lit a fresh cigarette and intentionally turned his thoughts to the new future that awaited him. This was a time for celebration. He had an entire week off.

  He picked up the Philadelphia paper that had arrived with his breakfast. On page three he saw his picture with the man who had been honored, a balding corpulent judge. The caption read: ROBIN STONE, PULITZER PRIZE-WINNING NEWSMAN, TELEVISION PERSONALITY AND LECTURER, CAME TO PHILADELPHIA TO SPEAK AND HONOR JUDGE GARRISON B. OAKES, 1960 MAN OF THE YEAR.

  He poured himself some fresh coffee and grinned. Sure he had come to honor the judge, a man he had never heard of. He had come because they paid Universal Lecture Agency five hundred bucks.

  He sipped his coffee, cheerful in the knowledge that he would never have to lecture again. It had sounded so easy in the beginning. He had been doing the local IBC news for about a year when Clyde Watson, head of the Universal Lecture Agency, sent for him. The agency occupied an entire floor in a new building on Lexington Avenue. And Clyde Watson, sitting behind the massive walnut desk, looked like a trusted stockbroker. Everything was designed to put the victim at ease, even the paternal smile. “Mr. Stone, why should a Pulitzer Prize-winning columnist wind up doing a local news show?”

  “Because I quit the Northern Press Association.”

  “Why did you quit? Because you had no New York outlet?”

  “No. Not being in a New York paper didn’t bother me. That’s just good for free tickets to theaters and free tabs at restaurants. That’s not my scene. I’m a writer. At least I think I am. But NPA allowed every editor in every small town to hack my column to bits. Sometimes they only ran three lines. Three lines of a column that had taken me six hours to write. Writing doesn’t come easy to me. I sweat over it. And for some guy to toss six hours of my life into a wastebasket—” Robin shook his head as if he felt actual pain. “At least at IBC I’m able to be a news analyst and there’s no editing. I’ve got complete freedom—just the usual station disclaimer at the end.”

  This time Watson’s smile was accompanied by an approving nod. Then a sympathetic sigh. “But it doesn’t pay well.”

  “Enough to live on. My needs are simple. A hotel room. Enough paper for my typewriter,” this time Robin grinned like a small boy, “and I steal all the paper and carbon from IBC.”

  “Writing the great book?”

  “Isn’t everyone?”

  “When do you get the time?”

  “Weekends, sometimes at night.”

  Now there wasn’t any smile on Watson’s face. He was going in for the kill. “Isn’t it difficult doing it piecemeal? How can you keep the flow going? Shouldn’t a writer be able to take a year off and give his book total concentration?”

  Robin lit a cigarette. His eyes met Clyde Watson’s with merely a slight show of curiosity. Watson leaned closer. “Universal Lectures could book you on weekends. I’m sure we could ask for five hundred—maybe even work it up to seven fifty.”

  “Doing what?”

  “You pick a subject. I’ve read your columns.” Watson held up a file to prove his point. “You could talk about amusing incidents that occurred when you were a correspondent. Mix it with anything timely. Play it serious. Play it light. I can promise you a lot of work.”

  “Why would anyone come to see me?”

  “Look in the mirror, Mr. Stone. Women’s clubs book the guest artists. They’ve had it with the bald-headed professors or comedians without sex appeal. You’d bring some glamour into their lives. A war correspondent, a Pulitzer Prize-winner—you’d be in big demand at dinners and colleges.”

  “And when would this leave me time to write my book?”

  “Shelve it for now. Forget it. At the rate you’re going it will take years. But two years of lectures and you can save enough to take a year off. Go away somewhere. Then, who knows—maybe another Pulitzer Prize, for the book? You don’t want to be a local newscaster all your life, do you?”

  It had sounded great. Even with the thirty-five percent the agency would take out of his fee for booking the lectures. He signed eagerly. His first lecture was in Houston. Five hundred dollars. One seventy-five back to the agency. That left three twenty-five. Then he read the small print: he had to pay his fare and hotel room. On that first lecture he had cleared thirty-three dollars. When he tried to break his contract, Watson merely smiled blandly. Sure he could break it—if he paid it off. That had been a year ago: a year of traveling tourist in planes, sandwiching his six-foot-three-inch frame into a narrow little seat, all-night flights with fat women and crying babies as seat companions. And the terrible motels, except for a rare case like Philadelphia, when a good hotel suite was included in the deal.

  Robin stared at the suite. It was a proper setting for his farewell performance. Thank God it was over: no more tourist planes, no more mingling with the guests … He could forget about the speech—the speech that had gotten so pat he could deliver it stoned. The laughs al
ways came in the same place, the applause was always the same. In the end, even the towns looked the same. There was always the good-looking, toothy Junior League girl on the welcoming committee to greet him, eager to discuss Bellow and Mailer and the state of the arts. And after the first martini he knew she was going to wind up in the kip with him.

  Well, he had humped his way across forty-six states. Now he was “Head of Network News.”

  With the first lecture money he had taken an apartment. Nothing fancy but it was better than his hotel room. But he never had a chance to spend any time in it. There was the new desk, the big stack of yellow paper, carbons, even a new electric typewriter to replace his tinny portable. But the job at IBC took up his days, booze and broads took care of the nights, the weekends were spent traveling. Well, that was over now. He’d do a hell of a job at IBC, save every damn cent. And he’d write that book.

  Sometimes Robin wondered about his writing. Did he really have it? The Pulitzer Prize didn’t prove anything. Journalism didn’t mean you had a book in you. And it was a book he wanted to do. He’d show the effect of war on men in politics—the resurgence of Churchill, the emergence of generals as politicians, Eisenhower—de Gaulle… . After that, he wanted to write a political novel. But most of all he wanted to see his book become a reality, see the yellow paper transformed into text.

  Material things meant little to him. When he saw Amanda purr as she showed him a new pair of shoes, he sometimes wondered about his own lack of interest in possessions. Perhaps it was because he had always had them, at any rate until his father had died, leaving the interest on a four-million estate to Kitty. Upon her death the principal of the estate would be divided between his sister Lisa and himself. Meanwhile on $12,000 a month, the glorious Kitty was having a ball. Funny how he always thought of his mother that way: “the glorious Kitty.” She was beautiful, small and blond—hell, she might have red hair by now. Two years ago, when she left for Rome, she was what he called a “plaid” blonde. Kitty said it was frosted. He grinned at the memory. For a fifty-nine-year-old broad she looked pretty good.

  His life had been good as a kid—it had even been good through college. The old man had lived long enough to give Lisa the biggest wedding in Boston history and now she was living in San Francisco, married to a crew-cut idiot who was one of the richest real estate men on the West Coast. She had two wonderful kids-God, he hadn’t seen them in five years. Lisa was … let’s see he had been seven when she was born—she must be thirty now, a mother, all settled. And he was still on the loose. Well, he liked it that way. Maybe it came from a crack his father had made. He had been about twelve and his father had taken him out on his first round of golf.

  “Approach the game as if it was a subject at school, like algebra—something you must master. You’ve got to be good in the game, son. Many a business deal is consummated on a golf course.”

  “Does everything you learn have to help toward making money?” Robin had asked.

  “It sure does, if you want a wife and family,” his father answered. “When I was a kid I dreamed of being Clarence Darrow. But then I fell in love with your mother and settled for corporate law. I can’t kick. I’ve become a very rich man.”

  “But you loved criminal law, Dad.”

  “Once you have a family you can’t do just what you want. They become your primary responsibility.”

  Robin learned to play golf. He had a seven handicap when he graduated from Harvard. He had wanted to take a liberal arts course, then major in journalism. His father had been against it, just as he had been furious when he caught Robin reading Tolstoy and Nietzsche.

  “That’s not going to help you with law,” he said.

  “I don’t want to be a lawyer.”

  Robin’s father stared at him and left the room. The next day Kitty gently explained how he owed it to his father to make him proud. Jesus, it sometimes seemed the only word he heard was “owe.” He owed it to his father to play football—it was a good image for a lawyer. So he broke every bone in his body to become the best quarterback Harvard had that season. When he graduated in 1944, he might have gone into corporate law but he was twenty-one and there was a war on, so he enlisted in the Air Corps, promising to return and complete law school. But it hadn’t happened that way. He saw a lot of action, got his captain’s bars and landed on page two of the Boston papers when he was hit in the shoulder—at least that made the old man proud of him! It was a minor wound but it aggravated an old football injury and Robin had to remain in a hospital overseas. To ease the monotony he wrote about life in the hospital and the experiences of the other soldiers. He sent his copy to a friend who was with the Northern Press Association. They ran it, and his career as a journalist began.

  When the war was over, he joined NPA as a full-time correspondent. Of course he got the usual arguments from both Kitty and his father. He owed it to his father to study law. Fortunately, Lisa had met Crew Cut and the entire household was spinning with the preparations for her wedding. Five days later, the old man dropped dead while playing squash. Well, that’s the way he would have liked it, Robin thought. Dying with all his muscles intact and all his obligations to his family paid off.

  Robin stood up and pushed the room-service table away. He was on his own, and he didn’t owe anyone in the world a goddam thing. And he was determined to keep it that way.

  He went into the bathroom and turned on the shower. The water sprayed hard and cold, knocking the last vestige of vodka from his brain. God, he had missed his Monday workout at the gym. And he had forgotten to call Jerry in New York and cancel the date. He grinned. Poor Jerry—he had probably gone to the gym alone. And Jerry hated the gym; he only went because Robin forced him to go. Oddly enough, Jerry didn’t seem to mind being flabby at thirty-six.

  Robin began to hum. He would call Jerry and Amanda as soon as he got into New York. They’d meet at the Lancer Bar and celebrate. But he wouldn’t tell them what they were celebrating—Gregory Austin had said he wanted to handle the announcement himself.

  He began lathering the shaving cream on his face. God, he thought, I’d give anything to know just what’s happening at IBC this morning.

  THREE

  To EVERYONE AT IBC it began as an ordinary Monday morning. The “numbers” (as the weekly Nielsen ratings were called) were placed on every executive’s desk. The first sign of disturbance came at ten o’clock. It was triggered by a simple message: “Gregory Austin would like to see Danton Miller in his office at ten thirty.”

  The message was transmitted from Mr. Austin’s private secretary to Susie Morgan, Danton Miller’s private secretary. Susie scribbled it on a pad and placed it on Mr. Miller’s desk alongside of the Nielsen ratings. Then she headed for the Powder Room. She passed the secretaries in the “bullpen.” They were immersed in their work; their typewriters had been clacking away since nine thirty. But the “Upper Echelon” (the VIPs’ personal secretaries) arrived at ten, with dark glasses and no makeup. They checked in, letting their bosses know they had arrived, then dashed to the Powder Room. Twenty minutes later they emerged, looking like fashion models. One of the more progressive secretaries had even installed a large magnifying mirror.

  The Powder Room was crowded when Susie arrived. As she spat into her mascara, she casually dropped her contribution to the gossip session. Gregory Austin had sent for Danton Miller! The first girl who left the Powder Room passed Susie’s tidbit to a friend who worked in the legal department. In less than six minutes the news had traveled all through the building.

  Ethel Evans was typing a release when the news hit the publicity department. She was so anxious to see Susie and get all the details that she didn’t wait for the elevator. She ran down four flights and was breathless when she burst into the sixteenth-floor Powder Room. Susie was alone, adding a final dab of lip gloss, when Ethel found her.

  “I hear your boss is getting his walking papers,” she said.

  Susie finished her lips. She picked up a comb
and teased her bangs, conscious that Ethel was waiting for an answer. She hoped her voice contained the proper tone of boredom when she finally said, “Isn’t that the usual Monday morning rumor?”

  Ethel’s eyes narrowed. “This time I hear it’s on the level. Gregory has his weekly meeting with the heads of departments on Thursdays. To send for Dan on a Monday morning—well, everyone knows that has to mean the ax.”

  Susie suddenly felt concern. “Is that what they say upstairs?”

  Ethel felt happier. She had gotten a reaction. She leaned against the wall and lit a cigarette. “It certainly figures. Have you gotten a load of the numbers?”

  Susie back-combed her hair. Her hair didn’t need it and she hated Ethel Evans. But if Danton Miller went, then her job went! She had to know if there was anything in the air. She knew Dan-ton’s job depended on the rise and fall of the numbers. It had never occurred to her that Gregory Austin’s summons could be ominous. In the Powder Room she had imparted the news as further proof of Dan’s importance. Now suddenly she felt panic. But she had to regain her poise—Ethel Evans was just a girl who worked in public relations. She was Danton Miller’s private secretary! Her voice was calm when she answered. “Yes, Ethel, I’ve seen the numbers. But the ratings of network News are hardest hit. Morgan White is President of News. He should be the man to worry. Not Danton Miller.”

  Ethel laughed. “Morgan White is related to the Austins. Nothing can hurt him. Your boyfriend is the one who’s in trouble.”

  Susie colored slightly. It was true she dated Dan, but their relationship was confined to an occasional dinner at “21” or the opening of a Broadway show. Secretly she hoped something would come of it, but so far all he had done was give her a light kiss on the brow when he left her at her door. But she knew she was assumed to be “his girl.” They had even been coupled together in a Broadway column. She loved the prestige it gave her among the other secretaries.