Selling Out

by Dan Wakefield

  Instead of causing any friction between them, this whole experience had brought them’ closer together. While Perry was writing in the mornings Jane took the rented Subaru and drove around the sprawling, magical county of Los Angeles, out to the beach, up in the canyons, exploring and taking photographs. Back in the afternoon she’d lie around the pool and Perry would come down and discuss a scene with her, get her ideas for some perspective on the domestic drama he was creating. She was like a collaborator, in a way she had never been with his more serious literary work.

  How much more fun this was!

  They had exchanged stories of their own early marriages, their conflicts with in-laws, and out of this real experience Perry drew the anecdotes and dramatic dilemmas of his story.

  Every few days he had driven in to the studio to hash out the new pages with Archer Mellis, getting ideas about making the action more visual, the dialogue more pointed. What fun it was to share in the process of creation instead of just being locked up by yourself in your own room, your own mind!

  They took a dip before toweling off and going up to get dressed for lunch—and, incidentally, stopping by the desk to see if any message—if the message—had arrived.

  The pink slip was there, of course, waiting.

  To Perry’s surprise, however, it was not from Archer Mellis.

  To his even greater surprise, it was from Pru Vardeman.

  Perry and Jane were invited to the Vees’ for a poolside brunch on Sunday!

  That was the last day of their stay, the day they were going back to Vermont, but their flight didn’t leave till five in the afternoon, and they could stop off at the Vees’ on their way to the airport. It would be a kick to meet some of the stars who would surely be present at any event Vaughan and Pru put on, and besides, Perry would hate to admit back at Haviland that he hadn’t seen any more of his old buddy’s fabulous home than what everyone else saw in People magazine.

  It seemed kind of silly now to cut off the Vees just because Vaughan tried to feel up Jane during dinner at Spoleto. Besides, they could be powerful connections for the future if Perry wanted to take a fling at writing a movie.

  Jane agreed.

  “I don’t think Vaughan will try to feel me up in broad daylight,” she said. “Besides, brunch with the stars is the perfect end to our Hollywood adventure!”

  Perry felt a sudden apprehension.

  “Well, it’ll be perfect if the network says yes. I don’t exactly relish the thought of sitting around with the Vees and their celebrity friends, telling how my TV pilot didn’t get made.”

  Jane laughed.

  “Darling! Don’t you know it’s a sure thing now? Otherwise we’d have never been invited to the Vardemans’!”

  “Come on, you don’t mean to say you think they know the network decision before we do?”

  Jane grinned and put her arms around Perry’s neck.

  “I think they can smell it,” she whispered.

  Perry kissed her and started stepping her backward toward the bedroom, running his tongue in her mouth as they went, but before they got there the room phone rang.

  It was Archer Mellis.

  His voice was full, vibrant.

  “The network loves you,” he said.

  “They liked the script, huh?”

  Perry drew Jane to him, squeezing her waist as he spoke into the phone.

  “They like it so much,” Archer said, “they want you to write a second hour.”

  “What?”

  “They want ‘The First Year’ to be a two-hour TV movie that will kick off the series.”

  “Two hours? Archer, I’m going back to Vermont on Sunday.”

  “Can you be in my office in an hour?”

  “Sure—but Archer. What does all this mean?”

  “You’re hot, amigo.”

  Archer hung up before Perry could inquire further.

  Jane and Perry walked along the water’s edge, barefoot, the sand refreshingly moist between their toes. She’d discovered this place in her morning explorations while Perry was working, and thought it might be an ideal spot to talk, to think, to try to reach the right decision, together.

  The sweep of beach was spectacular, a wide tan swath of sand that stretched with spacious ease along the coast from Venice all the way up to Santa Monica. There were mountains in the lower distance where the land curved out again, and a limitless expanse of azure sky blending to an endless indigo sea, broken by white froth of surf and slice of sails. Spinnakers added bursts of bright colors, oranges and reds and diagonals of gold, giving an illusion of pirate ships or Arab barks, adding to the ambience of fairytale strangeness and mystery, heightened by the deep green flare of palms, the molten tropical colors blending along the horizon.

  This was not just a continent away but a world of distance and difference from the coasts they knew in Maine and Massachusetts.

  This was Xanadu as opposed to Plymouth Rock.

  Perry shivered, feeling a thrill of awe and excitement.

  “What planet are you on?” Jane asked.

  “Southern California,” he said.

  Jane took his hand in hers.

  “It is like another planet,” she said. “Or like being in a dream that you can’t explain to someone outside it.”

  “Do you like it, though?” he asked. “Being in the California dream?”

  “As long as I know I can wake up and go back home again.”

  “Of course. We’d go back in June, Archer says the whole two-hour movie will be filmed, produced, edited, finished by the end of May.”

  “That’s of course dependent on your writing the second hour in the next month.”

  “By the end of February, yes. Of course, it’s theoretically possible to go back home and write it, in between teaching.”

  “Darling, you’re a genius, but you’re not Superman, too.”

  “I could take a shot at it.”

  “But even if by some miracle you did it, you’d miss being on the set and seeing it produced, being on the inside of things.”

  “And even getting paid a little extra for doing it. And getting a consultant credit to boot. It really is kind of a once-in-a-lifetime opportunity.”

  “Even Dean Rackley can surely understand that.”

  “I doubt it. But good old Al will, of course. Thank God he’s department chairman.”

  “You could do a stint in summer school—and take a heavier load in the fall.”

  “Mmm. And if it does become a series I can really be strictly a consultant, watch it on the tube at home, talk to Archer on the phone, send in my notes and comments. Whatever.”

  “And we can fly out over Thanksgiving. Maybe come for the January break again.”

  Perry laughed.

  “We’ll be what they call ‘bi-coastal.’ If it all sounds good to you?”

  She squeezed his arm.

  “I’ve got a book idea—photographing the two coasts. I don’t mean big sweeps of mountains and beach, the usual stuff, but my kind of things—small, intimate, particular. I’ve been reading Rachel Carson—you know there are whole different types of life on this coast, even different varieties of seashells?”

  “It’s a fabulous idea.”

  Everything seemed to fit, for both of them.

  The money was hard to pass up, too. Perry would of course be giving up his teaching salary, but at $13,000 for a half year, or one semester, that was a pittance compared to what he’d be making from his television work. The pay for the original one-hour pilot was $26,000, and now with the increase to two hours, that had escalated-to $40,000. Even more amazing, the $20,000 for rights to the short story for the one-hour pilot would now double, bringing that to another $40,000! Evidently that was small potatoes in Hollywood terms, but for a guy who made $26,000 a year teaching, and was lucky to get a $5,000 advance for a book, it was a small fortune. And that wasn’t even counting series royalties of $2,000 per hour-episode if the show went forward as planned.

/>   Of course Paragon couldn’t continue footing the bill for his living expenses all through the spring, but paying that himself would provide a tax write-off for him, Archer explained. He’d be actually making money by spending it out here!

  “How can we lose?” Perry asked.

  “We can’t,” said Jane, “if we keep on loving each other.”

  They kissed and nestled into one another as they walked up the wet, voluptuous sand, in step. They began to sing together, softly, in harmony.

  The Vardemans’ pool looked too perfect to actually swim in. Breaking the smooth surface of the water would have seemed like an act of vandalism, or, at the very least, a gauche violation of etiquette. It did not really seem like a swimming pool but rather a gigantic gem, a rectangular topaz, stunningly set in elegant tile, surrounded by tall, stately trees within a larger framework of manicured hedges and lawns as smooth and shimmering as glass.

  It was like being on a movie set.

  Except there weren’t any stars.

  At least not today, not for the Sunday brunch to which Pru and Vaughan had finally invited their old buddy Perry and his wife. Though the Vees were famous for hosting the Hollywood “A List,” they must have reached back deep in the social alphabet for this occasion. Instead of Meryl, Glenn, Warren, or Joanne and Paul, the only other guests besides Perry and Jane were an expatriate English novelist and two lesbian librarians from Pacific Palisades.

  Perry thought perhaps the Vees had thoughtfully rounded up the Hollywood literary set in his honor, but then, if this were really the cream of that crowd, where the hell was Gore?

  “Of course we’re familiar with your books, Mr. Moss,” the librarian with the leather bracelets assured Perry politely, and her more demure companion said in fact she had read and admired a story of his in a recent O. Henry collection—something to do, she thought, with a rather naif young married couple?

  “I’m frightfully afraid I’m not familiar with your oeuvre,” said Cyril Heathrow, “but then I don’t keep up with you Yanks and your fiction.”

  “Are you only here on a visit?” asked Jane.

  “A rather extended one,” Heathrow said sardonically, as he crossed one jodhpurred leg over the other and lightly rubbed the leather of his riding boot. “Twenty some years now.”

  “I’m afraid I don’t know your work,” Perry said, beaming. “Are you published here?”

  Heathrow sighed.

  “I’m afraid most serious fiction doesn’t travel well across the Atlantic,” he said.

  “Cyril has been known to turn out a few sharp scripts between the heavy-duty stuff,” Vaughan said. “But I don’t think he’s done any television—that so, Cyril?”

  The Englishman winced.

  “One would have to purposely write down, wouldn’t one?”

  “I guess I’m fortunate,” Perry said. “The first thing the guy I’m working with told me was to forget about any preconceptions of television and do my best work. Fact is, Archer Mellis demands quality.”

  “He’s no wetback, huh?” said Vaughan.

  “I’ve never had the pleasure of working with a more creative mind,” Perry declared.

  “As long as it’s fun!” Pru said brightly.

  “Of course my academic friends are convinced I’m selling out,” Perry said.

  “Lordsies!” Pru exclaimed. “I haven’t heard that expression in eons.”

  “‘Selling out’?” Heathrow asked, furrowing his brows with interest. “Isn’t that peculiarly an Americanism?”

  “It’s pretty much a nineteen-fifties term,” Vaughan explained. “The sort of thing the Man in the Gray Flannel Suit got his migraines about.”

  “Some people still take it seriously,” Jane said. “At least out in the sticks, where we come from.”

  “Why not?” Pru said. “I think it’s charming. Freshen your Chardonnay?”

  She tilted up her straw garden-party hat and summoned the man of the live-in Mexican couple who had served the brunch and now hovered in attendance.

  Jane finished off her glass of wine in a single gulp.

  “Why, we’re so deep in the boonies,” she said with bright ferocity, “grown-ups even discuss things like values and morals.”

  Perry kicked her under the table. The cracked crab and avocado was elegant but not very filling, and he feared the mimosas followed by the Chardonnay might lead his wife to say some things she—or he, anyway—might regret.

  “Speaking of the boonies,” Perry said quickly, taking Jane’s hand, “we better get you to the airport or you’ll never get to Boston tonight, much less on to Vermont.”

  “She’s not leaving you out here alone, surely?” Pru asked with sudden concern.

  “She’s just going back to rent the house, pack up our lightweight clothes.”

  “Well,” Vaughan said with a leer, “don’t leave him too long out here with his casting couch.”

  “Oh, I trust him,” Jane said with a withering smile. “It’s another sort of quaint old fifties thing we share—being faithful.”

  “Hell, Pru and I have the same deal,” Vaughan said, “except we figure it’s null and void when we’re in different cities.”

  “It really was great to meet you all,” Perry said, guiding Jane firmly toward the house, and their departure. “We’ll be in touch!”

  “Don’t be strangers,” Pru called, “now that you know where we are!”

  Thank God by the time they got to the airport Perry and Jane were giggling instead of fighting. They had a whiskey sour before the flight and then embraced, kissed, holding each other so tight that when Perry let her go he really felt part of him was being torn away. By the time the plane taxied down the runway for takeoff he was already missing her, wondering how the hell he was going to make it by himself for a whole week.

  IV

  Perry scanned both Variety and the Hollywood Reporter over a late, leisurely breakfast Monday morning at the Hamburger Hamlet, and at first was disappointed not to find any screaming headlines announcing that his hour pilot was so terrific the network was doubling its length and launching the series with a two-hour TV movie! He figured, however, the network probably wanted to keep the plans for its hottest new property under wraps, so the rival webs (as the networks were called in the trades) wouldn’t frantically rush to start planning competitive shows about young married couples to try to compete with “The First Year’s the Hardest.”

  Perry smiled, enjoying the secret of his own success, which was too hot to even be reported yet and was unknown by all the other aspiring show business moguls who were poring over the trades that morning at the Hamburger Hamlet. Leaving a big tip and whistling as he walked out onto Sunset Boulevard, Perry decided to reward himself, and at the same time put his mentor on notice that he wasn’t any longer the square academic who was fresh off the plane from the East. He sauntered into one of the hip men’s clothing stores on Sunset Boulevard.

  Perry casually strolled into Archer’s office at noon wearing a magenta T-shirt emblazoned with a silver palm tree, and a pair of tight bright yellow beltless slacks, whose cuffless bottoms rode high over his shoetops, Michael Jackson—style, revealing quality argyles worn with old tennis sneakers.

  Mellis himself was clad in the sort of three-piece London suit he had worn in New York when Perry first met him, though this one seemed, if anything, more somber, like something Brides-head himself would have found too grim, except perhaps for his own funeral.

  Today, of all days, Archer was evidently taking him to some elegant Eastern-style restaurant to have lunch. Perhaps they were going to meet some top network executive, maybe even its president! Perry slunk down in a chair, crossing his arms over his silver palm tree.

  Archer in his ponderous elegance paced regally while speaking on the phone about some other pilot, one evidently involving a group of terrorists posing as Parisian prostitutes. He acknowledged Perry with a wave as if from a long distance, or from the deck of a departing ship. Hanging u
p the phone, he flipped open the sleek attaché case on his desk and began slipping scripts and papers into it. He hardly seemed to notice Perry’s presence in the room, much less his exotic new outfit.

  “Are we going somewhere?” Perry asked.

  “I’m off to Paris,” Archer said, snapping the clips of his attaché case shut. “Be back by the end of the week.”

  Perry jumped up, trembling.

  “I thought you wanted to get me started on the second hour immediately!”

  “Exactly. Ned Gurney will be here to take you to lunch in a few minutes.”

  “Who the hell is he?”

  “Ever hear of Spoons?”

  “You mean the Broadway play?”

  “Won a Tony, ran for four years. Ned produced it, and he’s been out here trying to get the movie off the ground, but it’s run into some snags.”

  “What’s that got to do with me?”

  “I heard he was willing to do some television if he found anything of quality. Of course he produced the Willa Cather for PBS, but I mean network. I gave him your script and he read it last night and loved it.”

  Before Perry could ask what all this meant, Archer had swung around the desk, and was shaking his hand.

  “Congratulations. Ned is coming aboard as executive producer. This adds real class to your project.”

  “Wait!” Perry called after Archer, who was striding to the door. “What if I can’t stand this guy? How can I work with him?”

  “The man’s a genius. He’s worked with the very best.”

  “What if I hate his guts?”

  Archer stopped just before he went out the door, and leveled his gaze at Perry.

  “Trust me,” he said.

  Then he was gone.

  To Paris. Leaving Perry to wait for this stranger who was now evidently in charge of his fate, his precious project, his sacred words. He felt as if he’d just been handed over to a new, unknown psychiatrist. Perry sighed and sat down, adjusting his tight new slacks that were riding up on his ass. Well, at least he wouldn’t look like some academic hick from the East, not in his bright yellow pants and purple T-shirt with the silver palm tree.