Alexandra Waring

by Laura Van Wormer

  “Minnesota,” Ms. Rendelhoffer repeated, making a notation on the list, wondering if she appeared to have been jaded and cynical since the tender age of six. “Okay, next is Judy Woodruff.” She looked up. “I assume we are to now discuss the merits of Georgia.”

  “She’s from Oklahoma,” Jackson said. “You’re thinking of her Governor Carter years.”

  “Oklahoma.” Ms. Rendelhoffer wrote this down.

  “But Deborah Norville’s from Georgia and she’s on the list,” Jackson said, “so which do we want to talk about?”

  “Let’s start with Woodruff,” Ms. Rendelhoffer suggested.

  “But wait,” Jackson said, snapping his fingers, “I almost forgot. Write down Sylvia Chase, will you? She’s out in San Francisco now but she’s from Minnesota too.”

  “Okay,” Ms. Rendelhoffer said, writing this down.

  “And I’ve got Jane Pauley there, right?” he said.

  “Yes,” she said. “And she’s…?”

  “Indiana,” he said.

  “Indiana,” she repeated, nodding, writing.

  “Indiana, right,” Jackson said, leaning forward to watch.

  “Now what is this?” Ms. Rendelhoffer suddenly said, sitting back and frowning at the list. “You’ve got written down, all in one entry, Brinkley-Brokaw-Cronkite-Gumbel-Moyers.”

  “North Carolina, South Dakota, Missouri, Louisiana, Oklahoma,” Jackson said. “I’m just trying to draw you a map. See, if we just draw a line connecting all of these states, then we’d have the area outlined that we should be looking in.”

  “Wait a minute, Mr. Darenbrook,” Ms. Rendelhoffer pleaded, covering her face. “I’ve never worked this way before,” she said from behind her hands, “I need a second to think about this.”

  “Sure thing,” Jackson said, sitting back in his chair again and folding his hands.

  After a moment Ms. Rendelhoffer lowered her hands. “Perhaps, Mr. Darenbrook,” she said quietly, pushing the list to the side and folding her hands, too, “in twenty words or less, you could just tell me what it is you are looking for.”

  “Twenty words or less,” he repeated.

  She nodded.

  He looked at the ceiling for a moment and then leaned forward, folding his arms and resting them on her desk. “I want an anchorwoman,” he said, “from somewhere out there, who can survive life here, so she can be loved everywhere, always.” And then he winked. “That was twenty words, Ms. Rendelhoffer.”

  MNA sent him no less than one hundred and twenty-six tapes to watch, but it was one of his own employees—Gordon Strenn, the producer in charge of their first miniseries—who led him to Alexandra. “Watch her reel and you’ll know if you want to meet her. Meet with her and you’ll know in a second if she’s what you want.” And so Jackson had watched her reel and he had wanted to meet her and, when he did, he knew in an instant he had found the star of DBS News. The young woman simply had it. Creeping crickets, Alexandra Waring was it.

  As she walked across the lobby of the Ritz-Carlton in Washington, D.C. that September afternoon, Jackson’s heart had quickened in recognition of that elusive quality called class, that glorious all-American kind of class that wrapped confidence in humility, energy in grace and good spirit in good manners.

  And she had been born and raised in Kansas.

  She looked different than she did on TV though. She was thinner in real life, which didn’t surprise Jackson, since TV cameras added about fifteen pounds on him too—or anyone. But he was a little surprised at how Alexandra “traded up” on camera, being one for whom the camera’s slight distortion came as a gift, bestowing her with a kind of soft, low-glowing beauty on screen that she did not possess on her own. Oh, Waring was a head-turner all right, but she was more striking than beautiful off camera, more angular than soft. (Well, he reconsidered, glancing down at the rest of her, soft enough in the right places.)

  “Mr. Darenbrook,” Alexandra had said that day, extending her hand and raising her face to look up at him.

  When she turned those eyes on him he stopped breathing for a second. Geez Louise but this girl had eyes.

  Alexandra’s smile expanded, giving what seemed like even greater intensity to her eyes.

  To die for, he thought, taking her hand and shaking it vigorously. “And Cosmopolitan says I’ve got a nice set of baby blues.”

  “They’re really not very blue,” she said.

  He stopped shaking her hand and simply held it, leaning to peer into her eyes. She was right. They were more gray than blue; the blue in her dress was performing this trick electric. “I’d like very much,” he said, resuming the enthusiastic shaking of her hand, “to write a letter of thanks to your mother and father anyway. ‘Dear Mr. and Mrs. Waring, thank you for giving your daughter the most beautiful eyes to be found north of the Mason-Dixon line.’ “

  A slight furrow appeared across her forehead, which was a reaction either to what Jackson had just said or to the fact that he would not let go of her hand—it wasn’t clear which.

  “My grammar school sweetheart, Mary Flo Potter, has the most beautiful eyes in the world,” he explained, now simply squeezing Alexandra’s hand. “She owns a gas station and weighs three hundred pounds but still has the most beautiful eyes in the world and most times I’m back in Hilleanderville I drive thirty miles out of my way just to see them.”

  Alexandra’s smile was still holding, but the furrow in her forehead had deepened.

  “Damn, but Strenn’s a lucky guy,” Jackson heard himself say next.

  Her mouth parted slightly in surprise. Then she averted her eyes and laughed a little, stepping back a moment to slide her hand out of his. Then she stepped forward again and looked him squarely in the eye. “Is it really any of your business if he’s lucky or not—where I’m concerned?”

  “Oh, hey, listen, Alexandra,” Jackson said quickly, “I’m sorry—I don’t know who that was that just said that. I don’t know what I’m saying—which is exactly what Mary Flo’s eyes did to me in grammar school. I don’t want to offend you—all I want to do, Ms. Waring, is prove to you that I’m worthy of your trust and loyalty.

  “Lunch?” he said in the next breath, offering his arm. By now his drawl was practically dragging in the front veranda. He knew he was acting like a jerk, but he couldn’t help it, and he wasn’t sure if he wanted to help it since this was the first time in years he had found himself in danger of becoming tongue-tied. Novelty was novelty.

  He held his arm a little higher. “Won’t you let me build you a network? Please?”

  He would never forget how Alexandra laughed at that moment. It was a wonderfully warm, gentle laugh, and instantly she had relaxed, slinging her arm through his and walking on with him to the Jockey Club.

  He wasn’t the least bit surprised at how scary-bright Alexandra turned out to be and how easily she grasped the principle of the DBS television network. “Part-time programming for independent stations around the country,” she said, helping Jackson to get it straight. And her eyes grew bright as Jackson tried to explain how DBS News would work. “We’ll use each station’s local newsroom as a bureau desk,” she said, helping him again. “We’ll do headlines on international news, and focus on a domestic news hour. We’ll use local news reporters but frame the coverage within a national outlook from our headquarters in New York.”

  Jackson then sent Dr. Kessler (Darenbrook Communications’ resident scientist, who, with his assistant scientists, had designed the technology behind the Darenbrook Broadcasting System) down to Washington one Saturday to have lunch with Alexandra and answer any questions she had about how the DBS News system would work. According to Dr. Kessler, Alexandra possessed a rather extraordinary knowledge of satellite communications technology.

  “How extraordinary?” Jackson asked him.

  “Vell,” Dr. Kessler said over the phone from Washington, “eef I vere to compare her to Mr. Peterson”—Mr. Peterson was Langley Peterson, the president of DBS—”he know
s nothink compared to vat dis girl knows.” After Jackson laughed, Dr. Kessler added, “She vants to know our transmeetting and receiving capabilities to and from fife geographic points around the vorld—includink Moscow! Now vat kind of questions are dese for a domestic news operation?”

  Jackson grinned. “The same we’ve been asking you, Herr Mad Doctor. She’s trying to figure out if we have the capacity to go global.”

  “Vell, vat shall I tell her?” Dr. Kessler said.

  “Everything she wants to know,” Jackson said. And then, “So what do you think of her? Think you and the Nerd Brigade could work with her?”

  Dr. Kessler chuckled. “VeIl,” he said, “eef she can get me on top of a horse, she vill probably get me to vork vith her.”

  “On top of a horse?” Jackson said. Dr. Kessler was about sixty-one, five foot three and close to a hundred seventy pounds. “Where the heck are you?”

  “Virginia, I tink. Ve vere talkink about horses and I vas saying how as a boy I had always vished to ride, but vith the vor—the next ting I know, I am here and Miss Varing is vaiting outside vith a horse.”

  The week after that (with Dr. Kessler safely back in New York and able to stand with his legs together), Jackson had a lengthy breakfast at dawn with Alexandra in Washington, during which she proceeded to draw a flow chart for Jackson to illustrate her point about how, if he were willing to restructure the chain of command of his proposed news division, DBS News could be in operation by the fall of 1988 instead of 1989.

  “This is a very interesting plan,” Jackson said to her. “And I see that it all rests on one thing.”

  Alexandra only smiled, pencil poised over the legal pad she had been sketching on.

  “It all rests on you,” Jackson said.

  “Yes, it does,” Alexandra said.

  And so, by the end of November, on the strength of a handshake, Darenbrook Communications had proceeded on a crash schedule at their new broadcast center in New York to ready themselves for the arrival of their anchorwoman—who would be free to sign on in early 1988, just as soon as her contract with The Network expired. As Jackson would say—laughing and shaking his head—leave it to Alexandra to become a national heroine in the meantime.

  The history of the corporation Alexandra was coming to work for was inseparable from the history of the Darenbrook family. The start of the empire had begun in 1926 when Jackson’s father, Elrod Bunkhauser Darenbrook (alias “Big El”), won, at age eighteen, a newspaper in a New Orleans poker game. While running his paper, Big El met and married the widow Biddens of Richmond, Virginia (Lillian), which added two more newspapers to his holdings. Big El also acquired a son in 1929, forever nicknamed Little El.

  During a wild party on a cruise ship returning from Europe, Lillian fell overboard and drowned. Big El then married (while on a bender, or so people said) a hat-check girl from a New York nightclub named Gigi. Big El took Gigi home to New Orleans, where in 1933 she produced twins, Norbert and Noreen. But when Big El’s debts began to curtail their lavish living style, Gigi ran away with his brother in 1935.

  When his divorce from Gigi was final, Big El then married the thirty-eight-year-old Miss Madeline Magee of Hilleanderville, Georgia, an heiress whose two newspapers he mortgaged to keep possession of his three, thus expanding the family holdings to a total of five. At Madeline’s insistence, he relocated the Darenbrooks to Hilleanderville, in the Magee family homestead, a three-story, ten-bedroom mansion on Mendolyn Street. Madeline gave birth to a son, John James, in 1936, but then died while giving birth to a daughter, Cordelia Louise, in 1938—an event which sent Big El on a bender for darn close to a year and made him darn near lose all the newspapers.

  Big El was married the fourth and final time in 1939 to his secretary, Alice May Gaines, a marriage that was to establish the family fortunes and offer a period of grace in the turbulent upbringing of the Darenbrook children. Alice May continued to work for her husband and, after giving birth to Beauregard in 1940, opened the company’s first day-care center at their Atlanta offices. Almost immediately she conceived her next, Jackson Andrew, whose crash-landing delivery occurred in 1941. And then, when Big El went overseas in 1942 with Stars and Stripes, Alice May took over the Darenbrook newspapers.

  While America was at war, Alice May replenished the managerial ranks of their newspapers with women and instituted child-care facilities at all of them. At the end of the war the Darenbrooks bought twenty weekly papers around the country and then reassigned their wartime trained women to run them. Child-care facilities remained a permanent part of company policy.

  Big El moved them into printing plants and Alice May launched new weekly after new weekly, following the boom expansion of suburban communities on the East and West coasts. In 1951, Alice May delivered the unexpected delight of a beautiful daughter, Belinda Cecile, and so another Darenbrook baby made the tour of the company offices.

  By 1954 the heir apparent was young John James, who worked with his parents to buy three more city papers and run them from red to black. But nothing would better secure the family’s fortunes than the Darenbrook employee policy that Alice May, Big El and John James devised and instituted. Job sharing, benefits banking, profit sharing, child care…these were the words that would keep unions out and the Darenbrook presses rolling better, faster and strike-free for decades. In 1955, when they launched a textbook company, the corporation was renamed Darenbrook Communications, which by that time included eight city papers, three hundred and two weeklies, and seven printing plants.

  Alice May was killed in an automobile accident outside Chicago in 1956 and Big El went to pieces, drinking so heavily that young John James had to take over as chairman of the company. The Mendolyn Street house in Hilleanderville became steeped in depression. Big El took over the sun room and sat there, day after day, drinking, roused out of his brooding only when baby Belinda came tripping in, which, given Big El’s state, the nanny did not often allow. Cordelia got pregnant at Bible college and had to marry Kirby “Kitty” Paine—a preacher man with big ideas on how to spend Darenbrook money. The twins stole thousands of dollars of securities from Big El and ran off to Europe. Little El became horrendously overweight. Beau fell in with gamblers at college. Jackson, however, was an indefatigable good-natured teenager and, with Cordelia and John James acting as surrogate parents, seemed to weather those years well: he had very high grades, was a football, basketball and track star, and worked every weekend at their local paper, the Atlanta Parader.

  A year after Jackson graduated from Duke, in 1963, John James was kidnapped. The Darenbrook family paid the million dollars ransom, only to find that the kidnappers had killed him the first day they got him.

  And so Jackson Darenbrook, at twenty-three, became the chairman of the board of Darenbrook Communications, and a new board of directors was formed, whose membership would remain unaltered for the next twenty-five years: Big El (with his drinking problems); Little El (with his eating problems); Norbert and Noreen (with their compulsive spending problems); Cordelia Louise (with her greedy husband problem); Beau (with his gambling problems); and Belinda (with her later sanity problems). It was a collection of interesting temperaments, to say the least.

  For the next seven years Jackson managed to keep the empire intact as he had received it. When he married the lovely Barbara Bennett in 1967, Jackson moved himself and corporate headquarters to his wife’s native Richmond, Virginia. They had a daughter, Lydia, in 1970 and a son, Kevin, in 1972, and it was shortly after that that the Darenbrook empire started to expand. Four more city papers were bought and turned around; two national magazines were launched; the textbook operations were doubled; and four new printing plants were built. And then, in 1980, a whole new endeavor into computers was announced: the Darenbrook Library, the largest electronic research information system in the world.

  In 1981 death struck the Darenbrook family again when Jackson’s wife was killed in a freak accident at their country club. Jackson disappeared
from public view until 1983, at which time he reemerged as a run-around playboy eccentric the public scarcely recognized. And it was this new free-wheeling and dealing tycoon who battled the board and won, and proceeded to launch a new communications satellite called TELENET DBS and, in 1986, broke ground on the Upper West Side of Manhattan for a new corporate headquarters complex that would include a major television studio facility.

  The door of Jackson’s limousine suddenly swung open and there stood Alexandra, radiant, in the driveway of the Plaza, wrapped in a full-length navy-blue cape against the cold. Her hair was dark and lovely, and her eyes were dazzling. Even the snow on the ground seemed to be working to her advantage. “Good morning,” she said smiling in at Jackson.

  The Plaza doorman, in full-dress uniform, who was holding the door, peered in as well. “Good morning, Mr. Darenbrook—again!” (Jackson was staying at the Plaza too.)

  “Good morning,” Jackson said, scooting over to make room for Alexandra. He watched her as she slid in. “You’re certainly very beautiful this morning.”

  “Thank you,” she said. She turned to look out at the doorman. “And thank you.”

  He tipped his hat and closed the door.

  “How’s the shoulder?”

  “Okay, thanks,” she said, rearranging her cape around her with one hand, her other arm hidden underneath the cape, presumably in its sling. Then she nodded to the paper on the floor and laughed. “I see you’ve seen what my charming friends Clark and Regina have to say about me.”

  “I oughta sue the jackasses,” Jackson said.

  Alexandra turned to him. “We ought to succeed,” she said, “that’s what we ought to do. That would be the greatest punishment we could inflict.”

  For a moment they just sat there, looking at each other, smiling like the conspirators they were.

  “I hope you’re going to be happy in your new home,” Jackson finally said.

  “New home,” Alexandra murmured, turning to look out her window, “I like that.”