Turn of the Century

by Kurt Andersen

  “By the way, last night was a fantastic episode,” Ng tells him as she steps away. “The flashback? Where Jennie remembers her cocaine binge in college? Was completely incredible. I was like, ‘Is this a feature film?’ ” No wonder Featherstone is so fond of her.

  “The most excellent news,” Featherstone says, ignoring Ng, “is that you held on to more of the Freaky Shit! people last night than you ever did before. Maybe your twenty seconds of hip-hop is working.”

  Freaky Shit!, on at nine o’clock just before NARCS, is MBC’s highest-rated show, the one-line concept for which is “Howard Stern meets the Discovery Channel.” In print, the name is rendered as Freaky S***!, and on the air they call it Freaky Shhh!

  “And next week,” George adds, selling, selling, selling as he had never done until he became a boss, selling as he never imagined he would do, “we’re bringing back the kid, the handsome drug dealer from New Year’s. He’s on the cover of next month’s Spin. And we’ve written his girlfriend into the show, too.”

  “The crying girl in the lingerie and the chamois trench?”

  George nods. He has only heard shopgirls say the word lingerie. He has never heard anyone say chamois trench, ever.

  “I loved that girl,” Featherstone continues. “With the starburst on her belly? Fantastic. Great look. Recur her, definitely. With that wardrobe as her signature look.”

  “And we’ve got very strong scripts for the rest of the season.” Six out of the nine remaining unproduced shows are written. George has read three of those six drafts. Read two and skimmed one. And one of those two is definitely good. Plus, he intends to write at least one more script himself, maybe the final show of the season, if he can find the time. “I sent you the beat sheet for the last show of the season.” The beat sheet. He could have said the synopsis. During his decade as a print journalist he didn’t once call a magazine the book or talk about putting it to bed, and when he was in TV news he’d tried not to refer to talent being on our air. But the odds are only fifty-fifty that Featherstone would know what synopsis means, and George is still too much a show business newcomer to reject every bit of jargon. He’s happy to use the ones that provide real verbal economy, like MOW for movie of the week, or ADR for automatic dialogue replacement—a phrase for retaping lines of actors’ dialogue in postproduction that made George laugh out loud the first time he heard it.

  “Yeah, Laura gave me her coverage on your final episode. Sounds very mondo.” George assumes mondo is good. “This joint is filling up,” Featherstone says, looking around. For a man of his age and station, he has an exceptionally short attention span, about which he seems exceptionally unembarrassed. “High school with money. You know?” Featherstone continues scanning the crowd, finally concluding, “Serious M-A-W glut.”

  “MAW?”

  “Model, Actress, Whatever,” Featherstone tells him matter-of-factly, with no trace of a smile, eyeing one MAW after another.

  George marvels at how thoroughly jokes and no-bones-about-it insincerity have sifted into ordinary discourse. Irony is now embedded in the language, ubiquitous and invisible.

  Featherstone remembers something that excites him. “Did I tell you I happened to chitchat the other night with one of Alec Baldwin’s William Morris guys? And mentioned Alec guest-starring on the season ender. As Kahuna.” Kahuna is the internal NARCS nickname for the nameless, faceless, well-connected Washington political figure connected to a heroin-importing conspiracy. George had already called Tom Selleck’s agent about Selleck appearing as Kahuna. “Alec’s guy says Alec would definitely want the character to be a conservative Republican,” Featherstone continues. “But the guy is into it. I’d say we’ve got Alec semi-attached.”

  George pauses, preparing to speak carefully and tentatively, doing his best to mask his alarm and anger. He already sees that, in entertainment television, it’s never one big concession that makes a show bad—it’s the two or three small concessions every week until you’ve forgotten what you were trying to do in the first place.

  “But the back story so far,” he says, “has been that Kahuna is more in the Ted Kennedy, Jerry Brown neighborhood. You know? The Black Panther reference a couple of episodes ago?”

  “If you’ve got Alec f-ing Baldwin semi-attached,” Timothy says in a friendly tone that suggests he is nevertheless on the verge of brooking no quarter, “I think you can custom-build. I mean, who cares about the character’s political party. Does making Kahuna a Democrat get us a number? I don’t think so.”

  Does X get us a number? tends to be a trump card in television, even in television news. In fact, when he was a news producer, George himself used a version of the line a couple of times—uttered in a mock-schlock producer’s voice to give it an ironic sugarcoating his staff understood, but it was seriously meant, and his staff also understood that. George knows a would-be anchor on a morning show who had his network news career derailed by a single low-Nielsen guest appearance. Because, Timothy, he thinks of saying now, making the villain a liberal burnout is a lot more interesting than making him some obvious right-wing gangster. But George knows he’ll sound like a whiny writer pleading with a producer, and he’s the producer, paid to be tough-minded, to treat everything as fungible, to trade creative off against commercial. So he does not quibble.

  Instead, he says, “Sure, absolutely, if we got Alec Baldwin, we’ll take his notes. Of course.” He figures on being saved by his careful subjunctive, the if: he has heard about Baldwin’s enthusiastic semi-attachments and quasi-commitments. George doesn’t like dissembling and conniving, but he has to protect the creative autonomy of his show. That’s also being a grownup. That’s being a boss, a leader.

  Dissembling and conniving in order to defend one’s cherished freedom to cast Tom fucking Selleck? Is that believing one’s own bullshit?

  It feels so fine to be home, so fine, such a relief. Even though one of the upstairs radiators broke sometime during the week. And even though dinner will be a buffet of Paul Newman popcorn, a bag of Le Gourmet baby carrots, Michael Jordan cottage cheese one day past its sell-by date, and a pint of Cherry Garcia. At least the carrots aren’t a celebrity brand, Lizzie thinks, staring at the microwave as the kernel pops accelerate. Up in the living room, Max and Louisa sit in the dark, watching Nickelodeon, Max flipping through every one of the seventy-six channels during every commercial break.

  Again, the bright light. This time, he feels the heat. Ng, along with the Spic-and-Span Casual wearing the Lew Wasserman glasses and Francesca and thus the E!2 video crew, have enveloped him and Featherstone.

  “George, do you know Francesca?” Ng says, impressively. Among people who consort with the powerful and the celebrated, the flattering standard introduction is Do you know, never I’d like you to meet. We are all members of the international fraternal order of the somewhat famous. We’ve met before, haven’t we, in some green room or at some gala dinner? Or could have, certainly. George, you know His Holiness the Pope, don’t you? And to certify celebrity, here is their very own TV crew, live from Los Angeles.

  “No, nice to meet you. George Mactier.”

  As he puts his hand out toward Francesca, the furry E!2 mike swings toward his face.

  “It’s great to meet you,” she says. “I’m a serious fan.”

  “Thanks.” How quickly praise palls.

  “Of Wars Next Door,” she says.

  The Wars Next Door was his PBS series in the eighties about the insurgencies in Central America. Yes! More!

  “NARCS is great too. But Wars Next Door is my All the President’s Men. Seriously. It’s why I’m in this business.”

  “George Mactier! Hello! We meet at last!” says the Spic-and-Span Super-Casual, bringing his glistening, plumpish face and bloody-urine-colored lenses as close as he can to George. His smile is fierce. How do people manage to smile like that at someone they’ve never met? “It’s Sandy Flandy. How are you? The grapevine’s buzzing about the new show! And I can’t get Ms. Kalm
an,” he says loudly enough that Emily glances over and smiles, “to tell me a thing about it. You’re the talk of the town.” Flandy is the agent for Angela Janeway. Although Emily does almost all the negotiating with actors’ agents, thank God, George has had many phone conversations with Flandy. It was Flandy who called George, for instance, to express Angela’s discomfort with a line in which she was to call a tobacco executive a “scumbag.” (Angela’s daughter, George discovered weeks later, is a Brearley first-grade classmate of the daughter of a tobacco company CEO.) And it was Flandy who last month broached the Nelson Mandela guest-star notion on Angela’s behalf.

  The camera and lights have everyone talking a little louder, smiling a little brighter. A panpipe-and-drum ensemble has started playing. The room is noisy. With the tip of the mike twitching above their heads like some giant Amazonian insect, and the cameraman circling their little group, now joined by Emily and a very sober-looking bearded man who wants to be mistaken for Steven Spielberg, the seven of them squeeze closer together, and their expressions grow bigger, as if they’re being directed telepathically: Stay in the frame! Look like you’re chatting! It’s intimate and impersonal, real and stylized, the smells of their eaus and gels and unguents blending and simmering in the tanning-salon glare of the camera’s light. Emily, nodding and solemn-faced, looking as if she might be discussing Tuesday’s presidential primaries, is listening to the bearded man tell her about the well-known young talent agent who, having been treated for addiction to both cocaine and sex, went to live on a kibbutz, where he fell off the wagon sexually, because he found the women of the Israeli defense forces irresistible.

  From the living room, the children are suddenly screaming, loud, shocked, hysterical. “Mom! Mom! Oh, my God! Mom!” And even before Max adds, “Come! Quick!” Lizzie is leaping up the stairs two at a time, adrenaline-powered. What is it? But no flames, no blood, no wounds, no crying, not even a fight. It’s the television that’s alarmed them, their father on television, live, talking and laughing with an MTV star.

  The E!2 camera moves in as Francesca brings her mouth close to George’s right ear. She’s trying to be heard over the din. “So you’re developing a prime-time news hybrid. ‘Extreme news,’ my friend at MBC called it.”

  “I don’t know about that.”

  “It sounds amazing.”

  Ng rejoins them. “Timothy told me about the new show, George,” she says. “It does sound unbelievable.”

  “I hope it’s not that,” George says.

  Francesca laughs. Then, pressing hard against his left arm, she says breathily, “I cannot tell you how utterly available I am.” George locks his smile. At least a full second passes. Francesca says, “My Viacom contract’s up in June.” Then, retracting her mouth from his temple and her breasts from his arm, she says to him at normal volume, “You are the man, George Mactier. My hero. I’m serious.”

  “We should talk,” he says, too softly for the E!2 mike to pick up. “Back in New York.”

  “I want this,” Francesca growls to George as Hank Saddler pulls her off to meet George Stephanopoulos, who’s in Los Angeles promoting the miniseries based on his White House memoir.

  Sarah has galloped down from her room too, and now all four of them stand in the dark, staring at the TV. “Yes, LuLu, that’s really Daddy, and that party is really happening right this second in California, and it’s neither good nor bad. But it’s time for dinner.” A kind of religious hush has overcome Max. His jaw has dropped. “This is so awesome,” he says. Sarah, still holding her Princessy yellow cordless phone, glances at her mother. “Yeah, it’s awesome,” Lizzie says. “Come on, everybody, it’s late, chop-chop, it’s a school night,” she says as she whomps the power button on the set and marches out of the room.

  10

  Lizzie would never dream of saying I need some space or I’d love the chance to get back in touch with myself. But she has to admit, the first twenty-four hours of Georgelessness are almost always pleasant. It isn’t about toilet seats or toothpaste caps, or the mélange of cream and whiskers coating the bathroom sink, or the damp towels on the bed, the tabloids tossed near the recycling bin, the little drifts of sugar and drops of half-and-half left on the counter around the coffee machine. It’s the respite, very briefly, from familial complexity. One day, alone in her office, she diagrammed it on a whiteboard—then, blushing, immediately erased the diagram. As a full family, all present, the house hums with emotional permutation. There’s the big, twin-star gravity of her relationship with George; her solar relationships with Sarah, Max, and LuLu; George’s relationships with each of the kids; and the subtle but distinct vector, a kind of redundant dotted-line relationship, that passes from George to Sarah, through Lizzie, and back again. As a nuclear family with a single nucleus, Mom alone with the kids, the diagram is much, much more than twice as simple. Life on Water Street isn’t literally quieter without him (if anything, Lizzie makes more noise than George does), but it feels more peaceful. She’ll have had her fill of emotional austerity by tomorrow night, she knows, but this morning, the chill is still fresh and bracing.

  “We saw you on television,” she said to him on the phone last night.

  “What do you mean?”

  “You and Francesca.” She pronounced the name in an exaggerated Chef Boyardee accent, even though Francesca is thoroughly American, native born. She was trying to sound blithe.

  “So they aired that live? Jesus, what a zoo.”

  “ ‘You’re the man, George Mactier.’ ‘I want you.’ Talk about fucking California caricatures. I’m surprised she didn’t start singing ‘Happy Birthday, Mr. President.’ ”

  “Actually, she did, later. I guess the E! channel cut away before the humjob out on the terrace. By the way, it was ‘I want this.’ She wants a job.”

  Lizzie smiled, alone in their bedroom, but she doesn’t like it when George makes his jokes about having sex with other women. “I thought you were going to read scripts in the room all afternoon.”

  “I did.” He paused, a half second of mental rewind, which Lizzie mistook as some kind of guilt over attending Saddler’s party and flirting with the MTV girl, when in fact it was guilt over snooping around her computer files. “But Emily called and insisted I go with her to this Hank Saddler party, so I went. By the way, I think I’ll go to Las Vegas tomorrow night and surprise Ben at the Barbieland grand opening. I’ve got nothing to do here until Tuesday. Except visit your dad.”

  “Whatever,” she said. “It’s Barbie World. I’m going to sleep.”

  But now, awake and alone in daylight, she checks her George feelings: no peevish residue, no grievance. The Francesca spectacle was funny. She’s relieved to be back in New York, refreshed, recharged, and rebooted, happy to be on her way to work, happy even to be on the number 3 train. She’s late enough this morning (after loading Max and LuLu into the neighborhood gypsy-cab service’s ’88 Eldorado, watering the orchids, paying bills) that she gets a seat right away. Several seats. She sprawls, in her jeans and black lace-up boots, across a plastic banquette unit for three, both feet up off the floor, reading the Times. The paper isn’t folded into tidy little rectangles in space-saving subway origami style, but spread out on her lap and legs, the whole broadsheet.

  Since the move to Water Street from Sneden’s Landing last year, George admitted recently, he has taken the subway exactly four times. Lizzie maintains her subway ritual, especially in the mornings. She has her public reasons (it’s usually faster and always safer than a taxi, the number 3 stops close to her office, and, last and least, it saves thousands of dollars a year), but her attachment to the subway is less about utility than private personal symbolism. With money in New York City, it is tempting to ease into a platinum-card arm’s-length soft-focus version of urban life, Manhattan observed from behind tinted Town Car windows. (“What are ‘tainted limo windows’?” Max, misunderstanding, once asked.) As it is, the family has a city house, a country house, a sixty-thousand-dollar Land Cru
iser, three children in private school. Since NARCS began, George has complained more than once about union featherbedding rules, and even she has discovered that EEOC and OSHA regulations can be stupid and intrusive and infuriating. Lizzie would feel too Republican if she abandoned the subway, just like she felt too Republican living on their acre in Sneden’s Landing.

  Her train ride is a little pageant of race and class, each day the same and on many mornings so vivid it seems staged, a site-specific ten-minute avant-pop performance piece. Usually, before she can step into a car, she must stand aside for the hasty, eager exits of the very white lawyers and stock traders and investment bankers coming from their cheap, million- or two-million-dollar Brooklyn brownstones. At the next stop, the criminal lawyers and civil servants from the more Brooklynesque precincts of the borough get off, half of them white and half black, and are replaced by a shuffle of Chinese, each one carrying a cheap plastic shopping bag. At Fourteenth Street, Lizzie disembarks, slipping off the train and onto the platform between a pair of beggars, ready with their props and spiels, and a pack of actors and models, dreaming of theirs. One of the Fourteenth Street bums this morning—a white man about her age in a filthy T-shirt that has HIV! printed in huge letters across the chest—stands directly under a NO SPITTING ON PLATFORM sign and spits as she passes. Maybe antiexpectoration can be the last great crusade of the Giuliani age. Her loathing of Giuliani is visceral. She voted for him in both mayoral elections, first against a nice black man and then against a nice Jewish woman, and both times she spent Election Day giving out a five-dollar bill to everyone who asked for money, as penance.