Turn of the Century

by Kurt Andersen

  George is experiencing not just a Featherstonian wave of alertness, his own automatic teacher’s-pet eagerness to please, but a glint of something else, like contempt, or fear. Maybe it’s the hangover.

  Mose leans against the front of Featherstone’s desk, half sitting, his feet touching the floor, arms crossed low over his belly, casual but definitely proprietary. Featherstone leans against his black steel chiropractic arch, also half sitting, mimicking Mose as best he can. George and Emily, thus driven toward the couch, exchange a look. The bodies in the room have suddenly assumed a bad-news fait accompli arrangement, as if Mom and Dad are about to tell the kids about the divorce.

  “So, my friends, what do you think of our schemes?” Mose says. “Are you both aghast?”

  Neither has any idea what he’s talking about, although each has a reliable generic answer to that question, no matter what the subject—Yes for Emily, No, not really for George. When Mose sees they’re both baffled, his default wry smile disappears and he shoots a look at Featherstone—a sharp, hard look. Thwack! George’s moment of pleasure is not malice, but rather the same kick of relief he feels whenever he watches the man (always a man) at the dinner party knock over the giant goblet of red wine. Nasty luck; thank God it wasn’t me.

  “I was just about to explain the whole megillah to them. You mean ABS, yes?”

  “Correct.”

  Featherstone is still leaning casually against his exercise rack, but he has unfolded his arms. His bright eyes seem suddenly too bright, his tail not just bushy but painfully horripilated. “You know, George was a hero over there just now, and Emily too, but, Harold, our meeting with Barry and Jess got a little more …” He glances at George with a hey-buddy half grin. “… complicated than we expected.”

  Mose stares silently at Featherstone for another instant—thwack!—then turns to George and Emily. “NARCS, as you both know, is on its way to being a very profitable business for Mose Media,” he says.

  A very profitable business! What a fine, lustrous, grownup way to describe a cop show, George thinks, and Mose didn’t even mean to flatter. George Mactier, profit center.

  He continues. “You’re familiar with the basic idea of securitization? Asset-backed securities?” Before they have time to say no, he starts explaining. “Essentially, any revenue-producing asset can be turned into a security, like a company’s stock or a bond. Well, my bankers and I have an idea that we can do the same thing with our library at the MBC. With shows like NARCS.”

  “Like the Bowie Bonds, remember?” Featherstone says. “Backed by all the future royalties from David Bowie’s songs?”

  George knows they’re getting the Junior Scholastic explanation, but even as he resents being patronized, he also knows he would be out of his depth if Mose and Featherstone were not talking down. Unlike sports, the minutiae of which he’s sure he could understand if he spent the time, certain areas of finance are to George like theoretical physics or musical composition—simply beyond his ability to comprehend. He has had Ben Gould explain puts and calls and short-selling over and over, for instance, but he still can’t keep it straight.

  George realizes he’s been tuning out Featherstone’s even more rudimentary recapitulation of Mose’s explanation when he registers Emily’s skeptical, almost huffy tone.

  “Meaning?” she is saying sharply to Featherstone.

  “Meaning, my sweet M&M, that Mose Media Holdings and Well-Armed Productions need to snuggle even closer together in bed. You know? Grandfather in our affair before the marriage, so to speak. Make it kosher SEC-wise and all that Howdy Doody.”

  “In other words,” George says, “you need our approval in order to securitize your half of NARCS?” He is proud of pulling securitize out of the hat. Twenty years as a journalist made George good at simulating authority—cutting to the chase, jumping to a conclusion, summing up glibly. Or is it a knack for glib summary and faked authority that made him a successful journalist?

  “Correct,” Mose says. “Precisely.”

  “Ah,” says Emily, the hedgehog to George’s fox. “I see.” She understands one big-business thing: leverage. George sees her relax and go a little wide-eyed, as if some stupendous dessert had magically appeared before her.

  “I’m sure it’ll be no problem,” George says, “but we’ll have to talk to our lawyers.”

  His first flash of fear and contempt for Mose has simmered already into a congenial clubby chumminess. As a journalist, the only leverage he ever wielded was a not-unfriendly few columns in a magazine, or a two-minute interview on TV—theoretically wielded, since in journalism, explicitly exercising quid pro quo leverage seemed ignoble. But this is business. The horse-trading and self-interest are undisguised and unembarrassed. Shall we open the cognac? Light up the Cohibas?

  “Of course,” Mose says. “Although there is some urgency here,” he adds. “Just for this room, we’re planning to float a few new shares. And the underwriters insist we get all the securitizations in line ahead of the offering. You understand. Since it’s a little unconventional.”

  “New Network for the New Century!” Featherstone says in a not quite rapped singsong. He looks at Mose, then, refolding his arms, says, “The other idea we wanted to test your waters on is co-branding. We’re very close to a deal partnering with Smucker’s for Reunion—‘Smucker’s Presents Reunion.’ ” Reunion is the forthcoming MBC show, an “all-specials series,” that has three installments already in the can: Family Ties (the Michael J. Fox character’s daughter is a pierced Hillary Clinton intern, although Fox himself doesn’t appear in the show), a Hogan’s Heroes V-E Day show (minus Bob Crane and Werner Klemperer), and Family Affair (minus Brian Keith, Sebastian Cabot, and the little girl). “You guys wouldn’t have any problem with possibly co-branding NARCS, would you?”

  “Like, ‘Seagram Presents NARCS’?” Emily asks. “ ‘Pfizer Presents NARCS’?”

  “Well, could be, but a packaged goods advertiser probably isn’t the ideal fit,” Featherstone says.

  “I believe Emily is joking, Timothy,” Mose says.

  “We would have a big problem with that,” George says. He pauses and thinks of adding, It would be bad for the NARCS brand, just to remind Mose and Featherstone that he’s a grownup, with commerce on his mind. He’s pleased that Emily jumps in before he can.

  “Major problem,” Emily agrees. “Big time.”

  George and Emily look at each other, pleased and surprised to be in unrehearsed agreement on the side of virtue.

  “You guys don’t want to keep it on the table, nibble on it overnight?” Featherstone asks. “Think about it as a return to an old-fashioned tradition—remember The U.S. Steel Hour when we were kids? And I mean, you had no problem with the Prada deal? And we’re all pretty coolio with the American Spirit gig, aren’t we?” Last year, George, Emily, and MBC gave the fashion designer Miuccia Prada the exclusive right to dress the cast of NARCS for all their public appearances, and signed another deal selling product placement on the show to American Spirit organic cigarettes. The Kahuna character is a chain-smoker of American Spirits; the network has defended itself against criticism with what Saddler calls “the X-Files defense,” emphasizing that it’s only the show’s evil character who smokes. “New network, new century, new revenue stream,” Featherstone continues. “Co-branding would be money in the bank for all of us.”

  “Sorry, Timothy,” George says. “Especially given the shit we’re about to take from the Barry Stengels of the world on Real Time.”

  Mose smiles and puts his hand on George’s shoulder. “No wonder you married your wife. You’re both a couple of liberals, and you both love telling Mose Media to stuff it.”

  George forces a smile.

  “Say,” Mose says, “I ran into your friend Peter Jennings the other night at some god-awful Canadian consulate event. He said he’s very pleased that you’ve finally found your niche.”

  “Thank you so much, Peter.”

  There is a high
-pitched beep-beep sound. Featherstone turns and says to the ceiling, “What is it, Faith?”

  “Laura wanted you to know ASAP that Jason’s people have committed to the MOW. And we’re getting the life rights.”

  “Yes!” Featherstone says, and slaps himself five. “Awesome!” Then, to the room: “Jason Alexander, helming and starring in a reality-driven telepic for us for November sweeps. Total quality management! Eventissimo!”

  Does Mose enjoy Featherstone’s ridiculous jargon for the same reasons he built the soundstage on Fifty-seventh Street, because it reminds him that he’s in show business, makes it palpable, the same way some men enjoy women with preposterous synthetic breasts? Watching Timothy do an ecstatic pirouette because he has persuaded a former sitcom second banana to direct a movie of the week, George marvels at his boundless hair-trigger capacity for excitement over the trivial, his demonstrative enthusiasm—his “passion,” as they say out here.

  Too much happens too quickly. An hour and a half later, after asking Featherstone if his MOW liver-transplant rabbi happens to be named Mike (“NFI, my friend”); after the quick Real Time lunch with the MBC sales staff (“Instead of like having an actor play the president on your show,” one dim bulb suggests, “you could have him be like just a voice on the phone, like Charlie on Charlie’s Angels”); after Saddler’s confidential suggestion that George hire a communications coach (“I think she could help you evolve a more welcoming speaking style, with friendlier hand gestures, to draw people into the George conversational realm”); after Emily’s explanation of NFI (“no fucking idea”) and a farewell that is abrupt even for her (“I’m late, we’ll talk”); George is weak-kneed with relief and exhaustion, finished for the day with corporate song and dance, overstuffed with undigested raw intelligence (about Mike Zimbalist, MBC News, Mose Media Holdings, Lizzie), and headed out of the Valley, away from the slough. Speeding past a shopping mall called Media City Center and onto the Hollywood Freeway, he mentally rewinds, fast-forwards, cues up, and plays again and again the meetings with Mose and Featherstone, Stengel and Burnham.

  Mostly he dwells on the inconsequential moments—such as Mose’s reference to “your friend Peter Jennings.” What did Mose mean, precisely? His usage was surely not the mocking form used for one’s embarrassing acquaintances (Your little friend on the couch, as Ben said last night in Vegas, or Your friend Mike Milken, as Lizzie would soon start saying). Maybe the irony intended was the softer, specifically intercorporate form of “your friend,” which refers to almost any employee of any competitor—the consorting-with-the-enemy connotation. Or did Mose mean to insinuate that Jennings actually slagged George? Or was it, he thought hopefully, definition four, the version used only to refer to famous people and meant to imply, gently, that one is a star-fucker?

  George used to make a point of referring to celebrities, even when he knew them well, by their full names. Lizzie called it his “Charlie Brown rule.” Now that he’s in show business, he’s become less rigorous. A few months ago, after a Vanity Fair photo shoot with the NARCS cast, he mentioned at dinner that he’d had a nice chat “with Annie, at her studio.” “Really?” Lizzie said. “With Annie? And were Demi and Lorne and Arnold and Leo also there?”

  He is reveling some in the humiliation of Stengel, but even more in the endorsement of Real Time by Jess Burnham, the $2.9-million-a-year anchor, the star, the talent. What a surprise! What a fine example of the upside of George’s ritual pessimism! Burnham may be a Canadian and a Nieman fellow, but she’s also young enough, it turns out, to have been spared the ravages of Edward R. Murrow Disease, that knee-jerk sense of pseudo-regret about the passing of the putative golden age of TV news—of broadcast journalism. He has detected sparks of mischief and self-deprecation in her on-air persona all along, he’s pretty sure, his mind now collapsing into a kind of fond revisionism as he drives back into L.A. She’s not a prig. Hell, she let MBC fictionalize her name—how could she object to Real Time? On Canadian TV, as their Washington correspondent and then as an anchor, she was Marian J. Burnham. Saddler convinced Mose that Americans would more easily embrace an anchor with a one-syllable nickname, like Dan or Tom or Ted or Jim, and so out of her middle name, Jessica, Jess was invented. Does Burnham know, George wonders, that one of the reasons she was hired over a newsreader named Maureen O’Connor was the luck of syllabication? “Burnham is a highly anchor-appropriate surname,” one of Saddler’s lieutenants wrote in a confidential memo that made its way to George, “both nonethnic and bisyllabic with the accent on the first—like Rath-er, Bro-kaw, Kop-pel, Jen-nings, and Lehr-er.” Also, maybe her sexual orientation makes her more open-minded about unorthodox crossbreeds of news and entertainment. She is definitely open-minded: after Saddler changed her name, she also let him stage-manage her outing—the planted story in the Star about a nonexistent affair with Anne Heche, Burnham’s good-humored denial a few days later, her semiautobiographical prime-time MBC special a week after that.

  He starts feeling a little queasy about stumbling into a de facto alliance based on mutual willingness to play fast and loose in the name of airtime—slippery slope, slippery slope, slippery slope, slippery slope. Then he realizes he’s gone too far down La Cienega and missed the turn for George Burns Road. The rain is getting him lost. Making the U-turn, he sees it’s five of three, he’s late to see Mike Zimbalist, and his plane’s at four forty-something. Jesus Christ. He’ll have to take a flight tomorrow. That’ll be another whole day wiped out. Jesus Christ! He’s made himself anxious again. He’s overreacting. Why is he so perturbed? It isn’t the hangover. It isn’t the extra night in L.A. No wonder you married your wife, Mose had said, squeezing George’s shoulder, with that grin.

  13

  There is nothing but a six-inch-high black dollar sign on the door of Bennett Gould’s office suite, which occupies a grand space near the top of the Woolworth Building, a suite of offices almost untouched since the building went up in 1913.(Ben moved there a decade ago, after he made his first twenty million and George told him his offices in a new Water Street high-rise were “cheesier than necessary.”) Almost everyone calls the company Bennett Gould, like Goldman Sachs or Morgan Stanley, even though Ben’s firm officially has an unutterable name—since 1989 it has been $, simply $, on the letterhead and corporate records. “Kind of like Yahweh,” Ben tells people, particularly if he thinks it will upset them. Messengers and deliverymen and the security guys downstairs generally call it “the dollar-sign company.” He has thought about changing it twice. First in 1993, after the singer Prince changed his name to a typographic symbol and people started teasing Ben that he ran “the hedge fund formerly known as Bennett Gould.” He was ready to change again this past November, after a seventies-themed clothing and tchotchke shop called opened in TriBeCa and the same week the Times ran a story about a trademark fight involving a new magazine that called itself ®. Both times George and Lizzie convinced Ben to stick with $.

  Early every day from seven-thirty until about nine, and again every afternoon from four-thirty until seven, Ben phones and e-mails and meets with the managers of the businesses he’s started or helped start—the BarbieWorlds, the DefExes, the CompuCares, his new NASCAR buddies. From nine-thirty until four, however, he buys and sells stocks and options, mostly for his own account. Technically a hedge fund, Bennett Gould Partners, LP, is still the centerpiece of $. But Ben has made so much for himself that he’s now the fund’s largest investor by far. Some of his investors have left him for more orthodox money managers, money managers who wear suits and don’t buy up acres of New York billboard space in order to keep it blank and who wouldn’t think of telling a Wall Street Journal reporter, “I’d have personally given Bill Clinton a blowjob to keep Bob Rubin at Treasury.” He has also thrown investors out of Bennett Gould Partners when they displeased him, particularly the “goddamn rich weenies (nothing worse than rich weenies)” who second-guessed and badgered him in October ‘87 or August ’90 or September ’98.

 
; Back at work after his two days off in Vegas, Ben is unusually revved. “Let’s ramp!” he announces to the occupants of the Big Room—to his assistant Dianne, whom he brought along from Newsweek fifteen years ago, and his two traders and his analyst. It’s nine forty-four, and Ben is trading. For most of the seven or eight hours a day that he’s trading, Ben sits in his Big Room, rather than his private office, at a horseshoe cluster of desks with the staff, looking and tapping back and forth between his eight computer screens. He has his hinged, two-screen Bloomberg terminal (for bond and commodity prices), his Reuters terminal (for news), his Bridge terminal (for charting stocks), and four ILX screens for stocks—one for the thirty stocks that make up the Dow-Jones average, another for the NASDAQ 100, another for the stocks in which he holds positions right now, and the other for stocks he’s considering buying or shorting. He likes using all the screens at once, but the real reason for eight computer screens is redundancy—systems crash, and Ben has no intention of letting the technology ever stop him from trading. For e-mail, he has a PC.

  Right beneath one of the ILXs is his turret, the big, gray computerized phone, a state-of-the-art diptych of telephony, with rows and rows of names—Morgan, Goldman, Lehman, Smith Barney, First Boston—displayed in white on little blue screens.

  Ben thinks out loud, barking buy and sell orders to his staff and making phone calls that rarely last as long as a minute. Almost every day he’s a fountain of adrenaline, like a bureau chief on election night, or a squadron commander during a mission, or a teenage boy who takes his video-gaming way too seriously. Although it is only a slight overstatement to say that Ben Gould lives to trade, he knows he’s just about too old for this. He’s told himself that the years of sloughing off faithless investors is phase one of the exit strategy; that he will change professions with the century; that he will quit trading stocks when Cal Ripken quits playing baseball. Taped to the top of his Bloomberg terminal is a cheap black plastic sign George Mactier gave him for his thirtieth birthday, now cracked almost in half and held together with Krazy Glue and staples. THE TEST OF A FIRST-RATE MIND, it says, IS THE ABILITY TO HOLD TWO OPPOSED IDEAS IN THE MIND AT THE SAME TIME, AND STILL RETAIN THE ABILITY TO FUNCTION. It’s an F. Scott Fitzgerald line—which is why, George explained back in 1984, he had it printed with no attribution, so that Ben could display it without looking like a jerk.