Turn of the Century

by Kurt Andersen

  George is angry that he’s going to be working all weekend, through the Fourth, while Lizzie and the kids are out in East Hampton with Ben. He was angry, at first, about the postponement of the premiere. “One piece of event programming at a time, G-man,” Featherstone said. Starting Monday, MBC will be broadcasting the Classical Galley world championship race, live by satellite, across the South China Sea from Ho Chi Minh City to Bandar Seri Begawan. “It’ll give you more time for testing and tweaking your baby,” he’d said, “supertesting and supertweaking.”

  But Featherstone is right. The extra month to test Real Time has been useful. The test screenings have shown him how blurry the lines are, for most viewers, between fiction and nonfiction. They’ve shown him that reality and make-believe are more fungible, for most viewers, than he’d dreamed possible. The month has given him time to fight the fights with Fifty-nine before the show is on the air rather than after. The scores of the first regular testings of the Tuesday and Thursday shakedown shows, awarded by 337 strangers in the San Fernando Valley, are encouraging. A 100 is average, and the shows got a 120. The Friday news hour, however, tested poorly, as George knew it would. He has done his best for months to lowball Fifty-nine’s expectations about the Friday hour. “It’s news,” George said when the disappointing number came in. “Real news.” But as Featherstone said, “Seventy is still seventy, George, even if you expect seventy. Would you want to fuck the ugly ho just because your boy told you beforehand she wasn’t yummy?”

  In the twenty-two focus groups held around the country (in Tucson, Charlottesville, and Omaha), the responses became more precise, refined. George was surprised to learn that some of the participants were hooked up to polygraphs as they watched the show. “Viewers want more frequent and ‘real-seeming’ comedy,” the research report summarized, “and they want the dramatic ‘news’ interludes used only occasionally, as a way of providing the anchor and correspondent characters with something to react to, and thus giving them more human dimensionality.”

  The highest negatives in any of the three shows were for the segment on Kim Jong-Il, the North Korean dictator, and for Francesca Mahoney’s spiky hair and dark lipstick.

  “I guess it’s too bad Kim tested poorly,” George told the head of the audience-research firm an hour ago, “but he was displaying his secret biological weapons arsenal. It was news. And he’s a bad guy.”

  “We understand,” the woman said, “but it wasn’t just the character Jong-Il that the audience didn’t feel positively about, it was his country.”

  “So North Korea tested badly?” George asked. It was the first time this month he remembers smiling.

  “Exactly. We showed one of the Tucson focus groups a redubbed segment, with ‘northern Japan’ looped in over all the North Korea mentions? Scored almost ninety percent higher positives. See what I’m saying?”

  “I guess you’re saying keep the foreign news to a minimum, unless it’s Tom Hanks and Bill Clinton at a commemorative ceremony on Omaha Beach.”

  “That was fantastic. And your over-fifties are more interested in international events. The Mexican war, with Francesca under fire, tested pretty well even among eighteen-to-thirty-fours. Mexico is well known.”

  “A familiar brand,” Saddler interjected.

  The research woman nodded. “Now, your other foreign story had a different problem, an interesting problem, more along the real-unreal axis.”

  “The Kurd piece?” George said.

  “A majority of our test audiences thought ‘the Kurds’ were a fictional people, invented by the writers for the program. The end of the story scored pretty high, but only because viewers thought the word Kurdistan was, you know, a punch line—they found it funny. Unfortunately, most people today just don’t know that Kurdistan is an actual place.”

  Since George had decided to kill the piece anyway, he didn’t bother explaining that the Kurds have no homeland, and that Kurdistan is not currently an actual place. After she left, Saddler told George he had “one more major bee to insert in your bonnet.” He said that since the two anchors and two of the three chief Real Time correspondents are white, Fifty-nine wants George to assign more stories about people of color.

  “I know you agree, George, that this is the right thing to do.”

  “What if the stories turn out to be negative?”

  “Why would they be?” Saddler replied. George didn’t answer. “Also? Diversity-wise, you might want to task your folks to find African-Americans with darker skin tone, and Asian people who look more, you know, ethnic. Forty-three percent of your test groups didn’t even realize that Cole Granger is black! On the other hand,” Saddler said, checking a printout, “almost twenty-seven percent thought Francesca Mahoney was ‘other,’ so that’s an unanticipated plus. But you don’t want to go to the trouble of making a batch of quesadillas and have everyone think it’s just grilled cheese, do you?” Saddler also asked if he had considered “preteen leveraging of the Real Time brand.” He meant a children’s version of the show. George said he’s absolutely considered it. But not seriously, George failed to add, since children’s TV news programs are nonstarters. They seem redundant and unnecessary, not dumbed down so much as made overfriendly and condescending. And George has always understood why. His Real Time show next Friday—an entire hour of hard news, in prime time—will consist of approximately five thousand spoken words, or about the same number contained in an issue of Weekly Reader. Not one of those words, as a matter of network policy, is supposed to surpass the understanding of an average seventh grader. In a real sense, TV news is already news for children. Is that a good thing or a bad thing, Daddy?

  George is now alone in his office, fast-forwarding again through the shakedown shows in their so-called “data-rich” form. The screen looks like a financial news channel, with numbers and abbreviations moving across the bright red lower quarter of the screen. Instead of stock prices, though, the numbers and letters are a distillation of all the salient audience-testing research, synchronized to the relevant moments of the shows. In the second-act opener of the Thursday show, 32% NEG 18–49 M (SMILE: POS) scrolls by as Jess Burnham is shown leaving her house and hailing a taxi on Hudson Street, replaced by 13% NEG 18–34 M (HAIR: NEG) as soon as the show cuts to Francesca awakened in bed by a phone call from her field producer in Mexico City. Later, George sees that the research woman was absolutely right about Kim Jong-Il—under the shaky video of him grinning and looking into a vial of anthrax, the screen says 68% NEG AVE ALL DEMOS (HAIR & SMILE: NEG).

  Cole Granger’s teasing piece about the government’s embrace of “alternative health” tested well, particularly among men. The improvised news-staff discussions and arguments about the Deep Throat exposé in the Tuesday and Thursday shows tested extremely well (95% POS >34 M/F), although George pulled the story from the news-hour lineup the afternoon of shakedown Friday—not because of any pressure from his liberal media buddies, but because Sylvia Boudreau Shepley started hedging on whether Deep Throat was in fact George Bush or Bush together with Alexander Haig and Richard Nixon’s son-in-law, David Eisenhower.

  The shows were tested with commercials plugged in, so that the test audiences would experience the programs, the research woman said, “in a more authentic context.” George is a little surprised to see that on the data-rich tape, a stream of test results flows along with the ads as well. The commercials test very positively, generally as well as the shows, and sometimes better. “Slightly apples-and-oranges,” she said, “but if it’s any consolation, it’s extremely common for program material to test lower than adjacent advertising.” And now, as a handheld two-shot of Jess and Cole discussing the Republican convention fades to black and is replaced by a jaw-droppingly gorgeous thirty seconds for Coke—an old-fashioned bottle zooming through space, finally turning inside out and becoming the universe—he sees why. It’s entirely a function of budgets. Second for second, the budget of that miraculous, inspiring Coke ad was a hundred times his b
udget for the Friday show, twenty-five times his big-budget Tuesday and Thursday shows. Are the killing hours and the panicky solitude making him cynical? Or has he been naïve? Why has it taken him fifteen years in television to notice that the budget disparity between ads and shows may be the point of television?

  He needs to look at something old and plain. George slides in another tape, a compilation of raw archival footage, mostly black-and-white, and mutes the sound. First up are two minutes of slow pans from thirty-five years ago, Bobby Kennedy campaigning for the Senate in Manhattan. George really isn’t in the Kennedy thrall, never has been, but both the phenomenon and his own bewilderment fascinate him, as with professional wrestling and opera.

  If they don’t nail Deep Throat by next week, George plans to run the first “Kennedy World” in week one. “Kennedy World” is a simple idea: every Friday, a minute or less on a Kennedy, newsy if possible, elegiac or enthusiastic or irreverent, depending. He figures the feature will either run out of steam after a couple of months or bloom into its own program—“Hell, dude, its own channel,” Timothy says. Watching Bobby from the sixties, with Jack and their little brother, it occurs to George that even black-and-white footage shot today looks thirty-five years old. He wonders if he ought to shoot all the contemporary “Kennedy World” segments—John Jr. and Caroline, Bobby Jr. and Patrick and Joe, Maria and Arnold, whomever—in black-and-white, as a signature style of the feature. He doesn’t mean to keep thinking about the show.

  Bobby’s funeral is in color, on videotape. Teddy, in his neck brace on the Vineyard in the summer of 1969, looks hardly more dazed and callow than he did seven years earlier, when everything was fine; maybe demeanor is destiny. A color reenactment shot of the limousines driving through Dealey Plaza in Dallas, from 1963, pans up the School Book Depository and zooms in on the black-and-yellow Hertz billboard on the roof. As the scratchy gray leader comes up, George steps toward the TV to shut it off, but he stops when a 6-5-4-3-2 Academy leader appears, and then an old TV commercial, so familiar from ages ago: the fedora’d gray-flannel man falling from the sky in a sitting position and gliding smartly into the driver’s seat of a speeding Hertz convertible. Cut onto the end of the Hertz ad are a series of period movie car crashes, oversaturated long shots of old Barracudas and Mustangs and Cougars leaping off California cliffs and exploding in fireballs. George is reminded of the remarkable video loop Max made earlier this year on the computer from two scenes he’d taped off TV, one from Nick at Nite and the other from an American Sportsman rerun. He’d intercut back and forth between the shot from the opening of The Mary Tyler Moore Show where she throws her cap in the air, and a clip of Joe Namath firing a shotgun into the sky.

  George giggles the way he giggled tripping on LSD twenty-five years ago, gaga about receiving signs from a God in whom he declined to believe even as he was receiving the signs. He remembers what Lizzie said one night, drinking her martini, months ago, about life becoming art. He isn’t sure why his eyes are wet and his throat is tight, but it has nothing to do with Camelot. He wipes his shirtsleeve quickly across his face, and remembers to breathe.

  “Daisy?” he shouts. “Who put together this Kennedy reel? Was it Davey?”

  Daisy appears. “No one. I mean, it came straight from the clip place.”

  “Can you get me Jude McAllister in Washington? I need to talk to him about the Deep Throat piece.”

  “Aye-aye, sir.”

  Daisy never makes him angry. Maybe after he becomes a certified cuckold (and he’s thrown out of MBC, and show business, and barred from reentering real journalism), he’ll have an affair with ironic, wise, smiling Daisy Moore. The children’s resentment of Daddy’s girlfriend would abate if she was black, he thinks.

  At the threshold, Daisy turns back. “George?” she says. “I know this is the last thing you need to think about. But would it be awful if I took a two-week holiday in August? It looks like Cole and I are getting married. On the sixth.”

  “Daisy! Congratulations! That’s fantastic.” Your wedding is on the fifty-fifth anniversary of Hiroshima, he thinks. “The first Real Time marriage!” he says. George hasn’t known she’s been serious with Cole Granger. “Take as much time as you need.” But just a thought—you and I should probably begin this affair right away. That way, only one of us will be an adulterer officially, plus, as I understand it, I’d be grandfathered in. “And tell Cole that if the result of this is my losing you, he’s fired.” Her smile is huge. You wouldn’t mind if I fist-fucked you in the ass, would you, Daisy? With the stump? You’re a plucky girl. I don’t think you would mind. Would you?

  34

  “Yeah, it sliced,” Randy says, “but you hit the hell out of it. Didn’t she, Doug?”

  “She did. She really did. Real power.”

  “No wonder Harold is so excited,” Randy says. “He knows you can keep us bozos from Fifty-nine on our toes out here on Friday afternoons.”

  All four chuckle. She hands her club to the caddie. She and Doug and Randy and Steve begin to walk toward the green from the ladies’ tee, which is many yards in front of the regular tee. The ladies’ tee, golf’s gesture of built-in old-line affirmative action, is one of the reasons she’s never really liked the game, even when the old-fashioned phrase is politically corrected to “forward tee.”

  “Where do you mostly play, Elizabeth?” Doug asks.

  “I mostly don’t,” Lizzie says. “As a kid I played a lot. In Los Angeles and Palm Springs.”

  “Whereabouts in Palm Springs?” Randy asks.

  “La Quinta?”

  “Super course,” says Randy.

  “Super course,” Steve agrees.

  “Haven’t played it,” says Doug. “I like the Gary Player Signature Course out there. I haven’t played La Quinta.”

  “It’s super,” says Randy. “Next time you’re in Burbank, you should try to make it out.”

  “It’s nice,” Lizzie agrees. “I love that cheesy old clubhouse. Very Palm Springs ‘67.”

  No one says a thing for a while.

  “You see there,” says Randy to Steve and Doug, gesturing off to the left, “how they’ve pushed that long grass way back from where it was two summers ago? Easier to get some speed play going.”

  “They fill up some of the courses so much now,” says Doug, “it takes five hours sometimes just to play a round.”

  “How long did it take us to do eighteen last summer at Piping Rock?” Randy asks Steve. “At that charity tournament with that guy from Disney who went to AOL, Brian … Brian … ?”

  “Brian Gardner,” Steve says.

  “Right. We were out there six hours.”

  “Brian Gardner quit Disney for AOL?” Lizzie says. “I didn’t know that. He is such a loser. Brian Gardner’s perfect for AOL, isn’t he?”

  Again she has managed to stop the conversation cold. The rest of the hole, she doesn’t say a word.

  Randy and Doug are colleagues from Fifty-nine. The last time Lizzie played golf was on a foundation staff outing at Maidstone, eleven years ago to the day. She remembers feeling very Jewish then, too. George stayed back at the Goulds’ in East Hampton. She remembers walking up Ben’s big wooden porch after the round, sweaty in her Lilly Pulitzer culottes and teal shell and pigtails and NOSFERATU baseball cap, and George seeing her and rushing out with his finger to his lips because Sarah was napping inside, then taking her by the hand to the pool house and latching the door. She never got the glove off her left hand. “I’m sorry,” he said when they’d finished, “but the Muffy-wear makes me completely horny.” That was the day—June 30, 1989—they conceived Max.

  She noticed a memo this week from Doug, copied to about a thousand Mose Media Holdings executives, entitled “Quality Circles 2001: A New MBO at MMH.” MBO, she knows, stands for management by objective, which has always struck her as a tautologous concept. “So, Doug,” she says, trying again, a few holes later, “you’re head of strategic planning?”

  “EVP organi
zational and management effectiveness, competitive intelligence, and continuous improvement,” he replies. “Most of the strategic support specialists work under me—eight FTEs. You and I will definitely interface.”

  “And you report to Harold?”

  She notices Randy and Steve smile.

  “I report to Arnold,” Doug says, referring to Arnold Vlig, the COO, a dour, sleepy-looking lawyer who very seldom leaves his office on Fifty-nine.

  Randy, the one who invited her along, is president of sales and marketing. Steve is a senior vice president, and he explained as they teed off what his job is—she heard the phrases “external reporting,” “demand planning,” and “loss mitigation.” She has no idea what Steve does, or what floor he works on.

  “I understand you were responsible for that big microphone dish for the stockholders meeting,” Randy says. He gives a thumbs-up. “Super device. Folks were impressed. It was very impressive.”

  “It was,” Steve says. He catches Randy’s glance. “I mean, people told me it really was.”

  “Did you all hear about that Microsoft analyst presentation yesterday?” Randy asks.

  “So-so quarter, I understand,” Doug says.