Anatomy of a Miracle

by Jonathan Miles

  Back in Los Angeles, it took Griffin and his agent only eight days to sell “The Rising.” “It went fast,” he concedes, “though not always easily.” There was one network executive who asked if Cameron had “exploded” in any way when he stood up, seeming genuinely bewildered by the lack of sacred pyrotechnics. Another exec “adored” the pitch but wanted Griffin to find three other miracle recipients for a competition series that could possibly be set in the Holy Land. Another exec flatly rejected the entire premise: “Here’s what’s going to happen. A real physician is going to diagnose this guy with a psychosomatic injury and then we’ve got what? A show that’s called, ‘Whoops, It Was All in My Head.’ ” Another seemed fixated on having a celebrity host or narrator: “Who’s that black astrophysicist guy? Neil something Tyson. Huge cred and a great Q factor. Or what about someone like Alan Jackson?” An older exec recalled Geraldo Rivera’s 1986 primetime debacle, when he opened the gangster Al Capone’s secret vault on live network television and discovered it empty. “I don’t like doing mysteries in real-time,” he grumbled. “You’re just walking around with your belt unfastened the whole time. One wrong step and your pants drop.” It’s possible there were more nuanced reactions that Griffin is failing to divulge, but reality-TV insiders say this sounds about right. As one says, “I’m kind of shocked no one asked if there was any weight-loss component to the miracle experience.”

  Then came Bree Winterson, the recently installed head of programming at the Lifetime network. Griffin wasn’t expecting much traction from Winterson, who has a reputation for savage bluntness. He’d pitched her several years before, when she was in development at The Learning Channel, and she’d so thoroughly decimated his idea that Griffin had never pitched it elsewhere. Scarred by that experience, his pitch to her this time was soft, tentative, at times even apologetic. “I felt like I was trying to feed kale to a tiger,” he says.

  But this time was different. “The sister,” Winterson said after viewing the sizzle reel. Winterson’s manner of speaking is so distinct that impersonating her is a common late-night party trick among industry folk: She emits statements like smoke rings, pausing afterward to admire their passage through the air and expecting others to do likewise. “I love her. She’s the heart of this. He’s up in the clouds and she’s down to earth—that tension, it’s just so gripping. Obviously that’s what we’re looking for here at Lifetime—that strong female element.”

  “Of course,” Griffin purred, his theatrical confidence belying how bewildered and blindsided this reaction was leaving him. This wasn’t the “steak on the plate,” as he’d put it to Cameron, that she was praising; this was instead, to Griffin’s thinking, the parsley garnish.

  “But he’s got this strange appeal too, the miracle man,” Winterson went on. “It’s hard to put my finger on it, and that’s part of the appeal. It’s like half maternal affection and half I-wanna-jump-his-bones. That makes him total viewer bait. But her—what’s her name? Tanya? She’s your breakout, Scotty.”

  Griffin almost always corrects people: Scott Tee, not Scotty. With Winterson he let it slide.

  “He’s been transformed,” she went on, “but we’re going to want to see her transforming.”

  This wasn’t close to Griffin’s vision for the show—Tanya, to his thinking, was peripheral to the larger story of investigating a paranormal event—but Winterson’s smoke rings weren’t something you easily disputed; nor was the budget she controlled something to risk over what could be, if he stepped back for an objective look, merely a subtle shift in perspective. Winterson had been hired to fully revamp Lifetime’s offerings, and to accomplish that, Griffin’s agent had advised him, the network’s president had endowed her with “fuckbuckets of cash.”

  “I see this as a series,” she said, launching copulating cash buckets into Griffin’s head. “Here are these people, right? They’ve had this amazing thing happen to them. They hit the spiritual lottery. And they’re normal. They’re funny. They’re dirty around the edges. They’re just like our aud, in other words. That’s how I’m seeing this: Recipients of divine grace…they’re just like us!”

  Griffin glanced at his agent and swallowed. The agent’s shrugged response was reminiscent of the one Tanya had conferred upon Cameron two weeks prior: why not?

  “This is a hit, Scotty,” Winterson said. “This is so fucking loud. It’s sticky. It’s got a dark smart edge. I’m game for a deal memo.” This was her widest, most sculpted smoke ring yet. “Today.”

  In those deal memo negotiations, which the network’s lawyers ensured took several more days than Winterson desired, one stipulation arose: Winterson wanted Griffin and his crew on the scene fast. “We need to see him while he’s still limping,” she explained. “While these two are still in shock. The before and after is crucial here. Their acclimation is our biggest danger. I think we need this to be as close to live as we can get it.”

  In financial terms, this was the largest single deal—and, subsequently, the maddest scramble—of Griffin’s career. He had a thirty-day window for pre-production. During that month he and Douglas spent sixteen-hour days together, hiring crew and arranging tax credits through the Mississippi Film Commission and sketching out profile interviews and charting storylines (to which Winterson, as an executive producer, almost constantly objected) and hashing out licensing deals and more—much more. “It was like that old Mickey Rooney–Judy Garland routine: Let’s put on a show!” Griffin says. “Racing the clock the whole time. Nothing but adrenaline in the veins. It felt like rock ’n’ roll.”

  And then, on the morning of October 27, 2014, Griffin and his six-person crew took over Reconfort Avenue in Biloxi. Mrs. Dooley, from her porch, watched the black trucks roll in. “Somebody getting busted big-time,” she recalls thinking to herself. Other neighbors peered from behind curtains. Children from adjacent blocks lined up at the edge of the railroad tracks, glaring at this otherwordly invasion of men and women wearing headsets and conferring over clipboards and hauling or wheeling enormous video and audio equipment into the garage. The men and women wearing the headsets waved at the children but the children didn’t wave back. Filming for “Miracle Man,” as Winterson christened the show, began that afternoon.

  “Look, I know how story works,” Griffin says now. “I know there’s a certain compression that’s required, and that certain roles need to be filled. I get that. And so I get why some people are going to paint me as the villain in this story. Because of what I do, because of what I represent, because of what happened New Year’s Eve, the lawsuits, the whole fuckup parade. I’m not going to suggest that every choice I made along the way was the right one.” The laugh he inserts here is pungent enough to mistake for a cry. “But a villain, to my thinking, has to have evil intent or else a reckless and selfish disregard for consequences—and I had neither. I did the best I could with the situation I was given. No, there’s a villain here, but that wasn’t me. You see, this is what makes this such a Southern story. The villain was the past.”

  ten

  The weird aura of celebrity isn’t entirely unfamiliar to Dr. Janice Lorimar-Cuevas. Her father, Winston Lorimar, wears something of that halo, and while his celebrity is of the small-town variety, dimmed further by its literary derivation and then further by the where-are-they-now status of his reputation, she’s nevertheless witnessed its effect on people: the way its glow galvanizes and attracts them, at times as nonsensically as a porchlight entrances insects. More acutely she’s seen it on the infrequent occasions when one of her father’s famous friends would visit Greenwood—the actor Morgan Freeman, she recalls, used to drive down once or twice a year from his home in the north Delta to talk books with her father, and Winston often groused about their meals being interrupted by fawning, camera-brandishing white women “who’d never thought to speak to a black man before except to say how tightly they wanted the roses pruned.”

  Still, Janic
e found herself astonished by the commotion Cameron roused when, on November 14, he entered the Half Shell Oyster House, in downtown Gulfport, to meet her for lunch. Awaiting him at a table providing her a view of the door, she was able to track the reactions whirling through the restaurant as he made his way toward her: the double takes, the sidelong glances; the leaned-in whispers across tables (“You see who that is?”); swift tilts of the head or chin employed as directional signals; and, on a few diners, brute and undisguised staring, as though a giraffe were ambling through. Even the busboy refilling her water glass froze tableside to watch Cameron walk in, and he remained that way, immobilized by fame’s radiation, as Cameron found Janice and sat down across from her. The effect was so striking, in fact, that Janice noted it to Cameron even before greeting him. “Well you just got recognized all to pieces,” she said.

  “Do what?” he said.

  “You don’t notice everyone staring at you?”

  “Aw yeah, that shit.” He waved a hand opaquely. “We was at Hardee’s yesterday, in the drive-through, and about half the folks work there all crammed in the window to wave at me, all that stuff. Couple them taking pictures. They got this donation can hanging off the side there, you know—for some charity, I didn’t look which one. But Tanya tells me to put a dollar in there and then the whole window starts clapping and flashing me the thumbs-up sign like I…hell, I don’t know what. Like I just pulled a pit bull off a baby.”

  “That has to feel,” she said, “incredibly bizarre…”

  “Father Ace says it ain’t me they’re staring at, it’s God.” A thoughtful frown emerged on his forehead. “That’s how he says I’m supposed to think about it anyway.”

  “Ah, right,” Janice said. “The detective priest. He’s come to see me twice.”

  “He’s putting me in to the Vatican for a miracle.”

  “He’s very…” The word cued on her tongue was aggressive—that’s how she’d described Father Ace to her husband. But now she chose, “…energetic.” While Janice and the priest’s first meeting had been cordial, their second had borne an interrogative tension, with Father Ace making no effort to conceal his agenda: The explanation he needed for Cameron’s recovery was the absence of any explanation, which was precisely what Janice possessed yet which she felt reluctant to offer. She knew what he intended to pour into that empty vessel. Nap, for his part, found her account of the ordeal faintly amusing. “Not everyone gets deposed by God,” he told her.

  “Father’s downright hyper,” Cameron replied. “He drives me pretty hard.”

  Janice was curious what he meant by this but found herself distracted by Cameron’s appearance—something about it seemed different to her, or maybe multiple things were just fractionally different: cleaner, sharper…something. “You look good,” is how she summarized it to him.

  “I been working out a little bit,” he said, not quite as aw-shucksily, she thought, as the pre-recovery Cameron might’ve responded. “Tried running last week but I still don’t got the legs for it. They’re gone after about a quarter mile.”

  Continuing to assess him, she said, “You look like you’ve put some weight on, too. Healthy weight.”

  “They got this catering deal, you know, for the TV crew? You can pretty much get anything you want whenever. Taquitos, these little biscuits, must be ten different kinds of ham.”

  Unable to suspend her scrutiny, she moved her focus now to his clothing. Janice couldn’t recall having ever seen him in anything but a T-shirt, but today he was wearing a charcoal chambray hoodie—an urbane swerve. She complimented it.

  “Yeah, that was weird,” he said, with two fingers flecking the fabric in much the way Janice’s brothers used to pick at their Easter suits. “They measured me the day they arrived and then two days later come all these FedEx boxes filled with clothes. Something about how they can’t have logos and stuff on TV. You should see what they did to the house, too. Painted every room because white walls don’t look good onscreen. Tanya even told them about Mama’s old porcelain collection and a week later comes this glass case filled with porcelain animals. They’re all the wrong animals—Mama just did dolphins and coast stuff, y’know, lighthouses and shit—and now there’s like rhinos and kittens in there. But it got Tanya crying anyhow.”

  “So how is it?” Janice leaned in with a small-talk smile. “Life on camera?”

  The waiter interrupted and they paused to order. Meeting a patient for lunch was unprecedented—lunch itself is a rarity for Janice; nibbling a protein bar between patient consults is as close as she usually comes—though seeing a patient outside the office is not. Janice helps coordinate the hospital’s home-based primary care program, and her in-home consults, she says, make up her most rewarding time as a physician. A smirk crawls onto her face when she admits how baffling this would sound to her med-school professors at Pitt, who’d tried steering her away from primary care, the Peace Corps of medical fields, toward the elevated realm of specialty medicine. The glory (and money) in medicine, they told her, was in doing things to people, not for them. But she was never interested in parts; she was interested in patients.

  “My father’s ideal of a physician, which I might’ve absorbed a little bit,” she says by way of explanation, “was Doc Woodson in Greenwood, long dead. He zipped to his house calls on an old German motorcycle and expected to be served a slice of pie after his examinations. My father tells this story—who knows if it’s true?—about Doc Woodson treating a boy with a broken jaw. The story was that a mule kicked him but somehow Doc Woodson figured out the boy’s father had hit him. So he heads outside, finds the father, and whacks him in the jaw with a hickory stick. Then he sets the father’s broken jaw but tells him next time he won’t. My father called that the pinnacle of a medical house call: treat the injury, treat the cause.”

  The contours of this lunch meeting (Janice objects to calling it a consult), however, seeped outside the normal lines. She’d taken a personal day from the hospital and was afterward heading to the Tulane Medical Library in New Orleans to research glial scar histology. She’d declined to log the meeting with the hospital. No one—especially not Dr. Turnbull—was aware of it. This was on her time.

  “Life on camera, yeah,” Cameron was saying. “Not sure I reckoned what a job it’d be. Like, six in the morning till six at night. And them telling me what I’m doing that day. Like, today you’re going shopping with your sister, or you’re going to play football with some school kids. They won’t let me smoke or drink beer neither. Not on camera, anyhow. Says it ain’t in character. But they let Tanya do it. Hell, they open beers for her.”

  “They’ve called me, you know,” Janice said of the show’s producers. “A lot, actually.”

  “Yeah, I heard,” said Cameron, averting his eyes. Scott T. Griffin had been urging him to issue a personal plea to Janice to appear on the show. “You don’t want to be on TV?”

  “Well, that’s up to Public Affairs, and no, they’re not keen on it,” she said. “But, honestly? I don’t really have any interest in being on TV. Of course my father was a writer so TV was always sort of the enemy in our house. Just watching an episode of Friends, I mean, that was like betraying the Western canon.”

  “Huh,” Cameron responded. He sipped Coca-Cola through a straw. “I used to make all these movies when I was a kid, me and this friend,” he told her, so sheepishly that Janice felt he was confessing something. “Dressing up like spies and filming all this crazy stuff by the bayou back of his house. That was a lot more fun than the filming I’m doing now.”

  “I’ll bet it was,” she said, with the flatly encouraging tone of a psychiatrist listening while making notes, which is more or less what she was doing in her head. A theatrical bent in childhood was probably, of course, just that: one bend in a life that, like everyone’s, contained many. But it suggested, or maybe suggested, that the spotlight Cameron was entering
was not entirely alien to him. Perhaps just idly and childishly, and so long ago as to be meaningless, but he’d once aspired to an existence onscreen. “Huh,” she said.

  “They wanted to come along today,” he told her. “The producers.”

  “I’m glad they didn’t, Cameron. This is sort of…off the record. I just wanted—well, I guess I just wanted to see how you’re coping with everything. You know, up there, in your head. I—”

  She saw an unmistakable pall of disappointment drape his face.

  “What?” she asked him.

  “That’s why you wanted to see me?”

  “Yeah, just to catch up—I’m sorry, did I…”

  “I guess I just had it in my head that you might have some news for me.”

  “News?”

  “About what happened. About why I’m walking.”

  “Oh no,” Janice said, and cringing with guilt she reached a hand across the table. “I’m so sorry if I gave you that impression. I wouldn’t have—I would’ve called you into the office if—ugh. I’m sorry.”

  “Naw, it ain’t a big deal,” he mumbled, not quite convincingly. “Reckon I just got it in my head wrong.”

  “I haven’t stopped investigating,” she assured him. “In fact we’ve forwarded your case up to a VA research lab in Rhode Island that works on neurorestoration. And I’ve been looking into every angle I can think of.” Stung by his disappointment, and wanting to further assure him of her commitment, she divulged how she’d recently discovered a seventy-year-old case similar to his.