by John Varley
* * *
May 1 (King City Temple)
The April "Flack" numbers as compiled by the Trends Research Department of the Latitudinarian Church are as follows:
TITLE AAS Last Month Last Year
1. The Gideon Peppy Show 84.7 1 1
2. Skunk Cabbage 82.2 2 28
3. Admiral Platypus 81.8 3 5
4. Barney's Boulevard 75.0 4 8
5. Scoop the Poop 67.6 10 -
* * *
Skunk Cabbage retains its precarious grip on the number-two slot for the second month, edging the Admiral by only a few hundred thousand viewings. The big story is still the meteoric rise of Poop, CEW's replacement for the unlamented What the Fuck? which early this year fell into the becalmed straits of the likes of Sparky and His Gang, and now survives only on the marginal sales of back numbers. And so what if the carpers claim "Poop" is really nothing but recycled "Fuck?" As Chairman Bigbird pointed out to the critics, "Food is nothing but recycled poop, isn't it? What's the big deal?"
Not so dramatic but still cause for some concern among the mandarins of Sentry/Sensational is the continuing slippage of the Peppy Show, a five-month phenom that's been slow and steady and shows no signs of having reached bottom. Asked if this might harbing an eventual end to the six-year stranglehold TGPS has held on first place, Peppy replied: "We always lose some numbers when we head into summer. It ain't got me crapping in my drawers."
More likely to put skid marks in his skivvies is the dismal rise of Sparky from thirty-five to thirty-one after a full year in production. Staff changes don't seem to have done the trick, though some observers point out that most of the small gain the show has posted came in the last two months, with the introduction of two new and somewhat more interesting regular characters: Inky Tagger and Arson E. Blazeworthy. Press releases trumpet that a series of new faces will soon transform the Gang. The word from here: Don't bet the farm.
* * *
from Howdy Doody
The Trade Mag of Kid-vid
6/30/58
"Boogers and Snot"
by Summerfall Winterspring
"This is Crimea River," says Polly, rather diffidently, as she pushes a sheet of drawing paper in my direction. It is a pencil sketch of a girl who has cried so much the tears have carved massive Mississippi deltas into her face. Catfish could feed at the bottoms of these tributaries. Her hair is disheveled and she is wringing a bucketful of water from the handkerchief she twists in her clawlike hands.
"And what does she do?" I ask. Polly turns to Sparky, seated on her left.
"Not much," Sparky says. "She complains a lot."
"She's had a hard life?" I venture.
"Not so bad. She's a whiner. She's like a sponge. If you get around her she'll take up all your time and all your energy. She'll drain you dry, like a vampire, then she'll find somebody else to complain to."
"Tell her about..." Polly pauses, then gestures to Sparky. "You tell it, Spark."
"Well, when she cries, pretty soon you start crying, too. You can't help it, it's like pepper up your nose. Pretty soon you're bawling like a baby."
"It's infectious," I suggest, hoping to help.
"Yeah. That's it."
Something in his voice alerts me and I look up at him in time to see a glimmer in his eye. I am being humored, I realize. He knows precisely what word to use to describe Crimea's tears. But his face gives nothing away. Only the eyes have that glint of mischief. I won't patronize him again.
I have found the secret wellspring behind Sparky and His Gang. Without even knowing I was looking for it, I have stumbled onto the real reason Sparky's Gang has suddenly climbed from the low twenties in AAS to a surprising fifteenth place in the monthly Flack ratings.
I claim no great reportorial skills in this. Sometimes you're just lucky.
It seemed like good luck at the time to be assigned the Sparky beat. Mission: visit the set and the story conferences once or twice a month, produce a diary of the progression of the show. Who wouldn't have thought it a plum? A new series in development from Gideon Peppy, the man who set the current record in first-place finishes, who can apparently do no wrong? Sparky's Gang had monster hit written all over it.
Who knew?
Actually, by the time the show was ready to air, a lot of us in the entertainment press corps had a pretty good idea. There's a stink that attaches itself to a show that's in trouble, and it ain't the sweet smell of success. Sparky and His Gang had that aroma from the first day of shooting, a day I had the dubious good luck to witness. On the surface everything looked fine. It was the normal circus atmosphere of hurry up and wait, the usual snags that came from crews not yet used to working together. One can usually assume that by the third or fourth episode these little misunderstandings, squabbles, and comic traffic jams will have sorted themselves out, and the production staff will be running in as near an approximation of a well-oiled machine as a television series in production ever gets.
But just below the surface serious trouble was brewing. Brewing? More like seething. This ship was rudderless, Captainless, and lacked a compass. Directions would come from somewhere to alter this or that detail of the set. Two hours later it needed to be altered again. Grips started pools to see how long a new production designer would last, and the times were sometimes measured in hours, not days. It was easy enough to discover these things. Everybody on the set was talking about it. But nobody knew what was going on higher up.
A few weeks later I sat in on my first story conference. Sometimes a writer is handed a metaphor on, as it were, a silver platter. That was the case with Gideon Peppy's famous conference table. Perhaps you've heard of long-ago peace conferences where step one was to determine the size and shape of the table where two groups of people who hated each other's guts could sit and rationally discuss their differences. Peppy's table was a perfect barometer of what was going on with Sparky and His Gang. You could have drawn a wide red stripe across the width of the table and called it the Demilitarized Zone. At the south end sat John Valentine, father of little "Sparky" Valentine, and Sparky himself. At the north end sat Gideon Peppy and everybody else.
The dynamic at the south end was obvious: a father and his son. At the north end some barnyard politic was in operation, its causes not evident to the outsider, but its effects painfully obvious. Simply put, those most in favor with Mr. Peppy sat at his elbow, ready to osculate his rectum should he take a notion to bend over. Beside these high Priests of Peppy sat more ordinary acolytes, legs poised to leap at the shout of "Frog!" Then in the hinterlands, sometimes almost on the DMZ itself, were the fuckups, the doghoused gazing hollow-eyed at the feasting to the north, pathetically eager to scramble after any morsel that dropped from the master's table. The temptation was strong to fashion pointy hats for them out of foolscap.
But no matter how far out of favor one fell, one was never seated to the south of the invisible red line. That was clearly enemy territory.
The view from John Valentine's end of the table was a compact version of da Vinci's Last Supper.
John Barrymore Valentine. Sparky Valentine. The fourth and fifth generations of an acting family that can trace its lineage back to Old Earth. John is the eldest of three siblings, and without a doubt the most talented.
You know a lot about his brother, Edwin Booth Valentine. What's that? You say you've never heard of him? Try Ed Ventura. He is the black sheep of the family. The father, Marlon Brando Valentine, was a thespian of the old order—a very old order—in that he felt acting should be done on the stage. Movies, television, were barely arts at all, and their needs could be served entirely by computer-generated imagery. "Movies are a director's medium," he has said. "Actors are for the theater." John followed in his father's footlights, er, footsteps, but Edwin chose to exploit his good looks and screen presence to become a Movie Star, a Matinee Idol, a Celluloid Casanova. Everything his father hated. Old Marlon kicked him out of the family and disowned him—a real laugh, since Marlo
n passed his days in genteel poverty, and John... well, we'll get to that. The Valentine brothers had a younger sister, Sarah Bernhardt Valentine, but nothing is known about her. My calls seeking to interview Ed Ventura about his family were not returned.
John Valentine is such a charming man, so handsome, articulate, witty, so full of amusing stories, that it takes several meetings before you realize what a monster he is.
Don't get me wrong; Gideon Peppy is a monster, too. But you expect that from a man who has clawed his way to the top in a cutthroat business. He would cheerfully admit it. Peppy doesn't pretend to be a nice guy. It's all right out there in front with Peppy. What you see is what there is.
It would be easy to compare John Valentine with a well-known character from the historical musical stage: Rose Louise Hovick from Gypsy. The analogy fails at several points. Rose was not talented herself; John Valentine without a doubt is a major talent. I saw his Macbeth fifteen years ago, and recalling it can still give me chills. Gypsy Rose Lee's talents were, shall we say, limited. Sparky Valentine at the age of eight shows me more possibilities than any five movie stars I can name. The kid is awesome. But most importantly, compared to John Valentine, Rose Louise Hovick is easygoing. Rose wanted Gypsy to succeed where she herself had failed, or never had a chance. John Valentine is determined to mold his son into his own image. He doesn't so much want Sparky to be his vicarious ego on the stage; he wants Sparky to be him.
This is bound to lead to trouble. It is heartbreaking to watch Sparky on the set. When the cameras are rolling, he is vibrantly alive. He is Sparky, that devil-may-care freebooter with the heart of gold, setting out to right all the wrongs of the world. When the director yells cut! it all goes away. He enfolds it somewhere inside himself and he waits. He waits with seemingly infinite patience as his father and Gideon Peppy go at it hammer and tongs, unfailingly polite to each other, setting up a current in the atmosphere that has made hardened stagehands pale with apprehension. It seems to affect Sparky not at all. He waits. He listens. When the command to roll 'em is given, he acts. Before that, Sparky exists only as a glint in little Ken Valentine's eye. It is probably the only way the boy can keep from getting crushed between the massive egos of Peppy and his father.
So what has happened? The setup was and is a formula for disaster, a prophecy which fulfilled itself for the first year of production. The only reason I can see for Sparky and His Gang's continuance during those lean months was Gideon Peppy's reluctance to admit he'd come a cropper. Yet, in the last months, the show has begun to attract some attention.
Let's return to that conference table, shall we? The time is several months after our first visit. Various of G. Peppy's toads are perched on different toadstools around the table, but these are matters which could only concern the toads. They are unimportant to us. Most interesting is where John Valentine is seated. Instead of his throne of opposition down in the south forty, John is occupying a stool almost in the Demilitarized Zone!
What has happened? I don't think John understands this consciously, but some part of him does, because his air of smug assurance is getting a little thin. He raises his voice, almost shouts. He can't quite bring himself to actually sit with the rest of the creative staff, but it is clear that he would like to. Instead of his endless stream of barbs, his obstructionism—sometimes for no reason other than his loathing of Peppy—has been replaced by suggestions he clearly believes could improve the show. These are, of course, politely ignored ("We'll sure think about that, John, yes sir!"). The last thing a bunch of writers and a producer want in a story conference is some damn actor.
Of course! Sparky is a flop! Before, John didn't give a flying fuck about the project. It was plain to me that the only reason he and his son were there at all was the chance of some easy money. (Or the only reason John was there, at any rate. I think Sparky might have seen it a little differently, but it's hard to tell with Sparky, who plays his cards very close to the vest. God knows how John was convinced to join the enterprise in the first place, given his antipathy to television. It must have taken some really masterful arm twisting.) But Sparky Valentine—and through him, John Valentine—cannot possibly fail in an acting assignment, even one as menial as this. The low ratings are inexplicable. Sparky's doing a bang-up job. Therefore, the material must be improved. John is getting more and more involved in improving it, whether he knows it or not.
Fast-forward another several months. The Valentine end of the table is now being anchored by Sparky alone, unless you count Polly, who should be classed as a noncombatant, possibly a camp follower, given her obvious crush on Sparky, which he may or may not realize. The two sit on booster seats down there in the cold, away from the creative warmth of Peppy's fires. With them, sometimes, is the Equity rep and a tutor, but the children are able to buffalo these innocents with such ease they are gone most of the time, on one errand or another. John Valentine? Well, he camps out miserably in the DMZ, where we saw him last, but instead of his usual pointed barbs his infrequent words are starting to sound sort of... well, grouchy. And is that the smell of alcohol on his breath? A smudge of cocaine around his nose? Some people are ill-equipped to deal with windfalls of money. One never knows who these people are until the bonanza has struck, and up to this point in his life John Valentine has seldom had a pot to piss in nor a window to fling it from. Now, even with a flop show, the money is pouring in. Dangerous, John.
I can't keep skirting this issue forever. The fact is, John has an extensive criminal record. When times were lean he has been willing to lend his acting talents to unscripted roles, to street improvisations—in short, to what the police call the "long con." That's what he did time for, anyway, though I've been told his skills at the Pigeon Drop and the Spanish Lottery are considerable as well. He exhibits no shame about this, doesn't mind discussing it with the press. It's all part of some extremely wonky political worldview I will not bore you with. (That way I don't have to pretend to understand it.)
Even more alarming is his temper. How he has held it in check thus far during the gestation of Sparky is a matter between him and his probation officer. I'll only mention here that he has barely scraped his way out of numerous assault charges, usually against directors and producers, but occasionally with his fellow actors.
It takes no great insight to see what has been hobbling Sparky and His Gang. Part of it is the clash of wills between Gideon and John, a dislike so intense that Peppy has sometimes done things he should have known were stupid, simply to spite Valentine.
