by Mike Miller
What a spectacular, soul-satisfying catastrophe! The financial equivalent of an artist’s wet dream, an anarchist’s heaven: the slate wiped totally clean. Joe said it himself: “I made a mistake, but you know, it was honorable. It was a heartfelt mistake.” This with the heartbroken outsized expression of an abandoned teddy bear. “Heartfelt.” Thumping his fist against his barrel chest.
At that point, this being a year or so after I came to the area, Joe ceded control of the business to his son George, a slightly more refined and better-educated version of his dad, a boy who’d been brought up rich but turned out modestly intelligent, energetic, and socially adept. Like his father, George was a little too inclined to trust his own instincts, particularly regarding women, not that that matters here. Essentially cautious, he remained detached from the ruthless business of radio, preferring to exercise control from a remote executive distance. So George carefully reviewed his options and wisely retreated to a Top 40 format with a heavy disco emphasis, adhering to popular versions of the same safe strategy clear through the seventies and eighties, cultivating a solid stable of familiar DJs. Keeping his cool, never anxiously rushing to overtake the zeitgeist or beat the competition.
And basically that’s how it went, packaged and saccharine, until the collapse of civilization into electronic media chaos, and of course you openly welcomed the future but everyone knew it was only the beginning and soon enough you’d be left behind. The forced enthusiasm disguised a deep sense of cosmic betrayal. Conceding his ignorance of a radically evolving industry without at all relinquishing his firm business school faith, George invited in the first of a series of outside experts. Upheaval signals opportunity, they explained, pasting that Chinese proverb over the new home page and effecting substantial cutbacks, and it more or less worked out because at that point the economy was still playing by the rules.
At the instigation of these experts PHA’s already unthreatening format disintegrated into a full-out barrage of happiness, an unabashedly feel-good stationality continually refined through online audience participation: all your favorite songs plus the unembarrassed thrift of that canned music overnight. And eventually, of course, there was Ruth, such a quintessential Philadelphia personality returned from Florida of all foreign locales, clever but still obviously nice and level-headed and open-minded just like us.
Now through all of those transformations PHA held tight to its sense of tradition, operating as a family firm in every sense of the term, employing at one time or another practically everyone’s nephew or second cousin until it would take a skilled genealogist to trace out the generations of remote relationships, never mind all the established crony cliques straight out of college. Everyone telling the identical old anecdotes, speaking a singular cant of silly incidents and former employees and summer company picnics; there was this tired swagger betraying the eternal chip on the company shoulder. George kept an actual company photo album.
Meanwhile the physical plant migrated from its dilapidated West Philadelphia birthplace to a glossy office tower out on City Line, then up to a business park in a better suburb convenient to two major malls, and now back into the city, into this trim renovation near the gracious old Academy of Music and the sprawling Kimmel Center and a whole enthusiastic host of various smaller venues and theatres with across the street the Walk of Fame, a sidewalk of inlaid tributes to the local greats: Marian Anderson and Leon Redbone, Dick Clark of course and Frankie Avalon, Jim Croce and Jerry Blavat, the Geater with the Heater. All of them.
There to recover from the latest electronic wounds, home to reclaim the populace with the lure of the local, of tradition. So PHA sat on that dedicated thoroughfare and apparently committed itself to its own destruction, continuing to democratize the industry into nothing more than a platform for listener requests, another streaming service. Energetically hurrying the technological obliteration of all obstructive intervening media, your music right there in your ears right now.
Settling in to this new, modest existence, when abruptly new rumors of instability manifested in their entirety one day like an unexpected delivery of furniture, massive and unavoidable but eventually accepted as everyday fixtures. These more recent concerns were rarely discussed but were instead automatically classified as both broad and remote, national if not global, utterly separate from ratings or advertisers or anything else manageable. But wasn’t that long over now? Occasionally someone repeated a bankruptcy rumor, whatever that meant. Well, you could stop your equally terrified supervisor for a little exploratory chat, have him actively listen but then shrug or even smile in professed unconcern. And because any open skepticism was even then decried as essentially immoral, resentment and a protective numbness continued to flourish.
Personnel adjustments were discreet and respectful, everything handled so competently it was arguably not even a matter of exigency but maybe just a small, necessary correction for the errors and excesses of long-term mismanagement. No one denied that history of informal management anymore; now it was the obvious culprit and happily it was being corrected. Initial terminations were limited to Sales and Promotion, nothing much more than a minor reshuffling on the cubicle level with very few serious shifts higher up the organizational chart. Very inconvenient emotionally, of course, with the unfortunates piling their family photos and assorted comic toys into those shameful cardboard cartons, but at least they had time for that, it wasn’t like they were being escorted directly off the premises and their souvenir mugs confiscated for general use. That was later.
A spate of retraining clarified the situation: improvement was inevitable once each employee learned to communicate effectively, maintain an accurate schedule, and bring passion and commitment to the job every single day and blah blah blah straight out of the managerial bullshit industry, despicable spiel signifying nothing except that it was mostly the employees’ fault. And so there were mandatory team games coached by self-declared experts, training sessions designed to make everyone easily replaceable, and supervised table discussions leading to predetermined conclusions. Meanwhile the on-air talent was separately schooled in the usual textbook platitudes: work with Sales, it’s good for both of you. There’s enormous unrealized value in effective contesting. Don’t neglect forward promotion. Really punch those call letters! Keep that typical listener in mind, know her like your best friend, give her a name, know her secret desires, talk right to her because that’s what comes across.
While you sat around a conference table exchanging psychobabble flash cards, indulging in conference room antics to repel catastrophe, being existentially humiliated by wishful crap that eroded the final remnants of your respect for your superiors and the world at large. But that first team of consultants was let go early and reputedly unpaid, so maybe somebody senior retained a particle of common sense.
Yet throughout this miserable transition Ruth was consistently rising in the Arbitron books, hers the name those individual diarists most often remembered, the favored personality hogging all the likeability. Meanwhile efficiently traveling that inevitable psychological progression from gratitude to entitlement. And she acquired more of a loyal following under those clouded stars than she’d managed to attract during her whole previous decade in the industry. Maybe thanks to the stress, the way it inspired her need for dramatic possibility and lent her voice this slight frisson of desperate empathy.
In short, she was important. She was being discussed behind doors with brass nameplates well before her August debacle.
“I need to touch base with her in the morning,” her listeners said, and they kept saying it even when her uncensored ramblings turned more extreme and condescending. “She centers me,” they explained with glorious illogic. People required her opinion in order to form their own. God knows she was diligently keeping that typical listener in mind, speaking to that overweight middle-aged woman with bleached hair trudging off to the cubicle or hospital or classroom or counter, longing only for dinner and some television and
a chance to be herself.
And of course there was something fatally synergistic in the way listener devotion fed on and simultaneously encouraged Ruth’s diva behavior. Not that she ever lost her professional balance on air, more that she’d always tended toward emotional misbehavior, often disgorging too much irrelevant erudition with too little prodding, boorishly insistent. Or holding onto an argument well after it was over with that unsettling intensity, or rushing in to propound a definitive, snarky opinion without forethought and then having to explain away her rather mean indiscretions in honest surprise, plunging into these laughing, baroque explanations. But all that was sporadic and reasonably controlled. That very spring she personally negotiated a respectable salary bump with George, although arguably that wasn’t difficult.
Theoretically remaining madly in love with her career path, or anyway cherishing her power: “You know how Plato says about when modes of music change, the fundamental laws of the state change too? Well, in the end music is about morality.” Finding affirmation even in the most prosaic listener feedback, the Facebook comments, the intimate sidewalk confidences and devotee tweets. For Ruth it was all predestined: how else explain the marvelous ease with which she’d attained this ideal platform out on the cutting edge?
Except it wasn’t, and what’s more like her audience Ruth preferred the sentimental; she had no taste for exploratory, mind-freeing jazz, for the demands of classical or for unregulated hard rock and rap. It was purely intellectual approval that found her expounding on the power and cultural significance of it all, hands flying and face alight, dropping names while secretly envisioning herself a character out of an MGM musical when it wasn’t Amazing Grace. She had Bon Jovi and the swinging Sinatra on her phone, Elton John and Billy Joel and hits from Coldplay and U2 and Pink but not their complete albums. Such commonplace tastes, all those anthems: that’s the word. When did we start thinking in terms of anthems, earworms for the clinically depressed?
Granted music mattered to her, really mattered, infiltrating her bloodstream with confounding intentions and facts, making it virtually impossible to sort out the self-aggrandizing from the reality, the actual from the carefully reconstructed history. “I remain a dedicated feminist.” Mysteriously conveying a past of hairy underarms and floppy breasts and no make-up, possibly back during the sixties. “I carried my sign and I still do.” But press her for specifics and she got vague and overcomplicated.
“Oh, back when I was a kid, you know. When politicking was about sitting on the floor in a storefront headquarters, making endless phone calls, you know? Favorable or unfavorable or leave me alone.” With that practiced comical sideways glance, “My God how those ward leaders could lie!”
This was on JFK one bright afternoon, the glare bouncing down from the office towers and Ruth striding head down as usual, hands deep in her pockets. She paused abruptly so I could catch up, forcing an irritated stream of pedestrians to part and flow around us. “Although even back when I was an unquestioning Democrat I had qualms about Liberalism: the automatic arrogance and the prerogative to make fun of people like they were ignorant and didn’t matter because obviously the future was on our side.”
Moving ahead again slowly. “I’m ashamed I never spoke up, if you want to know the truth.”
Whatever Ruth’s larger ambitions – I’m guessing syndication and television what with her basing her life on Ruby Keeler dancing on a giant typewriter – they lingered untested although never formally abandoned either, merely put on hold in favor of her intoxicating new status as half a celebrity couple. Or perhaps she was secretly more comfortable playing pap and the marriage excused that tacit renunciation, temporarily protecting her from any risky career moves. What I know is, she outright confiscated Thom: looking out triumphantly through his eyes, incorporating his preferences in beer and books. And not gradually as most married couples do but from the start, even mimicking his gentle mockery, his expressive raised brow. I’m not exaggerating here, and I felt her overnight transformation egregious and disturbing.
We found seats on one of the stone benches in front of the Comcast plaza, part of a lunchtime crowd relishing the sunshine. Ruth absently checked her phone for about the fourth time in the past hour; she was still intent on rearranging the emotional events of her youth and I was pretending I cared.
“You know, I always saw things from the position of the responsible party, I automatically thought of myself as the one who had to pay the price.” Turning to look me in the face, eyes too wide and sincere, pushing back a clump of damp hair, checking out my reaction.
We met like this only a few times but I was already tired of having to study that tense, self-involved profile, playing the farce of brilliant subject and admiring biographer. For one thing, it all sounded a bit stale and rehearsed. Never once did she convince me of her ultimate excellence, although God knows that was her intention and I allowed her ample opportunity. She remained a phony on the lookout for shortcuts and glory.
“Anyway politics is just impossible anymore. It’s so vicious, it makes me physically ill.”
We walked down from 21st Street and around onto Market Street, past one of those gaps between huge commercial buildings where habitués gather at tiny outdoor tables, clerical staff aping sophistication. There was this metal sculpture there: outsize, elongated nude family figures, two parents lifting their children above their heads and presumably above their own limitations with every muscle of their perfect young bodies. On eastward past where there’s this gigantic mural of a vulva hovering over a hotel.
Ruth’s success in radio was entirely due to her own natural talent; she had the determination required to dominate those precious morning hours, that one remaining refuge of personality and music combined. And she had the proper guise, this persona that allowed her to be the woman she pretended to be in real life, always appropriately amiable, original, gossipy, caring, grave, and informed. All that supported by genuine intelligence, expertise, and professionalism, and until recently a beneficial ability to focus on the local or individual and ignore anything even vaguely controversial.
“Right before Thanksgiving. Wasn’t that fucking nice?” An afternoon that found Ruth striding in from lunch to confront an atmosphere as thick as gelatin, everyone numbly minding their own business. “I was getting coffee and Leslie came in and told me what was happening.” Leslie being a massively overweight, nicely sensible young woman from News and Public Affairs given to bright, stylish outfits and serious religion; she handled update breaks and hosted an intelligent Sunday morning interview program.
“They went by department, asking groups back to the small conference room. Leslie, Ruth, and some restless, avid others soft-voiced there in the kitchen, counting up the known casualties: six from Marketing and Promotions, six from Sales, five support people. Jeff the IT guy who Leslie said set up the television on 9/11. Glen from News who started out as an undergrad intern with old Joe himself, that teenager in the photo album painting the walls of some other new office. Energetic, incisive Brian, a natural leader who’d brought in two of his college friends. So many complex fraternal networks and in-law bonds cut without consideration, twenty-three members of the self-proclaimed family business deciding to seek other opportunities. Everything handled so expertly, too, with nothing of the destructive hysteria of those ancient individual terminations for cause, with no humane interval for communal grief.
“Which is to say, I realize it was perfectly ethical, in fact ethically required. But it was just so fucked up anyway.”
When in came the next host of designated saviors, degreed executives all, trained management professionals utterly unfamiliar with the industry. First Jenny Hare, General Sales Manager reputedly out of Wharton, a tiny, chic woman of fifty-odd with sleekly coifed, prematurely white hair, classic silk suits, and proper unobtrusive heels. Ruth discovered her sitting behind the bare desk of a newly vacated office and stopped short, hand on the opened door, to offer a gracious welcome.
“I know it can be a bit confusing, but I’m excellent at answering questions if you have any.”
“Thanks, I’ll keep that in mind.” Bestowing a superior’s dismissive smile and gazing back down at her desk.
Hunh.
As her first public act, Jenny called an informal meeting for all staff and management out on the larger cubby floor, comically climbing up on a desk for visibility and holding up her right hand. “I am making a pledge to you. There will be transparency. There will be accountability.” Taking her time to face them nearly one by one.”
“She impressed me as incredibly competent and intelligent.” Ruth said, leaving the door open to collaboration if not friendship. But Jenny, it developed, shared her inside jokes and insightful intimacies exclusively with the new Program Director, Rick Stanley. With whom, it was known, she shared a corporate history that unfortunately culminated in both of them blameless but at large, flotsam of a submerged advertising agency in a Baltimore suburb. Office spouses, then, examining everyone from their guarded joint viewpoint, conferring together privately often right there in the corridor or else with a cheery head poked round a door. Jenny politely commandeered Sara, George’s middle-aged, ginger-haired personal assistant, a prudent, middle-aged suck-up.
“So they’re constantly effing flaunting their crappy Lean Six Sigma jargon in front of the poor common people like no one’s ever heard of it before and this worries no one?”
Consider Stanley a slightly superior version of every competently raised and adequately educated professional manager with collared knit shirt neatly tucked into khakis, only marginally more observant and determined than the common specimen. He had a surprisingly sharp gray-blue gaze that came at you from an angle, below or from the side, but you rarely remembered meeting it straight on, and any hint of personality tended to retreat behind a friendly, cooperative facade. A face both intelligent and passionate, with a thin nose, narrow mouth, and high cheekbones over concave cheeks; his features countered his studied normality with something austere that put one in mind of Cardinal Richelieu or an elite surgeon. He was quite tall, over six feet, and probably in his late forties, with close-cropped gray-blond hair. There was a watchfulness about him, a kind of avidity or tenseness that made you cautious and kept him from being genuinely attractive.
