Dan Wakefield - Selling Out - A Novel

From the half-open window above the bed where Perry lay with the phone a soft evening breeze wafted in, scented with sea air and oleander. Jane’s voice sounded so immediate and close it seemed as if she might be calling from the corner, or from a booth at the Hamburger Hamlet, yet the words she was saying, the talk of roads blocked by snow, gave Perry the weird sensation she was speaking not just from across the country but from some other world, one of those sci-fi creations of Isaac Asimov or Ursula K. LeGuin.

Nor was it only the weather she described that seemed so oddly unreal and otherworldly. The people who only a month ago were familiar figures in Perry’s daily life, the students and faculty, now seemed almost as remote, as Jane spoke their names and concerns—the books and classes, Al Cohen filling in for old Bozeman, who had suffered a mild heart attack, a basketball game canceled with Bowdoin, in Maine, because of the weather.

“I love you,” Perry said. “Are you sure you’re all right?”

Being in such different climates made him feel farther from her than he really was, gave him a bit of a panic.

“I’m fine, and I love you, too,” she assured him. “I’ll come back as soon as I can.”

That night he dreamed of searching for her over ice floes.

It wasn’t just the weather that was different in Southern California. Time was different, too.

It was faster.

Perry had imagined that, if anything, time out here at the edge of the vast Pacific, under the palm trees and constant sun, would probably be slower, lazier, than back in the brisk climate of the East. Like everyone else, Perry had read about the famous laid-back atmosphere of L.A., the mellow attitude of the natives of the region, whose casual clothes and morals were suited to the slow, sensual rhythm of surf and sun. Maybe that was true for some beach bums and bunnies, but it bore no relation to the full-throttle freeway race of show business. If Rome were the set for a TV movie, it surely would have been built in a day.

Overnight, literally, Perry’s script had been transformed from the ethereal realm of imagination to the real world of production, even before he’d finished writing the second hour.

“The First Year’s the Hardest” was not just a story any more, it was a company, with its own office. Of course the office was just another of the old, anonymous-looking motel-like buildings on the sprawling Paragon lot that happened to be vacant at the moment because the last production it sheltered was finished, either by completion or failure, leaving no trace of its character, leaving only the building, the shell, the office, ready to receive and be filled by the energy and spirit, the furniture and flesh of a new enterprise.

“The First Year’s the Hardest.”

That’s what the secretary said when she answered the phone in Ned Gurney’s office.

She said the name of Perry’s story, Perry’s show, as if it were General Motors or Lord & Taylor or Standard Oil.

As if it were real .

As if it were a regular business with typewriters and desks, secretaries and executives—and it was, it was all that.

Perry felt a little like a combination of Henry Ford and Rudyard Kipling—a literary man of action, an empire builder.

“You can pick your own office here in the building,” Ned Gurney told him, “but don’t feel you have to be here if you prefer to write back at your hotel. Whatever suits you best.”

“Oh, I think I’d prefer to be right here now,” Perry said.

Prefer, hell; you couldn’t have kept him away from the place with armed guards.

This was where it was happening, the center of the action.

He selected an office on the second floor, right above Ned’s; it was only a dingy cubicle, really, with some Salvation Army—vintage furniture, and a small window looking out on another identical building, but it seemed to Perry quite splendid. It was near a watercooler in the hall, and he could quickly run down to Ned’s office and show him the latest pages that had just come out of his typewriter. Likewise, with an interoffice buzz on his phone, Ned could summon Perry down for important consultations, as he did later that very first afternoon.

“If you have a moment, Perry, there’s someone here I’m anxious for you to meet.”

He was a round, cherubic-looking young fellow. Perry realized at once he must be Ned’s choice to play the part of Jack. He was even dressed for the part, sloppy collegiate, with baggy old jeans and a faded sweatshirt, tousled blond hair that he had to brush up from his eyes. He wasn’t precisely the person Perry had imagined for the role, but the important thing was he didn’t look like some slick Hollywood star. If anything, he looked a bit young for the part.

“Perry Moss, I’d like you to meet Kenton Spires, our director.”

The pleasant, pudgy fellow blushed and shook hands, and Perry tried to hide his shock and disappointment.

How could he be a director? He was only a kid.

“Your script is the first really brilliant piece I’ve been shown for television,” Spires said quietly.

Well, at least he was a smart kid.

Kenton had won an Obie and directed several prize-winning dramas for PBS, yet he’d been languishing out here for almost a year without getting a break because he didn’t have what Ned called “schlock time,” or commercial TV experience. But Ned made it a condition of his own involvement in “First Year” that Kenton direct the pilot, so Archer had gone out on a limb and raised hell to get the network’s reluctant approval for him. Perry was soon delighted.

As the three new colleagues continued their discussion of the project over sandwiches and beer, the young director seemed not only as civilized as Ned, but also a fellow artist, a kindred spirit; hell, a buddy. It was as if time in L.A. moved faster in professional friendships, too, like an old-fashioned film run fast forward, so that what in the ordinary pace of life and relationships would require whole years was accelerated and experienced in a matter of hours.

By the time Ned and Kenton dropped Perry off at the Marmont late that evening it seemed as if the three of them had been best friends in high school and had just got together again to produce this show.

There was a couch in the room where Perry sat in on his first casting session, an old lump of Salvation Army furniture covered with faded brown slipcovers of some tired, nubby material. He figured this must be the infamous casting couch of Hollywood legend, but the actresses reading for the part of Laurie didn’t even sit on it. Ned and Kenton sat there, while the young women stationed themselves in chairs by the window.

The faculty wives back at Haviland would have no doubt been relieved—or perhaps secretly disappointed—to find the symbolic casting couch was nonerotic and businesslike, as were the sessions themselves. After three or four readings, and the quick exchange of glances and comments afterward between Ned and Kenton, it was obvious that any other consideration than the actress’s talent and suitability as Laurie was not only irrelevant, but annoying. Had some aspiring bombshell swiveled in and performed the most erotic disrobing since Salome, the reaction would have been that it was not the sort of thing Laurie would do.

At the end of two hours and eleven readings, Ned suggested they all get on with their other work for the rest of the day and “look at more Lauries” tomorrow.

“My God,” Perry said, with a sudden sense of the neophyte’s panic, “what if we don’t find her—the right Laurie?”

“We’ll find her,” Ned told him.

Alton Saxby, the casting director, whose job was to send in a steady stream of potential Lauries until the right one was chosen, placed a reassuring hand on Perry’s shoulder.