Dan Wakefield - Selling Out - A Novel

“I mean with the wine,” he said.

She was holding a can of Michelob.

“I’m thirsty and hot and I feel like a beer,” she said. “Do you mind?”

“Of course not,” he said, lying.

She had never been a big beer drinker until this summer, and he secretly suspected her sudden love of the suds was not as she claimed because the heat and smog gave her a thirst that wine didn’t slake, but rather because she regarded his sudden connoisseurship of California wines as more affectation than appreciation, and refused to share his enthusiasm.

He also minded that she was wearing her old one-piece, flower-patterned swimsuit from home, instead of the brief Day-Glo spandex bikini he had bought her. If she felt her body couldn’t bear comparison with the sleek beauties on the Southern California beaches, that was understandable, but her refusal to wear the sexy bikini even in the privacy of the backyard hot tub, he took as an act of defiance, a purposeful turndown of the simple turn-on he was asking for.

“Yiii—help!” she yelled, as she edged down into the boiling waters, squinting with pain and holding her beer can aloft.

Perry tried to ignore this childish to-do, closing his eyes and taking a sip of the golden Chardonnay. He swished it around in his mouth, ruminating on the flavor, then opened his eyes.

“Is this the David Bruce eighty-one?” he asked suspiciously.

“It’s whatever you had in the fridge,” Jane said, hunkering down in the bubbling waters like some kind of refugee on the lam.

“Darling, I think that was the Simi Valley Cellars Sauvignon,” Perry said moodily.

“For all I know it was the Bob’s Bargain Basement Burgundy,” she said, belting back a swig of her Michelob.

“Never mind,” Perry said, taking a gulp of whatever the hell he was drinking.

“I didn’t mean to blame you about the ‘tap dancing,’” Jane said. “I know it must be tough on you, really, having to decide people’s fates like that, and knowing how hard they’re trying.”

“It’s the worst with the older guys,” Perry said. “I feel for them, but when push comes to shove, I find myself wanting to go with the bright young faces.”

“Why?”

“The point is, you can’t afford to be doing someone a favor out of some misguided notion of charity. Or sentiment. It’s your own ass on the line.”

“But I thought you said some of the old veterans were really good writers.”

Perry took another sip of wine and shifted a bit in the tub, trying to get a jet of water in the itchy place in his back.

“Well, you begin to wonder, though, if they’re really good, how come they’re still doing episodes of somebody else’s series?”

“You’re not exactly a boy genius yourself, darling.”

“That’s what makes it so painful when I feel myself edging away from some of these older guys.”

“Still, you find yourself doing it, huh? Going for youth?”

“Going for what’s good for the show. That’s the bottom line.”

Suddenly Jane pulled herself up from the tub and shook herself as if she were a dog drying off.

“What’s wrong?”

“Nothing. I just can’t stand being boiled alive any longer. I’m going in and read for a while.”

Perry made a grunting sound of acknowledgment and took another sip of his wine. He wondered if the mention of reading was a bit of a barb since Jane noted recently that Perry didn’t seem to have time for it any more. She went every week religiously to some intellectual bookshop on Sunset Boulevard and in addition to new novels, came home with copies of the New Republic , the Nation , sometimes even Hudson or Partisan Review . Seeing those little intellectual publications lying around on the coffee table seemed odd to Perry, as if they were artifacts of his other life back East; these magazines that seemed familiar at home struck him as exotic out here, a cultural juxtaposition, like finding the latest Good Housekeeping lying around some bazaar in Tangiers.

Of course Perry hadn’t stopped reading, he was reading just as much or maybe more than he ever had, it was just a different kind of material. In the search for writers he had read dozens, hundreds of scripts and books, and in addition to that, he was now reading everything he could get his hands on about young married couples and graduate students in order not only to get ideas for the show but to make sure that everything in “The First Year” would be authentic, real . He had even had Ned’s secretary call Washington to get all the government statistics and studies on youthful marriage and couples in grad school. He wanted every scene of his show to be not only dramatically but sociologically valid. He felt he had a mission, not merely to entertain but to inform, to raise the educational as well as the entertainment level of prime-time television in America.

He finished off his wine, set the glass on the rim of the tub, and tilted his head back. The day was not only hot but the smog was heavy, making his eyes smart and his nose burn. Such small discomforts, however, were canceled out by the fine native wine and the action of the jet-streamed water massaging his flesh. He didn’t even mind the smog, for it was like a trademark of the place; he imagined for a moment the brown film staining the sky above was like the smoke of action hanging over a battlefield and he was a general, calmly preparing for the fray, experiencing now a thrilling hint of the charred scent of triumph.

“Jack and Laurie would never go to a porno flick,” Perry explained. “They’re not prudes, they’d just find it boring, kind of beside the point.”

“Right.”

“Of course.”

“Got it.”

His writers agreed.

Of course they agreed. They were his writers. He hadn’t “created” them exactly, they were writers before he met them, but now they were working to portray his characters on his show and so they naturally deferred to his judgment. How much more responsive they were, how much more eager to understand than a roomful of questioning, carping students, always trying to trip you up!

“Do you think Jack and Laurie might ever go bowling? ” Hal Hagedorn asked, and the way he said it cracked everyone up.

Hal was clearly the prize of the group. Witty and wise, with a well-tanned, muscular body and curly blond hair, he seemed more like a California surfer-turned-actor than a writer, yet his credits included scripts for some of television’s classiest series, like “Family” and “Fame,” as well as action stuff like “Remington Steele,” sitcoms such as “One Day at a Time” and “Three’s Company,” and the big hit melodramas “Dynasty” and “Dallas.” He said he preferred to work on other people’s shows and live the good life out on the beach in Venice rather than take the responsibility and undergo the grind of a show of his own. His laid-back life-style and philosophy kept him young, for in spite of his many credits and his actual age of thirty-nine, he could have passed for a young grad student like Jack, and his ideas and dialogue were right on the mark.

It was only his experience and string of credits, though, that made him seem a more ideal writer for the show than Estelle Blau, a bubbly twenty-six-year-old housewife who had written seventeen paperback romance novels and was now attacking TV with the same energy and enthusiasm. She had just sold an original after-school special about teenagers on dialysis, as well as an episode of “Falcon Crest.”

“Bowling!” she exclaimed in response to Hal’s idea, jumping up and clapping her hands. “Oh, for sure—I know some lanes over on Melrose we could go and research it, and get a few games ourselves!”