Dan Wakefield - Selling Out - A Novel

He had to tell Jane about turning down Al’s request to come visit, since he knew she’d find out sooner or later. Naturally, she didn’t understand.

“I’m not turning my back on my best friend, I’m not doing anything like that,” Perry tried to explain. “It’s just that he wouldn’t understand what I’m doing now, not because he’s a jerk, for God sake, he’s the most perceptive, brightest guy I know, but he’s—well, dammit, he’s a civilian .”

“Like me,” said Jane.

“I didn’t say that.”

“But it’s true, isn’t it?”

“Even if it is, it doesn’t mean I love you any less.”

“I know what it means,” Jane said.

Perry figured anything else he might say would only get him in deeper. He went to the bedroom to study a script.

“We’ll hold our fire till the end,” Archer commanded his men. He was bent forward over the wheel in determination, driving at breakneck speed through the high hairpin curves that led up out of the Valley and on to network headquarters. Perry was bending forward, too, not only to catch Archer’s instructions over the booming sound system, but also because of the sense of urgency about this unexpected meeting. Ned Gurney was crunched onto the shelf behind the two seats of the tiny sports car, seemingly resigned if not relaxed.

“Ignorant bastards,” he murmured.

“Don’t blow your cool, don’t let them put you on the defensive,” Archer warned. “We have a beautiful script, and we’re proud of it.”

“I thought they were too,” Perry said in genuine confusion. “I thought they loved it.”

Only a few days before, word had come down through channels from Archer to Ned to Perry (the writer being by tradition the last to hear any vital information, even about what he had written) that Amanda LeMay was simply gaga over Perry’s first hour script to lead off the series, and even more amazing, though of course less verifiable, was the rumor from higher on high that Max Bloorman had scanned it himself in New York and was not displeased!

“This is purely an E. and A. problem,” Archer said.

Over the blast of the music, Perry thought he heard T. and A. Like any other sophisticated citizen who followed the media’s inside accounts of the entertainment world, he knew that T. and A. was television code for tits and ass, a gross shorthand for the kind of show that appealed to the most base instinct of viewers by the most flamboyant possible display of the female anatomy. He understood that although one network in particular was most renowned for its belief in the foolproof lure of the T. and A. factor, there were executives at each network who felt that the addition of that lure could strengthen a weak show, just as there were some like Harry Flanders who thought that cars were the answer for bolstering any drama.

“My God!” he shouted in genuine shock. “You mean they want us to put in more tits and ass?”

Both Archer and Ned looked at Perry with alarm, as if they feared he had taken leave of his senses.

“Well,” he said defensively, “isn’t that what T. and A. means?”

Archer dialed down the musical volume.

“Not T. and A.,” he said patiently, “ E . and A.”

“What’s that?” Perry asked, his mind reeling at the possible meaning of this new bit of TV esoterica. Elbows and Armpits? Elastic and Action?

“E. and A.,” Archer said patiently, “is the network Department of Ethics and Attitudes.”

“The censors,” Ned explained.

Perry felt like a real rookie. Of course he knew about the network censors, but so far he had been shielded from them. There was really very little of a controversial nature in the pilot story of his innocent young married couple, and the few issues of censorship had to do with the language, which Archer gently explained to him had to be a bit toned down for television. Perry had been realistically agreeable about removing a few harsh bits of dialogue to satisfy the censors, a couple of “Screw yous” and “Up yourses” that would have been perfectly OK in the pages of a magazine but would not do for the ears of millions on national television.

He also knew that although every network had its own censors, they were never officially called censors, which smacked of totalitarianism, of un-American practice. Rather, each network, as part of its keeping of the public trust, maintained boards or departments devoted to the protection of what it conceived to be society’s accepted standards of morality, taste, and behavior. Each was called by a lofty title appropriate to this high function, such as, at Perry’s network, the Department of Ethics and Attitudes.

“But what could they possibly object to?” Perry asked. “We don’t even have any ‘damns’ or ‘hells’ in this script.”

“Don’t even try to outguess them,” said Ned.

“And don’t try to challenge them,” Archer warned. “Our best strategy is to see the problem from their point of view and try to accommodate them without losing any story point we feel is crucial.”

Before Perry could inquire as to how such a feat might be accomplished, Archer turned the music back up to an even higher volume.

Stu Sturdivant, chairman of the network’s Department of Ethics and Attitudes, was a warm, jovial man in his fifties, the sort who in Perry’s childhood would have been described in the terms of his father’s generation as a hail-fellow-well-met. He wore a plaid sport coat, bow tie, bright slacks, cordovan shoes, and argyle socks.

“How about those Dodgers?” Sturdivant asked the group with a shake of the head and a wide grin, and though Gurney was obviously at as much of a loss about the local team’s baseball fortunes as was Perry, Archer quickly responded with arcane talk about RBI’s and ERA’s, matching Sturdivant cliche for cliche as they batted back and forth observations on so-and-so’s performance at “the hot corner” and the relative strengths of the “wings” of various starting “hurlers” of skipper Lasorda’s “mound staff.”

Perry joined Ned in nodding and grinning and grunting through this seemingly interminable “warm-up,” till finally Sturdivant lit up a Dutch Masters cigar, and, amid billowing clouds of smoke, came to the point of his complaint about the script.

“We don’t mind him jumping on her bones in that last scene,” he said. “What the hell, the guy may be some kind of college teacher, but he’s no pansy. Am I right?”

“You called it exactly, Stu,” Archer said approvingly.

“Our hero’s a regular guy,” Ned said, nodding.

“When does he ‘jump’ anywhere?” Perry asked in genuine confusion.

Archer slapped him on the knee in a seemingly friendly manner, then added a sharp squeeze that meant, keep quiet.

“You know, after the argument, they make up, and he ‘jumps on her bones.’”

“The lovemaking scene,” Ned whispered.

“Oh! Sure, right, you mean that ,” Perry said heartily.

He tried not to grimace, pasting a manly smile on, trying to black out the mental image of a pervert pouncing on a skeleton.

“It’s not what they do,” Sturdivant continued, “it’s where they do it.”

The hour script was a low-key, familiar story of the married couple’s arguments over money that led to a cooling of sexual ardor, that were finally resolved over a “budget meal” so funny that it broke the ice of the couple’s hostility and led to a sudden, loving rekindling of passion right there on the kitchen floor. Of course the scene only suggested it would end in lovemaking, there wasn’t even any nudity, but it was clear that they couldn’t wait nor did they want to wait to get to anyplace more comfortable.