Daniel Price - Slick

I tried that yesterday. It didn’t quite work. There was no escaping Harmony. But I appreciated the concern.

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When the nation’s hottest new victim asked the nation to leave her alone, the cynics didn’t buy it. This was the age of Jerry Springer. And Harmony Prince, like it or not, was firmly entrenched in a demographic that lined up to exploit itself on trashy vessels like his. She was a hostess dancer. A hip-hop hoochie. A low-rent ass-shaker who’d presumably bite the head off a chicken if it gave her the chance to get bleeped on somebody’s talk show.

And yet the media — the legitimate media — had been standing outside her hotel for three days, waiting for her to spill her guts. Even Jesus popped up after three days. Who the hell was this woman?

She certainly wasn’t Jesus, but through her silence, her restraint, she was rising above the pathetically low expectations of her demographic, the caricature of the lower-class black woman. How very strange that this was all engineered by the whitest of white men, an apolitical flack who gagged at every form of mass-market idealism. I wasn’t doing this for black women. I was doing it for Harmony. I wanted the world to appreciate her for more than her entertainment value. How very sad that she, of all people, resented my efforts.

I wasn’t the first high-minded artist to get caught up in his subject. I wasn’t even the first one to get caught up in Harmony. Four years ago, a progressive filmmaking duo followed her around with a camera, studying her in her natural habitat like she was an exquisite gazelle. They amassed a hundred and two hours of raw video, all of which fell into a deep legal crack once the couple split hard.

By Thursday every network was pounding at their respective doors, looking for some way, any way, to untie the Gordian knot that was keeping all that beautiful footage from being released. Then Maxina cut right through it, not only freeing the product but getting an exclusive hold on it. When I asked her how, she said, “Who cares?”

The moment I reentered my apartment, I opened the box, closed the shades, and popped in the first of the eighteen videotapes. In my state, I must have looked like a moping ex-boyfriend, losing himself in old, happy images of the woman who dumped him. There was a little of that, but mostly I was working. I held a notepad in my lap, marking the most poignant segments. I wanted to explain to the masses, in a compelling nutshell, why Harmony lied. Why she stopped lying. Why everyone should forgive her and ultimately admire her for the person she is. I had my work cut out for me, especially since I was building my case off the person she was.

Outwardly, Harmony at fifteen was little different from Harmony at nineteen. Her hair was longer. Her teeth were crooked. She had some mild acne. All to be expected. What jarred me was the vastly different way she carried herself. There was a sharp edge to her that didn’t exist anymore. This Harmony was still two years away from being mowed down in a crosswalk by a wayward police cruiser. She talked quicker. She moved quicker. I could even see her think quicker.

She also had clearer access to some very bad memories, and it showed. The more I watched her interact with people, the more I noticed a jagged edge. She was polite to her teachers, funny to her friends, even a little sexy to the boys who paid her attention (and there were more than a few), but a lot of it seemed artificially generated for the cameras. Behind the act was a thin layer of contempt that never seemed to reach the surface.

Clearly the filmmakers adored her. Since this was all rough copy, I could hear Jay and Shiela’s off-screen chatter. They’d fallen for Harmony just as hard as I did, although I wouldn’t have been as easily roped in by this version. This one was a little less than genuine. This one put her best foot forward.

Twenty hours into the footage (and eight hours into my viewing), Harmony dropped the mask. She sat on a couch in her shabby group home, drawing into a sketchpad. It was yet another maddeningly dull segment to fast-forward through, but there was something about her increasing discomfort that made me slow down and watch. She kept peeking at the camera through the corner of her eye, increasingly vexed.

“I don’t know what y’all find so interesting about this.”

“We think it says a lot about you,” replied Sheila, invisible as always.

“Yeah, well, I don’t know what you find so interesting about me.”

Now Jay chimed in. “Don’t sell yourself short. You’re pretty remarkable.”

I rolled my eyes. So did Harmony. “Why? Because I’m less fucked up than I should be?”

“You’re a girl who grew up in a culture of violence and abuse—”

“I’m a black girl who grew up in Inglewood,” she countered. “And you only calling me ‘remarkable’ because I don’t got a pimp, two kids and a crack habit.”

I laughed. The filmmakers didn’t.

“Harmony, we admire you for the things you do have. You’re intelligent. You’re talented. You’re affable.”

“We look up to you.”

“Yeah, but you looking down to look up,” Harmony told them. “You admiring me like I’m the nicest dog in the pound.”

The next few seconds were pure nerve-racking silence. I sat forward, mesmerized.

Vindicated by the filmmakers’ silence, Harmony got back to her drawing.

“Don’t worry. I’ll play along for the show. I’ll even roll over and beg if it’ll get me out of this place.”

The scene would never have made it into Jay and Sheila’s final cut, had there been one. I couldn’t even work it into my own product. For the media, it would only be a tool to simplify her, a way to squeeze her into one of their preexisting molds. The world would never get Harmony right. But I was finally starting to.

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On Monday, February 12, the word got out fast: Harmony was breaking her silence. CNN lifted the gag order at 8 a.m., four hours earlier than promised. In a business where each rating point was worth millions of dollars, and in a month when the broadcast nets took great pains to trounce their cable competitors, the network couldn’t hold it in any more. We’ve got Harmony Prince, and we’ve got her tonight! Exclusively on CNN! Kiss our cheeks, Fox News! Oh, happy day! Happy day!

It certainly wasn’t a happy day for MGM. The final first-weekend box-office tally for Hannibal came in at $22.4 million, way lower than even the most skeptical forecasts. Move My Cheese had predicted a $58.1 million opening, a miss so wild that it shaved at least three points off the program’s overall accuracy rating. Ira briefly returned to the corporeal world to check the numbers and mutter a few expletives before vanishing back into his monitor.

Also cursing: Alonso. The New York Post ran a malevolent piece on his spotty reputation as a lawyer and citizen. The story included damning quotes from disgruntled ex-clients, ex-employees, ex-girlfriends, and a leery investigator from the California Bar Association who’d been sniffing after him since the early 1990s. If that wasn’t bad enough, the article contained two cleverly veiled references to transvestism, ambiguous enough to avoid a libel suit but clear enough to get the insinuation across.

When Alonso called me at 10 a.m., he was sputtering with rage. He was convinced that the story had been planted by none other than Doug Modine.

“So, that’s the way we’re playing it now?” he bellowed. “We’re using live ammo on each other?”