Steve Kistulentz - Panorama

“Kato Kaelin.”

“What?”

“The beach bum. The freeloader. Before I even give this serious thought, you need to tell me one thing. Why me? What do I bring to the table?”

Don’s answer came quickly enough for Richard to think it had been scripted. “You bring the fresh face, the new perspective. You bring a tiny bit of gravitas, but you do it at a small-market friendly price.”

“As in cheap,” Richard said.

“I prefer to think of it as value,” Don said, smiling.

“I don’t know what they say in television, but in politics, you never want to be the guy who succeeds a legend. You want to be the guy who comes after that guy.”

“If you start next month, during sweeps, you can be the guy who works alongside the legend. His name is Jack Shea. Been everywhere for every network. Vietnam for CBS, White House correspondent during the illustrious Gerald Ford administration. Anchored the Sunday-evening news, though he didn’t get to do the broadcast very often because they’d preempt for tennis and golf and football running long. Shit, you grew up here. You’d know the face. Guy looks like he was born wearing a trenchcoat. When he shows his vacation pictures around the office, you half-expect him to begin narrating in his on-air voice. ‘Good evening tonight from Paris, where in just twelve hours, all parties will gather once again around the famous round conference table to begin a final set of peace talks.’” Don’s voice came in staccato breaks that sounded more like Johnny Carson imitating Cronkite than anything else, but Richard knew the type. The MacMurray dinner table had always meant Cronkite blaring in from the Magnavox in the living room, Marvin Kalb in Saigon, Bernard Kalb at the State Department, Bert Quint near Khe Sanh, South Vietnam.

Richard said, “So he’s not getting forced out. He’s retiring?”

“Not exactly. He’s dying.”

“Jesus. What happened?”

“The guy’s diet consisted almost entirely of fast food and Marlboros for the better part of three decades. Who knows what happened? Maybe time. Maybe Jack got a flu he couldn’t shake. The insurance company sends him for a physical. He gets some blood work. There’s an elevated this or that, so they call him back for more tests. And those tests spell out a particularly aggressive form of lung cancer. Five-year survival rate is zero. He’s making a series. The unrepentant anchorman faces his mortality, tonight at six. We’ll send camera crews with him to chemo, to the lab for blood work, to his support groups. You’ll help him edit it for a series of two-minute drop-ins during sweeps.”

“What exactly am I getting into here?”

Don took a handful of bar nuts. “Let me tell you a little story. For the first four years Jack Shea was on the air up there, he was in third place. For sixteen consecutive quarterly-ratings books, he wasn’t within four points of the lead. Right up until this one afternoon when he’s filming a stand-up in front of the oldest furniture store in Wilkes-Barre. He’s there to tease the night’s feature story, thirty seconds, when a woman across the street gets her purse snatched. She starts screaming, and the camera follows her voice, and the thief runs right toward them. Jack Shea tosses his cigarette aside, very casually jogs across the street and clotheslines the guy, just a little close-combat hand yoke to the fucker’s throat. The guy falls backward onto the sidewalk, comic book–style, out cold. And the camera guy is right there, and Jack just picks up the purse, daintily pushes the tissues and lipstick or whatever back into the bag, and walks up to the lady and says, ‘Ma’am,’ like he’s Sergeant Joe Friday or something. Then he looks at the camera and winks. He’s been in first place ever since.”

“How long?”

“Since 1983,” Don said.

“That isn’t what I meant. He’s got what, six months? I’m not sure I’m ready to help someone put together a grand theorem on mortality.”

“Why not?” Don asked, a question for which Richard had no prepared answer.

The only person Richard had ever known who died of cancer was his mother, and she hadn’t exactly been the poster patient for a dignified last few months. She had gone to her general practitioner several times with minor complaints, and he’d frowned indecipherably at computer printouts, EKGs, and lab results, and then one afternoon, she went on a referral to a gastroenterologist, who sent her for some sort of scan—Richard couldn’t remember what type—and before the afternoon was out, was telling her, “It’s time to put your affairs in order.” There were options that would shrink, but not eliminate, her tumor. There were synthetic opiates for her pain. Injections to keep up the platelet count so that she could endure more of the treatments that would shrink, but not eliminate, the tumor. After her diagnosis, she’d lasted fourteen months.

Suddenly Richard was aware that if he failed in his new gig, he’d become the answer to a trivia question. Conversations that began, “Whatever happened to…?” were the city of Washington’s greatest pastime. One week, you were the young politico of the moment; the Secretary of State was at a party at your rented Georgetown townhouse, drinking white wine from a gallon jug and hitting on the intern from the Style section of the Post, and you were being lampooned in Doonesbury; the next week, you had fallen so spectacularly that people avoided your phone calls, and a few months after that, the Style section of the Post was running a feature on you, five thousand words in a tone best described as postmortem.

“Tell me why I’d even want to do this,” Richard said.

“Of all people, I’d think you’d understand what it means to shape the news. To understand the power there.”

“Here’s what I know about the news. The news suggests death, decay. News is over. It’s a thing of the past.”

Don smiled. “Just the opposite. News connects us with the parts of our past you think are dead. It’s resurrection. If you want to see it as a monster, then it’s a perpetual monster. And the thing is, this monster can’t be killed. Last year we did a series of two-minute features. Your basic whatever-happened-to stories on all the things of our childhood. Whatever happened to the guy with the ridiculously long fingernails?”

“The Indian guy? From the Guinness Book ?”

Don poked Richard in the arm, a quick and unobtrusive jab that said, Yes, you understand. “Who still hula-hoops? Do children even buy Slinkys anymore? Why is it that nearly every guy around my age knows that the fastest car on the planet was once called the Blue Flame? Or how that kid Mikey from the cereal commercials was supposed to have died from mixing Pop Rocks and Coke?”

“Eddie Haskell got killed in Vietnam.”

“That was an urban legend. Hell, for a while, it was rumored that Eddie Haskell was actually the porn guy. Johnny Wadd. But people don’t want to hear about that. They don’t want to hear about the former child star who robbed the video store to feed her crack habit. They want to remember everything just the way it was. They get nostalgic for the totems of their childhood. The Legos and Lincoln Logs, GAF View-Masters, Gnip Gnop, Tang. They get homesick for places that no longer exist. It forces us to adapt to our environment. Harry Reasoner came to ABC to make five hundred thousand dollars a year, and then he was bitching about Barbara Walters and her million-dollar contract, and then he was back with the geezers of Sixty Minutes, and a few years after that he was dead, and you never hear anyone at some journalism school lamenting the grand old legacy of Harry Reasoner. Why? Because he didn’t adapt. The future tapped him on the shoulder, and he said, Not now. I’m busy. And right now you are being tapped on the shoulder, and I want to know if you’re ready to face the future.”