Эд Макбейн - Mothers and Daughters

Julia Regan was going back.

April was a time for meetings.

The paneled private office of Curt Sonderman contained six executives of the corporation met in high conclave to discuss a television phenomenon known simply as “the trend to the Coast.” This, when translated from O’Brian, simply meant that New York City was becoming a dead town where television — live, filmed, or taped — was concerned. The trend was not a surprising one, nor had its development gone undetected over the years. The business of Sonderman Enterprises, Inc., after all, was television, and Curt was a shrewd businessman who knew upon which side his onion roll was buttered. But when you’ve got a going firm in a going city like New York, the natural thing is to believe not what your intelligence tells you is true, but what your emotions want you to believe. So what if they opened a big Television City out there? So what if North Vine was crawling with bright fancy studios, and more and more shows seemed to be originating from beautiful stages constructed for the sole purpose of television broadcasting, instead of the leftover legitimate theaters and converted lofts in New York? So what if every major film studio had subsidiaries that were grinding out more filmed television dramas than the public could consume in a month of Sundays, New York would stand eternal. New York would not succumb to the cry of the cannibals on the Coast, New York would remain the inspiration, the creative center of that world of video, yeah, the actors and the writers and the producers and the directors would recognize that Hollywood was just so much flesh in the pan, yeah, movies they could make, yeah, but when it came to television, when it came to that newest of mediums, which had its beginnings and its real roots in the East, yeah, nobody was ready to believe that Hollywood could take the ball away from New York.

Yeah.

Well, it had.

And so Curt Sonderman and six producers of Sonderman Enterprises, Inc., one of whom was David Regan, sat in that lush paneled office and pored over figures that explained without a single doubt, no matter what feelings they had about that mecca of creativity named New York, explained precisely and concisely that most of the television work — live, filmed, and taped — most of the really artistic and creative stuff like Wagon Train and Johnny Midnight and Peter Gunn and Maverick and Gunsmoke and Lawman and Leave It to Beaver and The Man and the Challenge and The Detectives and Air Power and The Real McCoys and Disneyland , all these were being done on the Coast. So where did that leave a New York firm like Sonderman Enterprises, Inc., whose business was producing and packaging television programs for consumption throughout the nation? Where did it leave them especially when New York City was still crawling with investigators who were complaining about perfectly legitimate rigged shows like The $64,000 Question and Twenty-One , and like that?

“What am I in business for my health?” Sonderman shouted, repeating the words his sainted grandfather had been fond of using. “We’re supposed to package shows, we’re supposed to produce shows, we’re paying enough rent in this Madison Avenue glass slipper each month to support a tribe of Arabs for the rest of their natural lives, am I in business for my health?”

David sat watching him, and said nothing.

“Who’s making the money?” Sonderman asked. “Hollywood is making the money. Who’s doing the shows? Hollywood is doing the shows. Where have all the actors gone? Hollywood! Where have all the directors gone? Hollywood! Am I out of my mind, staying here in New York! What’s in New York, would you please tell me? The Bowery? The Statue of Liberty? Grant’s Tomb? What is there in New York that I, Curt Sonderman, should stay here like a baby holding his mother’s hand, what is there would you please tell me? Nothing! That’s what there is in New York for an honest firm trying to do television business, N-O-T-H-I-N-zero! Nothing!”

“That’s not quite true, Curt,” one of his executives said.

“Look, buddy-boy, take a look at the books. This was the hottest firm in the business in 1956, and now it’s 1960, and we are very quickly falling on our big fat butts. You know what New York has? Legitimate theater, that’s what it has! And a little bit of movies is trickling back, they’re shooting up in the Bronx and on the streets. Are we supposed to start producing plays? Sure, try to edge your way into that pretentious crowd. Or movies, maybe? Ridiculous. They can do them better in Hollywood. They’ve been feeding the public crap for so long, the public is used to the product and respects it like a brand name. Television is our business! So where’s television? It’s in Hollywood, that’s where it is.”

“Curt, you’re getting too nervous,” another of his executives said. “You’re always getting too nervous.”

“Yeah, I got nervous when Studio One went to the Coast, and I got nervous when Kraft went off the air, and I get nervous right now when I see all these shows and on the credit crawl it says ‘Filmed in Hollywood at Desilu’ or some other cockamamie mixed-name outfit, yeah, I get nervous. You think I’m in business for my health?”

“What do you want to do, Curt?” David asked.

“I don’t know what I want to do. That’s why I called this meeting.”

“You want to pick up everything, lock, stock and barrel, and go West?” one of the executives asked.

“Maybe.”

“Foolish,” another of the executives said.

“Look, you said For Whom the Bells Toll was foolish when they wanted to do it, so they did it in two parts and it was a big hit.”

“It was a lousy job.”

“Who’s interested in lousy or good? It was a hit.”

“The movie was better.”

“It is only my pistol, Maria,” one of the executives quoted.

“Don’t clown around,” Sonderman said. “We’ve got business here.”

“It’d be foolish to go West, Curt,” one of the men said. “This is just a fad. A few new studios, a few actors and directors with itchy feet—”

“Itchy feet, my nose. That’s where the long green is, Hollywood, California. So we’re sitting here and watching the industry collapse all around us. That’s smart, all right. That’s smart if you’re in business for your health.”

“So what do you want to do?”

“This is April. We’ve still got the season to finish, and with a little luck we won’t be selling apples on the street before the fall. But we’ve got the whole summer to fool around with, while everybody’s showing reruns. I suggest we start fooling around in Hollywood. I suggest we send a man out there to get the lay of the land and to deliver a full report. And if there’s room for us out there, then, gentlemen, we are going out there!”

The executives fell silent.

“You feel like taking a trip to Hollywood, David?” Sonderman asked.

“If you want me to,” David answered.

“When does your show go off the air?”

“The last one’s on June sixteenth.”

“Can you leave by July first?”

“I think so.”

“Yes, or no?”

“Yes.”

“I’d like a vote on this,” Sonderman said.

The executives voted unanimously to send David Regan to Hollywood on July first, just to scout around. David sat and watched the hands go up all around the table in the paneled room. Oddly, only one word popped into his mind.

Gillian.

It was April, and a time for making plans.

Amanda sat down with her uncompleted suite and read it through carefully, and then decided if she was ever going to finish it, she would finish it this summer. Her own tenacity, her own concentration, sometimes amazed her. The suite would lie dormant for months at a time, untouched, barely thought of in the press of her household duties, and then she would begin working at it steadily again, sometimes devoting as much as eight hours to it in a single day. And then the world would close in again, the petty everyday things that had to be done to keep a home running smoothly, and she would put the work aside, once leaving it for as long as six months before returning to it again. There had seemed no real rush, no real necessity for completing the composition. She wanted it to be perfectly right, and so she had taken her time, knowing it was there, knowing she could always return to it. But now she had an idea, an idea she had never considered before, and the idea presented a new field for speculation, and a definite incentive for completing the suite during the summer.