Danielle Steel: Heartbeat

When he had first come to California, aching from the pain of leaving Leslie and the kids, he had fallen gratefully into the arms of a serious lady director, and had had an affair that lasted six months and almost led to disaster. She had moved in with him and taken over his life, inviting friends to stay, furnishing his apartment for him, running his life, until he felt as if he had been strangled. She had previously gone to UCLA, done graduate work at Yale, talked constantly about a Ph.D., and was into “serious film,” and she kept insisting that A Life was beneath him. She talked about it like a disease from which he might soon be healed, if he would only let her help him. She also hated kids, and kept putting away the photographs of his children. Remarkably, it took him a full six months to catch his breath and let her have it. It took six months because she was great in bed, treated him like a six-year-old at a time when he desperately needed nurturing and liked it, and she seemed to know everything about the television industry in L.A. But when she told him he ought to stop talking about his kids, and forget about them, he rented a bungalow at the Beverly Hills Hotel for a month, gave her the key, told her to have a great time, and not to bother to call him when she found an apartment. He moved her things to the bungalow the same afternoon, and didn't run into her for the next four years until they saw each other at an awards ceremony, where she pretended not to know him.

And what had come after that had been intentionally lighthearted and easy. Actresses, starlets, walk-ons, models, girls who wanted a good time when he was free, and enjoyed going to an occasional party with him when he wasn't in a period of high stress due to some change on the show, and they wanted nothing more from him. They fitted him in among the other men in their lives, and seemed not to care when he didn't call them. Some of them cooked dinner for him occasionally, or he for them since he loved to cook, and the ones who were good with kids were sometimes called on to go to Disneyland with him when the boys were in town, but more often than not he enjoyed keeping the boys to himself during their visits to California.

More recently, Bill had gotten involved with one of the actresses on the show. Sylvia was a pretty girl from New York, and she had an important part on the show. And it was the first time in a long time that he had allowed himself the indulgence of getting involved with someone who actually worked for him. But she was a sensational-looking girl, and she had been hard to resist. She had come to the show via years as a child actress and model, the cover of Vogue , a year in Paris working for Lacroix, and six months in L.A. doing bit parts in an assortment of unsuccessful movies. She was a fairly decent actress, surprisingly enough, and a sweet girl, which came through on the air, and Bill was surprised himself by how much he liked her. Liked. Not loved. Love was something he reserved for Adam and Tommy, who were, respectively, nine and a half and seven. Sylvia was twenty-three, and sometimes he thought she behaved like a child herself. Along with her sweetness there was a kind of simplicity and naiveté that both touched him and amused him. Despite her worldly experiences, acting and modeling for the past nine years, she seemed to have remained relatively unsophisticated through all of it, which was at times both refreshing and annoying. She was singularly unaware of the inevitable politics that went on behind the scenes on the show, and some of her performances were superb, but she was also easy prey for the more jaded women with whom she acted. And Bill found himself constantly warning her to be more alert to the games they played and the trouble they surreptitiously tried to cause her. But childlike, she floated through all of it, and seemed to keep herself amused when Bill was too busy to entertain her, as he had been for weeks, working on the addition of two new characters, and the surprise removal of yet another. He was always careful to keep the show fresh, and keep the audiences fascinated with the never-ending plot turns.

At thirty-nine, he had become the king of daytime soaps, as his row of Emmys lined up on a shelf on his office wall clearly attested. But he was, as always, totally unaware of them, as he returned to his office and began to pace, wondering how the actors in today's show would react to the unexpected last-minute changes. Two of the women usually handled it well, but one of his male actors frequently blew his lines when surprised at the last minute, and if the alterations made him too nervous. He had been on the show for two years, and Bill had thought more than once about replacing him, and yet he liked the human quality he brought to the show, and the power of his performances when he believed in what he was saying.

It was a show which seemed to mean a lot to untold millions across the United States, and the volume of mail Bill and the actors and the producers got was nothing short of amazing. The cast and crew had become a kind of family over the years, and the show meant a great deal to all of them. It had become a home and a way of life for a lot of very talented people.

That afternoon, his own ladylove, Sylvia, was going to be playing her part as Vaughn Williams, the beautiful younger sister of the show's principal heroine, Helen. “Vaughn” had been lured into an affair with her brother-in-law, and introduced to drugs by him as well, unbeknownst to anyone in her family, particularly her own sister. Trapped in a web from which she seemed unable to free herself, Vaughn's brother-in-law, John, was luring her deeper and deeper into his clutches and leading her toward her own destruction. In an unexpected turn of events on that day's show, Vaughn was going to be witness to a murder committed by John, and the police would begin seeking Vaughn for the murder of the drug dealer who had been supplying her drugs since John introduced her to him. It had been a difficult series of events to orchestrate and Bill had been closely supervising the writers, with an eye to stepping in himself if he had to. But it was exactly the kind of plot turn that had kept the show going for close to ten years, and Bill was clearly pleased with the morning's work sketching out the next developments as he sat down in a chair in his office, lit a cigarette, and took a sip from the steaming mug of coffee his secretary had just put there. He was wondering what Sylvia would think of the script changes he had just handed her through her dressing room door. He hadn't seen her since the night before, when he left her place at three a.m. and came to the office to start working on the idea that had been gnawing at him all evening. She had been asleep when he left, and he had gone home to shower and change before going to his office at four-thirty. And by twelve-thirty, the atmosphere in his office was still electrically charged as he got to his feet, stubbed the cigarette out,and hurried to the studio, where he watched the director carefully going over the last-minute changes.

The director was a man Bill had known for years, a Hollywood veteran who had come to the show after directing reams of successful television movies. He had been an unusually serious choice for a soap opera on daytime TV, but Bill had obviously known what he was doing. Allan McLoughlin kept everyone on their toes, and he was speaking seriously to Sylvia and the actor who played John, as Bill walked into the studio and stood discreetly in a remote corner of the room where he could observe but not disturb them.

“Coffee, Bill?” A pretty young script girl inquired. She had had an eye on him for a year. She liked him. He was what some people would have described as a “teddy bear,” tall, powerful, warm, smart, nice-looking but not gorgeous, with easy laughter and a gentle style that somehow softened the intensity with which he worked. But Bill only smiled and shook his head. She was a nice kid, but he had never thought of her as anything but the script girl. He was too busy working while he was there to concentrate on anything but what was happening in front of the cameras, or in his head, as he plotted the show's future turns and detours.