Читать книгу Gettysburg - Kevin Morris - Страница 9

The hardest thing for Reynolds about moving to LA was that there was nowhere to arrive. LA has no center you can touch. New York has Times Square; London has Piccadilly, and so forth. All cities have hearts, except LA. It has areas: Beverly Hills, Hollywood, Santa Monica, Downtown, West Hollywood, Los Feliz, South Central, and on and on. There is no focal point. It evolved into this—it was not always this way—Reynolds knew. It was a sad truth of history, the way the center had not held. In Nathanael West’s time there had been a central location—call it Hollywood and Vine—where people coming to California got off the bus to try their luck before dying. But now, there is not one place the pioneering youngster, the starlet, the Sooner from the Dust Bowl, or anyone, can drop their bags and say, “I’m here.”

During the summer, hundreds of tourists and local day-trippers realize the same thing about Malibu. They come looking to touch something, but there’s no fulcrum, no main location, no heart. Like LA itself, Malibu is spread out. Reynolds remembered traveling to upstate New York as a kid with his parents. His mother said they were going to the North Pole, and after a day in the car, they’d arrived in North Pole, New York, just outside Niagara. Satisfying the East Coasters’ innate sense of destination, in the dead center of town was positioned an actual fake North Pole. It was a fine, icy cylinder about eight feet high. It looked like the goddamn North Pole should look. When you set out for something, Reynolds thought, you should be able to find it when you get there.

He considered Malibu to be a miniature Chile, a skinny strip of land running north–south along the coast. All visitors heading north on the Pacific Coast Highway are informed of the length of its shoreline by a sign that says, “Malibu: 27 Miles of Scenic Beauty.” It was in truth a set of beaches strung together like a series of links golf courses: Topanga, La Costa, Carbon, Surf Rider, Colony, Puerco Canyon, Ramirez, Paradise Cove, Queen’s Necklace, Zuma, Broad.

Reynolds got dressed and turned everything in the house off—the coffeepots, lights, computers, printers, iPads—he had an obsession with turning everything off. He did not like leaving a house with anything running, because he couldn’t relax once he left thinking there were still things buzzing while he was away. He got caught up in that a lot, that kind of thing. Or with thoughts about Bella’s life compared to his—how the movie of her experience would be so different, how the camera inside her head would play back a different tape than his. Only now in life was it dawning on him that the camera in his mind was not recording the world’s sole experience. There were millions of movies, TV shows, talk shows—all manner of entertainments—going on. Each one had a different narrator, a different style, a different language, diction, idiom. Different tones, different casts.

The PCH paralleled the beaches and had intermittent commercially zoned stretches with motels and restaurants and gas stations. The few centers to speak of were shopping centers. Landside Malibu life was conducted in a few upscale strip malls closer in, meaning closer to Santa Monica and Westside. Retail shops, restaurants, bookstores, and banks. Each had a Starbucks and a Coffee Bean. (The place was well-caffeinated.) Locals avoided tourists as they do in any beach town, making a few dressed-down places hip until they became classics.

He went into Joey’s Restaurant and saw Norman sitting with a newspaper at their table in the corner.

“What happened to you?” Norman said.

“Sorry,” said Reynolds. He looked at his watch. “I’m, like, five minutes late. How long have you been here?”

“Not too long. I started my walk a little early today. I didn’t realize it. She was making me crazy. Whaddya want? I’m starving.” He looked at the waiter, standing a few tables away. “Luis, get your ass over here. We’re ready.”

The woman at the table next to them looked startled. Luis laughed to let her know it was OK. “Sixteen years he’s been yelling like this,” Luis said. Then he continued to their table. He nodded at Reynolds with a smile. “Hey, man.”

“Hey, Luis.”

Luis looked at Norman. “Why don’t you stick to baseball?” he said.

Norman closed his eyes. “Shit. What was the score?”

“Two–one.”

“Son of a bitch,” Norman said and reached into his pocket and pulled out a wad of bills held together by a rubber band. He peeled off two hundreds. “Here,” he said.

Luis pocketed the money, looked at Reynolds. “What can I do? Tell him to stop betting fútbol.”

“Fucking Barcelona,” Norman said.

Luis said to Reynolds, “What you are having today, chico?”

“Egg whites, turkey bacon, no potatoes.”

Luis looked at Norman. “Jefe?”

“Same. But give me tomatoes.” He held the menu back when Luis tried to take it. “Who’s back there today? Manny?”

“No. Tomás.”

“OK, he’s the one. Tell him, from me, that tomatoes are supposed to be red—not yellow.”

“OK, OK.”

“No yellow in the center. You got it?”

Luis said, “I got it, I got it. Stay calm, man. You going to have a heart attack. Then I got no one to bet with.” He sped away from Norman, who had reached out to grab him.

Reynolds looked at Norman and said, “You bet on soccer now?”

“I watch it on Sundays sometimes—in the mornings. The Russian guy up the beach likes to bet on it. I take money off him all the time.” He blew into his coffee. “But these guys,” he gestured at Luis, who was now at the coffee stand with a few of the other waiters, “they’re at another level.”

Reynolds chuckled at him. Even with all the passage of time, whenever Reynolds sat with Norman he was surprised at how big he was. By all rights he should have been a little guy—what one would expect from a seventy-five-year-old comedy writer. But sitting next to him, one was taken over by Norman Daley. He was big and handsome and funny and charming, a cross between Leonard Bernstein and Ted Williams. But today, Reynolds noticed, Norman had a black eye. A deep purple darkened the lid on his left side.

“You look terrible, what’s the matter?” Norman said.

“Me? Nothing,” Reynolds said. “I was going to say the same thing to you. What’s that?” He pointed at Norman’s face. “You have a shiner.”

“I was at the kidney doctor yesterday.”

“Did he punch you in the eye?” Norman, who didn’t laugh easily, chuckled, much in the same way Reynolds had chuckled at him moments ago. Now Reynolds smiled and said, “What’s the deal? Are you OK?”

“Fine. Forget it. And don’t change the subject. Why do you look so tired?”

“Dunno,” Reynolds said. “I slept fine.”

“Don’t bullshit me,” Norman said. “Look, happens all the time. It took a lot of courage, what you did.”

“You’re crazy,” Reynolds said, waving his hand. “I have too much other shit on my mind.”

“Yeah, well, let me tell you something, put your mind at ease. It doesn’t matter. All that matters is that you keep going. If it had been picked up, if you were warming up for a full order with a good time slot, it wouldn’t matter.” Norman was talking about Reynolds’s pilot that had just been rejected by A&E.

“Ah, I know,” Reynolds said. “I mean, I don’t know know, you know that. But I know.”

“Look,” Norman said. “It was a pilot about sleep. Sleep’s a hard sell.”

Reynolds never once thought it was a bad idea. And other than two braindead executives at Lion’s Gate, everyone he pitched it to—including Stella and Norman—got behind it. It was a tailor-made hour for cable, maybe HBO, even for network if it turned out right. What was more common, more universal, or more pressing than sleep? Everyone had trouble sleeping, but it was unexplored on television. A well-made program that explored selected individuals’ sleep issues could work in the warm void of television—pure, relaxed, and distracting voyeurism.

He also believed it could be his thing. A form of the medium that would allow him to get out from under the life-sustaining but identity-squelching influence of Norman. It would not be a narrative—not a procedural. Unscripted. Not serial. A reality show, to use the overused term. Sleep with Me. It would be about ordinary people. Once established, later episodes and then full seasons, or even spin-offs, could focus on athletes, celebrities, chefs. The possibilities were endless. A franchise. That’s what Ted Carlin from Comcast had said when Reynolds pitched it. With one show, Reynolds could escape the network scripted world he’d so nicely benefited from on Norman’s coattails. But that bored him more each day. And quickly he was in the world of non-scripted cable, which he was convinced was more creative, the place where the real energy of the business was. And as he had learned so well from Norman, any producer could leverage a hit—a sleeper, no less—into a classy scripted series. His own Sopranos or Band of Brothers. His own Game of Thrones. After years behind the scenes, he could come into his own. It had happened before for plenty of people.

The show had lain down in front of him from the moment he first thought about it. A subject—a person—would be selected each week, someone who had some kind of sleep problem. The first fifteen-minute segment would be documentary-style, giving the audience the basic information: who, what, where, why. Basic setup interview intercut with on-location pickups of family life, daily pressures, discussion of habits and attitudes toward sleep. The segment would wrap up with one of the show’s four rotating sleep doctors. (The network would like this idea because it meant the show would not become contingent on any one individual doctor’s personality, thereby avoiding a renegotiation headache. This was an example of the added value of an experienced entertainment lawyer.)

The doctor would identify the problem, explain it, and tell the subject what he or she proposed to do to treat the condition. Then right to commercial.

After the jump, the focus would return to the subject, now prepping for bed. The crew would spend several nights with the subject, so the subject never would know which night was being used in the show. (In fact, footage from all the nights could be intercut.) Presleep habits—TV watching, game playing, putting kids to bed, reading, interaction with spouse (even sex), listening to music, drinking, late night cigarette, masturbation, eating, telephone calls, texting, booty calls—it would all become normal after a while with the growing familiarity between the subject and the crew. Good stuff would be used for promos and teasers and so forth as the show took off.

Past the bottom break, the third segment would pick up with a recap of the story line and then get into night-vision hidden-camera footage of the subject sleeping. The edited cut would contain a combination of stop-motion, close-ups, and intermittent body measurements before, during, and after the night’s sleep.

The final fifteen-minute segment would reunite the doctor with the patient, and they would discuss attacking the issue first with a change in habits. Then there would be a transcending moment when the subject talked about the benefits of more sleep. As more episodes rolled out, the producers would throw in a failure, a subject whose sleep doesn’t change at all, to keep the audience guessing. Over time, the show would be spellbinding, addictive. Because, to Reynolds’s mind, there was nothing out there like it. “Because,” to use the promo line he’d come up with, “everyone needs sleep.”

At the restaurant, after a pause, Norman said, “Listen, you’ll recover.” He stared at Reynolds a second more, possibly satisfied. “Did you watch the Golden Globes?”

“I looked at it last night,” Reynolds said. “I turned it off.”

“I know. Horrible. That guy is not funny. The British guy.” Norman blew into his coffee again. “How’s my college girl?”

“She’s good,” Reynolds said. “She’s coming back from Mexico. Before she left she said she’s sending you something to read.”

“I know. I just got a text from her a little while ago.”

“Then you’ve talked to her more than me,” Reynolds said.

Having thought of the device, Norman put his glasses on to check his messages. He loved to catch the newest gadget whenever it came out. Norman told Reynolds, as if it were a secret, that staying in touch like this as you got older was the kind of the thing that kept you from getting Alzheimer’s. “I’m waiting,” he said.

“For what?” said Reynolds.

“Her Person,” Norman said.

“Oh, that,” Reynolds said. “Who is it?”

“Jackie Gleason. That’ll be good for her.”

“Probably right,” said Reynolds, after a moment.

“You know, we’re doing an experiment,” Norman said. “I gave her Jackie a long time ago. It’s the first time I’ve ever repeated. She doesn’t know it, but I have the old one.”

Norman had been giving Bella biographical writing assignments since she was eight, in a running flow. There were no fixed time schedules, and she loved to do them, without fail. He chose a subject, which Bella came to call her “Norman Person.” When she was bored or grumpy, Stella would say, “Do your Norman Person.” Over the years, Norman had her cover everyone from Kermit the Frog to Tallulah Bankhead to Jack Paar. He suggested the approximate length of each report and gave her research hints. When Bella was nine, she made Reynolds dig out his Encyclopedia Britannica set, and she pored over it, making sure not to crib, because she knew that was wrong. Whenever an assignment was finished, Bella left Norman the report in his mailbox in the Colony, and that same weekend, without fail, Norman took her to breakfast. When Bella went to high school they changed their regimen to frozen yogurt or coffee, since she hated getting up in the morning, and they were both worried about their weight.

From what Reynolds could tell, when they met for the discussion, Norman didn’t focus too much on the writing, though he complimented Bella, which was easy and appropriate, since she did a thorough and clever job. (Reynolds would find Bella’s reports and read them with delight.) Norman talked about what the subject meant to him, where he put the Person in his map of the world. Norman started with a historical perspective, then, no matter the Person, brought it down to some personal anecdote or another. Then Norman quizzed Bella a bit, and she answered. Then the Person report discussion flowed into a general conversation about anything. It was, at center, a great pretext for their relationship. Sometimes they spoke about the Person for two hours and even on the phone later or via e-mail. Then again, sometimes they got right into whatever was going on in the very eventful mind of Bella G. Stanhope.

Bella grew up having a constant tutorial with Norman Daley, the preeminent television showrunner of the sixties and seventies, one of the country’s most cherished filmmakers of the eighties and nineties, and, in these twilight Malibu years, author of glorious works of fiction. As Bella grew older, the conversations could get intense—for example, she didn’t talk to him for a month after Norman said Che Guevara was a dope. The real point, of course, was that Norman, ever the strategist, knew it was a way of keeping in touch, of having regular contact with his surrogate granddaughter. The relationship was unusual, but it endured on both ends, and the way they kept it up made each of them—Norman, Bella, Reynolds, and Stella—happy.

“Did I ever tell you about him? Jackie?” said Norman.

“Yeah, maybe. Wait, I forget. Someone did. Must have been you. Didn’t he take a party train to Florida or something like that?” said Reynolds.

“I was on it a few times. From Miami to the city and back. He was the best. Don’t listen to what anyone says. He was the best to be with. Bar none. Drink all night, women, play music, poker. The whole works.”

“God, you can’t say that in front of Bella, you know. She’ll call you a pig.”

“Ah, don’t worry about her. I got her under control.” Norman looked at Reynolds. “You’re fat. You’re gonna drop dead one of these days. Why don’t you call that guy I told you about? Niemeyer. The weight guy.”

“OK, all right,” Reynolds said. He needed to change the subject. “C’mon, we got to go over a few things today. I have to get back to Doug on the Universal thing.”

Norman had heard about Niemeyer during his card game. Once a month, Norman had a gathering of his pals from the real old days—the NBC days. All those guys had to talk about anymore was doctors. One of them, it might have been Leon Bremmer—Reynolds couldn’t remember—lost thirty pounds with this Niemeyer. Norman had met Leon in 1952 when they were both writing jokes for radio. It was around that time Norman had an idea for a new show and made an appointment with David Sarnoff. At the end of the meeting, Sarnoff had said to Norman, “I don’t know about the pitch, but I like your balls.”

Norman half-listened to Reynolds go through the business issue, which was a skill Norman had developed over forty years of dealing with the entertainment business. It wasn’t Reynolds. Norman loved Reynolds. He had been Norman’s lawyer and right hand for over twenty years, his Tom Hagen. Norman let Reynolds run everything. Everything that needed running, anyway. It worked on its own at this point—in truth, it had been working like this for fifteen years, at least. Monitoring the money coming in, approving reuses, renewing deals with syndicators, and all that garbage. The man was a full-time job.

Norman Daley was born in 1924 in the Bronx to an Irish family. After serving in the army’s communications corps, he gained an honorable discharge in 1946 and, armed with a set of connections at NBC he gained during the war, he headed for the world of show biz. His big break came in the form of a gig as the gofer in the NBC building in Rockefeller Center, which had a slew of writers who went on to become an integral part of American culture for the next sixty years. Norman was funny and sharp, and the writers liked him because he always came up with just what was needed, whether it was for a radio serial or one of NBC’s productions in the expanding world of television.

The show Norman created after his meeting with David Sarnoff back in 1952 was Artie in the Army. It ran for eight seasons, its life coinciding with the length of the Eisenhower administration. It was a vehicle for Bobby Bank, the beloved comedian who played Artie, the rascally unit commander who always found a way to outwit the Germans and the Army brass alike. Norman’s strategy was to get the show on the air to Phil Silvers’s audience, which all the networks desperately wanted to do, and to make it new by expanding the program’s world in terms of both writing and conception as well as visually, in the scope and camerawork allowing more depth of field and more close-ups. As a result, Artie was the first comedy on TV to do outdoor shots. Bobby Bank joined George Burns and Milton Berle in the ranks of America’s favorite funnymen. But it was Norman who supplied the genius of the show, finding the right blend of Bobby’s Borscht Belt style and the high jinx of Artie’s crew of enlisted men (mainly other writers who Norman stuck in front of the camera) in the burgeoning format of the half-hour comedy. Later (but way before M*A*S*H) Norman created heartwarming and heartbreaking endings as the soldiers were sent home or, in the cases of Sergeant Buddy Jaworski from Brooklyn (played by Sam Simpson) and Private Mel Harris from Memphis (played by Warren Berg), to unexpected deaths. By the end of the run, no other show in the short history of television had come close to accomplishing such emotional story arcs during one program.

Norman moved to LA when Artie finished and ensconced himself in the bursting television landscape. He began developing several shows at a time, realizing that volume would be the name of the game in the burgeoning business. By 1971, he had six programs on the air in prime time, on three of which he was the main writer. He kept offices at the studios at Sunset and Gower and had a group of writers from every program at his disposal. Not only did this make him a legend and a power within television circles at the time, it put him in a position to begin the careers of dozens of other creators, all of whom credited Norman with their start.

Norman remembered the first time he’d seen Reynolds. It was in the late eighties and Norman had been at his lawyer Irv Toffler’s office in one of the new buildings in Century City. Irv was laying on so much bullshit about the expansive investments the networks were making—as an excuse for less money showing up in Norman’s bank account—that it became too much. Norman noticed that Irv’s young associate, Reynolds, couldn’t keep his eyes open. Norman watched with amusement for the next twenty minutes as Reynolds tried to fight off sleep.

When the meeting was over, Norman had gone across the meeting room and, to Irv’s shock, asked Reynolds to lunch. They went to Jimmy’s, where Norman ordered a scotch. Reynolds did the same, and over the course of the next three hours, Norman had extracted from the young lawyer the ins and outs of Irv’s shenanigans. Reynolds was amazed that Norman, who the other lawyers in Irv’s office always figured was out to lunch on financial matters, knew the games Irv had been playing. But Norman was on to how the game worked: how the agents carved pieces out of broadcast license fees for themselves; how the agents teamed with the television studios—Lorimar, Warner Brothers TV, Universal—to fuck with the networks and their own clients by using two different financial models for each show, one that said the program would never make money, and one that showed the program would never stop making money; and how, through a blend of selling and fixing, lots and lots of money ended up in the wrong hands.

Norman was not unaware of the risks of financing and always appreciated the sunk costs and gambles that were taken by others. But nor would he be taken, and when his representatives were no longer representing him, when he was no longer the product but the stooge, he took action. At that lunch in Century City, Reynolds had balked at talking at first, but Norman had been overwhelming, alternately charming and tough. After learning about Reynolds’s background, Norman had said, “You like the business, but you don’t like the bullshit, right? You can’t stand the way these fat cocksuckers go over to Universal or to Warners and cut up the shows and the airtimes and use the unions one way or another to get what they want, am I right? I’m sure this is confusing. It would confuse me. You like television, right? You watch the shows. You like going to the pictures too, I’m sure.”

Reynolds had nodded like a prisoner hoping to join a jailbreak. And at that instant, Norman knew he had his guy. Norman had known for years he was getting fucked. He had turned things over in his head for months and finally come out with a plan, and when he saw Reynolds in the meeting, he’d seen his opportunity. Norman knew all he needed was an honest, smart, and ballsy young lawyer who couldn’t be controlled by the agents of the studios. He needed such a guy to help him take it all back.

Norman had spoken of his plans with Fred MacMurray, with whom he liked to talk business because no one worked those guys over better than Fred. Bobby Bank had played in a golf game at Riviera with Fred years ago, and Fred had told Bobby he’d like to meet Norman, that he was a fan. Norman made a friend out of Fred, and at the time he met Reynolds, Norman was still going up to Fred’s ranch to see him a few times a year. Fred had more money than anyone and had done it by keeping his distance and buying real estate. William Demarest, who had played Uncle Charley in Fred’s late-career vehicle My Three Sons, said Fred brought hard-boiled eggs in a brown paper bag for lunch. Fred would still be eating dyed Easter eggs two weeks after Easter. Fred had told Norman what to do. Find your guy and go get the bastards. At lunch in Century City, with Reynolds in his sights, Norman decided to unleash his plan.

“Look,” he said to Reynolds, “I’m going to fire Irv Toffler when I leave here—that’s a given. The question is, what you are going to do? So, spill. Tell me something I don’t know.”

And so, for the next two hours, Reynolds confirmed to Norman the specifics of Irv’s mishandled and shady dealings. In fact, the kid made Norman realize that not only were his fears well founded, he had not been suspicious enough. From Artie through John Iron and Crenshaw Ten, Norman had written more than four hundred television episodes. And while he now had more money than he once thought existed in aggregated world currency, Norman realized that the suits had just been keeping him happy, giving him just enough not to raise his suspicions. But the agents and lawyers and other older men in whom he had put his trust were slowing down, and as they did, their hands began to cake with mud. Plus, the times were now charged with the energy of change and drugs and greed, and Norman didn’t like the idea of heading into a shaky time with his career in shaky hands.

Norman never lost the confidence that his next idea would change it all, and this was foremost in his mind in Century City the day he hired Reynolds. He wanted to be ready; he had fed the machine enough, met all of them, had dinner with all of them, gone to Vegas, gone to bar mitzvahs, drunk with union heads, and played golf in the desert with the whole lot. The part of this that was going on at Norman’s expense would go on no longer. He knew his move. As Jimmy’s emptied, Norman told Reynolds he wanted him to come work for him. “One thing you need to know that Irv Toffler or Tony Riggi or any of these pricks will not ever understand: I’m smarter than all of them. I’m willing to give up a lot to write what I want and make shows people want to see, but I’ve had enough of this.”

Reynolds never forgot that day and how Norman had begun their new relationship. Norman was already the most prolific writer in the history of television, but it was Reynolds who came up with the name for his company: Mandale Productions. The name would roll off the tongue of every agent and D-girl and business-affairs person in the business for decades to come. Norman Daley’s prime was the period of the old Frank Sinatra and the young Warren Beatty. The highlight reel of America from that time would show hippies and Woodstock and Nixon and Jimmy Carter, but what made up the workaday substance of the country in that era, Norman knew, were the television programs made in Los Angeles over the course of the past two decades: Dragnet, Bonanza, The O’Hara Family, My Favorite Martian, I Dream of Jeannie, John Iron.

Mandale had more shows on the air than anyone else. Norman and Reynolds worked out of an office on the MGM lot in Culver City. John Iron, Norman’s detective show for NBC, was shooting its fourth season when Reynolds moved in. Norman finished the pilot script for The Fauntleroys at Christmastime and told Reynolds the pilot had to shoot in the spring, period. Wondering why Norman gave such an order, Reynolds coaxed the first draft out of his boss. It was a comedy about an interracial family in a Manhattan high-rise. Reynolds knew they were in for a fight. Norman had enormous clout with the management at Paramount at the time. Mandale had three programs on the air, and the company’s international unit was being launched on the back of many of its syndicated half hours. The concept of the foreign value of American television programs was in its infancy, but already the suits in New York and Burbank knew that if set up right—that is, with the right programming—these systems would become a cash and cultural gusher. So there was yet another reason they wanted to keep the most dependable supplier in television happy.

As much as they needed him, the men of television did not want to let Norman make The Fauntleroys. No network or studio wanted to touch it. Norman’s agent from William Morris drove to Mandale’s offices as soon as he read the script to rail against it. But Norman’s mind was made up. After the agent left, Norman said to Reynolds, “Looks like we’re going to have to do this ourselves.” And with that he told Reynolds to call Marvin Fludheim, the Austrian chief of Eastern Oil, which owned Paramount.

“Tell him that if The Fauntleroys is not green-lighted for a full season order, Mandale will not be doing any more shows for his fucking studio.”

Reynolds told his boss to stand right there while he dialed New York. To Norman’s amazement, Reynolds got Fludheim on the phone and delivered the message and hung up.

“We’ll get it,” Reynolds had said when he put the receiver down. “Fludheim doesn’t care about anything but the growth. He needs us to approve any foreign deals.”

“How’s that?” Norman said.

“Because it’s in your contract,” Reynolds said.

Then Norman had an idea. He would make the neighboring white family British, thereby enabling the studio to presell the program to the BBC and Australia, which would cut its cost.

The Fauntleroys went on to become the number-one rated comedy in the history of television, maintaining a stranglehold on the Thursday eight p.m. slot from 1981 to 1988. Its value to NBC was immeasurable, since Thursday was the biggest night of the week for advertisers looking to push weekend sales of everything from Buicks to blenders. Such was The Fauntleroys’ domination of the eight o’clock lead-in that it allowed NBC to build its other shows into hits. Thus, shows like Worcester Rules and St. Mary’s flowed from Norman’s brain into slots at eighty thirty and nine and became megahits. And when Lorimar convinced NBC to put its signature hospital hit, Medical Man, in the ten o’clock slot, it had no choice but to appease Mandale with five points off the top.

As they ate their breakfasts at Joey’s, Norman said to Reynolds, “Tell me again what the issue is.”

“What issue?” Reynolds said.

“The question you have for me. You know, syndication or affiliates, whatever you said. Whaddya you gots?”

“Oh. It’s a digital deal for the CBS shows—the whole library. Ten grand up to fifteen, with bumps over five years.”

“Is that what they’re getting now?”

“Well, when you consider that kids are streaming them for free whenever they want. And that some of them are twenty years old, yeah.”

“What, twenty-year-old kids?”

Reynolds looked at him. “No. The shows are twenty years old.”

“Right. Yeah, do it. Hey, Tommy called me.”

“Yeah, how’s he doing?”

“He’s good. He wants me to introduce him at his AFI thing.”

Tommy was Tom Mack, the movie star. Norman had given him his first break, on St. Mary’s, as the sympathetic young teacher at an inner-city school. He also let him out after three seasons to do a movie for Spielberg, and from there Tommy had blown up as a matinee idol of the modern day. Reynolds knew that though Norman downplayed it, he loved it when he heard from Tommy. And Reynolds was happy when he saw Norman pleased. Norman was a good man, the rare man whose reputation fit his character, perhaps better than people even knew. Though Reynolds was not objective, as a beneficiary of Norman’s largesse, Norman’s achievements and the respect he’d gleaned from decades of relationships with people in every area of the business—executives, studio heads, grips, gaffes, actors, agents—set him apart. He was like a father to Reynolds. And he was still the smartest, funniest guy Reynolds knew.

“I gotta go,” Reynolds told Norman.

“Into town? What the hell for? Come over the house with me. Or let’s go to the track,” Norman said.

“Can’t,” Reynolds said. “I have a lunch. Can’t get out of it.”

“One of your projects?”

Reynolds couldn’t help but feel the sting of that. He was a producer now, had been for the past ten years. The Mandale stuff was so automatic—at this stage it was just collecting checks. Reynolds had been drifting since Norman’s retirement. In his heart, he never wanted to practice law. Norman had rescued him from that life. So Reynolds had tried putting together a few movies. Norman had even backed one and convinced Paramount to pick it up. It was a film version of Reynolds’s favorite book, Appointment in Samarra, by John O’Hara. The book was a fictionalized rip on the town in the twenties. For Reynolds, it captured all the nuance of America between the wars, drunk and dancing but with one eye on the papers. The book read like a screenplay, and he collaborated with a young writer named Alan Bloom, whom Paramount fancied at the time, to adapt it. After much hand-wringing, and against Reynolds’s wishes, the kid was allowed to direct it. Norman warned him against it, but the studio wanted it, and Stella made a deal on the inside to ensure Norman’s money would come back if Alan could direct.

But the distributor went with a mid-September release, and a bad review in the New York Times sealed their fate, that of another bomb in the long history of bombs. Reynolds didn’t have the stomach to try the movies anymore. Next he took a deal with a management company, with the idea being that he would be their TV expert, get involved with their actors, and help package new shows for them to produce. Though Norman and Stella both warned him against working with actors, he’d convinced himself it would be fun. Hollywood was a place where you always envy how the other side lives. He had been fascinated with the sell side, the agent’s and the manager’s role: massaging egos, shepherding careers, collecting clout through the ability to get the ear of the stars.

“Yeah,” Reynolds said. “Trying to get something going.”

“What is it?

“It’s just general. Too early to even talk about.” He motioned to Luis for the check.

“Put your wallet away,” said Norman, pulling out a gangster’s wad of hundreds. “Go do your thing.” He pointed to Luis. “I’m going to get my money back from this collection of goniffs. Call me later.”