“There are some strange pussycats in the pool,” King said.
“Oh, Franklin sent those two out. What they are, they’re for the stewardess part. What he said, either one is okay with him, so you pick. They got the knives for each other, naturally.”
“Chrissake, Robbie, that isn’t until August.”
“I know. He says let’s get set as far as we can as soon as we can, on everything that doesn’t start nibbling the budget. What’s the matter with you maybe hustling Kerner on the script some, Franklin says.”
“Tell him to goose Kerner, and what’s the matter with you? I fire you last night?”
“Two or three times, King. Look, we’ve got in maybe forty calls, what they say mostly is that Jessup is a rat fink after all the time he spent with you, then doing that fright thing. They say you want he should have a broken leg, okay. I called Barney like you said, and he said nothing actionable.”
King Noonan stared at him. “Like I said?”
“Last night you said call Barney.”
“Chrissake, baby, I must have been sauced. Look, do I ever give a damn what’s written about me? No. Jessup is in the business of selling magazines. Right? I’m in the business of selling King Noonan.”
“Well, it was rough. You know that. It was rough.”
“Everything is rough wherever you look, Robbie. Let’s join hands and start the dancing around here. This is the way we open. I want Mitch to come pound me some to get my heart started, ten minutes of that, and then Hymie come give me a shave and a trim. While that is going on I can be going over the Chicago material with Mert and Willy. That’s tomorrow night out there, and it isn’t smoothed out yet. Breakfast here in... thirty-five minutes, mucho eggs scrambled, and a herd of those little sausages like yesterday. Have Mary Ann up here to go over those series ideas while I eat, and Maddy to take notes. But the first priority, you find Joseph and send him up here with an ice-cold pitcher of orange juice belted real good with vodka.”
Robbie moved toward the door. “Fennison is here with that deal about the French television...”
“Baby, after Mary Ann. Then we schedule and run like a train.”
He was stretched out on the rubdown table with big Mitch chopping at his shoulder muscles when Joseph scurried in and poured a tall glass of juice. Hymie was waiting by the barber chair, stropping his razor. Mert and Willy came in with pink copies of the Chicago material. The juice had reminded him of something. He had Mitch quit and he sat on the table and said, “This juice, I remember I was eighteen, nineteen, working this club in Camden, New Jersey. A little palace for cockroaches and the material strictly blue, the bar whisky two bits a shot, the broads cruising like vultures, you know the type place. So on a Saturday we all hear the place is closing, it’s the last night. Midnight we roust the customers we’ve got, maybe three, and word is around, so the bartenders, the broads, the entertainment from the other joints along the street, they come in through the back, and what we have is these odds and ends of bottles. Aquavit, Curaçao, crap like that, so we make a hell of a big punch bowl, and it tastes so bad we squeeze a hell of a lot of oranges in.” He was into the rhythm of it then, the clown face mobile, words flowing into the apt gestures, timing professionally precise, voice flexible. He told the little audience of four how one of the girls, anxious to use up all the bottled goods, had, when they mixed the second batch, dumped in the entire contents of the bartender’s little bottle of chloral hydrate, thinking it some kind of bitters. He bounced off the table and imitated the way they went down — the glaze, the sag, the little blind stagger. He had the audience howling and weeping with laughter. “Three years before I could stare an orange in the face,” he said and got into the barber chair. Hymie tilted him back and wrapped his face in the steaming towel.
He put on his dragon robe for breakfast. Mary Ann Mize was waiting for him at the bedroom table, sipping hot coffee. Maddy was over at the desk, her steno book and pencils ready. He ignored Mary Ann and went over to Maddy and kissed her, then hooked a finger in the top of her blouse, pulled it away from her body, stared severely down, and shouted, “You men down there! Back to work! We need more barrage balloons to save London.” Maddy flushed and giggled.
He went to the table and began to eat, without word or glance for Mary Ann. She was a fox-faced woman in her forties, with a sour inverted smile. She waited him out.
“So make the pitch again,” he said at last.
“I will make the pitch. And keep making it. Pressure, sweetie. This year is in the can, and the ratings are holding. Pressure from the network, the sponsors, the agencies. And pressure from me, sweetie. We should give them another thirty-nine weeks like the last thirty-nine weeks. It is hot and running. Everybody thinks you’d be insane to move to a new format, even if we could come up with a good one.”
“Do you think I’m insane?”
“Sweetie, after fifteen years I think I know how your mind works. Always you want to quit ahead. Right. About next season you wonder if it could go stale, and you get scared that...”
He turned the direction of the piece of buttered toast and, cat quick, thumbed her chin down and shoved it into her mouth. “The King is never scared, Mary Ann.”
She chewed and swallowed, her eyes narrow and angry. “You buy my advice, so take it, King. I say ride it another season. Already we’ve got six good scripts. We shuffle the writers some to hold it fresh. We’ll hold a top rating, believe me.”
He aimed a finger at her. “What you do, you brief me on the new ideas right now. Maddy writes down my reaction. I come back from Chicago, I say whether we ride the same thing another year or we come up with a new one.”
“The time is getting short, you know.”
“And if we go with the same one, it’s a risk for me. For taking a risk, I get paid money. They understand I’ll want more?”
“They understand and they’re crying, but they’ll pay.”
“Shut up and start reading.”
All things considered, it was an easy day. By one in the afternoon he had disposed of Franklin and the French deal. He had given Mary Ann some new ideas to whip into shape. Mert and Willy were putting final touches on the Chicago material. He had made a couple of long lazy phone calls to friends on the Coast, proving in an indirect and discreet way that Warner Jessup had been faking it out and hadn’t moved in close enough to sting the King.
At one o’clock he put on some baggy madras shorts and went down to the pool. Joseph was tending the garden bar, and some of his people were beginning to set up the lunch buffet. Hobbie and Marda and some of that crowd had come over, and thirty seconds after King had a drink in his hand, he realized that they were going to give him the rough treatment on the Jessup bit, with Hobbie leading the way. So he did the only thing he could; he took it right to them, pantomiming extravagant terror of every small thing. He went on the high board and did a guy too frightened to jump, who finally fainted and fell off. When anybody came up behind him, he would give a great shuddering leap. He renamed himself Chicken a la King, and after he started them all swinging his way, he zeroed in on Hobbie Thorn with particular attention to Hobbie’s network cancellation, and he kept driving it in until Hobbie finally went roaring off in his golden convertible, the back of his bull neck brick red.
It was sometime after three o’clock when, among the pool group, he noticed one of the pussycats Franklin had sent up from town. He got her aside. A small-boned blonde, young, wise-eyed, with a lot of facial business, conversational extravagance, the choppy gestures of the industry. Her name was Adele Bowen, and she recited a whole string of credits with watchful aplomb.