‘A backup,’ said Melody with a pointed smile at Valenti.
‘Okay, okay, so Serafin pitches in with his line on Goldengirl’s background,’ said Valenti. ‘In-depth analysis. Grandmother with her gold medal. Mother’s tragic accident. Great copy. They’ll love it.’
‘I hope you’re right,’ said Dryden. ‘What counts commercially, of course, is that the story matches up to the American dream. You don’t want adverse publicity. To be frank, I’m not completely confident of the value of Goldengirl’s story in promotional terms.’
‘Her unmarried mother, you mean?’ Melody inquired.
Valenti laughed derisively. ‘That’s immaterial,’ he crooned. ‘These days people don’t give a monkey’s whether your parents did it legitimate. That couldn’t hurt Goldengirl.’ He turned to Dryden. ‘What’s bugging you, then?’
‘I wouldn’t say anything is,’ answered Dryden. ‘Remember, I haven’t joined you yet. If I did, I might suggest you drop the Nazi grandparents out of the story. The girl can’t be held responsible for them, I know, and the war’s been over thirty-five years, but it’s still a sensitive topic. If you’re creating a Goldengirl image, they’re better forgotten.’ He might have added a suspicion that Serafin’s interest in the Third Reich was not confined to physiology. For the present, he kept this to himself.
‘Fine, we can ax the grandmother,’ said Valenti. ‘It’s still one hell of a story. The kid from the orphanage: there won’t be a dry eye in America when that’s released. Kleenex should pay us a percentage. You don’t think so? Okay, Dryden, you’re the professional here. How would you package Goldengirl?’
‘Unlike you, I’ve yet to be convinced she is golden,’ he reminded them. ‘No doubt you have the advantage of me, Mr. Valenti, coming into the consortium at the start, but since we’re talking in commercial terms, I like to be sure of the product before I push it.’
‘Fools’ gold, eh?’ said Valenti, lighting a cigar. ‘Maybe you got a point. Personally, I’ve seen enough of Serafin to say he’s no con.’
‘I’m impressed by him too,’ said Dryden. ‘But it won’t be Dr. Serafin out there with the pick of the world’s runners in the Moscow Stadium. With due respect to Mr. Klugman here, I don’t see how all the coaching the girl can stand will see her through two rounds of heats, a semifinal and a final in three separate events. Has she seen the program, do you suppose?’
‘It’s pinned up in the gym,’ Klugman said stiffly. ‘Give us some credit for intelligence. I have a little experience of the Olympics myself, and I promise you Goldengirl is under no illusions. She knows exactly what she has to do.’
‘That’s if she gets there,’ said Dryden, talking more than he intended. ‘She’ll have to make the U.S. team first, and to do that she has to get to the Olympic Trial. Am I right? She has to qualify for an invitation to that first.’
‘Tomorrow,’ said Klugman tersely.
‘Should be fascinating,’ said Melody, breaking the tension. ‘Her public debut! It’s crazy when you think about it. Here we are two months before the Olympics, and nobody’s heard of the girl.’
‘There’s nothing crazy in it,’ Valenti told her. ‘It has to do with the image. She’s the chick who comes from nowhere to win the Olympics. If she’d been running world-class races all year, the press would be homing in by now. And once they saw this complex, and learned who was backing it, we’d have no chance at all of putting her across as the wide-eyed California blonde who discovers overnight that she can run. Dryden calls it the American dream; I call it the Yukon syndrome. Mud today, gold tomorrow. People want to believe it: fine, we’ve got an angle.’
‘Just so long as the story holds up,’ said Dryden, tossing in a last uncertainty. ‘I’ll be interested to see if Dr. Serafin can keep the press out of this place after Goldengirl makes the Olympic team — provided she does.’
‘He’ll take care of that,’ said Klugman, with infinite faith in his employer.
After that, the conversation dwindled in the cigar smoke. Dryden strolled across the room to look at a relic of gold-mining days, a framed Notice of Claim fastened to the door. It didn’t match the rest of the decor: possibly it had a superstitious value, or maybe someone in the camp had a sharp sense of humor. They would need something to sustain them up here. Melody was right. It was crazy, a fantasy. Nobody would believe that a girl totally unknown in June could pull off a triple in the Olympics in August. If she was Atalanta herself, there was still so much that could go wrong — sudden illness, a pulled muscle, a tumble on the track — that only a super-optimist would back her. Armitage and Valenti obviously had money to fool with. Dryden was being asked to stake something more valuable: the reputation of his business. Setting up a promotion on the scale Serafin had in mind meant selling the idea in advance to people whose confidence he had nurtured for years. If Goldengirl fell flat on her face exhausted before she ever got to Moscow, they weren’t going to shake their heads and say it was a long shot that missed, but never mind; they were going to transfer their accounts to an agency they could trust. To go in with the consortium made as much sense as backing the fellow who posted the Notice of Claim.
Yet, mosquito-like, there soared and swooped on the edge of rationality the knowledge that if Goldengirl did pull it off, he would have passed up the biggest return in merchandising history.
A phone bleeped. Melody picked it up. ‘Okay, I’ll bring them over. Gentlemen,’ she announced, ‘you’re invited to the conference room, where the next phase of the program is about to take place. Would you come with me?’
‘Anywhere you say, baby,’ said Valenti.
Melody led them outside and across the compound to a two-storied building. They mounted an open staircase to the upper floor.
‘Nice to get some fresh air,’ Klugman commented, pausing at the top.
‘Ain’t you fit?’ said Valenti, flicking his Panatella as he marched past.
In layout the room resembled a small university lecture theater, with twelve rows of tiered seats facing a demonstration table. The front was cluttered with TV cameras and sets of arc lights, all focused on three empty seats behind the table. Loudspeakers were suspended from the ceiling at various points.
Someone Dryden had not seen before welcomed each of them solemnly as they entered: a man of forty or so with the unusual combination of a tall frame and oriental features. Behind thick, black-framed spectacles, his eyes had the spark of high intelligence.
‘This is Dr. Lee, gentlemen,’ Melody explained. ‘He is an associate of Dr. Serafin’s who specializes in psychology.’
‘The resident shrink,’ murmured Valenti.
Dr. Lee nodded affably and said in perfect English, ‘At your service whenever you have need of one, Mr. Valenti. Gentlemen, this afternoon you are to observe one of the simulated press conferences we hold from time to time to acquaint Miss Serafin, or Goldengirl as we call her, with the conditions she is likely to experience not only at the Olympic Games, but before, when her nomination for three events becomes public knowledge.’
‘Conditioning,’ Valenti declared in his authoritative style.
‘A term I would prefer not to use,’ Dr. Lee mildly retorted. ‘It is implacably associated in popular ideas of psychology with Pavlov’s experiments on dogs. What we are trying to achieve here brings us, I assure you, significantly further in learning theory than that. We have progressed some way beyond B. F. Skinner, whose work postdates Pavlov’s by more than half a century. But I must not be drawn into lecturing you, gentlemen. We are here for another purpose. As you must have gathered from Dr. Serafin’s account of Goldengirl’s childhood and adolescence, she has led a relatively sheltered existence up to now, and to expose her unprepared to the pressure of Olympic competition and all that goes with it could have a disturbing, not to say disastrous, effect.