There were arrangements to be made, too. She longed to duplicate the trip she’d taken in 1938. She wanted to begin in Paris as she had with Millie — only this time, Kate would be her companion, Kate would accompany her to the Meurice, and then out of Paris by rented car to Fontainebleau and Sens and Dijon where they would stay overnight at the Hôtel de la Cloche, and then on to Lausanne and the Beau-Rivage, and finally to Interlaken. Kate would be with her when they drove through the Grimsel Pass, and down that magnificent valley to Brig. Kate would be with her when the train pulled into Domodossola, white and shining in the sun. There were hotel reservations to be made, and maps to be marked, the entire route from Paris to Rome, and airline tickets to be purchased, and passports to be applied for and acquired, and vaccinations and shots, and traveler’s checks, and a letter of credit from the Talmadge bank, a hundred things to do before they left from Idlewild on the first of July.
She barely had time to think about Milt Anderson’s warnings in those hurried days of buying and preparing for the trip. Somewhere in a buried corner of her mind, there was the memory of a car stalled on a mountain curve, a bus rushing past, the frightening lurch of her heart as the horn’s sound filled the air, she did not want this to happen again. But she nonetheless planned her trip to duplicate that earlier one, telling herself nothing could possibly happen, she would avoid the physical and emotional stress Milt had talked about. Kate would make it easier for her.
And then, remembering the true intent of her trip, she wondered whether it was advisable to take Kate with her. But yes, there would be no harm, Kate would make it easier all around, easier to accept whatever physical hardships presented themselves, easier to reconstruct the past — and perhaps easier to adjust to the present. So she stopped questioning her judgment. April was a time for planning, and she planned happily and with joyous expectation.
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.”