George shook his head. “I don’t know,” he said. He looked over at Howard, who was sitting in a third Naugahyde chair, his attaché case propped on his lap as he made notes with ballpoint pen on a sheet of yellow paper propped on the attaché case. George said. “Howard?”
Howard looked up.
George said, “What happened?” He sounded very lost and helpless.
“I’ll be damned if I know,” Howard said. He was taking it all very calmly. “I guess he was in a mood, that’s all.”
“A mood,” said George sadly. He turned to his co-producer. “Can we get twenty-seven minutes out of it?”
“God knows. I’ll call you when it’s processed, we can take a look at it. You’ll be out on the Island?”
“More trips to the city,” Marie told the world. “How lovely.” She was sitting by herself on the Naugahyde sofa, deliberately flicking cigarette ashes on the floor.
George paid her no attention. “Should we scrap the whole thing? Start over with a brand new interview?”
“Beats me. He’s your grandfather, you want to make the suggestion?”
“What reason do I give him?”
“No film in the camera,” Howard suggested. He was still making notes.
George turned to him. “Howard,” he said. “What’s with the eight books?”
Howard looked over at him again. “I never heard of it before in my life,” he said. He consulted his notes. “The Final Glory,” he read. “It isn’t a bad title, but shouldn’t it be for the last book?”
“What the hell is it about, Howard?” George was getting a little shrill, which he himself heard in his voice. He finished the Jack Daniels and held the paper cup over his head for God or somebody to replenish it.
“That’s hardly the issue,” the co-producer said. “He didn’t want to talk about it, and that’s that. Let’s figure out what to do with what he did want to talk about.”
Howard said, “Why not show it? The whole ten hours, or however much you have on tape. Exactly as he did it, an American statesman one layer closer to the truth than the great over-informed public has ever seen before. Why not?”
“Don’t joke, Howard,” George said. “I wouldn’t come over to Random House and make fun of you if it was your desk that got shat on.”
Marie snapped to her feet. She detested George to use foul language. “I’ll be outside,” she said coldly.
Nobody paid her any attention at all. As she walked out, Howard was saying, “I’m not joking. What’s the problem? You think Bradford will have second thoughts? He won’t, I’m sure he won’t.”
The co-producer said, “You’re a relative of his, too, aren’t you?”
“A nephew, actually. Why?”
“Maybe I come from a different kind of family.”
Howard spread his hands, the right one still holding the ballpoint. “Am I being stupid?”
“Yes,” said George. He was in no mood for his usual effort toward amiability. The cup had been taken from his hand, but had not yet been returned.
“Let’s see if I’m trainable,” Howard said. “Explain the situation to me.”
“Shit,” George said, more in despair than anger, and the cup was given back to him. He sipped, and this time it was completely Jack Daniels, and even warmer than before. They must be keeping the damn bottle on the roof.
George thought he was probably going to get drunk, and the idea filled him, suffused him, with a kind of morose joy. He knew Marie would give him hell for it, he knew his own head would give him hell for it tomorrow, but sometimes a situation simply called for an alcoholic stupor, and this was definitely one of those times.
Howard was saying, “Shit? Is that television jargon? Does that go down as an explanation in the global village?”
George shook his head, but while he was trying to decide what to say his co-producer said, “Howard, look. May I call you Howard?”
“You can call me Little Mary Sunshine, if the sentence also includes an explanation.”
“Howard,” said the co-producer, “I can see from the global village reference you’re a man above television, so I want to—”
“I don’t need defensiveness.”
“You’re not going to get defensiveness.”
“We’re bickering,” George said. He was feeling the Jack Daniels already. “We’re bickering, and the guy we’re really sore at isn’t even here.”
“And if he was,” the co-producer said, “we wouldn’t be bickering. Just let me talk for a minute, George.” To Howard he said, “Television transmits images. You may think I’m being a snot right now, talking down to you, all that cat-fight stuff. I’m not. I mean that television transmits images, in every possible sense of that phrase. In the technical sense, it transmits images, that’s obvious. But in another sense, too. In the people sense, in the sense that I’ve got an image of you and you’ve got an image of me. This is a different thing from a book, a book doesn’t transmit an image, it transmits part of a mind, that’s something else again. What television transmits is an immediate, specific, all-in-one-package interpretation of an entire human being. An image. That’s what television does, it’s what it knows how to do. Are we in agreement so far?”
“Neck and neck,” Howard said.
“All right. Now. Some people already have an image, and when the public sees them again on television they expect the same old image. It makes them comfortable, they feel safe. Change the image, everybody gets upset. You take one of the night-time talk shows, on comes a guest, a comic, he’s known as a very funny man. But tonight he doesn’t tell jokes, tonight he wants to do some serious talking about astrology. Why not, nobody’s one-dimensional. But you know the kind of thing I mean?”
Howard nodded. “People get embarrassed,” he said.
“That’s right. The audience gets embarrassed. The guy has fallen out of his image, it’s like his fly was open. The emcee, Johnny Carson, whoever, he cuts this guy short, he brings out the next guest, this is a famous expert on children’s diseases. Everybody sits back, they’re ready for a serious discussion about crippled kids. Only, tonight this guy is in a mood for mother-in-law jokes, all he wants to do is yuk it up. But let me tell you something, this guy could have the funniest mother-in-law routine this side of Henny Youngman, he’s gonna lay an egg. He fell out of his image.”
“I take it you’re saying Bradford fell out of his image just now.”
“That’s only the beginning,” the co-producer said. “With Bradford Lockridge, we’ve got a whole new level to deal with. Here we’ve not only got a personal image, we also have our national image. There’s an American image, too, and it’s what we show on the screen, and if we deviate from that we’ve got more than embarrassment, we’ve got a mess on our hands. Remember the Democratic Convention in Chicago in sixty-eight?”
“Far too well,” Howard said.
“A lot of people got mad about that. And you know who they got mad at? The kids, you think, for causing the trouble? The stupid politicians, for letting it happen? Not a bit of it. They were mad at television, for putting it on the screen, it was the wrong national image. They didn’t send letters to Senator McCarthy or Mayor Daley, they sent them to the networks and the FCC. They don’t care if the child disease expert tells mother-in-law jokes, but not on television. They don’t care if the comic is ape over astrology, but not on television. They don’t care if the cops beat up college girls, but not on television. And that last one is a lot tougher than the first two.”