Limo, p.24
Limo, page 24
There was a silence. Hank Judson explained to America that he had lost contact momentarily with Akron, and meanwhile “Just Up the Street” was returning to the Georgetown home of Bob and Dorothea Skidmore, where a controversy had developed.
Hank certainly hadn’t overstated it.
In the control room we had been watching Georgetown on the monitors, and Nathanson had put Georgetown on the Preview Screen.
But Nathanson hesitated moving Georgetown onto the full CBC-TV network. Jack glanced around at me. I nodded, urging him to do it.
Nathanson shrugged, spoke to the technical director at his left and did his orchestra conductor gesture.
This is what our audience was treated to:
Bob and Dorothea Skidmore were screaming at each other in their foyer. Bob was trying to carry all four children. He kept dropping a little one in bunny-jamas. When he picked that one up he would drop one or two more.
“Dorothea, could you help me with this? They’re your kids, too, you know!” Bob screamed.
“You’re not only a cheat and a scum, you’re a coward!” Dorothea screamed.
“You want me to stay here and shoot it out with that Texas lunatic?” Bob screamed.
“That’s what a real man would do, yes!” Dorothea screamed.
The four children were crying.
If this hadn’t been show business, I might have felt about half rotten for that phone call.
“Where did you take this tacky little person on Monday nights? To the Lucky Motel? Or did you parade her through the lobby of the Carlton so some of my friends could see her?” Dorothea screamed.
“It wasn’t always Monday nights! Sometimes it was nooners during the week!” Bob screamed. “I nailed her on the grass in front of the Washington Monument one day! Now will you pick up one of these kids?”
Dorothea raised her chin, threw back her shoulders, turned her palms out at hip level and screamed, “Oh, Bob, you are low! low! low!”
“I’m going to be dead! dead! dead!” Bob screamed.
Several people in the control room, including Stanley, looked at Nathanson and me, wondering if we would really keep the Skidmores on the air.
“Okay, Frank, our ass is on the line,” Nathanson said.
“Let’s go out punching,” I said.
A concealed camera was giving America a fine view of the Skidmores. But our mini-cam guy crept closer, trying for a tight shot of Dorothea’s open mouth while she screamed.
Bob Skidmore thrust the tiny child in the bunny-jamas into our minicam guy’s hands and yelled, “Here, fella, make yourself useful!”
The mini-cam guy later said he got letters from all over the country telling him he had held the child upside down.
The sight of the mini-cam reminded Dorothea that she was on television. How much of this might have been seen at Easton, Maryland, or at the River Oaks Country Club in Houston, or even next door?
“I’m so ashamed of you!” Dorothea screamed.
“Shut the fuck up!” Bob screamed.
In the control room, Nathanson said, “Give me Three on Preview . . . okay, good . . . take Three.”
Our outside camera in Georgetown picked up Bob Skidmore as he opened his front door carrying three kids and ran down the steps of the townhouse.
He ran straight into Gladys and Phil de Menil, Senator Frick, and Parsons.
Into the headset Jack Nathanson said, “Tell Marty to give the kid to the mother and get the mini-cam going again. We need him on the street.”
On the home TV screen was a shot of Bob Skidmore attempting to greet the arrivals while looking around wildly for a Texas assassin.
“Did we come on the wrong night, old spoke?” Phil de Menil said.
“Bob, I need to talk to you about teamwork,” Senator Frick said.
“Why are the little lambs crying so?” Gladys de Menil said.
Bob Skidmore’s eyes looked like fried eggs.
He cackled and screamed at the same time, “Go on in! All of you! Go right on in! We’re expecting company from Texas! Make him feel at home! Throw the football with him, Phil!”
Bob Skidmore rushed to his Lincoln parked at the curb and threw the three kids inside. He counted them and realized one was missing. You could tell that for an instant he considered going back for the fourth.
But he jumped behind the wheel of the Lincoln, started the motor, put the car in reverse and crashed into the de Menils’ Mercedes.
“De Menil, you fucking pea-headed jackass! Move your car away from that fire hydrant so I can get out of here!” Bob screamed.
“See here, Bob, your sense of humor is a bit sick, isn’t it? You have bashed in my grille,” Phil de Menil said.
With that, Bob Skidmore leaped out of the Lincoln and ran off down the cobbled streets of Georgetown carrying two of the kids with him. The third looked out a window in the back seat.
With Akron still black, Hank Judson assured America that no one had been injured in Akron when the five-hundred-pound Roman candle missed the entire sky and hit our truck, but that the explosion was causing technical difficulties.
Hank then said “Just Up the Street” was moving back to the Tampa home of Angie Rocco, the plumber.
Lewis, the Tampa commentator, did a quick update on the Roccos. Mario had not yet come out of the bathroom. Carmen had invited Mr. Kaplan to have dinner with them.
Carmen had loaded Kaplan’s plate with rigatoni, veal, and garlic bread. On another plate for Kaplan were a dozen mushrooms stuffed with mozzarella. A thicket of salad grew from a nearby bowl. Carmen refilled the chianti glass Kaplan had just emptied.
“Mario, come out here and eat,” Carmen Rocco said.
There was no answer from Mario.
Carmen leaned one hundred and thirty pounds of bosoms across Kaplan’s head and poured the chianti glass up to the rim again the moment Kaplan took it away from his lips.
“You know, I could probably get you in trouble if I told your bosses you drink while you’re working on a case,” Carmen laughed.
“Aw, you wouldn’t do that, Mrs. Rocco,” Kaplan smiled.
“Carmen. Call me Carmen. We’re friendly people here,” Mrs. Rocco said.
“I’m Seymour,” Kaplan said.
Carmen touched her chianti glass to her chin and lowered her eyelids and licked her lips.
“Seymour,” she said.
“It’s no good trying to stonewall it,” Angie Rocco said with a sigh. “It’ll come out sooner or later. You might as well hear it from me, Kaplan.”
“Call me Seymour,” Kaplan said.
“I ain’t gonna call no Fed Seymour,” Angie Rocco said.
“Who sent you here, Seymour?” Carmen Rocco said.
“We’ve been observing your family, Carmen,” Kaplan said.
“Yeah, that’s what I mean. What’s the use of fighting the Feds? They listen to your phone and look in your window,” Angie Rocco said. “I might as well tell you the story, Kaplan. It was just little things at first. One year I deducted some wrenches that hadn’t really been stolen. I added a few thousand miles that I didn’t really drive my truck. Little things like that. And it was easy. I never thought I’d get caught. I didn’t know I was drifting into a life of crime. Sure, sure, the government needs money, Kaplan, but so do I.”
Mario came out of the bathroom, sat down at the table and started scooping rigatoni into his mouth.
“Mario, go back and flush the toilet,” Carmen Rocco said.
“What for? I didn’t use it,” Mario said.
“That trip where I went to Acapulco to bid on the job to keep the pipes open at the Hilton?” Angie Rocco said. “I didn’t really have no chance at that job. They got their own guys that keep the pipes open. Mexican guys. They got a union. But I wrote the trip off as business. You might lock me up on that one, Kaplan. But what if I had of got the job? I got a right to hope, ain’t I?”
Before Angie Rocco could plunge deeper into confession and probably reveal himself as a felon on the CBC-TV network to all of America, we replaced Angie on the screen with Hank Judson in his study.
Hank told the country everybody has a right to hope.
Then we moved “Just Up the Street” to Rochester, where several hundred people had gathered outside the home of Ralph and Ann Getz. Our commentator, Jerry Cummings, was still on the front porch doing interviews, but even on the earphones we could barely hear him in the noise of the crowd. So Jack left the outside of the house on just long enough to establish to you in your living room that you were now looking at Rochester.
Then Jack moved inside the Getz house.
Roxie wore a gold-spangled leotard and was twirling a baton. Ann Getz was playing Auto-Gammon. Ralph was talking to one of our technicians, who had wired an RF mike on Daphne, the singing Labrador.
“First I knew it was one day I was singing in the shower, and I thought I heard my wife Ann singing harmony with me from the bedroom,” Ralph said. “I thought that was real strange because Ann don’t sing a note. So I wrapped a towel around me and went into the bedroom. Ann wasn’t even in the room. It was Daphne throwing her head back and singing. That explained it. Hell, I knew it couldn’t of been Ann.”
Ralph scratched Daphne’s ears and said, “Sweetheart, seeing as how you got a mike on now, just like me, let’s do our all-time favorite.”
Daphne cocked back her head, and Ralph lowered his head to the level of the black Lab’s, and put his arm around Daphne.
If you saw it on your home TV, you would probably agree that it sounded like “Limehouse Blues.”
The big clock in the CBC control room indicated that “Just Up the Street” had less than five minutes to go.
Nathanson called for the final whip-around from the commentators in Akron, Rochester, Georgetown and Tampa.
“This is the round-robin. Ready on the billboard,” he said.
Akron was back on the air because our Akron affiliate had rushed its own remote truck to the Perry house. The other Akron radio and TV stations had sent news crews, making “Just Up the Street” a very well-publicized event in Akron. Three fire trucks had arrived to douse our remote unit. The Perrys, Sergeant Jackson, and the others were being interviewed by the media.
Even our man Rod DeRoache was being queried by our competitors at the same time he was on the air for CBC-TV:
“. . . well, you can see that the Perrys and their friends, after a tough day of making those steel-belted radials, like to loosen up and have a good laugh. This is Rod DeRoache, ‘Just Up the Street,’ in Akron, Ohio,” he said into a multi-network battery of microphones and cameras.
Next, the show switched to Parsons and the Senator in front of the Skidmore townhouse in Georgetown.
“Yes, they’re all back inside now—Dorothea Skidmore, two of her children, her sister Gladys and her brother-in-law Phil de Menil,” Parsons said. “Bob Skidmore and the other two children have gone ‘Just Up the Street’ in Georgetown. . . .”
Jerry Cummings couldn’t do the Rochester cleanup because the crowd on the porch of the Getz house had mashed him into a corner where he couldn’t be seen or heard.
So with a lead-in by Hank Judson, we had Ralph and Daphne sing us off the air. They sang “After the Ball Is Over.”
We faded out of that into Robert Lewis speaking from the driveway of the Rocco home in Tampa. Behind Lewis, Angie Rocco was showing his boat and trailer to Kaplan. If you wore a headset and could tune into the right monitor, you could hear Angie Rocco asking Kaplan what the boat might be worth in a settlement.
But on the home screens all that could be heard was Lewis signing off from Tampa.
Then a shot of Hank Judson in his study. Hank Judson was saying . . .
To tell the truth, I don’t know what he said.
The fact that Hank Judson was on the screen winding up “Just Up the Street” was all I needed to know.
32.
JACK NATHANSON SAID, “Okay, in twenty seconds let’s round up the suspects.” That meant stand by to roll the credits. Executive producer. Produced and directed by. Technical director. Air travel arrangements made by. This has been a live network presentation of. Nathanson was throwing it back to local, or, to take it out of TV language, our show was going off the air.
Nathanson said into his headset, “Hell of an effort out there, fellows. You can read the names of the dead and wounded in tomorrow’s papers.”
An A. D. said, “Nine . . . eight . . .”
Nathanson said, “Speed the credits . . . bring the music up full . . . and . . .”
We were off.
The way to know we were off for sure was to look up at the Air Screen and see that a commercial had replaced Hank Judson’s face. A group of young ladies dressed in giant Spearmint gum packages and tri-corn hats were playing fifes and drums on the deck of a tugboat circling the Statue of Liberty.
A few minutes earlier, the way to know we were getting ready to go off was Stanley Coffman’s party. He began making preparations for it at the top of the final hour.
At that point Stanley had rushed into the control room and said, “We must have the whole fucking country, guys. The board looks like Libby’s green peas.”
Long before the credits went crawling up the screen, then, I had three different glasses of champagne handed to me along with three different helpings of caviar, and at least four production girls—and maybe one guy—had already kissed me.
People who work in live TV production usually say something ritualistic to one another at the end of a show, a remark that might have some bearing on the lives we all lead. When I reached out to shake Jack Nathanson’s hand and give him my thanks, he grinned and said, “You get the luggage and I’ll get the police escort.”
Now Stanley Coffman was back in the control room. He had his own personal bottle of champagne, open and foaming. Behind him came a Frenchman in a tuxedo pushing a cart of iced-down magnums. And behind them came a half dozen waiters carrying trays of food and cocktails.
Staff people flooded in and out of the room, laughing, sloshing drinks, and doing what they generally refer to as unwinding.
Stanley not only had his champagne. On his other arm he had the tall, long-haired production girl, Melissa.
“Jesus, in the second hour we kicked the private eye’s ass four to one,” Stanley said. “Know where the ‘Movie of the Week’ went? Right in the old shitter.”
Stanley licked Melissa across the mouth. She did not seem to mind.
Stanley said, “Jesus, was that some show? A whole pile of niggers . . . The wops in there threshing around . . . The guy in Georgetown eating a mile of shit . . . Hey, do I love that dog? . . . Do me a favor, Frank. Fuck Melissa. I’m taking the dog to Elaine’s.”
And Stanley roared.
I moved away to look for Cindy or Sally or Cooper.
As I was easing through the crowd I brushed against Hank Judson, who was having a grand-grand final.
“Good job, Hank,” I said.
“Well, live television’s where it is, Frank. We all know that, don’t we?” Hank Judson said.
I said Hank handled all of the surprises we were confronted with in his usual professional manner.
“It’s just experience, old bloke,” he said.
We heard shouting and applause behind us.
I turned around to see Stanley had climbed up on the desk in front of the central panel.
Stanley asked for quiet from the crowd and said, “The little Wasp just wants to make a brief announcement.”
With that, Stanley unzipped his pants and hollered, “Right here, Nielsen! Here you go, guy! The old whanger!”
He then bent over and did a racing dive—a full Mark Spitz, he called it later—into Melissa and the party.
I lingered at the door to see if anyone was injured. I gathered not. When everyone peeled off, Melissa was swigging from the champagne bottle and Stanley’s head was under her skirt.
There is no happier human, for a day or two anyhow, than a network president with a prime-time hit.
Cindy and Cooper were sitting down eating off their laps in a corner of the VIP room. Cindy was blending three desserts together: chocolate sundae, strawberry shortcake, and lemon pie. Cooper was wrestling with a crab claw.
“If they don’t get ’em some bologna and American cheese in here, folks are liable to starve to death,” Cooper said.
“Where's Sally?” I said.
Cooper said, “I think she went to rope one of them Frenchmen and get a cocktail.”
My search for Sally included one more dip into a passing tureen of caviar, one more glass of champagne, and two invitations to a Cluster starting in a Village loft at midnight.
I spotted Sally as she came out of the powder room in a hall.
I didn’t think she kissed me all that fiercely, as a matter of fact, considering my heroic stature of the moment.
“Kaplan, huh?” she said.
“Kaplan what?”
“Wonderful old unrehearsed and spontaneous ‘Just Up the Street,’” she said.
Her tone was not explicitly what I had hoped for.
“You didn’t enjoy the show?” I said.
“It isn’t a question of whether I enjoyed it,” Sally said. “Of course I enjoyed it.”
“Then what’s the problem?”
“It was a fake, Frank,” she said. “If Kaplan was a fake, then maybe the rest of it was. Kaplan I know about for sure.”
“Kaplan?”
“Come on,” Sally said. “I was with you at Elaine’s the night Watts and Travers came in. That insane stuff about a series? A series about an IRS agent? Kaplan? You took that idea and used it tonight to shake things up.”
“If you’re trying to say that we added a new dimension to the banality of TV comedy, just blurt it out,” I said.
That was part of a line from one of Sally’s old columns.
She lit a cigarette and said, “I speak as a critic now, and not as a person who might care for you.”
“You called me a fake,” I said.
“You are,” Sally said. “I mean the show was.”
