The Dakota Winters, page 21
It wasn’t what he wanted to hear.
“I mean on the show as a producer, as my able-minded muse. I need you there.”
“I don’t know, do you?”
“I can’t do this without you.”
“Sure you can.”
“With you there I can do this, Anton. We’ll make it work like we did on The Tonight Show. We worked so great together.”
“That was all you,” I said.
“But it wasn’t. It was the two of us. A little more you than me.”
“Untrue,” I said.
“You’re backing out of this.”
“I’m not at all,” I said.
“Then what?”
It struck me that he honestly wouldn’t do this unless I partnered with him, and if he wavered they’d get someone else and we’d lose our shot. But if I said yes, I was signing on as Buddy’s Boy Friday again, and I’d been increasingly convinced I needed something of my own, even if it didn’t make much money, or make me famous, or even happy. We waited in silence to be served. He looked stressed and miserable, I thought, not the way someone should look after getting the sort of news he’d received. He was back on network TV. Couldn’t he see how fucking great that was? Couldn’t I?
He ordered for us, and the man behind the counter sliced the freshest, most amazing-looking Norwegian salmon, which Buddy wouldn’t enjoy a bite of unless I gave him the right answer right then, so I told him, “Yes, we’ll do this together.”
“Okay,” he said. “Then onward and upward.”
WE PICKED UP A SUNDAY TIMES AND A NEW YORK POST ON THE WAY BACK to the Dakota. The Olympics had begun in Moscow without us. They’d sealed off the capital as though they were in the midst of a military occupation.
I read from an article to Buddy, “‘The boycott was a clumsy plot that has failed, as all can see, they said on Soviet television.’ They’re carrying on without us as though we don’t exist.”
“A world without America.”
“Brezhnev’s dream,” I said.
“Oh, he misses us,” Buddy said. “You think beating Cuba and East Germany is as much fun as beating us?”
We passed the First Baptist Church, a huge turreted red-roof building that Buddy reminded me was designed by the same guy who designed the Apollo Theater, and later the Ansonia, where Toscanini and Babe Ruth once lived, he informed me for the umpteenth time, the Babe greeting visitors in a velvet bathrobe smoking Cuban cigars. It felt like Buddy was a realtor trying to sell me on the neighborhood so that I’d decide to put down roots here. Or maybe I just heard it that way. Everything about him suddenly irritated me.
AT A LIQUOR STORE ON COLUMBUS WE PICKED UP A BOTTLE OF CHAMPAGNE to celebrate—my idea—and we made mimosas. With the help of my mother and Kip, and two flutes of Moët, I got Buddy to see how lucky we were to get this shot, not to mention that after two years of hemorrhaging money he’d once again have a paycheck coming in. By that evening he was back in his TV-host brain, writing, and planning, reading the Times, the Post, Esquire, and People with a pen at his side to underline items to use in jokes. Before meeting with the network (in five days), we’d need to hone our sense of what we’d be, how we’d be different, and that would take work, and a little self-knowledge, and some late hours of tinkering. All within a week. We’d hit up our writers for ideas, and block out our budget, and then start reaching out to the affiliates, and potential sponsors to quiet their foreseeable concerns. And then we’d find a venue, and do a test run before an audience, and while doing all this avoid having another nervous breakdown, because that would ruin everything.
AT AROUND ELEVEN THAT NIGHT I MADE THE QUESTIONABLE DECISION TO call long distance to Bermuda, thinking John would likely be up late composing. The line was scratchy, but his voice was clear.
“Hello,” he said.
“It’s Anton,” I said.
“Anton me boy. Are you flying back down here? There’s a few things I need from the apartment.”
“Be there in a few hours,” I said.
“It isn’t the same without you,” he said in a mock female voice.
“You stopped writing songs.”
“Fuck no. I’ve got a suitcase full now.”
I blurted out, “Buddy got a show.”
“Bloody great.”
“I just wanted to tell you.”
“I’m glad you did.”
“Well, so I guess that’s our news.”
“You don’t sound completely thrilled.”
“He said he couldn’t do this without me.”
“Ah, I see.”
“What.”
“You’re worried it’ll be like that Twilight Zone episode with the prisoner exiled on an empty planet.”
“I don’t know that one.”
It wasn’t the first time it struck me that John had watched a lot of TV over the last few years of being a househusband.
“One of the guards leaves the poor sod a robot that acts as the guy’s companion, picks up his interests and tics. That’s you, you’re thinking, and all you’ll do for the rest of your life is hold Buddy’s hand and wipe his bum and you’re worried you’ll be on his deathbed laughing at his jokes and telling him how great he was and reminiscing about the day Orson Welles was on his show and said something magnificent, and all that will be true, and it will be true that his show was a great show, but where’s yours, you’ll ask. And whose bloody life will you have lived and will you wake up someday as an old man and realize all you did was work on someone else’s fading dream?”
“Aw fuck.”
“It won’t happen. It’s great news.”
“Thanks I guess.”
“But don’t get too comfortable. I want to take a longer voyage. Maybe to Tahiti, if you can keep from puking your guts out this time.”
31
Alex insisted we celebrate in style by getting fucked up and going out to the new club he’d been frequenting, the Blitzkrieg on Thirty-Fourth and Seventh, which operated out of an old clothing factory, and had three separate floors that functioned like different clubs. The basement had bands like the Cramps, the Skirts, and the Swinging Madisons, and the floor above had a DJ spinning records, and on the floor above that one there were dangling video screens and some bigger ones with image collages, Bowie vamping in drag, bombs being dropped, demolition derbies, Nixon giving his Checkers speech, Wally and Beaver on a camping trip, Heckle and Jeckle placing dynamite in the back of a boat belonging to a droopy-faced dog.
On our way to the club we stopped at a nearby dive and had a few vodkas.
“So it’s just once a week,” he said.
“Which is better, don’t you think?”
“I think it’s great. I don’t know how many people watch TV at eleven thirty on a Friday, but I certainly will.”
“They watch on Saturday night. That’s what they’re hoping for.”
“You’re up against some very lame competition. There’s a Saturday Night Live rip-off show at that time on ABC.”
“Fridays.” I had seen it a few times. It was an exact rip-off with skits and music and a news segment.
“So you know it. Have you watched it?”
“The bands are great, but it pretty much sucked.”
“You know that they fired everyone at Saturday Night Live. Lorne Michaels is out, and they’ve got a whole new cast. From what I’ve heard it’s a shitstorm.”
“Is that good or bad for us?”
“Neither. But it’s Buddy Winter. It’ll be great.”
“I’m going to be a full producer.”
“At twenty-fucking-three.”
“Freaks me out a little.”
“Give me a break.”
“What do you mean?”
“I mean, do you ever stop to think how lucky you’ve been, how many people would kill to be you? I love you, but sometimes I think you’re living in a bubbled-off little castle.”
“Okay.”
“Good, then.”
“And who nearly died twice in the last year?”
“But you didn’t, right? And now . . .”—he pulled out a baggie containing four or five mushrooms—“time for a pre-club snack.”
The mushrooms hadn’t kicked in when we entered the club, which was packed with punks and glam rockers, and a few mohawks, and a sea of insanely dancing fools, which we joined. On the video floor we danced to the Jam’s “Going Underground,” which in that moment was the best song I’d ever heard.
At some point the chemicals hit my bloodstream, and I couldn’t find Alex, and I walked by myself to the roof, where people were drinking and dancing and someone was setting off sparklers.
My eye kept dropping on something normally innocuous that I now found beautiful and odd, like the patterns of people’s shirts, and the beads in a woman’s hair, and the rings on a bartender’s fingers, and the sound of the speakers, and the feel of the night air, and the smell of pot, and the dampness of my shirt. I’d been sweating. Bands I remember hearing: Martha and the Muffins, Joy Division, PiL, the Ramones, the Normal. I drank down a cold glass of water, and after that a shot of tequila that someone gave me along with seven other people who seemed to be celebrating a birthday. I sang with them.
Then I heard a voice with a British accent say “Winterboy.” Olive. Her face was covered in silver sparkles, and her hair was teased out, and she was wearing a minidress and a sheer top.
Before I could answer, our mouths met and Olive pushed me against the wall and I surged with the music and felt her body up against mine.
Then she pulled back and said, “Where the hell have you been?”
32
Harry and Elliot Kaplan—who we stole from ABC the day we inked the deal—stopped by the apartment the next day to go over the media schedule, which included six different publications with whom Buddy would sit for interviews, and to work out strategies for how best to respond to questions about the breakdown and its aftermath. With a network show in development, Harry felt we should play it close to the vest, staying free of painful self-disclosure and focusing more on how great it was to be back, and our plans for the new show.
“I don’t want to seem secretive,” Buddy said.
“At this point I don’t think that’s a problem,” Harry said. “People know your story.”
“Not all of it they don’t.”
“They don’t need to know all of it. It was a classic inward search. A spiritual pilgrimage. A cleanse. A reawakening. And then say something funny, so they won’t feel as though you’ll be doing therapeutic infomercials each week. That’s pretty much it.”
“Should we do a few practice interviews?” Buddy said.
“I think that would be wise,” Elliot said.
We began firing questions at him, and with each one he smiled, gathered his thoughts, and gave a considered answer. Harry gave a thumbs-up after several of them but Elliot seemed unimpressed. When Buddy left the room to take a phone call, Elliot said to Harry, “You’ve stripped away his fire. He sounds medicated.”
“I did?”
“All your words of caution.”
“I just don’t want any fuckups. Not now. Not with just a few weeks before the show starts,” Harry said.
“What do you think, Anton?” They’d been looking to me to break the ties when they disagreed.
“I think he needs to be less self-correcting,” I said.
“Exactly,” Elliot said.
“All right,” Harry conceded. “I just don’t want him going whole-hog Howard Beale on us. We don’t need anyone shooting him from the studio audience.”
Buddy returned to the room, looking happily perplexed.
“Well wishes from Liz Smith,” he said.
“Seriously?” I asked.
“Did you give her our number?” he asked me.
“I did,” Elliot said. “You’re gonna need her, and it’s wise to make her feel privileged.”
Harry said, “Listen, I guess you get into it a little with your answers. No more coaching. Be yourself and it’ll all work out.”
“I thought I was being myself,” Buddy said.
“Be a little more yourself,” Elliot said.
Buddy shrugged and said, “I can do that.”
And then for the rest of our practice run he was great.
We went over the format too, and a request by the network that Elliot review the monologue at least a few hours before showtime.
“Why?” Buddy asked.
“It’s just a formality. There won’t be any editing. It’s your show.”
But we all knew it was to avoid the sort of meltdown monologues that Buddy had done last time.
I felt for him, having all of us picking at him, watching him, judging him (“like livestock at the county fair,” Buddy said), rooting for him, and at the same time visibly worrying that he might combust again, or be a shell of his old self, or be better and have no one care anymore because the world, as it does, had moved on. And still, I took solace in what Elliot told us all, which was that with Dallas on before us, Friday nights were there for the taking, and that the network that morning agreed to promo Buddy during commercial breaks on three hit shows. If all went as designed, we’d own the night, and if SNL was as fucked up as everyone said, we might own the whole weekend.
33
The Democrats alighted on New York for their convention in August, which meant Joan and Ted would be in town and my mother would be pressed again into action, a few parties here and a trip to a day spa with Joan. In the end Teddy had won nine states and enough delegates to prove that with a marginally better performance, starting with old Roger Mudd and on the trail in Iowa, he might be headed for a win, and fine-tuning his acceptance speech. Now he was hoping for a floor fight, with a sizable block of Carter delegates jumping ship, something that was at best unlikely, and made him look like a sore loser, I thought. It was looking more and more as though Ronald Reagan, son of a shoe salesman from a small town in Illinois, star of Bedtime for Bonzo, and spokesman for GE, would be our next president.
The delegates partied hard regardless, as though the world was ending. They made jokes about moving to Canada if Reagan won, and about wanting to invest in bomb shelters because of the likelihood now of nuclear war.
AFTER HER TRIUMPH AT THE TAVERN, THE REST OF THE CAMPAIGN HAD been an ordeal for Joan. As his losses mounted Ted’s spirits declined. He ate poorly, drank, and fell into moods, and journalists chronicled the weight he put on, his suits straining at the seams. When they posed for pictures, Ted very reluctantly held Joan’s hand, or put his arm around her, and sometimes he left the stage well before her, and once while she was speaking.
“If we were to pull off a miracle and win this thing,” Joan told my mother, “I can’t imagine what kind of president and First Lady we’d be. He acts sometimes like he can’t stand to be in the same room with me.”
Teddy’s last hope sank after a vote on the rules the first night went Carter’s way. Teddy was gracious and said all the right things about uniting around the party and getting behind the president, and then on the penultimate night of the convention he gave the speech of his life pounding Reagan and the Republicans with such passion and precision (Where was this guy all these months?) that you couldn’t hear him and not believe that this was what the country needed, and more so after Carter’s warmed-over speech the following night. My mother’s eyes welled with tears that had little to do with Teddy, I thought.
It was deeper: about the fact, I imagined, that life sometimes takes a wrong turn, and you can’t will it to be any different.
“I have a very bad feeling about what’s coming,” she said.
“You mean Reagan.”
“No,” she said. “It feels like we opened the door to something, you know?”
“I do,” I said.
“It’s just a feeling. I’ll get over it.”
JOAN AND TED WERE ON THE FRONT PAGE OF THE TIMES, PHOTOGRAPHED valiant in defeat. The next day he’d invited her to go to lunch with him at the Box Tree, an overpriced pretentious place in the East Forties. It was the first day of the rest of their life, Joan told my mother, with some real optimism that outside the pressures of the race they could start over again. But it turned out to be just a photo opportunity for Ted. In the pictures Joan looks lovely. She’s wearing a lightweight summery dress, white with splashes of color, and he’s leaning across the table in a dark suit, his thick curls combed drably back
The next evening, they held a party in their home in McLean, Virginia, and then they were supposed to fly to Hyannis Port, where they’d vacation together and plan the rest of their life, but according to what Joan told my mother later in a letter, Ted had asked the plane to make a stop on Montauk Point in Long Island. He told her goodbye, see you later, and thanks for everything, and then walked to a waiting car.
What made all this dreariness bearable was the early press for Buddy’s new show. Variety was first, then People, and both pieces read like love letters. Rolling Stone did an interview with him. Manhattan magazine sent a reporter to interview him at the Dakota. People didn’t like having reporters in the building. There was a mention of my living in the Dakota too, “on the dank and dimly lit ninth floor,” the writer said.
Playboy ran a short Q and A with Buddy Winter, with a dashing picture of Buddy seated at a red-lit horseshoe-shaped bar. His favorite interview subjects (Alfred Hitchcock, Katharine Hepburn), pet peeves (people who hang large oil paintings of themselves in their homes), drink of choice (Tanqueray martini dry), favorite beach in the world (Waikiki), athlete he’d most like to be in his next life (Walt Frazier).
Hefner had had his own talk show, Playboy After Dark, which lasted two seasons and was designed to make you feel like you’d stumbled into a cocktail party that happened to have famous people who’d stand for short impromptu interviews with the host, between journeys to the bar. Hef would slide over to Roman Polanski and Sharon Tate, or Jerry Garcia and the Grateful Dead, or the Byrds, or Three Dog Night, and Hefner in a break in the conversation would say, “Do you feel like playing a song for the kids?”
