The Dakota Winters, page 6
Here the locals embraced their transformation. They’d “dropped off their flannel shirts and exchanged them for a little Bill Blass,” one of the TV reporters said, and it was true. The stationery and hardware stores had cleared out for ones selling designer skiwear and Revillon furs. A lot of locals had rented out their homes; a Texas oil executive leased the biggest one in town for the week for $50,000.
And every fifth person it seemed was someone we knew from New York, and plenty from the TV world.
“Anton,” they’d call out, and then they’d ask about Buddy, and I’d tell them how great he was doing, and how he looked forward to getting back to work.
“Late night hasn’t been the same,” they’d tell me in one form or another.
“It will be again,” I said, feigning confidence, and making mental notes on who to call when the time came.
ELLIOT KAPLAN, THE PRODUCER WHO’D BEEN TESTING THE WATERS FOR Buddy’s reemergence, was working the games for ABC Sports, and would be at the U.S.–Norway hockey game for which Kip and I had tickets. Buddy arranged for us to meet up in the second-period break.
“He wants to talk about cable, he says. I know nothing about cable,” Buddy said.
“It’s the future,” I said. “I’ll report back at 0600.”
“All right, captain.”
The game would take place in the old Olympic Arena, where Sonja Henie won her skating medals in 1932 and which was the size of a midwestern high school gym. A weirdly small venue to host what had become the talk of the games—hockey, and specifically the U.S. team, who with a roster of college kids had already managed to tie the Swedes and rout the powerhouse Czechs 7–3, which Buddy likened to St. John’s basketball team taking down the Knicks.
As we entered the arena, chants of “USA! USA!” began all around us. People wore USA hats and scarves and T-shirts and carried flags. Quite a few had their faces painted red, white, and blue.
“Nuke the Nords,” someone yelled.
“Throw ’em in the sauna,” said someone else.
“What if I root for Norway?” Kip said.
“Why would you?”
“Because someone has to. And it’s an incredibly beautiful country, Mom says. More than a thousand fjords.”
“All right, but if they take the lead you have to switch back.”
“Geir Myhre is the best!” he yelled.
“Yes!” a pretty Norwegian girl yelled back. She looked college-age and had a friend with her. The two of them gave Kip a thumbs-up.
“Who’s that?” I asked.
“Norway’s best player. Right winger, born in Oslo.”
“You read up. Dad would be proud.”
THE GAME STARTED SLOPPILY. MISSED PASSES, CLUNKY SKATING. THE Norwegians outplayed the U.S. throughout the first period and led 1–0. Geir Myhre in fact scored the goal, their only one of the game. Kip waved over to the Norwegian girls, who were seated around five rows up, and they waved enthusiastically back.
“I want to move to Norway,” he said into my ear.
“What would you do there?”
“Norwegian things.”
“Reindeer racing,” I said.
“They have reindeer?”
“Of course,” I said. “It’s where Santa goes to recruit.”
MIKE ERUZIONE SCORED WITHIN THE FIRST FORTY-FIVE SECONDS OF THE next period, then it all caved in for the Norwegians. The U.S. scored three times in the second, then twice more in the third, and our goalie, Jim Craig, shut them down.
Between periods, I walked up to the press box to visit with Elliot. Kip ran into a friend from school and went wandering around the T-shirt stands and food vendors.
We sat in empty seats watching the Zamboni machine shine the dulled ice.
“In some ways it’s better that I get to talk with you first, Anton,” Elliot said. “How long were you in Ghana?”
“Gabon. A year.”
He glanced at the other journalists around him, scribbling notes and filing by phone partial game reports.
“You want to take a walk?”
“Sure,” I said. We walked in a loop around souvenir and refreshment stands.
We bought slices of flavorless pizza and grabbed a table. He told me of all the colleagues and friends who’d never gotten over the end of Buddy’s show, how they’d all tune in the moment he reemerged, and that to make that happen, “we just need to think outside the box.”
“In what sense?” I asked.
“You’re courting the networks, right? Because anything else would be a step backward. Buddy Winter on cable? That’s like Ali in a pro wrestling ring, right? Wrong, Anton. Cable is the new frontier, the Wild West. It’s exploding.”
I nodded because I had read as much.
“For instance, Bill Rasmussen, gets fired by the New England Whalers? He gets Getty Oil to kick in money and five months ago he starts a sports network he calls ESPN. This spring they’re carrying the NCAA basketball tournament, and their sponsor is a little beer company named Budweiser. Ted Turner puts broadcasts of his local UHF station TBS out of Atlanta on the RCA satellites, and bingo—he’s got the first national superstation. Now there are dozens of these—a lot of them are religious. Ever seen the PTL station? There’s also the Trinity network and the Christian Broadcasting system.”
“I’m mesmerized by those.”
“Amazing, huh. No dressing for church anymore, the Lord comes to your bedroom via cable satellite. Turner’s new venture is twenty-four-hour news. It’ll launch this summer. You wake up at three in the morning and you want to know what’s going on in Dubrovnik? Now you can. It won’t have any competition. Eventually the networks might have their own cable companies—but for certain there’ll be more programming—a lot more. You heard of PopClips? Brainchild of the Monkees’ Mike Nesmith, short videos of pop songs and news about music. Soon there’ll be a fashion channel, a food channel, a yoga channel for all I know. Niche programming is the wave of the future.”
“And someone will make money on this?”
“Everyone will. Here’s how it works. You get everything for free now but you have no choices. Cable is made up of subscriptions. A program on prime time that fetches twenty million viewers you call a failure. It gets you canceled, but on cable if you have, say, five million subscribers paying two dollars apiece for a show, that’s ten million dollars in revenue right there.”
He threw some more numbers and stories at me, and told me the networks were yesterday’s news, and not to worry if the big three froze us out.
“You think they’ll freeze us out?”
“I don’t actually. But you might be better off without them.”
His optimism was infectious, and I thought of the shows Robert Klein had done on HBO, which were hilarious and uncensored.
“I have to get back to hockey now, Anton, but look around and talk to people, and I will too, and we’ll meet up in a month or so when I have less on my plate and see where we are. Sound good?”
“It does.”
“Is that your brother?”
Kip was walking our way with what looked like a rolled-up poster.
“What have you been feeding him? He was a little guy like yesterday, and now he’s my height for chrissakes.”
“I bought a U.S. bobsled poster,” Kip said.
“Seriously? That’s too cool,” Elliot said. “I’ll give you ten bucks for it.”
“No way,” Kip said. “It’s going up on my wall.”
I CALLED RACHEL THAT AFTERNOON FROM THE ROOM, TO RAZZ HER about not being up here with us. Rachel taught tenth-grade English at Coolidge, an all-boys school, and was spending the weekend grading papers. She asked how much money we’d spent.
“Not an exorbitant amount,” I said.
“You’re lying.”
“I might be.”
“How much are the rooms?”
“A hundred and fifty I think.”
“For both?”
“Each.”
Silence on her end.
“And I bet you’re not eating Big Macs either.”
“Nope,” I said, and then quoting Buddy, “but how many times will we have the Olympians on our doorstep? At least we didn’t spend anything on airfare.”
“Classic Dad. At least I didn’t buy a mountain.”
“So listen. I agree with you, but the point was for all of us to be together and have some fun, and you’re the one who isn’t here. You’d get it if you were here.”
“I’m sorry,” she said.
“We miss you.”
“Did you see Eric Heiden?”
“We did.”
“Total babe.”
“He’s four years younger than you.”
“I’m taken, Anton.”
“By who?”
“Randy.”
“The cop? I thought he had a girlfriend.”
About a month before, Rachel’s neighbor on her floor had been burglarized and Rachel developed a crush on one of the officers investigating the break-in. He was smart and “soulful,” she said, had gone to NYU, and was taking a screenwriting course at night.
Twice he’d gone back to ask her follow-up questions and the conversation had gone off topic for at least an hour both times. Then he’d actually caught the thief and returned most of the missing items to Rachel’s neighbor.
“That ended.”
“Well, look at you.” And then because I couldn’t resist, I asked, “Has he handcuffed you yet?”
“No, and nor have I touched his gun.”
“Yuck,” I said.
“Anton?”
“Yes.”
“Don’t get sucked in again.”
“What do you mean?”
“You know exactly what I mean. Shall I quote you on all the reasons you needed to get the hell out of Dodge?”
“That’s all right.”
As a girl Rachel loved a movie from the 1940s, National Velvet, in part because the story revolved around the daughter, Velvet, and her dream above all others. The father was a kind and watchful butcher, whose worst act of irresponsibility was to bet on a horse race.
“If you leave right now, you can still make the end of the party we’re going to,” I said.
“Have fun,” she said.
“Oh, we will,” I said. “You’ll read about us in the paper.”
8
That night, the well-heeled and well-connected (aka the Winters) attended a black-tie party thrown at the Lake Placid Resort Hotel by an East Side socialite named Marylou Whitney. We arrived there by horse and carriage; other guests came by dogsled. I borrowed a tux from Buddy. I tried talking Kip into coming along but he met up instead with some high school friends, one of whom claimed he could get them into the athletes’ village.
Buddy and my mother polished off a round or two of vodka gimlets in the room, and on the way over were holding hands and singing dirty limericks, a weakness of theirs. It was around 8 degrees out and snowing.
“Therrrre was a young man named McNair,” Buddy sang.
“—Who was bonking a girl on the stairs,” my mother chimed in.
“He petted and stroked and the bannister broke.”
“—So he finished her off in the aaaair,” she sang.
Then to my regret they sang a chorus, “Roll your leg o-o-over, roll your leg o-o-over, roll your leg over the girl in your bed!”
My father sniffed at my mother’s neck as though it were a rose. She kissed him.
I don’t know how many parents acted like this, but I was glad mine did. On good nights they were like characters in The Thin Man movies they both loved. When, once in a blue moon, they fought, it was scary, in the way arguments can be between smart people who know exactly how to hurt each other.
IN THE LAKE ROOM AT THE RESORT THERE WERE FORTUNE-TELLERS IN Styrofoam igloos, and the room was festooned with silver snowflakes and cellophane icicles. An athletic-looking Santa Claus handed out gifts, Olympic necklaces for the women, and Olympic cuff links for the men.
The Lester Lanin orchestra played big band numbers like “It’s De-Lovely” and “My Funny Valentine.” Among the guests were princes and princesses, the Spanish ambassador to the Soviet Union, the French ambassador to the United States, the Italian ambassador to Germany, Canada’s governor-general, Edward Schreyer, and his bejeweled wife, Lily.
I know all this because the hostess made a point of introducing Buddy and my mother to everyone.
They served what she heralded as a typical American buffet, with Virginia ham, roast beef, potato salad, coleslaw, and ice cream. Behind the table, servers dressed as Winter Warlock and the Abominable Snowman filled our glasses with champagne “direct from the Finger Lakes,” they informed us.
“A blend of the sophisticated and the prepubescent,” Buddy whispered to me.
I talked a while to a woman named Astrid, who was a Swedish Olympic attaché, while her husband danced with a woman I was told was a distant cousin of Teddy Roosevelt.
We talked about skiing. She told me about a resort in her country called Åre (pronounced “Aura”), which lacked the crowds of the Alps but was “just as nice.” The summit could only be reached by snowmobile.
I tried as hard as I could not to look down her dress. I think I succeeded.
It was that kind of night.
Buddy was speaking with a man from Austria who’d won a bronze in the giant slalom at Grenoble about Ingemar Stenmark, and whether he was the best skier ever. Buddy made his case for Jean-Claude Killy.
“Let’s float,” my mother said, and we walked around together. I worried she might be searching the room for a young woman for me to talk to and was relieved to realize she just wanted to people-watch.
Terry Bradshaw cavorted alongside his figure skater wife, JoJo Starbuck, one of the glamour couples of the Olympics. He was weeks from winning the Super Bowl. I’d seen them earlier at the hockey game.
“My problem is I’m a hayseed. I don’t get ballet. I get square dancing,” he said. “We’re like the Green Acres couple.”
“He wants me to quit skating,” she said. “And I won’t.”
“I admit it. I’m a male chauvinist pig. Cooshawn. Is that how you say it?”
He tried to feed her an hors d’oeuvre. She took it from his hand and placed it on the table behind her.
“I love your skating, sweetheart. That’s why we’re here.”
They kissed.
“Aw, lovebirds,” the woman who’d been talking to them said.
“A couple in deep trouble,” my mother said when we were out of earshot.
We worked the crowd some, allowing Buddy to do the same, talking with various luminaries about the competitions we’d seen. My mother was pleased to find one of the event organizers with a Kennedy pin on his jacket. At one point she caught Buddy’s eye and he raised his glass to us, and then we did the same to him.
“You guys seem good,” I said.
“What a thing to say to one’s mother. Of course we’re ‘good.’”
“I’m saying you look happy.”
“We’re at the Olympics. Everyone’s happy.”
I told her of my conversations with Elliot Kaplan, his prediction that we’d soon get a shot at a new show, and my sense that Buddy was ready to work again.
She didn’t answer.
“You disagree?”
“It depends on what ready means,” she said. She tilted her head and looked away from my eyes to form her thought. “Here’s the thing, Anton. . . . I love the way our home has felt lately.”
“Me too.”
“It’s been different, homier. We watch TV together, play Scrabble, read books, and the time he’s spent with Kip has been transformative for both of them.”
“He needs to work,” I said. “He can’t just retire and sit on his ass.”
I was pushing too hard, I knew, but I needed her aboard on this.
“He’s much better, yes, but he hasn’t had the stress of preparing for a show every day, of having to be on for an hour straight. Who’s to say we won’t go through the same thing all over again?”
“We won’t,” I said.
“You know for certain.”
“I know he’ll go crazy staying at home.”
She didn’t answer.
“Poor word choice,” I said.
“He’s still figuring himself out, Anton. He does need to work, and lord knows we need the money, but if it doesn’t happen immediately, we’ll live.”
She was trying to temper our expectations, and maybe her own.
On cue, Buddy made his way toward us from across the room.
“Damn, that man’s handsome,” she said.
“What are you two plotting?” he asked.
“I’ve decided you’re too sexy for TV,” she said.
“How many men has she said this to tonight?”
“You’re the third,” I said.
“Could be worse. Dance? Or shall we have our fortunes read?”
“Fortune-tellers disturb me,” my mother said.
“Then let’s dance,” Buddy said, and off they went.
THE PARTY’S YOUNGER SET GATHERED OUTSIDE ONE OF THE FORTUNE-TELLING igloos, drinking cocktails and smoking French cigarettes. I recognized a few of them, sons and daughters of people my parents knew, one guy I recognized from a sailing camp on Block Island when I was twelve.
“Your parents?” a girl my age asked.
“How could you tell?”
She wore a press lanyard around her neck.
“Because of how you’re looking at them.”
“How am I looking at them?”
“With concern, and affection, like you’re praying they get home safe.”
“You’re British.”
“How could you tell?”
“A hunch.”
“Wasn’t the accent?”
Her name was Olive Diop. I guessed one of her parents was from West Africa.
“BBC, huh?”
“Afraid so. Don’t hold it against me.”
“I’ve actually been following two of your athletes,” I said.
“My athletes—have you.”
“There’s Konrad Bartelski.”
“Born in the Netherlands, but yes, our greatest Alpine skier.”
“And then Robin Cousins of course.”
