Alexandra Waring (54 page)

“I know what you mean,” Alexandra said. “It’s very hard sometimes.” And then she frowned slightly. “Do you think I’m after something from you? Having you here?”

Jessica didn’t know why, but she blushed. “No.” But after a moment she smiled and added, “Though I must admit, it has crossed my mind that if I died you wouldn’t have much to syndicate overseas.”

“Oh, you are a most charming girl,” Alexandra said, pushing her back down on the bed and standing up.

“Well then, you tell me,” Jessica said, sitting all the way up as Alexandra headed for the door. “Why are you being so nice to me?”

Alexandra turned around. “You haven’t heard a thing I’ve said to you in the last few days.”

“I don’t think my brain’s working all that well,” Jessica admitted, hitting her head in such a way as to convince Alexandra that all cogs and wheels inside were definitely amiss, askew or otherwise severely a-slip.

“Because you are my friend,” Alexandra said quietly, smiling, standing there with her arms folded. She was still in her on-air clothes, still in her studio makeup, still looking very much the part of Miss DBS News America. She tilted her head to the side. “You called me Saturday night. You didn’t want me to boost your career, you didn’t want money, you weren’t drawn to me by my fame, you didn’t want to sleep with me—you called because you wanted my understanding.” She paused, letting her head fall to the side. ‘Jessica, do you have any idea how long it’s been since I’ve had a real friend stay with me?” She moved over to the door and, holding it, turned back again. “I guess what’s in it for Sam to be a friend to you right now is pretty much the same. You need something he can give—and he needs someone to need what he has to give. Just like I need you to need me this way. Just like I need what you have to give me in other ways.”

Whoa.

Alexandra Eyes could get like that sometimes. Heavy. You know. But Jessica liked it.

When Jessica met Sam at the meeting the following day, Tuesday, she asked him a little about himself. Well, one thing was for sure, he was not looking for a job. He was a corporate vice-president of Electronika International. And he was married to a vice-president of Gardiner & Grayson Publishers, a woman named Harriet, with whom he was “shamelessly in love.” He had a daughter who would be a senior at Columbia in the fall (who was, as a matter of fact, an intern this summer over at the “Donahue” show) and a daughter still in grade school.

That afternoon Jessica did a show on how women’s relationships with their fathers influenced their relationships with men for the rest of their lives. They had on this great Harvard psychiatrist, Dr. William Appleton, who was terrific with all the messed-up women and fathers they had in the studio audience. But he was best with the messed-up woman named Jessica Wright, who inexplicably started crying in the middle of the show when they were talking about how fathers who ignore their daughters tend to make them terribly insecure in their future relationships with men. Dr. Appleton somehow turned the horribly embarrassing moment (Denny said later they had almost shut the taping down) into one of those magical moments in television when viewers are genuinely helped by seeing someone they “know” admit that she had some of the problems they were talking about. (“But will you come back on Mother’s Day?” Jessica asked Dr. Appleton at the end of the show.)

After the show, as was her custom, she read up for the next day’s show and then later that night, at Alexandra’s, she made brownies. When Alexandra got home from the studio around eleven-thirty, Jessica was thrilled when Alexandra asked for her opinion about certain parts of her tour itinerary. (What was thrilling, actually, was realizing that Alexandra was getting scared about the tour. Big bad Alexandra, Miss Perfect, sitting there at the kitchen table, smiling a little sheepishly, the silent question being, “Will you reassure me that I can do this, please?”) “My thoughts?” Jessica said. “Waring, not only can you have my thoughts, you can have one of my brownies. It’s very Kansas, you know. Here.”

On Wednesday Jessica went by herself to the meeting because Sam was in Washington on business, and then she got through a wild show about how famous women having babies out of wedlock were or were not influencing teenage girls. (Was the studio ever rocking and rolling on this one.) That night Jessica picked up some more of her things from the Plaza and, on an impulse, took out her meeting book, looked at it, and—just for the heck of it—stopped in at an East Side meeting. It was no big deal, Jessica told herself, but when Alexandra came home that night the first thing out of her mouth was, “I went to a meeting by myself—one I’ve never been to. On the East Side. And I stayed for the whole thing.” And after seeing the look on Alexandra’s face, for some strange reason Jessica felt prouder of herself than she had in years.

On Thursday the guests for the serial killers show were late for the special morning taping (“Good God, call the cops,” Jessica said) and so the taping ran late and Jessica could not make the afternoon meeting. So she “caught” a meeting on her way home to Alexandra’s that night. Later on Alexandra asked for her help on what she should do in the Southwest leg of her tour, and the two of them got all excited when Jessica screamed, “We’ll bring my show to Tucson! We’ll meet you there! And you’ll be my guest on the show!” And they called up Cassy in the middle of the night—Jessica in the kitchen, Alexandra in the bedroom—going on and on, chattering like magpies at her, until Cassy promised that, yes, Jessica could do a show from Tucson and have Alexandra as her guest, and it was only when she got off the phone that Jessica realized just how crazy she had gotten this week because she heard herself say, “And I really can go because there’re AA meetings in Tucson.”

Alexandra, standing in the doorway of the kitchen, let her mouth fall open.

“Oh, hell,” Jessica said, “stop gawking, Alexandra Eyes. It beats turning into Blanche Dubois every night.”

Friday was an okay day too. Jessica read up for her show, got to the meeting okay, and a closed-set interview with Kim Basinger went very well. She stayed on at West End (taking a nap, having a snack and hanging out in the newsroom) until eleven, when Alexandra threw a little catered farewell dinner for the crew because, come Sunday, she’d be out on the road for two months on the DBS Across America tour.

Saturday morning Alexandra announced that it was final. Jessica had to stay in her apartment for the next two months because she needed someone to look after her plants. Jessica had not fully responded to this idea—they were sitting at breakfast—when the doorbell rang and Jessica saw all of her stuff from the Plaza being carried in.

In the afternoon Jessica lay down on Alexandra’s bed and watched her pack. They talked about—no, Jessica did all the talking. For about four straight hours she talked, about her life, about what a mess it had been, about anything and everything, and all the while Alexandra kept packing, organizing, looking over every once in a while, smiling, laughing, murmuring sympathy, whatever was appropriate.

That night, after they ate dinner, Alexandra went with Jessica to an “open” AA meeting, where friends and family of AAs were welcome to sit and listen, to see what AA was like. At one point in the meeting some guy asked if there were any newcomers. Jessica’s heart started pounding and before she thought about it too much she raised her hand—for the first time that week. The guy smiled and pointed to her.

Jessica cleared her throat and said, “My name’s Jessica, and I’m an alcoholic.” Her face was burning. “And I have, uh, six days,” and everybody clapped and Jessica looked down at her lap, feeling so embarrassed she didn’t know what else to do. Then the clapping stopped and the guy called on someone across the room, and so Jessica raised her head. And then she heard someone sniff and she looked over at Alexandra and saw that she was crying. Smiling, laughing a little, but crying.

Alexandra was crying for her.

And so Jessica cried a little too. For herself.

38
Alexandra Across America

Alexandra, the DBS sports editor, Dash Tomlinson, and a gofer, Marc Ogakani, flew up to Portland, Maine together Sunday evening and met Will Rafferty and his field team, technical engineer Oscar Podanski and technical assistant Pete “Parky” Wilson, at the hotel. The group from New York was not greeted with good news. WMN had only signed as a DBS affiliate the week before and tonight was the first Will had ever seen of it—and was the last he wished to ever see of it.

“How bad is it?” Alexandra asked, riding over to the station with him that night to take a look.

“Remember the time we went down into that Metrorail tunnel to see the cave-in?”

“Yes,” Alexandra said.

“It looks sort of like that,” Will said.

Alexandra said she couldn’t quite understand how WMN could be as bad as Will said it was. Only a year ago it had been part of Burton Rydale’s chain of indies, and Mason Communications, who bought them when Rydale retired, was a very good company. And even though Mason Communications was a subsidiary of General Merchants & Wire, and so had been included in the leveraged buyout of General Merchants & Wire two months ago by Orvatz, Slatterly, a Wall Street investment bank.

“That explains it, then,” Will said, interrupting her. “What happened to the staff and the equipment—they’ve stripped the place.” Alexandra looked at him, horrified.Over the next eight weeks, every weekday morning they were to arrive in a new city and that affiliate station was supposed to have lined up a local story for her (and one for Dash) to do, which in some way captured a sense of their community. Then Alexandra was supposed to anchor the news from that affiliate that night and run her local story as well as Dash’s, and then move on and do the same at the next station the next day. The idea of kicking off their tour at a dysfunctional TV station was not an appealing one. And yet, they both knew, all of their promotion had promised a kickoff from Maine, and WMN had been the only available indie
in
Maine to sign.

“Wait until you see,” Will told her. “There’re
out
lines—on the walls —where equipment used to be. They’ve sold all the good stuff and replaced it with junk.”

It was true. The station had been stripped of everything valuable and this included the employees. Usually, even the tiniest TV station with the most modest equipment imaginable had some devoted worker or workers who would do almost anything for the pleasure and satisfaction of producing a newscast and community affairs programming in their studio. Like newspaper and magazine and book publishers, the success of the enterprise depended on a seemingly irrational devotion to painstaking hands—on production work within a maelstrom of financial and technological schemes. While putting movie cassettes into a machine or receiving a network feed could be fast and easy and money—making with complete idiots as staff, in—studio production was more often than not complicated and demanding and required an investment of money and brains and talented people to do it “the old-fashioned way.” However, it was that old-fashioned way within the streamlined high—tech bucks and bang that, in the long run, with local news, more often than not made enormous amounts of money.

But the new owners of WMN were evidently uninterested in even maintaining the station, much less investing in it. Evidently they were looting the place and dumping it. Evidently the term “investment banker” needed a little revision in America.

In any event, putting cassettes of movies in the machine seemed to be the most demanding production work left at WMN. As for their news department, they were down to doing one half—hour newscast that could scarcely be called local news—or even television news, for that matter. It was like an old rip—and—read show, where the advertising manager ripped the AP reports off the machine, put on a tie and sat in front of a camera and read it.

“You don’t do any public affairs programming, not even on Sunday?” Alexandra asked the station manager.

“Nope,” he said.

“Then how do you expect to hold onto your license? You’re a broadcast station. Remember the American people? The ones who grant you your license and whom the FCC says you have to service with public affairs programming?” Alexandra said.

“We don’t have to do diddily as long as Reagan’s in office and you know it,” the station manager said, lighting a cigarette. “At the other station I managed?” he asked her, tossing his match into a metal ashtray. “We didn’t even
do
the news. Nobody cares anymore.”

Alexandra, face scarlet, left his office without comment.

Back at the Sheraton Tara, in the living room of Alexandra’s suite, Will called Kyle with a list of their complaints about WMN and all they would need to even make it on the air by the following night. Something had to be done about the WMN set and fast, Will said, otherwise they could look forward to Alexandra looking like she was reporting from prison. The one mini-cam the station owned was not working properly. (“They do have a sixty-pound pack that shoots sixteen—millimeter film, Kyle,” Alexandra said over Will’s shoulder into the phone. “Maybe you were planning for us to reshoot
Birth of a Nation
while we’re here.”) The station had not prepared any local stories for Alexandra and Dash to cover tomorrow; there was no computer system or fax machine to send tomorrow night’s script over; there was no TelePrompTer in the studio; and there was not even a decent typewriter to use.

And then Alexandra grabbed the phone from Will and told Kyle to call back by midnight with some solutions or the whole thing was off, she was taking everybody on to their Boston affiliate. And then she called somebody in Washington, D.C., named AJ and dictated a seventeen—point complaint about WMN that she wanted filed with the FCC as soon as she left Portland.

“You can’t file a complaint against one of your own affiliates,” Will said, laughing, listening to her on the phone.

“Hang on a sec,” she said, covering the phone. “Why not? Being a reporter disqualifies me from being an American citizen?”

“Alexandra,” Will said.

She thought a minute and then spoke back into the phone, telling whoever AJ was that AJ was to draft the complaint but to leave everybody’s name out of it except WMN and Orvatz, Slatterly, and to send it—stamped URGENT, but blind, without a return address—to the Portland newspapers, both Maine senators, both congressional representatives and the governor. And AJ was to make sure that everybody who received the blind complaint knew everybody else who had been sent a copy, but nobody was to know who had sent it. It was just a hint of things someone might want to look into to score a story or to score in an election. Then AJ was to call the FCC in two weeks and find out if there had been any inquiries or complaints about WMN in Portland and report back to her.

“Nobody cares anymore,” Alexandra muttered, hanging up. “I’ll show that smarmy little—”

By eleven o’clock that night a van had left West End, heading for Portland, carrying pieces of set, TelePrompTer screens, a lap—top computer, a fax machine, a portable editing console and a mini-cam.

Near midnight Kyle called back to say that a reporter from the Portland
Press Herald
was willing to take Alexandra and Dash along to cover the Fourth of July whaling—boat races if they were interested. (“Yes,” Alexandra told Will. “Dash can do the teams and race, I’ll cover the crowd and history of Portland.”) And, Kyle assured them, they were triple—checking the stations down the itinerary to make sure nothing like WMN would happen again on the tour.

In the morning Alexandra “sat in” by phone on the editorial meeting at West End and then headed out to cover the whaling—boat race with the
Press Herald
reporter, Dash and Marc. Since it was unclear if there really was anyone at WMN who could operate a mini-cam properly—who, even if there was, had the holiday off, as apparently most everybody at WMN did—and since it was going to take all of Will’s and Oscar’s and Parky’s efforts to get the studio in working condition by tonight, Alexandra ended up shooting almost all of the footage of the day herself, teaching Marc enough to shoot the footage that she herself needed to appear in.

When they got back—sunburned and salty—Alexandra sat in the DBS van with Dash and edited their piece. It was nothing to win awards, but it was colorful and interesting and did do something to capture the dichotomy of Portland, the cottage industry yuppies and the historic port of call, still receiving oil, but not the whale kind. Will liked the piece but agreed with them that it needed some music or something. So they called New York, cued up the tape in the control room and Dr. Kessler and the Nerd Brigade zapped it back to Kelly in the West End satellite room. Kyle called ten minutes later to coordinate voice—over narration from Alexandra and Dash in the WMN control room to Hex in the editing bay at West End, and a half hour later the Nerd Brigade transmitted the finished three—minute piece so they could see it at WMN, complete with original sound, voice—over narration and music on the sound track. It was now a good piece, they decided.

The working script from West End did not get faxed to WMN until an hour and a half before air time. By now a new crisis had evolved in the studio: almost every light over the set had shorted out in rehearsal. Will and Oscar managed to rewire the system for it to hold, but they had lost the fill lights—most of which had not been working to begin with—and there were of course no replacements to be had. So now they were stuck trying to use all key lights against backlights—lights so strong and harsh that, without fill or mood lights to diffuse them, they could flash the faces of Alexandra and Dash right out of the screen.

And so, when Alexandra wished to rewrite the copy on three of the stories in the script faxed from West End, she had to work on the laptop computer on the set (her hair in rollers, no less) while Will and Oscar, up on ladders, moved lights—filtered them, screened them, bounced their light off all kinds of angles—testing them over and over in a kind of freaky light show around her, and Dick Gross yelled through Will’s headset that everything looked like hell (and demanded to know what idiot was operating camera 1 up there who thought “to frame Alexandra” meant to cut off the corner of her head). But Alexandra typed away, pausing to read aloud every once in a while—as one of the DBS van drivers, filling in as an audio man, tried out various microphones on her to see which ones worked—and she handed off her revised copy to Marc to be faxed back to West End and to be photocopied (yes, they had a photocopier here) and be inserted into the final scripts for everyone at WMN.

Her portable makeup mirror and kit were set up in the all—purpose control room, and after changing her clothes Alexandra sat down and quickly went through the cosmetic routine she had done for herself until coming to West End. “Stand back,” she warned everybody, shaking a can of hair spray, “Time to bomb my hair.”

At West End, Dick called for mini—rehearsal and Alexandra hurried out to the set. Although things seemed to be working pretty well (cues were being given and heard back and forth from West End to WMN well; the TelePrompTer screens over the cameras were hooked up to West End, where Alexandra’s usual operator was doing her usual smooth job; Parky, acting as stage manager, was quite good at it; the studio monitors were working and in position), unfortunately, according to Parky, Dick said Alexandra and Dash “looked like two faceless ghouls” back at West End, prompting Alexandra to jump out of her chair and cry, “Will!”

“Don’t worry, don’t worry!” Will assured her, running out of the control room. “Come into the control room—both of you. I’ve got Cleo on the phone and she’s going to tell you what to do.”

And so Alexandra and Dash went into the control room and Alexandra sat down in front of the makeup mirror and followed Cleo’s instructions while Dash held the phone to her ear. “Heaven help me,” Alexandra said a while later, “I’m starting to look like an aging madam. Am I supposed to look like an aging madam? Cleo? Am I supposed to look like an aging madam in normal light?”

“I think she’s laughing,” Dash said, holding the receiver to his ear.

And then it was Dash’s turn—who recoiled from Alexandra’s lipstick brush as if it was a cobra—but Alexandra managed to coax him into complying with Cleo’s instructions by reminding him that it was the only way he was going to have a face on camera. But when she was finished and Dash looked at himself and groaned, “Aw, geez, I look like that guy on ‘Batman,’ the guy Cesar Romero played,” Alexandra couldn’t help laughing and then Dash started laughing, but then Parky called the ten—minute cue and they raced back into the studio and onto the set, put on their microphones and waited for the verdict.

“Passable,” Parky said, relaying the message received through his headset from Dick back in the West End control room. “Okay, Alexandra,” Parky continued, “we’re in business. We’re going to open on camera 2. Program will be on that monitor—keep an eye out. If anything goes wrong, Dick says to remember that Chester’s waiting to back you up in New York.”

“You mean if my face melts off,” Alexandra said, flicking through the pages of her script a final time to make sure they were in order. “Shut up, Tomlinson,” she growled out of the corner of her mouth at Dash, who was laughing again.