B004YENES8 EBOK (22 page)

The next morning I arrived at my office to find a very long telex from Tyne, addressed to me, in which she used her selective memory to recount the offense (my “betrayal” of her vis-à-vis her billing) that she had to live with and how, under the circumstances, she could not participate in the show. Mike Medavoy and Harvey Shephard were copied. The fact that the telex came from the production site where she was working on a Mace Neufeld film did not go unnoticed.

I took the position with Rosenbloom, Shephard, and Monique that basically I had all of the previous week: for better or for worse, right or wrong, this is the issue on which Tyne Daly would not compromise. I didn’t ask her to—Sharon did (and that was done without soliciting my advice). I was pleased to be proved wrong, although I wasn’t wrong for very long. After some argument, Rosenbloom agreed on my approach; he and I would meet with Ronnie Meyer, Sharon, and Monique to discuss our three options:

(1) Sharon capitulates on this

(2) We recast Tyne

(3) We drop the project

It would be Sharon’s decision, and I felt that compromising her billing was the least distasteful of the solutions for Ms. Gless.

I believed this billing thing would end Tyne’s contractual demands (provided it was settled her way so that her “honour”—as she spelled it in her infamous telegram—was unsullied). If I was wrong on this, it could be disastrous. This was a volatile woman we were in business with. I thought that, for her, a lifetime of “us versus them” was being challenged by the possibility of her becoming a “them.” I could only guess to what extent she might go to sabotage herself, and us along with her.

Another concern at that time, assuming Sharon did capitulate, was the secondary negotiations with CBS and what that network would give Tyne (and Georg’s) production team. I believed that in this area, Tyne had totally unrealistic expectations of what she could get. But it didn’t matter. She was not only angry but believed she now had the bosses at her mercy.

Weighed against all that anger was an interesting gig, a forum, a platform for her— and a lot of money. It would, I speculated at the time, be interesting to see what road she’d choose. Me? I was a bit depressed and uptight but trying to keep cool.

Rosenbloom and I met with Sharon, Ronnie Meyer, and Monique. We stated our case well, pointing out our three basic alternatives in light of what we believed to be Tyne’s irrational but firm stand. Tyne was no longer interested in sharing billing as we had come to know it—what she demanded was for billing to continue to alternate week after week, including publicity and advertising, and, in addition, she now insisted she be the first billed on all future odd-number shows, believing this would give her the opening night in perpetuity. (This came back to haunt her for the life of the show, for if she had stopped to do her arithmetic, she would have known that in success—due to our short order in 1984 being only for seven episodes—every subsequent season would now begin with an even-number episode.)

Sharon was genuinely pissed and disillusioned. On matters political, Sharon had always looked up to Tyne. Now she had perceived a crack in the Tyne Daly egg (vis-à-vis Tyne’s public stance on partnership, feminism, sharing, and the work being all important).

“Add to that, the billing,” snorted Sharon. Ms. Gless would go home to think on her answer.

The next day, I awaited word. Sid Clute came by for lunch. He looked good, despite his then-two-year battle with cancer. He asked me to tell the girls that if they really wanted to know what was important (as opposed to billing), they should talk to him.

That same day, Farrah Fawcett called to tell me that she saw, and liked,
This Girl for Hire
. We both agreed we would both have liked it a lot better if she had played the lead. I then heard from Monique.

“Confidentially,” she wanted to know, “would Orion—not CBS, not Barney Rosenzweig —make a gesture: a new Jaguar sedan for Sharon?” I passed this on to Rosenbloom. He was concerned how this bribe would be interpreted by Tyne. I relayed that to Monique, who shrilled at me; their worst fears had been realized: Tyne was now in control of the show! I quickly backpedaled. (If only my deal were settled, I’d put up the damn car.) Rosenbloom felt he was wallowing in rot, then added he did not have my talent for duplicity. (Talk about your left-handed compliments!) I, too, had become tired of all of this. I called Monique and told her, “No dice,” and to do whatever she had to do. I capped off the afternoon with a day’s-end argument with Rosenbloom over the as-yet-still-unresolved status of my own deal.

At home that night, Corday and I discussed it. She pointed out that virtually whatever I got from Orion would be a gift; that they didn’t have to give me anything. I had heard that before from Rosenbloom but had tended to discount this, for I had “leverage.” I did not have to do the show! Not so, Corday pointed out. “You do have to do it: emotionally, egotistically, and pragmatically. If you don’t,” she said, “what credibility will you ever have again in a network meeting? What, in fact, will your passionate commitment to a show mean if you walk from this series, which has brought you more of the things you went into this business for in the first place than anything you have ever done?”

She was right. I had to do it. Corday was terrific at this stuff. How I wish I’d had her talking to Tyne and Sharon. I informed Lee the next morning to make my deal.

Corday kiddingly reminisced with me about Leo Corday, her songwriter father who, in 1949, sold “See the USA in Your Chevrolet” for $750 and no royalties. Bad deals seemed to run in the family.
³⁸

Late in the day, Merritt called me to tell me he had heard from Dick Rosenbloom that Sharon had given in on the billing crisis. My momentary relief was stymied by Merritt’s question: What could he tell Tyne? Could he express our sincere feelings that we all felt the right thing had finally been done? He said he believed this was essential to getting Tyne to accept.

I told him he might be able to get people to eat shit, but I doubted if he could get them to say they liked it.

I passed this newest wrinkle on to Rosenbloom, who asked me to handle things with Tyne’s agent. First, I called Sharon. “Thank you,” I said. Sharon wanted to know why I sounded so sad. I fibbed. “It’s been a difficult week, and I know how hard this has been for you.”

“Don’t shit me, Barney,” she said as she laughed. We had a nice talk. She had spent the night alternating between disenchantment and anger over Tyne’s latest position. I warned her to steel herself for a call from Tyne over the weekend, and she said she was not ready for that. She did assure me that all would be OK when shooting rolled around. I remember thinking how much I liked her. I called Merritt back. He was still searching for what to tell Tyne of an upbeat nature.

I told him I’d just gotten off the phone with Sharon, who had been in tears for six hours, and I suggested he merely say to his client that Tyne got what she wanted and that Sharon obviously wanted to do the show enough to let it happen.

Merritt wanted to know if anyone had acknowledged the efficacy of Tyne’s position. I coldly let him know that in all of our opinions, Tyne’s position was “bullshit.” I reminded him of his earlier statements: “Just give in on this, and that’s it.” Now he wanted more. I warned him, in my most menacing tone, that if this didn’t work, “I will bury you and your client!”

Calmer, having said that, I suggested he simply tell his client to send Sharon champagne and a simple thank-you—not to call, blaming the difficulties of time changes and long-distance telephone wires.

The deals with Sharon and Tyne were finally closed with Orion, but there was still no authorization for me to move forward with plans for production because both women still had negotiations to complete with CBS (separate and apart from their dealings with Orion). That process dragged on.

We were supposed to start shooting in six weeks, and I had neither staff nor crew, nor sets, nor finished scripts. Rosenbloom just might have been the unhappiest man in America.

Chapter 24 

THE AUDITION 

Richard Rosenbloom’s despair during the negotiating process had turned to anger and to a prognosis of gloom and doom. His negativity impacted all of us. It was so debilitating, and all so false. Everyone in America, save for Rosenbloom, knew this was going to work. No matter, he would not authorize any expenditure, and so we waited, wasting time and (eventually) paying crews for an inordinate amount of overtime for last minute, hurried preparations. It was all so silly.

“
Maybe not so silly after all
,” I noted in my diary. Sharon Gless finally ended her CBS negotiations by telling them to forget their offer of a guaranteed movie of the week. She would stick with her Orion deal and didn’t “need CBS’s charity.” Each day I was more and more impressed with this gal. Tyne Daly, on the other hand, having just arrived in New York from Yugoslavia, told her agent she would sleep on the final CBS offer.

Tyne Daly’s previous M.O.W. price had been, perhaps, $40,000. CBS had offered her a guaranteed $200,000—plus everything Orion had pledged—and she had to
sleep
on it!? My diary note was: “
How outrageous
.” Even allowing for a price increase because of her
Emmy
, one had to concede this was inflationary beyond reason. I was growing so sick of this whole process; I found myself hoping she would turn us down, longing for the press conference that would surely follow: “Lacey says no to Cagney.” I was looking forward to “going public” with this entire mess, but then I would jog myself back to the realization that I must root for this all to come together—or must I?

I was not at all sure how Tyne and I would work together in the future. In addition, I was feeling like a jerk on the subject of my own deal. We had wasted so much time on this negotiating business that I was increasingly pessimistic as to what kind of staff I could put together, especially with Rosenbloom persisting with his anti-actor, anti-writer, anti-money spending approach. I just didn’t want to root for this anymore—
que sera, sera
.

My agent, Lee Rosenberg, believed I should walk away from the whole thing; attorney Stu Glickman agreed with Corday that I really couldn’t do that. I didn’t know what to do, but it depressed me when, on top of my not knowing, my advisors couldn’t agree. The real reason for doing the show was “I enjoyed it so much.” The reality was that, save for a few weeks the previous spring, the whole production phase had been pure torture.

Rosenbloom called to tell me that CBS promised a second M.O.W. to Tyne after the 1985–86 season for $250,000, and, as a result, Monique was on a rampage. Sharon’s camp had turned down CBS’s “charity” (believing it was only one film at $200,000). Now, discovering they could have had a second film at $250,000 had, as far as Monique was concerned, blown the deal with Gless.

I talked to Monique. She was beside herself, believing she had badly advised her client. It would not, she said, be out of line for Sharon to fire both her and Ronnie Meyer. She had forgotten, she went on, the lesson of twenty-eight years under Lew Wasserman. She should have been tougher.

“What is the moral here?” she railed. “The bad side won.” I told Monique I believed that she and her client took the high road, that they had a good deal and had gained the respect of all parties. Monique appreciated many of my comments, but she wasn’t buying.

Ronnie Meyer and Monique James rightfully (I thought) believed that Tyne and Merritt Blake had used them for all their negotiations. Tyne had used Sharon to escalate her deal in every way, basing both her episodic and M.O.W. fees not on what she had received in the past, but, rather, what the, in those days, “more in demand” Ms. Gless had been paid. That’s OK, they said, but now Tyne had played extra tough and gotten even more—that was what was driving the Gless corps insane.

Merritt Blake had used Ronnie Meyer and had come out the more successful agent. For a time, I was bogged down in having to deal with the managers’ bent egos, but this was short-lived, as Sharon finally heard from Monique about the situation and couldn’t care less about what Tyne got or didn’t get from CBS .

The deal was finally set!

A week later, I chaired a publicity luncheon at Yamato’s restaurant for our stars and their publicists, which is only noteworthy because of Tyne. She acted as if nothing had ever happened, as if the last several pages in this history did not exist. She seemed full of enthusiasm and raring to go. It was often thus with Ms. Daly, as I remembered then that it was she who got me into the diary-keeping business in the first place. So much with her was all illusion—except when it wasn’t.

One month later, 1983 was drawing to a close. It had taken all of the fall’s three months to make this deal, but now commencement of production on our seven-show order was only days away. I did some interviews, planned to do some more. The scripts—the ones originally developed by Lefcourt in the hopes of a pickup nearly a year before—were coming along nicely, praised by most, save for Tyne and Sharon, which was the norm. There had been a few minor references to the difficult weeks of negotiations but nothing too serious. Sharon had refused to accept any of the motor homes we’d shown her; Tyne continued to push for an unneeded full-time stunt coordinator. Stan persistently manifested his penurious ways (regarding furniture, phone lines, or any of the necessities of life at Lacy Street); Rosenbloom still headed up the cheapest operation in all of show business (as witness the company’s Christmas gifts, usually consisting of some chintzy paperweight with the Orion logo, or attitudes toward minimal increases for longtime loyal employees). In other words, business as usual. I was focusing on the things that made 1983 one of the best years of my life, made even more so by the realization that 1984 could be even better.

“I feel like Warren Beatty,” I would say to the press early in 1984. “I feel like I died, and Mr. Jordan let me come back to Earth to play quarterback for the Los Angeles Rams.”
³⁹

There was another side to this. I also felt like a fool. Upton Sinclair wrote at length about the nature of big business and big money interests. The essence of Sinclair’s point is that these capitalistic elements care for one thing and one thing alone: the maintenance of the status quo. It is that status quo, he wrote, that keeps big business and big money where they are and where they want to be.

Applying this to my industry in 1984, there were three major entities: the television networks, the A.C. Nielsen Company, and Madison Avenue. Then, as now, the networks broadcast programs, Nielsen rated them, and then—based on those figures—Madison Avenue placed its clients’ advertising dollars at the networks. The networks each made hundreds of millions of dollars per year, Nielsen made tens of millions, and Madison Avenue made hundreds of millions. Everybody won (and continues to win).

Into this perfect symmetry came this intrepid producer—corresponding with fans, contacting the press, and generally stirring things up to such a point that a network called and said, “We have made a mistake; can you put it back together again?”

They wanted seven episodes in the spring. I had demurred. I objected to being asked to audition. I asked for a full commitment, saying we would do the seven if they would also contract for twenty-two more for the following fall.

“Out of the question,” they said.

“All right,” I countered in those early days of September. “What about thirteen? I could be ready for air in January.”

At that point Harvey Shephard took me aside. “Barney, don’t be a schmuck,” his tone was conspiratorial. “If you go on in January, you will be murdered by the February sweeps and the Winter Olympics. By doing seven, I can put you on in March after all that is past. You will be on in March and April against weak competition, and (with all the attendant promotion and publicity) your success will be assured.”

Later, in a meeting with Harvey Shephard and Alan Levin, it was further avowed that CBS was not in this for the short haul. We would be given all the help possible, including a protected time slot. I bought it. I bought it, and I sold it. I sold it to my lawyer, to Sharon, to Tyne, and to their representatives. I gave upbeat interviews: CBS was, no doubt, completely sincere.

Our “protected” time period turned out to be our old failed slot of 10 pm Monday night, replacing our replacement,
Emerald Point
, which had proved to be a dismal failure.
⁴⁰
Then we learned we would be preempted two weeks after our debut in March. It meant we would only get four shows on the air before CBS would make its decision. Four chances—not seven—and half of them after a hurtful preemption, in the weakest spot of the CBS schedule (a slot that just before our debut received a 14 share of audience). Then I learned from Shephard that only the dates in March would count. After that the season would be over, and the competition was insignificant, he said. Now our seven shots were two.

Next I heard from Mort Pollack,
⁴¹
who told me of the great promo plans he had authorized. He couldn’t imagine that I’d remember the figures from the past, and that this “great promotion campaign” was actually 20 percent below what we had had for our 1982 debut. Then I read in the trades that Harvey Shephard would experiment with
Emerald Point
, placing it after
Dallas
on Friday. It was the spot I had wanted. What could I conclude?

Harvey Shephard had positioned himself and CBS in the best win-win position possible. If, by some miracle,
Cagney & Lacey
was a success, CBS had a hit, which it could always use. In the more likely event that it were to fail, well then, you see, that would be proof that the system was correct, that it all works. Nielsen would be right. CBS would be right. And America should stop sending letters to networks and messing with this very perfect order of things.

The only way this could be better is if it didn’t cost much. And it didn’t. Five million dollars for seven hours of prime-time programming, a chance at a hit without development costs and included in the package (win or lose), was the greatest public relations campaign a major corporation could have. A chance to prove to their customers that they were not a mere monolith but a company with a responsive ear to the public will.

All of this I finally pieced together as my company naively went before the cameras that January on the first of seven episodes. There was nothing I could do about any of this, of course. No one I could “confront” or “expose.” It was simply the game of capitalism, as played by the big boys, and, as stated earlier, they call it “win-win” (for them).

Back at Lacy Street, the tension was palpable. I joked that it was so thick one needed a machete to move from room to room. Emotional outbursts occurred on a daily basis, as each episode took on the magnitude of a pilot.

We were far from hitting the ground with alacrity. The timing between Sharon and Tyne was off just enough to be troublesome. The pressures of the “audition” were mounting; the scar tissue from the brutal negotiating process far from healed.

At one point, I pulled Tyne aside. “You are carrying the importance of your
Emmy
in one hand and the weight of the series in the other,” I said. She understood. She had been pressing, working too hard. She promised to relax and enjoy.

Our staff now consisted of Peter Lefcourt and Terry Louise Fisher. The scripts were basically those developed by Peter in the fallacious expectation of a pickup nearly a year before. Chris Abbott was now no longer available. She had, in the time since our cancellation, accepted the offer to be writer-producer of Tom Selleck’s Hawaii-based series,
Magnum
,
P.I.

I brought writer Joel Oliansky into the mix to direct an episode, hoping I could induce him to write for us in the future. He was critical of the script I gave him to direct (“Partners,” written by Patricia Green). He did not feel it was as good as the stuff from last season. He was right, and he was wrong. What he knew of last season’s product was the end result that he had seen on television, inclusive of my work in editorial, the late-night script sessions with the women during production, and—more importantly—the efforts on stage of Sharon and Tyne. He had never before had to read one of our scripts in the raw.

Despite those points and my affection for both Peter and Terry (who were fabulous to work with), I had to agree with Joel that the level of writing was not up to the standard deserved by Sharon or Tyne’s considerable talents.

Writers I had worked with, such as Oliansky and Ronald M. Cohen, I theorized, could eat Peter and Terry for breakfast and not gain weight. I worried that this duo of mine could certainly not be measured favorably against our competition of Bochco, Milch, and Kozell on
Hill Street Blues
, Fontana on
St. Elsewhere
, Holtzman on
thirtysomething
, Caron and Hall on
Moonlighting
, or David Kelley on just about anything. I continued to consider Steve and Terry a qualitative drop off, even from their
Cagney & Lacey
predecessors, Smith and Crais (though, in retrospect, this judgment may, quite possibly, be unfair).