End of the Tiger (26 page)

He went to the table and began to eat, without word or glance for Mary Ann. She was a fox-faced woman in her forties, with a sour inverted smile. She waited him out.

“So make the pitch again,” he said at last.

“I will make the pitch. And keep making it. Pressure, sweetie. This year is in the can, and the ratings are holding. Pressure from the network, the sponsors, the agencies. And pressure from me, sweetie. We should give them another thirty-nine weeks like the last thirty-nine weeks. It is hot and running. Everybody thinks you’d be insane to move to a new format, even if we could come up with a good one.”

“Do you think I’m insane?”

“Sweetie, after fifteen years I think I know how your mind works. Always you want to quit ahead. Right. About next season you wonder if it could go stale, and you get scared that …”

He turned the direction of the piece of buttered toast and, cat quick, thumbed her chin down and shoved it into her mouth. “The King is never scared, Mary Ann.”

She chewed and swallowed, her eyes narrow and angry. “You buy my advice, so take it, King. I say ride it another season. Already we’ve got six good scripts. We shuffle the writers some to hold it fresh. We’ll hold a top rating, believe me.”

He aimed a finger at her. “What you do, you brief me on the new ideas right now. Maddy writes down my reaction.
I come back from Chicago, I say whether we ride the same thing another year or we come up with a new one.”

“The time is getting short, you know.”

“And if we go with the same one, it’s a risk for me. For taking a risk, I get paid money. They understand I’ll want more?”

“They understand and they’re crying, but they’ll pay.”

“Shut up and start reading.”

All things considered, it was an easy day. By one in the afternoon he had disposed of Franklin and the French deal. He had given Mary Ann some new ideas to whip into shape. Mert and Willy were putting final touches on the Chicago material. He had made a couple of long lazy phone calls to friends on the Coast, proving in an indirect and discreet way that Warner Jessup had been faking it out and hadn’t moved in close enough to sting the King.

At one o’clock he put on some baggy madras shorts and went down to the pool. Joseph was tending the garden bar, and some of his people were beginning to set up the lunch buffet. Hobbie and Marda and some of that crowd had come over, and thirty seconds after King had a drink in his hand, he realized that they were going to give him the rough treatment on the Jessup bit, with Hobbie leading the way. So he did the only thing he could; he took it right to them, pantomiming extravagant terror of every small thing. He went on the high board and did a guy too frightened to jump, who finally fainted and fell off. When anybody came up behind him, he would give a great shuddering leap. He renamed himself Chicken a la King, and after he started them all swinging his way, he zeroed in on Hobbie Thorn with particular attention to Hobbie’s network cancellation, and he kept driving it in until Hobbie finally went roaring off in his golden convertible, the back of his bull neck brick red.

It was sometime after three o’clock when, among the pool group, he noticed one of the pussycats Franklin had sent up from town. He got her aside. A small-boned blonde, young, wise-eyed, with a lot of facial business, conversational extravagance, the choppy gestures of the
industry. Her name was Adele Bowen, and she recited a whole string of credits with watchful aplomb.

He sat on a bench and beamed up at her and said, “The way we’ll work the picture, dear girl, we shoot it tight, like in thirty days, but we play it free and loose, like improvise, so we can all have some fun. I like to move around in the lines, and you got to pick it up without breaking up.”

“King, I’ve done a lot of …”

“You do me some quick takes right now, dear girl. Walk by me and double take into horror and astonishment.”

She went into it without pause, the bland glance as she passed, the halt, the slow turn of the head, eyes widening, mouth sagging, a look of comic, stricken idiocy.

“Fine. Now you are getting yourself set to pounce on a very attractive guy. You’re working up to it. Play it broad.”

She fixed him with a vast, suggestive, avaricious leer. Slowly, slowly, she raised each palm in turn to her lips and pretended to spit. She moistened her lips, gave a little hitch to her bikini pants, one slow suggestive roll of her hips, and then came swaying toward him, eyes slitted, working her fingers like claws.

“Give me some heartbreak.”

She stopped and looked at him, half smiling, half frowning, her head tilted. “Oh, no, darling!” she whispered, and with the tender smile still in place, her eyes filled slowly, and one tear trickled as she shook her head.

He took her wrist and pulled her down onto the bench beside him. She sniffed and wiped her eyes. “Now, cookie,” he said, “you are me and Hank Franklin sends up these two broads, so which one do you pick if you are me?”

She moved away a little to stare suspiciously at him. “What do you expect me to say to a mad, mad question like that, King?”

“What’s the name of the other pussycat?”

“Wendell. Priscilla Wendell.”

“Appraise her for me, dear girl.”

“Well, I’ll just assume you do want me to be terribly honest and fair. As she had made goddam certain you
and everybody else would see, she truly has one hell of a figure. She’d make Mansfield feel insecure. She’s Equity, of course, but honest to Jesus, King, I can’t think of her as pro. What she’s had is experimental theater and girl college stuff. And some chorus line. Put it this way. What I just did, she couldn’t do. She seems nice, but a thing like this would be out of her league. She’s so damned anxious to beat me out for it, she’s all tightened up. But she seems nice enough. You know. Maybe she could cut it later on, but this year she’s green.”

He pinched her by the chin and kissed the tip of her soft young nose and said, “Hang around, pro. I’ll have the word.”

Priscilla Wendell was in a white tank suit. She had a long rich shine of chestnut hair and soft green-brown eyes. She was trying to play it very cool, but her eyes swiveled too much, and her hand was damp and chilly and trembling. He was slightly stoned and a little bit sleepy, so he took her around through another door and through the big silent house and up to his bedroom study. He picked an old script at random and leafed though it and found a long female speech and told her to read it. She stood very erect. She had a precise and cultivated voice, and he knew she was no good for what he wanted of her. Adele would do the stewardess.

He paced and listened to her and then went up behind her as she read and fitted his hands to the deep curves of her swimsuit waist. He stuck his nose into the chestnut hair. She was tall, almost as tall as he. The contact made her voice thin. She lost her place and found it again, and read with less assurance.

He turned her around slowly and brushed the script out of her hands and stared at her. Her smile remained wide and fixed and rubbery, while her eyes tried to run, darting little glances around him and beyond him and across him. She put her hands, awkward and butterfly-light, on his shoulders, and he knew she was scared weak but steeling herself to acceptance.

Scared. Suddenly he found it very touching. All this bounteous and terrified flesh, and this terrible anxiety to please.

The two of us, he thought. And some of his little
houses came tumbling down. What if you said it, just once?

“Pussycat, look at me. Listen to me. I want to say something. Pussycat, every goddam minute of every goddam day, unless I’m stoned out of my mind, I’m scared. Believe me, baby. I am
scared
!”

To his consternation, his voice broke and his throat thickened and his eyes began to sting. He looked at her smooth young uncomprehending face, and before his first sob could erupt from him, he yanked her into his arms. He bawled and snuffled into the sweet and pungent hollow of her neck and shoulder, holding her rigid and alarmed body, and suddenly he knew he could not give this much away to anyone. So he caught at it quickly, and with the skill and force of all the years, he twisted it into the crying bit, the thing he had started way back in the Johnny Ray days, the regression bit that ends with that uncanny and perfect imitations of the mewlings of a newborn child. When he had control of it, he released her and went into it, watching for her reaction. She was dazed and puzzled and then she began the laughter the clown must always have. He adjusted his act to her laughter and brought her along into helplessness, gasping, doubling, laughing until she cried. Then he ended it and held her in his arms again, feeling the little spasms of her hilarity in her big young body. He gave her a hearty and vulgar and painful tweak, and she leaped and hugged him strongly, and then, with her half laughing, half crying in his arms, he began to lead her over to the huge gaudy bed.

“Oh, you funny
man
,” she gasped. “You funny
funny
man!”

John D. MacDonald was an American novelist and short story writer. His works include the Travis McGee series and the novel
The Executioners
, which was adapted into the film
Cape Fear
. In 1962 MacDonald was named a Grand Master of the Mystery Writers of America; in 1980 he won a National Book Award. In print he delighted in smashing the bad guys, deflating the pompous, and exposing the venal. In life he was a truly empathetic man; his friends, family, and colleagues found him to be loyal, generous, and practical. In business he was fastidiously ethical. About being a writer, he once expressed with gleeful astonishment, “They pay me to do this! They don’t realize, I would pay them.” He spent the later part of his life in Florida with his wife and son. He died in 1986.