Welcome to the World, Baby Girl! (14 page)

“But I wasn’t, I mean … I started to let him kiss me. I think it might have been my fault and I didn’t say no until he—”

“What do you mean it was your fault? You were only fifteen years old. How old was this guy again?”

“Twenty-three.”

Dena’s eyes lit up. “That’s it, Peggy, threaten him; a twenty-three-year-old man and a fifteen-year-old girl. You were a minor. That son of a bitch could go to jail for statutory rape.”

“Rape?”

“Yes!”

“No. I couldn’t do that.”

Dena glanced over at the couple who had been shown to the next table and realized that the restaurant was beginning to seat early dinner customers. “Look, I think we better get out of here. Go home and talk to Charles.”

“Dena … I don’t know how to thank you for warning me. I’m not sure what we can do at this point but pray about it.”

“Well, you can pray if you want to, but in the meantime, I’d threaten to have him arrested.”

“Dena”—now Peggy Hamilton took her arm—“no matter what happens, promise me you won’t quit over this. I couldn’t live with that on my conscience, too.”

Dena nodded. “All right, I promise.”

She squeezed Dena’s hand. “Thank you.”

Dena waited a few minutes so no one would see them leave together. When she got up and walked through the restaurant, she found that her knees were weak and realized she was not as brave as she thought she was.

For the next few days at work Dena waited like an inmate sitting on death row. Would Ira call? As the time for the interview grew closer she began to get terrified, and had trouble breathing. This morning she was just about to take a Valium when the buzzer almost made her jump out of her skin.

She answered. “Yes?”

Wallace barked, “Come in here!”

As she walked down the hall her heart was pounding. This last mile could be the end of her career. She knocked lightly.

“Come in.”

Wallace got up and went over and closed the door. “Sit down.”

He scowled at her across the desk.

“I know this ain’t gonna break your heart, but we are going to have to pull the goddamn question about the goddamn Hamilton kid.”

“Why?”

“Julian Amsley won’t let us go with it. He’s afraid of a lawsuit.”

“Why?”

Wallace slammed his fist down and yelled, “Because the goddamned corncob Capello dug up is now claiming he lied about it and it never happened. And he had the goddamned nerve to deny the goddamned story, so we have to scrap it.”

Wallace continued, “Can you believe the bastard is denying it? That son of a bitch reneged on a deal. But that’s what you’re dealing with now, liars, cheats, bums, no-good bums. People don’t have any goddamned ethics anymore.”

Dena had no idea how the Hamiltons had managed to talk him into denying it, but she quickly pulled herself together and put on an act that would have made her college drama teacher proud. She looked at him with the same face she would have shown if Ira Wallace had said he had decided to become a priest.

“Are you telling me, Ira, that after all you put me through on this piece, that now I can’t use it? I can’t believe it … I just
cannot
believe it!” She stood up and started to pace the office. “Well, I don’t care if Julian Amsley is the president of the network, I’m going to ask the question anyhow. It’s news, for God’s sake. He can’t interfere with the news!”

Wallace panicked. “Do you want to get us all fired?”

“I don’t care, it’s the principle of the thing.”

“Well, I care. It’s the principle of keeping my goddamned job.”

“What the hell am I supposed to do, Ira? I had planned the whole interview around it. Now I’m left with some softball piece that I have to rewrite in less than twenty-four hours.”

Wallace tried to calm her. “I know, I know, but what can I do? Tell me, what do you need? How can I help?”

“So Capello is the best! He didn’t even check out his source and now look what I’m left with.”

“OK, OK, it was stupid.” Wallace raised his hands in surrender. “Shoot me.”

Dena was enjoying herself now. “Well, I can’t possibly be ready by tomorrow. You’ll have to cancel the interview.”

“No, no, we can’t do that. It’s already scheduled.”

“Look, Ira, I’m the one who’s going to look bad, not you. I ought to let you and Capello sit your butts on camera not prepared and see how you like it.”

“All right, all right, you’ve made your point. How can I make it up to you? You want my firstborn, take him, he’s yours. Just don’t go nuts on me, all right? What do you want? Tell me.”

The next thing Dena said surprised her, but once said, she knew she meant it. “I want you to fire Capello’s ass.”

“Yeah, I should.… But look, I’ll have three assistants at your disposal, I’ll send in dinner, breakfast, I’ll even pay overtime. What else can I do?”

“I told you. I want you to fire Capello.”

“I can’t do that. I just hired him.”

“I want him fired.”

“You want him fired. Get serious.”

“I am serious.”

“Look, even if I wanted to, which I don’t, I couldn’t fire him. He has a contract. We’re talking money here.”

“Ira, don’t tell me you didn’t put a loophole in that contract. You always do.”

It suddenly dawned on Ira. “Hey, wait a minute, you can’t tell me who to fire. Who do you think you are? You ain’t got the job yet.”

She leaned on his desk. “Let me put it this way. If he’s not out of here in the next hour, I’m going to be too upset to do the interview, and the Hamiltons won’t do it without me. Like I told you before, they like me, they trust me. And you’ll be left with twenty minutes of dead air.”

“Oh, come on, now, you’re kidding. Aren’t you? You don’t want to do this to Capello. The poor guy made one lousy mistake. Have a heart. The poor slob feels bad enough. You should have heard him. He hated letting you down like that. He was almost in tears. You should have seen him.”

Wallace could see that she was unmoved. Dena had a determined look he had not seen before. They sat staring at each other. After a while, Wallace said, “All right, all right, but this is frigging blackmail. I’m telling you, you are making a mistake. Capello can do you a lot of good.”

“One more thing.” Dena stood up. “I want to be here when you do it.”

Now Wallace could not believe what he was hearing. He looked at her with a hurt expression and slowly shook his head. “What’s happened to you? You used to be such a nice, sweet kid.”

She did not answer.

Forty-five minutes later Capello had come back from lunch and Dena was sitting across from Sidney Capello when Wallace fired him.

Capello immediately turned on Dena. “You bitch, I’ll get you for this. You just wait, you—”

Wallace came around the desk and more or less pushed him toward the door. “Yeah, yeah, yeah, we all know how tough you are, Sidney; now get the hell out of here.” He shoved him out the door and slammed it behind him.

Wallace went back to his desk. “Satisfied?”

Dena smiled. “Wouldn’t have missed it for the world.”

As she walked down the hall she felt a surge of something that made her feel strong. For the first time in her life she felt that heady rush of power and she suddenly understood why men fought for it. It felt good, and at that moment she was glad that she was not like Peggy Hamilton. She did not have to forgive Capello.

As Wallace leaned back in his chair and relit his cigar, he was also feeling a surge. Only it was admiration, for himself, for having pegged Dena Nordstrom. Damn, she was tough. She never flinched for a second while he was firing Sidney. She had not backed down an inch from him, either. He may have made some mistakes about people in the past, but he had always suspected that behind that innocent face was someone he could use to push all those sanctimonious types over at the other network—the types that looked down on him—right out of the business. Especially their lordly newscaster, Kingsley, who Wallace would love to knock off his pedestal. Howard Kingsley had once refused to work with him, costing him a big job at Howard’s network, and he had not forgotten it. He reached over and buzzed Sidney Capello’s new office. Capello picked up.

“It’s me, Ira.”

Capello started to curse him and to issue threats and Ira said,
“Hey, hey, hold on … hold on. I know what I said but listen to me.” He yelled. “Listen, for Christ sakes! You ain’t gonna sue anybody. I called to tell you not to take this thing seriously. I just needed to clear up a little temperament problem so don’t get excited. We can work your contract out, no big deal. So you just won’t come into the office. What’s so terrible? You stay home, you send your stuff in, you get paid. She don’t know the difference. You’re happy, I’m happy, she’s happy. I know I promised to get you in the door here, but what can I do? She hates your guts. Look, you’ll get paid and at the end of the year maybe a nice bonus, OK? It’ll be better in the long run. Trust me.”

Capello was bitterly disappointed. This was his chance, maybe his one chance to get into big-time television and he knew it. Wallace was the only one who would ever have hired him and now, thanks to that blond bimbo, he was right back where he started. Still nothing more than a paid informant working out of some seedy hotel room. There went the office, his producer title, everything, all because of some bitch who thought she was better than everybody else. Goddamn her.

As he packed up the office he had had for only a few days, he pacified himself somewhat by reading the plaque he kept on his desk.
REVENGE IS A DISH BEST SERVED COLD
. He smiled.

Life is a long time.

Two weeks after the Hamilton piece ran, Dena and almost everyone else of any prominence in television, except Ira Wallace, attended the Heart Fund dinner at the Waldorf-Astoria. The Heart Fund man of the year was Howard Kingsley, the grand old man of news broadcasting and one of the last really great newsmen in the country. He was introduced as the man whose face and voice had become the one the country depended on in any crisis for the past thirty years, to calm us down, to reassure us that all was well, or to share our sorrow. That was certainly true for Dena; his face and voice were as familiar to her as if she had known him all her life.

Kingsley was now sixty-four years old and still a handsome man, distinguished for his thoughtfulness and balance, and beautifully spoken. His acceptance speech was gracious. He thanked his wife of forty years for sticking with him through thick and thin (“mostly thick”) and said that without her he most likely would have wound up selling insurance in Des Moines, Iowa. That she and his daughter, Anne, had always been “his safe harbor on the rocky and stormy sea of broadcasting.” After his short speech he received a five-minute standing ovation, and as professional and sophisticated as Dena thought she was, she was thrilled to be in the same room with him.
As dinner went on she tried to figure out what he had that was so different from most of the TV people she had met. Then it came to her: integrity, that’s what it was. It wasn’t really anything he did or said but you just had the feeling that he was a decent and honorable man who could always be trusted to tell you the truth. He wasn’t really different than most men, but in the television news business, integrity was slowly becoming a rarity, more and more like a light in the dark. Dena looked over at his wife and daughter and felt that old feeling whenever she saw a father and a daughter, a sadness tinged with envy. All she had ever seen of her father was a photograph. She was even envious of Ira Wallace’s little girl. He might be one of the most despicable human beings she had ever met but at least he did adore his daughter.