Welcome to the World, Baby Girl! (45 page)

“He asked her to please play something else but she told him that song was all she knew, and we left. I said, ‘Mother, why didn’t you tell me you could play the piano?’ And she acted like it was nothing. But she must have been good or else that man wouldn’t have come over.”

“Did she ever talk about her parents?”

“No … just that they were killed in a fire.”

“Did you ever see any pictures of them, or of her when she was growing up?”

“No. She said everything burned up.”

“Weren’t you curious?”

“She didn’t want to talk about them, it upset her. So I just didn’t.”

“You spent a lot of time not upsetting your mother, didn’t you? Can you remember that?”

“Yes …”

“Why?”

“Why? Because … I was enough trouble as it was.”

“Why do you think that?”

“Well, because she had to look after me.”

“Let’s go back to your feeling of being afraid. What were you afraid of?”

“I told you, I don’t know.”

“Was there something that made you think your mother was frightened?”

“No.”

Diggers sat back and waited. Then Dena said, “I think she was afraid of that man, one time.”

“What man?”

“Some man she saw … when we were still living in New York. We were coming home and it was snowing. We turned the corner and when we got to the apartment building she stopped all of a sudden. I looked up at her and saw that she was staring at the man talking to the clerk at the desk. He had his back to us and all I saw was a big man in a black-checked overcoat. I said, ‘What’s the matter?’ Before I had finished, she grabbed me by the arm and almost dragged me down the street. I asked, ‘What’s the matter, Momma? What is it?’ She said, ‘Be quiet and let me think.’ She was walking so fast that I had to run to keep up with her. I was panicked now. So I said, ‘Did I do something, Momma?’

“ ‘No,’ she said, ‘come on.’ In a minute she told me to go out in the street and get a cab, wave one down.

“ ‘Me?’ I said. ‘What do I do?’

“ ‘Just go and wave; go on.’

“I ran and stood on the corner and waved and waved but nobody stopped. I ran back to her and said, ‘They won’t stop.’ She said, ‘Is anybody coming?’ I looked up and down and nobody was. She practically ran to the subway and we caught the first one and she sat down and just looked straight ahead. I was convinced I had done
something wrong and I started to cry. She said, ‘Why are you crying?’

“ ‘I’m scared,’ I said. ‘I don’t know what’s the matter.’

“ ‘Oh, Dena, it’s nothing. I just saw someone I didn’t want to see, that’s all. Don’t be so sensitive.’

“ ‘Who is he?’

“She said, ‘Oh, nobody, just some man I used to work with, nobody important. I just don’t want to see him, that’s all.’

“I asked, ‘Why?’ She said, ‘He’s been bothering me to come back to work for him and I don’t want to.’

“ ‘Why don’t you just tell him?’

“ ‘I would rather not hurt his feelings. Now stop asking so many questions.’ Then she looked up for the first time and noticed where we were headed. She stood up and we got off at the next stop and changed subways and we went all the way to the Village. It was really snowing and it was hard to walk but we got to West Twelfth or maybe Eleventh Street. We stopped at a coffee shop and she made a phone call. After she came back she seemed a little more herself. She said, ‘We’re going over to see Christine.’ ”

“Who was Christine?”

“A friend of my mother’s who was a dancer at Radio City. She said, ‘She’s invited us to come and spend the night with her; won’t that be fun?’

“She lived in a basement apartment on St. Luke’s Place and was very glad to see us. She let me play with her cat, Milton, and then Christine put me in this long gown of hers and I slept on a pad that she made up for me, and Momma slept on the couch. At about daybreak I woke up. I looked over and saw that my mother was sitting by the window. I remember having that cold, scared feeling in the pit of my stomach again. I knew she was unhappy and I didn’t know why. I was scared to ask her because I thought maybe it was me. Maybe she wished she did not have a little girl. I don’t know why I thought that but I did.”

“Dena, I’m going to count to three, and when you wake up you
will feel rested and peaceful.… One … just like you have slept for hours … two … feeling calm and serene … three.”

Dena slowly opened her eyes.

“How do you feel?”

“Fine.” She yawned. “Hate to disappoint you but I don’t think I was hypnotized. I remember everything you said.”

Diggers smiled. That’s what everyone she hypnotized said.

Ira Wallace was listening to an idea Capello had for a television news show. Although Wallace did not trust Capello as far as he could throw him, the more he heard about the idea, the more he liked it. Capello elaborated. “We cover all the Hollywood stuff; I can feed you enough material from my files to keep you supplied for years. We set it up as a news thing—legit gossip, headline stuff, cutting-edge, hard-hitting, red-hot items. I’m telling you, it’s a uranium mine. It’s what the people want.”

Capello threw a copy of his supermarket rag’s P&L for the year across the desk. Wallace glanced at it. The profits were impressive. He said, “I don’t know, it sounds good, but you know Winchell tried a gossip show like that in the early days of TV and it didn’t work.”

Capello had an immediate answer. “Of course it didn’t. He was too hard. We soft-sell, we get some hair-spray head or some good-looking broad to sit up there, tell them to smile, and I guarantee you got a hit. You just have to package it the right way.”

“You talking network?”

“No, I’m talking syndication. That’s where the money is. We own it, we sell it, no regulations. We can cover stuff the networks won’t touch.”

Wallace was suspicious. “Syndication? What do you need me for?”

“Experience. With my story contacts and your TV experience we can flood every major market within five years. Somebody is gonna do it … if we get a jump on this and do it right, I’m talking millions, maybe billions, Ira.”

Wallace leaned back and relit his cigar. “You may be right. Get some legit, recognizable anchor … like maybe a David Thorenson? Have you been anywhere else with this?”

“No, you’re the only one … so far. I need to move on this thing as soon as possible, Ira.”

“How soon?”

“Today.”

Wallace looked at Capello. The dirt-digger had not seen the light of day for years and had unhealthy, blue-white skin and lips the color of raw liver. Wallace, who was no beauty, wanted to throw up at the sight of him. But he thought, as he fought back his nausea, You rat bastard: someday somebody is going to slit your throat and I wish I could be there to see it. But in the meantime, Wallace was smart enough to know a damn good idea. “What’s the deal?”

“Sixty-forty.”

“Jesus,” Wallace said.

“Hey, without me, you got no show.”

Two months and what seemed like forty-eight lawyers later, Sidney Capello and Ira Wallace were, as they say in the business, in bed together and Wall-Cap Productions was formed. As the thing took shape, looking good, looking very good, they again discussed talent. Capello dropped his bombshell. “I want Dena Nordstrom.”

“Yeah, and I want the queen of England but she ain’t available.”

“Why not? She’s got the following, she’s got the looks, she’s got the class; we’d have a built-in audience. She’d make it legit. Mass plus class.”

“Sidney, she’s now the most popular female newscaster in the business. Nordstrom would be anybody’s first choice. But you are dreaming. I know her and she ain’t gonna do it. First of all, she hates your guts. Second of all, she hates your guts, so forget it, we’ll get some other blonde.”

“It doesn’t hurt to ask, Ira. You never know, people change.”

“Yeah, but they don’t change that much. Besides, she’s on some goddamned scruples kick. She got mixed up with that asshole Howard Kingsley and he screwed up her head. I’m telling you we don’t have a chance.”

But Capello would not give up. For years now he had thought long and hard about the day when Dena would be working for him, and he relished the idea. After a week, Wallace gave in. “All right, we’ll ask. I guess it can’t hurt to ask.”

Dena’s agent, Sandy Cooper, sat wide-eyed. “Executive vice president in charge of production?”

Wallace smiled. “That’s it, kid. You’re in charge of all the talent, you’ll have a staff of a hundred if you want it. What say? I’ve got to move on this thing.”

Cooper was busy figuring out how much money he might make in five years. Wallace helped out. “We’re talking a guarantee of five million for two years with options and bonuses. And that could be just the beginning. What do you say? You want to be a penny-ante small timer all your life?”

“No. But—”

Capello, sitting in a corner, spoke up. “Tell him the best part, Ira.”

Sandy looked over at the man who he had not been introduced to. Wallace said, “What Sidney is talking about is it’s a package deal. We want your client, too.”

“Dena?”

“Yeah, and we are prepared to offer her a contract that will make her the highest-paid female on television. Look, we know it’s gonna take some negotiation to get her away from the network, and we’re willing to do a profit share, over and above salary. She
owns
a piece of the company. I know it’s probably a bad move on our part, but—”

Wallace shrugged his shoulders. “Call me crazy, call me sentimental, but I wanted to come to her first with this. You know, not that she
owes
me. But I have a soft spot, what can I say.”

“Why do you need me in this?” Cooper asked.

“Well, we might have a little problem.”

“Besides the network, what little problem?”

Wallace poked his thumb at Capello. “She don’t like my partner.”

Sandy Cooper was no fool and got the picture. “So, in other words, I deliver her or I don’t have a deal, is that it?”

There was no answer.

After Cooper left, Wallace warned Capello again that she would most likely turn them down, but Capello did not look concerned. “It may take a little more persuasion … but I think she’ll take the offer.”

He didn’t tell Ira but he could almost
guarantee
it was a done deal. He knew how to negotiate.

The next day, Sandy Cooper asked Dena to meet him after work. He had an offer that had come in for her. She said, “Can’t you just tell me over the phone?”

“No, this is too big, too important. This is something that could change your life.”

At seven o’clock that night she met him across the street at a restaurant on Sixth Avenue. They ordered drinks, Dena specifying chocolate milk because her ulcer had been giving her trouble lately. Cooper ordered a gin and tonic because he was nervous. He took a gulp. “So, Dena, how would you like to be a millionaire by the time you are thirty-five?”

Since she was now thirty-four, he had her attention.

“Just hear me out before you say anything, OK?” And he went on to tell her all about the new show she had been offered, what the deal would be, that she would own a piece of the show, what the floor on her guarantee was. Dena knew how much money there was to be made in syndication, and was intrigued.

“Who’s producing this? Do they have the money?”

“It’s a new company, just formed. But they have the money and the experience.” Cooper looked around the room and confided, “I’m not really supposed to tell you until it is announced, but it’s Ira Wallace … and a partner.”

“Ira?”

“Yes, he’s handing in his resignation to the network and forming his own company. And you know he knows what he is doing and has the money behind him, but the best part is, and I don’t want to let this influence your decision one way or another, but he’s offered to make me executive vice president.”

Dena sat back in her chair. Something was off. She knew Ira thought Sandy was a fool; why would he need to bring Sandy in? “Wait a minute. What’s the name of this company?”

Cooper couldn’t hedge; he’d have to tell her eventually.