What's a Girl Gotta Do (6 page)

I never thought I would end up like this,
writing and reporting on such gems of journalism as “Grannies Who
Like Sex” and “The He-She Report,” with everything given an extra
sensational twist in the copy-edit process by Jerry Spurdle.

But Jerry’s all-time low, the worst series he
ever did, was “The Cancer That Dare not Speak its Name,” on colon
cancer, before I worked for him. A previous special reporter, now
in our London bureau, told me about it. It wasn’t a bad idea
really, looking at colon cancer as a sidebar to the Reagan polyps
story, dispelling some of the myths, encouraging people to have
themselves checked out. The mistake was asking viewers to send
samples of their excrement on a Popsicle stick implement available
in kits distributed free at outlets of a popular drugstore chain.
Actually, ANN asked them to send their Popsicle sticks full of shit
to a lab on Long Island to be analyzed at ANN’s expense. It was a
humanitarian gesture that backfired, so to speak. On part one of
the series, Jerry neglected to include the full-screen graphic with
the lab address, which was to be run at the end of each “Cancer
That Dare not Speak” segment, and as a consequence thousands of
people with bowel problems throughout the tri-state area just sent
their shit samples to ANN. Most didn’t even bother with the
Popsicle stick. They just wrapped up a good-sized hunk and slipped
it into a padded envelope.

Needless to say, the folks in the mailroom
have had it in for Jerry Spurdle ever since.

After roaming the byzantine hallways of ANN
for forty-five minutes, I finally learned that McGravy was tied up
in meetings with the mandarins. But just as I was about to abandon
giving Jerry his RDA of grief, I saw Turk in the hallway outside
the newsroom.

“Turk, how are you?” I said. “You should have
been over in Special Reports five minutes ago.”

“Yeah?”

“Well, Jerry and I were talking about the ’69
Mets.”

“Is he still there?”

“Sure. Why don’t you go over?” I
suggested.

Turk took off like a man on a mission.

I felt much better now.

In the afternoon, we had an interview with a
white woman whose husband banked sperm with Empire Semen before he
died of cancer, and who had given birth to an Asian-looking child,
leading her troublesome in-laws to believe she’d had an affair with
an Asian man while her husband’s body was still cooling.

The sperm bank’s lawyers played up this
theory in order to get it off the hook, and there was no way she
could prove otherwise. She loved the child dearly, she said, but
she wanted her reputation restored and she wanted her late
husband’s sperm found so she could try to have his child as
well.

After that, we interviewed a doctor who did
genetic typing on another baby conceived from Empire Semen semen.
While he was 99.6 percent sure it was the wrong semen, he couldn’t
prove the woman hadn’t slept with other men.

With those two in the can, we went back to
the office. We had another such interview to shoot later that week,
along with at least one undercover shoot, before we’d start writing
and assembling the series, so at the moment I was rather
under-employed. The pace could get kind of slow in Special Reports
between interviews. I missed the action of general news.

I logged into the computer and an E-mail
message blinked in the corner of the screen. I retrieved it. It was
from Eric.

“Stairs?” it said.

I laughed. The night before, I’d quizzed him
on his sex life, where he’d done it, in what position, how many
times, etc. Now he was reciprocating. I hesitated before answering,
but then decided it was okay, it was safe to proceed.

I typed back, “Not yet.” I sent the message
and then typed, “Public transportation?”

From his computer terminal in a far corner of
the building, he answered, “Yes. Please be more specific.”

“Subways, buses, trains, planes, helicopters,
elevators, escalators, moving sidewalks, the Staten Island Ferry?”
I typed.

“Yes, yes yes yes no yes no no yes,” he
beeped back. “And the Verrazano-Narrows in a moving vehicle,” he
added.

Around five o’clock Claire came into my
office and said she wanted to discuss her career strategy in a more
relaxed setting. Greg Browner was thinking of adding
Nightline-esque backgrounder pieces profiling the celebrities on
the show, and that would mean a reporter slot. Claire was dying to
report.

“Keggers?” I suggested. Keggers, our usual
handout, was cheaper and more convenient than Kafka’s, where she
wanted to meet, and much less pretentious, or at least pretentious
in a different way.

“Expand your horizons,” Claire said. “You
might even like the place. Besides, I want to talk about Greg and
reporting and I want to do it away from the radar ears of
journalists.”

“Kafka’s then,” I said, and went back to the
computer.

For another hour, I scanned the wires for
interesting murder stories, and then went off to find McGravy.

The early evening, after the day shift was
gone, was the best time to catch him in his office. I found him
there carefully winding one of the twenty or so windup toys on his
desk: lizards, wind-up sushi, kangaroos, robots, chattering teeth,
and so forth, all of which seemed to be moving. More tactile
replacements for cigarettes.

“The great thing about quitting smoking,”
McGravy said without looking up at me, “is that you can get away
with all kinds of childish behavior under the banner of quitting
smoking. I don’t think I’ve had so many toys in my life, or enjoyed
them so much.”

Not exactly dignified behavior for the
network vice president in charge of editorial content, God bless
him. Although he blames this behavior on giving up the toxic weed,
calling this his second childhood, the truth is it’s more of a
recurring childhood, and quitting smoking is just his latest
excuse.

He looked up at me now, pushing his glasses
up the bridge of his nose, and laughed this grumbling kind of
laugh. “What can I do you for?” he asked.

“Jerry Spurdle . . .”

McGravy rolled his eyes. “Now what?”

“He sickens me. He wants to go undercover on
this sperm bank story. He wants to donate sperm.” A pair of walking
sneakers were winding down on his desk and he picked them up and
rewound them before answering. To his side, a marching baseball
walked off the edge and fell into the wastepaper basket, where it
flailed its legs helplessly against the trash. McGravy bent over
and retrieved it, then rewound it and sent it towards the other
edge.

“Sperm,” I reminded McGravy.

“Well,” he said, rewinding the chattering
teeth. “It might be necessary and there’s no way it can cause the
kind of problem colon cancer did. You have to learn to bend,
Robin.”

“Bend, or bend over? Bob, it’s too hard for
me to work for him,” I said, weariness in my voice, trying to
appeal to his respect for individual personality. “He makes me so
mad I want to pound him into the ground sometimes. It takes seven
major muscle groups just to hold my tongue. Can’t you get me out of
there?”

“No, Robin, I can’t. My hands are tied,” he
said, gesticulating with a toy duck. “Jerry wants you in that unit,
and what Jerry wants, he gets. I’m sorry, Robin.”

“Jerry wants me there?” I echoed. “What a
sadist.”

“Some people who know your temper, Robin,
might say he’s a masochist,” Bob said. “He knows you’re smart and
can get the job done. The fact is, you’re not exactly a hot
commodity right now, and he is. As long as he keeps his overhead
low and his profit high, he’ll be Dunbar’s fair-haired boy and
he’ll get what he wants. You know Jerry has turned a huge profit in
Special Reports ever since he took it over.

George Dunbar, the president of ANN, had been
hand-picked by Georgia Jack Jackson for his ability to squeeze
dollars from dimes, and he loved Jerry Spurdle. Puzzled by Jerry’s
success, the J-school grads down in the newsroom came up with two
theories about how he’d made it to his position: Either he had
color videos of network executives performing sexual acts with
members of endangered species, or he performed those sexual acts on
network executives himself.

But I knew the truth. While the journalists
of the network disdained him, the accountants loved him because he
was cheap and the salesmen loved him because his series were easy
to sell to sponsors. He made them that way; he aimed the shows at
the sponsors as much or more than the viewers. He knew a famous
maker of tampons and sanitary napkins would appreciate the
concentrated female audience tuning into a series on Hollywood
hunks, for instance. Spurdle bragged that his unit’s reports were
the only ones never sponsored by anything that flashed an on-screen
800 number. He had real sponsors, no small boast at the network
built by Slim Whitman and Ginsu knives.

“Robin, let me tell you something I learned
over the years I’ve been lucky enough to make a living in this
business,” McGravy said.

Uh-oh. I smelled a
“When-I-worked-with-Murrow” story coming. This usually involved a
homey anecdote or parable about some character he knew in the early
days of television, culminating in an odd moral.

Sure enough, McGravy told me about a man he
used to work with at CBS, back in the olden, golden days before
color transmission, who had a lot of talent but a bad temper. He
could never compromise and not only did it make him unpopular
around the office but it ruined several of his shows. One day, just
as his show was about to go to air, he had a massive coronary and
died. It was like a bad smell was removed from the place, McGravy
said. Nobody missed him.

He paused and I knew the big finish was
coming.

“The thing is, if you’re talented you can get
away with being a sonofabitch, but nobody misses a sonofabitch when
he dies.”

Oh, like when I’m dead I’m going to care, I
almost said. But then I remembered that I respect this man, so I
held my tongue.

I knew what he was trying to tell me, and I
knew he was right. I had to be nicer to other people, be cooler,
panic less, cuss less, smile more. Deep down, I knew all this and
yet it galled me—it absolutely galled me—to have to take orders
from Jerry Spurdle, a man for whom I had no respect, for whom I had
nothing but contempt, a man who believed a woman was only a vehicle
for the transport of her breasts.

“I could make Spurdle fire me,” I said. “ANN
would have to pay out my contract.”

“I have no doubt.”

“He shouldn’t fool with a woman who knows his
credit card number. Because living well is not the best revenge,
Bob. The best revenge, in my opinion, is huge crates of Depend
adult diapers delivered to his apartment door. Or live chickens
maybe . . .”

“Don’t do it, Robin. Nobody will hire you in
this town right now. Nobody will hire you in Washington or L.A.
either. You’ll end up doing paid programming or pollen stories on
the Weather Channel for the rest of your life.” He stood up and
leaned over the desk for emphasis.

“No, I won’t.”

“You’ll be selling tooth whitener at four in
the morning on Nickelodeon. If you’re lucky. Because there are guys
like Jerry everywhere, and sooner or later you have to learn how to
deal with them. You’d better do it sooner, Robin.”

“I’m not going to kiss Jerry’s ass. . .
.”

“I’m not asking you to kiss his ass. I expect
you to stand up to him, to fight to lower the sleaze factor. But
quitting is backing away from a fight just because it isn’t turning
out precisely the way you want at the moment. Don’t chicken out. If
you stay here, do your time in Special Reports, pretty soon
everyone will forget about the . . . belch and the cannibalism
thing, and I’ll be able to safely move you back to general
news—maybe. But be patient, and remember, as the old saying goes,
you get more flies with honey that with vinegar.”

“Well, if you really want flies, you ought to
try bullshit,” I said. “It’s an old folk remedy.”

“I have faith in you, Robin, for whatever
it’s worth,” Bob said. He wound up a monkey with cymbals and sent
it towards me.

“It’s worth a lot, Bob.”

The monkey clanged its cymbals.

Chapter Four

BEFORE I WENT TO KAFKA’S, I had to stop at
home to change clothes and to feed my dictatorial cat. Louise
Bryant greeted me at the door with a contemptuous howl.

“Relax, you’re not starving,” I said to
her.

Knowing that tone of voice, she adopted
another tactic, kissing ass, rubbing her back against my leg and
looking up at me with something almost like affection. If I didn’t
feed her soon, she’d move to more punitive action, taking a clawed
swat at the back of my leg. Louise Bryant was very
Machiavellian.

Louise Bryant came to us, to me, late in her
life. It was like this: Burke wanted a baby, I didn’t. Some people
are meant to be parents, and some of us, those with long histories
of insanity in the family, for instance, are not. In the end it was
moot, because it turned out I was infertile. Children just weren’t
a

realistic expectation without tens of
thousands of dollars of costly and chancy in vitro. Burke needed a
more fecund field than me (which he apparently thought he’d found
in Amy Penny). So Burke and I compromised on a cat. Actually, we’d
decided on a kitten but at the SPCA we changed our minds and took
home this ancient, battle-scarred alley cat with a taste for
restaurant dumpster food and roses, a strange fear of harmonica
music and a less strange fear of thunderstorms. After an unknown
number of years as a street cat she took to being a house cat
surprisingly well, as though she was born to luxury. But right
away, the battle of wills began between Louise Bryant and me over
her diet. She refused to eat anything from a can unless I
stir-fried it with greens and oyster sauce.