fter a month of not hearing from the New York dramatic agent, out of the blue one day, tucked in among the usual mail order house catalogues in our mail box, (I almost missed it) there was a postcard with the agent’s return address and on the opposite side two pre-printed boxes: (Sorry) and (Please call). The box next to “Please call” was checked. Oh, Lord. I had to show it to Annie to make sure it said what I thought it did.
“It says to call, Bill,” she said, her eyes widening as she shoved it in front of my face. “It says to call.”
That was confirmation enough. Not wanting to appear over eager, I waited three minutes, then dialed.
Naturally, I didn’t get to speak to the agent immediately. A male secretary with a flutie voice said Mr. Rosen (for that was the dramatic agent’s name) was on the phone at the moment. Would I care to hold? Would I care to? I suppose he thought I would say, No, the hell with it.
“Do you know if he liked my script?” Even as I heard myself saying it, I cringed.
“You’ll have to discuss that with Mr. Rosen,” was the crisp reply. And I was put on hold while Mr. Rosen finished his call. Maybe there were two or three other calls, because the waiting was going on for eternity. After waiting 15 minutes, I hung up and immediately dialed again, telling myself that maybe we had lost a connection (not believing it for a second).
The male secretary wasn’t too happy about the hanging up bit. “I told you he would be with you in a minute,” he said, sounding a little bit like Miss Crashaw at Peter’s school. Maybe he wanted to spank me.
“Sorry,” I said. And held on.
“Hello.” It was the voice apparently of Mr. Rosen.
“Mr. Rosen? This is Bill Brock calling.”
“Oh, yes,” as if drumming up some memory of his childhood. “Yes. I wanted to talk to you – about your script.”
“Yes?” I said, breathlessly.
“I like it,” he said.
Thank you, Lord. “Oh, very good,” I said, striving not to sound hysterical.
“Maybe you could come in, and we could talk about it.”
“Yes. Oh, sure. Yes. Of course.” I would leave the rubber factory forever. I would give Diana Payne-Pignatelli a loud Bronx cheer, and shake hands farewell with my old pal and mentor Morrie Glick. “When?”
“You want to come in tomorrow?”
Tomorrow I had a meeting in the city with a trade magazine editor. Tomorrow would be perfect.
“Say, about three o’clock.”
“I’ll be there,” I said, vowing immediately to drink nothing stronger at lunch than a diet Coke.
“Oh, Bill!” Annie exclaimed delightedly. “You’re on your way.”
“Yeah, well –” Immediately I was cautious. Too many things in my life had not turned out as I had hoped they would in the blush of the first happy moment.
“Come on, buck up. This is what you’ve wanted.”
“Uh huh. Well, I hope so. Do I have a clean shirt?”
She laughed. “Yes, yes, yes. You have a brand new one, in fact. I gave it to you for your birthday.”
“So you did.” I paused. “Maybe I should wear my leather pants and a cowboy shirt. Show him I’m a hip dude.”
“Oh, Bill. You’re not a hip dude.”
“I am, too, a hip dude. I wore my leather pants on the night of the cast party, and the leading lady – the cast, I mean – fell all over me.”
“I know what you mean,” she said, giving me a mock stern expression. That Annie. She wasn’t born yesterday. She would know that I almost wet my pants with excitement when the leading lady jumped me, but that I would never fool around behind her back.
“Wear your blazer and gray flannels, with one of those old ties from your college days. You know, casual, but correct. Don’t forget you have to meet with the trade editor, too.”
She had me there. “Okay. I’ll play it as the successful writer who is just as conservative as Mr. what’s-his-name.”
“Rubin.”
“Rosen. Maybe I should have a pipe sticking out of my coat pocket.”
“Okay. Good idea. You’ll dazzle the pants off him.”
Well, it’s not easy to dazzle the pants off a guy who is 10 years younger than you, who wears $1,000 Armani suits (in contrast to my navy blazer with the fake brass buttons), who sits in a corner office about the size of the entire downstairs area of our rented farmhouse, on the 42nd floor of a glass-enclosed mid-town skyscraper.
The male secretary, flapping his arms and wrists like a seal in heat ushered me in to the head man’s office.
Mr. Rosen – Hank, as he was soon to encourage me to call him – was on the phone when I entered. There were paintings on the wall, which I paid no attention to, and a curious pencil thin sculpture (African fake? Giocometti?) projecting a shadow across the expanse of gold carpet that I could envision moving ineluctably during the whole of the day like a sundial. Without actually looking at me he gestured with waggling fingers at a cocoa-colored leather chair (one of several), which I took as an invitation to sit down, which I did, the chair making an embarrassing sibilant sucking sound, something like a whoopee cushion as it insidiously drew me into its embrace. How could a guy who was probably not yet 30 present such an imposing presence? As he talked on the phone, he laughed, scowled, scolded, chuckled, growled and finally ended up by saying, “I’ll have the business guys draw something up.” And you knew he had a deal. He was handsome in a way that always made me shrink back a little, a tall lean guy, obviously in tip-top shape, an early morning jogger and a week-end tennis player probably, with a bristling shaved head designed most likely to minimize a receding hairline that exposed a large broad forehead (suggesting intelligence, or at least shrewdness). He projected a prominent nose similar to that of the colonel’s; (maybe a prominent nose was an imperative for command), an orange suntan, probably from one of those indoor baking coffins at the health club, and despite his conservative attire, he sported, as Diana Payne-Pignatelli might have put it, a couple of flashy gold and silver and diamond rings on the fingers of both hands.
I immediately feared him. Which was, no doubt, precisely the reaction he aimed for. Surrounded by the accoutrements of prestige, flunkies kowtowing around him, there could be no doubt in anybody’s mind that he was to be paid attention to. He had the power. Attention must be paid. (A line from “Death of A Salesman”).
Hank put down the phone eventually, and raised his eyes to look at me. He didn’t have to raise them very much, since his desk and chair were on a platform pedestal about six inches above me giving me the sensation of sitting in an orchestra pit. Or a gladiatorial arena. Hank gave me a big smile and waved. He knew I would have trouble getting out of the chair to shake hands. “Hi,” he said.
“Hi,” I answered, consciously adopting his casual mode.
He shuffled some stuff around his desk, and found my script, which looked now as if it had been used for the past month as a coaster for his coffee, dog-eared and stained, the cover might have been an abstract painting.
“I read your script,” he said. “Not bad. Not bad at all. In fact, very commercial.”
“Well –” I started to say, but then held back. This was a work of art, after all.
“Problem?”
“No, no. Commercial. Well, I was thinking more along the lines of it’s being a work of art.”
Without a word Hank patiently put a hand to his broad forehead, rings on his fingers glistening in the sunlight before peeking back out at me. It was a sign of his tolerant nature (perhaps carefully developed) that he managed to bestow a small smile, as if instructing a much beloved child on how to use a fork at the table. “Art. Of course, Bill. Of course. But just a word of advice, around here better to avoid the “A” word, no offense. You’ll put the kibosh on it from the start.”
I nodded. “Oh.” Well, after all he was the expert,. I was merely the writer. Chekhov, I could console myself, was a consummate artist, but was commercial in his time.
“I’ve already talked with Elizabeth Snidecker at CBC. They want to do it. She’s read it, given it to a producer.”
“They want to do it,” I said. It was more of a question than a statement.
“That’s the first step in about 16 steps to getting the thing on.”
The thing. “Sure,” I said. “Sixteen steps?”
“Or more.” He paused. “They’re thinking in terms of a Movie of the Month.”
“Good,” I said.
He raised a finger. “Hold on.” He reached for the phone and told the secretary to get him Elizabeth Snidecker. I never in my life had been able to tell somebody to get a number for me. Once or twice I may have asked Annie to call the drugstore, but only because I had a fever of 102 at the time. A little red light flashed on the telephone deck (another enviable extravagance I’d never had. Well, after all, I hardly needed one).
“Lizzy! Hi, sweetheart. . . . Ha, ha, ha. . . . Guess who I have with me in the office right at this moment . . . That dumb son of a bitch down the street. Ha, ha, ha. . . . Really?! . . . You don’t waste any time, darling, do you? . . .” Hank looked over at me with a broad grin and a wink and a thumb’s up sign. I gave him a hopeful little smile, not having any idea what I was smiling at. Good news apparently.
“Well, why don’t you do this, Liz. Call Goldman, and set up a meeting. . . . Oh, any time is all right.” Hank looked over at me again, and nodded, at which point I took it to mean I should synchronize my own head movements up and down with his.
“Liz, listen. I’ll get the business guys to call your guys . . . Ha, ha, ha. No, listen, this guy has credits a mile long.” Hank looked over at me and grimacing guiltily so that the corners of his mouth turned down making a small trestle across his chin, he plunged ahead. “He did a play in Europe, something about his grandmother at Christmas. The French went crazy over it, and it was in English, too. . . Ha, ha, ha. Maybe they didn’t understand it? Stop it, Liz. Listen, he’s published poetry. Nothing heavy. Just light verse. Funny as hell” Hank’s eyeballs were pointed up at the divinity now. “And I’ll tell you something else, Liz. He’s a copywriter. Yeah. One of the best. Corporate. Fairfield County. . . Toys. And rubber products, I think. Terrific imagination. . . Well, you’ve read the play . . .” He put his hand over the mouthpiece and in a lowered voice asked me, “Are you a member of the Writer’s Guild?”
I shook my head no. Negative.
“That’s affirmative, Liz. But he won’t accept minimum. Listen, I’ll send all this over with the business guys. You and I don’t have to talk deals. . . Ha, ha, ha. . . . Creative and development, right? . . . Ha, ha, ha. . . . That’s right. So just let me know when Goldman will see him, and I’ll send him around.”
Send me around. Okay.
“’Bye, Liz. ‘Bye, sweetheart.”
He hung up. “Oh ho! Boy! They’re hot to trot, Bill.” He shook his head. “Hot to trot.”
This was wonderful news. I was wondering what it all meant until Hank immediately went on to explain to me. “They showed the script to Goldman. The producer. He loves it, too. Can’t wait to get to work. He produced ‘Cops in Love’ couple years ago. Did you see it?”
I had to confess that I hadn’t seen or even heard of “Cops in Love”. It didn’t matter. I was glad I was sitting down. The blood in my veins was racing over the cholesterol coagulations like Niagara’s rapids. “So – so what’s next?”
He lowered his voice. “Join the fucking Writer’s Guild immediately. I mean, like today. You gotta have some kind of deal to get in. I’ll call them. Confirm the deal. They’ll be in touch. Don’t worry about it.”
“Is there an initiation fee?” I was thinking of my checking account and this month’s upcoming bills.
Hank gave me a quick frosty look, quite disapproving, in fact. “Bill. For Christ sake, do you know how much you’re gonna make on this deal?”
“You mean, on the script.”
“On the script. Probably 50 g’s.” He smiled impishly. “Less commission. You can afford the fucking initiation fee. If they let you write it, you could make another 50.”
A hammer blow from nowhere. I fought my way up out of the leather to sit forward in the chair. “Let me write it? It’s already written.”
“Ha, ha, ha. Of course. But – Well, do you know how this business works?”
I had to admit that I didn’t, shaking my head, and a bit disconsolately, too. “No.”
Again, that patient expression. “They love the script. They want it. They have to pay for it –”
“Good.”
“Then it has to be adapted. You can understand that, can’t you? It’s a stage play. This is television, baby.”
Baby. “Right.”
“So we have to have a rewrite.” He was examining me for a reaction now.
“Okay.”
“We can fight like hell for you to do the adaptation.”
“I should hope so.”
“But that don’t necessarily mean you’ll be the one.”
“Oh, oh, wait a minute. No, no,” I was shaking my head. “Oh, no. I do the adaptation. It’s my play –” If they wanted the script, goddammit, they were going to have to play my way. I would write the adaptation. He might as well know right from the start that I could play hardball, too.
Hank raised a flat palm deflecting my objection, at the same time his smiling eyes of a minute before were narrowed into a little squint, either warning me, or threatening. Perhaps both. “Do you want to sell this fucking script, or don’t you?”
Ooh. He waited for an answer, still holding the squint until I quickly nodded yes.
“Then, let me do the negotiating, okay?”
“Okay.”
“What I said was, after we sell the script, we’ll try to get you as the writer. We can talk with Goldman.”
“Goldman. The producer.” This was all new to me. “And where does he come in?”
“Look, Bill. This is a show. Possibly a Movie of the Month. I know this is all new to you. But you should understand. The network makes a space for the show, but they don’t know squat about making the goddamn thing. All they know is about scheduling, getting advertising, and then paying some guy to put it all together for them. That’s the producer.”
“Yes,” I said, following him.
“And the producer gets to pick the actors, the director, and the writer. Capisce?”
Yes, I capisced. As he would say, no sense in putting the kibosh on the deal. “But you’ll try to get me to be the writer.”
“Of course!”
A thought occurred to me. “I don’t suppose you’ve got other writers as clients who the producer could use.” Would it matter to him, really, which of his writers he earned his commission from? Boy, I was catching on fast. I narrowed my own eyes a bit. We must have looked like two cats squaring off in an alley. Only he was bigger.
“Ha, ha, ha. Bill, listen. I – me – I want you to be the writer. Even though you don’t know the first fucking thing about writing for television.”
“I watch a lot of television.” This was a lie, and he probably knew it.
“Ha, ha, ha. Do you trust me?”
I nodded. “To the ends of the earth.”
“I know Goldman. I’ll talk to him. This is a very special kind of script you’ve written. Not just anybody can do it justice.”
“Exactly!” What a sweetheart, after all, this Hank Rosen was. He understood. Well, of course he did. He was the guy who had discovered the play, in the first place. He would fight for me. He would. I knew it now. “So I’ll be meeting with this producer as soon as you can set something up?”
“Yes. And take this down, guy, I’m going to fight for you to be the writer. If they okay it and you get to do it, even if you fuck it up and they kick you off, it’s okay, because you’ll still get paid anyway. That’s the way it works.”
“I’m not going to fuck it up, Hank.”
“There you go!” He was standing now, towering over me from his platform. He was moving around the side of his desk and stepping down to my level as I pushed up from the leather chair. He wasn’t all that tall. About my own height, in fact. We were face to face. All of a sudden I loved him. He would sell my script for 50 g’s, get me another 50 as the writer, protect the integrity of my script, make me famous and in demand by all the networks. And our partnership would be indissoluble forever.
“How old are you, Bill?” he asked as he guided me to the door of his office.
“Forty,” I said.
I felt his hand tighten on my arm. “Thirty-five, Bill. You look thirty-five.”
I grinned. “Thank you. I try to keep my body –”
“Tell anybody who asks that you’re thirty-five. Tell that to the Writer’s Guild.”
“Oh?”
He was nodding. “You’re thirty-five.”
I got it. They liked their writers young. “Thirty-five,” I said agreeably. “Don’t want to put the kibosh on the thing.”
“Ha, ha, ha. You catch on fast.” And he gave me a little wave as he handed me over to Flutie.
Annie and I broke out the champagne that night (non-vintage California stuff) “I guess we definitely have a sale,” I said.
“Oh, Bill, that’s wonderful. I’m so proud of you.”
I was feeling pretty cocky, I have to admit. I had an almost irresistible desire to call up the local weekly, and share the good news with them but Annie persuaded me to wait until the neighbors saw the show on television. The guys from the newspaper would be calling me.
“At least, we don’t have to worry about securing a mortgage anymore.”
“Oh, Bill! I almost forgot. Attorney Birnbaum called. They’ve set a court date for a hearing on the house.”
“Really! Great news. I think. When?”
“In four weeks. In Superior Court. Stamford.”
“In four weeks?” This was exasperating. “The old lady may not make it that long.”
Annie shook her head. “It was the earliest spot they had open.”
I never argue with Annie about these things. She’s too soft-hearted. You have to talk to these lawyers with a firm voice. “I’ll call Birnbaum,” I said.
Annie gave me a bleak expression, and shrugged.
I got Birnbaum on the phone, shifting into my wheedling mode. “Attorney Birnbaum.” Showing respect, at the same time bringing a certain urgency of command to my voice. “How are you?”
“Fine. What’s up?”
“I’m calling about the court date over the house. Four weeks is an awful long time to wait for a court appearance, don’t you think.”
“I know. I know” He was definitely sympathetic, if sounding a bit weary.
“Isn’t there some way we can push the thing up. Mrs. Hollingshead isn’t all that well, you told me.”
“I know. I know. I tried, Mr. Brock. The only opening was next week –”
“Next week! Next week would be great!” I turned to Annie giving her a smug little smile, and a thumb’s up sign.
“Mrs. Birnbaum and I will be out of the country next week,” Birnbaum replied.
My smug look was immediately transformed into an expression of fury. “Out of the country?!”
“We’re taking a little cruise to Bermuda.”
I managed to suppress a scream, rolling my eyes to the ceiling where for the first time I noticed some brown puckered spots. Right under the bathroom. Either somebody had been taking showers with the shower curtain outside the tub, or the pipes, which were probably installed under the floor at the time of the Civil War were disintegrating. You can bet on which one it was. “I think we have a leak in our upstairs plumbing,” was what I said.
“Your wife already told me. I’ll have Sissy Sweatland look into it.”
Annie was standing beside me and listening. It was she now who was giving me the big smile.
“How long will you be gone? Are there no other openings in the court calendar?”
“Answer to your first question: two weeks. Answer to your second question: No.”
“Um.”
“I explained all this to your wife.”
“Yes.”
Annie, still standing beside me, was nodding There is no point in describing her own expression.
“Oh, oh. Got a call coming in.” I was beginning to think that was the way Attorney Birnbaum had of ending all conversations.
“Thank you, sir.” But it was doubtful if he heard it. There was a buzzing on the dead line in my hand. Slamming the receiver down in its cradle I turned to Annie.
“You didn’t tell me he was going on a cruise.”
“You didn’t ask me. I would have told you if you had given me a chance. Birnbaum says he’s dug up some real estate expert who will testify that the house is falling apart.”
“Well, that’s progress. David Harris trashes the place so that nobody wants it. We fix it up, and now he says the sale price is too low.”
“Something like that.”
“The son of a bitch.”
“He’s stalling, Bill. Waiting for his cousin to die.”
“Oh, Annie.” I put my arms around her. “It’s always something, isn’t it?” I wanted to reassure her. I held her, my head raised to the ceiling until a drop of rusty water suddenly landed on my chin. “Jesus!” It could be sewage, or something. Annie handed me a Kleenex.
That wasn’t all the news. Apparently Annie had been inquiring around, and had found a tutor for Peter. A Mrs. Bellingham, who used to teach Second Grade in the local school, and was now retired. Highly recommended, she would come two afternoons a week and go over Pete’s subjects with him.
There was one more term of school before summer vacation. If we could pull his grades up, he would pass, and move on to the third grade with his sister. How humiliating it would be for him, I was thinking, if his younger sister should pass by him.
Pete, I think, was the only one unconcerned. He was willing enough to meet with Mrs. Bellingham. (The guy never gave us any problems). How well he did in school, or what grade they put him in, didn’t seem to bother him. He was not a brooder, always busy. A little bit like Spot. We had bought him a kid’s metal detector, and he would spend hours out in the woods by himself. From the hollow down by David Harris’s shack the land rose up sharply in a series of rocky outcroppings, and Pete was certain that there were veins of gold locked in the granite. Explaining to him that the metal detector would not detect gold did not deter him. He would scramble up the rock faces, causing his mother a certain amount of anxiety, his metal detector tied to his waist, dangling around his legs like a samurai sword. Along ledges and at the edges of promontories he would scan the earth, and despite the fact that he never struck gold, incredibly he would locate from fissures and fairly deep soil overburden all kinds of useless artifacts, which he dug out and brought home – tobacco tins, old rusted monkey wrenches, an axle to an old car (which was too heavy to move), a bedpan, and in among the metal there were glass objects – old blue Bromo Seltzer bottles (which he cleaned up and prized), old iodine bottles, a couple of amber beer bottles. He had them all lined up on the windowsill of his room, along with some cleaned up old squirrel skeletons. Or rats. Or maybe chipmunks. Sometimes he drew pictures of the skeletons. The pictures were quite good, actually. At least, we were willing to believe so, and we encouraged him by buying him a sketch pad and some colored pencils. He was delighted. Sometimes on his scrambling excursions over the cliffs he took his drawing materials with him, toting them in his schoolbook knapsack. I sometimes romanticized that maybe he would become an Alpine guide someday.
So there we were. It looked like we were to put $50,000 in the bank, and possibly more, wondering if the judge in the court case would rule in favor of us buying the house, (keeping our fingers crossed that the Señora would survive his ruling), and hoping against hope that possibly Mrs. Bellingham could work a miracle with Peter and get him through second grade.
Meanwhile, we were serenaded almost daily by strains from “The Bridge Over the River Kwai” accompanied by Spot’s frenzied barking and the crack of the colonel’s bullwhip.
© Robert Riche