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Mills/TYCOON!
Bob Mills
4444 Derwent Dr
Roswell GA 30075
770-402 1947
Words 122,606
Ms Pages 481
TYCOON!
a novel by Robert A. Mills
“The theater has long provided a home for misfits—adventurous strays and loners who find asylum in each other’s company. It is not just the common search for fame and fortune or even fantasy that draws them all together. It is also the need for family.”
A. Scott Berg
PART ONE
FREDDIE LASSITER
PROLOGUE
“You know Lennie McCarthur?” Wally asked, and his tone was incredulous, jumping up half an octave with enthusiasm at his good fortune.
“Sure,” Carson said. “How do youknow Lennie?”
To Wally Emerson, running into Johnny and Joanna Carson in TWA’s Global Club at Chicago’s O’Hare was as remarkable and exciting as it was unexpected. The illustrious TV personality and his wife were sitting in a corner of the room with Suzanne Pleshette and another gentleman Wally assumed was Mr. Pleshette.
It was close to five-thirty, and the young man from Buffalo had already had too much to drink on the flight from BUF to ORD. He approached the foursome cautiously in the dimly lit and ornate lounge, now, at this early hour, nearly deserted; the foursome seemed to be swimming, or at least floating, in a flash flood of cigarette smoke.
“I simply have to intrude and say hello,” Wally gushed, leaning toward the television icon and extending his hand. “I saw you all sitting there, and I’d hate myself if I passed up an opportunity to say hello.” He started to say I watch you every night, but thankfully the line, stuck in a sudden depository of common sense and never came out.
Carson turned from his wife and looked up; there was no hint of annoyance in his demeanor. He glanced at Wally’s extended hand, and instead of transferring his drink from his right to his left, which was holding a smoldering Camel, he sat the highball on the table in front of him and shook Wally’s hand. “No problem,” he said, his tone as gracious as it was familiar. “This is my wife, Joanna. And this is Suzanne Pleshette and Tim Gallagher.”
Wally nodded to Joanna Holland Carson, mentally noting what a ravishing beauty she was, and he shook Tim Gallagher’s hand. When Suzanne Pleshette smiled, her teeth were dazzling; for a brief moment Wally wondered, should a decision have to be made, which of the two women would he declare more gorgeous? As he shook Gallagher’s hand, it occurred to him how gratifying it was that Carson did not brush him off and tell him, as perhaps he should have, to get lost; neither had ever set eyes on the other.
“My name is Wally Emerson, from Buffalo—I’m really sorry to bother you—come on like, you know, some sort of tourist or clochard, uh, or something—” ‘clochard,’ Jesus, what kinda word is that to use on a guy like Johnny Carson!—“but I’ve been watching you on TV a hundred years, Mr. Carson, I mean, I’m on my way to Los Angeles—I’m on TWA 14— maybe we’re all, all of us,are on the same flight . . .”
“I don’t think you’re such a bum,” Carson shrugged and glanced up at Tim Gallagher, admitting to Wally he obviously knew what the word ‘clochard’ meant. “I don’t know about the flights, though,” he said; “I doubt it. I don’t even think we’re on TWA. This lounge was the closest . . . What flight’re we on, Tim?”
Wally looked over at the taller, darker man, an athletic and handsome matinee idol-type who sported a razor-thin moustache and lacquered hair that was parted dramatically and precisely in the middle, and Wally assumed he was quite prim and British, as though he had just come from the set of a Peter Brook film at Pinewood Studios. Gallagher reached inside his jacket and drew out a sheath of tickets. “We’re on—let me see—United’s 5 at three-oh-five.” Gallagher placed his cigarette in the corner of his mouth and continued examining the flight documents and boarding passes; Wally was impressed that the smoke going up Gallagher’s nose seemed not to bother him at all. “These are a little screwed up,” Gallagher said, his accent more Corpus Christi than Salisbury Plain. “They’ve got youand mein One-A and B, and the girls in Two-A and B!”
Wally did not know that Tim Gallagher was Suzanne Pleshett’s husband, but he did notice that Joanna Carson was the only one not smoking. Although it was common TV Guide information that Johnny was rarely without a lit cigarette, Joanna had never smoked and could barely tolerate the habit in others; although there were many who did not, in Hollywood, smoke at movie and television studios, a person who did not was as singular and unique as—Gene Autry’s smooth, unblemished, dome-shaped and dexter hat that was still pristine after a choreographed barroom brawl.
Carson did not go so far as to pat the sofa cushion and invite Wally to sit down, but the younger man moved gingerly around the coffee table and perched on the hard edge of the divan, next to the genial Carson.
“Do you really know Lennie McCarthur?” Wally asked again.
“Sure,” Carson said. “How do you know Lennie?”
“He was on my TV show a few weeks ago. The Shrine Circus was in town, and McCarthur was a featured act. He came on the show as part of the usual hype, and I got to spend a lot of time with him. Helluva guy.”
Carson smoked his cigarette and sipped his drink. “Yes, he is. Probably the best cowboy stuntman and double in the business. . . . Youhave a TV show?”
“Yeah. Just staff stuff on a local outlet.”
“Buffalo?”
“Yeah.”
“Hmm. Well. McCarthur’s a super actor in his own right. . . . He actually came on your show?”
“Yes.” Wally nodded, with naive zeal. “I’m gonna see him when I’m out in California. We’re going to get together and maybe have dinner.” The young man began to talk faster. “You know Terry Powell?”
“The soap opera actor?”
“Yeah.”
“Not personally. May have met him a couple times.”
Joanna Carson said, “I know Abby, his wife. They live in Brentwood.”
“Really?” Carson looked over at his wife, and his eyes narrowed as if he was momentarily perturbed she had interjected.
“Yes,” Joanna said. “They hang out a lot with Brian Donlevy and the Edmond O’Briens. They all live in a row in Brentwood.”
Wally was not sure what she meant. His first image was a row of tenements, á la Philadelphia or Cleveland. Somehow, Carson, no longer peeved at Joanna, if in fact he had been, picked up on Wally’s blank facial expression and asked, “What do you mean, sweetheart, in a row?”
Joanna shrugged, as if an explanation was superfluous, and Suzanne Pleshette answered for her. “Youknow, houses all on the same street, side by side . . .”
“Oh!” This made Carson laugh. “You mean, like all different houses, homes, but side by side on the same street?”
“Right. You know what I mean.”
“Yeah—I gotcha!” Carson looked directly at Wally. “So—you’re going to see Terry Powell and Lennie McCarthur while you’re out on the Coast. . . . Good for you. . . . May I ask why?”
The question sent Wally’s thoughts in a different direction. “Why?”
“Yeah, why?” Carson said it as if he really wanted to know. “I mean, why would you go all the way from—where? Buffalo?—to see a couple guys you don’t even know—I mean, well, just barely?”
Tim Gallagher answered for him. “How do you know he doesn’t know them, Johnny? Jesus. Maybe they’re all buddies. You don’t know.”
Wally shook his head and looked at his drink. “No—Johnny’s, uh, Mr. Carson’s right. I never even met Terry Powell. A guy I work with used to work with Terry’s brother in New York, at NBC, I think—Peter Powell’s his name. He told me if I was ever in LA I should look up Terry.”
“Peter did?”
“No, the guy I work with in Buffalo. He got Terry’s number from Peter in New York, so I called him up and talked with him just yesterday. He, Terry, he told me to call him when I got to LA.”
Carson lit another cigarette. “So between Lennie McCarthur and Terry Powell you’re going to be a busy beaver this week . . . right, Mr. Emory?”
Before Wally could correct him that his sur name was Emerson, not Emory, Joanna said, “And actually, John, it’s really none of our business.”
Suzanne Pleshette agreed. “But I think it’s absolutely marvelous someone is coming out to Hollywood finally and knows someone to—to say hello to. Most people come out here and don’t even know where the studios are. I think it’s marvelous.” Her voice was an alto saxophone down which some prankster had perhaps poured several gallons of single malt Scotch whisky, laced with a duffle bag of nicotine.
“Actually,” Tim Gallagher wanted to know, “why are you coming out to the Coast? What’s really in the back of your mind, if I may ask?”
The question was unfair. Wally, sitting now on the sofa beside Johnny Carson, leaned back against the faux-leather cushions. The nimiety of cocktails notwithstanding, he wished he had a full vodka/tonic, and he momentarily thought of offering to get fresh drinks all around, for everyone; but getting up and moving away to the bar would surely terminate the entire event, leaving this area of the TWA Global Club forever empty of his illustrious celebrities. How often could a very minor television news-weatherman-announcer-type run into a gregarious and receptive entertainment icon—two, actually—who with seeming grace and genuine interest tolerate an abrupt intrusion in a quasi-public place? Good question, Wally thought; nobody at WNGD, Buffalo was going to believe this, anyway.
1
Wally Emerson, at twenty-eight, was a charismatic and talented local celebrity with a highly inflated, solipsistic sense of his own immature persona. His first job, almost right out of high school, was at a small radio station in the outskirts of Buffalo: WBFY. It was a small, independent and relatively insignificant operation, at 590 on the AM dial, a station that was on the air from sunrise to sunset only, sustained by 250 directional, erratic watts—erratic because there were at least a hundred hours annually when the transmission was interrupted, diminished, or non-existent. There was another radio station at 590 on the dial, a certain WIRI located near Providence, Rhode Island, and WBFY was required to signoff daily at sunset to avoid a collision of signals that would result in an overlapping cacophony of static, indiscernible babble, and wavy music. WIRI had precedence over WBFY, having an FCC license approximately a year older.
FM was in its infancy, and in Erie County that year, there were less than a hundred useable FM sets. The management of WBFY, however, was aware there were few, if any, regulations governing operation of the innovation; they were accidentally shrewd in deciding to broadcast on FM each night from the moment the station was forced to sign off AM. In Western New York, in the Eastern Time Zone, this meant that AM might disappear as early as 5:30 PM in the winter and be replaced by FM until bona fide signoff occurred—usually sometime around midnight. Had it not been for FM, Wally might never have become a leading local broadcasting personality.
The want ad in the Buffalo Evening News was deceptive: Local radio station seeks fulltime, highly personable, aggressive staff member for specialized assignments. Call for immediate interview. WBFY 354-5921.
Wally, then just twenty and a genuine arriviste, was on the phone first thing in the morning; a day later, at the appointed hour, he was in general manager/program director Huffner ‘Huff” Denton’s WBFY office in downtown Buffalo, on Elmwood Avenue.
“If I take you on, you might be the youngest account executive,” mused Denton, fingering the stems of his rimless glasses, “ever hired by a radio station in America.” His vatic tone seemed more prophetic than profitable.
And it would not have been entirely true. Huff Denton himself, just a decade earlier, had been hired at the age of nineteen by a small Missouri station of no greater importance than WBFY. Now, at twenty-nine, his hair already salt-and-pepper and his waistline inflated four sizes larger, Denton was on a fast track to broadcast management that would eventually see him at KFO in San Francisco before arriving at age thirty-seven and achieving his second divorce.
“Account executive? . . .What’s that?”
“Salesman. You know,” Huff Denton asserted, his demeanor of acute acedia belied by his posture of malignant indifference, “time salesman.” If Wally had been an athlete, he would have seen Denton as a rigorous and focused coach—tall but poorly proportioned with narrow shoulders and wide hips. Somewhat effeminate, Wally mused; he could never have taken the man seriously: get in there, kid, and score one for . . . who? . . . the Gipper? Was he fucking nuts!
Wally shook his head. “Sell what?”
“Time.”
“Time?”
“Yeah. You know. Spots. Commercials. Programs. . . . The stuff we get paid for to put stuff on the air.”
Wally exhaled and blew out his checks. “You mean—like sponsors?”
“Yeah. You got it. Sponsors!” Denton reached for a pad on his desk and pretended to make some notes. His hands were small and—delicate. Girls’ hands. “That’s what account executives do. You go out and get people to sign up for spots, commercials, shows—youknow—they sponsor stuff like shows, like the news, the sports, baseball, hockey—the opera.”
Wally was silent for a moment, taking it all in. Then, “What actually kind of job would I have here, assuming I was hired?”
Denton flipped the pad back to his desk, and it hit the blotter with a flat rifle report that made Wally’s right leg jump. “What kind of a job you looking for?” the station manager asked.
“I don’t know. Announcer. Disc jockey, I guess . . . Announcer.”
Denton shook his head and for the first time Wally noticed he was balding. “Yeah, well, you got a great voice, but . . . no. Not here. I need a time salesman.”
“Your ad—”
“Yeah. Like it says, looking for special assignments—somebody to go out and drum up new business. Special . . . assignment. That’s what a special assignment is.”
Wally slumped back in his stiff chair. “I wouldn’t know where to, where I’d begin. . . . I’m no salesman. I don’t even know how you sell radio time.”
Huff Denton smiled in spite of himself, remembering his own first radio job. “A no-brainer,” he said, “kid stuff. I give you a rate card, a broadcast schedule, and an order book. A few sample commercials—hell, you read those samples in a good radio announcer voice like you already have, and every store on Elmwood Avenue will wanna sign up! Spots are only a dollar apiece, and you can buy fifteen-minute news or sports shows for ten bucks. Spots inthe ball games are a dollar-fifty—shit, you can sponsor a whole inning for three-fifty or four bucks! This is the easiest get-rich job you’ll ever have in broadcasting! Chrissake, kid, whaddaya want? Egg in your beer?”
The following Monday morning Wally Emerson began his broadcasting career as an account executive at WBFY: fifty dollars a week guaranteed against a ten percent commission, a new plastic briefcase with gold-embossed call letters, a sheath of commercials, a rate card, a schedule, and a pad of two-page contracts divided by virgin carbon and containing three-quarters of a page of mouse-type legal print and one-quarter for price and specifics. “Where do I start?” Wally asked, searching in the briefcase for business cards.
“Right outside the door. Start right up Elmwood Avenue and hit every business between here and Breckenridge Street,” Denton told him. “Just go in and tell ‘em you’re from WBFY, and they oughta advertise where they’ll be heard and get rich. . . . I ordered business cards for you—you want Wally or Wallace?”
“Wally.”
“Well—you’ll have ‘em in a couple days. Just hit the stores!”
“Cold-call?” Wally asked.
“Yep. Just stay away from ‘protected agency’ accounts.”
“What’re those—and how do I know if they are or not?”
Denton shrugged. “You can tell. If you never heard of them before, they’re ripe for the pickin’.”
Cold-call was the understatement of the year. It was February, and Wally did not—nor ever had—owned a car. After three unsuccessful walk-ins—a shoe repair shop, a tinsmith’s, and a barber shop—he ducked into the Elmwood Theater against a wind that pierced his forehead like a bent nail and watched Robert Taylor and Deborah Kerr in Quo Vadis. For two hours and fifty-one minutes, with a Clark bar and a box of Junior Mints, Wally Emerson was warm and content.
“Whadcha sell today?” Huff Denton asked, when he returned to the studio at 5:37.
“Nuthin.”