Life Its Ownself (21 page)

The bicoastal didn't seem to grasp the fact that I was out of the Giants' lineup. I would never know what he thought my cast and crutches were for.

The troops congregated in the living room of the
Rita
set, some sitting, some standing, some pacing. Sheldon and Kitty, afraid to go near a dark suit or a tailored woman, huddled in a corner with an earnest drone and looked as if they were explaining to him that what he had seen had nothing whatsoever to do with their ingenuity.

No one seemed to want to speak at first, and I never did figure out which dark suit and tailored woman had the most authority. None of them had an overabundance of it. Even I knew that the phantom decision-makers were somewhere back in New York.

The silence was broken when Jack Sullivan said, "Well, I liked it!"

This got the bicoastals talking.

"It has a chance," said a dark suit.

"I think it has a chance," a tailored woman agreed.

A second dark suit said, "Are you saying it has a chance- chance or just a chance?"

"It has a very good chance," the first dark suit said. "I'd liked to have heard more jokes."

"I'd liked to have seen a little more charm," said the tailored woman.

Another dark suit said, "I don't see how we can give it a go yet."

"We could give it a limited go," said a different tailored woman.

"Yes, we could," the second dark suit spoke up again. "Or... not."

"What about a tentative go?" the first dark suit asked the group.

Bicoastals shook their heads affirmatively.

"We'll get more jokes in the episodes," someone said.

"And build up the charm."

The second tailored woman said, "It certainly has a better chance than it did."

The first dark suit turned to Jack Sullivan.

"Jack, I need to know this before I go back to New York. If we give it a tentative go... or a limited go... or even a full go... how long can you stay with it? Can you stay thirteen?"

"It depends," Jack Sullivan said. "I can stay with it for six. Thirteen? Hard to say. I've been talking to Paramount about a feature. They have Brooke Shields committed, but I'm not sure they're going to get the cooperation they'll need from the Politburo."

The director came back to the hotel with us for a nightcap in the lounge.

That was where we learned that
Rita's Limo Stop
was a cinch for a full go of thirteen episodes. Jack Sullivan was more aware of what was going on in the entertainment division of the network than any of the dark suits and tailored women. One of the phantom decision-makers in New York was an old buddy. They had shot commercials together. The network was desperate for
Rita
and planned to throw it into the prime-time lineup in late January as a mid-season replacement.

Had the pilot been the worst piece of shit anyone had ever seen, it wouldn't have mattered. But the pilot wasn't that awful, Jack Sullivan said. The pilot was well into the upper half of mediocre—and Barbara Jane was fetching, a potentially fine actress. With her looks, her spark, and her built-in familiarity as a model, she might just hit the old demographics in the heart.

Rita was practically the same thing as on the air, he said.

ABC was going to cancel two shows for certain,
Car Wrecks
and
Jerome
.
Rita's Limo Stop
was going to get one of the slots and
Celebrity Car Wrecks
the other.

The network's whole schedule was being juggled.

Just Up The Street
was shifting from Friday night to Thursday night.
Buffed Up
, the comedy-adventure series about a group of daredevils from Redondo Beach, was taking over the eight-o'clock spot on Sunday night.

The network hoped to blow everybody away on Saturday night with a powerhouse lineup. ABC intended to throw
Kindergarten Disco
into the hammock between
Don't You Love It?
and
Cruds!
That would give the network three big winners in a row.

Rita
would fall into the nine-o'clock Sunday-night slot. It looked like a rating-getter.
Buffed Up
would be the lead-in, and
Return of the Humans
had been rock-solid at nine- thirty for more than two years.

Jack Sullivan smiled at Barbara Jane and said, "I didn't want to tell you this before. We couldn't afford to let up. Looks like you and I are in for some steady employment."

Barb said, "I'd feel a lot better about it if they'd put us behind
Cruds!
on Saturday. We'd be a mortal lock."

She rattled the ice in her empty glass at the bartender.

Shake said to Barbara Jane, "Let me see if I understand this. You're an actress?"

"Uh-huh," she said.

Shake turned to me. "Billy C., I don't know what we're gonna do with Barbara Jane Bookman."

I said, "She always had a missing gene. I knew it when she quit the Pi Phis."

The three of us laughed together. Barbara Jane leaned over and gave Shake a kiss; then she leaned over and gave me a kiss.

And the more we exchanged looks, the more we laughed—as we had so many times in the past about so many things that other people hadn't understood.

Jack Sullivan was observing us with a faint, puzzled grin.

Barb finally said to the director, "Jack, you'll have to excuse us old boys from Texas if we think all this shit is pretty funny."

GOING DIXIE

As a place to visit, Green Bay, Wisconsin, had never meant much more to me than a night in a motel room, three hours of football on an Arctic grassland, and a chartered jet making a getaway in a blizzard.

Therefore, in any discussion of Green Bay, I had always been at a disadvantage when sportswriters I knew had compared it to having a villa in Sorrento or taking a cruise around the Greek islands.

But I no sooner hobbled inside the terminal of the Green Bay airport when I was given reason to wonder if this trip— my first announcing job for CBS—might have something more interesting in store for me.

Kathy Montgomery met my plane.

My leather overnight bag was swinging from my shoulder and a crutch was under each of my arms when she stopped me in the airport lobby.

"Hi," she said. "Welcome to Leningrad."

She introduced herself as a member of the CBS crew and said she was going to be my "stage manager."

She took the bag from me. Easier on the hobble.

"I'm not supposed to meet people at airports," she said, "but, golly, Billy Clyde Puckett! How could I turn that down?"

In the beginning, I said I would be talking about events that happened a year ago. The drinking man's memory becomes all the more clouded in a year's time, so I wouldn't want to exaggerate my first impression of Kathy that day.

She was just your average, friendly, likable young girl of twenty-four who happened to be outrageously fucking gorgeous.

As Kathy Montgomery drove me to the motel where the CBS crew was staying, I learned some things about my stage manager.

She was a graduate of Berkeley, but she was ingrained with the sanity of a South Dakota childhood. She had grown up in Sioux Falls. She had been with CBS for three years, having gone to work for the network as a secretary just out of college "to get in the door." She had just been promoted to stage manager from "broadcast associate," which used to be called "production assistant," or "PA," or, more to the point, "go-fer." Stage manager was another step toward becoming a producer or director of "live" events, news or sports. That was her goal in life, to work "behind the camera."

"When it's live, I'm spun," she said.

I took that to mean she was enthusiastic about live telecasts.

She would be up in the broadcast booth during the game with Larry Hoage and me. Her job was to keep us coordinated with the producer, give us cues, hand us promo cards, alert us to improvisations—and see that we didn't run out of coffee. She had been assigned to our "announce team" for the rest of the football season.

"Like it or not, you got me," she bubbled. "I'm your trusty sidekick."

I didn't do the old line about what's not to like, but I'd be less than candid if I said it hadn't entered my mind.

This was a gray, misty Saturday in Green Bay. A bite was already in the wind although the date was only Oct. 9. The work clothes on the sidewalks would soon be blooming into mackinaws.

"When did you get to town?" I asked Kathy.

"A month ago yesterday."

By the time we reached the motel, I had found out from Kathy that my appointments for the afternoon and evening were plentiful.

Wade Hogg, the Green Bay coach, was expecting me to drop by his office. Ray Hogan, the Washington coach, was expecting me to drop by his motel room. It was customary for the TV color man to visit with both head coaches before a game. The color man needed to know what surprises, if any, to anticipate. The Redskins were headquartered at our motel. That would make it easy for me to knock off the all-important insert with Dreamer Tatum.

Kathy said, "I spoke to Dreamer Tatum. He's real happy you're going to be here."

"He's a friend."

"Dreamer's the guy who whaled on your knee, right?"

"He didn't mean to."

"That's how it was for us in college. At Cal, you're supposed to hate Stanford. But everybody I knew liked Stanford. Everybody I knew at Stanford liked Cal. I think the hate's more for the Old Blues and the Down-on-the-Farms. Stanford has a neat band. "White Punks on Dope" is one of their fight songs. Ever heard it?"

"It missed the charts, I guess."

It was Kathy's information that Larry Hoage would be arriving in the early evening on somebody's corporate jet— one of those Tennecos, Nabiscos, or Fritos. Some rich guy was making sure the celebrity announcer reached his broadcast assignment from a speaking engagement.

"You know Larry Hoage?" Kathy asked.

"I've only loved him from afar."

"He'll complain about his room. That's always first."

A dinner reservation had been made in the motel's "gourmet" restaurant for me, Larry Hoage, Mike Rash, the telecast director, and Teddy Cole, the telecast producer. Rash and Cole were bright young guys, really good at their jobs, Kathy said.

"What about you?" I said to the stage manager, who could have retired the Miss South Dakota Trophy if she had ever entered the contest.

Kathy was an exquisitely built 5-8, a golden-haired beauty with mischievous, sea-blue eyes and what you call your radiant complexion.

"Dinner's just for the big guys," she said.

"Used to be. If you're gonna be my trusty sidekick, dinner's part of the deal."

"Really?"

"I've always had a weakness for the Nordic combined."

Body. Eyes. Hair.

"The what?"

"Nothing. You're coming to dinner."

"Great! I brought a clean pair of sneaks."

Inviting Kathy Montgomery to come along to dinner was a harmless enough thing to do, I thought. There was no point in letting our professional relationship begin on an awkward social footing.

Contrary to what Shake Tiller would say about it in the months to come, I'm certain I would have extended the same invitation to my stage manager if she had been a sawed-off little bilingual, erudite beefo-dyke from an Eastern girls' school instead of the winner of the Nordic combined.

Here again, I knew how to deal with the unfounded accusations of those who questioned my moral fiber.

A man simply told the truth.

Or lied.

Before America had been brain-washed by television, a professional football coach had never been called brilliant. A coach was wily, crafty, shrewd, inventive, determined, cagey, respected, innovative, sometimes even lovable, but never brilliant. He wasn't called a brilliant organizer, administrator, delegator, thinker, or teacher because he didn't know anything about self-promotion. He kicked a player in the butt and told him to win games.

Every coach in the National Football League is brilliant now. He's perceived as brilliant for many reasons. One, he speaks a foreign language: "Zone, gap, flex, crease." Two, he has a loyal staff. Three, he has an energetic organization. Four, his owner stands behind him. Five, his computerized scouting system has revolutionized the game. Six, the whole community's on his side. Seven, he has an unselfish family. Eight, he's earned the respect of every player on his team. Nine, he never panics during a game. And ten, he has a vague past in which he learned some kind of secret from either Paul Brown, Vince Lombardi, or Bear Bryant.

But the main reason he's brilliant is because television says so.

Meanwhile, there are things about the brilliant coaches that puzzle me. If they're so brilliant, why do they all use the same offense and defense? Why do they all say, "We like to establish our running game, then throw"? Why do they then say, "You win with defense"? And why can't they answer a simple question about what happened in a game until they've seen the films?