Mumbo Gumbo (3 page)

“But,” Quentin rebutted, “Tim said that—”

“Tim,” she countered sweetly, “is not here. So let’s move on.” Greta wrote the words “
Pasta al Pesto
” on the large white board in her office, and next to those words she wrote “Madeline Bean.”

That was one week ago and I am embarrassed to admit I still think of it. No wonder I have come to enjoy the daily writers’ meetings.

I was like a tourist, just passing through, looking for a few thrills before I checked out. Normally, I might take a moment to reflect on how odious Quentin Shore could be. But in my tourist mode, Quentin was just one of the picturesque natives, irritating but quaint. I love to travel. There is the voyeur’s delight in living briefly a foreigner’s lifestyle. Knowing you are not stuck here, like the inhabitants are, it’s fun to go native. There is also joy, when working in stress-pitted Hollywood, for those who charge in to the rescue. I had agreed to come “help out” an old friend in a deadline jam. My old friend was the boss. Under these artificial circumstances, what fun working in television was!

Still, no matter how many little triumphs I had had over the past week, I was still the new girl. I was not going to be late to this morning’s meeting. I looked at my watch and vowed to speed up, but then had a little trouble shutting the darn drawer. After rearranging its contents in such a hasty manner, it just wouldn’t close. I reopened the drawer and ran my hand over the supplies, settling them flatter. When I withdrew my hand,
the drawer was able to close, but an errant Post-it note had stuck itself to the cuff of my black T-shirt. Clearly, the entire desk was booby trapped.

As I stood up and slung the strap of my red canvas bag over my shoulder, I pulled the little yellow note from my sleeve, rolled it in a tiny ball, tossed it into the trash basket, and walked out of Tim Stock’s office. In the hallway, the show’s other writer, Jennifer Klein, and the first PA, Susan Anderson, were up ahead. As they turned into the door to Greta’s office, Jennifer saw me and smiled.

She gave me the sign to hurry up or I’d be late.

I knew. I was just shutting the door to my temporary office when I stopped myself. What business did I have tossing away that Post-it note? It wasn’t, after all, really my office. It wasn’t my desk drawer. And I hadn’t so much as looked at the tiny yellow slip of paper.

Back into the office. Really, it would take no time at all. I quickly bent down to the black plastic trash can and stuck my hand into its fresh liner. Out I pulled the crumpled note. On my knees, red bag still hanging from my shoulder, I impatiently uncrumpled it. Was it trash or was it, perhaps, something I should replace in Tim’s desk drawer?

The sticky note was not entirely blank, I saw, as there were several faint words printed in purple ink on the front. Thank goodness I’d scooped it out.

As I stood, I read the note. I steadied myself on the desk and read it again.

“Heidi and Monica might have to die.”

F
rankly,” Greta Greene said to the team gathered in her office, “I had expected Tim would be back with us by now. It’s been eight days. How long can anyone stand Vegas? Have any of you heard from him?” Greta’s bright-green eyes settled on us.

The staff of
Food Freak
looked at one another. Several of us sat on chairs, which we’d drawn up to Greta’s glass-topped coffee table. Others lounged on her black leather sofa. No Herculon, I took note, to scratch the executive staff’s posteriors.

Murmurs of “Tim was born to be bad” and “That lucky dog” circulated. It suggested that Tim Stock, the show’s apparently hard-partying head writer, had still not surfaced from what was probably stretching into a week-long bender. I looked over the small group and noticed that Susan Anderson, the chief PA, remained silent amid the rowdy suggestions of the others. Susan was a tall, curly-haired woman in her mid-thirties, with a great figure and wire-rimmed spectacles. Her yellow T-shirt had a saying on it: “Pull the Wool Over Someone’s Eyes.” Interesting philosophy.

About Tim Stock’s current location,
Food Freak
’s full-time question writers, Quentin Shore and Jennifer
Klein, seemed fairly clueless—a lovely irony since the two of them were, after all, in charge of clues. Quentin, in his spray-starched jeans, sat beside Jennifer, a sweet-faced woman, cute and plump, with dark hair and large gray eyes.

Greta answered her intercom’s buzz and excused herself for a moment. As we waited for her to return, I took another look at Susan. The first PA was making furious notes on her legal pad. On a weekly prime-time game show such as
Food Freak,
the head production assistant has a massive job and she supervises the junior staff to help get it all done. During the tapings, she works in the control booth, taking editing notes from the director, timing the show in progress, and keeping track of the game-score readouts on camera to make sure the guy working the scoreboards is accurate. During the preproduction period, before the actual taping takes place, the first PA organizes all the approved game material, putting together the scripts for upcoming shows. Seemingly unaffected by the stress and the incredible amount of work, Susan looked pretty happy. She was a veteran of many prior game series and her curly-headed halo seemed to bestow on her a serene calmness despite the workload.

On folding chairs pulled close to Susan were her two assistants, the youngest members of the ensemble. Jackson Rush was the researcher, the guy who had to look up all the facts. Writers often wrote from their own memories, and that wasn’t really reliable, I’d been told. No matter what you know, it’s probably wrong half the time, Greta warned. That’s why Jackson worked so hard leading up to every tape day. He verified every item to be used on the air with a second independent source. His heavy-framed glasses sat at a
constant tilt to the level of his thick dark brows and he gave me a shy smile. Far slicker was Kenny Abernathy, Susan’s second PA. He was a tall, wiry, good-looking kid just out of Stanford. Kenny’s fine university education had earned him a job inputting game material into the show’s computer database. A warning, if ever there was one, as to the job market for philosophy majors.

Greta Greene returned to her office. She took a chair between Jennifer and me and began the meeting.

“We’ll be in the studio all this week, taping our final episode. I know you’ll all help Madeline in every way you can, since she’s playing catch-up while working so hard to feed us extra material.” Greta looked up at her writers and PA staff, her gaze making contact ever so quickly with Quentin. “And by the way, Madeline, I went over this week’s script with Artie and he absolutely loved the segment on
pasta al pesto.
I gave you credit for it, of course.”

Arthur Herman was the show’s executive producer and creator. A busy man in his early seventies, he rarely stopped into the production meetings, but I’d seen him around the offices and had been introduced to him on one occasion.

The group looked content. All but Quentin. He looked rabid. Or was that just a trace of foam from his latte?

“Now, let me just briefly go over our preproduction checklist with Susan’s group before we look at new material,” Greta said, and then went into a series of consultations about contestant biography data that needed to be added to the upcoming show. As they talked, Jennifer excused herself and left the office. There were innumerable delays and lots of waiting
around in these meetings, so we often took our own rest room or phone call breaks when the getting was good.

As we waited for Greta to get to our new material, I wondered how each one on the staff had ended up in this offbeat branch of entertainment. Whether one was on a brief holiday, playing behind the scenes on a real television stage, like me, or sweating out the pressures of keeping a hit show on the air, like Greta, I doubt anyone who works on game shows is doing what they had originally intended to do in life. Whose college counselor suggests a future in games? I looked around the room.

A young guy like Kenny could probably go this way or that. Into feature films. Into prime-time dramas or sitcoms. He still had a few more years to find his place in Hollywood. But the others, those who were in their thirties and forties—my friend Greta, the two staff writers, Quentin and Jennifer, PA Susan, and researcher Jackson—they had all become game-show pros. They’d succumbed, this group, to the temptation of making good money on the outskirts of show business. In fact, there are hundreds of odd little jobs in the entertainment field that can save one from the humiliation of going back home to Toledo and admitting to Aunt Ruth that one had not made it in Hollywood after all. And so, one by one, I imagined, each had stumbled into working on game shows and discovered they had a knack for doing the work.

As Greta was taking rather a long time to finish up her conversation with Susan’s group, Jennifer Klein returned to the black leather sofa and smiled at me as Quentin slipped out of the meeting.

Frankly, putting aside any suggestions of redeeming
social value, the work of putting on game shows is fun. There is a wicked pleasure in performing a task for which no sane grown-up could expect to get paid, and in fact getting paid well for it. Like circus clowns or nuns in a convent, this unique, offbeat employment lifestyle encouraged a bond among the longtime staffers. Jennifer noticed me looking at her and whispered, “Are you feeling a little more comfortable here this week?”

I nodded and whispered, “Maybe.”

She laughed. To these folks, I must seem like the next new shiny-faced gal to pull a chair up to their lavish table.

Finished with the production notes, Greta looked up and suggested, “Someone go find Quentin.” As she collected our writers’ pages, Kenny ran out the door to track him down. Greta then began to read through the material that Jenny and I had submitted. Susan and Kenny chatted to themselves, going over some revised plans. A few minutes later, Quentin Shore reentered the office.

“You’re late,” Greta said, keeping her eyes on the papers she was reading.

Quentin walked over to her desk, handing over his material for the day. As he returned to his seat, his beady eyes read the room, looking for enemies, no doubt. He whispered to Jennifer, “Sure, when I take a tiny break that’s when she decides to go over my work.”

“Relax,” Jennifer said, under her breath. “The torture is only beginning.” Jennifer had a quick laugh and a talent for the subtlest of sarcasm. She seemed fairly unruffled by the process at hand. I was frankly just happy to be there, enjoying the show.

After only one week on the job, I had become accustomed to the schedule for the writers of
Food Freak.
In the mornings, we met to go over new material. After lunch, we were left alone to write up new recipes or rewrite something that needed work from the morning meeting. On this particular Wednesday, it took about ninety minutes once we got serious, all of us sitting in Greta Greene’s office gossiping over each other’s recipes, tossing out suggestions, offering corrections, for Greta to make her way through the material we had handed in. Once, when Greta was involved in a longish phone conversation with Artie, I stepped out to make a call of my own.

As I walked out into the hallway, I almost bumped into Kenny, who looked startled to see me popping out of the door. I smiled and pulled the door shut, and walked down the stairs to go outside for a moment and get some air.

My cell phone reception was slightly better outside, and I connected with Holly, our young and invaluable assistant at Mad Bean Events, after a few rings.

“What’s shaking?” Holly answered, not bothering to ask who it was on the other end.

“Not much,” I said.

“Ah, Madeline! You must be clever and sneak me onto your studio lot. I heard that U2 is shooting a music video there this week and I simply have to, have to, have to see them.”

Holly is the sort of adoring fan whose enthusiasm could power a small city. Her devotion has prompted me, at times, to keep an extra-careful eye out, when one of her favorites shows up on the guest list of one of the parties we are catering. She’s a mass of fan nerves when she actually meets them, saying “stupid
fan things” and kicking herself for days after. She’s hopelessly devoted to just about every celebrity she has ever met, and indiscriminately adores the guy who’s on
Angel,
the guy who wrote the song “Short People,” and the gorgeous guy who played the Royal Canadian Mountie on some long-canceled series.

“I’ll see what I can do,” I said warily.

“Please, Mad,” she whispered, moaning. “I am going crazy. I can’t find a single job. Can you believe it? I’ve spent the entire weekend helping Wesley move furniture around his spec house. If he tells me to hold the mirror an inch lower one more time…”

“Maybe I can get you a temporary gig here,” I suggested. I could imagine that Wes and Holly needed a little breather from each other. He was probably overwhelmed with details before the real estate brokers held their open house tomorrow.

“Could you?” she asked. “That would get me onto the lot. I could scout around and see what other interesting productions might be going on over there.”

“I’m sure. Look, I’ve got to go. I’ll call you soon. Don’t drive Wes nuts.”

I trotted back up the stairs and reentered the writers’ meeting. Greta was still on the phone with Artie and I noticed that Susan Anderson, the able first PA, had also taken advantage of their long conversation to take a quick break.

Quentin refused to look at me, but Jennifer brought me up to date. Artie was worried about Chef Howie’s performance or some such thing. The star was unhappy.

Greta hung up her receiver and smiled at us. “Sorry. So many decisions and nothing, apparently, can wait. Let’s get back to the fun stuff—the material.”

Together, we discussed what recipes would work well, which ones had been done before, what recipes couldn’t be repeated, and so on. The show was based on a simple concept: the celebrated star of the show, Chef Howie Finkelberg, challenged two small teams of contestants, talented home chefs, to cook extreme meals from Chef Howie’s own stunningly fabulous recipes. Of course, it was our job to concoct those recipes, a job that I considered incredibly easy. But then, I was the new guy. Jennifer and Quentin had already worked for an entire season, coming up with hundreds of recipes. They were professional, pragmatic, experienced, expedient. By this time in the long season of shows, they were partially burned out. When my offering at this meeting, an off-the-wall recipe for Chef Howie’s Confetti French Toast was praised and scheduled into the show’s script, I felt terrific. I was having a ball.

Greta turned and said, “I am so glad you are here, Maddie,” as she closed the meeting. The truth was, so was I.

As we all got up, and chatted, and stretched, and began filing out of her office, Greta held me back a moment.

“Do you have plans for lunch today?” she asked me quietly.

Quentin, who was hanging back, heard Greta’s invitation and his shoulders seemed to sag beneath his heavily starched shirt.

“No plans,” I said. “Would you like to discuss the new wrap party?”

“Fine. Let me take you out to lunch. I have something else I’d like to ask you about, too,” Greta said.

She grabbed her purse and we walked together
down the hall. My office—Tim’s office, really—was three doors down, about thirty feet away. As we approached it, we both noticed something odd.

“Your door…,” Greta said, her voice perplexed.

I reached it first. The door to Tim’s office was not completely shut. Greta looked up at me sharply. “Didn’t I tell you that we always keep our office doors locked? It’s a security issue. A precautionary measure when the game material is around.”

“I usually pull the door shut and it automatically locks.” I tried to remember if I’d done that this time.

Greta didn’t look particularly disturbed but I made a mental note to double-check the door each time I left the office. Because the door was ajar, I simply pushed it in. “I’ll just put down my files. It’ll only take—”

I never finished the sentence. We both saw it at the same time.

“Oh, no!” Greta said, an intense whisper escaping like steam.

I could say absolutely nothing. A thousand tiny hairs on the back of my neck stood up and I began to feel sick.