Slippage (34 page)

On the 22nd, CBS approved me as director for the segment. It was a scary step for me to be taking, but I
knew
what I wanted to see there on the screen come Christmastime, that rushing-toward-us Friday night, and I knew I could pull it off. Hell, ain't I the guy who writes such visual scripts, with all the shots in there just to give the director a vision, not a floorplan?

That day I scouted locations with my Assistant Director, Paul Deason; costumes were set; and I called in a favor by getting Edward Asner to play the loathesome Jack Podey. Ed and I had been on a few barricades together, and though I knew he did not do ordinary episodic tv, and that he drew down a much heftier salary than TZ could pay, I felt he would want to do a show like this one. "Nackles," by the very presence of an Asner, would be a statement of moral imperative that nobody could dismiss. Ed agreed to play Podey. I loved it...because I'd had him in mind as Podey from the first line I'd written. (True to his nature, Ed Asner announced he would donate his entire fee to charity. So what's not to love about him?)

We worked through the weekends painting mattes, dressing sets, hiring the other actors, looking at dozens of kids till we found one who could play Pooch to the hilt.

Everything was set.

And then, in New York, a woman named Alice Henderson, bearing some sort of title or other, but high up in the CBS Standards & Practices division, finally got around to reading "Nackles." Later, CBS would say that they'd gotten the script at the last moment. As you can tell from the dates of various versions of the script, which would have been approved all the way through the process, they knew what "Nackles" was to be, as far back as July. Notwithstanding the duplicity, Alice Henderson's hair rose like Medusa's serpentine locks.

The word came down on Monday the 25th:

You cannot do this script. Not no way, not no how, not never!

DeGuere and everyone else went crazy, we were thousands of dollars into the game already. Asner had a pay-or-play contract. They would have to pay me the full director's fee, even if the show never got made. Everyone started trying to get Henderson and her department to suggest ways in which it could work.

The suggestions were vile, infamous!

It couldn't be New York. (Because the week before, CBS had aired a special starring Lucille Ball as a bag lady, and the head of CBS had gotten a cranky call from Mayor Koch, upset that the Apple was always being portrayed as a cesspool.) We couldn't have the Puerto Rican woman fudging on her welfare, no matter how compassionately we portrayed reality. It couldn't under any circumstances be Christmas, but we could pick any other holiday we chose.
(TV Guide
quoted me as suggesting, "Perhaps the dark side of the Easter Bunny!")

There were more strictures. Many more. I won't name them, because you may be reading this before you read the teleplay, and I don't want to spill the beans. But when you reach the punchline, you'll understand that they absolutely forbid...

Well, you'll see.

I resigned on the 26th. There was a lot of noise about it. I don't suffer in silence. It was in the
New York Times, TV Guide, Los Angeles Times, Variety,
dozens of newspapers all over the country, on
Entertainment Tonight
and, ironically,
CBS News.

But they wouldn't back down.

They pulled the plug, costing the TZ production company what has been estimated at between $150,000 and $300,000.

And the Christmas show had a substitute segment slipped into it. And I was gone. And that was that.

Except. In the Spring of 1986, when it appeared that TZ would be picked up for a second season, DeGuere called and said CBS wanted me to meet with Alice Henderson, who was coming in from New York, to discuss my returning to the show. We three met and had lunch at Musso & Frank Grill in Hollywood, and I presented my case to Ms. Henderson. I told her that I respected her desire to protect the American public from dangerous materials but that I felt it was very shaky ground for the network, to be taking a stand
against
a potent indictment of racism and bigotry. I told her this was intended to be the real thing, not Archie Bunker calling someone a "spook" and then smiling, and everybody knows he's at heart a good guy, didn't he cry when Edith died?

I told her that I perceived her actions as intending to serve the commonweal, but that, in fact, she was serving the
status quo.
And since the
status quo
was one of bigotry and racism, that she was in no way defending the responsibility of the network.

It was an amicable talk. Nice woman, actually. And she said she'd consider revising her decision.

Well, they jerked me around for months. Finally DeGuere had a meeting with the Powers In Charge, and we arrived at some revisions (they've been included as gray-tone sidebars at the appropriate places in the teleplay), revisions that I thought we could live with.

I did the rewrite free of charge.

Sent it in.

And they switched censors. They altered the rules of the game, and some new jamook said not no way, not no how, not never!
 

And that was that.

I forgot. I forgot that for every DeGuere and Crocker who cares about what comes to you through that little box, there are a hundred clowns in suits, terrified of making waves, who puff up like a banjo player who had a big breakfast with the import of the job. Men and women who care only that a loaf of bread costs more than 13¢ and they will make
damned
sure no little smartmouth writer endangers their purchase of the Staff of Life. Let us offend
no one,
even if the cost of that chickenshit political correctness cowardice is a perpetuation of despicable practices and mores and vile, outmoded, cultural values.

For some of us, who live to regret having forgotten the lessons of history, there are other, more important Staffs in this life. The Staff with which I worked for a year on T2 was more important, and CBS has broken
that
staff...Brennert and Crocker and I are gone. The Staff of honor is also important. And if a writer cannot do with honor what he/she does best, then working in the medium is only for the buck.

And that's no reason worth a fart in the wind.

___

I took a moment to clear my head, and went over next door, to the house of the woman who had rented us the place, and I borrowed a broom from her. Then I swept up every room in the house, clean as a whistle, obsessively neat, and whisked the piles of dirt into a big shopping bag, and tossed the bag into the garbage can, and returned the broom, and went away from there. I didn’t think about her again till nearly a year and a half later.

___

Nackles

a short story by

Donald E. Westlake

Did God create men, or does Man create gods? I don’t know, and if it hadn’t been for my rotten brother-in-law the question would never have come up. My
late
brother-in-law? Nackles knows.

It all depends, you see, like the chicken and the egg, on which came first. Did God exist before Man first thought of Him, or didn't He? If not, if Man creates his gods, then it follows that Man must create the devils, too.

Nearly every god, you know, has his corresponding devil. Good
and
Evil. The polytheistic ancients, prolific in the creation (?) of gods and goddesses, always worked up nearly enough Evil ones to cancel out the Good, but not quite. The Greeks, those incredible supermen, combined Good and Evil in
each
of their gods. In Zoroaster, Ahura Mazda, being Good, is ranged forever against the Evil one, Ahrinian. And we ourselves know God and Satan.

But of course it's entirely possible I have nothing to worry about. It all depends on whether Santa Claus is or is not a god. He certainly
seems
like a god. Consider: He is omniscient; he knows every action of every child, for good or evil. At least on Christmas Eve he is omnipresent, everywhere at once. He administers justice tempered with mercy. He is superhuman, or at least non-human, though conceived of as having a human shape. He is aided by a corps of assistants who do
not
have completely human shapes. He rewards Good and punishes Evil. And, most important, he is believed in utterly by several million people, most of them under the age of ten. Is there any qualification for godhood that Santa Claus does not possess?

And even the non-believers give him lip-service. He has surely taken over Christmas; his effigy is everywhere, but where are the manger and the Christ child? Retired rather forlornly to the nave. (Santa's power is growing, too. Slowly but surely he is usurping Chanukah as well.)

Santa Claus
is
a god. He's no less a god than Ahura Mazda, or Odin, or Zeus. Think of the white beard, the chariot pulled through the air by a breed of animal which doesn't ordinarily fly, the prayers (requests for gifts) which are annually mailed to him and which so baffle the Post Office, the specially garbed priests in all the department stores. And don't gods reflect their creators' (?) society? The Greeks had a huntress goddess, and gods of agriculture and war and love. What else would we have but a god of giving, of merchandising, and of consumption? Secondary gods of earlier times have been stout, but surely Santa Claus is the first fat primary god.

And wherever there is a god, mustn't there sooner or later be a devil?

Which brings me back to my brother-in-law, who's to blame for whatever happens now. My brother-in-law Frank is—or was—a very mean and nasty man. Why I ever let him marry my sister I'll never know. Why Susie
wanted
to marry him is an even greater mystery. I could just shrug and say Love Is Blind, I suppose, but that wouldn't explain how she fell in love with him in the first place.

Frank is—Frank was—I just don't know what tense to use. The present, hopefully. Frank is a very handsome man in his way, big and brawny, full of vitality. A football player; hero in college and defensive linebacker for three years in pro ball, till he did some sort of irreparable damage to his left knee, which gave him a limp and forced him to find some other way to make a living.

Ex-football players tend to become insurance salesmen, I don't know why. Frank followed the form, and became an insurance salesman. Because Susie was then a secretary for the same company, they soon became acquainted.

Was Susie dazzled by the ex-hero, so big and handsome? She's never been the type to dazzle easily, but we can never fully know what goes on inside the mind of another human being. For whatever reason, she decided she was in love with him.

So they were married, and five weeks later he gave her her first black eye. And the last, though it mightn't have been, since Susie tried to keep me from finding out. I was to go over for dinner that night, but at eleven in the morning she called the auto showroom where I work, to tell me she had a headache and we'd have to postpone the dinner. But she sounded so upset that I knew immediately something was wrong, so I took a demonstration car and drove over, and when she opened the front door there was the shiner.

I got the story out of her slowly, in fits and starts. Frank, it seemed, had a terrible temper. She wanted to excuse him because he was forced to be an insurance salesman when he really wanted to be out there on the gridiron again, but I want to be President and I'm an automobile salesman and
I
don't go around giving women black eyes. So I decided it was up to me to let Frank know he wasn't to vent his pique on my sister any more.

Unfortunately, I am five feet seven inches tall and weigh one hundred thirty-four pounds, with the Sunday
Times
under my arm. Were I just to give Frank a piece of my mind, he'd surely give me a black eye to go with my sister's. Therefore, that afternoon I bought a regulation baseball bat, and carried it with me when I went to see Frank that night.

He opened the door himself and snarled, "What do
you
want?"

In answer, I poked him with the end of the bat, just above the belt, to knock the wind out of him. Then, having unethically gained the upper hand, I clouted him five or six times more, and then stood over him to say, "The next time you hit my sister I won't let you off so easy." After which I took Susie home to
my
place for dinner.

And after which I was Frank's best friend.

People like that are so impossible to understand. Until the baseball bat episode, Frank had nothing for me but undisguised contempt. But once I'd knocked the stuffing out of him, he was my comrade for life. And I'm sure it was sincere; he would have given me the shirt off his back, had I wanted it, which I didn't.

(Also, by the way, he never hit Susie again. He still had the bad temper, but he took it out in throwing furniture out windows or punching dents in walls or going downtown to start a brawl in some bar. I offered to train him out of maltreating the house and furniture as I had trained him out of maltreating his wife, but Susie said no, that Frank had to let off steam and it would be worse if he was forced to bottle it all up inside him, so the baseball bat remained in retirement.)

Then came the children, three of them in as many years. Frank Junior came first, and then Linda Joyce, and finally Stewart. Susie had held the forlorn hope that fatherhood would settle Frank to some extent, but quite the reverse was true. Shrieking babies, smelly diapers, disrupted sleep, and distracted wives are trials and tribulations to any man, but to Frank they were—like everything else in his life—the last straw.