The Boy Who Never Grew Up (51 page)

The nation’s newspapers devoted countless editorials to the question of whether Lyle Hudnut had or had not committed a victimless crime. Some argued the man was being hounded unfairly. It wasn’t as if he’d committed rape or murder or vehicular manslaughter while intoxicated. He hadn’t, in fact, hurt anyone. Others felt that there was indeed a victim here—America’s children. A role model like Lyle Hudnut, they argued, had to be held to a higher standard of personal conduct than someone else did. On and on it went. When
Entertainment Tonight
conducted a phone poll on whether or not the TV series should be reinstated, fourteen million people called in, the highest response ever. Fifty-four percent said yes, forty-six percent no. Everyone, it seemed, had an opinion on Uncle Chubby—even Tamarra Wett. “I don’t see what everybody’s so worked up about. The man kept his hand to himself,” sniffed the
Of Human Blondage
star, who herself landed on the cover of
People
magazine when she was discovered to be the runaway daughter of an Evansville, Indiana, Methodist minister. And fifteen years old. In fact, she was still peddling a memoir of her own,
Slippery When Wett.
I turned it down, if you must know.

The Manhattan DA chose to prosecute Lyle Hudnut. But to avoid the circus of a trial, he offered him a plea bargain—a five-hundred-dollar fine and a year’s probation if Lyle pleaded guilty to indecent exposure. Lyle refused it. He was innocent of any criminal conduct, he insisted, and vowed to fight all the way to the U.S. Supreme Court if that’s what it took. Legal experts debated the merits of his case on
Larry King Live.
Several believed he had a strong case, arguing that exposing one’s sexual organs in a theater designated for the express purpose of showing pornography did not necessarily constitute indecent exposure. The DA came back with a new offer: Lyle Hudnut would agree to plead no contest, pay a one-hundred-dollar fine and all court costs, in exchange for which all criminal charges would be expunged from his record. A pale and shaken Lyle Hudnut appeared in court to accept this offer. It was his first public appearance since his arrest. The hearing was televised live on CNN. It was over very fast. Then a limo whisked him away.

God elected to reinstate the nation’s No. 1 show, a decision for which he was widely applauded within the show biz community. Not that his decision had anything whatsoever to do with bravery. It had to do with money, and with the extremely deep financial soup his network was drowning in. His and the other two networks as well. None of them, as it happens, had ever learned how to swim.

America’s three-network system was dying. In 1976, the big three could claim nine out of ten prime-time viewers as their own. These days, they could claim only six. Cable TV and home video were to blame. Viewers were channel surfing now. They had more viewing choices—lots of choices. And they weren’t choosing the calculated blandness and sheer vapidity of network programming. Shrinking audiences meant shrinking advertising revenues. And that meant the networks had to cut back. News and sports divisions were going fast, virtually conceding defeat to the new cable rivals like CNN and ESPN. Meanwhile, Godfrey Daniels was even predicting that one or more of the networks might soon have to scale back their hours of prime-time programming. Maybe get out of prime time altogether one or two nights per week. Maybe go out of business, period.

A hit show like
Uncle Chubby
could still turn a network’s entire fortunes around. But not one of the three networks had found a hit in the past three years. Snap, crackle, flop was the painful norm now. Fickle audiences were thumbing their noses at one new show after another. Losing
Uncle Chubby
because of Lyle’s arrest had cost the network an estimated 13 percent of its viewers, viewers it could ill afford to lose. Its aggregate weekly ratings share fell from 21 percent to 18, dropping it from first to second place. And dangerously close to third. The network had wanted
Uncle Chubby
back on. The network had needed it back on.

So did Panorama City Communications, the film and TV studio that was financially partnered with Lyle in producing the show. The studio was his bank. It absorbed the rather punishing weekly budget overages that are common practice in network series production. In the case of
Uncle Chubby,
the licensing fee was $800,000 per week against an actual production budget of just over $1 million. Spread out over a season of twenty-two episodes, this amounted to a shortfall of $5 million. Panorama City was willing to take such a hit—a practice known as deficit financing—because they, not the network, owned the show’s syndication rights. That’s when a long-running series is sold into rerun heaven on local stations all over the country—all over the world. A sitcom was presently earning its producers and distributor around $1 million per episode. A hundred episodes means a $100-million pot of cash at the end of the rainbow. Of course, there is some risk involved. You can’t syndicate a show until you have that pool of a hundred episodes, which means at least four seasons’ worth of shows. Most series don’t stay on that long. Only the hits.
Uncle Chubby
was just such a hit. A lock. A studio’s wet dream. There was just one problem—it had only been on three seasons. Sixty-six episodes. Not enough. So the studio was out $15 million and
very
anxious to see it get back on the air. They had a huge financial stake in it.

As did Lyle Hudnut, who stood to take home a third of that syndication pie. More than the man’s dignity was at stake. Thirty million dollars was involved. And that buys a lot of dignity.

So
Uncle Chubby
was back on the air—with a few changes. And its season premiere would be a big-time happening, the biggest since
Murphy Brown
squared off against Danny Quayle. That meant big-time bucks, too. The leading sneaker manufacturer in the world had already signed on at an astounding $350,000 per thirty seconds of commercial airtime—a record for a sitcom. So had a new diet soft drink and one of the Detroit automakers.

Lyle Hudnut was back.

That made one of us.

Like I said, the past few months hadn’t exactly been swell for me either. If you were around and semialive you’ve been reading all about it. All about Merilee and me. Once, she and I had been something. She was Merilee Nash, fabulous star of stage and screen, two-time Tony award winner, Oscar winner, glamorous, respected, admired, the woman who had it all. I was Stewart Hoag, that tall, dashing author of that brilliantly successful first novel,
Our Family Enterprise,
the man who
The New York Times
called “the first great new literary voice of the 1980’s.” We were New York’s hottest, cutest people. Hands down. Until it all fell apart. That was my doing. Writer’s block is what they call it. I lost my juices, lost my voice, lost my wife. Merilee got it all—the seven rooms overlooking Central Park, the red 1958 Jaguar XK-150 drop-head, marriage to that fabulously successful new Southern playwright, Zack something. I got my drafty old fifth-floor walk-up on West Ninety-third Street, and Lulu. The juices did finally come back to me, in fits and starts, only the second novel was a thermonuclear dud. Novel number three was, as we say in the trade, in progress. Had been for nearly four years. It was not, as we also say in the trade, under contract. Neither was Merilee. She came back to me in fits and starts, too, after the Zack thing fell apart. We got semiinvolved all over again. Separate addresses. No commitments. No promises. But for me, there was no one else. There was only Merilee. Same with her, or so I had thought. See, it all blew up in my face over the winter when she politely informed me by phone from Fiji that she was pregnant. She said she knew I didn’t want kids, but she did, and since she was forty it was now or never so she was going to have this one. And, by the way, I was not the father. She wouldn’t tell me who was. She wouldn’t tell anyone. I can’t tell you why. I don’t know why.

I only know that when word got out that Merilee Nash was with love child, everybody, but everybody, wanted to know who Daddy was. The
National Enquirer,
convinced that all leading ladies fuck their leading men—because they do—deduced that the father was her costar in the black comedy she’d been filming at the time the dirty deed took place. I doubted this—Danny DeVito is happily married, and a borderline dwarf. Merilee is six feet tall in her size ten bare feet.
Hard Copy
was sure that the father was hubby number two, Zack something. I doubted this, too. Zack had been in India for the past two years trying to find himself. Not that it should be such a big fucking discovery. David Letterman chipped in with his own top ten candidates, including Colonel Muammar al-Qaddafi, Wile E. Coyote, Frank Perdue, and Spiderman.

As Merilee got bigger, the story got bigger. It simply wouldn’t go away. So I did. Fled to Provence with Lulu. Being a writer means you aren’t tied to any one place. You’re free to be unhappy anywhere in the world. I rented a two-hundred-year-old stone
mas
in the countryside outside of Joucas with a pool and six hectares of olive trees and grapevines. There I’d spent the past six months living in splendid, morbid isolation. I worked on the third novel. I swam. I ate the sun-ripened melons and cold roasted peppers, the garlicky pink
saucisson
and the
tapenade,
a native paste of black olives and anchovies that Lulu loves nearly as much as caviar. I drank the new Côtes du Rhône and found it every bit as amusing as the old Côtes du Rhône. It wasn’t a terrible life. Lulu did keep wondering where her mommy was. She didn’t understand what had gone wrong. The little ones never do. But it wasn’t a terrible life. I think I could have stayed there forever if it hadn’t cost money. And if mine hadn’t run out.

I didn’t call Merilee when I got back to town. I did catch a glimpse of her, but that was on the front page of the
Star,
a photo of her waddling down Central Park West in maternity clothes and sunglasses, very pregnant. The headline:
WHERE’S POPPA?

Damned if I knew.

You’re probably beginning to wonder exactly what it is I do when the money runs out. Let me tell you about my not-chosen field. I’m a pen for hire, an invisible man, a ghost. In my own defense, I’m not one of those “As Told To” lunch-pailers who routinely run some doddering ex-movie star’s self-congratulatory twaddle through the word processor. Or maybe it’s the food processor! No, I am
the
ghost. The reigning champ, if there can be such a thing as an invisible champ. Four number-one best-selling memoirs to my noncredit, as well as someone else’s best-selling novel. Unlike the lunch-pailers, I know how to handle stars. Used to be one myself, and I was married to one and am not, repeat not, the father of her child. I also happen to be a former lion of American literature, a master of the finer nuances of character, tone, structure—which is to say I know how to make up better stories than they do. Sorry if this is disillusioning you, but you should never, ever confuse a celebrity memoir with Truth. And you’re old enough to know this by now.

Of course, there’s one other reason why my celebrity memoirs tend to be breakout hits. Things—how shall I put it—have this way of heating up when I arrive. I don’t mean the way Lyle said the control room heated up when Katrina wiggled in. I mean the way famous people have this unpleasant way of turning up dead. By other than natural causes. Ghosting, you see, isn’t just about making up stories. It’s about dishing dirt on friends and foes. It’s about secrets, past and present. Usually, there’s someone around who wants them to stay quietly buried. Most ghosts say fine, ’nuff said. Not me. I rise to the challenge. At least my ego does, and my ego is executive producer of this particular long-running sitcom. Not that I look for trouble. I don’t. Trouble just has this uncanny knack for searching me out, like a pig nosing around in the dirt for truffles.

I told you I never thought I’d be a sitcom writer. Well, I never thought I’d be a ghost, either. Same as I never thought Merilee Nash would be pregnant with another man’s child. “Just another one of those little surprises that make life so interesting,” as Ozzie used to tell Dave and little Ricky on
The Adventures of Ozzie and Harriet.
Of course, Ozzie is history now, and father no longer knows best. Nobody knows best. I sure don’t. I used to think I did, but that was the old me. The me who knew everything. The new me knows next to nothing. The new me is growing dumber every single day.

H
UDSON STUDIO, WHERE
The Uncle Chubby Show
was taped before a studio audience every Friday evening during the season, was located down on West Twenty-sixth Street, on the edge of the garment district. It was a street lined with wholesalers and sweatshops and shops that did nothing but service sewing machines or sell body parts for mannequins of the nonhuman variety. Trucks were double-parked everywhere, loading and unloading dresses, furs, and leather jackets. The studio itself offered little in the way of curbside appeal. It was a converted warehouse, six stories high, with its upstairs windows bricked over. There was a two-bay loading dock for trucks. There was no fancy sign. Just the words Hudson Studio stenciled on the double doors of smoked glass. Not that those doors were easy to get to.

There was a blue police barricade on either side of them and a knot of uniformed cops stopping everybody. This because about two hundred angry protestors from Citizens for Moral Television had rolled out the unwelcome mat. They carried signs saying
“CHUBBY MUST GO!”
and
“JUST SAY NO TO PERVERTS!”
They chanted, “Shame, shame, shame on you!” for all to hear. Especially the news crews from local TV stations and
Entertainment Tonight.
The protestors were plenty worked up. A few were even stretched out in the middle of Twenty-sixth Street with the hope of getting arrested for blocking traffic. Had to be from out of town. That tactic doesn’t play in New York, where nine out of ten cab drivers would just as soon go over you as around you. One of the cops let me inside.