The Last Debate Page 10

  “It’s not a line, goddamn it.”

  “I know that, goddamn it.”

  “Do you have the television on?” she asked.

  “Yeah. You? An Equalizer rerun on some cable channel.”

  “Is it the one with Pat Hingle in it?”

  “Yeah.”

  “That’s the same one I’m watching. I’m having trouble picking up the story.”

  “Me, too. I remember seeing it before, though, because of Hingle. I think he’s a schoolteacher with a problem kid who comes to McCall for help.”

  “I need to work on my questions and things,” Joan said.

  “Good night, my goddess of the airwaves.”

  “Shut up.”

  “Yes, ma’am.”

  Within minutes she was back reading a briefing book the CNS bureau had done on reducing the federal budget deficit while also trying to figure out exactly what Pat Hingle and Robert McCall, The Equalizer, were up to.

  Mike Howley went to the Inn’s bar by himself and ordered a nightcap—a Cutty Sark scotch on the rocks. He had taken only a sip or two of his drink when he received a phone call and left the bar.

  He spent the rest of the evening in his room, No. 3255, drinking Cutty Sarks on the rocks delivered by room service and talking on the phone.

  Among other things.

  5

  Jack and Jill

  The sun rose Sunday morning across Colonial Williamsburg at 6:07, according to the weather-bureau record of that day. It was a magnificent rising, the sun coming up through and behind the trees beyond the Inn like a strip of bright red-orange neon. I can bear my own witness to that fact because I was already up and out at 6:07. This was my first trip to Williamsburg, and I was determined to see a little of it as well as do my job for American journalism and The New American Tatler.

  I was also determined not to miss my daily jog. Running early in the morning was—is—my way to keep the body and the mind alive and alert. No matter the place or the weather, I run. I always run. Always.

  So there I was trotting down deserted Duke of Gloucester, the main street and pedestrian walkway in the restored area, when I came across the second most famous couple in America. Jack and Jill. There they were, running in matching red, white, and green running suits coming right toward me. Any regular reader of People and similar magazines would not have been surprised to see them. They also always ran every day, no matter the place or the weather. Always. They ran side by side together. Always, together, Jack and Jill. It was their trademark. It was their life. They most particularly ran together early Sunday morning, the day of their television program, the most popular of its kind on the air.

  Here they were like a colored magazine photo, right in front of me. I smiled and said: “Good morning.”

  “Right,” said Jack, not looking at me.

  “Amen,” said Jill, giving me a quick smile.

  They looked like they should have looked, Jack and Jill together there running side by side as they did every morning. Always.

  Then in a few minutes there came another jogger my way. It was a man, younger and running faster than Jack and Jill. He caught my eye and stopped dead in his tracks and motioned for me to do the same.

  “Hey, sorry, amigo,” he said, blowing wind out of his mouth. “But was that Jack and Jill who just went by here?”

  “Yes, it was,” I said, anxious to get on with my run.

  “Damn!” he said. “I figured they’d be out this morning. I wanted to meet them.… I’ll never catch them now. I missed them.”

  “Sorry,” I said.

  The man was young, probably in his late twenties, black hair, dark eyes and skin. He was wearing a gray sweat suit with TEXAS IS HEAVEN ON EARTH emblazoned on the front of the shirt.

  “I am Henry Ramirez,” he said. “I am one of the debate panelists.” I may have imagined it—or been influenced by postdebate events and my later knowledge—but it seemed to me that he made “I am one of the debate panelists” sound as if he were announcing his presence on a throne of some kind.

  I told him who I was.

  “I’ve read your magazine a time or two,” he said. “Most of the stories are too long for me, sorry.”

  I said nothing and made ready to resume my jog. I was weary of people telling me the stories in the Tatler were too long. I knew it and loved it. It was what made the magazine different from all the others. In a world of the short—short attention spans of readers and short visions of media owners—it was also most probably a difference that would not last much longer.

  Henry Ramirez was still looking down Duke of Gloucester in the star wake of Jack and Jill.

  “Someday I’m going to be one of them,” he said, again in the form of an announcement.

  Even though I had never met or heard of this young man before in my life, I knew immediately what he was talking about. I knew he meant he was going to someday be a Jack and Jill. And I almost laughed.

  It was not a surprise that he aspired to be a Jack and Jill. The remarkable success of their program, Face to Face with Jack and Jill, was being heralded as a major development in the fast-moving history of American television journalism. Columbia University seminars and think pieces in various journalism reviews were already authoritatively suggesting that this program was the future, the natural end result of a three-way marriage of the values from journalism, show business, and politics.

  How it happened has been thoroughly reported. CNS’s thirty-two-year-old News in the Making, the mother of all Sunday-morning hard-news interview programs, had fallen to a weak third in the ratings behind NBS’s Review of the Week with General Schwarzkopf and ABS’s Sunday Morning Ross, hosted by former presidential candidate Ross Perot. CNS changed hosts four times in three years, sets and theme music three times in four years, and formats five times in four years. It expanded from thirty minutes to an hour, then went back to thirty, way up to ninety, and then back to an hour. The ratings remained the same. The problem, according to a Washington Post television critic, was that “CNS is mired in the boring business of seriousness, and until it gets itself unmired it is doomed to third place.”

  A new management at CNS News, the fourth in six years, took that advice and decided to unmire. They fired all of the real journalists producing and appearing on the program and hired the Chicago clownalist Mark Southern to take over. He said he was going to get rid of the “pencil-neck professors and pundits in Washington talking to themselves” and replace them with real Americans. He said: “Americans are going to be on the show. Lots of people who talk like regular people are going to be talking, and the politicians are going to be listening to them. It’s going to be totally different.” He and his real Americans made broadcast history. For the first time ever, a major network’s Sunday-morning program’s rating was BMS—Below Measurable Standards. The San Francisco Chronicle TV critic called the premiere program “an embarrassment for the host, the guests, the network, the industry, and real Americans with brains and taste everywhere.” Southern was fired the next day, the program was scrapped, and another broadcast-industry record was set. Southern had the shortest tenure of any host of any network news/public affairs program ever. One program.

  And—for $3.2 million a year each, according to our “Tatler Media Intelligence” column—Jack Gilbey and Jill Christopher were immediately hired to co-create and co-host another whole new program and approach. Jack and Jill were the hottest public-affairs couple of the moment, possibly of all moments. Jack Gilbey and Jill Christopher had begun their public lives as successful political consultants. Jack worked for Democrats, Jill for Republicans. They worked against each other in one presidential campaign so much, so closely, and so intensely that they fell in love and into the news, the columns, and the magazines. During the campaign, their dates were sometimes covered by reporters and photographers. Their picture appeared on the cover of Newsweek, each holding a copy of a nasty press release and videotape cassette as if in a shoot-out at the O.K. Cor
ral. One unimpressed (“He’s lying with envy,” Jack retorted) critic claimed Jack and Jill got more favorable publicity and attention than either of their candidates. After the campaign they married, signed a multimillion-dollar his-and-her book contract, sold their story to the movies as a natural sequel to the early Hepburn-Tracy sagas, launched a major lecture tour (Them magazine said they got $30,000 for a joint one-hour Q & A appearance), and assumed joint ownership of a giant house in Georgetown and a forty-two-foot sailboat at Annapolis.

  It was their specific decision to form themselves into a two-person, left-right, one-call-does-all commentary team that led to their Sunday program. All networks, national radio call-in shows, and others competed to pay them money and tribute to come on after presidential speeches and other events to offer instant analysis. Then it came to a head for Jack and Jill, CNS, and America when instead of returning to their original profession, political consulting, when the current presidential campaign began, they chose to remain on the outside in their new world. They offered themselves to all interested parties as a commentary/television team on an exclusive basis. In a fortunate bit of timing, the bids were still being considered when Southern flopped. CNS jumped in, dramatically raising its bid both in money and program potential.

  Face to Face with Jack and Jill was not only number one in the ratings from its first week on the air, it had since gone to a full two hours and there was talk of making it even longer. “How long, O Lord, how long will it be before CNS turns over not only all of Sunday but possibly even all of Monday, Tuesday, and Wednesday to them?” asked the Los Angeles Times television critic.

  As coincidence would have it, when I returned to the Inn from my jog I ran into somebody who was going to be a guest on today’s Face to Face with Jack and Jill later in the morning. I knew it from my reading through a stack of press releases and Media Alerts that had been pushed under my hotel-room door along with a packet of background clips and other material the Tatler research office had FedExed to me.

  The person was Joan Naylor, the CNS anchorwoman, who like the young jogger was a debate panelist.

  I had never met Joan Naylor, but she was known to be a friend of the Tatler because of a long, favorable profile we had run of her a few months ago. I recognized her immediately when I entered the Inn’s large Regency dining room, which was filled with flowers, white starched tablecloths, heavy silver, and journalists who were in Williamsburg for the debate. She was at a table for two with a woman I did not recognize. I, for reporting and courtesy—and, yes, bravado—reasons, decided to go over and introduce myself. I was not yet seriously interested in the panelists for my story, of course. I saw it mostly as a social call.

  “Happy hunting tonight,” I said.

  “Thank you,” she said. I found her to be as attractive and charming in person close-up as she was from the distance of television and as she had been portrayed in our profile.

  “Meet Barbara Manning,” she said, motioning to the young black woman sitting across the table from her. “She’s also part of the hunting party.”

  “Oh, yes,” I said, and extended my hand. I was struck immediately by the perfectness of Barbara Manning’s face and the coldness of her right hand. She told me after the debate that the coldness was caused by the nervousness she had felt that morning when she woke up. She had immediately called Joan and asked if they could meet for breakfast. “I needed a fix of comfort, companionship, company,” she told me.

  I had no idea of any of that at the time, obviously. I had now, by chance, met three of the four debate panelists. The opportunity to meet the fourth, moderator Mike Howley, was presented to me via a Media Alert I found under my door when I returned to my room a short time later to shower, change, and prepare for my day and night of work.

  TODAY’S JOURNALISTS TO QUIZ THOMAS JEFFERSON, said the announcement. Howley and five other reporters would participate in a special nine A.M. press conference with “then Governor Jefferson on the occasion of his departure from Williamsburg with the moving of the Virginia state capital to Richmond in 1780.” It was being staged as a fund-raiser for some local Williamsburg charity in the East Lounge of the Inn.

  It sounded intriguing, fun—interesting. I figured there might be something there for my magazine piece. And I could possibly meet Howley, too. So I went.

  Howley and the other reporters—none of whom I knew or recognized—played their parts well. So did the guy, a professional actor all dressed up in full Colonial regalia that included white breeches and a burgundy frock coat, who played Jefferson. He not only stood tall and supreme the way we would want Jefferson to stand, he also spoke in a voice that was deep and firm and Jeffersonian—or at least Jeffersonian as we would imagine it to be.

  Jefferson was asked several questions that were clearly setups. They were about attacks by hostile Indians between the Ohio and Illinois rivers, a Patrick Henry-sponsored bill to collect taxes in support of Christianity, and a territorial dispute with Pennsylvania, among other things. Then for a few final minutes it turned open and freewheeling.

  “Did you and your fellow revolutionaries really believe you were going to be able to prevail over Britain when you signed the Declaration of Independence?” a reporter asked.

  “There are times in the course of a man’s life, sir,” said the Jefferson character without missing a beat, “when the price of doing nothing is much higher than that of defeat.”

  I had no idea if Jefferson ever said anything remotely like that, but the actor certainly made it sound Jeffersonian-authentic.

  Mike Howley asked the last question of Thomas Jefferson. “Have you a dream for what this new nation might become in two hundred or so years?”

  “Yes, sir, I do. It is a dream I dream most nights, particularly after having spent the day looking out from Monticello, my mountaintop home west of here, at a land and a people that have had the good fortune to be put in the same place at the same time by a benevolent and thoughtful God.”

  Again, it had the sound of the real Jefferson. I had no idea if it really was and it did not matter.

  I went up front afterward and shook hands with Howley. We had the following exchange:

  “I guess we shouldn’t be expecting any bombshells tonight?” I said. It was strictly a small-talk question.

  “Not unless you know something I don’t,” he said. “I’ve got to run now, sorry. I want to catch the talk shows and then there’s a lot of work still to be done before tonight.…”

  He seemed relaxed, cool, confident—the way the outside world had come to view Michael J. Howley. Sifting through his words and demeanor after the fact of the debate for any clues of what was to come was fruitless. He gave nothing away that morning to me or to Thomas Jefferson.

  I, too, had clippings and background material to read and television programs to watch. It was, in fact, almost time for Face to Face with Jack and Jill.

  Joan Naylor had kept her public mouth very quiet about Jack and Jill. But privately to Jeff and to a few others she held nothing back. She thought they were more than the beginning of the end of network news. They were the end. She had already visualized the scene and heard the words when somebody, probably a somebody she had never met before, called her into an office to inform her that, effective tonight, Jack and Jill would be anchoring the nightly news seven days a week from now until the end of time. Nothing personal, he (Oh, please God, let it be a he, not a she!) would say. We simply are no longer in a financial position to give the people what they no longer want, which is regular journalist-type people doing regular journalism-type news on television.

  The awful irony for Joan, one she also mentioned to very few people, was that she thought Jack and Jill were terrific on the air. They were funny, entertaining, and fascinating to watch. It was certainly not journalism, but it was … funny, entertaining, and fascinating to watch.

  And watching them was what she was doing now in a huge Williamsburg Lodge ballroom CNS had converted into a broadcast studi
o for Jack and Jill. Joan was waiting with twenty-two other guests for her turn to go on the air.

  Their now famous opening came on. It was a double head shot, live, of Jack and Jill from the side, noses almost touching.

  Jack said: “Once again you are in a position of defending the indefensible—namely that nonprincipled scumbag candidate of yours.”

  Jill said: “At least he breathes and he talks, which may be more than can be said for that intellectual and emotional cipher you are supporting.”

  Jack: “Watch him pull the upset of the century tonight in the debate!”

  Jill: “It would take an act of God for that to happen, and He’s clearly on our side.”

  They both turned toward the camera and Jack said: “Good morning, Democrats and other correctly thinking Americans, I am Jack.…”

  Jill said: “And I am Jill. I have a good morning to the real Americans of America … the Republicans and those of like right mind who want to Take Back America.”

  They smiled at the camera, then back at each other as the camera pulled back to show them sitting side by side in red, white, and blue director’s chairs while the orchestral rendition of their theme, which sounded similar to “America the Beautiful,” played in the background.

  After a few credits and commercials, they started through their guests, all of whom were seated facing Jack and Jill in plush movie-house chairs arranged bleacher-style in four rows of six. There were always twenty-four chairs, and there were always only twenty-three guests. The empty chair was always reserved for the president of the United States, the outgoing one being the only public person in all of America—excepting possibly J. D. Salinger and Elvis—who had thus far been asked and refused to appear on Face to Face with Jack and Jill.

  Jack said this morning, as he did every Sunday morning, that “one day we will look up and that empty chair will be occupied by a president if not this president.”