"John Morressy - Last Jerry Fagin Show" - читать интересную книгу автора (Morressy John)

VERSION 1.0 DTD 040600



THE LAST JERRY FAGIN SHOW

By John Morressy

The other networks were wiped out, and they knew it. After this there would be
no more "Big Three." There would be only a single network, and Jerry Fagin
would rule it like a king.
The others tried to put up a fight, of course. There are no good losers
in this business. One network threw together a nude musical version of the
Kama Sutra. Another did a live eighthour report on torture and execution of
political prisoners around the world. The PBS stations had the best solution:
They reran the Fischer-Spassky match.
But only the Jerry Fagin show could offer a real live honest-to-H. G.
Wells alien from outer space as a guest. The projected audience was 99.3
percent of all potential viewers. It was figured that 0.4 percent would tune
in to the other networks purely out of habit, and the
remaining 0.3 percent would be watching their own canned reruns of The
Lawrence Welk Show.
Given Jerry's personality and the nature of the television industry, the
wipeout was inevitable. A cage of tigers can be pretty impressive, but if you
drop a gigantic dinosaur into the cage, the tigers all of a sudden turn into
pussycats. And Jerry Fagin was looking like a very big tyrannosaurus rex. He
had been one all along, but he kept the fact hidden. Most people thought he
was a pussycat. Those of us who knew better said nothing-and kept our jobs.
Jerry Fagin was a funny man, as everybody knows. He had half a dozen
foolproof comic characters, but he didn't really need any of them. He could
stand in front of a camera deadpan, hands in his pockets, looking up at the
ceiling, and reel off a monologue that had everybody helpless with laughter.
He was born with pure comic instinct. At a party I've seen him zero in on the
one person out of, maybe, two hundred total strangers who could feed him
perfect straight lines.
Jerry was probably the funniest man I ever worked for, and I've worked
for them all. Along with all the funny he had a streak of pure killer. But
Jerry had talent, and, more important, he had luck; so the killer side hardly
ever showed. He always seemed to be on the scene at the right time or to know
just the right person and have something on him.
So he wound up, at twenty-nine, hosting Late Night Live. At thirty, he
was the hottest thing

in the industry. The Late Night Live title was forgotten. Everybody called it
The Jerry Fagin Show.
Jerry could play an audience like Horowitz playing the fiddle, or the
piano, or whatever the hell Horowitz plays. You know what I mean. He took
small-town talent-show winners and made them into stars of their own. Just by
holding up a book, he could turn a piece of schlock by an unknown hack into a
best-seller. He could take a clubhouse errand boy and make him into a