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

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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 political figure. And he did. And they always paid.
The payoff was never money. By this time Jerry wasn't worried about money. He wanted other things. He just hung in there and smiled and played kindly Uncle Jerry until he needed a favor. He never had to ask twice. Everybody knew that what Jerry Fagin had built up overnight he could tear down just as fast.
When the alien ship landed in Washington, Jerry counted up his LO.U.'s and decided that it was pay-up time. He must have called in every one he had to get that thing on his show, but he succeeded. At the personal request of the President, no less.

The alien was called Twelve. He came from a planet with a name that sounded like cowflop being tossed into a mudhole. Some White House speech writer tagged it Brother Earth, and that was the name that stuck, over the protests of the enraged feminists.
Twelve looked like a human being designed
by a committee and built by nursery-school dropouts. He seemed to have started out to be symmetrical, but missed. Two arms and two legs, like us, but they were of different lengths and thicknesses and set just a bit off center. Body lumpy as a potato, with a smaller potato for a head. Two eyes, a nose, and a mouth, but they moved around like the features of a melting snowman. Above one eye was a shiny spot. Twelve called it the weiox and tried to explain its function. No one understood a damned thing he said about it. They figured it was some kind of ear and let it go at that.
Aside from his weiox and a few other small details, mostly internal, Twelve made himself pretty clear right from the start. It turned out that he had been orbiting Earth for the last sixty-three hailumes, which was somewhere around twenty-seven of our years. All that time he was monitoring our broadcasts. And since most of his source material was supplied by television and radio, he had picked up a peculiar view of humanity.
For one thing, I think Twelve never really grasped the fact that there's a difference-most of the time, anyway-between a sitcom rerun and the Eleven O'Clock News, or an old Cagney movie and a junk-food commercial. They were all new to him, and all equally real. Or unreal. Or whatever.
Twelve's civilization had no word for entertainment. The concept simply did not exist for them. They did have some kind of music, but it wasn't an art form; it was a part of their

digestive process. And that was all. They had no drama, no literature of any kind, no art, and absolutely no sense of humor.
They didn't have wars, either, and Twelve didn't seem to know what weapons were for. So everyone breathed a lot easier.
Now, it was clear to me that if you're going to interview something like Twelve on television, live-before the biggest audience in history-you go get Sevareid out of retirement, or you hunt up a Lippmann or a Cronkite or somebody serious like that. You want the kind of people who cover elections and moon landings. You don't want Jerry Fagin.
But nobody asked me. Jerry Fagin landed the alien and scheduled him for a Friday night show. Then he sat back, read the headlines, listened to his telephones ring, and gloated.

I watched the show by myself that night, and , I certainly didn't gloat. I had been alone most r of the past month, ever since Jerry dropped me from his staff, loudly and publicly. In this business there is nobody as untouchable as a ', loser, and an out-of-work comedy writer is a loser of the Hindenburg class.
So I settled in, hoping to see Jerry screw up y and blow his big moment and knowing all the .i time that no matter how big a son of a bitch Jerry Fagin might be, he was a pro and this would be the show of his career. But I could
hope. -e
At the same time I didn't want to see Jerry completely wrecked, just badly damaged and
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requiring some repairs. Humiliation and disgrace were fine, but I didn't want him ruined. He was still my best potential source of income, and I was starting to feel the pinch. Trouble tonight, and Jerry would be calling me back, asking me to polish up some of the failureproof routines that had helped put him where he was. And I'd be there. I was not about to turn down the best-paying job in the business just because Jerry had made me look like a fool in public and closed every studio door to me. I mean, I have my pride, but I have my bills, too.

I started watching early, so I could savor the full hype. Spot announcements every fifteen minutes. On the Seven O'Clock News, a special five-minute report on the universe. At eight, ninety minutes of interviews with astronauts, starlets, clergymen, science-fiction writers, senators, a rock group, and the president of the Descendants of Prehistoric Alien Visitors. During the nine-thirty commercial interludetoothpaste, deodorants, and detergents hawked in skits starring, respectively, teen-agers and aliens, secretaries and aliens, and housewives and aliens-I started drinking. I could tell it was going to be better than a one-bottle night, and I wanted to start early and avoid having to rush things later on.
After the barrage of commercials came a special one-hour feature on alien visitors as depicted by Hollywood. Sixty minutes of blobs, globs, bugs, slugs, crawling eyes, brain-eaters, body-snatchers, mind-stealers, worms, germs,

robots, and androids, and every ten minutes a screaming reminder of tonight's once-in-alifetime Jerry Fagin Show.
What kind of impression all this was supposed to make on Twelve, I could not imagine. Maybe they made sure he was nowhere near a television set.
At ten-thirty, a longer, louder announcement. Then, after the mature-viewer commercials-wine, tampons, and laxatives peddled, respectively, by diplomats and aliens, female skydivers and aliens, and grandmothers and aliens-a half-hour special to remind the viewer who might have forgotten that there are nine planets in the solar system, that we are but a grain of sand on the shore of the great ocean of infinity, and so on. Very profound stuff, delivered like Sermonette or an insurance commercial. I kept on drinking.
Eleven o'clock brought the traditional mix of news, commercials, and station ID, and then, at eleven-thirty, came The Jerry Fagin Show. It was presented like the Second Coming.
The familiar Jerry Fagin theme was gone, and so was the studio orchestra. In their place was a selection from the The Planets, performed by the Hollywood Symphony and the Mormon Tabernacle Choir. Billy Bragg. Jerry's applecheeked, white-haired butterball of an announcer, did no clowning on this sacred night. He marched on camera with the step of a man in a college commencement procession. He was in white-tie and tails. I took another big drink.