To say that the next eight days rolled by uneventfully might not be entirely accurate. True, I had no further contact with Roger Charbonnet, either up front and personal or via some ugly little prank. Nor did I hear another word from Stew Gentry, though I did see him windsurfing on one of the rare evenings I was able to fit in a walk along the beach.
Nearly all of my time was taken up with work.
I spent my mornings with Vida Evans and a bearded cameraman named Hamid Tarul, doing segs for Wake Up. Someone, possibly Vida but more likely Carmen Sandoval, had decided to use several of the city’s more famous locations as the sites for my “Reports from L.A.,” creating a forced serendipity with Des’s spots promoting his show.
The serendipity began, as previously mentioned, at the La Brea Tar Pits, more specifically, at the Page Museum and adjoining park. There, Des, playing the new-to-L.A. hipster, goofed on the various outdoor exhibits—imitating the giant sloths, the prehistoric bear—before entering the museum and nearly leaping from his skin when the animatronic baby mammoth began to move and trumpet.
Meanwhile, I, and the morning show’s viewers, were given a mini-tour of the exhibits by a charming young volunteer guide that somehow managed to include a bit of Des’s clowning while condensing the usual two-hour-plus exploration to nine minutes, including one commercial interruption.
On subsequent days, we visited Chinatown, the Hollywood sign (where Des rode a cherry-picker, pretending to clean the letters), the back lot at Universal Studios, the Bradbury Building (the iconic movie location for hundreds of fictional private eyes, where our comic hero wore a snap-brim hat and trench coat), and, of course, Grauman’s Chinese Theatre (where, against all advice, he lowered his pants and impressed his Jockey shorts–covered skinny butt in cement, a grim exercise that, even though carefully photographed, to no one’s surprise wound up on YouTube rather than on the network).
As for my afternoons, they alternated between working with Harry Paynter on the book, which now had a tentative title, Murder on the Menu, and attending daily three p.m. meetings with the participants of Des’s new show. The latter included the baby-faced head writer Gibby Lewis, whom I’d met on my first night at the villa; producer Max Slaughter, a gent bovine in body and serpentine in thought, with a Vandyke beard that turned his plump face a bit demonic; his omnipresent gofer Trey Halstead; Tessa Ruscha, the show’s director, a formidable woman with a profile not unlike the comic-strip legend Dick Tracy, who, in flip-flops, towered over most of us; and Tessa’s efficient, no-nonsense floor manager, Lolita Snapps, a black woman in her forties with hair dyed the color of dull gold.
It was Tessa who, with Max’s approval, had brought in the “cutting-edge lighting consultant” identified by the uni-name Pfrank. With his chalk-white skin, long, stringy jet-black hair, a beard stubble that resembled smudged ash, fingernails as long as a mandarin’s, though not as clean, and teeth the color of lemon pulp, Pfrank presented quite a picture.
He seemed devoted to an unwavering wardrobe consisting of a Black Sabbath Heaven and Hell tour T-shirt covering his emaciated chest and black jeans wrapped around his pipe-cleaner legs. There were sparkling stones embedded in his earlobes, rings on his fingers, bands of metal and leather around his wrists, and Nikes the size of country mailboxes on his feet. A heavy chrome key chain drooped from a belt loop, eventually disappearing into his right pants pocket.
He also had heavily mascaraed eyes and topped the whole image off by speaking with a faux-British accent. In short, he was a low-rent modern-day Captain Jack Sparrow. All smarm and no charm.
“I felt it imperative that the at Night designation in the show’s title be treated as literally as … well, Black Sabbath treated their album Live Evil,” Pfrank informed me on the afternoon before the big telecast.
We were watching a complement of workmen put the finishing touches to six-plus months of extensive gutting and restructuring that had transformed what once had been the Margo Channing Playhouse, a midsize live Equity theater venue on Fountain Avenue in Hollywood, into the new Harold Di Voss Theater, named for Commander Di Voss’s late father, Gretchen’s granddaddy, who’d moved Worldwide from a fledgling network into what was at the time considered one of the big four of television broadcasting—NBC, CBS, ABC, and WBC.
Put together by a set designer named Giselle Cateline, the interior of the Di Voss Theater consisted of a high-tech, state-of-the-art television broadcast studio that seated one hundred guests. That was an audience approximately the same size as Craig Ferguson’s on CBS.
The building now had everything a TV studio needed. Except width.
“That is why,” Pfrank continued, “it was necessary we envelop the video mise-en-scène in a cloak of delicious darkness. And use what I call the ‘night minions,’ stagehands garbed head to toe in black.”
Des had already told me about the minions and the mise-en-scène, only not in those particular words. But I wasn’t sure what they had to do with the width of the theater. So I asked Pfrank.
“Didn’t you read my interview in the L.A. Times? It explained everything.”
“Missed it,” I said.
Pfrank sighed. “Well, first you have to understand that there were budgetary parameters that necessitated the use of the existing theater shell. So Giselle realized that while there was the limitation of width, we could play a little with depth. Did you meet Giselle?”
“Oh, too bad. She’s in Quebec now, working on a feature starring the Academy Award–winning Ms. Sandra Bullock, no less. Giselle is—well, the bitch is brilliant, and I don’t use that word very often.”
“I should hope not,” I said. “Feminists would have your guts for garters.”
He flashed a Joker grin, then continued his natter.
“Giselle has created a fucking fabulous design that uses the stage depth to create three separate areas—a cozy conversation-space stage front, near the audience, a flexible performance space just past that, and a permanent-space stage left behind that for the musicians.
“And you know what makes it all work?”
“The director?”
He gave me a chalky, tolerant smile. “I’m talking about the set. The things that allow Giselle’s design to transform an awkward, some might say impossible, space into television magic are wheels and … my darkness.”
“Anyone ever tell you you’re a very dramatic guy?” I asked.
“Are you calling me a diva?”
“Al Pacino is dramatic,” I said. “You’re a diva.”
He mulled that over and evidently was satisfied to be mentioned in the same breath with Pacino. “Shall I continue?” he asked.
“Please.”
“Well, everything is on wheels, soft rubber spherical wheels. The chair and couch used for Des’s interviews can easily be pushed to stage right to allow the cameras access to the performance area. There’s a scrim that will hide the musical group during those times when they’d be a distraction. It will simply be rolled away when it makes sense to put Mr. Fitzpatrick and his orchestra on display. The minions, of course, will be doing the moving, dressed in black, with my darkness design facilitating their complete invisibility.”
“It seems a little tricky,” I said. “Especially the timing.”
“We’re working on that.”
“And about those wheels, what’s to stop the furniture from sliding out from under people? I imagine Des could make a joke of it if he winds up on the floor, but what if it’s a guest like Morgan Freeman or Hillary Clinton hitting the deck?”
“That won’t happen,” Pfrank said smugly. “The wheels are set in a springlike device. When weight is applied, they disappear into the base of the furniture, making it as stable as … Oh, I’m sorry, Chef Blessing. I’m going to have to leave you now. My assistant has arrived with our minions.”
I watched him head toward a group of nearly a dozen men and women who’d filed in through the front doors. It wasn’t hard to pick out Pfrank’s assistant, who, except for platinum spiked hair, could have been his double. The so-called minions were mainly young and burly, the obvious exception being a tall male, at least a decade older than the others. He was wearing unusual octagon-shaped sunglasses in the minimally lighted theater, which suggested either an eye problem, an affectation, or a bizarre fashion statement.
Or maybe he was just warming up for Pfrank’s glorious darkness.
All of the minions, I presumed, belonged to IATSE (the International Alliance of Theatrical Stage Employees). I wondered what the local thought about its members working in the dark, wearing Pfrank’s ninja costumes. Well, it wasn’t my union. Not my problem.
Or so I thought.