“You were great,” the press secretary said to the president as soon as they were inside the vibrating cocoon of Marine One, the presidential helicopter, en route from the Sunday studio to Burning Bush Country Club in suburban Maryland for eighteen holes with Prince Blandar. The chief of staff pretended to be preoccupied with his PRESIDENTIAL ACTION folder. “Your line,” the press secretary tried again, “about how this is about beginnings, not endings. A home run.”
The president, changing into his golf togs, tossed his suit jacket at his Filipino steward.
“I go to his studio on a Sunday morning, because John Oliver Banion does not do remote interviews, and I get half an hour of abuse interrupted by three commercials showing toasters that talk to you and people smiling—smiling—as they’re being fed into MRI machines. I’ve had an MRI, and you do not smile while you are having it, let me tell you. It’s like being stuffed into a torpedo tube while waiting to hear whether you have cancer. You’re not smiling. You’re pissing down your legs. Why don’t Ample Ampere’s commercials show people being electrocuted in their new electric chair? That’s it. No more Sunday with John O. Banion.” He flung his pants at the steward. “I don’t care what his ratings are. ‘Exigencies of Mammon.’ Prick!”
The chief of staff’s rule was never to interfere while the president was shredding the self-esteem of another member of the staff, but it was his job to save the president from himself. He looked up from the secretary of transportation’s urgent memo about a bridge over the Mississippi that was about to collapse, halting all commerce on the river.
“Is Banion moderating the debates?”
The press secretary gratefully picked up the cue. “I talked to Jed Holcomb at the League of Gay Voters, and he says it’s a done deal. This is their first time hosting the debates, and they’re going out of their way to have as straight a moderator as there is. Banion’s nothing if not straight.”
“How did the League of Gay Voters get to sponsor the debates?” the president asked. “For Christ’s sake. Where does it end?”
“It was their turn.”
“We have no say in the moderator?”
“Theoretically. But if we veto him, it’ll get out and we’ll have elevated him into the Man the President Is Afraid Of.”
“Afraid, my ass. While he was playing squash at Harvard—”
“Princeton.”
“—my unit was taking thirty percent casualties in the A Shau Valley. I am not ‘afraid’ of some pipe-sucking, bow-tied talkshow host whose idea of hell is finding grit in his Wellfleet oysters.”
Marine One was circling Burning Bush, preparing to land. The president was lacing his spikes.
The chief of staff said, “Of course we’re not scared of him. But why give him a career boost by vetoing him in the debates?”
The president looked out his window at the small army waiting to receive him. “Aren’t Laura and I supposed to go to his house for dinner next week in honor of someone?”
“The British ambassador.”
“Schedule something for right before the dinner. Something that might run late. Really late. CIA briefing on the Russian situation.”
“Okay,” said the chief of staff. “But wouldn’t it be cooler to smother the bastard in honey? What’s the point of pissing him off?”
“When did these people get so goddamned important that the president of the United States has to suck up to them? Someone tell me.”
They were saved from having to answer by Marine One’s landing.
“All right, but you let him know: I’m not doing his show again. You tell him.”
The press secretary nodded.
The president stepped out onto manicured grass and was immediately engulfed by entourage.
A staff car was waiting to take the staff to the White House. The press secretary lay back against the seat with his tie loosened and the thousand-yard stare of a freshly reamed presidential aide.
“What are you going tell Banion?” the chief of staff asked.
“ ‘Great show, Jack. The president really enjoyed himself. He wants to do it again. Soon.’ ”
The chief of staff nodded and went back to his IMMEDIATE ACTION folder.
The president sliced off the first tee into a stand of sycamores, narrowly missing the skull of a congressman. The ball made a loud thok before disappearing into poison ivy. Prince Blandar, desirous of the president’s support with respect to congressional approval for the purchase of fifty shiny new F-20 jet fighters for his desert kingdom, urged him to take a mulligan.
VAL DALHOUSIE, PLUMP, TWO FACE-LIFTS INTO HER SIXTIES, voluptuous and billowy in a Galanos caftan, thousands of dollars of diamond-studded gold panthers chasing each other around her wrists, beckoned the late-arriving Banion into her Matisse-intensive parlor.
“I’m not sure any of us dares be seen with you.” She gave him a peck on each cheek in the European manner. She whispered, “If I had known you were going to be so feral with him, I wouldn’t have invited so many of his cabinet.”
Val had been a stage actress years ago. Before that, it was said that she had been in a different line of entertainment. She had married up the food chain, eventually reaching the rung occupied by Jamieson Vanbrugh Dalhousie, adviser to presidents, heir to an immense steel fortune, and twice her age. Jamieson had died ten years ago, leaving her a half dozen houses, a number of alarmed heirs by his first wives, a tidy collection of Impressionists, and $500 million in walking-around money.
Jamieson was a humorless old grouper with bad breath and hairy ears whom official Washington revered for reasons no one, if pressed, could really explain. He had advised President Roosevelt that Joseph Stalin was really, deep down, a decent sort. Another president had wittily put him in charge of the Vietnam peace negotiations, resulting in years of negotiations about the shape of the negotiating table and a peace that quickly went to pieces.
Before Val entered his life, his houses in Georgetown and Virginia were temples of parsimony and gloom. Guests entering his dining room mumbled to themselves, “Abandon hope, all ye who enter here.” The wine could have been mistaken for cough syrup; only the most determined alcoholic could swallow it without wincing. Over this grim mahogany domain, Jamieson Vanbrugh Dalhousie ruled, treating his guests to endless monologues on such riveting topics as Russia’s projected uranium needs in the next century and Konrad Adenauer’s struggle against fluctuations in the deutsche mark during the postwar era. Jamieson’s untimely death at the age of eighty-eight, after stepping on a garden rake, was treated by the Establishment as the end of an era and the passing of a national treasure. In his eulogy at the National Cathedral, the president said how much he would miss his wise, dependable counsel.
Val, by contrast, loved to spend money—by the fistful, by the armful. She practically used it to mulch her Georgetown garden. She sent helicopters to fetch her guests for weekends at Middleburg, in Virginia. She hired Pavarotti to sing for them, fed them caviar and quail eggs, flew in foie gras and truffles from France. She spent money on presidential contenders the way others bet on horses at the track. One of them was bound to win, after all. One of her horses eventually came in, and with it an ambassadorial appointment to the Court of St. James’s. You could hear Jamieson moaning at the expense in his grave. Thirty million? You could have gotten Italy for half the price.
Val took Banion by the arm and led him into the parlor, bursting with peonies and reeking sweetly of perfumed candles. Banion scanned the room for his wife. It was a fairly typical Val Sunday brunch: two cabinet secretaries; several more former cabinet secretaries; one declared presidential candidate, one undeclared; a movie star (in town to testify before Congress against a stylish disease); Tyler Pinch, curator of the Fripps Gallery—ah, there was Bitsey, with him—a quorum of senators; the Speaker of the House, majority whip; the managing and foreign editors of the Post; ah yes—Banion was pleased to see these two: Tony Flemm and Brent Boreman, hosts of the other Washington weekend shows; a brace of Op-Ed pundits, one readable, the other un-; a husband and wife biographer team, a Nick and Nora pair, rather exotic; a former presidential mistress (several administrations ago) now heavily involved in the symphony; looming above them all, suave, immense, baritone-voiced Burton Galilee, lawyer, lobbyist, friend of presidents, who had turned down a Supreme Court appointment rather than give up, as he had actually put it to Banion, a confidant, “God’s greatest gift to mankind—pussy.” Who else? The State Department’s new chief of protocol, what was her name, Mandy Something; the French ambassador, the Brazilian ambassador, the Canadian ambassador, the Indonesian ambassador, who was gamely trying to explain to the other diplomats his government’s recent decision to “pacify” another ten thousand East Timorians; that architect and his wife Banion couldn’t stand because she had announced to him that she never watched television.
A butler appeared with a tray bearing Bloody Marys, champagne, white wine, sparkling water with limes. Banion chose a sparkling water and took up his position, waiting for the homages to begin. He waved away the watercress sandwiches; too awkward, receiving compliments with a mouth full of verdure.
Bitsey reached him first, trailing Tyler Pinch. She was smartly turned out in a double-breasted suit, pearl necklace, gold earrings. Bitsey was petite, angular, pretty, in a slightly toothy sort of way, with large eyes conveying a permanently startled look. She had southern roots, as many Washington cave dwellers do. Her father could bore a man to death at a hundred yards tracing the family tree back to the Precambrian era.
Banion and Bitsey had met twenty years back when they were both summer interns on Capitol Hill taking part in an Excellence in Futurity program in which America’s young leaders were brought to Washington to stuff the envelopes of the power elite. Banion, shy and bookish, had never been very successful with women, but he was attracted to her. At a time when women took pains to look their worst so that men would take them seriously, Bitsey always looked her best, arriving each morning fresh, in pumps, stockings, and smartly pleated skirts, smelling of a perfume (White Shoulders) that Banion found intoxicating. He finally worked up the nerve to ask her out. To his amazement, she accepted.
That night, after the symphony at the Kennedy Center, they sat on the marble steps by Memorial Bridge and he told her in excited tones, in the moonlight, about his senior thesis on France’s decision to withdraw from military participation in NATO in 1966. She was enthralled. From Oxford, where he was avoiding his own military participation in the Vietnam War, he wrote passionate letters to her about the emerging Common Market. They were married at Christ Church in Georgetown. It was a by-the-Establishment-book affair. The secretary of state, an old family friend of Bitsey’s parents, attended. The reception was at the Chevy Chase Club. The honeymoon, in Bermuda. Jobs awaited them on their return. Bitsey in the marketing and sales office of the Hay-Adams Hotel. Banion as staff aide to Sen. Germanicus P. Delph of North Carolina—fortuitously, as it turned out, just as the Delph hearings on the CIA’s unsuccessful attempts to assassinate the Canadian prime minister were getting under way. It was the beginning of Banion’s unlikely career as a television “personality.” But then in Washington, most careers are unlikely, one way or another.
Senator Delph held his position strictly by virtue of seniority on the Senate Committee on Governmental Eliminations. He was not, as one pundit at the time put it, a charter member of Mensa. The newspapers usually described him as a man of “limited intellectual interests.” Banion, bright young man that he was, made himself indispensable to the senator, and as the hearings unfolded during that long, hot summer, he became familiar to the millions of Americans watching on TV as the handsome young staff aide whispering almost nonstop into Senator Delph’s ear. The Washington Post wrote that he “appeared not only to have the senator’s ear, but to live in it.”
Banion’s authorship of the resulting committee report did much to enhance his new luster. It struck a well-balanced tone between righteous indignation and cautious reform, between those who thought that the United States had no business trying to poison Canadian prime ministers and those who, while disapproving of this particular instance, felt that the United States ought to reserve the right to dispatch troublesome Canadian PMs in the future, should circumstances warrant. The quality of the prose was unusually high for a congressional report, down to elegant literary quotes from Cato the Elder, Paul Valéry, and, with a touch of intellectual sauciness, Mao Zedong. The New York Times bestowed upon him the laurel of “young man to watch.” Other senators tried to poach him away from Senator Delph for their own staff.
Banion began to appear as a frequent guest on Washington Weekend, one of the more thoughtful, if intolerably dull, weekend television shows. He enjoyed the sensation of being stared at on the street by people who had seen him on television, the little ah of recognition by a maître d’ when he arrived at the restaurant. Peg Bainbridge, the Post’s editorial-page editor, invited him to contribute an article to her Op-Ed page. She liked what she saw and asked for more. He resigned from Senator Delph’s staff—or, as he put it a bit pompously, let it be known that he was “allowing himself to be lured back into the private sector”—and set up shop as a print-and-pixel pundit, with a syndicated column in the Post and a regular slot on Washington Weekend.
He stood out on Washington Weekend, though, to be frank, anyone with a pulse would have, considering the other regulars: a gassy, perpetually indignant columnist who had once been ambassador to Lesotho; a woman who had been covering Washington for one of the wire services since the Truman administration, and whose favorite phrase was “on the other hand”; a woman TV reporter who was having an affair with an ancient Supreme Court justice; and an obese, lisping think tanker who had published a book passionately arguing that Shakespeare’s plays had been written by Queen Elizabeth. When Roger Panter, the Australian press baron, bought the television station that owned Weekend, Banion made his move. He wrote him a memo proposing certain changes, beginning with making him the show’s host. Panter promptly sacked the other regulars and gave the show to Banion with orders to “juice it up” and a budget to do just that.
Banion changed the format to a live, Sunday-morning one-on-one interview, introduced with a crisp taped investigative piece, and concluding with a one-minute parting thought by Banion. It certainly beat watching a bunch of self-important talking heads sucking their thumbs and regurgitating thoughts stolen from that morning’s papers, all in order to drive up their already inflated lecture fees. In a medium glutted with sound bites, people were happy to come on and have twenty minutes of national TV exposure all to themselves, even if Banion sometimes extracted an admission price by flaying them alive, on air.
His audience built steadily. His first big ratings coup came when former Secretary of Defense Robert McNamara went on the show to reveal that he had been addicted to mind-altering hair-restorative drugs the whole time he was escalating the war in Vietnam. Suddenly Sunday became the show to be on.
Ample Ampere, the giant electric company, signed on as sole sponsor. Banion signed a lucrative multiyear contract. The salary was nice, but the real money came from lecture fees, astronomical, bordering on intergalactic. It was amazing how much corporations were willing to pay to hear in person the same stuff they could get on TV, but such is the nature of celebrity. The historian Daniel Boorstin defined it as “being known for being known.” He might have added, “being paid for being known.” Banion’s youthful visage was now a fixture in the media firmament. Amazonian villagers with satellite TV would recognize his face if it went floating up their tributary. Maître d’s now saved tables for him on the chance that he might show up. His caricature was duly painted on the walls of the Frond restaurant, where bigfeet dined on briefcase-sized steaks and four-pound lobsters (despite the fact that younger, smaller lobsters have more tender flesh). He had to allow extra time in airports for signing autographs on his way to the gate. That is, in the event he was even traveling by commercial airline. His lecture agent, Sid Mint, now hinted strongly to his clients that their chances of getting John O. Banion to speak at their special event would be greatly improved by sending the corporate jet to fetch and return him.
And here he stood, in Val Dalhousie’s Rigaud-candle-scented parlor, preparing to have his posterior caressed by the very people who ran the country. Life was good. And it had all been so effortless.
Ah, here came Bitsey and Tyler. Tyler, curator of the Fripps Gallery, was looking natty today in a houndstooth blazer, dark blue shirt, French silk tie with little framed paintings—how appropriate—gold collar pin. He wore his hair slicked back at the sides in the manner of the athletically wealthy.
“Is that blood on your shoes?” Tyler grinned.
“He’ll survive,” said Banion airily.
“Can’t wait to see the seating plan at your dinner for him.”
“If he comes,” said Bitsey, looking even more alarmed than usual. “Val says they’ll cook up some last-minute crisis just to cancel.”
“This administration doesn’t have to cook up a crisis. They come naturally.”
“Here’s how to solve that,” said Tyler in a lowered voice. “I happen to know that Orestes Fitzgibbon is going to be in town that day.” Orestes Fitzgibbon, the Anglo-Greek financier, now a naturalized American citizen—owing to a tax problem—had recently purchased Immensa Corporation for $7 billion. He was known to be impulsively generous with his money—in part, it was said, because it infuriated his numerous ex-wives. “He’s presenting us with a third El Greco. Why don’t you invite him to your dinner? I doubt the president would be late if he knew Fitzgibbon was going to be at his table. He sat next to Senator Rockefeller two years ago and wrote him a campaign check for a million—on the spot.”
“Oh God, that would completely solve it,” said Bitsey. “Can we get him on this short notice?”
Tyler smiled.
“I’m not really his biggest admirer,” Banion said. “I’m glad he’s giving you all those El Grecos, but I sat next to him at an Erhardt Williger dinner, and frankly I found him kind of rough around the edges.”
“Oh, Jack,” said Bitsey, “don’t be such a stick.” Bitsey had been to so many dos at the British embassy that she had started to sound like a subject.
“I’m sowing marital discord,” said Tyler. “You two sort it out and let me know.”
“It’s decided,” said Bitsey.
Clare Boothe Luce had introduced them. Tyler was originally Australian. His father had made some vast, murky fortune selling the adductor muscles of giant clams—Tridacna gigas—to aging, impotent Formosans who thought they would help them get the old noodles to stiffen, then laundered that ill-gotten fortune in opals, oil, ranching, and vineyards. Young Tyler was sent off to English boarding school at an early age to be sodomized and otherwise inculcated into the British establishment. He’d gone on to Cambridge and then became a protégé to Sir Anthony Blunt, Surveyor of the Queen’s pictures at Buckingham Palace, Windsor, and Hampton Court, and, as it turned out, Soviet agent. It came as rather a shock that the man who had educated the monarch on the subtleties of Poussin had been whispering state secrets to the KGB’s London rezident. Tyler moved on and married the high-stepping, troubled daughter of Sir Reginald Pigg-Vigorish. Sir Reg was up for a life peerage just about the time their divorce was announced and, not eager for his daughter’s shall we say peculiar sexual antics to become tabloid fodder, settled a few spare Cézannes on his son-in-law to ensure his discretion. The divorce was settled quietly. Tyler sold the Cézannes to L’Orangerie museum in Paris for an undisclosed sum ($8.7 million) and left for America and the curatorship of the prestigious Fripps Gallery. His social luster was enhanced by the fact that he was close to the Prince of Wales. Banion was trying to enlist Tyler’s help in getting the prince on Sunday. What a coup that would be. Well, there was no point arguing with Bitsey over having that oversexed troll Fitzgibbon to dinner. It was, as Bitsey had made plain, decided. Had the two of them rehearsed this little dance?
But here was Tony Flemm, host of the second-rated Washington show, trying not to look jealous. “Jack. Nice show.”
“Do you think? I don’t know.”
That’s right, torture the poor bastard, make him explain, make him elaborate in front of everyone on just why he thought it was such a good show. But wait, here came Burton Galilee, beaming, shaking his head in mock horror at Banion’s ruffling of presidential eagle feathers. And here, just behind him, came the Speaker of the House of Representatives, and behind him, the French ambassador. A triumph. Banion filled his lungs with scented candle air and exhaled the soft, sweet vapors.
Val was clapping her hands. “Lunch, everyone, lunch!”