My love affair with Los Angeles began to wane twenty-three years ago, the morning a cleaning crew found Tiffany Arden’s body in a dumpster behind Chez Anisette, a very popular restaurant of the day. Her head had been pulverized. If you’re ghoulish enough to want a more detailed description than that, I suggest you Google the media coverage of the murder.
There was a lot of it.
Much of it was accurate. Some was not. For example, it was widely reported that her murderer was unknown. Not true. I was pretty sure I knew who he was. And I knew that he was still at large, enjoying a rich, full life in the City of the Angels.
“Now would ya just listen ta this, Billy.” The gruff but lilting voice of the Irish pop singer-guitarist Jimmy Fitzpatrick interrupted my morose thoughts with a statistic almost as disturbing. “There are two thousand, nine hundred an’ forty-three things that can cock-up the average airplane, any one of ’em capable of plummetin’ us to Earth an’ certain death. Would ya believe it?”
Fitz, my seatmate aboard flight 349 to Los Angeles, was reading a book he’d picked up at JFK: What Could Go Wrong?
“Thanks for sharing,” I said, and picked up my airport purchase, a Walter Mosley paperback, from my lap where I’d rested it while musing about poor Tiffany.
“O’ course, since we’re travelin’ in the comp’ny of the future king o’ late night television, this is certainly not the average airplane,” Fitz added, making sure he was heard by the king, who was sitting across the aisle.
Comedian Desmond O’Day was a wiry bantam-weight in his forties with a V-shaped face and short, neatly coifed hair so blond it was almost silver. He had a penchant for tight black apparel, which currently included linen trousers and a t-shirt designed to display his work-out biceps and mini-six-pack. He paused in his perusal of a script to glare at his shaggy-haired, bearded music director.
“Stop botherin’ Billy, ya sod,” he said. “The man’s doin’ us a big favor, travelin’ all across the country to help us kick off the show.”
Fitz, wincing from having incurred the displeasure of his old pal and new boss, said, “Sorry, Billy.”
“No problem, Fitz,” I replied. “A little conversation is fine, as long as it’s about something other than us skydiving the hard way.”
He gave me a smile and leaned back in his seat. I got the impression that I’d heard the last word out of his beard-enshrouded mouth until we landed in L.A. He’d known Des O’Day from their boyhood days on the Emerald Isle, so I assumed he was a better judge of the man’s temperament than I.
I’m Billy Blessing, by the way. Chef Billy Blessing to be formal about it.
For a decade and a half, I served in other chefs’ kitchens before opening my own in Manhattan, Blessing’s Bistro. It’s famous for steaks and chops and, in general, for food that has earned a top rating in Gault Milleau. I’m pretty proud of the place.
My fame, such as it is, comes only indirectly from my culinary skills. I’m a cohost on Worldwide Broadcasting Network’s morning news and entertainment show Wake Up America!, weekdays, seven to nine A.M. If you’re one of the show’s four million viewers, you’ve probably seen me, the guy who, I’ve been told, looks a little like a slightly stockier, clean-shaven (head as well as face) version of Eddie Murphy.
I provide a daily WUA! segment on food preparation, but I have other chores, too. Remotes. Interviews. The odd book review. I also chat up visitors to NYC who line up on the street each morning outside the studio. I have a few other things going: Blessing’s in the Kitchen, a weekly cooking show on the Wine and Dine cable network, a line of premium frozen dinners, and a couple of cookbooks.
At this particular moment I am flying from New York to Los Angeles to add two new credits to my list. One of them involves the Irishman across the aisle. Though you couldn’t have told it by his sour scowl, Des is very funny and quick-witted and he’s parlayed success on the stand-up circuit and a featured role as the cynical, sex-obsessed photographer in the popular sitcom, A Model Life, into a new gig as the host of O’Day At Night, WBC’s upcoming entry in the late-night talk show sweepstakes. It was set to debut in precisely ten days.
I’d been tapped as the new show’s first weekly guest announcer. The At Night producer, a Falstaffian charlatan named Max Slaughter, told me that I’d been Des’s first choice. My agent-lawyer, Wally Wing, who unlike most members of both of his professions, has never heard the term candy-coating, informed me that Des had wanted someone on the order of Tom Cruise or Brad Pitt or, at the very least, the former governator of California, Arnold Schwarzenegger. Gretchen Di Voss, the head of the network, somehow avoided laughing in his face and offered him Howie Mandell or me. Howie had other commitments.
“Why wouldn’t I have other commitments?” I’d asked Wally.
“Well, one reason—Gretchen wants you to do it. She feels it would be, in her words, ‘an act of synchronicity.’ You’d be the bridge between Wake Up! and At Night, drawing viewers of the morning show to At Night, while at the same time giving the At Night fans a taste of the morning show.”
“As dubious as that scenario is,” I’d replied, “it only explains why the network wants me to do the show. Why in God’s name would I agree to spend two weeks in L.A., away from home, hearth, and restaurant?”
Wally had grinned and said, “The real reason goes beyond the O’Day show. It’s … wait for it … Sandy Selman wants to make a movie about you and the Felix thing.”
The Felix thing. A typically Wally way of summing up one of the more unpleasant periods of my life. A little over a year ago, an executive at the network was murdered and for a number of reasons, real or imagined, I was put at the top of the cops’ suspect list. Then an international assassin got involved and all hell broke loose. I was threatened, nearly roasted alive, and shot at. And, eventually, I lost a woman I cared for.
The Felix thing.
“Okay,” I said, “a guy I’ve never heard of wants to make a movie about a devastating experience I’ve spent the last year trying to forget. Tell me why I have to go to L.A.?”
“You’ve never heard of Sandy Selman?” was Wally’s response.
“I’ve heard of him. He makes very expensive movies that are ninety percent computer graphics, eight percent sex and two percent end credits. So why do I have to go to L.A.?”
“To write the book,” Wally said in a singsong manner one uses to speak to a very young child.
“What book?”
“The book you’re going to be writing in L.A.”
“What makes you think I can write a book?”
“How hard can it be? Paris Hilton has written a book. Miley Cyrus has written a book. You may be the only person in show business who hasn’t written a book.”
“I did the cookbooks,” I said.
“My point exactly,” Wally said.
“Why do I have to go to L.A. to write it? I’ve heard it’s possible to write one in Manhattan.”
“Not if we want Sandy Selman to produce the film version. He likes to be able to look over his writers’ shoulders as they work. And don’t worry about that. It’s Harry Paynter’s shoulders he’ll be looking over.”
“I think I’m getting it now,” I said. “This Harry is one of your literary clients, and he’s going to be helping me write the book.”
“On the nose,” Wally said, tapping his almost nonexistent schnoz in a rare display of his expertise at charades. “He’ll also be writing the screenplay.”
“And you’ll be getting a packager percent in addition to your agent’s fee for both of us.”
“What’s with the ’tude, bro? I assure you, this little jaunt is gonna be worthwhile for you.”
“It’s not the money,” I said. “I trust you to handle that. It’s going to L.A.”
“Spending two or three weeks on the coast is gonna kill you, Billy?”
On the nose, I thought, but did not say.