Several months later, I prepared for a visit from the boys and Donna. Grady would join us on the weekend. The financial machinations of the payroll company he worked for had finally caught up to the firm and the company closed its doors overnight, locking out not only the production companies whose payrolls they were supposed to distribute, but also their own employees, to whom they owed several weeks’ salary. Before the closure, Grady and his boss, Carl, had confronted the management team with their findings, and had been assured that the company was turning things around. It wasn’t true. Grady and Carl had to scramble to help their clients find a new payroll service, and in the end had decided to start their own company.
“We’re calling it ‘Zucker and Fletcher,’ ” Grady wrote me in an e-mail. “I held out for ‘Fletcher and Zucker,’ but we flipped a coin and Carl won.”
I hoped Grady’s employment woes were finally over, now that he had a company of his own. But of course, for many entrepreneurs, that’s just the beginning of problems. Still, I had a good feeling about his new career move. Donna was thrilled that Grady would be working from home, at least until the company grew big enough to require office space. And they had purchased a second computer so she could help out.
The fall catalog for my publishing house had arrived with a large ad for Anne Tripper’s new book,
Inside Advertising: The Scamming of America
. When we spoke shortly after I’d come back from New York, Matt had told me he was anticipating a rough few months after the book came out. He said, “I keep vacillating between being thrilled at its potential for bestseller status and cringing at how my Hamptons neighbors are going to respond.”
I reminded him of the public relations theory that there’s no such thing as bad publicity. Attributed variously to Mae West, Oscar Wilde, Mark Twain, and even President Harry Truman, the oft-cited quote goes, “I don’t care what the newspapers say about me as long as they spell my name right.”
“Sure, Jessica, I’ll tell that to my wife when no one shows up at our Fourth of July picnic,” he’d said.
Ads for Permezzo were appearing on television and on the Internet. So far, my spot and the one for Anne Tripper had aired. I’d received quite a number of e-mails from old friends who’d seen it. Lance’s was going to break in the fall. He must have reached an agreement with Detective Chesny not to reveal his arrest record in Canada, because so far, at least, his sordid past has remained there—in the past. However, it wouldn’t surprise me if the truth leaked out at some point. Very few people in the public eye are successful in keeping their earlier indiscretions a secret—as our politicians can surely attest to—and a criminal record is a pretty big indiscretion to hide.
Antonio had decided to shelve Cookie’s commercial until the gossip died down about her involvement with the cover-up of Betsy’s accidental death. Jimbo Barnes had been charged with involuntary manslaughter and his case was set to go to trial. Cookie’s lawyer had managed to plea down the charges against her of accessory after the fact. She was given two years of community service and had chosen to cook meals for a homeless shelter in Dallas. I’d signed the photo Jimbo had taken of the two of us and sent it to her. It’s now up on her Wall of Fame.