Morning Glory (4 page)

I was from New Jersey. We know how to break balls there.

Inside the atrium, I waited for my escort to take me to my new office. My brand-new briefcase rested by my side, looking neat and professional and executive. I straightened my skirt and took a deep breath and waited.

The monitor in the lobby was playing
Daybreak
. I could see Paul McVee and Colleen Peck, the two anchors, bantering on the show’s signature sunshine-colored set.

“Tomorrow,” Colleen was saying brightly but vapidly, like the ex–beauty queen she was, “we’ll show you what to do with all those shampoo bottles you’ve got lying around with only an inch of shampoo left in the bottom.” She looked at Paul and smiled. “I’ve always wondered what to do about that.”

“Oh, I know,” Paul replied. “That is a toughie.”

Someone passing in front of the monitor looked at the screen, then rolled his eyes.

I straightened in my seat. Okay, I clearly had my work cut out for me—no argument there. I needed to improve not only the show, but its reputation, even internally at IBS.

“Also,” said Paul, “we’ll have more on the flooding in Iowa. Finally, some better weather news on the way for those folks.”

I raised my eyebrows. Better than
flooding
? Really? Apparently the bar for improving this show wasn’t set too high.

Colleen broke in. “So please join us tomorrow and”—she paused dramatically for her sign-off—“thank you for spending your morning here at
Daybreak
.”

“Take care, everyone!” Paul said with a wave at the audience.

Colleen nodded like a queen issuing a last-minute pardon. Which, given the quality of the show, wasn’t too far off. “
Goodbye
.”

I sighed.

The guard behind the desk looked at me. “You interviewing at
Daybreak
? Assistant? Intern?”

I patted my hair. “Actually, um, I’m the new executive producer over there.”

“Another one?” the guard scoffed.

“Excuse me?”

The guard lifted his hands in surrender. “Just saying. Don’t unpack.”

Great. Even the security guard thought I couldn’t hack it. Maybe the straightening iron hadn’t worked as well as I’d hoped.

Just then, I saw a man walking toward me. “Becky Fuller?” He extended his hand.

I popped up and accepted it. “That’s me.”

He gave me a weak smile. “I’m Lenny Bergman.”

“Associate producer,” we said at the same time.

“Yes,” I went on. “I know who you are. You started out at WABC, then two years at CBS, been here thirteen years.”

“That’s right,” he said, impressed. Lenny was in his forties, a bit portly, with hair in need of a cut and a carriage like he bore the weight of the world on his shoulders. Was this what it was to work at
Daybreak
for thirteen years? This constant look of defeat?

“My only question is, why didn’t they bump you up?”

“Not for me,” he said.

I shook my head. He didn’t want a promotion?

Catching my disbelief, he shrugged. “I did it for a couple of weeks once, then they put me back at number two.”

“Why?”

“Apparently, the crying was distracting.”

Oh. I forced myself to nod, as if I understood.

“But you’ll love it,” he said as quickly as possible. “It’s a
great
job.”

The security guard snorted.

 5 

A
fter the requisite stop at HR to fill out all my paperwork and pick up my ID badge, Lenny led me into the bowels of the IBS building. Our first step was a long, long trip down a surprisingly rickety elevator for such a new building. Next, we traversed a series of increasingly shabby and narrow hallways while Lenny filled me in on the schedule.

“Our morning meeting is at five
A.M
.,” he explained to me.

“Isn’t that a little late?” I asked. Even at Channel 9, we had more than a two-hour window for last-minute adjustments.

We flattened ourselves against the wall as a bunch of tech folks passed, toting cables and props. The hallway went on, tunneling its way to what might as well have been the center of the earth. Here and there lay disused pieces of office furniture. I twisted and turned to avoid bashing into things as I tried to keep pace with Lenny, who clearly knew this rabbit warren like the back of his hand.

“It’s just that,” I said, as he sidestepped a dead potted ficus, “I’m used to early hours.…”

“Hmm,” said Lenny, as if the thought had never occurred to him. “Maybe we need better donuts.” He started pointing places out as we drew closer and closer to the control room—break room this way, ladies’ room down that corridor—but I couldn’t get past the schedule.

“At the
Today
show,” I said, “the senior staff is in by four thirty.”

Lenny stopped and turned around, an amused expression on his face. “Yeah. We’re just like the
Today
show,” he said, his tone facetious. “Without the money, viewers, respect … but, you know, kinda similar.”

And with that, he opened the door marked “Control Room,” and led me into the interior of an abandoned Cold War submarine.

Well, not really. But if Lenny had told me that this was the set for some IBS movie-of-the-week version of
The Hunt for Red October
, I wouldn’t have been surprised.

“Is there … electricity in here?” I asked with horror.

“Sometimes the line monitor turns off and I have to kick it while holding on to a coat hanger.”

“Ah.” Guess I had my answer.

Lenny watched me take it all in. “So, Jerry give you any money to upgrade the control room or the studio?”

“He told me he’s cutting the budget twenty percent.”

“Damn,” said Lenny. “I had my heart set on a new coat hanger.”

I laughed. Lenny I liked, as long as he could keep from crying.

He shrugged. “Suppose that’s what I get for working at a network with the same acronym as irritable bowel syndrome.”

“Bowel” was right. I looked around at the ridiculously outmoded control room. And I’d thought things at Channel 9 needed an upgrade. But still, it was a control room, and I hadn’t been in one of those for quite a while. I took a deep breath. Ah, I love the smell of napalm in the morning.

“Look,” I said to Lenny. “I’m not an idiot. I know what this show is up against. But just because no one watches it and it has sucked mightily in the past doesn’t mean it needs to suck any longer. I won’t let it. It’s a privilege to work on a network show and
I
for one am not going to let that opportunity go by.”

Lenny gaped at me. “Are you going to sing now?”

I grinned. If that’s what it took to wake these people up. “So, what do you say? Are we going to give this thing a shot?”

“If you insist,” Lenny said with a smile.

“Great.” I pushed at the sleeves of my blazer. “Let’s have at it.” I strode to the door and pulled the doorknob.

It came off in my hand.

“That was one of our best doorknobs,” said Lenny.

Lenny continued the tour, leading me past Craft Services and toward the dressing room. The walls were covered with shots of
Daybreak
cohosts through the years. I noted without surprise that though the fashions changed, their faces and hair never did. Colleen Peck had sported an unaging, cheerful smile and a Martha Stewartesque blond coif since the mid-nineties. Paul McVee was her visual opposite: dark hair, a rare smile—good thing too, since it could sometimes come across as a bit too Anthony Perkins—and rather more hair product than any one man could possibly need.

“Colleen has been here forever,” Lenny was saying. “Don’t mention that, by the way. But McVee is paid more—don’t mention that, either.”

“Right,” I said, and snagged a bagel from a Craft Services table. I was actually surprised to hear it. Though I supposed they had as much trouble wooing hosts to the show as they did producers. Maybe McVee viewed it as hazard pay.

“They hate each other—don’t mention that—but that’s because Colleen actually hates everyone—don’t mention that—and she used to sleep with Paul, who threw her over for her own assistant—don’t—”

“—Mention that,” I said. “Got it.”

“And make sure after you talk to Colleen, you come get me
before
you talk to McVee. So I can go with you.”

I furrowed my brow. “Why?”

“Just … trust me, okay?” Lenny paused outside Colleen’s dressing room. “You ready?”

I nodded and knocked.

“Enter.” Colleen’s voice was almost unrecognizable as she issued the command. I gave Lenny a look, and his expression said it all.

Don’t say I didn’t warn you
.

As it turned out, no warning from Lenny would have sufficed to prepare me for the amount of hostility Colleen aimed at me from the second I walked through her door. Gone was her on-air persona, full of smiles and soft-spoken bonhomie. The Colleen Peck I met was a rabid tiger—eyes flashing, hair tossing, mouth twisted into a snarl. She didn’t even let me introduce myself before she started ranting.

“Do you know how many EPs I have had in the last eleven years?
Fourteen
.” She stepped out of her heels and shoved her feet into a pair of fuzzy slippers. “If they’re stupid, they get fired, and if they’re smart, they quit. And now”—she gave me the most contemptuous up-down I’ve ever received—“now look what I’ve got.”

I stuck out my hand. “Hi, I’m Becky.”

“Becky.” She glared at my hand, but didn’t touch it. “Are you stupid or smart?”

“I’m going with smart,” I said. “And staying.”

Colleen gave a rather inelegant snort and turned to her dressing table. “Do you think I like being in last place?” she asked as she smeared moisturizer on her face. “Think it’s fun to work for a network that spends more on one episode of a dating show about a bachelor dwarf than on our entire weekly budget?”

Was that true? Granted,
A Little Bit o’ Love
was a surprisingly entertaining program, but still.

“The only reason I haven’t been fired,” she said, whirling on me, “is that I’m cheap and I have a high Q rating with bored, postmenopausal women who buy the advertisers’ junk.”

She poked her perfectly manicured nail at me until I backed up a few steps. “I’ve never had a decent coanchor, just a revolving door of cretinous morons. Our ratings are in the crapper. How long can the show limp along this way?” She spun and disappeared into her closet.

I peered after her, but she slammed the door in my face. I wasn’t entirely sure whether or not she was looking for a real answer to her question. And it was a good question, too. The show couldn’t go on like this. And I had no intention of letting it. “Look, Colleen,” I said to the slats of the door. “I know the history of the show. I know everyone has been through a lot and—”

Colleen whipped the door open and stepped out, clad in pants and a fitted T-shirt and looking every bit as impeccable as she did in her stage clothes. That she’d been able to pull it off standing in a dark, cramped closet was nothing short of a miracle.

A very intimidating, possibly sorcery-related miracle.

“You,” Colleen stated in a haughty tone, “will fail. Like everyone else. And then you will be gone. Like everyone else.” She advanced again, and again I retreated. Some ballbreaker, me. “And I will still be here, pulling this train up the hill with my teeth.”

Her very white, very even, and likely very sharp teeth. The ones she was currently baring in my direction. I realized I’d underestimated this one. The pageant queen air she adopted in front of the cameras hid the piranha underneath.

I wondered if I could work with that. Rebrand her as a tough, no-nonsense kind of broad. Bette Davis. Katharine Hepburn. Barbara Stanwyck. People liked that.

She poked at me again. “You think it’s fun to get your ass kicked?”

I stumbled back until I was right on the threshold. Though, of course, people really only liked tough broads when their ire was directed elsewhere, as Colleen was so very helpfully illustrating for me. “Well, I—”

“Welcome to
Daybreak
—Gidget,” said Colleen. And she shut the door in my face.

“Okay,” I said to the door. “Good talk! Terrific feedback. Looking forward to …” I trailed off. “Okay then.”

Right. Well, Colleen would be a bit prickly, but I was sure we could learn to work together. After all, she seemed committed to the same cause as me:
Daybreak
. We could … pull that train up the hill by our teeth together. Or something.

As I turned, I spotted Paul McVee heading down the corridor.

“Paul!” I shouted.

He turned, and I got the full effect of his—er—enhancements. Without the help of the camera, they were a bit … valley of the uncanny. If I’d run into him outside Madame Tussauds, I might have mistaken him for his own figurine. His skin was too tan, his teeth were too shiny, and his hair was too shellacked. But I pasted on a smile every bit as fake as the cleft in his chin and walked briskly up to him.

“Becky Fuller,” I said. “I’ll be your new executive producer. So thrilled to meet you. I—”

He kept walking toward his dressing room, ignoring the hand I held out for him to shake and eschewing any kind of greeting, even the one Colleen had made me suffer through.

“When you get a chance,” I called after him, as if he were paying the slightest bit of attention, “I’d love to talk to you about some ideas. I’d like to move something around in the budget, see if we can get you on the street doing more remotes—”

He stopped at his door. “Yeahhh,” he said slowly. “I don’t like to leave the studio. I like … climate control.”

Right—otherwise he’d melt. I caught up to him, determined to salvage the introduction. “Oh, I see. Well, I’m sure you have plenty of ideas for other—”

He shrugged. “Not really. I punch in, I punch out. No complaints here.”

Oh-kaay. “See, because Colleen and I were just tossing around some possible—”

“Of course,” he continued, swinging open the door to his dressing room, “I’d always be happy to discuss this matter
privately
.” He waggled his plucked eyebrows at me.

“Uh …” Okay, maybe I was just reading it wrong. After all, I’d spoken to Colleen in her dressing room. Such as it was. I peered inside. Hold on—was that a
cot
?

He looked down at my feet. “What size do you wear? Six and a half? Seven?”

“Seven and a half narrow,” I replied, confused.

“Uh-huh.” He cocked his head, still staring at my heels. “How do you feel about having your feet photographed?”

Lenny came rushing down the hall. “Becky, Paul,
there
you are.” He gave me a look that said
I told you so
.

I gave him one back that I hoped communicated the finest in New Jersian:
I don’t give a shit
.

This was
my
show now.

The next gauntlet was my first staff meeting. The employees convened in
Daybreak
’s conference room, which unfortunately was every bit as shabby as the rest of the studio. But at the same time, I was impressed. The staff—
my
staff—was about four times larger than what we’d had at Channel 9. At least fifteen people ringed the table before me, and every last one of them was trying to size me up.

I wore my cool, calm, and collected expression like battle armor, and took a seat next to Lenny. “We all here?” I asked.

Colleen rolled her eyes, exasperated. “Missing McVee,” she said. “Shocker.”

Lenny jumped in, “McVee doesn’t always come to these.”

The hell he doesn’t. “Punch in, punch out” was now permanently off the plate for my anchors. I turned to one of the interns sitting behind me and gave her a sweet smile. “Tell Paul we need him, please.” And if he dared to make some kind of pervy crack about her shoes, I’d have his head.

“Okay then,” I said. “Hi, guys. I’m Becky Fuller. So …” I tapped the edge of my folder against the table. “Let’s just dive in.”

And dive in they did. For the next few minutes, it seemed like I was being besieged from all sides by story ideas, scheduling crises, inane queries, and every bit of demographical indecision known to mankind.

“Tomorrow, Rocco di Spirito wants to make lasagna,” said one producer.

“Great,” I said.

“I told him we did that last week with the Barefoot Contessa, but he’s insisting. What do I do?”

Oh. Not so great.

Lisa, whom I recognized as the entertainment reporter, piped up, “For next week, I want to do a piece on juice cleanses—all the celebs are doing them and they have amazing powers of rejuvenization.”

“Rejuv—”

“My idea,” she barreled on, “is that I get a juice cleanse and then we can, like, measure my toxins.”

Her
toxins
?

“For the psychic pet interview,” another producer asked, “the living room set or on stools? And do you want a parakeet or an iguana?”

“ABC says we can’t have Eva Longoria until three weeks after
Good Morning America
gets her. What do we do?” asked a third.

A fourth spoke up. “You think you’ve got problems? They’re only offering us the third lead of the Patrick Dempsey movie. Do we even want him?”

“Look,” said a fifth, fed up with the trials of dealing with celebs and their demands. “I’ve got a
real
story. A great story out of Tampa about a retirement account scam. Great victims, great visuals, but we’ve gotta move quick, since they’re dropping like flies. Should we send a team or use local talent?”