Til the Real Thing Comes Along (14 page)

“I’m sorry,” R.J. said, and as everyone moved toward the living room, where the television sets were already on full-blast,
she walked into the kitchen, asked one of the kitchen help for a phone, and called a taxi.

A LAUGH A MINUTE

a treatment for a half-hour
television pilot submitted
by R.J. Misner

This is an idea for a pilot called A LAUGH A MINUTE. It’s about a single, female comedy writer who works on the staff of a
television show where she is the only woman, and even though some days she’d like to quit, she can’t because she’s supporting
her thirteen-year-old son who’s a great athlete. Molly is short, neurotic, and Jewish, looks kind of like a short, neurotic,
Jewish Mario Thomas.

The characters are MOLLY; her son; her housekeeper, ESPERANZA, who Molly suspects speaks perfect English and who won’t admit
it, so with whom Molly communicates in sign language. And the staff of the television show on which Molly ekes out a hard-earned,
very insecure living—i.e.:

The comedy writing team of FELZER and BOWMAN. Felzer is claustrophobic and Bowman is agoraphobic, so they can’t get together
to write inside or outside. The dilemma is solved by their taking offices on the first floor so that Bowman may sit inside
their little cubicle of an office with the window slightly ajar, communicating with Felzer, who sits outside on the grass
keeping track of everything on his portable typewriter.

ALVIN KARP, a lovable old veteran who tries to teach Molly all of the rules of comedy writing, who when Molly asks him if
a joke she just wrote is funny, says, “Yeah, and it was funny when I wrote it for
Miltie in fifty-one and a few years ago for Hope at the Oscars and right after that for Johnny. Now was your question is it
still
funny? The answer is yes.”

MURRAY DEEMS, the show’s head writer, who says of himself that he must be a liberated guy because, after all, he did hire
Molly, whom he calls “the broad.”

AT HOME, Molly is living the life of a single Hollywood woman. Raising her son, JOSH, who would argue that
he’s
raising
her.
Especially when he sees her dating the crazy men who go by. Wanting to get married so badly she proposes to every man she
meets. So far the mailman has given her a strong maybe. Her best friend is LEONA. Also single, with a teenaged daughter CISSY.
CISSY starts every sentence with the words “Okay, like.” Leona is outrageous and outspoken. She has a boyfriend and she is
never without a fix-up for Molly. The fix-up unfailingly turns out to have some bizarre problem and is always more trouble
than he’s worth.

AT WORK, Molly wants so badly to fit in that before she exits the one restroom that she shares with all the other writers,
she puts the seat back up. The guys take a fatherly interest in her, and like Leona they are always trying to fix Molly up
with guys. Much of the series will be based on Molly trying to find one man in the whole big wide world to whom she can relate.
But no luck. Short, tall, fat, thin, old, young, there isn’t one who’s right for her, and she’s worried, because all the independence
in the world can’t take away her longing to find a guy who wants to come home after work and be a family with her and her
son. And maybe even start a new wing of the family. In Hollywood? No chance. It’s an updated “Courtship of Eddie’s Father,”
with a harder edge.

The two sets are the office and Molly’s apartment.

SAMPLE STORY

Josh calls Molly from school and says he isn’t feeling well. It’s Esperanza’s day off and Molly doesn’t warn Josh to go home
from school and be alone, so
she picks him up at school and brings him to the office. By the end of the day Josh is covered with chicken pox. By the end
of the week, so is most of the staff of the show.

“N
ice pitch,” Arvin Podvin said. He was the manager of comedy development at the network.

“Very nice. Funny. Good idea. We don’t have anything else like it right now that I can think of,” Sheldon Milburg offered.
He was the director of comedy development at the network.

“But the problem is,” Howard Colson said, and he was the vice president of comedy development at the network, “that it’s about
show business, because your character Molly is a comedy writer for a living. And shows that are about show business don’t
work.”

“The Dick Van Dyke Show
was about show business, and so was
The Mary Tyler Moore Show
about show business, and so was
WKRP in Cincinnati,
and so was—” R.J. began, but she was interrupted by Howard Colson’s tone of voice.

“Let me put it this way.
We
don’t want a show about show business. Peter says that America doesn’t understand show business. And I have to agree.” Peter
was the executive in charge of all programming at the network, and Howard Colson was right. He did have to agree. Peter fired
network underlings for showing the least bit of individuality. Peter Tavaris was the one who was credited for the network’s
current first-place status, and all programming decisions were left to him. The job of the men R.J. was meeting with today
was simply to sift through all the material that was submitted to the network and pick out the
proposals that complied with Peter’s rules. Peter never went to meetings. Not the ones with writers on R.J.’s lowly level
anyway. R.J. had met him once when he’d come to a taping of Patsy’s show.

She’d been sitting in the makeup room that day in a seat next to Patsy’s makeup chair, trying to work out next week’s monologue
with Patsy. The seating area, of the adjacent dressing room had been filled with the usual hangers-on. Patsy’s latest boyfriend,
Patsy’s hairdresser, the wardrobe lady, Patsy’s ex-sister-in-law, who had dropped by to report on how miserable the eighteen-year-old
girl was making Patsy’s ex-husband Freddy. R.J. knew something strange must have happened because they’d all been yakking
away just a moment before and now not only were they all silent, but when she peeked out of the makeup room to see why, every
one of them was standing, heads kind of bowed in awe as if they were at a religious service. Peter Tavaris had just walked
into the room.

“She decent?” Tavaris called in to the makeup room.

“No, I ain’t,” Patsy had yelled out. “And if yer here ta tell me ta tuck my tits in on my opening number, you kin just go
right back to yer big fancy office, ’cause they’re my stock in trade, Mister Network Biggy.”

Tavaris didn’t even crack a smile.

“Just stopped in to say hello, Patsy,” he said.

“Be right out,” Patsy answered.

R.J. came into the seating area and extended her hand to Tavaris. “I’m R.J. Misner,” she had said.

“I know exactly who you are,” was the reply. “The opening monologues and ‘Patsy At Home,’” he said. It was chilling the way
he said it. There were dozens of writers on the shows his network produced. He knew exactly which one of them wrote what.
“Nice to meet you.”

R.J. and the others left the dressing room so Peter Tavaris and Patsy could be alone. An hour later, when they were ready
to tape the opening monologue, the blue-sequined low-cut dress Patsy had been supposed to wear was nowhere to be seen. It
had been replaced by a green-sequined dress with a high mandarin collar.

“It’s not really about show business,” Arvin Podvin suggested now, albeit somewhat softly. “I find it to be more about single
motherhood than it is about show business. Show business is just the arena in which this particular
single mother spends her time,” By next week Arvin Podvin will be working somewhere else, R.J. thought.

“Maybe she could still use the same single mother and kid, because the kid is funny. I like the kid. And the mother could
do something else instead of being a comedy writer. Like a teacher,” Sheldon Milburg said.

“We have three teacher pilots in development,” Howard Colson reminded him.

“True,” Sheldon Milburg said, and looked embarrassed that he’d forgotten the three teacher pilots.

“Well,” Howard Colson said, pushing his chair away from his desk, standing and offering his hand to R.J., “we really like
your work, but no sale today, I guess. Please come back another time.”

R.J.’s mind raced. Maybe she should offer to rewrite the woman’s profession. Not to teaching. They did, after all, have three
teaching pilots, but to something else, because they liked the kid. The kid is funny. And she could come back with it. What
could she change the woman’s profession to? She ran through the alphabet. Aviator, boxer, call girl, dancer… no. Dancers were
in show business. Executive, farmer… Sheldon Milburg and Arvin Podvin were standing, too, and R.J. stood.

“Thanks,” she said, only there was a frog in her throat and it sounded like “hinks,” and she walked to the door that was now
being held open by Arvin Podvin and out into the reception area of Howard Colson’s office. And even though when she thought
about it later she knew she must have exaggerated the number in her mind because she was feeling so lousy about her meeting,
she would have bet she saw, sitting and chatting loudly, competing for one another’s attention, at least fifteen comedy writers
she knew, waiting for their turn to pitch their ideas to Howard Colson, Sheldon Milburg, and Arvin Podvin.

A bath—that’s what would make her feel better, she thought as she pulled the Mustang out of the network parking lot. A nice
hot bath. She would sit in the tub, then make a little dinner for herself and Jeffie and sit down at the typewriter and come
up with more ideas. More ideas. Hah. She said that as if it were like
bake another pie.
The way people who didn’t write thought about writing. That it was easy. That it didn’t cost in time and energy and head-beating
against the wall. Especially if you had to write to
other people’s specifications. Easy. Just something lucky people sat around and did every day. Marty Nussbaum had once told
R.J. that when he was writing episodes for television, his wife came to him and said, “Marty, we need new outdoor furniture.”

“Gloria,” Marty had said to her, “I’m sorry, but right now we can’t afford outdoor furniture,” Marty’s wife had the answer.
“So why not just whip up an episode of
Sanford and Son?”

R.J. missed Marty Nussbaum. Poor Marty. She missed all the guys from Patsy’s show. Episodes of the shows she had worked on
were still airing, and she would sit by the television on Sunday nights, watching them and feeling homesick for her crazy
friends. She was still hurting from the firing. Not just hurting. Shocked too. For weeks she had tried to get Patsy on the
phone, hoping maybe in a confrontation she could get an answer out of Patsy about what happened, find out if it had really
been Patsy’s idea. But Patsy wouldn’t take her calls. R.J. had even dropped her a note, but Patsy hadn’t answered it. How
could it be that one minute Patsy was her buddy, offering to fix her up on dates, and the next she wouldn’t even call her
back?

A bath. After her bath she would begin again to think of ideas to sell. That was her life now. Writing. Writing. Every idea
she could think of. With an occasional visit from Dinah, who would breeze in, engulfed in a cloud of Opium, wearing another
of her outrageous outfits. “You have to get out of this place and have a life,” she would say in a voice so loud that it was
still ringing in R.J.’s ears after she left. Jarring R.J.’s usual silence. She loved the quiet times with Jeffie, talking
about his father. Arthur. And how much they missed him. And laughing about the good times the three of them had shared. Arthur.
That guy at the Oscar party had been right on the nose. R.J. Misner was dosed. Unavailable. She had tried to open up and come
back into the world. Starting with Michael Rappaport. Granted, an unfortunate choice. But she’d made what Arthur would have
called “a good college try.” She just wasn’t ready and might never be. One day they would come with a little white truck and
cart her away, because she stood around sometimes, talking to rainbows as if they were signs from her dead husband.

Closed. Was it so obvious that even a stranger at a party could pick up on it? A stranger who looked right into
her eyes and told her in so many words what a jerk she was. Won’t it be nice when you’re able to turn your sign over so it
says open? How precious. Probably the guy just stumbled accidentally on the truth. It was what he said to all the girls at
parties when he was trying to pick them up. Hah. Pick her up. Why would he want to do that? He was with a tall gorgeous blonde
who called him darling. He didn’t need to pick up an exhausted out-of-work comedy writer.

“Dinah called you,” Jeffie said with a mouth full of something he’d just taken out of the refrigerator. R.J. was sorting through
the mail. “But you missed her, ‘cause she’s goin’ outa town,” he added. Yes, she’d forgotten that this was the day Dinah was
leaving to visit her mother in Florida.

“Thanks, honey,” she said absently.

Maybe a shower. The water pounding on her back would break up some of the tension that had taken over her neck since the meeting
with those network creeps.

“Getting into the shower,” she announced.

She dropped her clothes to the floor and stepped into the silent cold space of the shower cabinet. She was so lost in thought
that she stood for a long time without even turning on the water. Every morning she and Arthur used to take showers here together.
And fight. And when they made up, Arthur would joke that it was a good thing the water had been running so the neighbors couldn’t
hear them. They would fight about her working; they would fight about his traveling so much on business; they would fight
about whether or not to have more children.

She wanted them, little lambs with soft squishy cheeks to bite and secret little spots under their chins to kiss—the way Jeffie
was before he became a big boy and was no longer a baby. Arthur didn’t want any more children. Expensive, demanding, time-consuming,
he said. He adored his son, really adored him, but one child was enough. And to make that clear, every time Arthur made love
to her, which was not very often, he always asked without fail: “Are you wearing your diaphragm?” Sometimes she would be in
the heat of passion, and it infuriated her, insulted her, because he was asking that as if she might try to trick him and
get pregnant without his consent. Consent that he would never give.