Dedication
For G.
Let us cease being presumptuous, cease believing that the fights we lead are definitive. History is a series of cycles, marked by struggle and victory, victory and struggle.
— Dana Feldman, The Next War
All the characters in this book are the fruit of my imagination and any resemblance to real people, living or dead, is purely coincidental. I took liberties with places and names, beginning with Métis Beach, to which I added an accent for fictional purposes. To my friends in Métis-sur-Mer, who were so helpful as I researched this book — you’ll find yourselves nowhere in these pages.
C.B.
I
GAIL
1
The past is like a gun in the hands of our enemies. What we’ve said, what we’ve done, whether deliberate or not, the mistakes we’ve made when we were kids — sooner or later someone will find out about them and point them at your head.
I made a promise to myself I’d never write again; I’ve paid too high a price already. And if I find myself wandering through this story now, my own story, it’s to establish the truth and hope that with it, I might regain those I loved and lost — through my own fault.
On that morning in October 1995, I woke at dawn, still on edge from the previous night’s meeting. A grey light filtered through the window. It was too early to take in the hills on the other side of the canyon, along with their great white lettering, still hidden by the thick smog that rose from the city. The sight of that sign was the consecration of my success, a feeling of revenge experienced every time I contemplated it from my office window, in my house all the way up Appian Way.
In the car on the way home, I had unleashed my anger on Ann, who’d been troubled by the intensity of my words. I saw the way she stiffened in her seat, and I regretted it instantly, “If that’s success, I want no part of it! What are they trying to do? Silence us? Take away our freedom to write? It’s the money, goddamn it, the money that’s making us cowards!”
She touched my arm, and with that soft but unyielding voice she used in such moments, when she wished to calm me down, said, “It’s okay, Romain, forget what just happened. It won’t happen again, you’ll see.” And I thought, How can you be so sure?
It was Chastity’s abortions that had provoked the most violent responses. Letters, calls, sometimes threats, not to mention the small groups of demonstrators that had begun parading silently in front of the La Brea studio we called The Bunker, their anger a burning ember, the colour of painted blood splashed on their signs. Gloomy looking pro-life demonstrators would arrive early in the morning, icebox and folding chair under their arms, as if they were going to a baseball game, and leave late in the evening with, or so I imagined, the feeling of having accomplished something. They ignored us, and we ignored them. We did our job, they did theirs. Each of us defending our own understanding of freedom of speech in this country, though always keeping a distance from the other, in a show of feigned but civilized respect. To me it wasn’t a problem; to me that’s what America was all about.
Chastity was a character in my television series In Gad We Trust. I had finally succeeded in selling my first script after years of disillusionment and struggle, at a point when I’d pretty much stopped believing it would ever happen. “When perseverance pays,” the newspapers had said. Success at the ripe age of fifty, which wasn’t a common story in Los Angeles, made me into a sort of celebrity that was apparently mocked, or at least that was what some large, drunken fellow from ABC had told me at a party, his warm hand on my shoulder, a dumb smile on his lips, “Have you heard what they’re saying about you? That they ended up saying yes to you for humanitarian reasons.” I had no qualms about it. I’d even learned to laugh at my own expense, speaking with derision of a miracle worked by Gad himself, adding sometimes, “Like a pregnant woman who thought she was sterile her whole life.”
Don’t get me wrong though — the story I’m telling you here isn’t a comedy. This scriptwriter hasn’t laughed in a long time.
It was a stimulating and exciting time, despite the whining from various quarters. Complaints told us we were on the right track — boldness doesn’t always please. At least that’s what we told ourselves, until the attacks became more personal and the head office of our network, It’s All Comedy!, became preoccupied with remarks made by an influential columnist with the Los Angeles Daily News. We were in the middle of filming the second season, surfing on the instant success of the first, which had put wind in our sails and given us enough arrogance to ignore the negative comments. But this, this was different. The criticism had turned into a vicious mess.
“These Hollywood types never go after Jews. But Christians — why not?... Would these eager defenders of freedom of expression have been so eager to defend Julius Streicher’s anti-Semitic pamphlets in Nazi Germany? Of course not.”
And of course, within “of course not” sits the malicious intent of the author. So much so that after the text was published, the author was interviewed on a popular talk-radio show, and the putrid wind — Jews, money, Hollywood — blew once again through the town’s populist media. And Josh Ovitz, president of It’s All Comedy!, felt himself the target of these cruel attacks.
I told Josh, “Don’t let it distract us. We know what this disgusting propaganda is all about. Another reason not to give a single inch.”
The whole affair had shaken the crew and provided the impetus for a series of long discussions among the staff, How far is too far? It’s around that time that a certain scene, which hadn’t been thought of as problematic after a first read, had suddenly become so. And Josh had asked all of us over for a meeting. On a Sunday afternoon.
In production meetings, I had the reputation of being pugnacious when defending my ideas. We’d wanted dark comedy, we had dark comedy. A handful of complaints from saggy sanctimonious nothings in Orange County wouldn’t paralyze us.
“Okay, Roman …” Dick, a producer friend, was speaking. “But the stuff on God.…”
Flabbergasted, I stared at Dick. I suddenly wondered if the complaints, which until that point we’d treated with either indifference or amusement (hadn’t we popped a bottle of champagne in honour of the first one?) — and now these fallacious newspaper articles — would complicate our task. Censor myself? No way! Sure, what we had undertaken was edgy, but it wasn’t revolutionary in any sense — the American public was ready for it. The Simpsons on Fox had opened the way. Now, new cable outfits had taken the baton and run with it, taking greater and greater risks. To me there was something a hundred times worse than sedition: vulgarity.
And here was Josh Ovitz, an intelligent young man, a bit over thirty and intrepid, a pure product of East Coast education, out of arguments. Without much resistance, he was signing on with Dick and all the others around the table, including Matt, a man whose work I admired, and Ann, who’d participated in the writing of the series. Ann? You agree with them? Before my astonished air, she lowered her eyes, while Josh’s assistant distributed photocopies of the scene in question, which I was asked to read out loud. I staggered through it without the enthusiasm with which I’d written the thing:
Season 2 / In Gad We Trust / episode 4 / scene 14: interior, Paradise Church, day
(After a particularly lucrative religious service — the faithful had once again been generous — Gad Paradise and his son are chatting in the room behind the altar. Gad takes off his preacher’s garb.)
GAD PARADISE
You know, God, he’s like a Mafia Don. God-Bonanno. God-Al Capone. God-Lansky. God-Father. D’ya get it? God-Father! If you go behind his back, God can have you dead any time, any place. Divine prerogative, right? You following me? (Gad picks up the collection bags filled to the brim, and begins opening them.) But if you