When Stars Blow Out: A Fable of Fame in Our Time

By Matthew Gurewitsch

“A bejewelled dandy of a novel.”*

When Stars Blow Out spins a brisk fable of fame in our time. Chloe Pitt, the imperious editor-in-chief of the sizzling glossy Pilgrim’s Progress, has a grim job for her new star reporter Austin Baer. Off he jets to the Riviera to profile another writer: the aged Gregory McClintock, half a century ago the devoted observer of actors, dancers, musicians, and artists who now live in legend. With his forgotten essays about to appear as a book, the reclusive old-timer stands to break out as something of a legend in his own right. Baer arrives with plenty of attitude, and McClintock receives him with justifiable suspicion. Their fencing soon escalates into an all-out clash of cultures, lit up with unexpected flashes of mutual illumination as the past starts bleeding magically into the present.

• Language: English
• Publisher: iUniverse
• Release date: Oct 26, 2001
• ISBN: 9781469718347

Matthew Gurewitsch

Matthew Gurewitsch, for several years the performing-arts editor of Connoisseur, writes on the arts and travel for the Wall Street Journal, the New York Times, and other leading publications on three continents. When Stars Go Out is his first novel.

Book preview

© 2001 by Matthew A. Gurewitsch

No part of this book may be reproduced or transmitted in any form or by any means, graphic, electronic, or mechanical, including photocopying, recording, taping, or by any information storage or retrieval system, without the permission in writing from the publisher.

Authors Choice Press

an imprint of iUniverse, Inc.

For information address:

iUniverse, Inc.

5220 S. 16th St., Suite 200

Lincoln, NE 68512

www.iuniverse.com

This is a work of fiction. Most of the events, locations, and institutions are completely fictional. Any characters who are not depart in radical ways from their real-life counterparts.

ISBN: 0-595-19253-X

ISBN: 978-1-4697-1834-7 (ebook)

Printed in the United States of America

Contents

PROLOGUE

CHAPTER 1

PART I

CHAPTER 2

CHAPTER 3

PART II

CHAPTER 4

CHAPTER 5

CHAPTER 6

CHAPTER 7

CHAPTER 8

CHAPTER 9

CHAPTER 10

CHAPTER 11

CHAPTER 12

CHAPTER 13

CHAPTER 14

CHAPTER 15

CHAPTER 16

CHAPTER 17

CHAPTER 18

CHAPTER 19

CHAPTER 20

CHAPTER 21

PART III

CHAPTER 22

PART IV

CHAPTER 23

CHAPTER 24

CHAPTER 25

About the Author

To Susan

Glory is like a circle in the water,

Which never ceaseth to enlarge itself,

Till by broad spreading it disperse to nought.

William Shakespeare, Henry VI, Part I,

Act I, scene ii, 133-135

I think the press enjoys a good fall, and particularly a good fall by

someone who’s younger and more successful and better looking than

they are. That really turns ‘em on.

James Carville, as quoted in The New York Times,

Monday, July 26, 1993

THE AUTHOR ACKNOWLEDGES with thanks a grant from the Ann and Erlo Van Waveren Foundation, which gave him time to undertake this project. Thanks, also, to Robert O. Fehr and Edith Fehr, who graciously provided a retreat with companionship but without distractions: the perfect writers colony for one.

PROLOGUE

On The Funny Page Of Life

CHAPTER 1

Bought and Sold

AUSTIN CABOT LIVINGSTON BAER, handsome, clever, and rich, with a comfortable home and happy disposition, seemed to unite some of the best blessings of existence; and had lived nearly twenty-three years in the world with very little to distress or vex him.

The younger of two siblings but the only son, he had been made much of from birth and indeed before, when his sex was still in hopeful supposition. As he grew, his gifts were praised; his defects, winked at. No one ever thought to teach him table manners. He was so charming as he was.

At home and at school, with family and with friends, he took esteem as his due the way the sky takes sunshine. All he wanted was his for the taking, and he lacked imagination to want what he could not have. In the circumstances, it took no clairvoyance to predict he would develop a high opinion of himself and an indifferent opinion of others. Blame the native perspective. But could you in conscience call him arrogant? The sense of superiority sat lightly on him, the reflection not of will or wish but of self-evident truth and settled fact. If others found him wounding or overbearing, what of that? They mistook their place. Austin Baer did not mind setting them straight.

And so he breezed through Harvard, sculling on the Charles, pontificating in the Crimson, high-stepping at the Hasty Pudding Club. The law beckoned, but young Austin resisted; cousins galore were lining up to swell the ranks of the family firm. Instead he walked his sheepskin straight in the front door of The Daily Planet, dropped the names of his aunt (the Supreme Court Justice), of his godfather (the founder of Godfather Pictures), and his father’s golf buddy (who often summered at the Baers’ cottage in Newport and also happened to own the paper). The halo over Austin’s head gained him a staff position in the teeth of a hiring freeze.

Like his mother before him, Austin had a habit. Scarcely issued from the womb, he was the abject slave to slick text richly laced with sleek images. He devoured magazines. And so he gravitated at The Planet, like the apple predestined for the pregnant skull of Newton, to the weekend supplement The Planet on Sunday, a confection as sleek as it was slick, to which in not quite a year he had contributed no fewer than seven juicy Tinseltown profiles, neatly turned and dripping with attitude, four of them covers.

The call to Pilgrim’s Progress followed as the night the day. Pilgrim’s Progress! That most clucked over, envied, and unavailingly imitated of glossies not only in Gotham (where it was published), not only in America or the English-speaking world, but everywhere the likes of Austin and his mamma Baer surrender to the cheap narcotic of the periodical magazine.

Tell me, Austin dahling, purred Chloe Pitt, P.P.’s editrix and wicked witch, having summoned him to her L-shaped banquette at Equinox, "which of all your mahvlous stories do you like best?"

"Tough call, Chloe. There was that one about Arnold on the skids. Wasn’t that great? Giving him that craggy grandeur. I wonder if people got the irony. I mean, who was he, even in his heyday? A two-bit, steroid wonder with a kicky accent and a pretty face. And that one about Kevin right after he bombed with Braves! Oh! And what about the one about Preston Cross? Old Pres is a heavy! That’s a guy you’ve got to respect. He gives you resistance. No softball. A championship match."

Remind me, said Chloe, widening her eyes.

Austin launched into the whole bloody saga. Prescott Cross, the all-American misfit. Drifter. Narrowly escaped a rape and murder rap in the boonies. Drifted all the way to Tinseltown. Terrorist evangelist in cult classic Jasper Burns. Vanished into a hundred blink-and-you’ll miss-’em specials. Comeback in Dawn Duel, beating out Schwarzenegger, Stallone, Seagal, and Sheen for plum role of Galahad.

Blah, blah, blah, yawned Chloe. So what do you like so much about this story?

It did real well for me. It was my third cover in six months. It’s got grit. It generated sacks of mail, over seventy percent of it hostile to the point of apoplexy. Cross shit a brick.

With good cause. Baer had smoked Cross out of his log cabin in Montana, wasted a day of his time he badly needed for a roof job, and jetted back to Gotham to insinuate that Cross was holed up in the wilderness stockpiling arms and chainsawing human bodies. In point of fact, Cross flew into an epic but laconic fury. Ah, you publishing scoundrel! Cross is reported to have cried, torching the magazine in his Lincoln stove. When people want to publish, they’re capable of violating a tomb!

That isn’t just!, Baer laughed when he heard the tale, That isn’t generous!

His stock shot through the steam-stained ceiling of the Planet newsroom. "I scare them, was his unspoken message to his reflection in the men’s-room mirror. His pale eyes gleamed slate-grey behind his tor-toise-shell glasses. I scare them. His mind formed the silent words again as he pushed a hand through his beach-boy hair. He grinned for the pleasure of exposing those sharp, pearly canines. Baer the Barracuda. I scare them because I see through them. And then… Kaboom!"

Across the table from Chloe, the Barracuda’s eyes were gleaming once more. She knew the look.

"All well and good, Austin, all well and good. The Planet’s got pages to fill, same as everybody else. But there’s one reason you’re here with me. One reason alone."

She tilted a sharp cheekbone off to her left, fluttering her lashes.

Mari Ho!, said the Barracuda, the tip of his tongue running over those canines. Off across the room, at a lesser but by no means negligible two-top, sat two women of perhaps Japanese extraction, at a guess a mother and daughter, the younger prim in starched, micropleated paper-white, the elder in black, straight-backed and sober as a duenna. The silky nymphet was, of course, the sensation. Still in her teens, a professional virgin, she first captured the public imagination with her little anthem My Body is a Temple, warbled in a choirboy’s prepubescent soprano as Mari fingered her soulful dulcimer and just said no straight to the top of the charts, where, to the astonishment of the business, she was showing no immediate signs of slipping. After a Time magazine cover proclaiming her High Priestess of the New Chastity, there was no telling how high she would fly. To be sure, her songs were full of yearning romance, but yearning of a strictly theoretical nature. If there was a heartthrob in her young life, the gossipmongers had yet to smoke him out.

Austin whistled a soft whistle.

You rode the bus on Mari’s ‘Holy Light’ tour, Chloe informed Austin, who bit his tongue. Good boy. I know. You’re not supposed to say. Hush-hush. Don’t say a thing. Don’t even nod. I’ve seen the piece.

But it’s not out until Sunday after next!, Austin confirmed.

With the scarcely detectable flick of the practiced bidder in an auction room, Chloe summoned Franco, the captain. Her, she indicated, in no tone at all.

A chief responsibility of Franco’s at this hour, today and every day, was unobtrusively to guard Ms. Pitt’s perimeter against approaches by undesirables. Not that his unassailable skills were often called into play. The law of the Victorian nursery—Speak when spoken to—still held force in Chloe’s circle, and few were the fools who breached it.

Was it guile or naïveté that prompted Mari actually to tiptoe over with her mother, actually guiding her by the hand?

Oh, Ms. Pitt, what an honor!, Mari panted in her breathy little-girl voice, all but bobbing into a curtsey as a sleek black tendril fell loose from her soft coiffure. Such an honor to see you in person. You received my note, I hope? Such a beautiful story in your magazine. So kind of you, so generous, such an honor for me…

Mari! The children play your record all the time! We love it, all of us do. Can’t wait for the new one. Will it have a wedding theme, I wonder?

Ms. Pitt, may I present my mother? So sorry, she speaks little English…

"Have you read Memoirs of a Geisha?, Chloe wanted to know, fixing her gaze on Mari like a cobra as she extended a limp hand to the older woman.If she’s your mother, I’m John Paul III.And where’s her seat on the bus?"

Chloe’s reward was twofold: fluttering lashes over the downcast eyes of Mari, and on mamma’s cheek, a flash of angry crimson.

I believe, Chloe forged ahead, with a tilt of a cheekbone, you’re acquainted with Mr. Baer.

Mr. Baer, yes indeed. Mr. Baer and I have met.

Ask him for a cigarette, why don’t you, Chloe suggested. "Not that they’d let you light up here. Your body is a temple, eh, Mari? No sticks of incense at the altar? A filthy habit, smoking, I quite agree. Ta-ta. Give a ring next time you’re in town. We’ll have a party, shall we? Out on the Island? Just family? The children would love to meet you. It’ll be a thrill. Maybe I can persuade Mr. Baer to come, too. If he’s not too busy with some road tour. Such a busy fellow. How did the two of you meet, exactly?"

It will always be an honor to see such a distinguished writer as Mr. Baer.

"And so penetrating. You’ll like what he wrote about you, I’m sure. Won’t she, Austin, angel? Don’t forget to buy your Planet. Sunday after next is the big day. Don’t worry about a thing. The photographs… well, never mind. Come to think of it, maybe P.P. should throw your wedding party. An exclusive, of course. When you find Mr. Right. Ta-ta."

Mari Ho and the other woman took their cue. "The bahdee is a temple," sang Chloe, smirking at the women’s retreat.

You caught that bit with the smoke in the elevator, Austin beamed. It’s the first clue.

Ha!, said Chloe, she’s too much. You have to hand it to the handlers, though. My spies tell me the ‘Holy Light’ tour was one long debauch. You banged her, of course.

Yeah, we got it on, Austin confirmed, too enlightened to lie. "But The Planet’s too square for journalism vérité. I had to veil that part some, but anyone with a brain can figure it out."

Attaboy!, said Chloe, neatly spreading her claws. "I could smell it. I wish that damn fool features editor of mine had had the smarts to give our story to a hetero. Kiss and tell, Austin, kiss and tell! That’s the real thing. That’s the spice. Not that they can see that at The Planet.Such a waste. A writer is lucky to get three chances in a career. Some writers never do. Some never try. You’ve got the instinct. Kiss and tell. All the rest is—"

Her voice trailed off, and she shrugged her shoulders.

Buzz?, Austin suggested.

Talk. To Austin’s satisfaction, though hardly to his surprise, his têteà-tête with Chloe Pitt on her banquette (and Mari Ho’s walk-on with the woman in black) made both Joan Shoptalk’s gabby column Get This! and Fairley Merriweather’s tonier Fair Weather. Rhoda Broome saw the newsbreaks, too. The Daily Planet’s squat, bossy managing editor, La Broome was not one to take a raid sitting down. Vaguely but purposefully, her spreading feet in their baggy knee-highs began trolling the chasm beneath her cluttered desk, where among the litter of cast-off message slips she located the pair of floppy mules with floppier red bows. Into these homey articles of footwear Rhoda slipped, off her chair she bounced, and from her carrel she chugged to the open door of her editor-in-chief, Clark Kent. Minnie Mouse mug and the morning’s first Ding-Dong in hand, she clicked off Kent’s desk radio, ever trained to the news.

That broad!, Rhoda scolded. Reading those bullshit commercials like they’re the Song of Songs.

What gives me the honor?, Kent inquired.

Rhoda delivered the awful message, then demanded that Kent do something. Framed in the sparkle of her harlequin glasses, her frog eyes flashed Mayday.

What, Kent wondered, did she expect? Should he jump a tall building in a single bound? Duck into a telephone booth and shed his glasses? This woman, he thought (and not for the first time), reads too many comic books.

Kent could not bear the sight of her or the sound of her voice. He could not bear the coarseness of her mind or her sequined spectacles. If he had had no one but himself to please, she would have been axed long ago. But she met deadlines and rode herd to see that others did. This skill in itself would have guaranteed her job until the age of mandatory retirement, unfortunately rescinded, as Kent recalled with horror. His eye caught sight of her bunchy fingers, cruelly pinched by dime-store friendship rings, stuck on in high school, when (as pictures in Broome’s office showed) she had had the lines of a whippet, short as she was. Could no one else do the job?, Kent asked himself for the thousandth time. Minnie’s face flew by, trailing a splash. Broome paid no never-mind as the sweet, mud-brown java ran from Kent’s papers to his desk of polished mahogany and then drip-drip-dripped to the much-abused carpeting of institutional forest-green. Her left hand reached below her left buttock and lifted to ease what she used to call her heartburn but no longer thought to cover up at all. Could no one else on The Planet do the job?, Kent wondered again. No one in all Gotham?

He cut off her harangue with a push of the buzzer.

Baer’s extension, please, Camilla. No thanks, I’ll dial. Who’s my lunch date today? Ouch. Well, switch him to next week, with my personal apologies. No, don’t cancel the table.

Baer’s secretary’s voice quaked when she took Kent’s call. Just one moment, please, Mr. Kent, she stammered, jotting down a note to wave under Baer’s nose. Baer, however, was on another call, feet on desk, and not to be disturbed. The secretary screwed her courage to the sticking place and approached him with the scrap of paper. When he waved her off and she failed to vanish, he rolled his eyes before condescending to glance at the message.

Hank, gotta go, Baer responded presently. "Chief ’s on the line. Clark! How’s it hanging? You’re talking lunch when? Hey! I’ll have to blow off my date. But sure."

Without pausing to cancel his prior engagement, he sauntered forth.

"The Planet stands alone," Kent told Baer over drinks at the Golden Calf.

Baer gave a knowing nod, man of the world to man of the world, as a wrinkle formed snottily across the bridge of his nose. While the captain hovered, table talk was allowed for a decent interval to drift irrelevantly to the menu, but over the yellowfin carpaccio Kent resumed the mentor’s claptrap. Baer, quick to decode the subtext, savored his triumph.

We’re not just another newspaper, Kent droned. We’re the newspaper every other newspaper wants to be. Ours is a sacred trust. We write the history of the times.

And so on. He walked the high road of platitude, playing up The Planet’s mission, brooking no rival.

Make him an offer!, Broome shrieked back in the privacy of Kent’s office, once again having pushed the button on the round-the-clock news station. I bet Chloe’s talking twice what he gets here.

"We’re news, Kent said patiently. It’s a calling. It’s not show biz. We write the history of the times."

Groans were heard across his desk, and the thud of a large, flat foot.

You don’t feel the majesty of that mandate, Rhoda?

Groans, and the blow of a fist on the desk.

Rhoda, that will do. If Baby Baer wants to rocket off to Planet Chloe, all a bidding war will do is kite his price tag. I don’t want to do him the favor. Baby Baer, had he been by, might have pointed out that he didn’t need the money (though he was not insensitive to the symbolic appeal of top shekel).

With the same grasp of the big picture that had seen her to her lonely eminence so near the top of the greased pole of The Daily Planet, Broome was lowballing her estimate. The contract Chloe Pitt dangled before Austin Baer’s eager eyes was for a good three times his Daily Planet salary, with liberal increases in a second and third year,