HOT NEWS : A Love Affair: Great While It Lasted, but . . .

THE END OF THE AFFAIR . . . being an account of what some may simply refer to as a man’s losing his job, but what the author prefers to think of as an infatuation gone wrong; in which the players are the following:

The Author . . . . Eric Burns

The Woman . . . . “Entertainment Tonight”

I

My friends are not surprised. They said I never should have gotten involved with her in the first place. The Woman was not my type, was too flashy, would only bring me down. One friend even resorted to an analogy from high school. He said it was like the president of the stamp club putting moves on the captain of the cheerleaders.

II

Which is not to say it started out badly. Quite the opposite. The summer of ‘85, it was, and I happened to be in L.A. on a family matter. In my spare time, I eagerly took in the sights, a stranger in paradise. I went to Disneyland and the Huntington, Malibu and Melrose, the Santa Monica Pier and the Music Center. And, of course, I toured the studios, the fabled dream factories I had heard so much about.

I met The Woman at Paramount. It happened quite by accident, but there was nothing accidental about my response; I was smitten. Never before had I known anyone like her: Glamorous and glittery and high-spirited, the dream factory’s enduring model. If she was also a bit on the vapid side, well, was that so bad? It was an Angst -ridden time for me, the late innings of my mid-life crisis; I liked the idea of getting together with someone who hadn’t either the interest or the raw materials for gloomy introspection. Perhaps I could learn to glitter a little myself.

I was, you see, as different for The Woman as she was for me. A former NBC newsman, I had covered striking football players and the PLO, abortion referendums and the Falkland Islands War, Chicago politics and New York bank heists. I had not covered show biz. I was a collector of books, an aficionado of quiet evenings, rather a homebody. But what is a mid-life crisis for if not to break out of old patterns?

I said: We are apples and oranges.

The Woman said: It’s what turns me on about you.

I said: Really?

She said: I want you for your mind.

III

The Woman and I had begun to see each other regularly and feel surprisingly comfortable with the arrangement. I enjoyed her brassy affability; she liked my “artsy musings.” Her term.

Then I read in the paper one day that various news organizations had chartered a total of six helicopters to get shots of people going to the Sean Penn-Madonna wedding reception. Six helicopters! For pictures of celebrity heads! And not even real celebrities; these were celebrities of the Brat Pack variety, celebrities even younger and less interesting than those kids who drive the Domino’s Pizza to your door still hot.

So I came up with what I called the Helicopter Index of Relative News Importance, or H.I.R.N.I. It was based on the assumption that coverage of the Penn-Madonna wedding was actually worth six helicopters.

If so, I told The Woman, an automobile accident in the middle of the night on a deserted road outside Fargo, N.D., with no one injured and minor damage to the car was worth 23 helicopters.

A City Council meeting in late summer in Cleveland with a small agenda and no quorum was worth 37 helicopters.

A Presidential press conference was worth the American aviation industry.

I even got a friend to make up some little helicopter decals; I pasted them onto a card and, as I referred to the event, I held up the appropriate number. And--as the camera was rolling. That’s right, I shared my artsy musings not just with The Woman, but with the millions of viewers who tuned in to ogle her every night on syndicated TV.

The Woman was not amused. It seems that one of the choppers was hers! She had split the costs with CNN and aired the video as enthusiastically as if it were exclusive footage of the Second Coming.

OK, she fumed, so much for your mind. Now I want your body.

IV

The Woman started sending my body to places I had never intended it to go. I was, in TV terminology, reassigned. I went to a movie set to ask Molly Ringwald whether the character she played in her latest movie was anything like the person she is in real life. I went to an office on Hollywood Boulevard to ask Ralph Edwards what made him think the time was right for a “This Is Your Life” comeback. I went to Carlos’ & Charlie’s to ask the entrants in a Statue of Liberty look-alike contest what it would mean to them to win. I went to a gymnasium in the Valley to ask the “Gorgeous Ladies of Wrestling” whether they were as ill-tempered out of the ring as they were inside.

I went without complaint. I hoped that by demonstrating a willingness, if not exactly enthusiasm, to accede to The Woman’s whims, I could show her I was a sport and so rekindle the fires.

It did not happen. My compliance only seemed to make her think she could get away with even more insulting assignments.

John Ehrlichman is doing a guest shot on one of those TV courtroom shows, she snapped; ask him what he’s trying to prove.

Don Rickles is playing a piece of stain-resistant carpet in his new commercial; ask him how he prepared for the role.

Joan Rivers is having a “Joan-for-a-Day” contest, with the winner getting to be the co-host one night on her talk show. Look into it.

I did. The winner was a guy. He lived in Brooklyn and he sold office supplies for a living. As I walked into his dressing room to do an interview before the show, he was putting on his panty hose. A blonde wig was next to him on the sofa arm. He looked up at me with a winking kind of smile and told me he had always admired my work.

V

Then one day The Woman said to me the words that all men hope to hear from the women they covet. Come up to my place, will you? Alone. And when I got there she told me to shut the door and make myself comfortable on the couch. I thought: This is it, this is our rapprochement. She will tell me she is sorry, she wants me back. She thinks we ought to give the relationship one more chance.

Instead . . . she told me I would no longer be reviewing videos for her. I had been giving her, and her millions of oglers, my thoughts on new video releases every week for more than a year and a half, and I thought she liked the segment, found it distinctive, if a little curmudgeonly at times. I remember the conversation clearly:

TW: You’re too elitist.

Me: Elitist?

TW: You’re always bad-mouthing videos that the average person likes and raving about those fancy foreign films.

Me: I am?

TW: Like in that article you wrote for TV Guide last week, you know, the one where you talked about some of the strangest videos you’ve ever seen?

Me: What fancy foreign film?

TW: I forget.

Drawing a blank on the subject, I went back and checked the TV Guide article. The fancy foreign film was “Last Tango in Paris.” I had compared it favorably to “Gore-Met: Zombie Chef from Hell,” “Best Buns on the Beach” and “Taxidermy by Video,” which I referred to as “an hour and a half of gradually exposed duck innards.”

VI

The months went by. The Woman and I grew further apart; she barely spoke to me and when she did I could almost hear the gnashing of teeth. Her attentions were elsewhere:

On Ted Danson’s account of the pet chicken that one of his co-stars had brought to the “Cheers” set.

On the party to honor the 100th episode of “Lifestyles of the Rich and Famous.”

On the tour she took of Zsa Zsa Gabor’s clothes closet.

Or was it Eva?

Can any reasonable person be expected to tell the difference?

VII

A man knows it is over with a woman when what initially attracted her to him now repels her.

One morning, talking to one of my contacts in show business, I learned that during World War II, several scenes had been edited out of the movie “Lost Horizon” because they showed Asians in a favorable light. In particular, the Sherpas who helped Conway and his party up the mountain to Shangri-La after the plane crash were portrayed as helpful and unmenacing, qualities that Americans were not supposed to believe Asians possessed anymore, not since Pearl Harbor.

But a gentleman whose name I have forgotten, himself of Asian descent, had devoted several years of his life to searching for the censored footage. It was a painstaking process; he tracked down people who had been associated with the excising, checked out leads and ransacked forgotten film vaults. Eventually he managed to locate virtually all of the missing scenes and restore them to the existing print. “Lost Horizon,” a sentimental classic of a movie and a special favorite of mine, could at last be seen as director Frank Capra had made it. I thought the story an intriguing one, combining elements of art and detection, entertainment and politics. I told The Woman about it.

She said: So what?

I said: I’d like to do a piece on it for you. Muse artsily.

Forget it.

Why?

We’re not doing that crap anymore.

Huhn?

We’re giving the people stars, not issues; decolletage, not analysis.

Does everything we do have to be geared to the lowest common denominator?

As low and common as possible.

Yes, she really said it, those words. And no sooner had they escaped from her mouth than I saw her eyes gleaming wildly with commitment.

VIII

When the end finally came, which it did without ceremony, I was not surprised. In truth, I felt a certain relief. Perhaps this explains my lack of bitterness toward The Woman, even though it is a tradition of the man scorned to lash out at the scorner. A long tradition, in fact. I did some research on the subject the other day and found an example as far back as the first century A.D., when the Latin epigrammatist Marcus Valerius Martialis, in a similar predicament, reviled his ex-mistress.

“Your tresses, Galla,” he said, “are manufactured far away; you lay aside your teeth at night as you do your silk dresses; you lie stored away in a hundred caskets, and your face does not sleep with you; you wink with an eyebrow brought to you in the morning.”

Well, not for me such spiteful carping. It is true, of course, that my woman is also composed of a good many parts unknown to nature, that the images of the world she presents bear little relation to underlying realities. But I was aware of this at the start. It is not her composition that must be called into question here, but my initial judgment.

Yet when I think of her these days, as I still do, it is invariably the good times I recall. The hopes, the joys. The laughs, the smiles. The day I fell off the stool . . .

The stool was in the studio, next to the control room, and it was wobbly to begin with; all four of its legs were of different lengths. As I was sitting on it, getting ready to go on the air with one of the last of my video reviews, I leaned too far to the side and tumbled to the floor. I bumped my head on the wall; my glasses fell under a desk.

The cameraman laughed. The sound engineer laughed. The Teleprompter operator laughed. Even I had to admit the sight must have been an amusing one.

But no one was more convulsed than The Woman. That was great, she said, just great. I didn’t know you had it in you. Maybe we can salvage your career yet. She smiled at me more warmly than she had in months.

Over the intercom came the director’s voice: Ready to roll tape, he said. Stand by.

The Woman said: Do the fall again.

What?

Do it again. We’ll put it on the air. It’ll look great. People will love it.

I will not.

Don’t be a fuddy-duddy.

Is this an entertainment news show or the opening act at some kind of low-rent strip joint?

The woman laughed even harder, tears coming to her eyes and a flush to her cheeks, although whether at my pratfall or my naivete I could not tell.

Epilogue: Burns survived the affair. He went on to Fox Television, KTTV Channel 11, for which he is “entertainment commentator,” giving personal nightly essays on such diverse subjects as the resurrection of Elvis Presley, Rev. Jerry Falwell’s campaign to free Oliver North, the Ku Klux Klan’s desire for its own TV show in Kansas City and, not inappropriately, kiss and telling.