A Dog and His Agent

In Los Angeles, where the air kiss and the weekend marriage were born, the existence of any close relationship is a notable occurrence.

When I discover such a union, I rush to my word processor and put it down on paper, I mean on screen, and celebrate its existence with a fervor equal only to that which accompanied the first miracle at Lourdes.

And that’s why, today, I write about a man and his agent.

Well, yes, women have agents, too, I suppose, but for us it’s different.

A man often feels closer to his agent than to his wife, although the feeling is not always reciprocal. A former agent once told me he felt warmer toward his dog than to most writers.

My agent, Sol Leon, is celebrating his 50th year with William Morris, the last five of which have been heavily occupied with me, although to the best of my knowledge no one is celebrating that.

Sol is a soft-spoken man with an unassuming manner and a positive outlook, which are traits not necessarily associated with people who represent writers.

But he is also capable of frowning with disapproval and wincing with emotional pain, a combination of responses that pretty much cover whatever anguish a writer might be suffering at any particular moment.

Sol is also good at admonishing procrastinating authors to stop their whining and go home and write. Occasionally, knowing that the man he’s dealing with ought not to be writing in the first place, Sol will comfort him and tell him to go home and bathe.

I have an agent not for my work in newspapering, where we lack the guile for duplicity, but for dealing with the television industry, where duplicity was created during the mid-1950s and is practiced with enduring facility to this very day.

I write TV movies occasionally and am often in close contact with people who not only eat their young but who also eat their rivals. Writers, thank God, generally do not count as rivals. We are to television what ants are to aardvarks, gobbled up or ignored, depending on the need of the diner.

But if we’re in the wrong place at the wrong time, slurp, we’re gone.

Especially bad are independent producers with no means of income other than to squeeze free stories out of those too dumb to keep their ideas to themselves, into which category I, alas, fall.

If Sol has told me once, he has told me a hundred times not to talk about stories with producers and, above all, never to discuss money with them.

“All you have to remember,” he has often said, “are three little words. Call-My-Agent.”

In addition to protecting writers from themselves, from producers and from the nagging suspicion that writing is very close to doing nothing, a good agent keeps track of his brood.

He sees to it that when a client disappears midway during a project, he is home writing, not on an island somewhere spending his advance money on native hookers and pink rum drinks with slices of pineapple in them.

I suspect I am one of Sol’s more troublesome cases due to a tendency to drift through life without any purpose other than to live long enough each day to make it to a martini before dinner.

I would rather do almost anything but write, with the possible exception of taking out the garbage, which I find demeaning and possibly racist.

But Sol won’t let me idle my life away.

“What’s the status on the killer porpoise project?” he’ll say.

“On the way!” I’ll reply enthusiastically.

I find enthusiasm is often a satisfying substitute for real work.

“What about the presentation for the pit bull that saves the baby?”

“In the final stages.”

“The nun who becomes a vampire?”

“Two days from done.”

There will be a moment of silence as Sol studies me. When one becomes uncomfortably aware that he has been studying writers in such a manner for half a century, one realizes he is not about to be fooled by enthusiasm.

“Look,” I say, “I’m not really that close to finishing any of the projects.”

“I see.”

“The truth is, Sol, I’ve been ill.”

“That’s too bad.”

“Right. I’ve, uh, been in a coma since the start of the season, and I think there’s brain damage.”

“Good,” he’ll say, settling back. “Then you ought to be able to finish the script without unnecessary mental diversions.”

You can’t fool a guy like Sol. I’m back on the project again, the one about the nun becoming a vampire, and I guess I’ll finish it this time.

I’d say I’m two days from done.