The Man Who Cancelled Himself Read online

  “I’m totally serious,” he fired back.

  “Then I suggest you hire yourself a good private detective. Someone who knows what he’s doing.”

  “I don’t want someone who knows what he’s doing. I want you!”

  “Careful. I flatter easily.”

  “Look, I can’t hire a detective. I need someone who can function as a real member of my family. An insider. You. Besides, you’re supposed to have a certain … knack. I mean, my editor said if anyone could get to the bottom of it, you could.”

  I had worked for this editor before. His gleeful taste for high-profile tell-alls by convicted serial killers, drug-addicted teen prostitutes, and would-be presidential assassins had earned him the nickname The Merchant of Menace. He bothered a lot of the highbrow brigade. Me he had never bothered. He paid on time and he left me alone, which is all I ever ask.

  “I write books, Lyle. I don’t solve crimes.”

  “He said it was a perfect fit, you and me,” Lyle argued stubbornly.

  “Never be fooled by a perfect fit. There’s at least three-percent shrinkage to take into account—particularly when I’m thrown in hot water.”

  Lyle Hudnut clasped his hands before him, as if in prayer. “This isn’t just about a show, Hoagy. Or money. Or endorsements. Uncle Chubby is my life. Somebody tried to take him away from me. That’s murder, is what it is. You take a performer’s character away from him and you’re committing murder. Nobody should be allowed to get away with that. Nobody. I have to know who it is. I got a right to know who it is. You’re the one person who can help me. I’m begging you, Hoagy. I’m down on my knees.”

  And he was, with a thud. Right where he’d drawn that line between us in the sand.

  Only the line in the sand was gone. The waves had erased it. There was only smooth, wet sand there between us now. A corny and obvious symbol, to be sure. But I wasn’t surprised by it. Not in the least. Because it had already happened. I had already entered the world of prime-time television.

  I never thought I’d ever stoop so low as to be a sitcom writer. Not me. No way. But my life had been full of surprises lately, few of them pleasant. Still, my story was cherry pie compared to Lyle Hudnut’s. What had happened to Lyle Hudnut shouldn’t happen to anyone.

  He was an unlikely candidate for stardom, this round-faced pink elephant from Bay Shore, Long Island. It was while he was part of a scruffy Greenwich Village comedy troupe in the midseventies, the Surburbanites, that Lyle Hudnut first stumbled on Chubby Chance, his nasty, dirty, and thoroughly off-the-wall send-up of Mister Rogers. Dressed in a moth-eaten cardigan and sipping from a hot cup of what he claimed was Ovaltine, Chubby advised kids on how to get the family dog stoned, how to steal money from their dad’s trousers, how to get the most fun out of playing doctor with that cute little redhead next door. Chubby Chance on proper nutrition: “What’s the big difference between boogers and broccoli? Kids won’t eat their broccoli.”

  Stardom did, in fact, elude him at first. Lyle Hudnut was still just another fringe performer kicking around the comedy clubs a decade later when he hit upon the idea of Uncle Chubby’s Bedtime Stories, his own hip and caustic version of old childhood favorites. Like “Tom Thumb,” in which poor, tormented little Tom moves to West Hollywood and becomes involved with an older man who is into chains and whips. Like “Henny Penny,” in which Henny Penny, Cocky Locky, Ducky Duddles, Goosey Poosey and Turkey Lurky do tell the king that the sky is falling, for which he has them slaughtered, dressed, and eaten. Chubby’s bedtime stories caught on with savvy college audiences. Soon Lyle Hudnut was reciting them on David Letterman and campuses around the country. Cult success led to his own HBO special, Uncle Chubby’s Story Hour, and a best-selling book, Uncle Chubby’s Storybook. All of which caught the attention of Godfrey Daniels, enterprising new programming chief of America’s third-place network. Daniels saw Uncle Chubby as a way to pull in both the kids who had outgrown Mister Rogers and their baby-boomer parents as well. He convinced Lyle Hudnut to sand down Chubby’s rougher edges and to move him into the tidy, suburban New Rochelle home of his sister, Deirdre, a prim, no-nonsense lawyer—as well as a divorcée with two little kids and a not-so-gentle rottweiler. It was there that Stanley Chance, an irresponsible, beer-swilling slob who listed his last full-time employment as “high school,” found a home. And a career—as Deirdre’s live-in housekeeper, babysitter, and nemesis—the latter a role he had thoroughly enjoyed since age five.

  The show’s premiere at eight P.M, on Monday, September 24, 1991, was the highest-rated sitcom premiere in the history of network television. Uncle Chubby was an instant phenomenon, a No.1 breakout hit that left Roseanne, The Cosby Show, and Cheers choking on its dust. Over its first season it averaged a 40 share in the Nielsens—as in 40 percent of the televisions in use when it was on. Roseanne, the previous champ in the weekly ratings, had pulled in a mere 33. Uncle Chubby held the No. 1 spot for a record 127 weeks in a row. So potent was it that it shot the rest of the network’s Monday night lineup through the roof, too, making top-ten hits out of Master President, a sitcom about a twelve-year-old boy who we know is going to become president of the United States in 2032, The Abdul-Salaams, which one critic described as a “black Cosby Show,” and Hammer & Tongs, a cop show set in San Francisco’s Chinatown. So potent was it that it turned the third-place network into America’s leader, often by more than three ratings points per week, generating an estimated $500 million in new annual profits. All of which made Godfrey Daniels a genius, and Lyle Hudnut a very, very wealthy man. He was soon being paid an estimated $400,000 per episode to dispense to his on-screen niece and nephew patented Chubbyisms like “Life is short and so are you,” and “I got a real problem with all of this sex and violence on MTV—there ain’t enough of it.” There was another volume of his bedtime stories, this one a No. 1 best-seller for nearly a year, its sales rivaling those of Dr. Seuss at his peak. There were Uncle Chubby dolls and Halloween costumes and comic books and instructional videos. There was Uncle Chubby cereal and vitamins and cough syrup. His ratty old cardigan became better known than Columbo’s trench coat, his easy chair more familiar than Archie Bunker’s. Kids loved Uncle Chubby. He was one of them—messy and funny and always in trouble. He was so popular that, inevitably, they began looking to him for genuine advice, the kind that Mister Rogers had given them when they were younger. Their parents did, too. When Magic Johnson turned up HIV-positive, it was Uncle Chubby who parents turned to for help. “Heroes are people, too,” Uncle Chubby told little Erin and Trevor, in the historic AIDS episode—a show which the Laker star personally endorsed. “And all people get sick.”

  And so the surreal evolution was complete. Uncle Chubby was no longer a send-up. He was the semireal thing, trusted by kids and parents alike. And Lyle Hudnut was no longer a comic-actor playing a role. He was Uncle Chubby.

  Until that day he strolled into the Deuce Theater in Times Square to see Of Human Blondage, a hard-core porn film starring one Tamarra Wett. That day when it all came tumbling down. They placed him in a holding cell. He was freed within hours on three hundred dollars’ bail but, as his lawyer candidly put it, “The man’s career is over. Uncle Chubby is dead.” Both the New York Post and Daily News devoted their front pages to his grim-faced mug shots. “BOOKED & COOKED” screamed the News’s banner headline, “FAT CHANCE,” cried the Post. America’s parents were horrified and furious. Because they had trusted Uncle Chubby, and because they didn’t know how the hell to explain this to their kids. Oprah and Sally Jessy and Phil rode quickly to the rescue with special programs devoted to the subject. But the bad jokes rode up even quicker, and made a far more lasting impression: Hear about the new Uncle Chubby doll? Wind him up and he plays with himself. Hear what Uncle Chubby is doing next? Coming back in a remake of Diff’rent Strokes. Know what Uncle Chubby’s favorite restaurant is? The Palm. Don Imus, the popular New York radio personality, even campaigned for a concert to benefit the Uncle Chubby defense effort cal
led Fists Around America. Its anthem: “All we are saying is give Chance a piece.”

  Toys “R” Us, the nation’s largest toy retailer, announced it was pulling the popular Uncle Chubby doll from its shelves immediately. Mattel, the doll’s maker, discontinued its production, even though it had generated an astounding $52 million in the past two years. Librarians across the country yanked Uncle Chubby’s storybooks from their shelves. Pressure groups advocating so-called family values demanded that the network remove this supposed role model from the air, vowing to boycott the products of any and all companies which continued to sponsor it. The network promptly complied, shelving The Uncle Chubby Show until, stated Godfrey Daniels, “this unfortunate episode can be resolved in a court of law, rather than the court of public opinion.” The American Civil Liberties Union, as well as many high-profile show business figures, promptly blasted the network—for finding the man guilty until proven innocent, and for just plain knuckling under to pressure from so-called guardians of public morality. A Performers’ Coalition headed by Kevin Costner, Susan Sarandon, Glenn Close, and Sting organized a protest march on network headquarters on Sixth Avenue in support of Lyle Hudnut. Forty thousand marchers joined them, some clashing with anti-Lyle Hudnut forces. Dozens were arrested.

  The nation’s newspapers devoted countless editorials to the question of whether Lyle Hudnut had or had not committed a victimless crime. Some argued the man was being hounded unfairly. It wasn’t as if he’d committed rape or murder or vehicular manslaughter while intoxicated. He hadn’t, in fact, hurt anyone. Others felt that there was indeed a victim here—America’s children. A role model like Lyle Hudnut, they argued, had to be held to a higher standard of personal conduct than someone else did. On and on it went. When Entertainment Tonight conducted a phone poll on whether or not the TV series should be reinstated, fourteen million people called in, the highest response ever. Fifty-four percent said yes, forty-six percent no. Everyone, it seemed, had an opinion on Uncle Chubby—even Tamarra Wett. “I don’t see what everybody’s so worked up about. The man kept his hand to himself,” sniffed the Of Human Blondage star, who herself landed on the cover of People magazine when she was discovered to be the runaway daughter of an Evansville, Indiana, Methodist minister. And fifteen years old. In fact, she was still peddling a memoir of her own, Slippery When Wett. I turned it down, if you must know.

  The Manhattan DA chose to prosecute Lyle Hudnut. But to avoid the circus of a trial, he offered him a plea bargain—a five-hundred-dollar fine and a year’s probation if Lyle pleaded guilty to indecent exposure. Lyle refused it. He was innocent of any criminal conduct, he insisted, and vowed to fight all the way to the U.S. Supreme Court if that’s what it took. Legal experts debated the merits of his case on Larry King Live. Several believed he had a strong case, arguing that exposing one’s sexual organs in a theater designated for the express purpose of showing pornography did not necessarily constitute indecent exposure. The DA came back with a new offer: Lyle Hudnut would agree to plead no contest, pay a one-hundred-dollar fine and all court costs, in exchange for which all criminal charges would be expunged from his record. A pale and shaken Lyle Hudnut appeared in court to accept this offer. It was his first public appearance since his arrest. The hearing was televised live on CNN. It was over very fast. Then a limo whisked him away.

  God elected to reinstate the nation’s No. 1 show, a decision for which he was widely applauded within the show biz community. Not that his decision had anything whatsoever to do with bravery. It had to do with money, and with the extremely deep financial soup his network was drowning in. His and the other two networks as well. None of them, as it happens, had ever learned how to swim.

  America’s three-network system was dying. In 1976, the big three could claim nine out of ten prime-time viewers as their own. These days, they could claim only six. Cable TV and home video were to blame. Viewers were channel surfing now. They had more viewing choices—lots of choices. And they weren’t choosing the calculated blandness and sheer vapidity of network programming. Shrinking audiences meant shrinking advertising revenues. And that meant the networks had to cut back. News and sports divisions were going fast, virtually conceding defeat to the new cable rivals like CNN and ESPN. Meanwhile, Godfrey Daniels was even predicting that one or more of the networks might soon have to scale back their hours of prime-time programming. Maybe get out of prime time altogether one or two nights per week. Maybe go out of business, period.

  A hit show like Uncle Chubby could still turn a network’s entire fortunes around. But not one of the three networks had found a hit in the past three years. Snap, crackle, flop was the painful norm now. Fickle audiences were thumbing their noses at one new show after another. Losing Uncle Chubby because of Lyle’s arrest had cost the network an estimated 13 percent of its viewers, viewers it could ill afford to lose. Its aggregate weekly ratings share fell from 21 percent to 18, dropping it from first to second place. And dangerously close to third. The network had wanted Uncle Chubby back on. The network had needed it back on.

  So did Panorama City Communications, the film and TV studio that was financially partnered with Lyle in producing the show. The studio was his bank. It absorbed the rather punishing weekly budget overages that are common practice in network series production. In the case of Uncle Chubby, the licensing fee was $800,000 per week against an actual production budget of just over $1 million. Spread out over a season of twenty-two episodes, this amounted to a shortfall of $5 million. Panorama City was willing to take such a hit—a practice known as deficit financing—because they, not the network, owned the show’s syndication rights. That’s when a long-running series is sold into rerun heaven on local stations all over the country—all over the world. A sitcom was presently earning its producers and distributor around $1 million per episode. A hundred episodes means a $100-million pot of cash at the end of the rainbow. Of course, there is some risk involved. You can’t syndicate a show until you have that pool of a hundred episodes, which means at least four seasons’ worth of shows. Most series don’t stay on that long. Only the hits. Uncle Chubby was just such a hit. A lock. A studio’s wet dream. There was just one problem—it had only been on three seasons. Sixty-six episodes. Not enough. So the studio was out $15 million and very anxious to see it get back on the air. They had a huge financial stake in it.

  As did Lyle Hudnut, who stood to take home a third of that syndication pie. More than the man’s dignity was at stake. Thirty million dollars was involved. And that buys a lot of dignity.

  So Uncle Chubby was back on the air—with a few changes. And its season premiere would be a big-time happening, the biggest since Murphy Brown squared off against Danny Quayle. That meant big-time bucks, too. The leading sneaker manufacturer in the world had already signed on at an astounding $350,000 per thirty seconds of commercial airtime—a record for a sitcom. So had a new diet soft drink and one of the Detroit automakers.

  Lyle Hudnut was back.

  That made one of us.

  Like I said, the past few months hadn’t exactly been swell for me either. If you were around and semialive you’ve been reading all about it. All about Merilee and me. Once, she and I had been something. She was Merilee Nash, fabulous star of stage and screen, two-time Tony award winner, Oscar winner, glamorous, respected, admired, the woman who had it all. I was Stewart Hoag, that tall, dashing author of that brilliantly successful first novel, Our Family Enterprise, the man who The New York Times called “the first great new literary voice of the 1980’s.” We were New York’s hottest, cutest people. Hands down. Until it all fell apart. That was my doing. Writer’s block is what they call it. I lost my juices, lost my voice, lost my wife. Merilee got it all—the seven rooms overlooking Central Park, the red 1958 Jaguar XK-150 drop-head, marriage to that fabulously successful new Southern playwright, Zack something. I got my drafty old fifth-floor walk-up on West Ninety-third Street, and Lulu. The juices did finally come back to me, in fits and starts, only the sec
ond novel was a thermonuclear dud. Novel number three was, as we say in the trade, in progress. Had been for nearly four years. It was not, as we also say in the trade, under contract. Neither was Merilee. She came back to me in fits and starts, too, after the Zack thing fell apart. We got semiinvolved all over again. Separate addresses. No commitments. No promises. But for me, there was no one else. There was only Merilee. Same with her, or so I had thought. See, it all blew up in my face over the winter when she politely informed me by phone from Fiji that she was pregnant. She said she knew I didn’t want kids, but she did, and since she was forty it was now or never so she was going to have this one. And, by the way, I was not the father. She wouldn’t tell me who was. She wouldn’t tell anyone. I can’t tell you why. I don’t know why.

  I only know that when word got out that Merilee Nash was with love child, everybody, but everybody, wanted to know who Daddy was. The National Enquirer, convinced that all leading ladies fuck their leading men—because they do—deduced that the father was her costar in the black comedy she’d been filming at the time the dirty deed took place. I doubted this—Danny DeVito is happily married, and a borderline dwarf. Merilee is six feet tall in her size ten bare feet. Hard Copy was sure that the father was hubby number two, Zack something. I doubted this, too. Zack had been in India for the past two years trying to find himself. Not that it should be such a big fucking discovery. David Letterman chipped in with his own top ten candidates, including Colonel Muammar al-Qaddafi, Wile E. Coyote, Frank Perdue, and Spiderman.

  As Merilee got bigger, the story got bigger. It simply wouldn’t go away. So I did. Fled to Provence with Lulu. Being a writer means you aren’t tied to any one place. You’re free to be unhappy anywhere in the world. I rented a two-hundred-year-old stone mas in the countryside outside of Joucas with a pool and six hectares of olive trees and grapevines. There I’d spent the past six months living in splendid, morbid isolation. I worked on the third novel. I swam. I ate the sun-ripened melons and cold roasted peppers, the garlicky pink saucisson and the tapenade, a native paste of black olives and anchovies that Lulu loves nearly as much as caviar. I drank the new Côtes du Rhône and found it every bit as amusing as the old Côtes du Rhône. It wasn’t a terrible life. Lulu did keep wondering where her mommy was. She didn’t understand what had gone wrong. The little ones never do. But it wasn’t a terrible life. I think I could have stayed there forever if it hadn’t cost money. And if mine hadn’t run out.