The director took a package of Winstons from his breast pocket,
took one out, put it in his mouth, took it out again and reversed it
so the filter was facing away from him, and abruptly bit the
cigarette in two. He threw the filtered half in one direction and spat
the unfiltered half in another.
'Get up a show from the library with Rickles,' he said. 'No Joan
Rivers. And if I see Totie Fields, someone's going to get fired.'
Then he strode away, head down. He shoved a chair with such
violence on his way out of the control room that it struck the wall,
rebounded, nearly fractured the skull of a white-faced intern from
USC, and fell on its side.
One of the PA's told the intern in a low voice, 'Don't worry; that's
just Fred's way of committing honorable seppuku.'
The man who was not Johnny Carson was taken, bellowing loudly
not about his lawyer but his team of lawyers, to the Burbank Police
Station. In Burbank, as in Beverly Hills and Hollywood Heights,
there is a wing of the police station which is known simply as
'special security functions.' This may cover many aspects of the
sometimes crazed world of Tinsel-Town law enforcement. The
cops don't like it, the cops don't respect it ... but they ride with it.
You don't shit where you eat. Rule One.
'Special security functions' might be the place to which a coke-
snorting movie-star whose last picture grossed seventy million
dollars might be conveyed; the place to which the battered wife of
an extremely powerful film producer might be taken; it was the
place to which the man with the dark crop of curls was taken.
The man who showed up in Johnny Carson's place on the stage of
Studio C on the afternoon of November 29th identified himself as
Ed Paladin, speaking the name with the air of one who expects
everyone who hears it to fall on his or her knees and, perhaps,
genuflect. His California driver's license, Blue Cross - Blue Shield
card, Amex and Diners' Club cards, also identified him as Edward
Paladin.
His trip from Studio C ended, at least temporarily, in a room in the
Burbank PD's 'special security' area. The room was panelled with
tough plastic that almost did look like mahogany and furnished
with a low, round couch and tasteful chairs. There was a cigarette
box on the glass-topped coffee table filled with Dunhills, and the
magazines included Fortune and Variety and Vogue and Billboard
and GQ. The wall-to-wall carpet wasn't really ankle-deep but
looked it, and there was a CableView guide on top of the large-
screen TV. There was a bar (now locked), and a very nice neo-
Jackson Pollock painting on one of the walls. The walls, however,
were of drilled cork, and the mirror above the bar was a little bit
too large and a little bit too shiny to be anything but a piece of one-
way glass.
The man who called himself Ed Paladin stuck his hands in his just-
too-loud sport-coat pockets, looked around disgustedly, and said:
'An interrogation room by any other name is still an interrogation
room.'
