This editor tells me readers don’t want a story about somebody born cute and talented, getting paid a fortune to appear on television, then living happily ever after.
No, people don’t want a happy ending.
People want to read about Rusty Hamer, the little boy onMake Room for Daddywho shot himself. Or Trent Lehman, the cute kid fromNanny and the Professorwho hanged himself on a playground fence. Little Anissa Jones, who played Buffy onFamily Affair, clutching a doll named Mrs. Beasley, then swallowing the biggest overdose of barbiturates in the history of Los Angeles County.
This is what people want. The same reason we go to racetracks to watch the cars crash. Why the Germans say,“Die reinste Freude ist die Schadenfreude.”
Our purest joy comes when people we envy get hurt. That most genuine form of joy. The joy you feel when a limousine turns the wrong way down a one-way street. Or when Jay Smith, the “Little Rascal” known as Pinky, was found stabbed to death in the desert outside Las Vegas. It’s the kind of joy we felt when Dana Plato, the little girl onDiff’rent Strokes, got arrested, posed naked inPlayboy, and took too many sleeping pills.
People standing in line at the supermarket, clipping coupons, getting old, those are the headlines that sell these people a newspaper. Most people, they want to read about Lani O’Grady, the pretty daughter on Eight Is Enough, found dead in a trailer house with her belly full of Vicodin and Prozac.
No crack-up, the editor tells me, no story. Happy Kenny Wilcox with his laugh lines, he wouldn’t sell.
The editor tells me, “Find Wilcox with kiddie porn on his computer. Find him with dead bodies under his house. Then you got a story.” This editor says, “Better yet, find him with all the above, but find him dead.”