A Stranger in the Mirror By Sidney Sheldon

“I—I’m terribly sorry, Sister,” he stammered. “I—”

“Don’t be sorry. It’s a great cock,” the nun said, and began to go down on him.

It was six months before he learned that it was Toby who had sent the hooker in to him.

As Toby was stepping out of an elevator one day, he turned to a pompous network executive and said, “By the way, Will, how did you ever come out on that morals charge?” The elevator door closed and the executive was left with a half a dozen people eyeing him warily.

When it came time to negotiate a new contract, Toby arranged for a trained panther to be delivered to him at the studio. Toby opened Sam Winters’s office door while Sam was in the middle of a meeting.

“My agent wants to talk to you,” Toby said. He shoved the panther inside the office and closed the door.

When Toby told the story later, he said, “Three of the guys in that office almost had heart attacks. It took them a month to get the smell of panther piss out of that room.”

Toby had a staff of ten writers working for him, headed by O’Hanlon and Rainger. Toby complained constantly about the material his writers gave him. Once Toby made a whore a member of the writing team. When Toby learned that his writers were spending most of their time in the bedroom, he had to fire her. Another time, Toby brought an organ grinder and his monkey to a story conference. It was humiliating and demeaning, but O’Hanlon and Rainger and the other writers took it because Toby turned their material into pure gold. He was the best in the business.

Toby’s generosity was profligate. He gave his employees and his friends gold watches and cigarette lighters and complete wardrobes and trips to Europe. He carried an enormous amount of money with him and paid for everything in cash, including two Rolls-Royces. He was a soft touch. Every Friday a dozen hangers-on in the business would line up for a handout. Once Toby said to one of the regulars, “Hey, what are you doing here today? I just read in Variety that you got a job in a picture.” The man looked at Toby and said, “Hell, don’t I get two weeks’ notice?”

 

There were myriad stories about Toby, and nearly all of them were true. One day, during a story conference, a writer walked in late, an unforgivable sin. “I’m sorry I’m late,” he apologized. “My kid was run over by a car this morning.”

Toby looked at him and said, “Did you bring the jokes?”

Everyone in the room was shocked. After the meeting, one of the writers said to O’Hanlon, “That’s the coldest son of a bitch in the world. If you were on fire, he’d sell you water.”

Toby flew in a top brain surgeon to operate on the injured boy and paid all the hospital bills. He said to the father, “If you ever mention this to anyone, you’re out on your ass.”

 

Work was the only thing that made Toby forget his loneliness, the only thing that brought him real joy. If a show went well, Toby was the most amusing companion in the world, but if the show went badly, he was a demon, attacking every target within reach of his savage wit.

He was possessive. Once, during a story conference, he took Rainger’s head between his two hands and announced to the room, “This is mine. It belongs to me.”

At the same time he grew to hate writers, because he needed them and he did not want to need anyone. So he treated them with contempt. On pay day, Toby made airplanes of the writers’ paychecks and sailed them through the air. Writers would be fired for the smallest infraction. One day a writer walked in with a tan and Toby immediately had him discharged. “Why did you do that?” O’Hanlon asked. “He’s one of our best writers.”

“If he was working,” Toby said, “he wouldn’t have had time for a tan.”

A new writer brought in a joke about mothers and was let go.