Walk on the Wild Side - By Karl Edward Wagner Page 0,126
baddies, he knew he was having a religious experience. After that, he watched The Agency every Saturday night, without fail. It would have put a crimp in his dating if Webley had been one who dated. His greatest moment in college was the night when he stood off two drunken jocks, either of whom could have folded Webley in half, who wanted to switch channels from The Agency to watch a basketball game. They might have stuffed Webley into a wastebasket had not other Agency fans added their voices to his protest. Thus did Alex Webley learn the power of fans united.
It was a power he experienced again with news of Elisabeth Kent’s departure from the series, and later when The Agency was cancelled. Webley was one of the thousands of fans who wrote to the network demanding that Stacey Steele be brought back to the show (never mind how). With the show’s cancellation, Webley helped circulate a petition that The Agency be continued, with or without Stacey Steele. The producers were impressed by such show of support, but the network pointed out that 10,000 signatures from the lunatic fringe do not cause a flicker on the Nielsen ratings. Without Stacey Steele, The Agency was out of business, and that was that. Besides, the fad for overdone spy shows was over and done.
Alex Webley kept a file of clippings and stills, promotional items, comic books and paperbacks, anything at all pertaining to The Agency and to the great love of his life, Elisabeth Kent. From the beginning there were fanzines—crudely printed amateur publications devoted to The Agency—and one or two unofficial fan clubs. Webley joined and subscribed to them all. Undergraduate enthusiasms developed into a lifelong hobby. Corresponding with other diehard fans and collecting Agency memorabilia became his preoccupying outside interest in the course of taking a doctorate in neurobiology. He was spared from Viet Nam by high blood pressure, and from any long-term romantic involvement by a highly introverted nature. Following his doctorate, Webley landed a research position at one of the pharmaceutical laboratories, where he performed his duties efficiently and maintained an attitude of polite aloofness toward his coworkers. Someone there dubbed him “the Invisible Man,” but there was no malice to the mot juste.
At his condo, the door to the spare bedroom bore a brass-on-walnut plaque that read HQ. Webley had made it himself. Inside were filing cabinets, bookshelves, and his desk. The walls were papered with posters and stills, most of them photos of Stacey Steele. A glass-fronted cabinet held videocassettes of all The Agency episodes, painstakingly acquired through trades with other fans. The day he completed the set, Webley drank most of a bottle of Glenfiddich—Dane and Miss Steele’s favorite potation—and afterward became quite ill.
By now Webley’s enthusiasm had expanded to all of the spy shows and films of the period, but old loves die hard, and The Agency remained his chief interest. Webley was editor/publisher of Special Assignment, a quarterly amateur magazine devoted to the spy craze of the ’60s. Special Assignment was more than a cut above the mimeographed fanzines that Webley had first begun to collect; his magazine was computer-typeset and boasted slick paper and color covers. By its tenth issue, Special Assignment had a circulation of several thousand, with distribution through specialty bookshops here and abroad. It was a hobby project that took up all of Webley’s free time and much of his living space, and Webley was content.
Almost content. Special Assignment carried photographs and articles on every aspect of the old spy shows, along with interviews of many of the actors and actresses. Webley, of course, devoted a good many pages each issue to The Agency and to Stacey Steele—but to his chagrin he was unable to obtain an interview with Elisabeth Kent. Since her one disastrous comeback attempt, Miss Kent preferred the life of a recluse. There was some dignity to be salvaged in anonymity. Miss Kent did not grant interviews, she did not make public appearances, she did not answer fan mail. After ten years the world forgot Elisabeth Kent, but her fans still remembered Stacey Steele.
Webley had several years prior managed to secure Elisabeth Kent’s address—no mean accomplishment in itself—but his rather gushing fan letters had not elicited any sort of reply. Not easily daunted, Webley faithfully sent Miss Kent each new issue of Special Assignment (personally inscribed to her), and with each issue he included a long letter of praise for her deathless characterization of Stacey