AARON SORKIN WORKS HIS WAY THROUGH THE CRISIS

Exactly two weeks after terrorists ambushed New York and Washington, killed
more than 5,000 of us and changed everything, and nothing, Aaron Sorkin,
creator of ''The West Wing,'' leans anxiously against a long table filled
with actors and production assistants. This is the high-tech briefing area
where the show's main character, President Josiah Bartlet, huddles with the
military brass when make-believe blips on the radar grow alarming. In the
conspicuously insider patois of the show, the space is called ''the Sit
Room,'' and this is roughly the Situation: for the last two years, ''West
Wing'' has become one of the most popular shows in America because, among
other things, Sorkin has been able to give his kinder, gentler, nobler
White House enough verisimilitude to seem tantalizingly possible. ''The
only reason it's not 'Touched by an Angel,''' Sorkin says, ''is that it
imitates just enough the sounds and appearance of reality. And the way I do
it is by saying words you don't normally hear on television shows, like
'Democrat' and 'Republican,' and having the place look real and the
hardware look real and abbreviations be right. If I can do just enough of
that, then hopefully we're on board.''

To maintain his elusive parallel universe, one that feels contemporary but
is also impossible to pin down in time, Sorkin employs a half-dozen former
high-ranking politicos and keeps a close watch ''on the dials and gauges.''
To come up with the four or five story lines the show burns through each
episode, the staff reheats old issues from the archives or imagines
something plausible enough to have actually happened. What they do not do,
however, is dramatize recent headlines. They try to never mention any
president after Eisenhower, and according to a co-executive producer, Kevin
Falls, who runs the writers' room, ''When we talk about the Kennedy Center
on 'West Wing,' we're referring to George Kennedy.''

But on Sept. 11, the world lurched violently in one very particular
direction, and producers, who had already shot the first five episodes of
their third season, were in a quandary. Sorkin became convinced that his
show's subtle connection to reality had been severed and that unless he
could find a way to let viewers know that his characters had suffered the
same trauma as everyone else, the show would forever clink hollow.

''We have these eight characters who have been our friends for two years,
and we want them to live,'' Sorkin says. ''And in order to do that, they
have to bow their heads for a moment to what concerns the rest of the
world. Once we've done that, it will give us permission to go back to
telling the kind of relatively trivial stories I like about the N.E.A. and
soft money and big tobacco.''

Less than a week before the scheduled broadcast of the splashy two-part
season premiere, Sorkin began writing a new episode that for the first time
directly addressed the news. And he insisted that the premiere be delayed
so that this new stand-alone episode could run first as a back story for
the whole season. Because of all the time and money that had already gone
into promoting the original premiere and the fact that NBC could only
charge advertisers half price for time on the rerun they had to air
instead, the network's decision to accommodate Sorkin was a $10 million act
of largess, proffered to a man who barely four months before had been
arrested at the Burbank airport with a carry-on bag containing marijuana,
hallucinogenic mushrooms and crack cocaine. And Sorkin, who was in rehab
six years before, admitted that this was not the first time he had fallen
off the wagon.

Sorkin listens through headphones as Richard Schiff, who plays Toby
Ziegler, White House director of communications, struggles with his speech
about the history of terrorism, trying to explain how teenagers in the 11th
century were tricked into committing heinous acts of violence by being
drugged with hashish and taken to a staged paradise stocked with
concubines. As the speech is ending, Ziegler's deputy, played by Rob Lowe,
enters and caps the scene with one of Sorkin's characteristic over-the-top
verbal flourishes: ''Ahhh, temptation I have seen thee and thy name is
woman.'' As he listens and watches, Sorkin displays a level of anxiety
appropriate to the occasion, although it is no higher or lower than what he
radiates every waking moment.

Sorkin, 40, is rabidly unhip, and not just in the way he dresses, which
today is like a middle-school student. He talks too fast and too urgently,
as if he is on trial and every moment might be his last chance to testify
in his defense. He eats too voraciously. He tries too hard. And while all
these things make him likable, his saving grace is that he listens hard too.

As Sorkin strains to compare Lowe's delivery with the beats he heard in his
head when he wrote the words, he taps one foot spastically and works the
muscles around his mouth as if he is trying to dislodge a bit of food. His
cheeks are shaded with stubble, and his eyes are sunk deep in his head
behind graying Stephanopoulos-like bangs. He says he has the flu. He feels
clammy.

There is a break in the shooting, and Lowe, whose character is addressing a
group of brainy high-school students who have won a visit to the White
House and find themselves stuck in the kitchen when there is a security
''crash,'' steps off the set to confer with Sorkin. Lowe wears a white
dress shirt and dark slacks and seems to have been painted in black and
white with just a touch of red in the cheeks. According to Bradley
Whitford, who plays Josh Lyman, the deputy chief of staff, considered by
show insiders to be the voice of Sorkin, ''I think Aaron would like to have
my character's job and look like Rob.''

Sorkin gives Lowe a couple of notes: ''You don't have to be so somber and
funereal. It's not a wake.'' He snaps his fingers to demonstrate the
brisker delivery he has in mind and adds: ''You're smart. You know these
things. Here they are.''

Soon after Lowe leaves the set, there is a stir as two real-life Hollywood
generals -- Jeff Zucker, the president of NBC Entertainment, and Peter
Roth, the president of Warner Brothers Television, both clad in black --
step into the Sit Room. In defiance of the current Hollywood dictate that
people act as though everything they do is suddenly irrelevant, the
baldheaded Zucker, who was in his dermatologist's office in the Empire
State Building on the morning of Sept. 11 -- When the second plane hit the
tower, I was out of there'' -- is openly jazzed.

Squeezing his tiny palms together and shaking them loosely at the wrist as
if rattling lucky dice, he extends to Sorkin that particularly hospitable
strain of Jewish anxiety that says, ''Isn't it a privilege and a joy and a
disease to be doing something that makes us so uptight?''

Sorkin, bobbing his head and smiling maniacally at the floor, confesses to
Zucker that he is sure the episode will be a colossal disaster. (When it is
broadcast eight days later, the critics will essentially concur.) But
Zucker, who never thought the episode was even remotely necessary, with all
the numbers showing that Americans were flocking back with relief to the
safety of their belovedly familiar TV worlds, and yet obliged him anyway,
shushes him.

''You're crazy -- it's going to be great,'' Zucker says. ''It's going to be
landmark television.''

Then Zucker purses his lips and makes another giddy little move with his
hand, sending it diving off his right shoulder. The gesture manages to
simultaneously convey someone heroically taking off into the stratosphere
and stepping blindly off the edge of a cliff.

Fifteen years ago in a small Manhattan apartment, Sorkin, an underemployed
actor whose closest thing to steady work was occasionally touring small
Southern towns with the Traveling Playhouse and who had never considered
writing anything other than ''a chore to be gotten through for some
class,'' fed a blank sheet into a friend's throbbing I.B.M. Selectric. Four
and a half pages later, he had a journalist named Shepherd throw down in
disgust the script he had been given by his actor friend Danny and launch
into a wordy speech about ''why you can't write about a bunch of actors in
the South playing poker on a hot summer night just because it really
happened.''

As he tapped out the dialogue, Sorkin, whose older sister and brother are
both lawyers like their father and who, growing up, always considered
himself the dumbest person in the room, says that he ''felt a phenomenal
confidence and a kind of joy that I had never experienced before in my life.''

Around that time, maybe a year later but it might as well have been the end
of the same night, Sorkin started experimenting with marijuana and cocaine.
Later, a friend instructed Sorkin how to cook cocaine powder with baking
soda and water, stick it in a pipe and smoke it. The result, he says, ''was
that I found a drug I absolutely love and that gave me a real break from a
certain nervous tension that I kind of carry with me moment to moment.''

Both writing and freebasing have proved devastatingly addictive to Sorkin,
and since those fateful nights, Sorkin has never stopped doing either for
very long.

It took Sorkin four and a half pages to find his voice and three plays to
find his commercial groove. His third play, ''A Few Good Men,'' whose
percussive courtroom exchange (''I want the truth.'' ''You can't handle the
truth.'') has left a stubborn ding in the culture, was bought for the
movies by the director Rob Reiner before it reached Broadway. Leftover bits
from ''The American President,'' the second script he wrote for Reiner,
became ''The West Wing,'' a show that won nine Emmys last year and attracts
upward of 20 million viewers a night. If Sorkin can keep it going for a
couple of more years, the series will earn him hundreds of millions dollars
in syndication fees. In the last three years, he has written every buffed
and burnished word of dialogue for 98 episodes of network television
(including ''West Wing'' and the critically praised, though short-lived,
''Sports Night''). It may well be some kind of record.

Through all of it, Sorkin has strained to maintain some kind of coherent
personal life. When he first moved to Los Angeles in 1993, he lived in the
Four Seasons Hotel, where he worked on the screenplay for ''The American
President.'' When his drug use became increasingly hard to manage, his
girlfriend, Julia Bingham, an entertainment lawyer he met through work,
helped him into rehab. Shortly after, they were married at the Four
Seasons, and less than a year ago had their first child, a girl they named
Roxy.

The drugs, however, never vanished from Sorkin's life, as was made clear
this spring when his $4 pipe was discovered in the X-ray machine at the
Burbank airport. For Sorkin, freebasing is as solitary a pursuit as
writing. He says that he never does drugs with friends and that he is most
vulnerable after completing a long stretch of work. When he was arrested,
he was on his way to Las Vegas, where he went every six weeks or so,
usually alone.

''Sometimes I like to go with friends,'' he says. ''But honestly, I just
like the feeling of being myself in a very crowded place with that kind of
energy.'' He would take about $2,000 in cash and play craps and blackjack.
''It wasn't Bruce Willis stakes. I'd play at the $50 table.''

He would leave on a Friday night and return the next morning. ''I kind of
have a hotel fetish,'' he says. ''I love walking into a new hotel room. But
then I realized every hotel room in Vegas is exactly the same, so after a
while, I just stayed at the Bellagio, which is the closest to the airport.''

Sorkin says that the most humiliating aspect of his arrest was that it
reinforced the exact sense of himself he has been trying to write away for
15 years. When he recalls the moments at the metal detector, his memories
have a compressed hyperreality, as if the metal detector hadn't just
detected the pipe but had also found him out.

''In my head, I was calm -- I wasn't shaken,'' he says. ''But my body had
completely lapped my brain. I was saying to myself: This is happening. This
has just happened, and now the important thing is not do anything stupid.
Don't lie. Don't bolt. Don't go, 'Oh, my God, how did that get there?' But
as I was saying this, this thing just started rising up from my feet. It's
difficult to describe. So I just started talking to myself in my head
louder. This is fine. Relax. The worst just happened, and you're still
here. So I was sort of talking to my legs, but it just kept rising up and
rising up to the extent that I had no choice but to lean against the metal
table. The last thing I remember was hearing one of the bag-search people
saying, 'Please don't lean against the table.'''

Then he fainted. The police picked him off the ground and put him in handcuffs.

Soon after his arrest, Sorkin and his wife separated. Since June, he has
been back where he started, alone in his room at the Four Seasons. ''It's
not the identical room,'' he says. ''But it's the identical room on a
different floor.''

When I ask him why he doesn't rent a house, he says that after a couple of
weeks he called a real-estate broker, who took him around to look at some
rentals. ''I looked at five,'' he says. ''They were all great, and I could
afford them. But I didn't want any of them. I'm just not ready.''

While Sorkin seems to derive a very similar kind of relief from writing
hyperarticulate dialogue and from inhaling crack, he keeps his two worlds
separate. That is not to say that he never writes about drugs. His
teleplays are sprinkled with roach clips and bong pipes, and all the
references are slyly appreciative. Five minutes into the ''West Wing''
pilot, a high-priced call girl, whom we will soon come to appreciate for
her intelligence and strength of character, greets the day by lighting up a
joint and saying: ''It's not like I'm a drug person. I just love pot.'' And
in one of the best bits in two years, Bartlet, after accidentally treating
his bad back with a Percodan and a Vicodin, meanders back into the Oval
Office and informs his assembled staff, ''I've been seriously thinking of
getting a dog.''

But the overwhelming thrust of ''West Wing,'' and of Sorkin's work in
general, has nothing do with the darkness so apparent in his life or what
he calls ''the whole black world of addiction.'' His show is a tour de
force of Hollywood professionalism. Every piece of dialogue is
spit-polished within an inch of its life. The story lines, worked over by a
roomful of Ivy League graduates, land softly with just that right little
narrative twist. The acting is gracefully understated, and the lighting and
direction are all far better than in most movies. With references to
Shakespeare and Graham Greene, visits to rare-book stores and oblique Latin
episode titles like ''Post Hoc Ergo Propter Hoc,'' the show is so achingly
high end that you almost expect the warning ''Quality Television'' to start
flashing below the picture.

The characters themselves are just as highly produced. From the pot-smoking
hooker who soon graduates from law school to President Bartlet with his
Nobel in economics, everyone is brilliant -- and they're even better
people. In an episode that won an Emmy last year, Toby, the communications
director, arranges a military honor guard funeral for a homeless war
veteran who happens to die in a coat the White House aide had given to
Goodwill, one act of kindness begetting another. But that is nothing
compared with what they will do for one another. When they huddle in
offices or convene in hallways, Josh looks at Sam, Toby looks at C.J. and
Leo looks at Josiah as if they are each other's newborns.

In fact, the only time they go slightly astray is when their Talmudic sense
of right and wrong is blinded by that awful failing: loyalty. When that
happens, they burn with shame, then march right back and apologize, and you
can tell by the lump in your throat as you watch that they will never,
ever, do it again.

It is well done, and someone has to do it, but why Sorkin? Why is this
twisted, second-generation Portnoy, who has apparently seen things in his
head that might have made William Burroughs wince, the one to be offering
America such a glittering lie about itself? It would be one thing if Sorkin
were indulging a private fascination with the corridors of power. But he
has never worked on a campaign or ever felt a desire to do so. Left to his
own devices, he would rather watch ''Sports Reporters'' than ''Crossfire.''

For Sorkin, subject matter is beside the point. When he started writing ''A
Few Good Men,'' with its trumpeting speeches about ''code reds'' and honor
and the hard choices facing battle-scarred men, he was a 26-year-old slouch
who had never spent a day in fatigues and who, at Scarsdale High School,
hung out in the drama club.

''Early on, like after 'A Few Good Men,' people were very surprised when
they met me,'' Sorkin says. ''Their assumption was that I was a 50-year-old
ex-marine who had decided to write about his experiences. And I didn't like
that. I understood what they were saying : 'Boy, you've done a great
imitation. You're a guy who has obviously spent a lot of time in theater
and read a lot of plays and has absorbed how to sort of craft a flashy
product with some snap and you can make drama happen. But it doesn't seem
to have anything to do with a guy who is living in New York and is about to
start a life of drugs and God knows what else and who had a strange first
18 years.'''

When I circle back, it becomes clear that the same question vexes Sorkin
himself. ''Yeah, I often wonder to myself why the things I write about are
pretty much disconnected from the things I think about,'' he says. ''I will
think about politics, but it's only because I enjoy writing about it so
much.'' Most of his real life, including all the time he has spent
''sitting alone in a room being high,'' as well as the ''other darker
things that I'm not going to talk about,'' don't come out on the page --
not because he willfully suppresses them but because he lacks the capacity
to express them. ''I can't connect with those things to the extent that I
can write about them,'' he says.

When I ask others involved in the show about this apparent gulf between
Sorkin's experience and his work, they quickly get defensive and object to
the media's radical-chic bias for vicarious darkness. ''Ooh, violence -- I
went to prep school but I'm down with that,'' mocks Bradley Whitford.
''Aaron is pushing the envelope of intelligence and hope, and that's so
much more radical than the envelope of violence and sex. A mobster going to
a shrink, that's not a fantasy?''

Thomas Schlamme, an executive producer of ''West Wing,'' wonders whether,
if Frank Capra were making movies now, he would have to endure the same
condescending assumptions that exploring the darkness in people is better
art than celebrating the good in them.

Sorkin protests far less. ''I'm telling you, I get the difference,'' he
says. ''I would love to throw myself into a project that is dark. I just
don't think I know how.''

The connection between his life and his work, to the extent there is one,
may in fact be inverse -- the bleaker his moods, the brighter and more
upbeat his scripts. From 1993 to 1995, when he was at the depth of his
addiction and would sometimes go six weeks before letting the maids at the
Four Seasons into his room, he wrote ''The American President,'' a White
House fairy tale that makes ''The West Wing'' seem like ''Notes From the
Underground.''

The week I visit Sorkin in Los Angeles, a fierce late-September sun pushes
the temperature into the mid-90's. Sorkin sits in his large, shades-drawn
office on the second floor of a low-slung, unmarked stucco building. The
vast, hushed studio lot has the feel of a military complex, with the guards
at the gate peering into every car. But the wariness around Building 146,
which houses the ''West Wing'' writers, is caused less by fear of
terrorists than by the bad press that has dogged the show all summer.

Much of it was brought on by Sorkin's arrest, but a good deal also came
from ex-writers of the show who claimed that even by the spotlight-hogging
standards of Hollywood, Sorkin has been exceptionally ungenerous in his
sharing of writing credit. ''You know when you go to your uncle's for
Thanksgiving and the kids are kept at one table,'' says a former staff
member. ''For the writers on 'West Wing,' every day is Thanksgiving.''

One of them, Rick Cleveland, was livid about not being able to make any
remarks at last year's Emmy ceremony at which an episode he wrote with
Sorkin (the one about the homeless war veteran) was honored. What made the
exclusion all the more galling to Cleveland was that the story was based on
his father, a Korean war veteran who spent the last years of his life on
the street.

Characteristically, Sorkin couldn't leave the matter alone. Immediately
after the dispute was reported in The New York Times, he trashed Cleveland
online in a ''West Wing'' chat room. (He habitually visits such Web sites
after a show airs.) In a signed tirade, he insisted that Cleveland's
contributions were so minor that he should have counted himself lucky to
have won an Emmy at all. But as Cleveland points out, the co-writing credit
was not offered by Sorkin but dictated by the Writer's Guild.

Sorkin's intense reluctance to share writing credit and his need to create
such uniformly positive characters seem to come from the same place. If the
reason that you are writing scripts in the first place is to undo the
terrible impression you believe others have of you, you would want to make
sure that people know exactly who wrote them. ''I don't want to analyze
myself or anything, but I think, in fact I know this to be true, that I
enter the world through what I write. I grew up believing, and continue to
believe, that I am a screw-up, that growing up with my family and friends,
I had nothing to offer in any conversation. But when I started writing,
suddenly there was something that I brought to the party that was at a
high-enough level.''

When I ask about the heinous crimes of his Scarsdale youth, they turn out
to be heartbreakingly minor. As a kid, he left his coat at the playground a
lot and his room was a mess. In high school, he got his diploma a few
months late because he didn't go to phys. ed. At Syracuse, where he
received a degree in theater, he once accumulated $237 in parking tickets.

Sorkin doesn't criticize his parents, at least not in my company, but it is
obvious that those misdemeanors were, at the time they were committed, held
up as evidence of much deeper failings. ''I used to think that I could
never be a writer because my childhood was just too normal,'' he says. ''I
realize now it wasn't normal at all.''

Sorkin grabs a Merit, sticks it between his lips, then throws it back on
the table without lighting it. ''In other words,'' he says, ''it isn't
enough for me to write something that people like. It's helpful for me
personally for people to get their sense of me from what I write. I think
the young men in my scripts have to be in some shape or form the husbands
and boyfriends that women want. I think the fathers have to be the fathers
that sons and daughters want. I think the bosses have to be the bosses
employees want. And believe me, I don't do this on a conscious level.''

Mainstream television, the sitcom particularly, has often served up
idealized surrogate families, but Sorkin's illusion is much more compulsive
and personal. He is singing for his supper every line.

Sorkin's insecurities influence the show in other fundamental ways. Unlike
''The Sopranos,'' which takes shape in the off-season when David Chase, the
hit show's creator, lays out the destinies of each of his major characters,
''West Wing'' is never plotted out for more than a few weeks ahead and has
no major story lines. With characters who have no flaws, it is impossible
to give them significant arcs, and so as engaging as ''West Wing'' is
minute to minute, it has no cumulative power. ''Aaron doesn't trust the
idea that he's writing a play in 23 acts,'' Schlamme says.

What limits it dramatically makes it all the more commercial. Because there
is no arc or any concern for sequence, a viewer can stumble onto the show
at any point in the season, or even in the middle of a show, and get
hooked. To Zucker, all this makes Sorkin more, not less, of a genius.
''Aaron makes you laugh,'' Zucker says when I talk to him in his office the
day after his visit to the set. ''He makes you cry. He makes you think. And
he makes you want to come back.''

As acclaimed and watched as ''West Wing'' is, it has spent its life in the
shadow of the far more critically acclaimed and fervently watched
''Sopranos.'' For those involved with the show, it has been a little like
being Patrick Ewing in the era of Michael Jordan. Kevin Falls says that
every Monday, staff writers spend a good part of the morning dissecting the
''Sopranos'' episode of the night before. And although Sorkin and others
have often praised their Emmy rival, there is no evidence on record that
the respect is mutual. ''The silence is deafening,'' Falls says.

Zucker is the only person I talk to associated with ''West Wing'' who isn't
the slightest bit defensive about the ''The Sopranos.'' ''You want me to
stoke the rivalry?'' Zucker says a week before the postponed Emmys are
canceled for the second time. ''I'll stoke it.''

For him, the difference between the shows is the difference between the
work of a bona fide pro and that of an inspired amateur. ''Look, Aaron
gives us 22 episodes a year, not 13, and he gives it to us at a schedule
that we set.'' (This is a reference to the creative delays that have pushed
back the next batch of ''Sopranos'' shows until at least next September.)
As much as Zucker might dread that call from the lawyer or the cops, it is
not nearly as scary as the one that could come from Sorkin's agent
informing him that Aaron just isn't feeling it at the moment and needs
another six months.

As Sorkin puts it himself in one of his less self-flagellating moments: ''I
never missed a day of work. I never missed a single meeting. The work has
won every award. So sometimes I'm not so sure how I let the whole world down.''

Sorkin's commercial instincts will be tested in the months ahead as ''West
Wing'' adapts to the changing political environment. For the first two
years of its life, the show's depiction of an executive branch truly
populated by the best and brightest was a balm to the millions of viewers
weary of the endless frustrations and scandals of the Clinton era. The
political operatives that Sorkin summoned from his imagination were so
smart and scrupulous and impassioned that they were irresistible in a
moment when real-life politics seemed trivial.

That moment, however, has passed, and it is not at all clear whether the
fantasy will be as alluring now that events have brought the actual White
House closer to the imagined one on ''West Wing.'' Washington is a serious,
meaningful place again. The week before I visited Sorkin in Los Angeles, he
told me over the phone that he is not certain the show will have to
permanently change. He has ''a sense that our perception will return to
normal'' and that the real government will ''go back to being annoying.''

Sorkin described to me the episode that they were about to film when the
terrorists struck. A foreign correspondent, deeply disappointed about being
reassigned to the White House, goes off with typically Sorkinian bombast
about about how ''with the Larry King-ization of everything from Monica to
Gary Condit to shark attacks, television has abandoned the notion of
reporting altogether. He talks about a mother taking her kids to school in
Bosnia, and the implication is that real news is something that happens
somewhere else, not here.'' Sorkin pauses. ''Well, now Bosnia has come to
our front yard.''

Still, after shoehorning in that one episode, Sorkin is not planning on
overhauling the formula for ''West Wing.'' Zucker would not want him to.
The NBC executive slipped Sorkin that $10 million tip because he knows that
Sorkin is the real deal, a Hollywood money-minting freak of nature.
Marines, sports reporters, White House staffers, small pet veterinarians,
you could pick the subject of his next workplace drama with a ouija board
and Sorkin will churn out 22 episodes a year that will make you laugh and
make you cry and make you want to come back. And he will do it year after
year until the billion-dollar residual check is in the mail. Not because he
wants to, but because he can't help himself.

Peter de Jonge is a regular contributor to the magazine. His last article
was about the arrival of television in Bhutan.