American Dream Machine

by Specktor, Matthew

  “What’s wrong?” He plunked a plate of eggs down in front of me. “You look sad, Nate.”

  I shrugged. “I’m nostalgic.”

  “Dude.” He laughed, collapsed into the chair opposite mine and began to attack his breakfast with wolfish energy. He ate like our father, at least. “It’s a little soon for that, isn’t it?”

  “Maybe.” The air hung still with the smell of browned butter. Outside the day was clear and palmy. And we had nothing to fill it with except our twenty-three-year-olds’ dreams. “Maybe it is.”

  He shrugged. He always seemed to carry his burdens a little more easily than I did. Even then he wore a certainty neither Little Will nor I could match. Long before he became a famous novelist—if that’s fame, because as our father went on to joke, If you’re so famous, Severin, how come I’ve never heard of you?—even before he won the National Book Critics Circle Award in ’99 and a MacArthur grant after that, he seemed to have it all together. But he wasn’t anything special back then, just another punk with Hollywood in his veins, another struggling screenwriter who worked all day in a video store. In his smoggy horn-rimmed glasses, shorts and horizontally striped T-shirt, one of those thrift shop Hang Ten Muppet numbers, he looked like he’d barely made it out of junior high.

  “Yo.” Williams swaggered in, still shirtless, slapping his chest.

  “Dude, put that thing away.” Sev shoved his plate back, slurped his coffee. “I don’t need to see it any more than I already have.”

  Will shoved his hand into his boxers and adjusted, then laughed. His gaze was a little veiny, now that he’d baked himself properly. He grabbed a carton of milk from the fridge and guzzled.

  “You should talk,” he gasped, finally. “You were the one making all that noise.”

  He mopped his mouth with his forearm, then stepped to the stove and plated up. We had no shame, it seems to me now. Or we were all shame, the way boys are. Humiliation was our currency. Williams sat down next to Severin. He looked at me, chewing, eggs flecking the corners of his mouth.

  “What’s with you?”

  What was with me? I was the dreamy one, where they were the Hollywood heirs. Already I was full of regret. I had my mother’s last name, Myer. I’d been through my entire childhood without knowing my dad at all, but Sev grew up in his house. I found I missed him. God knows why. You really wanna be Beau’s kid, Nate? Severin used to ask me, straight up. D’you really know what he’s like?

  Perhaps I didn’t, but I could imagine. I could imagine him even now, in that gruff, almost Tourettic way of his, throwing his arm around my shoulder, barking in my ear as he did all the time now that I had the mixed fortune of being acknowledged. It’s all shit, it’s all bullshit, this business. Nobody knows anything. This last phrase was William Goldman’s famous folk wisdom about Hollywood. No one knows anything. Only Beau could embody that knowledge and surpass it at the same time.

  “Aw shit, man.” Little Will was laughing now. My two friends, brothers, whatever they were, were having an argument. “Don’t start in on Richard Burton.”

  “Go ahead.” Sev tilted his chin forward, gave Will a haughty, goading look. “Show me what you’ve got.”

  Funny that none of us were actors. Especially Williams, who had not just the looks but the tragic penumbra, the half-doomed quality, of one. Like Burton.

  “Julius Limbani is alive!” He shook his lustrous brown hair back. It fell below his collarbone. I could smell the bong on his breath.

  “Not quite.” Sev snorted. “Lock your teeth, and pretend you’re holding a cat turd on your tongue.”

  They were mimicking, quoting The Wild Geese, a crappy action movie from 1978. It seemed we were always quoting something, memorizing our lines from The Long Goodbye or California Split.

  “Let’s go watch it again,” Sev said. “We’ll swing by the store and grab it.”

  “No, no,” I said. “Let’s watch The Big Sleep.”

  “Again?”

  This was us, before the shit hit the fan. And after all the massive losses and small gains that preceded us, long after our fathers, Beau Rosenwald and Williams Farquarsen III, had built and demolished their partnership. The elder Will was dead, under circumstances that were still a little hard to explain, and Beau had reinvented himself as a producer, again. There was no end to their story yet. Nor to ours.

  “Come on. Nate’ll drive.” Sev yanked me up by the collar. Things were about to get crazy. “He’s clean.”

  “Yeah, I’m clean.” I whiffed Will’s resinous neck. “But we might have to stuff stoner boy here in the trunk.”

  “I can’t find my pants!”

  “Where’d Emily go?”

  “She left.”

  “Nah, she came back in and fell asleep, upstairs. She couldn’t find her keys.”

  Back then it didn’t even matter which of us spoke. We weren’t completing each other’s thoughts so much as having them together.

  “Leave ’er.” Severin said, in his best hard-boiled voice.

  “Leave ’er,” Williams repeated, with a shrill, mimicking laugh, the hysterical bray of a psychotic henchman in a movie. Everything is everything. That’s what I’m trying to tell you. Everything is everything.

  “Let’s go!” We grabbed pants and socks and tennis shoes, wallets and belts and glasses. Will took his bong off the glass table in that strangely denuded living room. We left something too, because you always do, some residue of ourselves brooding over that girl, Emily White, upstairs in a stranger’s bed. The room held no sense of habitation: there were no photographs or paintings or books. Just the hungover haze of our energetic debauch. Through the windows I could see the blue towers of Century City, Beverly Hills’ putty-colored plazas, those places where men with millions came to waste their money, and where our fathers’ story, too, began.

  “Nate, dude, come on!” Sev’s voice drifted from outside. “Let’s bail!”

  Outside, Williams’s opal-green Fiat exploded to life. Its ailing engine had no muffler, and the stereo played Black Flag, grainy LA hardcore like the puny violence of bees.

  “Come on, man! Vidiots opens at ten!”

  I reeled into the driveway, shoved slack, stoned Will into the passenger seat, then toppled into the back. We were making a getaway, under all those laurels and cypresses, the otherwise-quiet of this house in the hills. I threw the car into gear. And we roared off, laughing, leaving this house with its doors still flung open, wafting its scents of eggs and stale fish and sex, as if from this place—this pale chamber—we had all just been born.

  II

  “ROSENWALD”!

  “Excuse me?” The receptionist blinked up, staring. Staring and staring. “May I help you?”

  In 1962, our father walked into an office on Bedford Drive. He was so young then. He didn’t even know his favorite show business joke yet, the one about the five stages of an actor’s career. He knew nothing.

  “Sir?” The receptionist looked at him, her black hair swept into a truncated beehive, eyelashes too long. She looked like a brunette Tippi Hedren.

  “I’m Beau Rosenwald.” He swung his arms, in a suit that was too warm and too tight. As any suit might’ve been, for a man who weighed 285 pounds. “I’m here to see Sam Smiligan.”

  “He’s not in.” A chilly smile. “Might I know what this is regarding?”

  “Abe sent me.”

  “Abe?”

  “Yes. Abe Waxmorton. From New York.”

  “I see.” Another tight smile, which he was green enough to take for hospitality. “I’ll let Mr. Smiligan know when he returns.”

  He must’ve seemed like such a rube! She would never have behaved this way otherwise. He went over to the far end of the reception area and sat down. These were the West Coast offices of what had been minted in 1897 as the American Amusement Corporation and grown into a vaudeville empire. In the teens, Abe Waxmorton’s father had led the industry-wide fight against a controlling monopoly of theater barons.
/>   “Talented Artists, how may I direct your call?” The receptionist sat with her Kewpie-blue eyes, her stiff hair and unaltering expression, the muted black-and-white check of her skirt and jacket making her subtle, like op art. In the dark marble tomb of the reception area, she was the only thing that moved on this Monday morning. Her hands flew as she routed calls through an old-fashioned switchboard. “One moment please.”

  Beau could hear the labored weight of his own breathing. He sat on a black leather stool beside a glass coffee table laden with newspapers and pristine ashtrays. To his left a smoke-tinted window disclosed the green and palmy panorama of a street whose stillness unnerved him.

  Until this morning, he’d never been any farther west than Jersey.

  “I beg your pardon?” the receptionist chirped. “We do receive mail for Mr. Peck, yes. One-two-four Bedford Drive.”

  Inside, the building hummed with activity, the murmurous commercial sound of a train station. At long last, Beau stood up.

  “Excuse me.” He approached after a thirty-minute exile. “Has Mr. Smiligan returned?”

  The girl stared at her hands. “No sir.”

  “Do you expect him? A—Mr. Waxmorton was sure he’d see me.”

  He’d removed his jacket. He was five eight, and at the peak of his girth, and his powers, he would tip three hundred pounds. This morning, he was hapless in his heavy gray pants, white sleeves rolled, perspiration stains spreading under his armpits. His hair was mussed and the short brown curls, unruly even at this length, plastered his forehead. That face! The receptionist patched a plug with an agitation close to fury, punching the cord home like a dagger.

  “Hi, Sarah, there’s a Mr.—”

  “Rosenwald.” He cleared his throat.

  “Rosenwald. Waiting here to see Mr. Smiligan. He says Mr. Waxmorton sent him. Yes.”

  She nodded back at the waiting area. “Someone will be out.”

  If she had looked closely, she might have noticed his shoes. They were Church’s brogues—English, expensive—and anyone here who saw them would have recognized Waxmorton’s hand. A man is judged by his persistence, his substance, and his shoes. Waxmorton had offered Beau the same lecture he did everyone who came to work for the company. An agent must possess the first. With any luck, he possesses the second. But the third! This business forgives eccentricity...

  From here he would taper off, as if there were many things “this business” might tolerate, but poor haberdashery was not one. The job was to know where the restaurants were, to understand hotels. It involved an accumulation of secondhand knowledge, circulation of gossip that became, if repeated long enough, true. Jack Lemmon is hot. Fox is going to offer Kim Novak a three-picture deal. Agents were simply almanacs with energy, aggregations of rumor that flew into truth.

  “Would you like to go to the pictures?” Beau’s voice echoed across the lobby.

  “Pardon?”

  He was sunk into the black leather couch, by the table with its issues of Daily Variety and The Hollywood Reporter, fanned out in their respective green and red like decks of cards. A bowl of fruit—oranges, grapes, and bananas—sat in the middle. Like the receptionist, it was really just for show.

  “Would you go to a picture with me?” He leaned forward and snapped off one of the bananas and peeled it. “The movies. I understand they make them out here.”

  He took down half the banana with one bite.

  “You aren’t supposed to eat those.”

  He sat with the fantastic solidity of a toad. You could imagine his stillness lasting for days. He wolfed the second half of the banana and snapped off another, then sauntered back over to the counter where she sat behind a lip of cold marble.

  “Will you go to the pictures with me?”

  “Sir, I—I don’t know you.”

  “Yes, you do. Everybody knows me.” He smiled. “At least, they never forget me.”

  She stared. He had a tuberous face, lips damp and pursed like a trumpeter’s, one eye slightly lower than the other like a disappointed hound’s.

  “I’m sorry,” she stammered, “but I’m engaged.”

  “Your fellow doesn’t buy you a ring?”

  He leaned over her desk. Beyond confidence, he had confidentiality. He said hello like he was telling you a great secret. He glanced out the window and then, very casually, peeled and demolished his second banana.

  “What’s your name?”

  “Trix.”

  “What’s your real name?”

  “Carol.”

  “Carol what?” He set the peel down on the edge of her desk.

  “Metzger.” She blushed.

  “Nice Jewish girl.” He smiled. “How come they call you the other? Is it a stage name?”

  He could never be handsome but look at anything long enough—a street lamp—and it establishes dominion, a quiddity: it becomes itself.

  “It’s just a nickname.”

  “How’d you get it?”

  You didn’t have to be handsome when you were the last man standing.

  “Mr. Rosenwald!”

  He turned. Waxy strands clung to his fingers, his lips. Sam Smiligan stood by the glass doors, dry and immaculate in his navy blue suit. He was small and walnut-colored and, from the looks of it, completely humorless. His fingers folded over to touch his palms in a gesture less hostile, more dapper than a fist. There were intimations of gold, a discreet glow along the cuffs.

  “You’re the one?” Sam removed his glasses. The room rang with his incredulity. “You’re Abe’s boy?”

  Beau Rosenwald never graduated from college. His education consisted of one man, one book, one thing. The day he left high school he answered an ad in the Herald Tribune about a mailboy position. Told the agency only hired university graduates, he went and enrolled in Queens College, then came back after three years of academic futility, when at last he paid someone off for the degree and the transcript. Thus, every morning of July 1955 began the same way.

  “I’d like to see Mr. Waxmorton.”

  “Mr. Waxmorton is busy, sir.”

  “Really?” Beau nodded. “I’m here since eight o’clock and I haven’t seen him come in.”

  The Talented Artists Group offices in New York were different from the ones in LA. They were humid and ugly, with low ceilings, corrugated acoustic panels, parquet floors. Ficus plants swooned in the corners. The male agents were shrewd, the girls spoke Beau’s language. Their accents were Jackson Heights, Astoria Boulevard. This receptionist had a nose like a flight of stairs. Beau could imagine her writhing in the back of a Bonneville, just how many times her legs might snap shut before she gave it up.

  “Listen, sweetheart.” He leaned over and murmured. “I’ll keep coming back. You want to look at this face every day?”

  Eventually, he won his audience. Abe Waxmorton was the son of the company’s founder. He’d had his start, long ago, in vaudeville. He’d fought the company back from bankruptcy twice, most recently in 1934 when the studios had put the squeeze on talent in an effort to recoup the higher costs of producing talkies during the Depression. That year, in which the combined force of Roosevelt’s National Industrial Recovery Act and the talent’s decision to unionize had almost decimated the business, Waxmorton sent his lieutenant Sam Smiligan to open an office on the West Coast. He was old enough to remember when apartment buildings hung signs that read NO BLACKS, NO ACTORS, NO DOGS, old enough never to drink tomato juice, so-called “clients’ blood,” in public. To Beau, he seemed monumental.

  “You have any experience?”

  “No sir. I see a lot of movies.”

  “A lot?” Waxmorton tutted. “You should see them all.”

  He was fifty-five, old as the century, with the battered face—squashed nose and cut expression—of a pugilist. His silver hair was shot through with black strands, and he cupped a mandarin orange between his palms. He didn’t peel it, merely rotated it between his fingertips as he leaned back in his chair.

 
“Education?”

  “Queens College.” Beau had the purchased diploma in his pocket.

  “What else? What makes you special, besides your good looks?”

  Outside, on Fifty-Third Street, a light snow fell. Waxmorton set the orange down and inhaled his citrus-kissed nails. Through his window the sky was a lithographic, late-afternoon gray.

  “What does your father do?”

  “He makes shoes.”

  “Shoes!” Waxmorton shook his head. “Ask him to make you a better pair.”

  What was it? Was it the hardness, the hatred in Beau’s eyes when he spoke of his father? Herman Rosenwald was a world-class son of a bitch, to hear Beau tell it: an angry widower with a heart as tight as a clamshell. But maybe Abe Waxmorton just liked my father’s energy. Maybe he just needed a buffoon.

  “Come tomorrow. You’ll start in the mailroom, like everybody else.”

  “I’ll start today.”

  “Not in those clothes.”

  Not in those clothes. Abe taught him to think like an agent, act like one, dress, like an undertaker or a G-man, too, in dark, solid colors. Abe’s office walls showed photographs with Greta Garbo, James Cagney, Olivia de Havilland; in the corner was a bat—the bat—Ted Williams had used to bring his batting average to .406 on the last day of the 1941 season. Beau worked in the mailroom, then was promoted to handle the great man’s desk. Then, for slightly longer than was good for him, he became something else. Abe’s driver, or his attaché. Technically, the job didn’t have a name. He was Waxmorton’s shadow, his advisor: he did everything short of wipe the man’s ass. Walked his dogs, measured his golf handicap, squired his wife, sitting in Flora Waxmorton’s kitchen in North Fork, where she made him inedible tuna sandwiches. For three years he did this. This was the education he’d had, and it was enough. One day he came in and his own office, the little nook adjacent to his master’s, stood empty.

  “Go.”

  “What?” Beau turned. Waxmorton hunched in the doorway, staring with eyes gone bulbous, accusatory.