American Dream Machine

by Specktor, Matthew

  “You need to go to Los Angeles.”

  “Los Angeles?” Beau was close enough now to be peevish. “What the hell for?”

  Beyond tan carpets and walnut trim, the only things left in the room were books. Shelves of them, belonging to Waxmorton. Beau’s boss was an enthusiastic autodidact, and many of these leathery volumes were written by people the agent actually knew. Eugene O’Neill, Tennessee Williams.

  “There’s nothing in Los Angeles. You said so yourself, it’s all desert and horse piss and guys with sixth-grade educations.”

  Waxmorton turned his palms up. “You want to keep shuttling me out to North Fork every day?”

  “You’re firing me?”

  “Your clients will fire you. Your friends will stab you in the back. The sooner you get used to that the better.”

  Beau was twenty-eight, an indifferent student all his life; he’d needed to repeat second grade. Waxmorton was all the finishing school he’d had.

  “Will you back me?”

  “Am I your mother?”

  He’d waited for this moment all his life, and still it had the force of a betrayal. Beau’s boss appeared to understand this as he shuffled over to one of the shelves and took down a leather-bound volume.

  “What’s this?” Beau turned it in his hands. Coriolanus.

  “It’s a play.”

  “I know that. Is it for a client?”

  Waxmorton shook his head. Those half-moon eyes peering over the tops of his glasses.

  “You read much history, Beau?”

  “Not much,” Beau smiled. “No.”

  “The story of one bloodbath can prepare you for the next.”

  Often enough, Beau had sat in this office and stared at the spines of Waxmorton’s books. The History of the Decline and Fall of the Roman Empire. Who read such a thing? Edward Gibbon’s name merged in his mind with an adjective he didn’t know the meaning of either, gibbous. A pet word. Good morning, Darlene. He’d sway over the receptionist’s desk. You’re looking gibbous today. Odd that Severin and I turned out the way we did; Beau’s own verbal gifts were strictly for patter.

  “Control the talent.” Waxmorton shuffled forward to shake his hand. “You want to know how to get ahead? Control the talent, you’ll bring the studio to its knees.”

  Beau had read the play twice on the plane. Now it rattled around his otherwise empty briefcase as he chugged down the hall after Sam.

  “Will I, uh—will I have an office?”

  “Unless you’d prefer a stall.”

  In the air, on a red-eye flight, he’d scoured the bloody story of a Roman general for clues. But the play had provided no answer to what he should do now. He followed Sam Smiligan past a long row of secretaries. Pretty girls from Chatsworth and Loma Linda and Beverly Hills. Occasional among them was a man, whose white shirt and whipped expression signified a trainee.

  “Here,” Sam snapped.

  They’d stopped before a corner room, as dark and shabby as a janitor’s closet. Its blinds were drawn and its desk was dusty and there was nothing else inside it but an enormous circular Rolodex and a phone.

  “You were expecting grander accommodation?” Sam lifted one eyebrow, his tone an ocean of sarcasm.

  Behind them the air filled with the brittle chatter of typewriter keys and the cascading half harmony of female voices. Edwegaben-martadigian’s office?

  “Do I get a girl?”

  “Do you need one?”

  Sam Smiligan had unfurled his fingers but once, briefly, to shake hands. There was something about him that resembled a gingerbread cookie: an easel-like splaying of his legs, a neatness that suggested he might never eat, or shave, or defecate. He had the precision of a minor general.

  “Why don’t you concentrate on making the phone ring first,” Sam said. “Then we’ll get you someone to answer it.”

  Beau stared at the Rolodex. There were at least a thousand cards inside it, and every last one of them was blank.

  “At least you know how to drive, Mr. Rosenwald.” Another punctilious smile. “That’s one thing you won’t have to figure out.”

  The two men glared. It took my father ten minutes to make his first enemy. Here too, he was ahead of the curve. Then Beau bent down and picked up his briefcase. He disappeared into the empty room, the leather-bound volume banging audibly as he walked.

  III

  HIS FIRST CLIENT was an actor. Even before he met Will’s dad, the man who would teach him so much about the game—how to negotiate, how to woo, how to close—it turned out Beau had a knack for it, for the long-form seduction it often took to represent someone. The trick was to find men as desperate as you were and when, like Beau, you’d been desperate since infancy, they were easy enough to recognize. He scoured episodic television, watched Wagon Train and Perry Mason, watched Alfred Hitchcock Presents and later Burke’s Law and I Spy. He hung around outside the open calls, sweet-talked his way onto the Universal lot and into the various production offices.

  “Hey, Bryce!”

  “Huh?” A skinny and kinetic man, lithe as an eel, was leaving one of these when Beau cornered him. He was handsome, but not distractingly so. “Who’re you?”

  “Beau Rosenwald. Talented Artists Group. I’ve seen everything you’ve done and I love your work.”

  “Everything?” The man’s eyes were a little too close together. His teeth were faintly rodentine, and his face telegraphed an anxious skepticism, like he was scanning the horizon against an imminent calamity. Still, handsome. Authentic. “You must have good vision, because I’m never up there for very long.”

  “That’s your agent’s fault.” They stood on the steps of the Wagon Train office, in the patch of shadow thrown by one of the hangarlike soundstages.

  “I don’t have an agent.” Bryce pushed his hand through coarse blond hair. “Mine just fired me, said I’m too difficult to cast.”

  Beau smiled. “You know the five stages of an actor’s career? It starts out with Who’s Bryce Beller? Then, Get me Bryce Beller. Eventually, Get me a young Bryce Beller. And then, Get me a Beller type. Then—”

  “Who’s Bryce Beller?” The actor snickered. “I like that joke.”

  Beau had done his work. Bryce was twenty-two when my father first saw him onstage doing Sweet Bird of Youth in New York. Now Bryce shook his head, astonished to discover a short, fat fan in the industry.

  “That Hitchcock you did where you scared the old lady with the squirrel? Fantastic!”

  Bryce cracked a smile that lit up half his face. “You really have seen it all, haven’t you?”

  This was how it started. The effort to move Beller out of bit parts and into features. The campaign to make him first a working actor, later a star. There was something unnerving about Bryce—he projected instability, discomfort on-screen—but the same could be said of Warren Oates and Harry Dean Stanton. Half the men Beau knew looked like future stars, or small-town mechanics. He signed Tim Zinnemann, a director; he signed Strother Martin, and then another actor named Walter Tepper. Beau built himself into the rank and file, expending nothing but time and nonsense and shoe leather. Around him were the foot soldiers of the motion picture department at Talented Artists. Ned Bondie, Peter Katzman. A man named Teddy Sanders, wise as an owl behind rimless glasses. New York had a lawyer named Williams Farquarsen III, a Princeton-educated sharpie everyone was afraid of for some reason. But all of them had style, each man had a rap. Told Red Buttons was too short, Fast Marty Bauman sold him by seating the actor on a stack of phone books while they had lunch with a director. When a client died in the middle of negotiations, Teddy Sanders had the skills to convince the studio to pay for his funeral—and offer the widow an annuity.

  I remember those offices just as they were a few years later, a warren of rooms all beige and clubby, tucked discreetly away from the street. Desk lamps glowing, cigarettes smoldering, posters signed by Billy Wilder, by Rex Harrison. Beau Rosenwald spent hour after hour at his desk, with his leg elevated
like a patient in traction and the phone crooked to his ear.

  “Listen you little shit, just make the offer. My client is there for forty-eight hours. After that, get someone else to wear the fucking horse costume and shovel up Connery’s leftovers!”

  Even at his most profane, it was impossible not to love him. He ripped up an executive’s Rolodex card and sent it to him in the mail. The man sent back flowers and an apology. Beau had one skill: negotiation. The way he fell still and listened, also, his face gone grave as a statue’s as he sat there on the phone.

  “Beau?” His secretary, now that he had one, peered in. “Lew Wasserman on line one?”

  Smoke from a Pall Mall clustered, cirrus-like, around his head. He shifted the receiver and gave the barest of smiles.

  “Better act fast, Sy. Beller’s got another picture he’d like to do.”

  IV

  “LOOK AT THAT CHICK!”

  How thrilling it must’ve been for him! The fat kid from Queens, loosed into a world like this one. Can you blame me for wanting to crowd in before my time, for wanting to jam into a booth at Dominic’s, at the Factory or the Haunted House, next to Beau and Bryce and Nicholson and Bob Skoblow, the man who’d booked the Beatles onto Ed Sullivan? It was Skoblow who nudged Beau now, pointing across.

  “Where? Skobs, I don’t see any—ooh.” He spotted her. “Nice.”

  The girl had blonde hair peeking out from under a fur-trimmed Santa hat, a zebra-striped mini, and a top so tiny you could make out her nipples, stiff in the room’s Arctic, air-conditioned freeze.

  “I can see her cooze,” Nicholson leered. “When she walks by, drop your cigarettes.”

  It was Christmas, 1965. There was fake snow all across the floor, gold and silver tinsel trimming the bar.

  “Get her over here.”

  “You do it, Skobs.” Beau said. “Tell her you know Paul McCartney.”

  They were all equals, then. Nicholson was doing Corman movies, and some thought Bryce had the greater chance of becoming a star. Beau sat between these two, in the middle of the booth. With his arms splayed out atop the banquette, he looked like a king. He’d learned how to dress and was carrying an umbrella. It was a conversation starter, nothing else. In the two and a half years since he’d moved here, he could count the days of rain.

  Bryce snapped his fingers. “I’ll go.”

  “You?” Nicholson snickered. “Brycie, the last woman you pulled was your mom, and she’s still not over it.”

  Bryce sat on the booth’s edge. He had a long, almost equine face, that caged intensity that still made him hard to cast. But he was coming along. He’d done a few Corman movies now too, was making that step between B movies and the mainstream. The two actors were on parallel tracks: for a moment it was possible even to confuse them.

  “Just watch me, Jack.”

  He crossed the room on spindly legs, moving with a restless syncopation. He talked to the girl for a moment, then came back.

  “She’s coming over.” A smile cracked his knifelike profile. He was dressed tonight like a ranch hand, in a denim jacket. “She wants to talk to the fat man.”

  Beau sat with his umbrella atop the table, clutching it against his belly like a bar on a roller coaster.

  “We’re doing Pontevecchio,” Bryce added.

  “Again?” Beau’s face assumed a grave, faintly injured expression. The most European he could manage. “We’ve worked this one too many times.”

  Skoblow went to the bar, where he stopped and talked to a cherubic kid with a pageboy, a buckskin fringe. His own hair was dark and kinked out into short but unruly curls. His face was wry, sly, Jewish. He nodded vigorously, scratched below his black turtleneck. The girl approached and Bryce took her fingers by their tips.

  “Allow me to present my friend . . . ” Bryce spoke and Beau feigned total opacity, cocking his head like a bewildered dog. “Carlo Pontevecchio.”

  “Pontevecchio?”

  “Yes,” Bryce said. “The filmmaker.”

  Beau took her fingers and pressed them between his thumb and palm, briefly.

  “I . . .” the girl hesitated. “I’m afraid I don’t...”

  “You’ve never heard of Carlo Pontevecchio? You don’t know his work?”

  She shook her head as Bryce mimed amazement. Nicholson had joined Skoblow at the bar. It was more fun to watch this trick from a distance.

  “So are you, uh, making movies in America now?” The girl cleared her throat. “Will you shoot films in English?”

  She wasn’t as pretty up close. They never were, quite. She had one of those farm-girl complexions, a milky iridescence in the siren-red light of the bar. A band was setting up in the room’s far corner.

  “Where you from, honey?” Bryce cut in, while Beau held that expression of soulful idiocy. He hadn’t yet breathed a syllable. “Ohio?”

  “I’m from Bloomington, Indiana.”

  “I knew it! I’m from Illinois.” Bryce leaned in confidentially. “Mr. Pontevecchio doesn’t know Idaho from Iowa. But he’s a very important filmmaker, and I’m going to be in his next picture.”

  “Really? I knew it, too! I saw you guys sitting over here and I knew one of you was somebody!”

  Her flaws might’ve been invisible anywhere else. Her eyebrows were slightly crooked, forehead a little too long. Everything else was right: the cheekbones, the smile.

  Bryce slid a hand around her shoulders. “Are you an actress? You look like an actress.”

  Her head bobbed up and down. “How did you know?”

  “Strasberg thinks this man is one of the most talented filmmakers in the world. He said to me, Bryce, the two directors you most want to work with in your lifetime are Kazan and Carlo Pontevecchio.”

  “Why haven’t I heard of him?”

  Across the room, the band plugged in, eliciting little burps of feedback as live cords met amps. The buckskin kid Skobs had talked to at the bar was now up there among them, dragging his cord free of his feet and coiling it behind him like a lariat.

  “I don’t know. His last movie, Olio e aglio, won the, uh, Golden Gondola at Venice last year. I’m honored just to sit at his side.”

  “Wow.”

  The girl was hooked, with Beau having said nary a word. He leaned into her now, placing his manicured hand on her leg.

  “Signora,” he screwed his lips into a would-be Italianate scowl, which came out closer to Hitchcock’s pout. “My Angliss is not so good—”

  The accent was disastrous, but who noticed? Not when there was such genuine need beneath it.

  “I wonder if you might dance with me?”

  “Dance?” She stared as if wondering whether Beau would be physically capable of such a thing. “I, uh, sure.”

  A pasty-looking kid stepped onto the stage in the corner. He brushed long hair from his face and spoke into the mic.

  “Ladies and gentlemen—the Byrds!”

  The band began and Beau launched into a series of preposterous arabesques with the umbrella, spinning around the room with the girl, dragging her along with his free hand.

  “What were you doing?” At last they’d stopped, panting, on the edge of the floor, after two minutes of circus ballet that made even the band laugh. The guitarist snapped a string. “What was that?”

  Beau gasped. “I’m a talent agent, honey.”

  “Huh?”

  Onstage, Gene Clark fiddled with his Gretsch, grimacing merrily at the distraction that had just taken place. Beau led the girl around the bar, away from the rattle and the twang and the feedback, where she might more easily hear him.

  “I’m not a director.” He spoke with his regular accent now too, the bluff touch of Queens that had mostly been sanded off, rounding itself toward something else: the Universal Judaica of Hollywood. “I’m a talent agent.”

  “God.” She looked off toward the stage, away from him. They were over behind the pay phones. “God.”

  “No, wait.” He put his hand on her wrist. “I
’m really sorry.”

  “Don’t touch me.”

  “Wait.”

  He kept his hand where it was. There was ash on his cuff, a few sickly black crumbs—somehow—of her mascara. His fingernails were trimmed; he wore a Patek Philippe watch. Among his friends, he was suddenly the most elegant. His Devon cream shirt had subtle pink stripes.

  “What do you want for Christmas?”

  “What?” The girl stared. Her face sharpened into perfect prettiness: there is nothing like scorn to render feminine beauty. “Now you’re fucking Santa Claus?”

  “I could be.”

  She swept off her fur-trimmed hat. Strands of hair clung to skin that was flushed, damp. The exertion had enlivened her, overturned a certain doll-like quality. She was Cynthia, from Indiana. Her pulse fluttered as Beau gripped her wrist.

  “Don’t pull that Lana Turner at Schwab’s shit,” she said.

  “I’m not. I’m just asking, what do you want?” He nodded. “It’s a simple question.”

  He held the umbrella now slack, point upward. He stood like an exhausted commuter.

  “I want not to be serving drinks to jerks at Ciro’s.” She yanked off her hat and tossed it toward the bar. “That’s one thing.”

  “Of course. What else?”

  “To go home and see my parents.”

  “Really? You wouldn’t rather show them how beautiful it is out here?”

  “You say it’s beautiful. I think it’s lonely.”

  “I think it’s lonely too.”

  She sneered. You should, fat man.

  “I do. Even I miss my parents, this time of year, and my dad used to beat me.” He spoke plainly. There was nothing demonstrative in this admission, no bid for pity. “I’d like to go home.”

  “So why don’t you?”

  He jammed his hands now in his pockets. The way he looked at her, you’d think he’d never seen a girl this pretty. Even if he did every day, his amazement was genuine.

  “This place compels me.”

  The floor was sticky beneath that fake snow, scattered around their feet like powdered slush; the bar’s tinsel waved gaily in the air-conditioned breeze. The band’s guitars sparkled and chimed as they launched into Bob Dylan’s “Spanish Harlem Incident.”