American Dream Machine (12 page)

“You’re shittin’ me.”

“Nope.” On the other side of the door, Bryce whooped. “Get dressed.”

Beau hustled along the hall, into the downstairs bedroom where he kept his clothes. It was too dingy to sleep down here, all the furniture draped with sheets, but it would do for possessions.

“What does Davis want with us?”

“
The Dog’s Tail
.” Bryce’s voice drifted from upstairs. Beau heard the jangle of his keys. “He wants to do our movie, my friend!”

“Bullshit!”

Beau scrambled into agent-wear, clothes he hadn’t had much occasion for lately, but they still fit if he inhaled and you were stoned. Davis DeLong had bigger fish to fry. He had to.

“What makes you think Davis would touch a picture like this?” Beau clomped up the stairs now. “We don’t have anything to give him. May as well go after Steve McQueen.”

“Pessimist,” Bryce sneered as he emerged into the living room. Beau did a double take at the sight of his friend in a tie. “We have poetry.”

“Poetry.” Beau exhaled. Their lives up here on the second story of this house that was built down along a low bluff that sloped to the sand: these were poetry, too. “Davis gets seven-fifty a picture.”

“Davis has a chance to work with us.”

“
OK
.” Beau smiled. “That’ll tip the scales, I’m sure.”

Bryce’s paisley tie triangled his chest like a penguin’s underbelly. He wore an untucked denim shirt and sandals. Still, a tie. The sun was beginning to go down outside, the tide rolling in all the way under the house.

“Where are we going?”

“The Luau. We’re due in forty-five minutes.”

“Davis’ll be late. How’d you get the meeting?”

“Jack made it happen.” Bryce led them toward the door. “I’ll tell you, we don’t even need a script if Davis wants to do it.”

Lassitude. Reverie
. “Poetry,” Beau guessed, was another word for it, but wasn’t the key to their movie tedium?
The Dog’s Tail
took its name from something Nicholson had overheard at a party. It was meant as a descriptive, applicable to anything from women to vacations.
It’s the dog’s tail
, they might say of a bad booth at Dan Tana’s, the girl who crawled under your table at last call. It wasn’t always bad: the dog’s tail could be what you secretly yearned for, the life lesson you needed like a small loss at roulette. The dog’s tail, Beller reasoned, was existence itself, which was why this movie had to be made. The story, which Beau, Bryce, and Jack had cooked up over a 4:00
AM
breakfast, about two brothers being pursued around the country by an assassin. They had everything but motive, but it didn’t really matter. The movie had begun as an inside joke, one of those flashes of “inspiration” you had at that hour. Bryce, though, wouldn’t let it go. He’d dug into his own pocket to hire a kid named Mitchell Gibson to write it, after everyone else had passed: Dennis Hopper, Curly Bob Rafelson, Buck Henry. Mitchell’s script had “poetry,” sure, it had a rugged desert beauty—even Beau could see the kid could write description, was aiming for American Antonioni—but the movie didn’t make
sense
. It lacked drive. Mitchell wouldn’t even confine it to a single time period.

“I hope you brought dope,” Beau said. “We’ll need all the persuasion we can muster.”

“Davis read the script. He
likes
it.”

Beau wore a navy jacket, a white shirt with cuff links. Most days, he dressed like a distressed beachcomber, lay around watching
Sesame Street
and scratching his ass. But he could still put it on when he needed to.

“All we gotta do,” Bryce said, as they stepped into the courtyard that led to the garage, “is convince Davis’s agent.”

“His agent?” Beau’s shirt was immaculate, arcing over his belly like a sail. “That’s Sam.”

“Sam? Shit, Rosers, he’s coming to the meeting!”

“How could you miss that?”

“I told Davis over the phone we needed to talk about the script. He said he already loved it and would bring his agent. There are a thousand agents in this town.”

Beau laughed. “There’s only one who knows me so up close and personal.”

The courtyard’s fine white gravel crunched under their feet. To their left was a separate property. No house, but Bryce kept an unruly garden that stepped down to the sea. On its various terraces were recessed wooden benches, cozy fire pits, bonsais and Japanese maples. Bryce had a meditation shed there too, the little gray outbuilding where he went to clear his mind. Beau looked over as they passed. Nothing could ever go wrong in this place. So long as neither of them had anything to lose, everything that came their way was gravy.

“Maybe I should just whip it out and offer to freshen Sam’s drink.”

“Maybe he won’t remember.” Bryce turned the key in the ignition and backed out of the garage. “Teddy Sanders says the guy had his second angioplasty last month.”

“Maybe he’ll just drop dead.” Beau studied his face in the passenger’s side visor, began to trim his mustache with tiny scissors. “That’ll take care of that.”

Bryce drove a ’68 Porsche, sluicing through an absolute absence of traffic, past Zuma and Carbon Beach, the maroon hood gleaming, their voices carried away by wind. Past
GLADSTONES
4
FISH
and up Santa Monica Canyon. Only when San Vicente Boulevard merged with Wilshire, and the light was gone and the air was suddenly dank, only then did their mood too darken.

“I need this movie,” Bryce murmured. Fog hung over Westwood. “I haven’t worked since spring.”

“I know.” Beau was almost tapped again, too. “I know we need it.”

They parked up the block, to avoid the valet’s charge. Beau cracked his knuckles behind his back as they stepped out of the car. The street was white and cool, the shop windows studded with oversize snowflakes and drab golden orbs, plastic Santas and flock-covered sleighs.

“Happy holidays.”

There in the islandic depths of the Luau, all tiki darkness and volcanic flame, Sam oozed sarcasm. He looked like a shriveled head on a stick, prunier than ever as he stuck out his palm.

“Sam.” Beau shook it. “Good to see you.”

Davis DeLong, the real prize, reclined in the booth’s deepening center, both arms extended along the top like a groggy fighter’s. He
was even more handsome in life. Bryce slid in beside him while Beau stayed on the edge, as far from Sam as possible.

“We’ve met once before,” Beau said. “I don’t know if you remember.”

“Sure.” Davis was cool. “At Vana’s.”

Sam kept his feet outside the booth, facing the room as if he were about to leave. There was no way he’d abandon his star client to these loons, but there was that feeling of Tinseltown cubism, like two or three separate meetings might happen at once.

“So you like the script,” Bryce said.

“Love it. It’s existential, you know? Deep.”

“Yeah,” Beau said. “Mitchell did an excellent job. He’ll do a polish, but—”

“Shit,” Sam said. “The script is complete shit.”

“Oh?”

The room was kitschy, fifties absurd. Pineapples floated; there were big blue goblets flavored with Curaçao; bowls topped with jets of yellow-white flame circled the room like fireflies.

“My client is not doing this picture. I came here for the exquisite pleasure of letting you know, you’ll make this movie in hell.”

Davis lolled. He seemed almost will-less, as if loving the movie were one thing, making it quite another. He was as blonde as a ski instructor, handsome and dumb, with a cleft chin and a pedigree that included a turn at the Yale School of Drama. He brushed a long lock of hair away from his eyes.

“So?” Beau smiled. “Looks like we’re at an impasse.”

“We are. The client and I are leaving.”

Beau threw one arm up on the back of the banquette. “Is that right?”

Sam swung his feet back into the booth, happy to join a fight. He looked at Davis. “This lardass pissed on my floor.”

“I was a little overexcited.”

“This”—Sam flourished his hand in small circles—“person. This human being.”

“Yes. Did you get my apologetic note?”

Davis just leaned back a little farther. His green eyes were worn and dull, a forest color. “I heard about that also.”

“You fucked up,” Sam said. “C’mon Davis, let’s—”

“Client.”

“Excuse me?”

“You called him ‘the client.’” Beau leaned, calmly. “Davis can’t make up his own mind? Is he meat?”

Bryce sat quietly beside Davis, as if the two actors were in one world and the barking elders in another. Beau was all of thirty-eight, but he held seniority.

“Pretty nice, huh Davis?” Bryce lifted his eyebrows. “That’s my guy.”

“You’re a fine one to lecture me,” Sam snapped.

“It’s not a lecture. Consider Davis’s interest. Why shouldn’t he do this movie?”

“Because it’s uncommercial.”

“You said
Mellow Yellow
was uncommercial, and Blake Edwards made a killing.”

“
Mellow Yellow
was a comedy. I have no idea what this is.”

“It’s a poem.”

“A poem!” Sam’s eyes flashed contempt. “You’d be unemployed even if you were potty-trained.”

Davis smiled, a curved and scornful look that was the key to his success. It gave his bland face an air of superciliousness, even danger. He’d used this look in a movie with Paul Newman, playing a young ranch hand apprenticed to a cattle rustler; with Steve Mc-Queen, he was a rival racer; against Lee Marvin, he played a rube cop on the trail of an aging bank robber.

“A poem.” He thumbed his lip. “I dig it.”

“You dig it?” Sam looked at him. “Davis, the sixties are over.”

“No, no. There’s
love
there, between the brothers. I dig that.”

“Nothing
happens
, they just drive around for ninety pages until it gets violent.”

“So? That’s life, isn’t it?” He looked at Beau. “I really like this.”

Beau couldn’t believe it. The waiter came by and he ordered a pupu platter, winking sarcastically at Sam.
For you
. The older agent stood up.

“This is suicide. You know that, Davis? This could kill your career.”

“It isn’t suicide.” The word hung over the table a moment. “I’d like to do it.”

“You would, huh?” Sam’s voice was phlegmy, tremulous. “How come?”

Davis just leaned back, cool as ever, and shrugged. “I think it’s neat.”

Neat
. Now the men faced one another and ate and drank and were as civil to one another as they could muster. Davis’s dopiness, his aw-shucks manner that played against the smile was the reason besides, the genius in casting him opposite Bryce.

“This picture could destroy you,” Sam glowered, clutching a skewer of shrimp poke like a tiny conductor’s wand. “You could never work again.”

“Naw.” Davis shrugged. “It’ll take more than a poem to destroy me.”

Poor Sam! He looked like a little buzzard, pointing his stick at Beau.

“The king of Hollywood, eh Sam?” Bryce chuckled. “That’s you?”

Sam jabbed. “You think I’m old-fashioned. My time will come.”

“I never said that.” Beau leaned across. “But you don’t understand this movie.”

Sam’s face was painted red by the light above the booth. There was something primitive and ugly, garish and loud and at the same time civilized about this place: the waiters in their island shirts and the affluent customers, the Mexican busboys and the six-dollar drinks served in voodoo goblets. Sam licked his lips and lifted a finger.

“Everything comes around. There are worse things in life than being antiquated.”

He shook his head sternly. Beau laughed out loud.

“Come on, Sam.” He crunched an egg roll. “Let’s be friends.” He swallowed. “Let’s not let animosity get in the way of doing business.”

Sam smiled. He might have been waiting the whole time just to let Beau’s euphoria crest. “Oh, I won’t. But there isn’t any business to do.”

“What do you mean?”

“This movie isn’t set up,” Sam said. “Davis won’t commit without a guarantee.”

“So?” Beau belched. “Any studio in town will make it with him.”

“Maybe. But he still needs a real offer. Pay or play. Davis?”

The actor just grunted. He had returned to the lolling, indefinite posture he’d held at the beginning. “Neat” the project may have been, but love wasn’t about to trump money.

“Come to us with an offer.” Sam smirked at Beau and folded his hands with serene assurance. Glasses flamed around the room, a
lounge piano tinkled, the perfect setting for an adding machine ritual. “Then we’ll talk.”

“No.” Chain-smoking Jeremy Vana was a good friend, but not crazy. “I’m sorry, but no.”

“Why not?” Bryce snorted. “Let’s hear the studio executive’s reasons.”

Jeremy was beefy, blond, with a thick beard and a square jaw. He looked like an old-school politician: there was something almost nineteenth-century about his crooked, sturdy frame. He flicked a cigarette into the standing ashtray by his desk.

“Davis isn’t as bankable as you think. His next picture’s a turkey.”

Antsy Jeremy. He might be expected dead of a heart attack before he was forty-five. Yet he was their appointed salvation, there on the Columbia Pictures lot when it was still in Burbank. His office was like a Mandarin explorer’s, a room full of parchment shades and faded leather. An antique globe stood atilt by the couch where Beau and Bryce both sat. Davis’s next picture, in which he played Thomas Egerton, Lord Chancellor of England, would turn out all right, but others who’d told our men the same included Ted Heller at Fox and Lewis Spruill at Universal. Paramount had passed, and they brought it back to Jeremy. Still no.
MGM
, no;
UA
, no. Dennis Hopper had agreed to direct and they’d come back to Universal.
Absolutely not
. They’d gone outside the box to Hammer Films in the UK and even met with Melvin Van Peebles. You can imagine how that went. Now here they were in Vana’s office again.

“I wish I could tell you something had changed,” Jeremy plunked one boot onto his desk. “But I’m going to get shit-canned if I make this movie.”

“So?” Bryce sneered. “You’re gonna get shit-canned anyway. That’s what happens to studio executives.”