American Dream Machine (17 page)

Williams turned and circled around to the trunk. Just another Hollywood father, too, playing hooky for an afternoon. Little Will shoved me.
Junior shark
. We weren’t too young to be turned on by blood. Just so, I burst out screaming, the need for attention dawning in my consciousness at last.

“I NEED A JOB.”

“Huh?” The man in the black-and-white shirt looked him over as Beau inhaled. That smell of polish and plastic. “I’m sorry, you don’t really look like someone who—”

“Beau Rosenwald.” At his weakest, my father always fell back on his name. “I made movies. I was a talent agent.”

“This is a sporting-goods store.”

“You think it’s easier to sell actors than shoes?”

Beau’s face flamed.
Imagine
what this was like! They were in a store on Wilshire Boulevard in Santa Monica, Beau having cornered the manager over by a rack of orange skis.
K2
, Kneissl. This was how fast you could fall in Hollywood, no matter that you were already near the bottom to begin with. Just days ago he was toe-to-toe with a studio head. Now he was shivering, quavering before some schlub with Bozo tufts.

“I know more than you think,” Beau said. “Sizing, soles. I used to work in my father’s shop in Queens.”

The manager was jug-eared, tiny, and balding. His name tag read
IRV
.

“You wanna fill out an application?”

“You think I should?”

Strange, that beneath his shame, Beau Rosenwald felt peaceful. He’d gone home from the screening last night and slept better than he had in years. In time—sure—the movie would sneak out anyway. Morrison would buy back the negatives and screen it around town, then with Vana’s help they’d be able to find a distributor and
show it in New York, Chicago, Montreal. They’d tone down the violence, and so the whole thing might become what it perhaps was always meant to be, a semi-interesting cult movie designed to appeal to distant obsessives. Maybe all Beau did then was submit to fate, there in the side room of Tex’s Sporting Goods. As the excruciation of the moment peaked and then subsided.
Shoes
.

The manager looked him up and down. “Get a vest.”

Hired on the spot, he’d go back to his roots and flog sneakers. This was a comprehensive admission of defeat. Yet it was also oddly satisfying. The fat man, hustling in middle age. He had become what everyone else wanted him to be, had fulfilled some prediction of his failure. This was what it was like,
not
to be the hero of your own story. Shuffling from stool to storeroom over and over, opening those boxes—size ten, or ten and a half—and removing the shoes from their bundles of tissue paper and lacing them up while he knelt and looked at the toes.
How’s that feel?
Every box smelled new. Dripping flop sweat, his skin felt buttery as a calf’s. Day in, day out, for three months, five. One afternoon a kid came in and cornered him.

“You were in that movie, weren’t you? With Davis DeLong?”

He’d had one line in the picture, played a trooper Udo shot and left for dead at the roadside.

“Uh-uh.”

“Yes, you were. Morrison Groom’s film. They just showed it to us at
AFI
. He spoke to our class.” Oh, for God’s sake. There was an enthusiast for everything. “I never forget a face.”

Beau had forgotten his own face. He said, “Nope.”

The twins were in public school. Sev and Kate had lived with him at Bryce’s for a while, and then Beau had moved to Santa Monica, closer to his job and his benefactor, who continued to live his off-the-track, bohemian, and domestic life in the Marina. Williams had offered to help with the twins’ private school tuition if Beau wanted them to go to St. Jerome. That’s how good the man was to his friend.

“Beau?” The phone rang at work, in the afternoon. He picked it up and found his voice recognized straightaway.

“Yep?”

“It’s Davis.”

He was standing on the floor at Tex’s. Wearing his own referee’s shirt and a
TEXAS LONGHORNS
cap, looking less like anyone who
had ever been in the movie business than you can imagine. Like a fucking zebra, stranded there against the store’s puffy neoprene jackets and jumpers.

“Davis!” The actor had quickly recovered from their debacle and would soon receive a nod for best supporting in a picture he’d just shot opposite Gene Hackman. While Beau was repricing all the skis and hanging out new wetsuits, accommodating the change of season in April. “How’d you find me?”

“Through Beller.” There was a sound as if he were chewing tobacco, juice flowing down the line. “You’re selling shoes, now?”

Beau didn’t say anything. Just stood with his name tag and his whistle around his neck and rubbed his chin. The full ridiculousness of his situation had never hit him, or else it hadn’t existed until an actor, a man who tried on and discarded selves like a hyperimaginative three-year-old, pointed it out.

“I want you to represent me.”

“What?” Surely this was a joke, fate rubbing his nose in the wet plate of failure.

“I’m unhappy with Sam. There’s a picture I’m wanting to do at Columbia and he’s trying to talk me out of it.”

“You don’t think you should listen this time?” Beau laughed.

“No. Look, Beau, I need
your
advocacy.”

“Why me?” Not for the last time, Beau asked this question. “Why d’you want me?”

“I need a new agent.”

“I’m inactive. Haven’t had a client since ’72.”

“So?”

“Conflict of interest. I’m a producer. I can’t be an agent
and
a producer.”

“Why not? Have you seen any money beyond your original fee?”

Beau leaned against the glass display case, next to the register. He stared down at jackknives, bandannas, pins for different ski resorts—Alta, Whistler, Mammoth—and thick tubes of Bonne Belle lip gloss. Kate loved it when he brought those home.

“Not a dime.”

“So represent me. You’ll sign a waiver, resign from the guild. Whatever it is you have to do.”

“Why me? Davis, you could have anybody.”

“Why not you?” Davis said. “You’re Hollywood’s last honest man.”

Beau rubbed his forehead and stared down, down, down into the case. Root beer was Kate’s favorite flavor, then bubble gum, cherry. He was perspiring, he suddenly realized, his face not just damp but dripping. Was it the thought of a lifetime selling shoes that frightened him, or this other life, in show biz, that scared him half to death?

“Columbia won’t negotiate with me.”

“Hmm?”

His boss swung by and clipped him on the shoulder.
Back to work, Rosenwald
.

“You said Columbia. They won’t negotiate with me even if I offer you to them for nothing.”

“Not true.”

“Why not?”

“Vana’s in charge now. Haven’t you heard?”

Over and over, he’d play this moment in his head. For years there would be nightmares in which he found himself menaced inside Tex’s yellow thicket, clutching an unloaded BB gun against the threat that had already passed. If only, if only, if only he’d said no. Would the rest of his life have been different? Would he have saved himself the greatest tragedy of all? But what he felt when he hung up the phone was a surge of ecstasy so violent he might’ve exploded.

“Beau, we need you—”

“Fuck you.” He yanked the phone free of its rickety wall brackets and tossed it onto the floor. His jug-eared boss just stared at him in amazement. “Fuck you, Irv. Nothing personal.” He flung the cap, name tag, whistle behind the register, plunked down ten bucks, and took a fistful of lip gloss. “I’ve got places to be.”

“You’re quitting?”

Of course, Irv was a screenwriter, not a very good one, and Beau had shown him the courtesy of reading his work.

“I’m gone, Irv. In fact, if anyone asks, it’s safe to say I was never here.”

This was all it took to transform a life. Beau drove home from the store and picked up his kids and, later that night, took them both to
Ma Maison for dinner.
Hungry, guys?
If Kate wanted to eat fresh berries and pastry cream until she was blue in the face, she could, always.

He bought a car, even before he placed a call to open negotiation. He was that confident.

“Jer, it’s Rosers.”

“Beau!” Jeremy sounded transformed, weightless with power, himself. “Good God, man, it’s great to hear from you.”

“Yeah. Listen, Davis is going to do this movie and you’re going to pay him more than you’ve ever paid an actor in your life.”

“That’s an interesting gambit, Beau. You’re supposed to play hard to get.”

“Fuck hard to get.” Through the sliding–glass window of his two-bedroom apartment in Santa Monica he could see the grass square of a park on Lincoln, his new silver Jag gleaming in the sun. It still had the tags on it. “You’ll pay through the nose.”

“I dunno, buddy. Davis’s new movie isn’t doing too well. The last one, you’ll recall, wasn’t even released by this studio.”

“So what?” He looked out at the park, its semiderelict benches and statuary. This apartment was like the one on Sherbourne, too: humid with the sour smells of incontinence and chicken broth, the sound of hissing pipes. He’d take one of those houses on the other side of Montana soon, too.

“
So what?
” Jeremy snorted. “What else is an actor’s value based upon but past performance?”

Beau leaned back in his chair. The wrecked bedroom was also his “office.” “The future.”

“Hey? I don’t get you, buddy. You can’t possibly pay an actor based on what his agent thinks he
will
be worth. That’s suicide.”

“How come? You think you can get him on the cheap the way you used to?”

How he loved negotiating. Hated business, but loved negotiating. It wasn’t closing the deal but creating it. This was the thing he loved.

“No, no. But there’s a middle ground here. You don’t even have a second client.”

“A million bucks.”

“
WHAT
?”

“Yep.” Beau snickered. “That’s what you’re going to pay, Jer.”

“That’s nuts.”

“It’s
fair
. Think of what our movie did for you.”

“It nearly ended my career.”

“It didn’t. It kicked you upstairs. I’ve been selling shoes.”

“Is that where you’ve been?”

“Yes. Your wife bought a nice pair of Rossignols there, a few weeks ago.”

“Ex-wife.”

“Oh, Jer, I’m sorry. When did that happen?”

“Not long. Listen, there’s no way I’m giving Davis a million dollars. Melissa’s breaking my balls. Don’t you do it too.”

“Do I have to?” Beau smiled, and as always his expansiveness surged down the line, his warmth and desperation making themselves felt as surely as if he were in the room with Jeremy. “Sounds like they’re already broken.”

Beau didn’t have to mention how he’d once spared the executive blame before his boss. Davis DeLong would get his million dollars. In bicentennial America, this was still a fortune. Ex-wives, ski trips (“Maybe if you hadn’t fucked Davis’s girlfriend, you wouldn’t be in this kind of mess,” was Beau’s next retort), these things were chump change compared to what Beau saw. You could buy a house, cold cash, with just his ten percent. Imagine what the rest of it, the gloating alone, was worth.

“You coming back to me, Brycie? You gonna be my client again instead of Teddy’s?”

I remember my father, from this period. I remember tennis whites, a sort of country club affectation that fell upon him for a while. I met him again just before I met Severin, before our paths crossed at St. Jerome in the fall. He’d come around to see Teddy that spring, and he brought champagne, dressed in a V-neck pullover and shorts, like some sad aristocratic refugee from the Jazz Age.
So you’re Teddy’s son, huh? Nathaniel?
He certainly didn’t seem to remember me.
Good-lookin’ kid you got here, Ren
. I recall his hand falling, awkwardly, on my scalp. With no suspicion at all on his part. There was only that bluff, half-assed curiosity these men always showed, that amped-up enthusiasm pretending to charm.
Hey
Teddy, you heard I’m back in the game? What’s Sam saying, now that I stole his golden calf? I’ll bet that really gets him, huh? Huh?
For a brief while, he was intolerable to his friends. Even Bryce had difficulty.

“Are you gonna come crawling?”

“Give it a rest, Rosers.”

At a party in the Malibu Hills—Richard Jordan’s place, a stone castle at the end of a long dirt trail—he’d cornered his ex-client by the crudité table. Their kids were playing outside. They were up in the canyon wilderness, the air silty with russet dust, drunken adults spinning around the access roads in their host’s jeep. A courtyard filled with languid retrievers and bored chickens.

“Aw, c’mon Brycie!” Beau wheedled. Teddy had stepped in to represent Bryce out of necessity. After the fiasco with
The Dog’s Tail
, the actor had to defect. “Who am I without my first and favorite client?”

The kids’ feet slapped against stone, their shrieks rising. An open window, without glass, was at Beau’s elbow. The actress Bryce was schtupping came over. Her pink, flat-chested body looked concave in a bikini, its string taut across her hip bones.

“Look at this.” She held a clip in her hand, torn from a magazine. “Look.”

“
Morrison Groom’s
The Dog’s Tail
may not be the most interesting movie of the year, and it certainly isn’t the best, but it warrants your attention anyway
.” Beau read the beginning of the review, from
New York
magazine, with stentorian pretension.

“Excellent,” Bryce said. “Anything that lets that maniac make another movie.”

They laughed. The kids passed out of the courtyard’s gateway and came tramping around toward the front of the house.

“But see, look, look.” The actress pointed at the bottom of the clip. “Right there.”

Beau squinted. A carrot stick larded with spinach dip was in his hand. A shaft of sunlight passed through the window by his side, lit a bright red carpet runner on fire.

“This guy’s crazier than Sarris.” In the
Village Voice
, the house critic had seen some nonexistent connection between Morrison and Max Ophüls. “Here, my God, look—
in Li Chang’s performance, Morrison Groom locates not just emptiness but The Void, she is Bardot in
Contempt,
or
—I can’t go on.” Beau dropped the clip. “I should sign Li, just to make Vana pay through the nose again.”