American Dream Machine (31 page)

Here they were again on the phone. Each man was trying to control the whole picture, bending the facts according to his need.

“I mean that Albert—”

“Yes, Albert. I saved him.”

Just the two of them now. There was no meeting. Williams was in his car and Beau, like a petulant child, sat exiled in his hotel room.

“He won’t take Teddy’s calls. Says he won’t speak to anyone but you.”

“Oh, for God’s sake.” The image of Finney as some lone gunman, a maniac hostaging a roomful of innocents while negotiating with Harry Callahan, came to him. He couldn’t help but smile. “Actors.”

“We represent actors.”

“And?”

“We represent them together. And you fucked Teddy by taking his client.”

“I ‘took his client’?” Beau smiled at Williams’s rare profanity, too.
Uh-oh
. “Pardon me, partner, but what about the ethos of this place? He threw himself at me, anyway.”

Beau stood in the middle of the room at the St. Regis, the living area of his suite, where the remains of his late breakfast—coffee, yogurt, muesli, berries—still sat on a glass table with the paper. He was putting
into his fireplace at three in the afternoon. He didn’t even golf! Somebody had sent him clubs for Christmas, so here he was teaching himself to do something, out of boredom more than anything.

“Pick up the receiver, Beau. I’m going up Coldwater.”

Williams would’ve been on the way to the Valley for lunch, en route to one of the studios. Beau crossed the room.

“What the fuck, Will? Albert was gonna jump ship. He would’ve gone to another agency.”

“We would’ve survived.”

“But you sent me there to
prevent that from happening
!”

“It’s the principle.”

“He’s still our client. He still pays his commissions to us instead of
ICM
. Wasn’t that the point of my going to England?”

“It’s. The. Principle. Beau, we don’t poach one another’s clients. We don’t do that. We’re a team, here.”

“Listen, you mealy little cocksucker, you tell me to do something, I do it,” Beau roared. “But let’s not forget where this company came from. You
needed
me!”

What set him off here, Lord knows. No one spoke to Will that way, ever. Beau had never heard his partner raise his voice, not once. Will’s greatest weapon was silence.

“Let’s not get hasty here, Beau.”

“I’m not hasty.” In his hand was still a seven iron. He was just getting used to the feel of these clubs; he needed to amuse himself here in this weird city where he rattled around like a loose tooth. “I’m not hasty, Will.”

“You just cursed at me.”

“I cursed because you started to lecture me on principle. Because you, who sent me to this place to
uphold
a principle—”

“I sent you?”

“Yes, Will, you sent me. The move to New York was not my idea. It was all about the soul of the company, you’ll recall.”

Men with short memories. The promised year was half over. Beau planned to come back the moment Severin’s school ended, the very day. He’d had enough; you weren’t going to understand yourself any better by returning to your roots. If anything, you were only going to grow stranger, more alienated.

“Fuck it,” Will said. “You’re right.”

“Listen . . . how do you know all this?”

“Excuse me?” Williams’s phone crackled, his voice grew tinny. Beau could imagine just where he was, the bend he’d be rounding near the canyon’s peak.

“If Albert won’t take anybody’s calls, then how do you know all this?”

“I talked to him.”

“You’re nobody?”

Reception cut out for a moment. They were forced abruptly into dots and dashes, verbal Morse code.

“—
matter
, Beau, the thing is—”

“—see the percenta . . . screwing one ano—”

“—all right, it’s all right, the way I fee—”

“Beau? Beau, are you there?”

The connection righted itself. Williams must’ve been over Mulholland by now, that candy-apple Ferrari, its silver stallion gleaming on the hood, plunging into the Valley below skies of desert blue. He didn’t even keep that car in the Marina, because you couldn’t. Every morning Will got up and drove his ancient Peugeot to a garage in Santa Monica. Strange behaviors and bedfellows alike, this business bred.

“I’m here. Are we clear, Will?”

“Crystal.”

“Fine. I’m sorry to have upset you.”

Beau hung up and went back to his clubs. He strolled over to the couch and finished breakfast, soft and easy there in his hotel robe. Spooning up blueberry yogurt and muesli.

AT CHRISTMAS, BEAU
came home. The offices were closed. The restaurants were empty. That last week of the year, Hollywood is a ghost town. My mother and I were away and so Beau prowled his old haunts—the valets at Morton’s, at least, remembered him—dining alone and with Severin, who glowered at scallops swamped in raspberry coulis. Was he losing his grip?

“Welcome home!”

When the big man waltzed into the conference room on the third of the new year, Williams stood where he always did, at the head of the oval table in his untucked white shirt. He wore black loafers, and the shirt had a red monogrammed falcon on either cuff. This was Williams’s affectation, these bits of flair like a musician’s—a white shirt that cost five hundred dollars—to let everyone know he wasn’t a true prole.

“We want you back, Beau.”

“Excuse me?”

The welcome that met him seemed Japanese, ritualized and tense. Only Will spoke. The fifty-six other agents had all offered handshakes and hugs, but now maintained a ceremonious silence.

“We want you to come home,” Williams repeated. “It’s not necessary to stay in New York. You’ve done your job.”

Beau watched him. This was unexpected. He would go back tomorrow morning, had sent Severin ahead so he wouldn’t miss the first day of school after vacation.

“I’ve done my job? Gee, thanks, Will.”

He set his briefcase down, that same battered leather rectangle with the solid gold clasps he’d owned since 1967. He scanned the room. He
wanted
to come home, in his heart. But Williams Farquarsen had somehow caused that heart to secede from him.

“I’d prefer to stay through the school year. Severin loves Dalton.”

Or maybe Beau simply hated being told what to do. Around the room the agents sat with their plates, filled with green cubes of honeydew, and luminous columns of water. Laura Nyde, in her tan skirt and spike-heeled boots. Wanda Pearlman—who was soon going to marry Rick Lepke, another agent, a bare-knuckled New Yorker Beau particularly liked—smiling up in her ditzy blonde innocence.

“I’ll come in the spring.”

“Come now. We’d prefer it.”

Were these people privy to Will’s perfidy? Or was there such? Perhaps Beau was making a mistake. Outside the skies were that radiant shade that follows a week’s worth of rainstorms. You could see the white-tipped mountains in the distance.

“I’m sure you’d prefer it,” Beau said. “But I might not.”

“How come? You didn’t want to go in the first place. Marty might be happier knowing you were here to kick a little ass on his behalf.”

“What does it matter? My legs are longer than they look.”

No one else spoke. Once upon a time, these meetings had been genteel anarchy. Beau might belly surf the conference table, be lying on his back when Will came in.
What are you, the Venus of Willendorf? You sitting for a portrait, Beau?
Running a company was once the most fun they’d ever had.

“I’ll come home in June.” Beau crossed the room, poured himself decaf from a silver thermos.

“Is this about what happened before Christmas, Beau? Because we’re
OK
there, you know.”

“I know. This has nothing to do with that.”

“What’s it about, then?”

“Freedom. It’s about freedom.”

“Beau—” Teddy Sanders stood up to intercede. Bob Skoblow came forward too, and might’ve reminded him that this was
just another word for nothing left to lose
, although I doubt that, since it isn’t true.

“I—I think we should b-be cool,” Milt Schildkraut said, and
everyone turned since he controlled the purse strings. “We don’t need this argument.”

“There’s no argument,” Williams said. He was calm and level, as bracing as the January light. “
All mankind is of one author and is one volume
. The same poet said,
Every man is a piece of the continent, a part of the main
.”

“Right.”

“So if you want to stay in New York, Beau, stay. Stay and take care of Marty and Bob and we’ll see you in six months.
Do what thou wilt shall be the whole of the law
.”

Here, as always, Williams had chosen irreconcilable masters. John Donne and Aleister Crowley weren’t exactly the most probable bedfellows either. Yet the truth was, Beau never understood Williams even if he could—still—practically read his former best friend’s mind.

“Look, asswipe, I don’t need your permissions.”

“Excuse me?”

This wasn’t a contradiction after all. You can read your own mind, but can you understand it?

“I said, you piece of shit, you dog turd, you rat-fucking excuse—”

Beau strode forward without raising his voice, so for a moment people thought he was just being himself, the ribald fat man.

“I don’t need your fucking permission.” Then he lifted his voice. “I shit where I wanna shit and eat what I wanna eat and if they happen to be in the same place—”

Bob went for him. Milt too. But before they could get there, Beau lunged at Williams. The latter, who practiced tae kwon do, merely stepped aside. Beau went crashing and clattering into his chair.

“Do you need help?” Will bent down with one hand on the small of his friend’s back. “Do you?”

Beau knelt, panting and embracing the black ergonomic chair. Understand, he was crazy. He had been from the beginning. Who pisses on another man’s floor? But understand, too, how strong was his grip on reality. He knew Williams was gaslighting him. Wasn’t he? There was never any
need
for him in New York, never any need for London or Albert Finney, nor any for him to come home. Wasn’t it clear that when Will visited Chicago he was sneaking around with Beau’s client? Paranoia does strange things to a
man, but even Milt Schildkraut, whose reality hunger was stronger than anyone’s, had seen it. Had Williams paid for John Belushi’s hooker, were those
his
drugs at the Chateau? You were in deep water if you thought John Belushi was assassinated by anything other than his own lack of impulse control, but you were in deeper water still if you failed to understand the treachery, the ugliest truths to be found upon the human scene. Williams wanted everything for himself. We all do. The fact that he didn’t know it, that his “generous” behavior was secretly a bid for control, might have been dark to Williams, but Beau knew exactly what he was up to. The big man understood ugliness too implicitly. Having been born, after all, with so much of it.

He pushed up off the chair. He turned to face his partner, his tormentor, his—let’s call it what it is—
love
.

“We’ll get you anything you need,” Will pleaded. “Any kind of treatment at all, we’ll pay for doctors, rehab. Anything.”

Beau opened his mouth. And began to laugh. He just couldn’t help it. In his beautiful salmon-colored shirt, with the sleeves rolled; a pair of John Lobb brogues he’d had made in England; his gold Rolex, which was standard-issue for the better-heeled men in this room.

“You think I need
doctors
, Will? You think this is something to fix?”

“I think you need something.”

He scanned the room, the faces of the men and women all twisted with shock and horror. How backward that was, truly. Who should’ve appalled whom, here? There was a word for this, one that Sam or Abe or Williams, certainly, would know:
cathexis, catharsis
, one of those Aristotelian or analytic terms. But Beau just shook his head.

“I need something. But I won’t find it here.”

He bent down and picked up his briefcase, having come straight from the garage. And then he strolled out, whistling, with his jacket over his arm and his stride light and even.

“Personal difficulties.” That was the euphemism. Beau wasn’t “in rehab,” nor was he on vacation: there was no tacit understanding that he’d “gone skiing” for six weeks, the way Bob Skoblow
did when he needed to quit cocaine. Beau Rosenwald was away from his desk because of “personal problems,” the one thing Hollywood—where the problems were always social or chemical or even mental without ever being truly private—couldn’t forgive. If he’d punched a photographer, if he’d been found naked and shivering in somebody’s backyard, if there had been an authentic humiliation of any kind at all, he would’ve been forgiven. Instead he’d attacked his business partner without provocation, inside a confidential company meeting.
The employees of American Dream Machine wish to extend our sympathies during our colleague’s time of trial
. These words appeared in an advertisement in
Variety
during the third week of January. That’s how big a bastard Williams actually was. Why not tar Beau with a brush, Will, and dip him in feathers? Way to further a guy’s career. “Our colleague.” What a fucking snake!

“More tomato juice, sir?”

I would never forgive Williams this, myself. As he had haunted me all my life, my other father, I would haunt him from beyond the grave. But Beau flew home that night. “Home” it was, for now. He needed Severin, not just since this was his life’s remaining actuality, but because he knew if he told Sev what had happened, he’d be believed. Severin would get it. Who understands power struggle, the battles and the sly bullying, better than a teenage boy?

“Thank you.”

The stewardess poured him his drink. He was in the first-class cabin, under a tan cashmere blanket. He had enough money in the bank to last him for years. Williams would have to buy him out, if it came to that.

“Would you like vodka?” The stewardess was touching his wrist with two fingers.

“No, thank you.” He returned her smile. “Maybe some peanuts?”