American Dream Machine (32 page)

Why did women like him, he wondered, watching her straighten up and deliberately turn just enough so he could enjoy a view of her ass in its blue skirt? Was it because of kindness, charm? Not quite. Money? No. It was because he was genuine, and in some sense had always been, although before he’d gained the other things it was never quite so simple. He’d stayed unlaid until he was twenty, and then of course had needed to pay for it. Now, things
were different, and yet it took all that experience, so much raw humiliation, to become real.

“Sir? Sir? Club soda?”

He’d spilled tomato juice on himself. The stewardess was leaning over him with a napkin.

“Thanks.”

To become real
. The plane hummed, hissed, and as they soared away from twilight and into the dark, Beau wondered if this was even available to many people, if someone like Williams—privileged from the day he was born—understood that you needed to suffer? Probably not. Then, what did he know of Will’s suffering? If Will had a weakness, some vulnerability—anything Beau would’ve recognized—it might’ve saved them, given the men a chance to reconcile. Blotting his shirt furiously at thirty thousand feet (
Out! Out!
) he thought of that part of his partner that was dark to him. Williams had no mistresses, no chemical dependencies, and every day of the week he ate his half grapefruit at his desk at 7:45
AM
sharp. Behind that unflagging discipline lay something else, but Beau would never guess what it was.

“Ladies and gentlemen, the captain has turned on the fasten seatbelt sign . . .”

If Williams had a weakness
. . .

By the time his plane landed, whatever had occurred earlier seemed unfathomably far away. Los Angeles could’ve been the moon, and this morning could have been the Pleistocene. He called Will from the hotel. It was 8:30
PM
in
LA
, but his partner was still at his desk. Of course.

“Will, it’s Beau. I’m deeply sorry about what happened.”

“Don’t mention it.” Williams drew a breath. “Actually, I’d like to say don’t mention it.”

“Why?” Beau shifted the receiver.

Severin was in the room watching
Hill Street Blues
on the big
TV
. Silver room-service trays lay in front of him as he nested on the couch.

“It’s going to be in Christy’s column tomorrow.”

“What? Who told George?”

“People talk.”

“Who talks? There wasn’t anyone in there except us.” Beau sighed. He stared at the carpet’s slate-gray patterns. He supposed expecting
this to remain off the radar was ridiculous. “Never mind. Look, Will, the point is, I’ll get whatever I need. Treatm—” he looked at Severin across the room—“I’ll make the necessary arrangements.”

“Well, that’s a step in the right direction.”

Severin was eating a bowl of frosted Mini-Wheats with peaches. No matter how big he got, no matter how ridiculous his hairdo, he was still a kid in some sense. Those angular elbows and knees jutted in three different directions while he spooned up bits and stared, transfixed, at the
TV
.

“You’ll need to take an absence. If you come in here next week, they’ll say we have problems. If you take time off, then
you
have problems. It’s just for the good of the company.”

“Of course.”

“And our clients. Yours will understand. You think Marty and Bob have never wanted to hit each other before?”

Beau chuckled. “Good point.”

“So don’t worry about this. Don’t. Worry. Take the time to get straight. Go to Hazelden, if you want to, or McLean.”

“I’m from Queens, Will. Those places are a little upmarket.”

“Go to Switzerland. Go to a peep show on Forty-Second, for all I care, if it helps you get straight.”

“It wouldn’t hurt.”

Williams laughed. They were back on the same frequency. “Do what you need to do, Beau. Our door is open.”

One thing you must know about Hollywood. Slow fucking is what they do best. All these men who probably cum in about eight seconds—why wait for anything, after all?—can screw each other over for years.
Revenge is a dish best served cold
. Yes. It’s just more fun to brutalize someone across time, and torture isn’t torture unless you really draw it out. You think I’m paranoid, that, like Beau Rosenwald, I’m misinterpreting Williams’s gestures?
Our door is open. Get what you need
. This is the vocabulary of business, the tenderness with which we punish one another every day.

“Beau, it’s Marty.”

(
We had a great run
, says the deposed studio chief in the press release announcing his firing,
and I look forward to making movies here
at Blankiversal, and to working closely with Peter and Ed
. To which the boss’s boss’s boss responds,
Jeremy has fantastic taste, and we expect him to be a major supplier for us these next three years
. Read this in
Variety
, over and over again, and know these are three years in which Jeremy Vana can’t get Williams Farquarsen’s second assistant on the phone, let alone get a movie made, from his opulent offices on the lot. If you’re going to castrate someone, do it with love.)

“Marty!” His favorite director had visited him in the hospital, twice. Beau had gone through an outpatient program for alcohol—never mind that drinking was never his problem—and was now diagnosed as bipolar. Yet like many diagnoses, this was only a guess. “How are you, sweetie?”

“I’m good. Listen, Beau, I have a problem.”

“You have a problem with who? The studio? Is there a problem with publicity?”

This conversation took place on the fifteenth of February. That week, Beau resumed work at the
ADM
offices in Century City. It was important that people see him here, know that he was back in town, out and about, negotiating. He and Williams had lunch at Jimmy’s on Monday. This was important too. The two men at one table, telling jokes. Beau looked healthy and relatively slim, but this was nothing like the pallid cadaver who’d emerged into the light after his daughter died. This was him at fighting weight, fiercely lucid and ready to kick some ass.

“You want me to call Marvin Davis?”
The King of Comedy
was opening on Friday.

“Different problem. Beau,” Marty sucked his teeth, “I’m leaving.”

“Leaving? Where you going, Chicago?”

“I’m leaving the agency. This is difficult.”

“Leaving the—Marty, where the hell you gonna go? Williams and I take care of you!”

“I’m going with Mike.” You know how Marty talks, the nervous darts of his speech. “This is very difficult for me, Beau.”

“I’m sure it is. Mike?” Mike!
CAA
! They’d seen Mike at Jimmy’s that day, too. “No one likes Mike.”

“Everyone likes Mike.”

“They’re afraid of Mike. Marty, why are you doing this?”

There in his office, Beau had the first apprehension that things
were not going to go as he’d hoped. It was like coming down off anesthesia. The flowers were browning; gift ribbons had been piled in the trash. The welcome notes and compliments, too, were fading.
You look fantastic, Rosers
.

“I understand.” Beau stared at the red pistils of some calla lilies in a glass. “No, Marty, I hear you. I get what you’re saying, but shouldn’t we have another chance?”

You know, too, how stupid a man sounds when he’s pleading. Forget business.
Don’t leave
, one spouse tells the other, and we’ve all said it—or wanted to say it, or wanted to want to say it—at some point.
Don’t go, don’t go! Please!

“Marty, this breaks my heart. I knew you when you were with Roger!”

“This isn’t easy for me.”

Beau rubbed his fists into his eyes.
Am I dreaming?

“What does Will say? You talked to him?”

“Not yet. I needed to talk to you first. You’re my friend.”

“And is this because”—Beau had no choice but to ask—“because of my difficulties?”

“We’ve all got difficulties. I get up in the morning and can barely shave with a steady hand.”

“I’ve noticed.”

Both men laughed, the one more ruefully than the other.

“Stay in touch, Beau. Stay in touch.”

Beau was in touch. Nothing makes you more in touch than loss. But when he hung up the phone and began those breathing exercises he’d been prescribed—he was prescribed something for everything—all he felt was the ceiling starting to crumble over his head. You lost an actor, even one as talented as Albert Finney, and it was understood to be part of the game, what you paid for signing someone else and offering the new client more attention. You lost an award-winning director like this? You were halfway to being a schlepper all over again.

“Beau?” His assistant, Linda, was at the door, leaning in and fixing him with her usual tender tolerance. Maybe he should marry her and flee; she’d already seen the worst of him. Not so bad-looking, needing better hair and less makeup and fifteen fewer pounds. Easy enough. “Will, on one.”

Beau sighed. As if he could escape his fate, as though the die for this, every last bit of it, hadn’t been cast long ago.

“Beau”—Teddy Sanders stood in the doorway of his colleague’s office, a few weeks later—“I just got a phone call.”

“From who?”

“Bob.”

It came down so quickly from there. Teddy leaned against the jamb. Beau was back in
LA
again—again! That spring of ’83, he’d needed to be here constantly.

“What’s Bob calling you for?” Beau rubbed his eyes.

“He wants to have lunch.”

I wonder if there was pleasure in this for Teddy. Maybe there was. But he showed no particular interest in me then, either; it was all between his lawyers and my mom.

“Huh,” Beau snorted. He hardly needed to ask why.

“I put him off,” Teddy said. “Told him I’d get back to him.”

“Don’t do that,” Beau said. Because you never dangled a client, no matter what. “Why don’t you take him to that Japanese place?”

Teddy loitered there in the doorway. His toes barely poked onto his colleague’s parquet floor. A little paunchy, he still wore that genial mustache, the face of a Midwestern uncle.

“You sure?”

Beau watched him. Who was fucking him deliberately and who was merely along for the ride, he never could tell.

“Yeah.” In fact, he liked Teddy. He always had; neither my paternity nor the Finney incident had changed that. “You go ahead.”

How complicit are we in our own fates? Was Beau Rosenwald just tired? Did he feel all this was like a trip to the dentist, better to have all your teeth gone in one jerk than to feel them lovingly scalloped one nerve-shearing root at a time?

“Go. Bobby could use a steady hand.”

Beau knew what was happening. The American Dream Machine ideal, the notion that the agents should work seamlessly to promote their clients’ welfare above even their own—that there would be no poaching of one another’s clients—had crumbled some time ago. But when his own standing began to fall, he did nothing.

“What’s wrong?”

Linda came in after Teddy’d left and found him sitting with his fingers laced and his forehead propped gently against his knuckles, elbows on the desk. He looked like someone at the Wailing Wall.

“Can I have a tissue?” His face was wet, cheeks streaked with a few tears. “Please?”

He didn’t even like Bob. Not that he disliked Bob. He liked
being with
Bob, the way he liked being with so many actors because they resembled him more than anyone knew. Most had thin skins and limited educations and animal intelligence and an impossible degree of self-consciousness. Which part of that was Beau not going to understand?

“What happened?” Linda handed him a Kleenex and waited while he blew.

“De Niro’s leaving.”

“Oh. I’m sorry.” She grimaced. “And good riddance.”

“Nah. He’s just going up the hall, to Teddy.”

“Really? You could block that.”

Beau nodded. “I know.”

“Then why don’t you? Beau.”

In her searching stare was everything:
Big deal, you lost Marty, you blew a fuse, you think Abe Waxmorton hasn’t got a temper, what are you doing, why don’t you fight, I love you, you big baboon!
But Beau just shrugged. He set down the wadded blossom of his Kleenex. Perhaps he was tired, perhaps he was disgusted, perhaps he was just lured by the pleasure of defeat. For there is an exquisite joy in seeing a person collapse, even, sometimes, when that person is yourself.

“It’s all right,” he said. Linda’s eyebrow curled; the sweet and crooked outcroppings of her face glowed overhead in the morning sun. “We’ll live to fight another day.”

What a strange year that was! In the spring of ’83, Beau found himself alone. Severin was still at school in New York, or else—occasionally—in Portland, Oregon. He took mysterious trips on weekends. Beau presumed he had a girlfriend there, that pen pal he’d found in eighth grade, whose envelopes continued to arrive, unmarked
but with a tellingly feminine scent. Sev was a little young still to be unsupervised, but Beau had his hands full. His clients took flight like swallows. And on April 15—tax day—he was called into Will’s office. Their meeting was set for 11:30
AM
, but when Beau strode in, his partner was in a meeting with an actor whose own career was beginning to show cracks.

“Hey, Beau.” Will gestured to his client, who was angular and equine: the man who launched a thousand disco fingers now sat drinking coffee on Will’s couch. “You know John?”

They shook hands. Nineteen-eighty-three was a shit year in the movie business, but it was a golden age compared to what was coming next. How many great films can you name from the latter half of that decade?
Blue Velvet
, sure. What else?

“You wanted to see me?”

The elder Farquarsen looked at his client, then at Beau. “Can it wait?”

Beau retreated and stood outside his partner’s office. Once, he might’ve fumed at this snub, as Williams kept his clock with absolute precision. He never let a meeting run late. The actor’s presence was a red rag, a show of dominance on Will’s part. Yet somehow Beau didn’t care. Nick Nolte had bailed on him, Bill Murray. He was down to two clients now: Bryce, essentially unemployable on the heels of three straight turkeys, and Davis, of whom the less said, the better. The gap between Robert Redford and Robert Wagner was narrower than anyone had supposed.