American Dream Machine (42 page)

“He’s not that bad,” Emily protested.

“He isn’t? He bought you a DeLorean, which is kind of the same as buying you an eight ball and demanding that you blow him. You should sue.”

“It was supposed to be a Jaguar.”

“What?”

This was the part of the story Emily usually didn’t tell, because she couldn’t explain it even to herself. Maybe it was her way of protecting him, how she’d turned this lavish gesture into a joke by choosing a car that
no one
could drive. It cost her money to garage it.

“There was a beautiful old E-Type,” Emily said. “He offered that to me first.”

Like choosing a costume stone over a Tiffany diamond. Lucinda burst out laughing. Beau thought it was funny too. But Lucinda, whose ugliness was more than skin-deep, corrected herself into a sneer. “That’s disgusting. I heard he once took a shit on some guy’s floor.”

“Not true.”

“Why are you defending him?”

This was the face of the studio today: it was freckled and efficient and sharp. Lucinda had invited her to lunch, but thus far all Emily had done was drink water in the senior woman’s office. Other than a narrow gold watch there wasn’t an ounce of decoration on the executive, who was the scourge of Beau Rosenwald’s life.

“He’s been good to me.”

“Good to you, hell,” Lucinda said. She was Beau’s own personal roadblock, seemingly devoted to stalling all his projects. The studio was having a spectacular year, with one-and-a-quarter billion domestic, three of the four top-grossing summer movies. Not one of these happened to be Beau’s. “You’re too special to be sweeping up his cage.”

Nineteen-ninety-seven was a year without a movie for the fat man at all, in fact. Ninety-six hadn’t been so hot either. While his children were rising (and we were—it wasn’t just Severin who was carving out a path for himself; in 1995 I’d written a script based on Chandler’s
The Lady in the Lake
that got optioned), Beau was struggling to find his place. Emily’s mission, in part, was to ensure he
did. She hoped to bring Lucinda around to understanding he was a good guy. She hadn’t told Beau she was having lunch with his enemy, and had some trepidation that he might freak out or feel betrayed. She’d felt some fear about the meeting herself, since Lucinda’s reputation was even worse than Beau’s had ever been, but the moment she walked into the senior executive’s office she found herself at home. It was, strangely, as if she were dreaming: she had this feeling of déjà vu, like she had been here, like everything that happened the moment she set foot in Thalberg had already occurred, long ago. Like it was written. She and Lucinda walked over to the commissary. The day’s blazing heat restored her, somewhat. It made the world seem real again.

“You’re shaking!” Lucinda’s fork never went near her chicken salad.

“What? No.” Goddamn it, Emily was. “I’m not—”

“You are.” Lucinda leaned forward and touched Emily’s shoulder. A dry touch, nonsexual. “Are you afraid of me?”

Yes
.
No
. It was hot in here too, but the goose bumps on Em’s shoulder gave her away. “Yes.”

“Don’t be. I’m only mean to people I dislike.”

This wasn’t true. Lucinda was brutal to everyone, screaming and snarling when she didn’t get her way. Her meanness wasn’t like Beau’s—situational, and prone to vanish as soon as you got to know him—but indiscriminate. Executives, valet parkers, assistants all suffered equally. Everyone had a Lucinda story.

“Oh, I have a reputation.” The one about her telling a young
ADM
agent that his client, a writer, would have to
pry her fee from my dripping cunt flaps?
True. “But you really have to be on my bad side to see it.”

Beau Rosenwald was on her bad side. Beau Rosenwald
was
her bad side, all that swinging dick stuff Lucinda loathed, “honey” this and “baby” that. What a fucking dinosaur.

“I’m here to rescue you,” Lucinda continued, so gently Emily could almost believe it. Once more she had that feeling she was dreaming. “I want you to bring me things.”

“I do.”

“No. Don’t go through Beau.” A thin, dry, tight smile. With her glittering dark eyes and faint freckles, she looked like an unhappy doll. “Just you. I want your passion.”

Emily smiled back. She’d lived this long in the business to know a trap when she saw one. She wasn’t going to sell her boss quite so easily.

“Sure thing.”

Was Beau right? Did Emily simply lack passion? She walked back to the office after lunch, feeling happy, loyal, poised. She could do great things if she kept her wits about her. Sweeping her teeth with her tongue to dislodge a fragment of mandarin orange, she watched Lucinda vanish down the avenue toward the Thalberg Building. Sunstruck grass and the translucent pink cups of Iceland poppies waved in the breeze.
Poppies
. As if Lucinda were some sort of wicked witch, who could be neutralized with something as mild as mineral water.
I’m mellltinng!
Beau Rosenwald had nothing to be afraid of.

“I think it’s a terrific relationship,” Beau said.

“Do you? You’re not mad?”

He looked up. He studied his apt little pupil in the doorway, where she stood. “I’m not mad.”

So much was in motion around this time. Severin had published his third book,
Cruising the Flat Surface
—this was an enigmatic science fiction story about a shy janitor who builds a supercollider in his basement—and was just getting into his fourth, the one that would really make his career. I’d moved to New York, where I’d taken a development job myself. I’d finally gotten tired of waiting for my Chandler script to go while I envied my brother’s industriousness. I went to work for a rival studio, 20th Century Fox, where I climbed through the ranks fairly quickly, discovering an economy in myself I’d never previously dreamed existed. Emily White had nothing on me. Little Will got married to his college girlfriend, then went to work as a fact-checker at
Vanity Fair
. Funny job for someone whose neuroplasticity had been endangered. Will still had his lapses, moments where recent experience would abandon him, but for the most part, he seemed no more forgetful than he’d always been. Severin, too, moved to Brooklyn. Where else was a young novelist supposed to be? Within the next couple of years, all three of us would be married, and all living in one of the five
boroughs. It was a lot of change for Beau Rosenwald to process. Emily might have been all he had left. But to even his own surprise, he didn’t mind her dining with Lucinda at all.

“It’ll be good for us,” he grunted, rooting with his spoon at the bottom of his yogurt cup. “It’ll help us push things through.”

“You think? Lucinda really hates you.”

“I know!” He chuckled, set the spoon down. “Now that I’m not married, it’s almost fun having a woman hate me that much.”

“I think she’s sniffing me out for a job.”

Beau shrugged. He was almost sixty-five now. Once upon a time, that was considered “retirement age.” Shall I tell you he’d mellowed? It isn’t true.

“Let her sniff. It’s her own shit that stinks.”

“What are you doing?” Emily spotted something—was that a protractor?—next to the cup on his desk.

Beau looked to be sketching something, in this four o’ clock lull. He covered a sheet of paper with his hand, this man who sometimes didn’t even bother to close the door to his private bathroom when he took a leak in mixed company.

“Nothing.” He flipped the paper over. “Glad you had a good lunch.”

What
was
he doing? She leaned over the desk, squinting at the paper that, whatever else, seemed to have nothing to do with the movie business.

“Beau . . . Are you happy?”

“What the hell kind of question is that?”

“An honest one.” Emily wasn’t rattled anymore by his snapping fits, or by anything he said. “I was just wondering.”

He shook his head, made a sound that was like a dog sneezing.
Tchhh!
He looked more than ever like a dog, now, having contracted a conjunctivitis that bothered his left eye. He led with the other when he stared at you, which made his face seem deep, interrogative, screwy.

“Go wonder somewhere else.”

Was he happy? He was alone. And I think he was in a kind of pain that was difficult to imagine, with his kids gone, his former partners dead now or retiring. Rollie Mardigian flew planes in the south of France. He had a vineyard. When Beau thought of Will, and
he did, often, it was to wonder what his long-ago friend would’ve made of the business as it was today, or of the slick tomb that now housed the company they’d built.
ADM’
s Frank Gehry offices were half a block down from what once was Jimmy’s, where he and his partner used to have lunch all the time. Together. That’s what he always came back to: they’d built it together, and no matter how Will fucked him later, he never forgot. Never. The business seemed to rest now on forgetting. You were no longer as good as your last hit. You were only as good as your next one. What had happened to an industry that used to rely upon memory, that was founded, however tenuously, on some feeling for the elegance, the inextinguishable glamour, of the past?

It wasn’t so very long before something else happened to remind him.

“Oh!” Beau set down his newspaper. He was at home eating breakfast on a Wednesday morning, digging calmly into his grapefruit when he saw. “Jesus.”

He bowed his head as if in prayer. He pressed his elbows so hard against his wooden breakfast table that they hurt. Amazing the way some deaths really affected him and others didn’t, so that a close friend could die—Jeremy Vana or Ned Bondie from the old office, or even his first wife, whom he presumed was dead after all these years—and it might seem to mean very little, where other times it came roaring at him with the force of a tornado.

“Christ.”

He rubbed his forehead with his fingernails. Closed his eyes against the room’s oppressively white surfaces. The quartered section of the
LA
Times
told the story. It wasn’t front-page news, but it was in the Calendar section, below the fold.
Former Talent Agent Dies after Long Illness. Represented Marlon Brando
. . .

Sam Smiligan. He hadn’t even known Sam was sick, although . . .
complications from pneumonia
. . . Figured. Yes.
No children. Survived by his partner
. . .

All these years, Beau had rarely thought of his old enemy. It was hard to hate a man who’d quietly exited the business, or else just been whelmed by its tides. Sam was a dinosaur in ’72, so imagine
what it must’ve been like by the time it was all
CGI
, robot cops melting in and out of walls. You never heard about him anymore. Occasionally you skimmed a program at the Geffen Playhouse, looked at the board of directors for a Holocaust museum: he was there. But Beau hadn’t seen Sam in fifteen years. Once, maybe. Sitting in a lilac pullover, eating dinner with Liza Minnelli at the Polo Lounge, hand quivering a little as he lifted his fork. He’d nodded to Beau, without warmth or hostility. Perhaps he no longer even remembered.

So why was Beau Rosenwald sobbing now?

“Gah—”

He picked up his plate and flung it, stupidly, across the room. His half ruby grapefruit landed facedown on the floor. The plate shattered at the foot of the sink. Beau sniffled and mopped his tears with his palms.

“Fuck,” he murmured. “Fuck.”

What does it mean when there’s no one left in front of you? When the only possible cannon fodder is yourself? He looked around the kitchen and blinked, dazedly. It was weird to act emotional, too, when there wasn’t anyone around to witness it, when it wasn’t for anyone else to see.

“C’mere.” He spoke to the dog, a fat black lab who didn’t listen. “Daisy, c’mon.”

Finally, she did. The dainty, heavy clicking of her nails on the terra-cotta floor.
Survived by his partner
. Beau felt a wash of happiness, or relief, to know Sam had finally come out of the closet. Everyone should come to accept himself in the end.

Had
he
? As he scratched his dog’s forehead, kicked the floor with short legs as energetic as a toddler’s, the answer in Beau’s case was plain: not nearly. I believe he was as restless within as he had ever been. But that didn’t mean he didn’t dream of such peace for others. And perhaps that was the difference, too, between himself and Sam and Williams. He was a mammal, deep down, no matter how much flesh he ate. Whereas Sam was a vampire and Will an enigma, even in death: the two men were the only truly private people he’d ever encountered in the movie business, albeit to such wildly different ends.

“Ralph?” He was on the phone now with his business manager, squinting at the final lines of the obit. It didn’t matter whether you were survived by a family or a foundation, or if the company you’d
built had morphed into something utterly strange: you deserved to be remembered. You did. “Ralph, I’d like to make a donation . . . ”

“What do you think, I’m made out of money?”

Of course, at work it continued. Emily would ask for a raise and a promotion and what was he going to say? No?

“Are you?” she teased.

“I might be,” he grumbled. But there were worse things to be made of than money. He knew that. Emily’s bright and fearless face was what kept him alive. It wasn’t that she made him feel young. It was that she made him feel at all.

“You want anything else? A second assistant?”

Emily wouldn’t wreck it by laughing. Her affection for him was almost bottomless by now: he was such a good boss! He stared back at her over the top of his gold-rimmed reading glasses, clean-shaven these days, his hair a mess.

“Nope.”

He gave her what she needed. She too was like a character in a fairy tale.
Make me a queen. Now make me an empress
. Not knowing that something close to desperation had crept in, that if he didn’t originate a movie soon, the studio wouldn’t renew his deal. But I think she imagined him the way the young almost always do the aging: incompletely, as if his successes protected him. As if the money and the material goods indemnified against fear.

“I’ll just go find us another movie.” She smiled, before she turned back down the hall. The phone on his desk gave a little burp, a muted purr. “That should make it a little easier for you to afford me.”