American Dream Machine (26 page)

Beau pulled out the rectangular brass tray, the slide-out bottom in which he half expected to find something repulsive. Instead there was a thin envelope and a thick wad of cash. Two tickets to London, first class.

“Take your girlfriend. You need a vacation.”

“I do? From what?”

But Williams just smiled. “Enjoy yourself, Beau. Just do.”

The agency’s ethos never faltered. They looked after one another, so devoted they were mocked with a nickname—“the Secret Sharers”—at other places. Beau
did
enjoy himself, more than he ever thought he could. He was the point man for De Niro, he handled Sidney Lumet. With Williams, he shared Scorsese. On top of it all, the best part was that he loved not just his business, but his son. Some days he woke up grieving and clammy and haunted and ill, and there were times still he wanted to die. But he began to feel—at last—he had surfaced. The song of a man who has come through! Too seasoned to imagine success would last forever, he vowed to enjoy it while he could. With Star, he imagined starting a family. With Severin, he went to Dodger games, and facing the orange
UNION
76 sign beyond the blue center-field wall, staring from the Dream Machine box behind home plate, he could feel their shared contentment.
Want another dog, Sev?
His son was undergoing a growth spurt, with the barest hint of a mustache along his lip. My brother may have been an alien to him, into things he could feel
were Rachel’s, but Beau had never been closer to another human being.

“Go on, Rosers!” Teddy Sanders said. “They make movies in England, too.”

“I’ll sign David Puttnam,” Beau crowed. “We never said we wouldn’t have a London office.”

And so he went. With Star he stayed at the Connaught, then they went to Rome for a lost weekend. Sev crashed at my house, as they were gone almost three weeks. Everything was paid for by the company, everything. Meals were expensed, hotels were comped, even the ring—yes, there was a ring—came through the phone call Williams made to the props department at Disney, who had a deal with Harry Winston. If ever his life was like a movie, if ever things happened without any effort at all, it was now—doors opened themselves, drivers carried bags, reservations were so elastic that if they wanted to dine at eleven o’clock instead of eight the same table was waiting, with the same silverware and different flowers. All was an idyll. When Beau arrived home, he was married. To a girl from Topeka, who’d had her first drink on a date with him two years before.

“Hello, sweetheart.” His secretary, Linda, looked up on Monday morning. She was older—thirty-one—and not beautiful, two things he’d sought out when hiring, in order to remain untempted.

“H-hey, he’s back!” Milt Schildkraut sat on the edge of her desk. Milt had a slight stutter when he was excited. “How was it?”

“I’m reborn.”

“You look tan. Who goes to London and comes back tan?” Milt said.

“We went to Ansedonia. We were in Rome, and Carlo loaned us his beach house.”

“Which Carlo?”

“Pontevecchio.” Beau grimaced, amused. It was the long hand of Williams again, of course. “He’s one of our directors.”

“I’ve never paid him.”

“You’ve never paid anyone else. Linda, did I miss anything?”

“Davis, this morning. Gene. John Calley.” They’d spoken four times a day while he was gone, rolled calls in his hotel room. Besides getting his trades a day late, there wasn’t anything to miss. “Nothing urgent.”

“Get Gene.”

He and Milt turned and went into his office. Linda was thick-waisted and black-haired, with the densely waxen complexion of girls he’d known growing up, though she was from Hacienda Heights and not Astoria Boulevard. She was pretty by any regular standard, but since when did that standard pertain here?

“What’s up, Milt?”

“Did you a-authorize this?” Milt handed him a mimeographed form.

Will’s expenses. Beau squinted at it incuriously. The two men signed off on each other’s expenses—someone had to—but all he saw here were ordinary hotel bills, restaurants. “So what?”

“Who lives in Chicago?”

“Bill Murray lives in Chicago. What are you being such a bean counter about, Milt?”

“My job.”

Outside, Linda squawked, “Left word!”

“Are we in trouble?”

“No, n-nothing like that,” Milt said. “Nowhere close.”

“Then why worry?” He and Williams shared a number of clients. Certain nervous Nellies like Marty, who needed both hands held
and
another to yank them off under the table. Beau handled Bill Murray by himself, but so what? Murray was as loyal to Beau as Belushi was, in fact because of Belushi, who loved Beau, predictably enough, like a brother. Each looked at the other and saw himself. “I visited Larry in London too.”

Larry, Sir Laurence. This was Will’s client, in turn.

“All right, it isn’t a worry. I just worry when there’s nothing to worry about.”

“Who doesn’t?”

In the near interior of Beau’s office there was an overstuffed white couch, a glass table with a large bowl of cinnamon jelly beans, a pitcher of ice water, and two cylindrical glasses. Today’s
Daily Variety
reported on the weekend gross for
The Idolmaker
, the ratings for “No More Mr. Nice Guy,” the season premiere of
Dallas
.

“Davis DeLong!”

“Call back.”

Milt Schildkraut slipped the expense report, with which there was nothing wrong, back into its folder.

“You still married?”

“Yeah. You took the under?”

The two men chuckled.

“You gonna get her some work?”

“Nah.” Roland Mardigian had done that, gotten his restaurant girlfriend a spot in a series. It hadn’t worked out: they were separated already. “Not my style.”

“So whatcha gonna do?”

Morning light fell through the window at the far end, onto Beau’s desk and the leather-backed chair and the various trophies, on the spittoon and an autographed ball from Dusty Baker and Rick Rhoden and Ron Cey resting on a stand. Posters for
Midnight Express, Being There
. These offices could not have been more different from the old Talented Artists Group ones, being neither cloistered nor clubby; their plate-glass windows faced smog-tinged sky.

“We’re going to have a baby,” Beau said. “I’m going to knock her up.”

“BITCH! FUCKING WHORE! CUNT!”

Beau Rosenwald stood, bare-chested, in his elegant kitchen at night. He was yelling those things at his wife, who was soon to be an ex-wife. You came to a certain point in life, you just knew how these things went.

“Fuck you! Beau, don’t.”

Star was teary. She was sitting down. She wore one of the original American Dream Machine shirts, a white baseball T with red sleeves, the company logo on the front, on the back a vaudevillian cartoon dog talking to his agent.
What I really want to do is direct
. Whatever she was contrite for, and she was, it overwhelmed her. She sat and wept while her husband prowled the crimson-tiled room, banging its steely fixtures with his hand.

“I don’t want to have a baby! I’m sorry, it’s too soon.”

“So you aborted one?”

“I did. I’m sorry.”

“How could you do that to me?”

“To
you?
” She shook her hair out of her face. Teary, angry, her expression sharpened also into something resolute as an adult’s. “How typical of you to imagine this is about yourself.”

“What d’you know from typical?” He waved her off, dismissive. “What do you know about anything, you shiksa whore?”

This was late autumn of ’81. They’d been married barely a year. I don’t know where Sev was during this, but if I were to hazard a guess I’d say in his room with his ’phones on, either masturbating or listening to
The Wall
.

“Fuck you, Beau. My father used to beat me!”

“He should’ve beat some sense into you.”

She glared. “How can you say that? You give money to Planned Parenthood, the Venice Family Clinic.”

He stared back, flexing his fingers. He could feel the impulse to really let fly, just as Herman Rosenwald’s voice roared in his ears.
Fat shit!
He was ugly, unattractive as he’d ever been with his bitch tits and his sloping belly, the top of it rolling over a pair of pale flannel trousers.

“I’d like to have another kid.”

“I know! Why can’t we wait a few years? We just got married!”

Why couldn’t they wait? The refrigerator hummed, the radio, which was almost always on in here, sat quiet. The track lights were moody. He went over to the fridge and got himself a Perrier. He offered her one too.

“I can’t wait,” he said. “I’m sorry.”

“How come?” Did he know something, was he ill? “I just want to
work
, Beau, I want to accomplish things, my career!” Her career. “I’m so close, Beau. I could wait a year, two years, three years,
five
and I wouldn’t even be thirty! What’s the hurry?”

She did love him. She didn’t care that he was fat and rich, or that her stepson was a supercilious little prick who insulted her at every turn, lifting his eyebrows whenever he saw her with a massive paperback in her hand as if to ask,
You enjoying that?
The Other Side of the Mountain?

“I care.
I
care,” he said. But he didn’t in that moment and felt he might never again. “Oh, fuck it.”

She blinked back, soupy with tears. Her sincerity bugged him, the way she actually meant everything. Hadn’t Olivier told him, once, that the secret to being an actor was being
un
truthful?

“Get out of my house,” he roared, while she sniffled and wept. “I’m serious. Get the fuck out!”

How stupid she was! How stupid
he
was, ever to fall for her. How stupid, all of it, the way he forced a gorgeous girl who truly loved him—the first one, ever—to leave, to pick up her purse and shuffle out of the kitchen, clutching the long strap of the Bottega Veneta bag he’d bought her. He could hear her banging around the stairwell and weeping, her voice carrying and echoing off the tiles in the hall. Such histrionics! He felt nothing.

“Dad.”

Severin came in, later. Beau’d been sitting there for who knew how long, over at the table now with his forehead propped on his balled fists.

“What are you doing?”

Star was gone, the house was silent, Beau sat and willed himself toward a regret he could not feel, save for that lingering taste of failure. Was failure ever stronger, really, than when it was in remission? Did it ever actually go away?

“Your stepmother and I had a fight.”

“I heard.”

“You did? Sorry.”

Why couldn’t he be like Williams, in this respect, too? Why couldn’t he control his temper, why did he need a different woman every twenty minutes?

“It’s all right. Why aren’t you dressed?”

Severin was high, really high for one of the first times. Antigravitationally, skin-meltingly, face-crushingly stoned.

“I dunno.” Beau stood up, looked around the room without interest. He’d been sitting here forever, since midafternoon, reading scripts. Exactly as he’d been when Star dropped the bomb. “I had a shirt, somewhere.”

“Are you an athathin?” Sev mimicked Brando in
Apocalypse
.

“Not quite.” Beau laughed.

He loved his son. More than anything, he loved his son. The first spread of regret, the inkling he may have made a mistake, washed through him. Star was beautiful, stupid but magnificent. She was far better than he deserved.

“Hungry?”

Severin was scrambling eggs, cracking them now into the pan. One thing Sev could always do was cook, since who else was gonna do it? Beau couldn’t.

“I’m fucking starving, son.”

He watched Sev closely. Beau was aware of the marijuana in his son’s life, but what was he supposed to say about it?
Don’t?
He stood up.

“I’m going to put a shirt on.”

He went upstairs and got one, a salmon-colored bespoke he’d had made on Jermyn Street. The bedroom was a mess, Star’s shoes
and jewelry flung everywhere and his tent-like clothes strewn across the floor. Who cared? This master suite was more like a hotel room, the gargantuan bed, the bottled water all over the place. A dildo stood upright on the nightstand. He’d lived like this always, the prisoner of his own sloth. He came back down, found Severin already sitting with a six-egg omelet.

“You want some of this? I’ll make you some. Dad.”

Sev’s face was frozen, bent into some weird rictus of befuddlement and hilarity.

“You
OK
, son?”

“Nah. Yes. I mean yes.” He was staring at his fork, at the scrap of egg at the end of it, like it contained some key to the cosmos. “I’m all right.”

He yelped and dropped his fork with a spastic little laugh. Beau went over to the counter and poured himself an enormous glass of Mount Gay rum over ice. Time to start drinking again after months of eating like an insect, this actress with her actressy food. He sat down opposite his son, at the metal-framed breakfast table he’d owned since 1965. Practically everything else in the house was new.

“I’m sorry about your stepmother.”

“It’s
OK
.”

“It’s not
OK
.” Beau spoke slowly, the way he did when he had to make a tender point. He sipped his rum beneath the sickly light of the kitchen, the sullen yellow that never felt particularly like home. Except now, when he sat with his boy and tried to explain the unexplainable. “I know you miss your mother. Your real mother. Star and I tried to—”

“I don’t like her.”

“Sev!”

“I don’t. I think Star is fucking awful.”

“Awful?”

“Yes!” Severin laughed. “I think she’s a moron.”

Beau searched his son again. Awful wasn’t the same as stupid, actually, but the two things had some relation.

“Are you stoned?”

“Yes.”

Beau looked at his son in amazement. “I don’t want you to get high.”

“But you’re not going to punish me?”

“I can’t do that. No. But I don’t want you to do it, Severin, I don’t want you to smoke pot.”

“I will.”

“I know, but I don’t want you to. I don’t want you to want to.”