American Dream Machine (3 page)

Until this morning, he’d never been any farther west than Jersey.

“I beg your pardon?” the receptionist chirped. “We do receive mail for Mr. Peck, yes. One-two-four Bedford Drive.”

Inside, the building hummed with activity, the murmurous commercial sound of a train station. At long last, Beau stood up.

“Excuse me.” He approached after a thirty-minute exile. “Has Mr. Smiligan returned?”

The girl stared at her hands. “No sir.”

“Do you expect him? A—Mr. Waxmorton was sure he’d see me.”

He’d removed his jacket. He was five eight, and at the peak of his girth, and his powers, he would tip three hundred pounds. This morning, he was hapless in his heavy gray pants, white sleeves rolled, perspiration stains spreading under his armpits. His hair was mussed and the short brown curls, unruly even at this length, plastered his forehead. That face! The receptionist patched a plug with an agitation close to fury, punching the cord home like a dagger.

“Hi, Sarah, there’s a Mr.—”

“Rosenwald.” He cleared his throat.

“Rosenwald. Waiting here to see Mr. Smiligan. He says Mr. Waxmorton sent him. Yes.”

She nodded back at the waiting area. “Someone will be out.”

If she had looked closely, she might have noticed his shoes. They were Church’s brogues—English, expensive—and anyone here who saw them would have recognized Waxmorton’s hand.
A man is judged by his persistence, his substance, and his shoes
. Waxmorton had offered Beau the same lecture he did everyone who came to work
for the company.
An agent must possess the first. With any luck, he possesses the second. But the third! This business forgives eccentricity
...

From here he would taper off, as if there were many things “this business” might tolerate, but poor haberdashery was not one. The job was to know where the restaurants were, to understand hotels. It involved an accumulation of secondhand knowledge, circulation of gossip that became, if repeated long enough, true. Jack Lemmon is hot. Fox is going to offer Kim Novak a three-picture deal. Agents were simply almanacs with energy, aggregations of rumor that flew into truth.

“Would you like to go to the pictures?” Beau’s voice echoed across the lobby.

“Pardon?”

He was sunk into the black leather couch, by the table with its issues of
Daily Variety
and
The Hollywood Reporter
, fanned out in their respective green and red like decks of cards. A bowl of fruit—oranges, grapes, and bananas—sat in the middle. Like the receptionist, it was really just for show.

“Would you go to a picture with me?” He leaned forward and snapped off one of the bananas and peeled it. “The movies. I understand they make them out here.”

He took down half the banana with one bite.

“You aren’t supposed to eat those.”

He sat with the fantastic solidity of a toad. You could imagine his stillness lasting for days. He wolfed the second half of the banana and snapped off another, then sauntered back over to the counter where she sat behind a lip of cold marble.

“Will you go to the pictures with me?”

“Sir, I—I don’t know you.”

“Yes, you do. Everybody knows me.” He smiled. “At least, they never forget me.”

She stared. He had a tuberous face, lips damp and pursed like a trumpeter’s, one eye slightly lower than the other like a disappointed hound’s.

“I’m sorry,” she stammered, “but I’m engaged.”

“Your fellow doesn’t buy you a ring?”

He leaned over her desk. Beyond confidence, he had confidentiality. He said hello like he was telling you a great secret. He glanced
out the window and then, very casually, peeled and demolished his second banana.

“What’s your name?”

“Trix.”

“What’s your real name?”

“Carol.”

“Carol what?” He set the peel down on the edge of her desk.

“Metzger.” She blushed.

“Nice Jewish girl.” He smiled. “How come they call you the other? Is it a stage name?”

He could never be handsome but look at anything long enough—a street lamp—and it establishes dominion, a quiddity: it becomes itself.

“It’s just a nickname.”

“How’d you get it?”

You didn’t have to be handsome when you were the last man standing.

“Mr. Rosenwald!”

He turned. Waxy strands clung to his fingers, his lips. Sam Smiligan stood by the glass doors, dry and immaculate in his navy blue suit. He was small and walnut-colored and, from the looks of it, completely humorless. His fingers folded over to touch his palms in a gesture less hostile, more dapper than a fist. There were intimations of gold, a discreet glow along the cuffs.

“You’re the one?” Sam removed his glasses. The room rang with his incredulity. “You’re Abe’s boy?”

Beau Rosenwald never graduated from college. His education consisted of one man, one book, one thing. The day he left high school he answered an ad in the
Herald Tribune
about a mailboy position. Told the agency only hired university graduates, he went and enrolled in Queens College, then came back after three years of academic futility, when at last he paid someone off for the degree and the transcript. Thus, every morning of July 1955 began the same way.

“I’d like to see Mr. Waxmorton.”

“Mr. Waxmorton is busy, sir.”

“Really?” Beau nodded. “I’m here since eight o’clock and I haven’t seen him come in.”

The Talented Artists Group offices in New York were different from the ones in
LA
. They were humid and ugly, with low ceilings, corrugated acoustic panels, parquet floors. Ficus plants swooned in the corners. The male agents were shrewd, the girls spoke Beau’s language. Their accents were Jackson Heights, Astoria Boulevard. This receptionist had a nose like a flight of stairs. Beau could imagine her writhing in the back of a Bonneville, just how many times her legs might snap shut before she gave it up.

“Listen, sweetheart.” He leaned over and murmured. “I’ll keep coming back. You want to look at this face every day?”

Eventually, he won his audience. Abe Waxmorton was the son of the company’s founder. He’d had his start, long ago, in vaudeville. He’d fought the company back from bankruptcy twice, most recently in 1934 when the studios had put the squeeze on talent in an effort to recoup the higher costs of producing talkies during the Depression. That year, in which the combined force of Roosevelt’s National Industrial Recovery Act and the talent’s decision to unionize had almost decimated the business, Waxmorton sent his lieutenant Sam Smiligan to open an office on the West Coast. He was old enough to remember when apartment buildings hung signs that read
NO BLACKS, NO ACTORS, NO DOGS
, old enough never to drink tomato juice, so-called “clients’ blood,” in public. To Beau, he seemed monumental.

“You have any experience?”

“No sir. I see a lot of movies.”

“A lot?” Waxmorton tutted. “You should see them all.”

He was fifty-five, old as the century, with the battered face—squashed nose and cut expression—of a pugilist. His silver hair was shot through with black strands, and he cupped a mandarin orange between his palms. He didn’t peel it, merely rotated it between his fingertips as he leaned back in his chair.

“Education?”

“Queens College.” Beau had the purchased diploma in his pocket.

“What else? What makes you special, besides your good looks?”

Outside, on Fifty-Third Street, a light snow fell. Waxmorton set the orange down and inhaled his citrus-kissed nails. Through his window the sky was a lithographic, late-afternoon gray.

“What does your father do?”

“He makes shoes.”

“Shoes!” Waxmorton shook his head. “Ask him to make you a better pair.”

What was it? Was it the hardness, the hatred in Beau’s eyes when he spoke of his father? Herman Rosenwald was a world-class son of a bitch, to hear Beau tell it: an angry widower with a heart as tight as a clamshell. But maybe Abe Waxmorton just liked my father’s energy. Maybe he just needed a buffoon.

“Come tomorrow. You’ll start in the mailroom, like everybody else.”

“I’ll start today.”

“Not in those clothes.”

Not in those clothes
. Abe taught him to think like an agent, act like one, dress, like an undertaker or a G-man, too, in dark, solid colors. Abe’s office walls showed photographs with Greta Garbo, James Cagney, Olivia de Havilland; in the corner was a bat—
the
bat—Ted Williams had used to bring his batting average to .406 on the last day of the 1941 season. Beau worked in the mailroom, then was promoted to handle the great man’s desk. Then, for slightly longer than was good for him, he became something else. Abe’s driver, or his attaché. Technically, the job didn’t have a name. He was Waxmorton’s shadow, his advisor: he did everything short of wipe the man’s ass. Walked his dogs, measured his golf handicap, squired his wife, sitting in Flora Waxmorton’s kitchen in North Fork, where she made him inedible tuna sandwiches. For three years he did this. This was the education he’d had, and it was enough. One day he came in and his own office, the little nook adjacent to his master’s, stood empty.

“Go.”

“What?” Beau turned. Waxmorton hunched in the doorway, staring with eyes gone bulbous, accusatory.

“You need to go to Los Angeles.”

“Los Angeles?” Beau was close enough now to be peevish. “What the hell for?”

Beyond tan carpets and walnut trim, the only things left in the room were books. Shelves of them, belonging to Waxmorton. Beau’s boss was an enthusiastic autodidact, and many of these leathery volumes were written by people the agent actually knew. Eugene O’Neill, Tennessee Williams.

“There’s nothing
in
Los Angeles. You said so yourself, it’s all desert and horse piss and guys with sixth-grade educations.”

Waxmorton turned his palms up. “You want to keep shuttling me out to North Fork every day?”

“You’re firing me?”

“Your clients will fire you. Your friends will stab you in the back. The sooner you get used to that the better.”

Beau was twenty-eight, an indifferent student all his life; he’d needed to repeat second grade. Waxmorton was all the finishing school he’d had.

“Will you back me?”

“Am I your mother?”

He’d waited for this moment all his life, and still it had the force of a betrayal. Beau’s boss appeared to understand this as he shuffled over to one of the shelves and took down a leather-bound volume.

“What’s this?” Beau turned it in his hands.
Coriolanus
.

“It’s a play.”

“I know that. Is it for a client?”

Waxmorton shook his head. Those half-moon eyes peering over the tops of his glasses.

“You read much history, Beau?”

“Not much,” Beau smiled. “No.”

“The story of one bloodbath can prepare you for the next.”

Often enough, Beau had sat in this office and stared at the spines of Waxmorton’s books.
The History of the Decline and Fall of the Roman Empire
. Who read such a thing? Edward Gibbon’s name merged in his mind with an adjective he didn’t know the meaning of either,
gibbous
. A pet word.
Good morning, Darlene
. He’d sway over the receptionist’s desk.
You’re looking gibbous today
. Odd that Severin and I turned out the way we did; Beau’s own verbal gifts were strictly for patter.

“Control the talent.” Waxmorton shuffled forward to shake his hand. “You want to know how to get ahead? Control the talent, you’ll bring the studio to its knees.”

Beau had read the play twice on the plane. Now it rattled around his otherwise empty briefcase as he chugged down the hall after Sam.

“Will I, uh—will I have an office?”

“Unless you’d prefer a stall.”

In the air, on a red-eye flight, he’d scoured the bloody story of a Roman general for clues. But the play had provided no answer to what he should do now. He followed Sam Smiligan past a long row of secretaries. Pretty girls from Chatsworth and Loma Linda and Beverly Hills. Occasional among them was a man, whose white shirt and whipped expression signified a trainee.

“Here,” Sam snapped.

They’d stopped before a corner room, as dark and shabby as a janitor’s closet. Its blinds were drawn and its desk was dusty and there was nothing else inside it but an enormous circular Rolodex and a phone.

“You were expecting grander accommodation?” Sam lifted one eyebrow, his tone an ocean of sarcasm.

Behind them the air filled with the brittle chatter of typewriter keys and the cascading half harmony of female voices.
Edwegaben-martadigian’s office?

“Do I get a girl?”

“Do you need one?”

Sam Smiligan had unfurled his fingers but once, briefly, to shake hands. There was something about him that resembled a gingerbread cookie: an easel-like splaying of his legs, a neatness that suggested he might never eat, or shave, or defecate. He had the precision of a minor general.

“Why don’t you concentrate on making the phone ring first,” Sam said. “Then we’ll get you someone to answer it.”

Beau stared at the Rolodex. There were at least a thousand cards inside it, and every last one of them was blank.

“At least you know how to drive, Mr. Rosenwald.” Another punctilious smile. “That’s one thing you won’t have to figure out.”

The two men glared. It took my father ten minutes to make his first enemy. Here too, he was ahead of the curve. Then Beau bent down and picked up his briefcase. He disappeared into the empty room, the leather-bound volume banging audibly as he walked.

HIS FIRST CLIENT
was an actor. Even before he met Will’s dad, the man who would teach him so much about the game—how to negotiate, how to woo, how to close—it turned out Beau had a knack for it, for the long-form seduction it often took to represent someone. The trick was to find men as desperate as you were and when, like Beau, you’d been desperate since infancy, they were easy enough to recognize. He scoured episodic television, watched
Wagon Train
and
Perry Mason
, watched
Alfred Hitchcock Presents
and later
Burke’s Law
and
I Spy
. He hung around outside the open calls, sweet-talked his way onto the Universal lot and into the various production offices.