American Dream Machine Read Online Free

had confidentiality. He said hello like he was telling you a great secret. He glancedout 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