American Dream Machine Read Online Free Page B

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.

III
    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.
    “Hey, Bryce!”
    “Huh?” A skinny and kinetic man, lithe as an eel, was leaving one of these when Beau cornered him. He was handsome, but not distractingly so. “Who’re you?”
    “Beau Rosenwald. Talented Artists Group. I’ve seen everything you’ve done and I love your work.”
    “Everything?” The man’s eyes were a little too close together. His teeth were faintly rodentine, and his face telegraphed an anxious skepticism, like he was scanning the horizon against an imminent calamity. Still, handsome. Authentic. “You must have good vision, because I’m never up there for very long.”
    “That’s your agent’s fault.” They stood on the steps of the Wagon Train office, in the patch of shadow thrown by one of the hangarlike soundstages.
    “I don’t have an agent.” Bryce pushed his hand through coarse blond hair. “Mine just fired me, said I’m too difficult to cast.”
    Beau smiled. “You know the five stages of an actor’s career? It starts out with Who’s Bryce Beller? Then, Get me Bryce Beller . Eventually, Get me a young Bryce Beller . And then, Get me a Beller type . Then—”
    “ Who’s Bryce Beller? ” The actor snickered. “I like that joke.”
    Beau had