Chapter 1
The summer of 1979 was a terrible season to be a rich disappointment.
Poverty would have offered an explanation. Hunger might have supplied an alibi. A young man born with nothing could fail in a thousand ordinary ways and still find someone willing to blame the world.
But wealth denied a man that mercy.
Wealth fed him, clothed him, educated him, and then stood at the foot of his bed each morning asking what, precisely, he intended to become.
In the Hammerstein family, the question had teeth.
Their father had built their fortunes out of things that could be weighed, counted, stacked, and delivered: warehouse space, freight contracts, refrigerators, washing machines. Things with invoices. Things with warranties. Things that did not require anyone to believe in them.
Their sons wanted something less respectable.
They wanted an audience.
And an audience was a creature their father trusted: many-headed, fickle, expensive to summon, and impossible to command.
Weiner Hammerstein sat behind a polished mahogany desk in his father’s New York office while the afternoon light burned against the windows.
Beyond the glass, the city stood beneath a lid of yellow heat. Trucks crawled through the streets with their iron bellies full. Down at the loading docks, men in sweat-darkened shirts moved merchandise into the shadows of warehouses. Everything belonged somewhere. Everything had a destination, a purchase order, a price.
On the desk before him lay a ledger.
Its green columns extended across the page with the solemnity of scripture.
His father stood behind his chair.
The old man did not pace. Pacing suggested uncertainty. He remained motionless, one broad hand resting on the back of the chair, his wedding ring clicking occasionally against the wood.
Weiner had come to hate that sound.
It meant instruction was approaching.
“Do you know what that column means?”
“No.”
“The column beside it?”
“No.”
“The profit margin?”
“I know what profit means.”
His father drew a slow breath through his nose.
Above the filing cabinets hung a photograph of the first warehouse he had purchased. In it, he stood beside a loading bay in an overcoat, looking less like a businessman than a man who had personally defeated winter.
He had shown Weiner the photograph many times.
He had never shown him a picture of himself enjoying anything.
“You are twenty-three years old.”
“I know what age means too.”
The hand on the chair tightened.
Weiner watched a bead of condensation descend the side of his untouched water glass.
His father could speak for hours about depreciation schedules. About trucking contracts. About the difference between goods in transit and goods received. He spoke of these matters with a reverence other men reserved for miracles.
Weiner could have spoken with equal feeling about a painted monster rising above a miniature city.
He could have explained why the woman on a horror poster always looked toward the thing behind her instead of running. He could have described the precise shade of red that made a title seem to bleed beneath a theater marquee.
His father regarded movie posters as packaging for a product that somebody else had been sensible enough to manufacture.
“You have been given an opportunity,” the old man said.
Weiner looked down at the ledger.
What his father called opportunity had a desk, a swivel chair, and a view of the building in which he would grow old.
For a moment, he saw the years ahead with unbearable clarity: the same columns, the same windows, his own hand one day resting on the back of a younger man’s chair.
He closed the book.
His father looked at it.
Then at him.
Outside, a truck backed toward the loading dock, its warning bell ringing steadily through the heat.
Weiner decided he should leave before one of them said something that could never be taken back.
Across the city, Meyer Hammerstein was receiving his inheritance in the form of a lecture.
His father’s kingdom stood beneath fluorescent lights.
Row upon row of refrigerators gleamed in the appliance showroom. Washing machines waited with their round mouths open. Electric ranges displayed clocks that all showed different times.
Meyer had grown up among these machines.
As a child, he had hidden in the empty refrigerator cartons while his father made sales. As a teenager, he had carried ovens into apartment buildings whose staircases seemed to have been designed out of personal malice.
He knew the business.
That was part of the trouble.
He knew exactly what accepting it would mean.
His father stood beside a refrigerator large enough to preserve a family through the end of the world.
“People always need appliances.”
“I know.”
“They get married, they buy appliances. They have children, they buy bigger appliances. Something breaks, they come back.”
“I know.”
“It is a good business.”
Meyer looked at their reflections in the refrigerator door.
Their father’s was solid and dark.
His own seemed stretched thin.
He had inherited the family appetite for success, but it had attached itself to the wrong object. He did not dream of another showroom, another delivery truck, another newspaper advertisement announcing a sale that would somehow be extended the following week.
He wanted his name on a screen.
He wanted the lights to dim and hundreds of strangers to fall silent because something he had helped create was about to begin.
Their father listened to this with the exhausted expression of a man hearing that his son intended to make a living by teaching wolves to sing.
“Movies,” he said.
“Eventually.”
“What does eventually mean?”
It was a reasonable question.
Meyer had no reasonable answer.
Three hours later, the brothers met in a diner beneath a sign whose missing letter promised HOT COF EE.
The air smelled of fryer oil, burned toast, and cigarettes extinguished in old coffee. A waitress brought two mugs without asking whether they wanted them.
Meyer sat with his tie loosened.
Weiner had taken his off entirely.
For a while, neither spoke.
“So?” Meyer asked.
“So.”
“You quit?”
“I quit.”
Meyer studied him.
Then he grinned.
“I quit too.”
Weiner lifted his mug.
“Congratulations.”
“Congratulations.”
The cups touched with a small, thick sound.
It was an unimpressive noise for the opening of a gate.
Neither man heard the warning in it.
They were young, well-fed, and newly disobedient. Their father’s money still lay beneath them like a net, and they had not yet learned how far a man could fall without ever touching the ground.
Outside, the evening traffic moved through the heat.
Inside, the brothers began discussing a company.
Hammerstein Productions came into existence two weeks later, on the second floor of a former insurance building.
The stairs smelled of damp wool and floor polish. A long-dead leak had left a brown stain on the ceiling above the landing, and the radiators knocked even when nobody had asked them for heat.
Their sign was painted by a local artist whose principal experience consisted of airbrushing dragons onto vans.
He had already completed the dragon when Meyer arrived to inspect his work.
It was green, horned, and extravagantly muscled. Flame streamed from its mouth in a shape that suggested the artist had run out of room.
HAMMERSTEIN PRODUCTIONS appeared underneath in gold lettering.
Meyer stood on the sidewalk and looked up.
“We should have hired a professional.”
“We did,” Weiner said.
“Then where is the professionalism?”
Weiner pointed.
“The dragon.”
To Weiner, it looked like a guardian.
To Meyer, it looked like a reason a bank might decline a loan.
They left it.
Inside were three desks, two telephones, a filing cabinet that would not shut, and approximately two million dollars of family money.
The money had arrived with conditions, warnings, and several conversations neither brother wished to remember. Each regarded accepting it as a temporary embarrassment on the road to eventual vindication.
Their secretary arrived on a Monday.
She hung up her coat, examined the empty filing cabinet, and sat at the third desk.
“What exactly does the company do?”
“We produce movies,” Weiner said.
She nodded and uncapped a pen.
“What movies?”
“Future movies.”
The pen remained above the paper.
“Do you have any scripts?”
“No.”
“Directors?”
“Not yet.”
“Actors?”
“We’re exploring possibilities,” Meyer said.
She looked from one brother to the other, then toward the two telephones.
“Who am I calling?”
For the first time since leaving their father’s business, they encountered a question enthusiasm could not answer.
They wrote letters.
They made calls.
They purchased better stationery.
Weiner believed the first letterhead had lacked authority. Meyer believed authority might be easier to convey if they had a film to discuss.
They enclosed descriptions of their ambitions.
They emphasized their financing.
They waited.
Hollywood did not reject them all at once. That would have required acknowledging them.
Instead, it allowed their letters to disappear.
Messages went unanswered. Assistants promised callbacks with the untroubled voices of people making promises on behalf of men who would never hear about them. An agent laughed before realizing Meyer had not intended to be funny.
So they flew to Los Angeles.
They arrived carrying briefcases and wearing suits too heavy for the weather.
The city seemed to have been built to keep its important people somewhere else. Every office contained a desk. Every desk had a telephone. Every telephone appeared capable of reaching anyone in the world except the person the brothers needed.
“Do you have an appointment?”
“No, but—”
“Then you’ll need to make an appointment.”
At another office, Meyer leaned forward.
“We have financing.”
The man opposite him did not look up.
“So does everyone.”
At a third, Weiner explained that they wanted to make movies.
For a moment, the receptionist regarded him with genuine curiosity, as though he had entered a hospital to announce that he wished to become ill.
“Get in line,” she said.
They ate late dinners under hotel lighting that made every meal look recently exhumed. They reviewed conversations, reassigned blame, and made plans for the following morning.
By the end of the week, their suits smelled of travel and defeat.
Meyer stood on Sunset Boulevard while traffic passed in bright, indifferent streams.
“We can’t get into movies.”
Weiner looked across the street.
Above the traffic rose a concert billboard.
A singer’s enormous face stared down over the city, mouth open, hair blazing beneath painted lights.
“There has to be another way,” Weiner said.
That evening, in their hotel room, he proposed concerts.
Meyer sat on the edge of the bed.
“Concerts.”
“We produce them.”
“And use the profits to make movies.”
“Exactly.”
Meyer considered the idea.
Unlike a studio executive, an empty venue could be rented. A band could be hired. Tickets could be printed. There would be obstacles, certainly, but they were obstacles with prices attached.
For the first time in days, he could see something resembling a road.
“That’s actually not stupid.”
Weiner smiled.
They ordered room service to celebrate.
Later, Meyer would remember that dinner with particular bitterness.
Their first concert took place in a high-school gymnasium in a town the highway had learned to avoid.
The floor smelled of varnish and old exertion. Basketball hoops had been cranked up toward the ceiling, where they hung above the stage like abandoned machinery.
Thirty-seven people attended.
Twelve had come by mistake.
An elderly man near the entrance wanted to know when the church raffle would begin.
Weiner assured him there had been a misunderstanding.
The man stayed anyway. He had already paid.
During the second song, the sound system emitted a noise like sheet metal being torn apart.
One speaker went silent.
The other continued screaming.
Behind the stage, a fuse box caught fire.
For several seconds, the band played on, either from professionalism or because nobody could hear anyone shouting.
Then someone vomited on the drummer.
There were conflicting accounts of how this happened.
The drummer maintained that it had been deliberate.
The singer blamed the smell of burning insulation.
Meyer stood in the gymnasium doorway while a man with a fire extinguisher ran past him and understood, with a clarity bordering on revelation, that every person in the building expected him to know what to do.
The event lost almost twenty thousand dollars.
The second concert did worse.
The third ended in a fistfight over parking, a dispute that began with two motorists and eventually involved a bass player who had not driven to the venue.
By autumn, Hammerstein Productions had a reputation.
People returned their calls now.
Usually to complain.
The brothers drove.
They drove through flat country beneath enormous skies, through towns gathered around water towers, through streets where their concert posters curled in shop windows beside notices for lost dogs.
They learned the appearance of a failing venue before they reached its doors.
They learned that “plenty of parking” could mean a field.
They learned that “the electrician is on his way” could mean the owner had sent his nephew to buy extension cords.
Every morning brought a new demand.
Imported mineral water from a particular French mountain.
Twelve white towels, not cream, not ivory, and certainly not the grayish objects the venue manager offered from a box marked CLEAN.
A taxidermied owl.
No one could explain the owl.
The request arrived in writing, which made it seem both more official and more deranged.
Meyer spent an afternoon telephoning strangers about dead birds.
Weiner drove forty miles to collect one.
It cost three hundred dollars and rode back to the office strapped into the passenger seat, its glass eyes fixed on the road ahead.
The singer canceled.
The owl stayed.
They put it on top of the filing cabinet.
Their secretary refused to sit with her back to it.
Gradually, the machinery concealed behind entertainment revealed itself.
A concert was not merely a singer beneath lights. It was a hundred fragile agreements made among people who had slept badly, eaten worse, and believed their own emergency deserved precedence over every other emergency in the building.
It was a missing truck.
An unpaid deposit.
A locked loading door.
A microphone that had worked perfectly an hour earlier.
From the audience, the lights appeared at the touch of a switch.
Backstage, a man knelt in dust holding two wires apart and prayed nobody would ask him what he was doing.
The brothers had entered the business dreaming of applause.
They spent most of their time searching for someone with a key.
By November, the cold had settled over New York.
Snow gathered along the office windows, melting against the glass and freezing again at the edges. The dragon on the sign wore a white ridge along its back.
Inside, the radiators struck their iron complaints.
Meyer came up the stairs carrying the latest balance sheet.
He did not remove his coat.
Weiner looked up from behind his desk.
The owl watched from the filing cabinet.
“We’ve lost another eighty thousand.”
Weiner put down his pencil.
“That’s not ideal.”
“We’re burning money.”
“We still have money.”
“Less every week.”
Meyer laid the report on the desk.
The pages spread beneath his hand.
There were the losses from the gymnasium. The deposits they would never recover. The hotels, the gasoline, the printing bills. Charges for equipment they had been told was included. Refunds for performances that had never happened.
The figures were no longer abstract.
Weiner could look at nearly every one and remember the room in which it had been lost.
For several minutes, neither brother spoke.
Down in the street, a truck labored through the slush.
Their secretary typed a letter they could not afford to send badly.
The coffee machine gave a long, exhausted hiss.
Finally, Meyer sat.
“Do you ever think dad was right?”
Weiner looked toward the wall.
Above a radiator hung an old movie poster he had brought from his bedroom.
A monster rose over a city, its claws extended above streets filled with fleeing people. The paper had faded. A crease ran through one painted eye. The corners curled away from the wall despite the fresh tape he kept applying.
As a boy, he had lain awake imagining the film promised by that poster.
He had imagined the creature’s footsteps. The buildings collapsing. The silence afterward.
When he finally saw the movie, the monster had been a man in a poor costume, and one of the buildings had fallen over before he touched it.
Weiner had loved it anyway.
“No,” he said.
Meyer rubbed his face.
“We’ve failed at everything.”
“Temporarily.”
“Is there a difference?”
“There is if you’re stubborn.”
Meyer laughed.
It escaped him unwillingly, a brief sound in the cold office.
That was Weiner’s gift.
Not judgment.
Certainly not foresight.
He could stand ankle-deep in the wreckage of an idea and describe, with absolute conviction, where the staircase would go.
Sometimes Meyer hated him for it.
That evening, he was grateful.
He unbuttoned his coat.
The telephone rang.
All three looked at it.
By then, a ringing telephone had acquired a certain menace. It could mean a cancellation, a demand, a threat delivered in the measured voice of someone who had already consulted a lawyer.
Their secretary picked up.
“Hammerstein Productions.”
She listened.
Her eyes moved toward Weiner.
Then Meyer.
“Just a moment.”
She covered the receiver.
“You boys have a call.”
“Who is it?” Meyer asked.
She lowered her voice.
“Somebody named Van Halen.”
The office seemed to grow still around her.
Weiner stared.
Meyer’s hands remained on the buttons of his coat.
Outside, tires whispered through the slush. Somewhere inside the wall, a pipe knocked three times.
The secretary looked down at the receiver, then back at them.
“Aren’t you going to answer?”
Both men moved at once.
Meyer struck his knee against the desk.
Weiner caught the telephone cord with his sleeve.
For one perilous instant, the entire apparatus slid toward the edge.
Their secretary seized the base and held it in place while the brothers collided over the receiver.
“Careful,” she snapped.
They froze.
Then Meyer let go.
Weiner lifted the phone.
He straightened his jacket, though the person on the other end could not see him.
“This is Hammerstein Productions.”
Outside, snow drifted across the windows and settled on the painted dragon.
Inside, Meyer leaned close enough to hear.
Neither brother knew what had brought the call to their door. Neither knew what it would cost them to answer, or how faithfully a humiliation could outlive the men who suffered it.
For now, there was only a voice on the line.
A name they recognized.
A door opening.
And somewhere beyond it waited another set of instructions—pages they would be expected to read, demands they would be expected to honor, small particulars upon which larger things depended.
They had not yet learned to fear the particulars.
The brown M&Ms had not even entered the story.
