The Rolodex
THE ROLODEX
BEANIE
Size matters.
— A THIRD-FLOOR SECRETARY WITH A FIRST-FLOOR ROLODEX
1981
One Saturday in the spring of 1981, Beanie Rosen and Barry Licht were in Phil’s inner office redoing his massive five-thousand-card Rolodex. It was a double-ringer, packed with the home numbers of every rock and roll legend, their managers, their roadies, the concert venues, the hotel owners.
“There’s no ink in it,” Barry said proudly, turning the wheels, showing off. He worked daily to keep it up to date.
Phil was meticulous that way. He expected every card to be typed single space, and current in terms of—well, anything particular to the designated person. If, for example, Blondie liked Ho Hos in her dressing room, that would be noted on her Rolodex card.
While Beanie had seen a Rolodex before, she had never seen anything quite like this. It was a treasure trove, a slot machine where every time you turned the wheels you landed on another jackpot.
“It’s crazy,” she squealed, reading aloud the names and addresses of artists such as Bruce Springsteen, Billy Idol, Kenny Rogers, Dan Fogelberg, Belinda Carlisle, Lionel Richie, Mac Davis, Gordon Lightfoot, Mick Jagger, David Bowie, and thousands of others. And it wasn’t just their names, it was their birthdays, their social security numbers, the names of their kids, or dogs, or, in Keith Richards’s case, his armadillo, and any other peculiar likes or demands.
“The only thing in pencil were the wives,” Barry said. Spouses didn’t last as long as the pets , Beanie thought as she pulled out a blank Rolodex card and carefully typed her name, her cat’s name, and her social security number. “For future use,” she said, smiling up at Barry, who laughed out loud as she slipped it in place.
It was a huge undertaking, laborious and tedious, but in the end would make for speedy access to clients and client information, and that made Phil happy, which made Barry happy, which made Beanie happy.
Since Phil was on vacation, Barry had brought the secretarial Selectric typewriter into Phil’s office so he and Beanie could take turns typing while stretching, bullshitting, and smoking.
Barry, who had smoked in college, had picked it up again going to clubs and gigs. With his mustache, his longer curly hair, and Jordache jeans, which he’d wear only on weekends, he looked cool, Beanie thought. Like Jim Croce.
Beanie stood up and walked around. She loved being inside an actual agent’s office, and Phil’s was a vision in black lacquer. Front and center was an oblong black lacquer desk with a privacy panel to discreetly protect anything going on underneath; two mid-century modern chairs framed in black lacquer were in front of the desk, one of which Barry sat in when working alongside Phil, listening in on calls, taking copious notes, or rolling his eyes along with his boss at something stupid someone had said on the call.
There was a toggle switch on the trainee phone to allow Barry to listen without being heard, and to give his boss prompts should he need them. There were two guest phones on side tables, so that anyone could pick up an extension, and a black lacquer credenza behind the desk displaying photographs of Phil with famous friends and clients, cementing, by association, his own fame. There was also a large caricature of a man spinning vinyl, with a note: For Phil, it said, The man behind the music.
“It’s a Hirschfeld,” Barry explained. “Hirschfeld only does caricatures of famous people like Minnelli, or Sinatra, so this,” he said, referring to the small cartoon, “is… really priceless.”
Beanie nodded, made a mental note. One day she’d have a Hirschfeld, too, which would say, perhaps, Unstoppable.
Below the caricature and opposite the desk was a large deep green velvet couch, flanked by two black-and-gold Billy Haines deco swivel chairs.
Barry loved those chairs. To him they represented a defiance against authority, a confidence that no one can deter you from your destiny. “Billy Haines,” he explained to Beanie, “was a Hollywood actor who, being homosexual, refused Louis B. Mayer’s edict that he marry. Instead, he kept his boyfriend and left acting, becoming a top decorator. His career, legacy, and relationship lasted longer than anyone in Hollywood. Including the man who tried to change him.”
Beanie understood that Barry’s father, like Mayer, was trying to control his life, putting pressure on him to leave something he loved, to marry someone he didn’t.
“Is it okay if I lie down?” Beanie asked. They had been at the Rolodex for a good few hours.
“Sure,” Barry said, putting a mixtape into the cassette player.
Robbie Dupree’s “Steal Away” filled the room as she closed her eyes, letting her hands dance along the back of the sofa. That’s when she found the earring. It was sitting alone, waiting to be rescued, perhaps reunited with its twin. She picked it up. Studied it. It was a dangling clip-on, dainty, with little diamonds surrounding the tear-drop jewel.
“Phil’s?” she asked with a smirk while holding it up.
Barry squinted, looked, and smiled.
“You look like the cat who swallowed the canary,” she said suspiciously.
“I’m working here,” he said, trying to shift the focus.
“Or maybe the real question is, who swallowed Phil’s canary?” she asked, playfully walking over, dangling the incriminating evidence in front of him. “I thought he was going out with Phyllis Mitchell?” she said, referring to the newscaster on channel seven. Phil and Phyl had been an item for at least a few months.
They were a “new two you” in Army Archerd’s column a few months earlier. Army Archerd wrote for Daily Variety, and he always reported potential couplings as “new two you.” And there had been pictures of them in George Christy’s “The Great Life” on the back page of The Hollywood Reporter, where rich and famous people were photographed looking rich and famous.
“You think it belongs to Phyllis?” she asked, walking around to the edge of Phil’s desk, setting the earring down, and blocking the Rolodex and Barry’s access to the cards. He’d have to reach around her.
He knew it. She knew it. It was a game. She liked games.
While no longer overweight, Beanie was still curvy, and dressed to emphasize it. That day she was wearing a pink jumpsuit with a wide white belt and white leather mid-calf boots with her pants tucked in. She coordinated with big white enamel hoops and a white headband tied in a bow on top of her head, just like she’d seen Lisa Whelchel wear on The Facts of Life.
Beanie had grown confident, if not in her body, then in her skill of knowing how to present it. And that made her sexy.
“I need to get back to work,” Barry said, reaching around her.
“Fuck work,” she told him, pushing aside the double-ringer, upsetting the stack of alphabetized cards.
They were toying with each other, veering dangerously close to something forbidden. Until that point, they had avoided intimacy and any talk of sex. She knew he had a girlfriend back home, counting the seconds until he failed here.
“Come on,” she said, leaning in.
“It’s a secret,” he told her, smiling.
“I won’t tell,” she whispered.
They were inches apart, his mustache framing the curve of his top lip. It was intimate, titillating, charged.
“Okay,” he said. “Every Wednesday, Phil brings in girls—”
“What does that mean?” she asked.
“Actresses,” he said, explaining that they were usually brunettes, sometimes redheads, never blondes.
“And?” she said softly.
“And he ‘auditions’ them,” he told her, making quotation marks in the air.
Beanie frowned. “But he’s in rock and roll. He doesn’t handle actresses.” She was trying to apply logic to entitlement.
“He likes to help out,” Barry told her.
“Unless they’re blond?” she countered.
He looked at her and smiled. “Yeah. Now, can we get back to work?”
“No,” she said, moving closer, sitting on the desk. “And does said audition involve them taking off their earrings?”
“Sometimes,” he said.
“Does it also involve them taking off more?” The breath escaping her lungs belied her casual tone.
“Sometimes,” he said again.
“And they do it?” she asked. Her heartbeat quickened. Her face flushed. She was growing moist.
“Always,” he said. “And it doesn’t take much persuading.”
“How would you know?” she asked, gaining control. “It’s not like you’re sitting there.”
Then he dropped the bomb.
“Phil lets me listen in.”
Beanie, rarely at a loss for words, was dumbstruck.
Her eyes darted around the desk, the office. How? she wondered. Could the room be bugged, was there a hidden microphone? And then she saw the intercom.
Barry saw her see it.
Her voice locked in her throat. “The intercom?” she hissed, barely audible.
He nodded. Even though it was disgusting on every level, an invasion of privacy, ethics, and decency, and even though there were shades of blackmail and coercion, the intimacy of the confession Barry had made, and the fact that they were alone in the office where it had all transpired, was wantonly tantalizing.
“So, Phil switches it on, and… you hear everything?” Heart pounding, she looked at Barry, challenging. He held her gaze. She was simultaneously disgusted and turned on. She hated that she wanted to hear more. But she did. Badly.
“But why would he offer to have you listen, and why would you want to?”
“It’d be rude to say no,” he told her.
He was defending the indefensible, he knew it and she knew it, but she wasn’t going to call him out. She wanted to understand what happened behind closed doors, what was expected, and to stand in judgment would defeat the purpose. She wanted to know more. To hear more. She was too far in to turn back.
“What does Phil say to them?” she asked, urging him on, her warm breath close enough now for him to feel.
“He’d listen to their ‘audition’”—again, the air quotes—“and then stop them after a minute, tell them he’d rather just get to know them, that he could spot talent a mile away. Then he’d get them talking about their lives, their dreams, where they came from, and ask them to make him a drink. ‘Get yourself one, too,’ he’d say. Loosen them up, you know?”
She nodded, envisioning the scene that had played out in that very office the Wednesday prior.
“Then he calls Dan Bazuka, a casting director friend of his. Big guy, he does all the TV shows. Phil met Bazuka through Mike Barron. They all run together on weekends.”
She nodded. Mike Barron. Phil Carter. Dan Bazuka. They all run together. ’Nuff said, she thought.
“He’ll put Bazuka on speaker,” Barry continued, “and Phil would say that he had a pretty talented little actress in front of him. And Dan would say, ‘What does she look like, you know, is she tall, sexy, fun?’ And Phil would say, ‘Well, Dan, she’s tall and sexy, but is she fun?’ And then the girl will laugh or say something, to prove she’s fun, and it would…”
“Loosen them up?” Beanie whispered.
Barry nodded.
They were all in on it. Mike Barron who liked spinners, Phil Carter who liked brunettes, and Dan Bazuka, who liked them all. They passed around favors and girls and sometimes new memberships. Barry was being indoctrinated by Phil. Perhaps someday he, too, would be a member.
He watched her watch him. Was she judging?
Beanie smiled, trying to indicate that she was fine, enjoying it. One of the guys. Or one of the girls who gets the guys who get the girls.
“I mean it’s legit, in a way,” he told her, explaining that Bazuka always agreed to see the actresses for open roles, reassuring Beanie, or perhaps himself, that there was actual business being conducted. “Some of them even get hired,” he said, as if their ass justified the means.
She wondered if they had to do repeat “auditions,” all the way up the food chain, trading their bodies for a few minutes of screentime.
“Then what?” she asked, ready for the hard stuff.
He looked at her analytically. “Why do you want to hear all this? I mean, can’t you sort of do the math?”
She shook her head, smiling. “No, I’m bad with numbers.”
They were at a crucial point, not only in the story but in their relationship.
She leaned forward, lips to ear. “Please,” she whispered, her hot breath urgent, sending shivers down Barry’s spine.
He swallowed, not sure where this was going but quite sure he wasn’t the one driving. “They’d have a drink,” he told her quietly, not breaking her gaze. “Then he’d compliment them, you know, their legs, their eyes, their ass, and ask them to pull up their skirt a little…”
Beanie’s face flushed with heat.
“Does anyone ever say no?” she asked.
He shook his head.
Quietly, she asked, “And then?”
“Depends,” he said, staring at her sitting on the edge of the desk, her lips moist, parted. “Sometimes he asks for a massage. Other times he massages them, tells them how pretty they are, how sexy, how much he wants to help them, until…”
She held her breath in glorious agony, wanting and never wanting this to end.
“Until he asks them to strip for him,” Barry told her, his voice sticking in his throat. “And masturbate.”
She swallowed thickly, adjusting, wanting to herself at that moment.
“Then he tells them to walk over to him,” he continued, “with their shoes on, he always wants them to keep them on, and they sit on his lap and…”
“And?” she said, leaning in.
“And fuck,” he told her, as if the word completed the symphony.
They stared at each other. Inches apart.
“Any other questions?” he asked.
“Just one,” she said, as her eyes went from his face to the bulge in his Jordache jeans, and then back. “Were you as hard listening to them fuck as you are now, telling me?” Point. Beanie.
Nothing had prepared Barry for this, and everything had prepared her.
She stood up close to him, parting his legs with hers. “Do they always fuck?” she asked, hitting the hard “k.” “Or do they do other things?” she said, kneeling between his spread legs, her mouth inches from his crotch.
Barry swallowed, unable to speak, as she ran her mouth up and down his bulging zipper. His eyes were closed, his head tilted back. Beanie, on her knees in front of him, was driving. For Barry, this was uncharted territory.
For Beanie, it was her comfort zone. “Like this?” she whispered, moving her mouth up and down his crotch. Either because of Joel Schnitzer and Fish Zuko, or in spite of them, it not only turned Beanie on when she talked dirty, it made her feel in control and powerful.
“I bet they got on their knees in front of Phil and asked if they could suck his hard cock. Didn’t they?” she said as she unzipped Barry’s pants, stroking him.
It was only the third penis she had ever seen, the second she had actually handled, but it was huge— magnificent, she thought. It had a mind of its own as it stretched and yearned for her touch. She complied, grabbing the shaft, running her lips the length, over the head as she’d been taught, never taking her eyes off Barry’s, deep-throating him.
It was the best head he’d ever had. In less than a minute he exploded in her mouth.
She swallowed a little, let the rest drip down her face, unzipping her jumpsuit, rubbing it onto her heavy breasts still harnessed in her bra, as Shalom had once instructed.
“It’s primal,” Shalom had counseled. “It says You’re mine. ”
And though Barry belonged to someone else, Beanie hoped that he understood she was willing to share.