Juice by Stephen Becker Read Free Book Online

chairmanship and let the rest go. It took a man out of things. But they had all made it clear (all but Harrison) that they thought he would be better off upstairs. New times, new men. New slang. A new working language, composed of elliptical phrases which somehow signified all that had once needed firm, gentlemanly explication. A new world of stars, directors, financiers, advertising men. All on their way up. Jostling Rhein. None of them really knowing much about the business; each knowing (or thinking he knew, which was sometimes just as good) everything about his own fractional area. The world was run by absentee generals and occasional vice-presidents.
    Rhein saw, tonight, what it meant. As a working executive he had passed the point of diminishing returns. He nibbled sadly at the artichoke heart. His personal fortune was handy as a reserve, but P.A.N. had been more than self-supporting for several years. His experience was necessary only as long as the world of communications bore some resemblance to the world he had created and still knew; but that resemblance diminished daily. A good deal of the business was already beyond him; he admitted that. Only by virtue of his position could he command the respect of, give orders to, an editor who had come out of Missouri and taken a portable typewriter to Africa, China, Siberia, and come home to accept a Pulitzer Prize; or a news chief who had unreeled a portable mike in the Apennines to bring his audience an hour of the true sound of war; or a director who had worked with Clair and Korda and studied burlesque and tiptoed eagerly through Berlin to see what they were doing with Brecht, and then staged Wozzeck and come home prepared. But Rhein knew the stupidity of using his position at all; and Rhein had not been to Africa or China or Siberia or the Apennines (he knew only vaguely where the Apennines were) or Berlin, and Rhein deplored burlesque, was ignorant of the director’s function, thought Brecht had died in 1920 or so, and felt himself entirely destroyed by the notion that it was now necessary to have seen, to have done, to have known these things. Time was when an eye for a deal and a nose for profit were all you needed. And it was too late for Arthur Rhein to matriculate; he did not want to; he resented those who had, the newcomers, the relentless generation of them, not as rivals—why should he have to compete with them?—but because they did not know who or what he was, and they did not care.
    Arthur Rhein was, cruelly, obsolete.
    But they needed him yet. He dug more vigorously into the artichoke heart and cheered slightly. Few of them could count higher than a million, which was where Arthur Rhein started. Few of them—none of them, really—had the habit of six zeros. And this was a world in transition. Big money was handled by committees, by councils, by foundations, by governments, less and less often by men. Even Arthur Rhein had often to turn to groups—the state legislature, the FCC, the county police. Lawyers, commissioners, administrators. Everybody from the governor to the cop on the beat. Sheriffs. Judges. From million-dollar tax deals to a twenty-four-hour picket line: there was somebody who had to be seen. And Rhein was often an imposing emissary.
    If that was all he had left, it was still something. It was too bad that it came down to money; but it was still something: to spend more money in a day than most men see in a lifetime, and to do at least that without fear, without hesitation, in the certain knowledge that it was right, that it would come back to him—to P.A.N.—and then some.
    Not so obsolete after all.
    But why this desire to control the details? To be Joe Harrison? Harrison was a good man, no question. Presumptuous, aggressive, independent, arrogant, contemptuous even, but competent. Harrison had made a good deal of money for P.A.N., and probably saved it more. Harrison was known and liked. And Harrison was not