Make Believe (14 page)

I was breathless. Tears blurred my vision.

Silence.

Ava spoke into the darkness. “Damn, I’m good.”

I laughed. “You are…Julie.”

She looked into my face, a moment of doubt there, surprising me. A little girl’s voice. “Thank you, Edna.”

She started crying, and the two of us sat there sobbing like high-school girls in a malt shop swooning over some matinee idol. Within seconds, catching our breaths, we giggled.

“You’re a treasure, Edna,” Ava whispered.

The moment was shattered when Desmond Peake slinked in behind us. “The car is ready to take you back to the Ambassador, Miss Ferber.”

“Desmond, Desmond.” Ava pointed a finger into his chest. “You’re not a good host. Edna and I will have coffee in the commissary first. I’ll drive her back.” Ava reached out to touch his cheek, and for the first time I saw Desmond tremble. A slight twist of his head suggested that he could also collapse under Ava’s innocent flirtation. A moment I relished, though short-lived, for he pulled himself together, backed up, gripped the back of a seat, and spoke in a gravelly voice. “All right.”

He walked with us to the commissary. At one point Ava stopped to talk to someone, an assistant director who’d called out to her, and she told me she’d catch up. Desmond and I moved ahead.

“Miss Ferber,” he began in a hurried voice, “I feel I need to
warn
you.”

The word startled. “Warn?”

“The company you keep.”

“You mean Ava Gardner?”

“You know what I mean.”

“Actually, I don’t.”

That gave him pause. His fingers played with the lapel of the suit jacket. “Reputation is everything.”

“You’re wrong, sir. Reputation is often the threat that petty folks use to manipulate others into behaving their way.”

“I don’t understand.”

“Of course you do. You’re an intelligent man. Don’t worry about others’ reputations, Mr. Peake. Worry about your own.”

“I’m in charge of Metro’s reputation.”

I stopped walking and faced him. “Then you’re clearly failing at your job, given the reports circulating in the gossip sheets. I seem to recall Walter Winchell reporting that at Metro…”

He cut me off. “Hanging out with Commie sympathizers…well, Metro needs to clean house.”

I grimaced. “Then your expulsion of Max Jeffries must have helped.”

“He endangered my job.
He
did.”

Now this was a sudden burst of truth, an unexpected revelation.

He walked away as Ava rushed up. “What did you say to Desmond? He doesn’t look happy.”

“He warned me to be careful.”

Ava glanced down the hallway. “He wants the world to be at attention.”

In the commissary, sipping coffee, we chatted about the movie. People walking by watched her, warily, admiringly, joyously, and she nodded and smiled at them.

“I never come here,” she admitted. She waved at someone. “You know, Louis B. Mayer is a real bastard. But like most cruel people, he has a sentimental streak. He demanded homemade apple pie served here, and the chicken consommé is his own mother’s Old Country recipe. It’s delicious.” She lit a cigarette and sat back. “Ignore Desmond, Edna.”

“I already have.”

She took a sip of coffee, put down the cup too hard. The saucer rattled, as coffee sloshed onto the table. “You know, Francis is getting a little nervous. I guess they’re getting to him. I mean, he’s telling folks the only organization he’s joined is the Knights of Columbus. He’s been named as sympathetic by
Red Channels
, America First claims he’s a front for Communists, and Hedda Hopper continues her snide remarks. You want to hear something bizarre? Hedda actually addressed a column just to
us
. ‘Ava and Frank: Behave Yourselves.’ Bold headlines. She mentioned that Francis has been investigated by the FBI for Mafia activities, along with Lenny Pannis. Blood oaths and codes of silence and
amici nostri
. Well, Francis didn’t care about that. But now this ‘pinko’ label has thrown him off balance. He’s told me to back off.”

“Back off?”

“He wants me to stay away from Max’s memorial this afternoon.” She raised her eyebrows. “Of course, Desmond Peake warned me not to be there, too. But Francis is running scared.”

“You’re in a frightening place, Ava.”

She rolled over my words. “His career is stagnant. No more screaming bobby-soxers fainting in the aisles, girls running into barber shops to grab snippets of his hair, a slip in record sales, MGM not renewing his contract. He’s angry, sullen, a pouting little boy.”

“But you love him to death.”

She winked. “But I love him to death.” She leaned in, confiding. “I’m pushing folks at Columbia to give him the part of Angelo Maglio in
From Here to Eternity
. He wants it desperately, but we don’t talk about it. It will save his career, push him back on top. He has it in him. But he’s telling everyone the mob is pushing for him—his buddy Joey Something-or-the-Other, a cousin of Al Capone—because he doesn’t want people to know a dumb broad—his lovely words—has that kind of control over his life.”

“And you allow this, Ava?”

She breathed in. “I’m not painting a good picture of him, I’m afraid. That’s so wrong of me, Edna. There
is
a good side to him, a decent side. He can be funny and charming…”

“So, I gather, was Mussolini.”

Ava roared. “Oh my God, I have to tell him that.”

“Please don’t, Ava.”

“It doesn’t matter. He’s already told me he’s not fond of you.”

“Good, then we meet on the same playing field.”

As we strolled into the hallway, she stopped and placed her fingertips on my shoulder. A woman a half-foot taller than I, she dipped her head into my neck. “Edna, I’m worried about Sol Remnick.”

“I know. I could see it in your face when we had lunch. He’s so…shattered.”

“He used to be one of the funniest men around. He could crack me up, have me and Max and Alice rolling on the floor. He plays that lovable schmeil Irving on
The Goldbergs
, of course, but I swear Gertrude Berg had to base Cousin Irving on Sol himself. She had to. He
is
that character already.”

“He’s just so…sad, Ava. I sensed it. It’s as though he’s lost his heart. Even before Max died.”

“That’s my point.” Ava drew her lips into a thin line, a red gash on her face. “People like Desmond and his America First group have a mission to destroy people like Max and Sol. Now, with Max gone, he’s a…shambles. He lives in a world where people cross the street to avoid him.” Her face took on a bittersweet look, haunting. Now she was Julie in the creeping shadows, watching as the showboat chugged away, and with it…her hope for a life.

“And Sol?” I found myself choking up.

“The rumor is that he’s on the chopping block.”

Chapter Eleven

Alice chose an abandoned art deco movie theater in West Hollywood for the memorial service for Max, somewhat faded from its 1920s heyday, the splashy red, green, and black tiles and arches peeling or washed out. It looked charming to me, the kind of venue Max would have chosen, its vaulted interior filled with resounding echoes of vaudeville acts and one-reel silent pictures. I could imagine a piano player punctuating those tense moments up on the jerky screen as the mustachioed villain harassed the menaced whimpering virgin.

With an excited Max, Alice said she’d recently seen
The Squaw Man
there, a creaky, grainy print of the legendary first Hollywood movie ever made, back when L.A. was rolling acres of avocado and orange farms and the locals were none too friendly to the fancy New York actors suddenly invading their sunny landscape with megaphones and tin lizzies. “Max used to bring people here to look at the deco trappings.”

On the day of his service, a breezy Thursday afternoon, the sky loomed a dull gray, a clammy mist lifting slowly as we sat in cars in front of the theater. Three cars, with Alice, Lorena, and me in the front one, Lorena’s clunky Buick. The sun hovered high above the red-tile roof of a pink stucco building at the corner, suspended there, tantalizingly, fogged over by a dense yellow haze. “In Hollywood,” Alice noted, “movie funerals never take place in sunshine.”

Three or four reporters and photographers were stationed at the curb, leaning against cars, smoking cigarettes, gabbing, and joking. One snapped a photograph of me. I snorted at him, and he tittered. They kept looking up and down the street. If they were waiting for Ava Gardner and Frank Sinatra, they’d wait in vain.

Inside, as we gathered in the lobby, the Reverend Smithson appeared from a side door and looked for the crowd that wasn’t there. A Unitarian minister, he’d known Max for years. They’d served on a committee together—to save a deco movie palace on Hollywood Boulevard from the wrecking ball, and now and then they played cards. The two men liked each other, Alice told us. When they played cards, they chatted about the news of the day and inevitably, as the night went on, they abandoned their card playing and simply talked and talked about old movies, about Francis X. Bushman, about Cecil B. DeMille. All night long. Neither one ever cared who won a card game.

We waited, fidgeting. The echoey lobby seemed too vast for such a smattering of souls, maybe ten, no more. Alice, Sol, Lorena, me. A couple of old men in rumpled suits, one of whom Alice whispered was H. C. Porter, who’d directed
The Time of Your Life
with James Cagney. “I wouldn’t have expected him,” she told me. No one else. Space between us, uncomfortable.

At the last minute the front door opened and Desmond Peake hurried in. For a moment, startled, he stood in the entrance and surveyed us all with a jaundiced, squinty stare, oddly accusatory. All conversation halted. Alice let out a raspy gulp and turned to me, a helpless expression on her face. Standing on my left, Sol Remnick bristled and looked ready to approach the Metro rep.

“No,” I whispered to him, a hand on his elbow.

“Mr. Peake,” I raised my voice, “I’m surprised you’re here.”

Looking at Alice, Desmond stammered into the awful silence, “I came to pay my respects.”

No one believed that. I certainly didn’t. Of course, I’d been expecting the brazen reporters to sneak in among us, masquerading as anonymous keeners, though the minister had purposely spoken to the few gathered on the sidewalk and forbade it.

Desmond stood close to me, this telephone pole of a man, and bent into my neck. “I’m here because Metro assigned me…suggested I…”

“You’re checking to see whether the troops have obeyed orders.” I waved my hand across the small space. “Anyone under a Metro contract here?” I smiled cruelly. “Besides you?”

I turned my back on him, facing the others who were staring at him.

To my stiff back he muttered, “I got a job to do.”

I swung around to face him, my words even and chilly. “I’ve heard those words before. And in the not-so-distant past. You’ve heard of the Nazis?”

Desmond’s face blanched as he shuffled past me, grazing Sol’s shoulder, headed into the theater. Everyone was looking at me, but Lorena, her face hidden by a black contour veil, moved to my side. “Good for you, Edna.”

“I was hoping Ava would come,” I murmured.

“I spoke to Ethan last night…”

I broke in, testy, “And where is he? And Tony?”

“I didn’t expect them to come. Max…Alice…you know.”

“A sad commentary, no?” I stopped. “I interrupted you, Lorena. You were saying?”

“Just that Ethan told me that Ava was ordered not to show up today. She
wanted
to. Orders from the top brass, loud and clear. Dore Schary, he thought. They can’t afford one more embarrassing photo in the papers. Her careless abandon—God, how she loves to thumb her nose at Metro!—can cause real harm, and if she showed up here, with that gaggle of photographers outside ready to pounce…”

Sol had neared and was now peering into my face. Lorena smiled sadly at him and then drifted away, standing at Alice’s side. “Yes, Sol?”

For a moment he said nothing as he stared into my face. A short man, we saw eye to eye; and what I saw now disturbed me, for here was a man’s craggy face ravaged by grief. I started, so intense was the anguish there, the bleak loss. Trembling, his hands flapping like wild birds against his sides, he’d clearly dressed in a fog. A button was undone on his shirt. There was a dried smear of shaving cream on his lower cheek, a dime-sized spot of pale white. That vagrant spot, stuck there, seemed such a violation, such a token of his absolute sorrow, that I did something I’d never done before. “Give me your handkerchief, Sol.”

He squinted, confused, but extracted a large white linen cloth from a pants pocket and handed it to me. I took it and rubbed the spot on his cheek, wordlessly, quickly. He realized what I was doing, and for a moment a silly smile surfaced, the inveterate comic’s sense of absurdity, Cousin Irving cavorting with Molly Goldberg on a television soundstage. “Even at my age, go figure, people got to dress me.”

“You all right, Sol?”

“No.” Serious again, the words fierce. “Max’s death is beyond the pale, Miss Ferber. I’m awake all night long. I keep saying to myself, what could I have done? Did I…was I in some way responsible—all those talks we had about the blacklist, my encouraging him to send that letter.” Then, as though he just had a revelation, “No, that had nothing to do with this.” A wash of tears leaked out of his eyes, ran into the wrinkles of his cheeks. He reached for the handkerchief and, realizing I’d just used it, he smiled and said, “Perhaps I should keep it out.”

“You were ready to attack Desmond Peake.”

His lips drew into a razor-thin line. “That bastard. How dare he come here? God, he walked Max out of the Metro gates and to his car. Like Max was a misbehaving child in school.”

“Mr. Peake told me he was only doing his job.”

Sol grunted. “The job you do sometimes is a snapshot of your own character.”

“Yes, the butler who takes on the airs of the master of the house.”

Sol lowered his voice. “He’s a top dog in America First. Him…and that traitor Larry.”

“I know about them, Sol. Boys with their vendettas and intolerance.”

Suddenly, a shift in his tone, the voice gravelly, halting. “Max was my last friend, Miss Ferber.”

What could I say to that? Could this talented man, this popular television comic adored by millions—I assumed so, though I had no idea, never having heard of Cousin Irving before—lead so solitary a life? A man who spent his lonely nights in an apartment somewhere in this sprawled-out city? Or back in New York, lost in some small walk-up as he readied for the Monday night broadcast at NBC?

“I’m so sorry,” I said.

“They will never find his murderer,” he suddenly announced.

That startled. “Why? For heaven’s sake, Sol.”

“Because the cops don’t really care.”

“Of course, they do.”

“You have more faith in authority than I do, Miss Ferber.”

“What else is there that we have, Sol?”

The others were filing into the theater, so I nudged Sol. Yet he stood there, eyes brighter now, determined. “They think it’s some obsessed patriotic fanatic. You know, all those death threats Max got. Some America First zealot, armed with a gun and a head filled with delusions. Why should the cops care? One more Red sympathizer bites the dust.” He took my arm and we walked toward the open doors of the theater. “Or,” he added, “it was Frank Sinatra or one of his goons.” A sickly smile. “I guess the cops could believe that scenario.”

“You don’t really believe that, Sol?”

He stopped and I crashed into his side. “No, I don’t. Frank is a blowhard. I don’t like that man, but I think he’s a scared little boy playing in the big leagues with the tough guys. He’ll always be a loudmouth boy performing for the bullies in the class. Not a bad person, Miss Ferber, and sometimes I think deep down he’s a
good
person at heart, but he’ll always be a scared, bad
boy
.”

I breathed in. “So who killed Max?”

We were the only two standing in the aisles now, and I pointed toward seats up front. Sol deliberated. “Everyone is wrong in thinking it had to do with the blacklist. With the infernal letter. Those phony patriots with their Bibles tucked up against their firearms, posters of George Washington and Abe Lincoln taped to their walls.” He lifted his arms and spread them out.

“Then who?” I persisted.

“Those cowards don’t kill. You know why? The blacklist is their most powerful weapon. They want the Commies to be alive. To
stay
alive. They don’t want people like Max Jeffries or Doc Trumbo or Ring Lardner Junior—any of the Hollywood Ten and the others—to die. They believe in public humiliation. They want us out of jobs, imprisoned, begging, impoverished, suffering. They want to see our children starving. Beg for crumbs. That’s the American way. Death is too simple for them. No, Max’s death had nothing to do with being blacklisted. Someone wanted him dead for another reason.”

In a low voice, “God, what?”

“Find out, Miss Ferber. You find out.”

I nodded. Yes, I thought, I will find out. I had no choice: my mind catalogued and sorted through the folks I’d met out here, watching, watching, the faces tugging at the edges of my days.

He blinked wildly. “Be the irritant that produces the surprisingly important black pearl.”

I nodded again. Yes.

Already the organ music swelled from the side of the room, a lugubrious hymn that sounded like a liturgical rendering of an old Irving Berlin show tune. Then, to my horror, I realized it was. Sol and I rushed to our seats, joining the others huddled together down front. Desmond Peake sat alone a dozen seats back on the side, the solitary Greek chorus, hopefully mute.

At the microphone Reverend Smithson spoke in a dreary monotone, an informal greeting and a brief remembrance of trying to cheat Max at rummy, and Max letting him. A curious beginning, I thought, especially coming out of a clergyman’s mouth.
I cheated at cards and he let me
.

Few trappings of religion here, to be sure, though the Reverend Smithson did read a passage from Ecclesiastes—
to every thing there is a season
—and the Twenty-Third Psalm. The Lord is my Shepherd.

Finally, he signaled the organist who played a morbid medley of music Max had composed or orchestrated, a rolling hodgepodge that sounded painfully labored.

The organist was an old woman who wore an incongruous straw sun hat, her ample body bursting out of a black dress that probably had been bought off the rack a good three decades earlier. As she assaulted the hapless keys and stops, I thought I detected the strangulated strains of “Mis’ry Comin’ Round,” that mournful dirge from
Show Boat
, the haunting Negro chorus that augurs the exit of Julie and Steve from the
Cotton Blos
som and the downward spiral of Magnolia and Gaylord Ravenal. A dark lament, and, played here, appropriate.

Then, her body trembling, Alice approached the stage and talked briefly about Max’s love of theater and movies, and his deep love of his friends. She read a letter she’d received from George S. Kaufman celebrating Max. I thrilled to hear my old New York friend’s loving words. Finally, her voice a whisper, she stopped and walked back to her seat.

No one moved.

I stood and moved in front of that imposing and unnecessary microphone. I told stories. The oft-repeated tale of our first meeting at the
Show Boat
tryout in Washington D.C. The two of us in a New York deli sending back the split pea soup over and over because it was too cold. Max tickling a howling Fanny Brice in Times Square. Then he tickled me. I recounted his years of involvement with the various incarnations of
Show Boat
, his particular fondness for Paul Robeson’s rendition of “Ol’ Man River,” and quoted him: “It always makes me sob, that memory.” He’d learned to make crêpes Suzette for Ava because it was her favorite dessert. He had a childlike love of root beer. His joy at marrying Alice.

I ended with: “Sometimes Max and I didn’t see each other for years, though we always wrote long, chatty letters, his humor livelier than mine. But, as with any true friend, it didn’t matter the distance of miles or time, the long silences—I felt Max was always right next to me.” I sat down, and Alice nodded at me.

Beside me, Sol squirmed. He stood now, though I could see he was nervous. Hesitantly, shaking, he walked to the front. For a while he said nothing, this stump of a man in the over-sized suit. Near me, Lorena rustled in her seat. Then, in a tinny voice that was nearly a stage whisper, he began, and immediately he found his wonderful power.

“Max used to say that I was the funniest man he’d ever met in his life. That wasn’t true. He was. Yes, I did the stand-up routines, the radio skits, the vaudeville
shtick
, but Max would sometimes look at me, after I’d blathered some nonsense, and you could see the funny in his eyes, in the twitching of his lips, the way he tilted his head. One time, years back, he was working on a score and had a bout of insomnia. So he went to a doctor for sleeping pills.” Sol imitated Max in a Yiddisher voice: “‘So doctor, some pills to sleep, yes?’ When I saw him I said, ‘For God’s sake, Maxie bubbe, sleeping pills? What for?’ With a shrug of his shoulders he says, ‘Because I keep waking up in the middle of our conversations.’” Sol chuckled. We joined in.