Ed Ifkovic - Make Believe

I harrumphed, grandly. “I aim to see about that.”

“Edna, don’t. Not for me.” From Max, pleading.

“You’ll be blacklisted, Miss Ferber, and branded a Commie sympathizer,” Sol said.

“I’ve been called a lot of things, sir, but I think my Americanism speaks for itself.”

Max hesitated. “I thought mine did, too.” A gleam in his eye. “Though I did cast a vote for FDR.”

Sol added, “America has become a dangerous place.”

Silence: the weight of the declaration, awful and raw.

I sat there, staring from one to the other, my gaze taking in these decent folks, good people, earnest, hard-working, loyal, trustworthy. For a split second my pulse raced, wildly. My heart fluttered. In this modest home, drinking coffee with an old friend, I was hit suddenly, as if by a lightning bolt. Fear flooded my soul.

“Are you in danger, Max?” Fear gripped me.

Max didn’t answer.

Alice looked worried. “Well, there have been threats. Some phone calls, nasty hate mail. Death threats.”

“Dear God!”

“Witch-hunt,” Sol muttered.

“What about your friends?” I prodded him. “Years of work in town. In New York. On the road. Your agency, respected. Your tradition with Show Boat -all those crews you worked with. Your name means something in this town. Your friends?”

“You.” Max had a wispy smile on his face.

“You’re exaggerating, no?”

Serious: “Edna, there are days I seem only to have enemies. Just enemies.”

The next day Max and I sat at noontime in the crowded coffee shop adjacent to the Cocoanut Grove ballroom at the Ambassador. We’d been there a half hour, fiddling with empty coffee cups, Max twisting a napkin into shredded bits while I ceremoniously checked my lipstick and hair in a compact mirror. I was nervous. Ava Gardner, of course, was late in arriving, but Max told me to expect that.

“Max, why are you so nervous?”

He grinned. “I’m not. You are.”

“You shredded a napkin into confetti.”

“You know I always do that. You’re the nervous one, you, the peripatetic novelist who’s interviewed presidents and battled with Ethel Barrymore.”

“Don’t remind me of that battle-ax. And I always check my lipstick twenty times a day. A minute. A second. I’m hopelessly vain.” I started to withdraw my compact from my purse but thought better of it.

“Edna, you’re Show Boat .”

“If you call me that one more time, Max, I’ll scrape the barnacles off your hide myself.”

He scoffed. “Don’t believe Hedda Hopper’s vicious sniping at poor Ava.”

“Well, frankly, I’ve never read a word of that harridan’s incendiary columns. I leave that to the worshipers at the Hollywood shrine. Like moon-eyed George Kaufman, who has told me that Ava’s been known to hurl dinner plates across a dining room and curse like a fishwife at quivering souls…and…”

“All true, Edna. A hellion, to be sure. A bottle of booze in one hand, a Coca Cola in the other.”

“I’ve little patience with…”

“But she wants to meet you, Edna.”

“I don’t tolerate bad behavior unless I’m doing it.”

“She’s had more than her share of bad press, Edna. That’s true. Hedda Hopper and Louella Parsons, two destructive women, choose their victims and then go for the jugular. Hedda with her outlandish hats. She lives in Beverly Hills in a house she calls ‘the house that fear built.’ They expect you to be afraid, to tremble. But with Ava, they misjudged her.”

“And why’s that?”

“She doesn’t care . Her career, her public image, what Metro thinks, what you think about her. She’s a fierce woman, strong. You want to know something? Edna, she’s out of one of your novels, one of your determined heroines. She’s like you-a savvy soul who speaks her mind. She’s you with more makeup, higher cheekbones, and an MGM contract.”

“And she’s called the most beautiful woman in the world.”

“She is that .” He tapped me on the wrist. “The artist Man Ray said she could only be truly experienced in person-such is her beauty. It’s not important to her, though. Her looks. Hedda Hopper labeled her a home wrecker because of the affair she’s having with a married man, and lots of souls can’t forgive her. She shows me piles of hate mail calling her a hussy and a snake. The seducer of the boyish Frank Sinatra. You’ve heard of him?”

“You say his name with such derision, Max.”

“Well, I don’t care for him. He’s an annoying gnat with a blustery ego. Downright nasty at times, especially to waiters and clerks.”

“A pleasant voice, I think. Too honey-toned for my taste. He sang ‘Ol’ Man River’ in that horrible movie, Till the Clouds Roll By , Sinatra perched up on a white Grecian column, that skinny man lost in that oversized white tuxedo…a travesty. People in the theater laughed out loud. What was MGM thinking?”

“Laughable. Truly. Frankie going on about toting that barge, lifting that bale. Only the part about drinking and ending up in jail rang true to some. And Metro now knows it. That finished him. He’s out of a contract now, his career kaput .”

“A disgrace.” I went on. “I knew Jerome Kern. He played his songs on my grand piano. Thank God he died before the release of that grotesquerie.” I bit my lip and announced, happily, “I’m prepared to dislike Sinatra.”

Max smiled. “You won’t be disappointed.”

The waiter refilled our cups, paused, and then swept up the shredded napkin Max scattered on the table. The young man whistled softly, clicked his heels deliberately, and shuffled off, looking back over his shoulder.

“A bad habit.” Max shrugged. “Sorry.”

Suddenly Max called out to a man strolling across the lobby. “Larry. Larry.” He waited. The man paused, deliberated, seemed ready to bolt out the door, and then thought better of it. Hurriedly, he glanced around the crowded lobby, eyes narrowed, searching, then hesitantly moved toward us. He wasn’t happy. “Larry, you’ve been a stranger.”

“Max,” the man mumbled, as his icy stare took me in.

“Larry Calhoun,” Max told me. “My oldest friend in Hollywood.”

A strange line, considering Max’s assertion last night that Sol Remnick was his oldest West Coast crony. Yet the words betrayed a hint of sarcasm, bitterness I’d never heard before from Max.

“Mr. Calhoun, a pleasure,” I smiled, though I added, “except for the fact that you seem a jumpy rabbit ready for the bush.”

He didn’t smile back, though Max chuckled. “Larry, sit down.” A command, out of character from the soft-spoken man, though Larry-again with the furtive glance around the small room, peering out the French doors into the lobby-slid into a chair. “This is Edna Ferber.”

“I know.”

“You do?”

Again, the sour frown. “Everyone knows you’re in town. You’re… Show Boat .”

I glanced at Max. “I really need to reassess my public image.”

Larry sat there, dutiful, hands folded neatly in his lap, a penitent schoolboy. “How are you, Max?”

“Getting more famous by the hour, it seems.”

“I mean…”

Max addressed me, warmth in his voice. “When I first came to L.A., Larry, Sol, and I were inseparable, happy-go-lucky young guys, the three musketeers, tackling Hollywood, making money, climbing up the tinsel ladder, dreaming, dreaming. Back then we invested in an apartment house or two in the valley, some property in the hills, too. Retirement planning, we called it. The three of us shared the little money we had. Years back, of course…when Hollywood was an uncharted Eden and we were three Adams thrashing through the undergrowth. There were no snakes in the garden.”