Ed Ifkovic - Make Believe

Five days ago I stepped off an American Airlines plane into blinding Los Angeles sunshine. It was a hot July afternoon, the air still and close. For a moment, standing there, I experienced a wave of panic. This was a foreign country, this vast landscape of hungry dreams under an unrelenting pale blue sky.

Five days ago I checked into the Ambassador Hotel on Wilshire, coolly regarded the bouquet of lush yellow roses already there, and immediately dialed my good friend Max Jeffries, the man I’d traveled across the country to see…to support. Max, a Hollywood insider, a man who could always make me smile, a man who now needed his friends nearby to buffer against a menacing world of accusation and condemnation.

Five days ago, the beginning of a whirlwind of lunches, cocktail parties, and Hollywood madness and tomfoolery, Max squiring me gallantly and cynically through the blather that passes for movieland hospitality. Max, the North Star in a western sky speckled with disappearing stars. Or hopeful stars.

Last night Max Jeffries was murdered.

While I socialized with his wife Alice and her friend Lorena Marr-the simple act of taking in an early dinner and a delightful movie-someone invaded his cherished bungalow and shot him in the back of the head.

Max, murdered. Impossible to grasp.

Late last night after the movie, settled in my hotel suite, I’d dropped off into a deep sleep with images of men in dark broadloom suits pointing gnarled fingers at a hapless Max. When the telephone rang, too loud in the quiet room, I yelped, sprang up in bed. Fumbling, I peered through the shadowy darkness. For a moment I imagined I was in my own Manhattan bed, snoozing in front of my apple-green headboard. The last traces of the nightmare slipped away: gun-metal shards of hot cinder rained down on a stark, endless landscape where I sat and called out to Max…But I could not remember the rest, except that I was cold and clammy and utterly abandoned. My mouth was dry, my eyes ached.

The ringing stopped. I fell back onto the pillow. Then it began again.

I was in L.A. in a suite on the top floor of the Ambassador. Outside everything was lost in darkness.

And the clock on the nightstand told me it was just after midnight. 12:05. That registered with me.

The voice on the other end sounded tiny, mechanical, and far away.

“What?” I yelled.

“It’s Sol, Edna. Sol Remnick. Max’s friend.”

“I know.” I’d met Max’s best friend at Max’s home just days before. I breathed in. “Tell me.”

Silence.

“Max is dead.”

“Tell me.”

“He was murdered.”

“Tell me.”

“I don’t know.” The sound of sobbing now, halting gulps, sloppy. “Alice phoned me, hysterical. The police are there now.” Another sob, thick and raw.

The line went dead.

All night long I lay in my bed, numb, eyes wide in the dark. But I must have drifted off because I started awake as sunlight streamed through the windows. I sat up, sobbing in raspy gasps like a beaten child.

Mechanically, I splashed water on my face, pulled clothing from a closet, then fiddled with the dial on the radio until I found a newscast at the top of the hour. Six in the morning, a beastly hour to be awake, lethal to the body. I rarely violated my longstanding regimen: eight hours of uninterrupted sleep, up promptly at eight, fully dressed, breakfast of coffee with whipped milk and fresh-squeezed orange juice, and then out the door for an invigorating walk. But you didn’t walk in L.A. No, instead, you found yourself wide-awake in bed after a restless, nightmare-laden sleep, grappling with the bizarre fact that an old friend had been savagely murdered. Six in the morning, sitting fully dressed in a chair, trying to make sense of a phantasmagoric world by searching for answers on local radio stations that played “Good Night, Irene” every five minutes.

It couldn’t work, of course, this search for answers, but what other recourse did I have? Room service delivered a pot of coffee, orange juice, and buttered English muffins-the man nodded at my generous tip but stepped back, doubtless startled by the gaunt face of the old and trembling woman.

Max, dead. Max, murdered. Dead. My Max. That puckish, lively soul singing “Make Believe” to me in a restaurant years back. Where? In Pittsburgh? In Philadelphia? A Show Boat tryout. I knew that. Of course. Whenever someone did Show Boat , he’d be there…and I would be, too. The two of us, giddy in the aisles. And now another Show Boa t, in Technicolor. Metro’s splashy version with Ava Gardner. But Max was dead. There’d be no more revivals with him. His musical genius would be missing.

Yes, it was Pittsburgh. That greasy spoon. Manny’s Deli Delight. Preposterous. Max sang to me, that twinkle in his eye. Silly and foolish, in a parody of ingenue Magnolia Ravenal’s arch soprano from the deck of the showboat. Everyone in the restaurant laughed. We got free coffee. I remembered that. Sing for your supper , Max warbled at the waitress, and you’ll get breakfast.

Why was this memory coming to me now?

Max, dead.

The news at the top of the hour. The lead-off story featured Max Jeffries, Hollywood agent and most recently musical arranger for Metro’s celebrated extravaganza Show Boat . I winced: even news of murder out here in Hollywood arrived with a requisite commercial endorsement. Max “was found murdered at his home on Wilshire Boulevard.” Police reports were sketchy, but early information indicated his wife, Alice, as leading suspect, “a woman once married to mobster Lenny Pannis.” Alice Jeffries, cleared of charges of murder in the Pannis case. Police were investigating. In the news recently, “Max Jeffries, champion of the Hollywood Ten, faced accusations of Communist leanings when he sent a letter to…” I switched off the radio and sat there, shaking my head. A few simple lines of questionable reportage-innuendo and suspicion and accusation. A few throwaway lines, and both Max and Alice-in fact, the world of the blacklist-were skewered and found guilty. Treason and murder.

At ten o’clock, after repeated attempts to reach Alice or Sol, I decided to take a taxi to his bungalow. I had to do something. The walls of my suite were closing in on me. I’d paced the carpet back and forth and watched L.A. wake up from my high window: the white buildings on the boulevard lost their night shadows and emerged into brilliant sunlight. A normal day in Los Angeles. All the days in L.A. were normal, except for…for what? The day when a close friend was shot to death. When the phone rang, I expected Sol, lunged for it, but was startled by a gruff though sleepy voice. Detective Marv Tilden would like to speak to me. He was downstairs. Could he please…respectfully…? Of course. After all, I spent last evening with Alice, the alleged but impossible killer of her husband. We watched a Jimmy Stewart movie and roared at his antics. Alice’s preamble to a deliberate killing when she returned home?

Detective Tilden apologized for the intrusion in a drifting, beachcomber voice that suggested we’d be sharing mai tais at the pool shortly. He even leaned on the doorjamb, slouching, one hand rustling his trim blond hair. Dark tanned, with small squirrel eyes in a long face, he towered above me, a pencil-thin man in a gray linen suit. He shouldn’t be standing there, pad at the ready, a sober look on his face. A young man, late twenties, he belonged on a surfboard waiting religiously for that elusive ninth wave.

“Miss Ferber, forgive the hour. An honor to meet you.”

I nodded. A good beginning. An apology and a courtesy.