Make Believe

by Ed Ifkovic

  “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.”

  Larry looked into his face and said in a small voice, “That was then.”

  “And now we have a paradise…if not lost, well, at least in the hands of creditors.”

  Larry snapped at him, “I don’t see you refusing the monthly check from the real estate folks.”

  “True.” Max shrugged. “Edna, Larry was in a few Betty Grable movies. One movie, if I remember, with Myrna Loy. Bit parts, but a line or two. God, how we cheered him on back then! Our friend on the movie screen. The handsome cad. The suave hidalgo, the continental gigolo.” He smiled innocently. “Typecasting.”

  Larry squirmed in his seat. He looked the faded actor, the square-jawed juvenile lead, romantic, with his tall lithe body, the chiseled bronzed face, the full head of carefully combed black-gray hair, an elegant Roman nose a little too red these days with blood vessel speckles. Yet he sported unfashionable sideburns, a pirate’s affectation, as though he’d just tottered off the set of an Errol Flynn movie. I imagined he inflamed a few fluttering hearts, even these days, this man with the matinee idol carriage. But his eyes betrayed callowness, a grubbing meanness. They darted too much, the caged animal; their blackness was dull and flat. I didn’t like him, though I didn’t know him.

  “I gave up acting, though I get called for parts—small parts—now and then.”

  “Are you his agent?” I asked Max.

  “God no,” Max said. “Larry set his sights on high ground—his first wife knew somebody who knew Paulette Goddard…”

  Larry started to stand, then slipped back into the chair. “Sorry to hear about your troubles, Max.”

  Max shrugged his shoulders. “So I’ll live.”

  “These are tough times.” He sucked in his breath and glanced away. “But you asked for trouble when you fired off that foolish letter. Christ, what were you thinking?”

  Max’s voice was rushed. “I was thinking about my friends.”

  “And you signed that petition against that mouthy senator, and Red Channels listed your name…” He seemed to be checking off a list in his head.

  “I didn’t see your name on it.”

  Larry snarled, “Nor will you ever. I don’t want to lose my job. I got three ex-wives to support.”

  “Just what do you do, Mr. Calhoun?”

  My question seemed to take him by surprise, a puzzler, because he furrowed his brow and seemed unable to answer. Then, with pride, “I’m a manager at Grauman’s Egyptian Theatre, where, by the way, Show Boat will shortly hold its West Coast premiere. It’s a real coup for us.”

  Max interrupted. “You don’t come around the house any more.”

  Larry stood now, rocked on one leg. “And you wonder why?”

  “I know why.” But Max was looking at me.

  “You can’t bring us down with you, Max. You have to understand that. The hint of scandal these days, names bandied about like crazy, the mere suggestion of Communist stuff, sympathies—you know, a death sentence.” He swallowed the last two words. “Miss Ferber, good day.”

  He hurried into the lobby and he didn’t look back. Pausing at the registration desk, he seemed to be asking for someone, and then idly glanced back at us. For a second my eyes locked with his. Even from that distance, I could detect fear there, palpable, stark. He turned away, his shoulders hunched as he leaned on the desk.

  “A coward,” Max grumbled. “The older he’s gotten the more frightened he’s become. He used to be a roustabout soul like the rest of us. I mean—the three of us had the times of our lives. Then he got scared. Now he plasters photos of Joe McCarthy into a scrapbook.”

  “I’m so sorry. Some friend.”

  Max reached across the table and held my hand, tightened his fingers. His touch was oddly cold, stiff.

  A low hum swept through the lobby and into the lunchroom. People walking by stopped, their steps frozen, heads tilted. Everyone seemed to be in motion yet, strangely, no one moved. Nearby a busboy, a freckled, red-faced lad with a hawk nose, had been refilling a water glass from a pitcher but now, oblivious, poured water sloppily onto the table. A comic scene, some foolish Marx brothers routine, but the hum got louder still, almost a titter, until I wondered…earthquake?

  When I looked at Max, he was grinning.

  Every head had turned, as though on oiled ball bearings, toward the center of the lobby where Ava Gardner, striding across the floor, momentarily stopped and looked around. As epicenter of that seismic shift in the earth’s rotation, she stood there, checking her watch, as all those around her seemed to lose their minds.

  It was, frankly, awesome. This presence one woman could have, electric, galvanizing, stupendous. Everyone was smiling, wide-eyed, like little children surprised by a treat. Only Ava herself, standing there naturally in the center of that space, bringing one hand up to check on her hair, seemed unaware of the rumbling sensation she caused. This was Movies, writ large; this was melodrama on the wicked showboat stage; this was Theater; this was, perforce, a blinding of the noontime sun.

  I held my breath, enthralled.

  She spotted us and smiled, gave a slight, tentative wave that struck me as oddly insecure. The lonely girl in town who spots an old friend at the bus station.

  As she approached our table, the busboy dropped the pitcher, and was immediately admonished by the truculent patron whose lap now was sopping wet. The boy didn’t seem to care.

  She held out a hand to me, and I shook it. Politely, she’d first slipped off her elbow-length white cotton gloves before she gave me her hand. A nice gesture, and correct. She dazzled, truly, but I was unprepared for her…radiance. A run of movie-magazine catchphrases sailed into my head, and I smiled at them all.

  Now I’ve never favored my own plain looks, not back as a young woman with bushel-barrel hair, and certainly not as I approached my seventies. A part of me had always irrationally resented the easy and fashionable beauties who glided through life. But now, slack-jawed, I found myself watching her. The most beautiful woman in the world, they called her, Hollywood exaggeration and utter blather. Now, frankly, I didn’t know who else came close, Helen of Troy having long departed from the world stage.

  You saw a woman put together with exquisite care, a black-and-white ensemble of geometric patterns, a white lacy blouse under a sleek black silk jacket wit
h green oriental stitching, over a tight black skirt that hugged her curves at the hip but dramatically flared out at the knee, lampshade style. It was her face that arrested yet excited: those high cheekbones, lightly rouged; the emerald almond-shaped eyes with a slight yellow mote that caught the overhead light; that seductive dimple on her chin, a face encased in a swirl of chestnut curls. Wide, sensual lips, coated in a deep passion crimson, a color so bloodlike it seemed enamel. Luminous porcelain skin with an opalescent cast, vaguely foreign.

  “Miss Ferber, I’m sorry I’m late.” A low, husky voice, and I thought of Greta Garbo speaking in Anna Christie. She leaned in and I smelled exotic perfume, pungent jasmine perhaps, a sweet elixir, heady as thick wine.

  Such women were dangerous.

  Deadly, but they compelled one to draw close. Ships were wrecked on the coasts of their attention. You had no choice.

  I smiled, stammered, “So you’re the new Julie LaVerne.”

  Those green eyes gleamed, catlike. “It’s a wonderful part, Miss Ferber. I don’t have to show my long legs, and there’s even a scene where I’m allowed to look haggard, worn, without makeup. I don’t have to look like the glossy prints in Photoplay.” She struck a model’s artificial pose, held it, and then burst out laughing. Her roar was raucous, whiskey husky, a late-night voice, closing time at the bar.

  “When Max”—she reached over and touched his cheek, and I swear he blushed—“told me you were his old friend and would be coming out here, I demanded a meeting.” She winked. “Men don’t refuse me anything.” She narrowed her eyes. “Except, of course, loyalty. Fidelity. Men seem to be missing those parts of their character.”

  Somehow I found my voice. “I’ve never married…”

  But she spoke over my words. “And I’ve married two times and will probably marry over and over and over, like a punch-drunk sailor looking for one more open tavern.”

  “Why?” I asked.

  The question surprised her, so she didn’t respond.

  Max looked into her face. “So how’s Frankie?” His tone was not friendly, and Ava picked up on it, wagging her enameled finger at him.

  “Now, now. Francis is Francis, you know. The boy who would be a menace to society. Read Louella Parsons who has her spies working overtime at Ciro’s and the Trocadero. Every time we have our spitfire public battles, I read a different version of it the next day in the Hearst tabloids. Frankly, her version of my life is much more interesting than mine.”

  “Fiction usually is more interesting than real life.”

  She leaned into me. “Max finds Francis an irritant. Which, of course, he is. But Max doesn’t love the scrawny singer. I do. Sadly. Max keeps telling me—Ava, he’s a married man. Separated, I say. I may stretch the morals clause in my Metro contract but I don’t fully snap it apart.” She reached for a cigarette, and, out of nowhere, a waiter bounded across the room to light it.

  We ordered lunch—she had chicken salad on rye and a pineapple and cottage cheese salad, and scarcely picked at both, though she ordered two martinis—as I quietly contemplated this Hollywood siren. No fool, this beauty, I realized. In fact, she struck me as quite smart, even witty, a woman in full possession. No, that’s wrong—not full possession because there was something amiss here, some little-girl desire to be noticed. Helen of Troy with a tragic flaw: insecurity. Vulnerability. Because her stream of words, delightful to listen to, dominated the conversation while laced with something else: she was hell-bent on making me like her. She had no way of knowing that I already did.

  I sat back, the warm spray of her words covering me. She and Max gabbed about the industry, inside gossip, internecine warfare, who was sleeping with whom, who’d lost favor with Louis B. Mayer, who passed out on the dance floor of the Mocambo last night, the night Howard Keel got juiced on martinis, her photo in that girlie magazine Wink. The day before, she’d bumped into Mickey Rooney, her first husband, who begged her to go home with him. She’d walked away. I took it all in, delighted by her words. With her flashing eyes and infectious laugh, she was, emphatically, my tragic heroine Julie LaVerne, exiled from the Cotton Blossom.

  The meal finished, she sat back, stirred her black coffee with a shot of brandy poured in. “I’m reading So Big, Edna. You know, when I met my second husband Artie Shaw, well, I’d only read Gone with the Wind. I am from the South, Edna. You had to read that book. Every parlor had a copy placed next to the Bible. We all told our boyfriends we’d…think about it tomorrow. Artie insisted I read Darwin’s Origin of Species on our honeymoon. I’m not making this up. Quite the aphrodisiac, let me tell you. Can you imagine? Talk about your survival of the fittest. And Thomas Mann, The Magic Mountain. One page of that and I’m asleep. No magic there, just a mountain of a book. Too thick a book. My arms sagged…”

  I volunteered, “Frankly, a strain on the stomach muscles, such a book.”

  She laughed. “You said it. To this day I cringe when I see the spine of Buddenbrooks in my bookcase. But he did make me into a reader. Sometimes husbands can actually be good for a marriage.” Then her voice dipped. “But, unfortunately, he also made me a divorced woman out on the town.” She sat up straight and held my eye. “Edna, I’m talking a blue streak, dizzy with being here with you, when I only want to ask you one thing. How can we help Max? This brouhaha about that letter to the Reporter. This nonsense of the blacklists. Metro knocking him out.”

  Taken aback by the sudden shift in conversation, I shrugged my shoulders. “I’ve been thinking about it…”

  That didn’t satisfy her. “Too many good souls crushed by this Red menace nonsense. Max a Commie? Preposterous. I’ve known him for years. Lord, he voted for FDR.” She grinned widely. “We all did. Hedda Hopper called my Francis a pinko last week, right after she named me the new tramp in town.” She stopped, out of breath.

  I fumed. “She should be blacklisted for wrecking the English language.”

  We all laughed, Ava choking on cigarette smoke.

  “We have to think of something.” Her fingernail with the red polish tapped her lower lip.

  “Enough,” Max implored. “Let’s talk of Show Boat, my real passion.”

  “No, it’s my real passion, Max. Yes, you’ve certainly left your mark on each new version, but this movie is my chance of a lifetime.” She reached into her purse. “But I have something here to share with Edna. You know what it is already, Max, but keep quiet.” She winked at him. “Something that trumps your Show Boat stories, dear Max. Even that dried flower you keep from Helen Morgan.” She shrugged. “A weed stuck in the pages of your diary. Such a sentimental fool.”

  Max teased her. “What is it now? An autographed picture of Rita Hayworth?”

  She gently tapped him on the cheek. “Fresh boy. Now, Edna, I come from a small dirt town in North Carolina called Grabtown, a desolate red-dirt tobacco town with a whole lot of poverty. Dirt roads, no running water, no electricity. I was a scrappy tomboy who picked the worms off the bright-leaf tobacco and washed the black sap off with lye soap. Back in 1924, when I was two years old, my mama’s cousin Minnie worked at a boardinghouse over to Bath by the Pamlico River where a certain lady novelist came to board Charles Hunter’s James Adams Floating Theater. Do you remember that?”

  I sat up, caught by her words.

  A fond memory, of course. I nodded, smiling. “I remember my stay on that wonderful boat, selling tickets, hauling props around, spooning out food, and listening to Charley’s amazing memories of life on a showboat as we sailed to Belhaven. It was a goldmine of information and lore from a great storyteller.” I grinned. “But when I lit a cigarette in town at lunch, I saw shock on everyone’s faces. Women don’t smoke in tobacco country. My Show Boat grew out of that visit.” I scrunched up my face purposely. “But I remember that boardinghouse, Ormond’s—the boat was delayed two days in Elizabeth City. I had to rent a room. A smelly place, an old brick house that took in transients, moldy with mice and indigestible food. Gray, grim sheets on the bed tha
t…” I shuddered.

  Ava was laughing. “Cousin Minnie delivered eggs and milk daily to that place. She got your autograph.” Ava slid a slip of paper across the table, a sheet torn from a school tablet, stained in one corner, wrinkled, but prominently in the center was my thick-inked name: Edna Ferber, followed by a resolute period after the “r.”

  Edna Ferber period. Always a statement.

  I shook my head and passed it to Max.

  “When she died,” Ava went on, “I got it. My treasure. And now I’m Julie, the best goddamn Julie there will ever be. Helen Morgan and Broadway my foot.” She reached out and took the slip from Max and tucked it back into her purse. “An omen, Edna. In the stars, you know. I was crawling through tobacco fields, barefoot and snotty, while in Bath you were creating an empire.” She bowed.

  Max groaned. “Ah, barefoot girl with cheek of tan. Barefoot girl with plenty of cheek.”

  “You said it, brother.”

  “I don’t remember Minnie.”

  “Of course not. No reason to. You hopped around town in an old Ford driven by a Negro boy, plodding through the overgrown graveyard. Everyone watched you. Minnie was scared to death of you, she told my mama. You were…famous.”

  “Well, now you’re famous.”

  She sat silent a long time. “True, but fame isn’t what it’s cracked up to be, is it, Edna?” Those gleaming green eyes held me.

  “No, it isn’t.”

  She was getting ready to leave. “Let me see more of you while you’re here, Edna. Max told me you’ll skip the premiere—you’re a sensible woman—but I’m gonna make you my Southern fried chicken one night. I’m a dammed good cook, though no one believes that. In ten years I’ll weigh three hundred pounds, and love it. Not only that but…”

  A flash of blinding light, disorienting. I turned to see a photographer bent on one knee, a few feet from the table, his camera aimed at us.

  “Damned fool,” Ava screamed.

  Within seconds a reporter in a wrinkled white linen suit, pad open, pencil at the ready, was next to her. “Ava,” he blurted out, “lunch with a Commie?”