Make Believe

by Ed Ifkovic

  I smiled. “Are you certain?”

  “Metro makes musicals. The best. And MGM has more stars than there are in heaven.” A mechanical wind-up toy, though one in need of oil.

  “I’ve heard that phrase before.”

  “I didn’t make it up.”

  “Max Jeffries was my good friend.”

  “I know.”

  “You knew him, right? His name has been taken off the movie. And then someone murdered him.”

  Silence for a time, Desmond examining the cut of a particular fingernail, absorbed in the expensive manicure. The corners of his mouth twitched, though he turned his head away.

  I cleared my throat. “How well did you know Max?”

  A heartbeat passed, awkward. Then that granite head swiveled, his tongue rolling across his lower lip. “Not well.”

  “What did you think of his being blacklisted by Metro?”

  Another pause. “I think ‘blacklist’ is a harsh and unnecessary word. Too extreme. There is no blacklist in Hollywood.”

  Annoyance laced my words. “What would you call it?”

  Desmond clicked his tongue. “I wouldn’t call it anything. It’s not my job.”

  “Knowing Max, his touch is all over this new Show Boat.”

  “That may be.”

  “And yet he was barred from showing his face in Culver City. By you.”

  “Not my decision, Miss Ferber.” He gazed out the window, trying to close off further talk.

  I wouldn’t have it. “When a man does work, he should receive credit for that job. His legacy now, his last movie. A man who touched every movie version of Show Boat.”

  He didn’t answer. Then, a surprising anger in his tone, he faced me. “You don’t understand the climate out here.”

  “Meaning?”

  “Moscow has tentacles that reach out and grab and…”

  “Nonsense. Max was a good American.”

  “Good Americans can be duped, manipulated, deceived. Soviet police agents, firebrands.”

  “Max wrote one letter…”

  “Look, Miss Ferber.” He sucked in his breath. “You may not believe this, but I always respected Max Jeffries. But Metro has a product to protect. Pinko affiliations hurt not only Metro but…America. God rest his soul, but Max showed himself to be a troublemaker…”

  I cut him off, furious now. “Hogwash, young man. A lot of blather and rumor and innuendo. It’s laughable.”

  “Max had become a tool for evil.” A dry cough.

  I echoed his own words, “Good MGM folks can be duped, manipulated, and deceived.”

  He turned away, his shoulders hunched against the door as if he were trying to escape. I noticed a conspicuous vein in his right temple throbbed. The manicured fingers tapped on his pants leg, a hailstorm drum beat.

  ***

  Arrived at Culver City, cruising through back lots of African jungles, New York tenements, artificial lakes, Alpine castles, medieval kingdoms, and all-American small towns, the town car seemed purposely maneuvered through unnecessary by-paths, a circuitous route that suggested the range and power of the massive company. Acres of diamonds, fields of gold, subdivisions of platinum.

  A message was being delivered to me, small cog that I was in its world.

  Desmond Peake spoke not at all until the chauffeur pulled up in front of a building. Smiling thinly, he escorted me to a projection room in Sound Stage Four, seated me third row center—“Are we on Broadway?” I quipped to his stony face—and then excused himself. I sat alone in that shadowy room. No popcorn? No juju beads? Was I an exile in paradise? Not that I expected to be greeted by Louis B. Mayer, for I was given to understand that he’d been squeezed out of the organization, though he was an early advocate of Show Boat and of Ava Gardner herself. Perhaps Dore Schary, the new head honcho, would greet me. But no bigwig appeared. I didn’t hold my breath. I understood that I was a trespasser in an alien landscape.

  Of course, I’d already registered my disapproval at Max’s cruel removal from the credits, messages met with silence. After all, having flown across the country to lend Max support and having publicly trumpeted my disillusion with this Show Boat remake, I fully expected to sit alone at this courtesy screening for the originator of the money-bags product, the unwed mother of Show Boat who now wasn’t on speaking terms with her wayward and flamboyant offspring. So be it.

  The lights in the room flickered, on and off, a hidden projector behind me groaned, hiccoughed, whirred, and then the lights popped back on. I heard a door open, a rustling in the aisle and, to my surprise but utter delight, Ava Gardner slid into a seat next to me. She leaned over and smelled like fresh oranges. A quick, friendly hug—yes, I’d come to expect those spontaneous hugs—and vastly appealing at the moment. Dressed in a floral sundress with baggy sleeves and turquoise beads that hugged her neck, her feet encased in jewel-covered strip sandals, she looked ready for a beach party, cocktails on a deck overlooking the Pacific in Malibu. I grinned back at her.

  “Bastards,” she muttered. “They told me the wrong time. On purpose, I assume.” She laughed, a whiskey growl. “Lucky I have spies in this house of illusion.”

  “But why?”

  “You’re tied to Max.”

  “Pinko high tide in Hollywood?”

  Ava leaned in. “I wanted to be here with you today.” Her cigarette voice got low, confiding. “Edna, I’m nervous about what you’ll think of me in the movie.”

  “Why? For heaven’s sake.”

  “Because I’m given crappy parts at Metro. I’m a face and legs and bosom. Cheesecake you don’t get at Little John’s Steak House. If I see disapproval in your face…” She breathed in. “It was Max who suggested to the director that I’d be good as Julie. Pop Sidney had worked with me before and liked me. I expected Lena Horne to get the role. She lobbied for it, but she’s also suspect these days, hints of being pinko. And she’s a Negro. Don’t forget that. Black on the outside, pinko inside. She’s a friend of mine, so she understands the politics—she’s been around the block. God, Edna, she looks the part of Julie. The mulatto.”

  “Why not her?”

  “They’d have trouble distributing the film down South. But she sings the Negro songs like Julie should sing.”

  “I can’t wait to hear your version.”

  “You won’t, I’m afraid. My rendition of ‘Can’t Stop Lovin’ Dat Man’ is good. It is. But they’re using Annette Warren’s high-pitched soprano, dubbed in. They don’t believe in me.” She snarled, “They’re bastards.”

  A hum, a click, a man’s voice yelling something inarticulate, and the lights dimmed. The credits rolled in glorious Technicolor, a wash of vibrant color that pleased me. Ava and I grew silent, though she was leaning so that her shoulder brushed mine. A delight, this wayward daughter comforting a mother who is about to be abundantly disappointed. Magnolia Ravenal at the side of her carping matriarch, Parthenia Hawks. The ingénue and the puritanical mother.

  What thrilled, of course, was the music, especially William Winfield’s basso rendition of “Ol’ Man River.” Paul Robeson in 1936 had been brooding, elegiac, gripping, and I confessed to liking that moment in the movie. How could I not? This version was more hopeful, exuberant. Both caused the hair to rise on the back of my neck. Kern’s elegant yet sing-along score haunted me, carried me off. Prepared as I was to dislike the movie, I found I couldn’t: its sheer sweep and color and range held me. It was a big budget extravaganza, no holds barred melodrama. This movie was why they invented a place called Hollywood.

  Not that it lacked faults, to be sure—after all, they’d abandoned Oscar Hammerstein’s pithy, intense libretto for some pay-through-the-nose hack’s turgid dialogue. And, of course, they brutalized the last part of the story. The charming cad Gaylord Ravenal had wooed the lovely Magnolia, an onstage romance that became love—and then marriage. My line in my book: “Their make believe adventures as they lived them on the stage became real.” But real life paled, ultimately,
when the bounder deserted her.

  In this oh-so-happy version Ravenal returns to the boat when they are both young and vital, with daughter Kim still a young child. They warble “Make Believe” as hymn to their blissful reunion, the showboat sailing down the Mississippi into the new and glorious day for all. That was what they called a Hollywood ending.

  What truly amazed, though, was Ava as Julie, the half-black, half-white doomed beauty. This new version paradoxically played down the racial underpinnings of my novel and the stage hit, but then, ironically, framed the entire movie around Julie LaVerne, Ava’s presence dictating the narrative. Julie and Steve, the married performers, are turned into the sheriff for the crime of miscegenation. In a dramatic move Steve takes out his switchblade and slashes her finger and drinks her blood. It’s a thrilling moment, staggering melodrama. When the sheriff arrives to arrest them, Steve insists he has Negro blood. After all, one drop of Negro blood makes a soul a Negro in the Old South. So they’re not arrested, but cruelly exiled, the beginning of Julie’s downward path of destruction. Brothels and honky-tonks and alleys. That scene was at the heart of my Show Boat. That scene said something important about America.

  In this new movie Steve uses a pin to prick her finger—and it’s out of camera shot. Someone not conversant with my book or the stage version might wonder what in the world was happening, this cryptic mixing of blood. Let’s not offend any viewer. God forbid. Please. How bizarre: a Victorian sensitivity to phony propriety in a shell-shocked age that just went through cataclysmic war and holocaust and nuclear annihilation. Please.

  But…Julie. Ava. Ava Gardner. A luminous presence, staggering. A beautiful woman in person, even sitting next to me with almost no makeup on, but someone who, captured magnificently on that huge celluloid screen, mesmerized. Her movements, fluid and sulky, demanded your full attention. Kathryn Grayson was pretty and sweet as the girl next door, if next door was traveling on a lumbering showboat. Rebecca of Sunnybrook Farm. Pollyanna. The ingénue was the wholesome lass from an operetta. Ava Gardner could never be that girl next door. No, she was the dark of the moon; she was a total eclipse of the sun. You could not take your eyes off her. It helped that I was sitting next to her, experiencing some sort of doppelganger moment. She was an actress, surely. I’d not expected that. Helen Morgan, an earlier Julie on Broadway, sat atop an upright piano in a Chicago dive, singing the torch song “Bill.” Just my Bill. Just plain Bill. The ache in your heart when you love so much…Ava moved around the piano, seductively, forlornly. You watched her.

  It was Ava’s movie. Howard Keel and Kathryn Grayson could warble, but Julie’s exile and decline defined the movie. You wait, anxious, until she reappears on the screen. When she and Steve leave the showboat, a scene filmed in murky darkness with the ponderous strains of “Ol’ Man River” rising solemnly behind them, you have the movie’s rawest moment. Suddenly, startlingly, I thought of Max, expelled from Metro and Hollywood. Like Julie, a soul dispossessed of life. Exiles from the garden of earthly delights.

  Then Ava ends the movie, standing on the shadowy wharf as the showboat drifts down river, Gaylord and Magnolia reunited through her intervention, Julie blowing that final kiss to them and her life on that boat, her only safe haven. She is left now to end her life a drunk and a whore.

  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 lo
ve 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.