by Ed Ifkovic
“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 Blossom 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.
But then Sol shifted his eyes. Another long silence, his head bent to the side as though listening to some inner voice, his hand rubbing the side of his jaw, his body trembling. He looked out over the few of us. “He shouldn’t have died like that.”
We all tensed up, waiting. Alice sucked in her breath, a rasp that made everyone look her way.
“You know, Max helped hundreds of careers, but that’s not important. What was important was that he was a friend to hundreds, and they turned their backs on him. Such a good, good man, a mensch, let me tell you. So where are they?” He stopped, pointed around the nearly empty chamber. For some reason, probably nerves, the aged organist inadvertently touched a key of the organ and the discordant note, powerful as a gunshot, made us jump. Sol glanced at her but then went on. “There’s something wrong here today. Small-minded people, narrow and mean-spirited people…they use innuendo…they say they speak for America…but…they…” He trailed off, helpless, now weeping.
Lorena looked at me, despairing.
Then he gazed at us. No, he looked at the vast number of unoccupied seats, the ghosts of Max’s friends and acquaintances oddly there—at least to him. “Old friends,” he muttered. Then, almost incoherent, “The three musketeers.” And I knew—I supposed we all did at that moment—he was talking about the absence of Larry Calhoun.
Sol’s voice became thunderous now. “Belly-crawlers,” he yelled out. “Turning in their friends for a few pieces of silver. Judas.” He faltered and let out a teary gasp. “The Talmud says…
the man who turns in his brother, the one who betrays…” Then, loudly: “Akhal Kurtza.” Hebrew, I assumed. “The man who ravishes the flesh of a brother…gnaws on the marrow of his brother…”
It was an awful moment, raw as dripping blood. Sol, confused now, stood there, unable to move. Quietly, in an act of utter beauty, Alice went to him, wrapped an arm about his waist, and led the weeping man back to his seat.
Dizzy, spent, I bent over in the seat, my eyes closed.
Nothing happened. Reverend Smithson sat on the side, the lost Lamb of God himself.
The creak of a stage door at the side, behind a tattered curtain.
Ava Gardner walked out of the back shadows. A collective intake of breath, as I turned to glance at Desmond Peake, sitting behind us. A stony face, though the knuckles gripping the back of the seat in front of him were white and tight.
Ava, the forbidden congregant.
Her eyes downcast, she stood silently before that microphone. Dressed in a simple black dress, with decorous black ruffles at the neck, elbow-length black cotton gloves, a single strand of pearls around her neck, a black scarf draped on her head like a mantilla, she looked the modest mourner, though that would be impossible for her: she stunned us, this woman. She glanced at the Reverend Smithson, who smiled at her and nodded.
She cleared her throat. Immediately the organist hit some keys. Ava glanced her way, shook her head, and said in a throaty voice, “No. But thank you.”
Then, a cappella, she sang a slow, bluesy version of “Can’t Help Lovin’ Dat Man,” Julie’s haunting lament from Show Boat. A perfect voice, compelling, thrilling. It was the doomed mulatto’s hymn to a loved one, the inevitability of a passion that takes over one’s life. Fish gotta swim and birds gotta fly…and, for one woman, for both Ava and for Julie, there could only be one man till they died. A lament for a lover, true, but now, transmogrified by Ava’s dirge-like piano-bar rendering, it was reinvented as a testament to her love for her friend Max.
And just like that it was over. She stopped, backed up, and disappeared into the back room. We sat there, all of us a little drunk with the moment. I started crying, big sloppy tears that rose unexpectedly, and I couldn’t stop. This was for Max, this special moment. It was, I told myself, a melodramatic moment from a nineteenth-century showboat revue, some climactic sweep of tears and drama. Tempest and Sunshine. The Parson’s Bride. The hero and heroine on the stage of the Cotton Blossom, a chorus swelling behind them, as the heroine emoted before a clamoring audience. This was the wondrous melodrama that made life on a showboat so important to the river towns and hamlets along the Mississippi River. It was right, it was sublime. It was theater, yes, and sentimental; but it was the life we all wanted to believe in, that moment when we feel so exquisitely alive and true and good.