by Ed Ifkovic
Max had switched on too many table lamps that did nothing more than exaggerate the long drifting shadows on the walls. I settled into a deep, worn sofa. A lived-in room, comfortable, inviting. A home. Max’s home. Every space from table top to wall, even a paneled door, held black-and-white photographs chronicling Max’s long career in Broadway theater, on the road during interminable tryouts, and, for the past couple of decades, life in Hollywood as a freelance musical arranger as well as small-time talent agent.
A quick glance gave me shots of Max with Clark Gable, Gary Cooper, Ginger Rogers, Jerome Kern, among so many others. Max grinning with Fred Allen at the Chi Chi Club in Palm Springs. Max playfully sparring with Mickey Rooney. Max doing an exaggerated soft shoe with Marge and Gower Champion, the two veteran hoofers now in the new Show Boat. I admit I didn’t recognize many of the celebrities in the photos. Despite my being enthralled, begrudgingly, with movieland magic, I always declared an abiding dislike of Hollywood’s trashy output. How many doomsday pronouncements had I made to the press on the unsavory effects of movies while at the same time demanding Hollywood moguls buy the rights to my novels? Jack Warner was now wooing me for the rights to Giant, a novel not yet published. Carl Laemmele used to send me boxes of Belgian chocolates. Max and I had long, intense talks on that subject, let me tell you.
Max’s face got serious. “Edna, you didn’t have to fly to L.A. to see me, you know. I don’t need…”
I held up my hand. “Don’t be ridiculous, Max. My indignation over the way you’ve been treated fueled my journey, truth to tell.”
He laughed. “It is wonderful to see you after so many years. It’s been so long.”
He walked to a black-lacquered art deco sideboard and poured red wine into two glasses. “Still merlot?”
“You know me, Max. The little tippler.”
“Yeah, I recall your insistence that one glass of anything is worthy and healthful. Two glasses makes you say and do foolish things.”
“Well, it’s true.”
“Edna, you’ve never said a foolish thing in your life.” He raised his glass to me.
We clinked glasses. “I’m an old lady now. Maybe it’s time to be foolish.” I sat back, sipping the delicious wine. I smiled back at him, the two of us silent for a moment, lost in the comfortable space that old friends fall into so neatly and deliciously, some reflective touchstone. A peaceful kingdom, this little bungalow.
Max had aged. He was a small compact man, so slender of build he seemed an undernourished adolescent boy. He had a bony face with jutting chin covered in a slight stubble, grayish. Balding now, his once straw-like honey-blond hair was sketchy and stringy. But those eyes, metallic steel gray, always-and still-giving his face a mischievous, impish look, the boy who steals the crab apples from your neighbor’s yard. Those deep-set eyes made the utterly drab face burst alive, rivet, demand your attention. As a young man, he’d been a dancer in a chorus line back in New York, a live-off-the-cuff gypsy. But when his dancing days were over, he became a back-of-the-chorus baritone in Broadway musicals. Then, for his final passion, a mighty fine arranger of musical scores, with a growing reputation for originality and cleverness. In time he became an intimate of Jerome Kern, a man I knew well, a man notoriously hard to befriend.
“You’re staring at me, Edna.”
“I know. I’m not sorry. I like looking at you.”
He shook his head. “My wife’ll be jealous…for the first time.”
I took a deep breath. “Max, a married man.”
“Hard to believe, no?” He pointed to a corner china cabinet with scalloped trim and chalk-white finish, something that rightly belonged in a colonial home on Cape Cod. “Your gift of the Baccarat vases was excessive.”
Four years back-Max, fiftyish then-the inveterate bachelor and summer nomad who trekked alone across the Alps, had surprised everyone by marrying a local widow, whom I’d never met. No one had-at least none of the New York circle that knew Max. Fond of Max, our serendipitous court jester, we were tickled-and talked of nothing else for days. George S. Kaufman famously quipped, “Some men have to reach that half-century mark before they make their first mistake.” Max’s letter to me, intimate and cozy, had gushed-a squirming emotion I dislike in nearly everyone-his absolute devotion to the mysterious Alice.
“And where is Alice?” I asked now.
“She’s dressing-keeps changing her dress.” He slapped the side of his face, a silly gesture. “Oh, perhaps I shouldn’t tell you that. She’s so nervous about meeting you that she’s been fretting all day. You’re Edna Ferber. You’re Show Boat…”
“Good Lord,” I interrupted him. “I’m hardly some massive pleasure craft lumbering down Wilshire Boulevard.”
“You know what I mean.” He grinned sheepishly. “She’ll be out in a second.”
It was almost a stage cue because, with a squeak of an unseen door and a very audible titter, the woman appeared in the hallway. She stood there, statue-like, one hand extended out for no apparent reason, a paralyzed smile on her face. I was reminded of the indomitable Katherine Cornell and her usual preposterous stage entrances, whether called for or not in the script. Max made the introductions while Alice slid into a canary-yellow wing chair opposite me. I wondered when she planned to start blinking.
I didn’t know what I expected, but not this prim, matronly-looking woman, dressed now in a simple floral-print housedress with two rather ungainly red bows stuck indecorously to her bodice, a dress that clashed with the yellow of her chair. Hardly Hollywood-more Emporia, Kansas, the farmer’s wife at a Grange supper of pork-and-beans that followed a Methodist quilting bee. George Kaufman, always privy to transcontinental gossip though most was spurious and definitely scurrilous, had informed me that she was a notorious black widow whose rich gangland husband had died under mysterious circumstances. I’d expected some slicked-over movie confection, much too young for Max, a vacuum slathered in a harlot’s glossy lipstick and dime-store rouge.
Alice, to the contrary, wore no makeup save the dimmest hint of light powder on her cheeks and a faint tint of apricot lipstick, decorous and flattering. With my own bright red lipstick and rouged cheeks, my head of permed white curls, I played the madam. The near-septuagenarian out on the town. Not only that, but Alice was small and chubby, with a cherubic face that held round walnut-brown eyes, a little too large, so that she seemed startled awake. She was the kind of woman you’d see depicted on a box of laundry detergent or baking powder. Or the friendly if annoying neighbor in an Andy Hardy movie. Mickey Rooney would beg her for candy.
I found myself liking her. She had a thin, sweet smile that reminded me of friends connecting after long absence.
“We finally meet,” she whispered.
“Can you believe I got married, Edna?” Max got up to pour his wife a drink. Not wine, I noticed, but iced tea from a pitcher.
“I was a tad surprised.” I was stunned, truth be told.
Alice looked at him with affection. “I had to convince him.”
“She asked me,” Max confided.
Alice grinned. “Otherwise we’d still be going Dutch after late Friday night suppers at Chasen’s. Or still standing at the juke box at Sneaky Pete’s on Sunset Strip, dropping nickels in to hear ‘I’m Looking Over a Four-Leaf Clover’ for the hundredth time.”
“No, it was ‘Baby, It’s Cold Outside.’ Esther Williams.” His eyes gleamed. “I love that song.” He took a sip of wine, rolled his tongue over his lips. A deep sigh. “Edna, seriously, this visit, though a pleasure, wasn’t…necessary.”
“Of course it was.” Emphatic, quick.
“I’m small potatoes in this whole political mess…”
“Well, you’re my potato.” I grinned. “Though these days a very hot potato.”
Max had long been involved with different productions of Show Boat dating back to the Hammerstein and Kern Broadway hit of 1927 that ran for 572 performances and was almost immediately revived. He’d been hired to per
form his wonderful magic on MGM’s latest Technicolor extravaganza, the much-touted remake starring screen heartthrobs Howard Keel and Kathryn Grayson, as well as, scandalously, Ava Gardner as Julie LaVerne, the tragic mulatto. The movie was now finished and eagerly anticipated. Previews in April and May in out-of-the-way theaters throughout California had been favorable, indeed, downright rapturous.
I was cynical, of course-the two earlier films had made me squirm, and I fully expected the same reaction this time around. Bowdlerized, slapdash renderings of my romantic saga, piecemeal and suspect. With his history, Max had been hired to orchestrate the music, and, typical of Max, he’d worked tirelessly on this new Metro release, his loving touch all over the production. In a letter he claimed it would be a superb movie, though I winced at that-but finally Max had written that L. B. Mayer or Dore Schary-he didn’t know which blustery mogul-had quietly removed his name from the film credits. In fact, he’d been cruelly walked off the grounds.
“I’ve been blacklisted,” Max wrote me. “I’m the new Hollywood leper in fantasy land.”
Hollywood, sadly, was awash in fear and reprisal, a noisome cancer eating into the rarefied industry of make believe. Back in 1947 the House Un-American Activities Committee in Washington, under the leadership of a pudgy martinet named J. Parnell Thomas, had begun investigating Communist influence in the movie industry, particularly among scriptwriters. Hollywood folks, stunned, had been compelled to head East to testify to past or present affiliation with the Communist Party. A garish public-relations nightmare. Are you now or have you ever been a member of the Communist Party? was the nightmarish mantra.
At first Hollywood fought back with protests and meetings, buoyed by support from the studios. But then public opinion shifted as the gossip columnists roared their disapproval, and Hollywood bigwigs ran scared. Heads tumbled. Careers died. Lives ruined. What resulted was the Hollywood Ten, now bound for prison and career suicide.
Just this past year, with the specter of jowly and stentorian Senator Joe McCarthy waving undocumented lists of Reds in government before Republican women’s clubs in the heartland, as well as a new round of attacks from a reconstituted HUAC, Max reacted. Bothered by the spectacle, he had to say something. Of course, he knew Communists, men who’d joined when it was a party dedicated to fighting fascism in Germany and Italy, idealistic souls who’d recanted after the Stalin purges. In fact, he was a close friend of two of the Hollywood Ten: John Howard Lawson, whom I knew as a serious if windbaggish playwright, and Dalton Trumbo, a brilliant scriptwriter we all called Doc.” Good men, and loyal Americans.
Max had penned an indignant but I thought beautifully crafted letter to the Hollywood Reporter, articulating the case for First Amendment rights of the accused, a heartfelt cry for balance and fairness and-well, it didn’t matter. That simple letter, forceful and intelligent, earned him the label of Communist, fifth columnist, fellow traveler, card-carrying Red, a betrayer of American democracy. An endless stream of glib, dismissive phrases. A brutal attack in Myron Fagan’s muckraking Red Treason in Hollywood.
Reprinted here and there, quoted by a slap-happy, Red-baiting Walter Winchell, referred to by Jack Warner before some committee, the letter branded Max a danger. His timing was bad. The Rosenberg trial was bold-face, front-page news. The Alger Hiss debacle still sizzled. The Russian A-bomb threat frightened everyone. No matter that Max was a good man; condemned in the local press, named by Red Channels in their muckraking columns, he became estranged from both friends and foes. Clients drifted away. Phones went unanswered. Max became the unwitting poster boy of the moment: the veteran entertainment insider who supposedly answered the phone when Moscow called.
I’d written that I’d be visiting him-to lend support.
Max now seemed eager to change the subject. “Metro asked you to the premiere of Show Boat?”
I swelled up, indignant. “Not exactly a heartfelt invitation…just a courtesy. No thank you! I’ve already refused. I made a point of it. I don’t like their treatment of you, and I’ve told them so loud and clear. I came to see you. Spend time with you, go out for dinner. Show Boat has nothing to do with my visit.” The West Coast premiere was scarcely a week away, and MGM knew I was in town. I’d heard they were worried I’d make a scene. Some of the scenes I’d made over the years were the stuff of legend.
Alice spoke up. “They’ll hound you. Their rep, a guy named Desmond Peake, the man who axed Max from the studio, called here to get information from us.”
“I know. There are phone messages filling up my cubby hole at the Ambassador.”
“He’s a real shark, that one,” Max noted.
“I will see them, of course, whoever them is. They’ve scheduled a private showing of the movie.” I bristled. “Max, I simply don’t like the fact that your considerable contribution to Show Boat is going uncredited. A horrible word: ‘uncredited.’ So dismissive and unfair.”
“It doesn’t matter to me.” Max shrugged.
Hotly. “Oh, but it does.”
Alice nodded. “Justice.” She wagged her finger at her husband.
“Exactly,” I echoed. “I detest a witch-hunt, and this one is lasting too long and is too insidious. I don’t understand this…this madness. I gather that gossip queen Hedda Hopper is on an anti-Red tear, even smearing you in her columns. ‘Moscow Max’-right? Snide and catty.”
“I’m famous.” Max raised his eyebrows. “Edna, everyone in Hollywood is desperate to be wildly famous.” A half-bow. “I did it effortlessly.”
“Infamous,” Alice muttered. She reached over and gently touched her husband’s hand. It was a sudden gesture, instinctive, but it seemed so necessary at the moment, a lover’s reassuring pat, sheltering. Just for a second they glanced at each other, excluding me, and in that instant I witnessed real affection, love, concern. And, to my horror, a little fear. I felt a lump in my throat because I realized, like a blow to the face, how treacherous and precarious their peaceful life had become. Trouble in a sun-drenched paradise.
Max breathed in, once again anxious to shift the conversation. A thin smile, teasing. “Ava Gardner can’t wait to meet you.”
I gasped, a histrionic Victorian reflex I detested in myself, though these days the grim specter of humanity seemed to warrant it more and more. “Whatever for?”
“Think about it, Edna. You wrote Show Boat, the movie she thinks will define her career, showcase her as a real actress. The movie that, like The Killers a while back, will finally convince the world she’s more than long legs, curvy body, and sex-goddess appeal. A breakthrough movie, that one. Hemingway himself sent her roses. But Metro has a track record of dumping her into grade B movies. They don’t believe her power. Both Hedda Hopper and Louella Parsons wrote wildly insane columns protesting Metro’s casting, can you believe? Keep her out of the classic. ‘Show Boat is America…Ava is…cheesecake.’ But she can act, you know.”
Alice chimed in, “She’s mentioned you a number of times.”
“Ava Gardner?”
They both laughed. “Edna, Edna.” Max leaned forward. “She’s not what you think.”
Frankly, I never liked it when people told me what I was thinking. A little too arrogant, such a presumption. Max, however, I’d forgive. “Well, to be honest, she doesn’t strike me as…dimensional. I mean…” I faltered. “Sex goddess, hellcat, those nightclub scenes that make the papers…” I suddenly realized my narrow image of the beautiful woman was the product of George Kaufman and Marc Connelly blathering their puerile adoration for the voluptuous woman. George, I knew, regularly devoured Photoplay and Modern Screen, though not in front of me. He knew better.
“You’ll love her,” Alice confided with certainty. She wrapped her arms around her chest, twisted her body into the cushions of the chair. “She gives the greatest hugs.”
“I don’t allow strangers to hug me,” I announced, imperious.
“You won’t have a choice.” Alice giggled like a schoolgirl.
“And she won’t be a stranger very long,” Max added.
Now I changed the subject. “Tell me, is the movie atrocious, Max?”
“God, no.” He laughed out loud. “It’s…Technicolor.”
I sighed. “Oh, joy. A splashy cartoon. Magnolia Ravenal dancing with Donald Duck.”
Max hedged, glanced over my shoulder. “Well, it’s different from the Hammerstein and Kern version. The director Pop Sidney didn’t want to use Hammerstein’s libretto. He did leave off that ugly word for Negroes in ‘Ol’ Man River’…”
“Thank God for that. In my novel only the lowlife characters use that word.”
“But they’ve rewritten most of the dialogue which is…”
“Juvenile, insipid…” I interrupted.
“A little bit, in places. But the music is pure Jerome Kern. Otherwise I wouldn’t have worked on it.”
“Thank God.” I paused. “You know, I make no money from this production. Not a red cent. Hollywood hacks can willy-nilly run amok with my work. I’ve sent off letters to MGM, in fact. Letters ignored, for the most part. They run from me like the plague. Show Boat is meant to be a simple story, a romantic look at life on a Mississippi floating theater, though with an underbelly of darkness-the mixed-blood tragedy of the South. Cap’n Andy and his wife Parthy shelter their innocent daughter Magnolia who falls for a ne’er-do-well gambler Gaylord Ravenal, marries him, and leads a life of sadness and penury until she returns to her home on the Cotton Blossom.”
“It’s a slice of Americana.” Max was nodding. “Melodrama, vaudeville, minstrel show, song and dance.”
“Remember that early script I got my hands on, thankfully abandoned?” I grinned. “I believe it may have come from you. Ingenue Magnolia blames herself for Ravenal deserting her and their baby. ‘I must have done something very wrong.’ Her fault, the failed wife, not the wastrel gambler and huckster. Lord! In my novel Magnolia grows as a strong, purposeful woman, not a simpering, weak-kneed woman fawning before a prodigal husband.” My voice was rising, my cheeks flushed, so I stopped. “I’m sorry. I’ll never be happy with what they do to my work.”