by Ed Ifkovic
“And you, my dear. Your story?”
“Is yet to be written. This chapter-movies-is a prelude.”
“To what?”
“Don’t know yet. But Francis is part of it. That I know.”
“Well…”
She smiled. “You don’t like him, Edna. That’s all right. It’s because he barrels his way through crowds. He can be so mean to people. He doesn’t stop to understand the…the quality of souls like you. He keeps his goodness hidden, Edna-like his long visits to sick friends in hospitals, days sitting at bedsides. That’s Francis, too!” She checked her wristwatch and frowned. “I have a photo shoot this afternoon.”
The bell over the front door clanged, and Sol Remnick walked in. He stood there, looking around, unbuttoning his sports jacket and removing his feathered fedora. When he spotted us, he ambled over and half-bowed to me. Ava stood and hugged him, but he seemed to push her away as he slid into a seat, and nodded toward me. He looked broken, this old friend of Max, with a collapsed face, bloodshot and red-rimmed eyes, and a quivering chin. I expected some tears, I expected grief-instead, what I got was sputtered anger. He blurted something out, incomprehensible, then had to start over.
“Sol, what?” Ava pleaded.
He breathed in. “I just had a fight with Larry Calhoun.”
Ava turned toward me. “Do you remember…”?
“Of course. We met him at lunch,” I broke in. “At the Ambassador. The old friend who warned Max…”
Sol rushed his words. “One of the three musketeers.” Said sarcastically, words laced with bitterness.
“What did he want?” Ava asked. “And a fight, Sol? Why?”
“He knocks on my door, this man who avoids me. This is a man who avoided Max, his old friend. I thought he came to talk about Max’s death, the two of us grieving, and we did…for a few minutes. How sad, how truly sad, who would do such a thing? Blah blah blah. Then, settling in, he tells me he wants to sell his shares in the property we own. Or for me to make him a loan. And he has the nerve to say-you know, with Max dead, his shares go to both of us. The deal, remember? He needs money real fast-he’s being pressured. And I say, such a bad time to discuss this, Larry, Max not in his grave, and he goes, hey, business is business, no?” Sol was sweating, mopping his forehead with a large white handkerchief.
“Why does he need money?” I asked.
Sol smiled. “He told me he had a favorite horse trotting at the track. A favorite, mind you.”
“I’ve long ago learned from my family that the ones you favor are invariably the ones who let you down.”
Sol said nothing for a bit, his face sagging, his eyes darting, pell-mell, from one corner of the restaurant to the other, unable to focus, settle. Quietly, “He’s gotta be in deep to the mob. They’re gonna hurt him. Otherwise, he’d never sell his shares away.”
The waitress had placed a coffee cup in front of him. When he picked it up, his hand shook. His fingertips were gnawed to the quick, a ragged line of dried blood on a couple of them.
Ava slatted her eyes, threw back her head. “He had some dealings with Lenny Pannis. I remember Francis told me.”
“Then,” Sol continued, not really listening, “he brings out some papers, says he’ll sign everything over to me. Just give him a check. He even quoted an amount. So brazen, hungry. So-cold. ‘Max has been murdered!’ I yelled at him. So he looks at me and says, ‘I didn’t do it.’ Like that ended the matter.”
I spoke up. “Where was he that night when Alice called him?”
“You know, I asked him that.” Sol tensed up. “It bothered me, him not being home. It bothered me that Alice called him, but that was petty of me.”
“And what did he say?” Ava asked.
“‘Out, I was out.’ That’s his answer. ‘I got a life, you know.’ So…cavalier. I wanted to…hit him.”
“No.” Ava touched his arm. “No.”
For the first time Sol smiled thinly. “I realized what a weak man he is-I suppose I always knew it. Max and I both did. Max always made excuses for him-‘There’s always one friend who weakens the chain.’ That’s what Max said. But I looked at him and told him no…no sale. No cash from me-even if I had extra, which I don’t. I don’t care what mobster is breathing down his neck. Let the goons break his legs. Let him get his cash elsewhere.” He shook his head. “I’d been waiting for the right moment-even before Max died-to confront him.”
“What do you mean?” I asked.
“He betrayed Max. Simple as that. I got this buddy at the Examiner, used to act with him in New York. He’d called me about that picture of you and Ava and Max that was in his paper. That nasty attack. He’d heard through word of mouth that Larry was responsible for the tip that led to that photo of you two and Max at lunch.”
Ava shrugged. “Sol, I assumed that. When I came in, I saw Larry hiding behind a palm tree, spying on Max and Edna. He was up to no good. He was never someone I liked, you know. An amateur at espionage.”
I stared at Ava, impressed.
“So he made a phone call.”
“Sort of dastardly,” I commented. “To turn in a friend.”
“That friendship ended a while back.” Angry, he reached for his pack of cigarettes and lit one, the cigarette bobbing in the corner of his mouth. Sol inhaled the smoke, breathed out, and relaxed, his chest swelling. “But the kicker is this-one of the editors at the Examiner, it seems, slips him a few bills now and then. A cheesy pay-off.”
Ava frowned. “God!”
“My friend found out that he even said my name to some folks at the Examiner for some cash.”
“You?” I exclaimed.
“Some inflammatory letter I signed years back, protesting some half-baked right-wing senator’s bill. But we never sent it-it was too over-the-top. But Larry provided a copy to the editor. He’s a lousy snitch. You know, he’d kept a copy from the days when we were all close. There’s a gold mine of names on that forgotten letter.”
“Did Max know?” Ava said.
“I phoned him the day he died.”
“What did he say?”
“You know Max. He goes, ‘So it surprises you that he’s a lowlife? Life turns some people good, turns others bad. A crap shoot.’” Now he laughed out loud. “So Max added, ‘Such entertainment we provide folks.’ He even imitated Molly Goldberg: ‘Yoo hoo, such a lot of tumul around me. Oy.’”
Neither Ava nor I laughed. Suddenly it dawned on me that Sol probably had no life outside his popular television persona, the bumbling Cousin Irving. And that scared me.
“Money,” I mused out loud. “Had he asked Max for money?”
“Not yet. Max told me he would not-never-give Larry any money. Larry was avoiding Max because of the blacklist nonsense.”
Ava took a cigarette from Sol’s pack, and he smiled at her. “God, he’s the worst of the lot.”
“So I called him a snitch to his face. A betrayer. A man who sells his soul for silver coins. A man who turns his back on friends. Turns in his friends.”
“What did he say?” Ava’s fingers trembled as she lit her cigarette.
“He didn’t answer for a while. Then he said, ‘I tell people what they already know. That’s not…snitching.’” Sol’s neck was beet red, his lips drawn into a thin line.
“A weasel,” I declared.
“You know, Larry got real smug-he knew at that point he wasn’t getting cash from me. We all should be worried, he told me. Heads are rolling. His job at Grauman’s Egyptian Theatre isn’t so secure, I guess. There are problems there. Then he got back on the subject of Max. How Max screwed it up for all of us. That infantile letter to the Reporter. Just look at the repercussions. All of us-himself included, an old friend and business partner-are now tainted by it. People may look at him as a fellow traveler, God forbid. I guess he’s friends with Desmond Peake, Metro’s liaison to the outside world. Babbitt goes to Hollywood. They’re both members of America First, that right-wing group. It seems Peake
mentioned Larry’s old friendship with Max-and Larry took that as a reprimand. Peake’s the one who gave Max his walking papers.”
“I’ve yet to meet this Desmond Peake,” I said. “Though his messages pile up at the hotel.”
Ava shivered. “My Lord, he’s attacking Max, a murdered man.”
“Then he mentioned Show Boat and Ava…and Frank.” A nervous chuckle. “He even quoted Hedda Hopper from a recent column. She called Metro ‘Metro-Goldwyn-Moscow.’ Imagine that!” His voice got ragged. “So Larry said he can’t be around people like us. Everyone is going to sink. That isn’t all. He had a lot to say about you two.”
Ava and I both exclaimed at the same moment, “Us?”
We stared at each other.
“Desmond had already warned Ava to back off Max. But she wouldn’t. You know how you are, Ava, hell-bent on doing what you damn well want to do. But he said your career was make or break with Show Boat.”
Ava whispered, “But I don’t care.”
“You too, Miss Ferber. He mentioned that you are on the boards for a novel about Texas oil, movie producers vying for rights before publication. Then he said, ‘This is the last you’ll see of me, Sol.’” He shrugged. “His last words to me: ‘If you change your mind about buying my share, call me. And bring a check.’”
Sol was watching my face. “Perhaps, Miss Ferber, you’ve written your last novel.”
We lingered too long in that sad eatery, none of us wanting to leave the others. Ava kept saying she had to go to the studio, but she didn’t move. Sol kept saying he’d promised Alice he’d help her arrange the memorial service for Max, two days hence. He lit one cigarette after the other, dawdled with this coffee cup, tilted his head back against the wall. Eyes half-shut, he sat there. And I didn’t want to leave them because I felt oddly safe there, Ava across from me, Sol on my right. In the deserted cafe, even the waitress now disappeared back into the kitchen, the tawdry trappings of such a workaday diner-the stained black-and-white linoleum tiles, the cracked leather in the booths, the wispy dust motes illuminated by a shaft of light from outside, even the hiccoughing whirr of an old floor fan that did nothing but circulate the hot sticky air-all of that comforted, peculiarly; this was an American eatery that could be anywhere. Keokuk, Iowa. Kalamazoo, Michigan. The Southside of Chicago. Astoria, Queens, New York. Anywhere. And, for that reason, though perhaps illogical, it was wonderful shelter.
It was getting late. One or two stragglers wandered in. A faint rumble in the air, heat lightning on this hot, hot afternoon. The sun-baked plate-glass front window darkened, the daylight dimmed. “Maybe a shower,” Sol mumbled.
“I hope so.” Ava glanced at the shadows drifting into the eatery.
Rain, I thought: there were nights back in New York when I sat by my windows overlooking Central Park as thunder and lightning transformed Manhattan. “Rain,” I said now.
But people said it never rained in California.
And so we sat there, the three of us, loathe to move, bound by some fierce love for a dead friend, mourning him silently. There we sat, fumbling with our coffee cups-the shabby Yiddish comic, the beautiful movie goddess, and the white-haired novelist who was so far from home-waiting for rain.
Chapter Nine
“What Show Boat creator visiting on the coast to add her fire power in support of a local Commie is now planning his funeral?”
I stared at the abrupt, cruel line. Furious, I paced my hotel suite. When I passed an inconvenient mirror, I spied a maddened old woman, her permed white curls in disarray. Worse, it was the face of a woman not used to being stunned-and certainly not bested by lesser forms of humanity.
And Hedda Hopper filled that bottom-feeder niche so perfectly.
Of course, I hadn’t read the silly gossip item in the morning paper because, frankly, I valued the English language and, as well, the innate decency of man. I came upon the scurrilous item by chance.
In my rooms all morning, I munched idly on an apple and read the Los Angeles Times. No comfort there, to be sure, because a front-page article explored Washington’s renewed investigation into Communist influence in Hollywood. In the light of the renewed attention from Congress, Red Channels, disingenuously chronicling pinkos on radio and television, was becoming influential. More sad souls would be grilled, ruined, maligned, jailed, ostracized. Max’s friends, John Howard Lawson and Doc Trumbo, were headed to prison, appeals denied. Wronged American writers.
So I would have missed Hedda Hopper’s snide diatribe had I not wandered out to the Sun Club Pool, dressed in my floral summer dress with a floppy Anne of Green Gables hat on my head. I was intent on sitting quietly under an umbrella. But left behind on a deck chair was the offending column, which I read. Enraged, I carried it back upstairs and read it over and over, fury rising in me like floodtide. When Alice called late in the morning, she asked whether I’d read the column.
“Of course.”
Alice spoke angrily, “Max is dead and they won’t let him rest in peace. They want to hurt you now. You have that new book coming out next year.”
“Giant. My take on Texas braggadocio.”
“Are you afraid?”
“Of Texas? Please. Overgrown boys with their lassoes twisting high in the air.”
“Let’s hope one of those lassoes doesn’t ring your neck.”
I touched my ancient but much loved neck, pearl adorned. An ugly image, my fragile body swinging from a cottonwood tree. “I’ve had bad press before.”
“But you haven’t been called to defend yourself before the HUAC.”
That remark gave me pause. My novels had covered a sweep of American geography-Chicago, Oklahoma, New England, Minnesota, Seattle, elsewhere-and I was praised as a robust chronicler of American life, my fiction a sweet hymn to American ingenuity, resilience, fortitude. I relished my reverential-if occasionally caustic and accusatory-love affair with the Republic…for which I certainly stood.
“I’m not worried,” I told her.
A long silence. “Edna, I had the strangest phone call.”
“From whom?”
“Larry Calhoun. He said he had a nasty fight with Sol. He said Sol accused him of being a snitch. Of naming names.”
I fumed. “Alice, he shouldn’t be bothering you at this time. The man has no scruples. What does he want from you?”
“He wanted to know what I’ve heard.”
“About what?”
“I don’t know. I gather Sol threatened to expose him.”
“That makes no sense.”
“I told him I didn’t want to talk about it.”
“The man makes me nervous.”
“He makes everybody nervous these days. The older he’s gotten the more…distant he’s become. Nowadays he’s running scared. Max could never understand the change in him.” Alice sighed. “Edna, I hung up on him.”
“Good for you.”
***
Early afternoon, back in a deck chair under an umbrella by the Sun Club Pool, I sipped iced tea and sorted through a batch of galleys for Giant, zooming in on typos in my epic of Texas oil and cattle and overweening ego. But Texas seemed so far removed from the tin-plated patina of Hollywood life. All that big sky and gushing oil wells and acres of buffalo grass seemed so alien from the plastic palm trees and piped-in Paul Whiteman strings. I missed Manhattan with its black-and-white grittiness, its taxi blare.
Instead, I drifted to the restaurant and ordered a sandwich and coffee. I daydreamed in the nearly empty room, and then spread out my galleys and got to work. Looking up, I suddenly realized that the palm trees lining the room possessed stuffed monkeys, peeking through the polished fronds. Echoes of Don the Beachcomber and that horrible evening. What was with Los Angeles? Did everything have to look like a zoo?
I was placing a mark in the margin when I heard someone grunt. Vaguely familiar and annoying, like a buzzing mosquito in your bedroom. My eye was riveted to a paragraph about some ugly Texas vainglorious boasting. Ten-gal
lon Stetson ego and ranch-hand swagger. I shivered. Another furor, this novel. Another state I’d risk my life visiting thereafter.
Like that vicious carping when Cimarron was published. All of Oklahoma ready to tar and feather me, the intrepid chronicler.
American Beauty. Colonial Connecticut. That book brought out the crazies. What did that Danbury newspaper spout? How dare a Jew vilify Connecticut? Nice touch. So much for my First Amendment rights.
My mind sailed to the Hollywood Ten, the blacklist, the dark shadow of accusation, the intolerance. Max, now dead. Murdered.
Something bothered me. Something nagged at me. I needed to do something about it…because, well, I’d come here to support Max. The fact that he was dead simply reinforced my resolve. Now a murderer needed to be identified.
Willy nilly, my mind shot to a ludicrous image: Liz Grable, overfed Oklahoma maiden, spewing lines from Cimarron during the legendary land rush. Liz the renegade Sooner, slathered in pancake makeup and hobbling on stiletto heels. What was her story? What part did she play in all of this?
The grunting got louder, immediately followed by a boyish titter. Tony and Ethan Pannis were at a table just beyond a bank of English ivy and flowering hibiscus. I put down my galleys when a third voice spoke up. It was Larry Calhoun’s. I hadn’t realized Max’s old friend and business partner-revealed by Sol as a paid informant for the Examiner-was friends with the Pannis brothers. Of course, there was no reason why not. After all, they all knew one another-friendships formed in the halcyon days of Hollywood, before war and coldness and backstabbing became the rule of the day.
Tony said little, save for the nervous ripple of laughter-someone uncertain of what was happening at his table. He suffered a brief assault of hiccoughs. Admonishing him to be still, Ethan was clearly irritated, talking in a measured voice. When he spoke, Larry Calhoun seemed tentative, unsure, his voice halting as though he were learning to speak after long silence. The reason was clear: he wasn’t happy. Eavesdropping, I leaned so far back in my seat that the waiter eyed me suspiciously and I feared toppling into the hibiscus planter, where, most likely, a stuffed marmoset was waiting to pounce on me. From fragments of chatter, I learned that Larry owned a small three-family rental in the valley, a modest investment from years back, now fallen into disrepair; and Larry was reluctantly deeding it over to Ethan for what he termed “a pittance.” This little luncheon was to finalize the deal. Ethan was handing over a check. His voice was ice cold. “You’re the one who came to me, so stop whining.”