Make Believe

by Ed Ifkovic

  “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. Ingénue 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.”

  “It’s a different movie now. Romance, yes, and sweeping ballads and dance, but with a dark thread of sadness, discrimination, loss. A lot of the movie now focuses on Ava Gardner, the doomed siren exiled from the boat because she’s mixed blood and married to a white man. Julie LaVerne frames the movie, the tragic mulatto who has a heart of gold, sacrificing her career for her childhood friend, Magnolia. Ava’s damned good…”

  My spine rigid, I stared at Max. “That remains to be seen.” I shook my head slowly. “Max, you’ve made a life of helping the enemy destroy my work.” But I smiled, and so did he.

  “Hey, I’ve done my best.”

  As a young man in Manhattan, Max had apprenticed on the Broadway hit with Jerome Kern and became the great composer’s protégé. I didn’t know Max then, of course, though I’d faithfully haunted the rehearsals of Show Boat at the Ziegfeld Theater. A clever, gifted young man, he’d migrated to music from dance, even writing a ragtime hit for Sophie Tucker that no one now remembered. Jerome Kern liked him—a rarity, given the composer’s notorious isolation. Over the years Max found his most comfortable place with the frequent versions of Show Boat—in one excruciating form or another.

  Alice cleared her throat. “Edna, tell me how you two became friends. Max tells me a silly version…”

  Max had started to sip his wine but stopped, eyeing me over the rim of the glass, a twinkle in his eyes. “Absurd but true. Tell her, Edna.”

  “A preposterous beginning, I suppose,” I began. “The tryouts for Show Boat were in Washington D.C. A freezing November. Everyone was a nervous wreck. After all, Ziegfeld had done a slew of zany, popular musical revues, with leggy chorus girls and madcap vaudeville comedy skits. Here was a novelty—a musical play, with the music and routines built around a real story, in fact, based on genuine American history. We had no idea how it would go over. We didn’t anticipate the…the hysteria. A jam-packed play, too long, too much music, opening night it ran hours over, with people stamping their feet and roaring. ‘Ol’ Man River’ had them screaming out loud. When the audience left, exhausted, at nearly one in the morning, we were stunned. No one had left the theater early. The next morning the line for tickets wound around the block, and we knew we had a smash hit. But they had to slash music, dialogue, scenes.”

  Max jumped in. “I was inside cutting a scene, debating which music had to go, listening to Hammerstein curse us out and Kern tinkling the keys of a piano like a bratty child, so I took a break, strolling outside. And there, wrapped in a puffy shocking-red scarf, buried in a full-length mink coat, was Edna Ferber, the wide-eyed and flabbergasted author, standing on a corner staring at the snake-like line.”

  I laughed. “And Max, a stranger, sidled up to me and whispered, ‘This is all your fault, Madame Show Boat.’”

  Max saluted me, laughing. “And a wonderful friendship was born.”

  “And he has had to hear me whine and kvetch with each new production. He reports in, dutifully, and I go off like a mad woman.” I grunted. “Especially the first movie in 1929.”

  “The joke was that I was hired to help with the music for a silent picture, Alice. You know, piano introductions. But then talkies came with The Jazz Singer and suddenly we had to do it over—half silent, half talkie. And then we had to do a third version, all talkie now, finally with Kern’s music rights secured.”

  “A hodgepodge of nonsense.”

  “Oh, yes, a mess. Unwatchable. Laura La Plante looking frail and helpless and not certain what continent she was on.” Max got up to refill his glass. I held my hand over my empty glass. “Then the 1936 version with Paul Robeson and Irene Dunne. Beautiful.”

  “Well, Robeson, yes. And now MGM with little of the Hammerstein dialogue intact. Barbaric, infantile.”

  “Now, now, Edna.”

  “Don’t ‘Now, Edna’ me,” I said in my best Parthenia Hawks spinster’s voice, arch and shrill, delivered from the deck of the Cotton Blossom.

  “Wait and see, Edna.”

  “I’m too old to be patient…or even tolerant of fools.”

  “I bet you were always like that, Edna,” Alice said.

  “It’s a talent I developed early in life.” I sighed. “Frankly, it saves time in an imperfect world.”

  ***

  Alice served an elaborate supper. Max had decided we’d have a Show Boat feast, a meal described in my book—Queenie’s sure-fire, bang-up sensation, a ham stuffed with cloves and cinnamon and peppercorns and a host of other aromatic herbs, all jammed in with a sharp knife so that the swollen meat, baked, glazed, sliced, formed an ornate mosaic of color and design. Luscious, tasty, and gratefully savored by me. I allowed myself another glass of wine. Alice served coffee and homemade pecan pie smothered in whipped cream spiked with brandy. Succulent, rich. I groaned under the pleasure. There was little talk during supper, idle chatter, catching up with news of old friends.

  Max was especially fond of George Kaufman, who’d recently been on the West Coast, and he recounted George’s scandalous caper with some frivolous and gaudy studio starlet. “George the saturnine puritan,” I babbled. A character flaw in an otherwise exemplary man.

  While we were still at the dining room table, the doorbell chimed, and Max invited in a short, stocky man, a shock of spun-white hair curling over tiny ears, a pale ashy face, and a thin hard mouth that seemed shaped by a razor. A cigarette bobbed in the corner of his mouth, the ash long and unchecked. Barney Google eyes behind oversized eyeglasses. “This is my old friend, Sol Remnick,” Max told me. “The first friend I made when I moved here from New York. He comes from the same old Brooklyn neighborhood, but I didn’t know him there.”

  Sol nodded hello, a mumbled greeting, his eyes wary, as he pulled out a chair across from me, watching my face. Alice poured him a cup of coffee. After the greeting, he said nothing but quickly downed
the coffee, almost in one hasty gulp. He sat back. “So I’m interrupting, yes?”

  “It’s all right.” Max waved a hand at him.

  “So you’re Edna Ferber.” Still no smile, but another respectful nod. “An honor. Max…values you.” A strange remark, I thought, though true. As I did Max. Still I said nothing. He started to stand. “I’ll be back tomorrow.”

  “No, sit, Sol,” Max insisted. “For God’s sake. We’re all friends here.”

  Sol leaned into him, confidentially. “The Screen Actors Guild is meeting tonight, Max. Someone told a reporter that it’s lousy with Communists. Everyone is panicking. Ronnie Reagan threatens to…something about a loyalty oath…He’s been talking to the FBI in secret, they say.” He paused and glanced at me. “I’m sorry.”

  Max grinned at me. “Sol and I stay up all night discussing Hollywood and the witch-hunt.”

  He shrugged his shoulders. “It’s my only story, I’m afraid. Miss Ferber, I helped organize the Committee for the First Amendment to fight back. We need to do battle. I’m…driven.” For the first time he grinned, and his face came alive, wrinkled, rutted, but filled with vitality and force. You saw a man who seemed a hard-boiled sort but was really a softie out of a Dashiell Hammett novel, a stocky man in a baggy double-breasted seersucker suit with a Hoover collar, an ex-boxer type, the pugnacious man who stops to play with children. But a man who could not disguise his nervousness.

  Alice pointed at him. “Your Cousin Irving.”

  That made little sense to me. “What?” I had no cousins named Irving. I’d know. I did have a pesky older sister named Fanny, and she was trial enough.

  Max explained, “Sol plays Cousin Irving on The Goldbergs. You know, Gertrude Berg’s wildly popular television show. He started when it was on the radio, but now he’s on television. A star, can you imagine? Molly Goldberg. You know, the nosy woman hanging out of the tenement window, yelling, ‘Yoo hoo, come in, you’ll have a nice glass tea and we’ll talk some.’ Irving is her nebbish cousin, the sad sack in an unpressed, oversized suit, a blunderer…”

  “I don’t have a television. Never will. A full meal of no nourishment.”

  Sol burst out laughing, enjoying the moment. “For that, all Hollywood moguls like Louis B. Mayer will applaud you.”

  “Cousin Irving’s hugely popular, Edna,” Alice added. “He fights with his son, Moshe the doctor.”

  “I’ll bet.” I spoke too quickly and, I feared, too snarkily. I could envision the hapless Sol with his Borscht Belt vaudeville slapstick, all buffoon and droopy face.

  “Did you read Max’s letter?” Sol suddenly asked me.

  “Of course,” I answered. “I can recite parts by heart.” Max wrote of being an American, and deeply proud of it, and the need for a voice of reason in the savage wilderness of accusation and calumny. By law, he stressed, American citizens could not be forced to disclose their political viewpoints, and yet, perversely, these poor men were commanded to do so. “My favorite line: ‘Now we will create American concentration camps for the honest naysayers.’” I liked that. “Noble.”

  “They want him to recant,” Sol told me.

  “What does that mean?”

  “To join a patriotic organization like the American Legion, I guess. To sign a loyalty pledge. To apologize. He should admit any errors he made. Penance.” Sol turned to Max. “But he’s unrepentant.”

  Max shrugged, the Yiddish comic by way of Jack Benny. “So what’s to repent?”

  “Metro unloaded Doc Trumbo, others. Fox booted out Ring Lardner, Jr. Hollywood has few heroes these days. But Max is one.” He saluted him.

  “For God’s sake, Solly, I’m not a saint. I said what I had to say. You got to speak up for your friends. I’m not Thomas Paine.” He grinned. “Just your garden-variety pain in the tuckus.”

  “A hero.” Sol looked at me, awe in his voice. “I couldn’t have written that letter.” Then, slowly, “Max’s touch is all over Show Boat but his name has been erased.”

  I harrumphed, grandly. “I aim to see about that.”

  “Edna, don’t. Not for me.” From Max, pleading.

  “You’ll be blacklisted, Miss Ferber, and branded a Commie sympathizer,” Sol said.

  “I’ve been called a lot of things, sir, but I think my Americanism speaks for itself.”

  Max hesitated. “I thought mine did, too.” A gleam in his eye. “Though I did cast a vote for FDR.”

  Sol added, “America has become a dangerous place.”

  Silence: the weight of the declaration, awful and raw.

  I sat there, staring from one to the other, my gaze taking in these decent folks, good people, earnest, hard-working, loyal, trustworthy. For a split second my pulse raced, wildly. My heart fluttered. In this modest home, drinking coffee with an old friend, I was hit suddenly, as if by a lightning bolt. Fear flooded my soul.

  “Are you in danger, Max?” Fear gripped me.

  Max didn’t answer.

  Alice looked worried. “Well, there have been threats. Some phone calls, nasty hate mail. Death threats.”

  “Dear God!”

  “Witch-hunt,” Sol muttered.

  “What about your friends?” I prodded him. “Years of work in town. In New York. On the road. Your agency, respected. Your tradition with Show Boat—all those crews you worked with. Your name means something in this town. Your friends?”

  “You.” Max had a wispy smile on his face.

  “You’re exaggerating, no?”

  Serious: “Edna, there are days I seem only to have enemies. Just enemies.”

  Chapter Three

  The next day Max and I sat at noontime in the crowded coffee shop adjacent to the Cocoanut Grove ballroom at the Ambassador. We’d been there a half hour, fiddling with empty coffee cups, Max twisting a napkin into shredded bits while I ceremoniously checked my lipstick and hair in a compact mirror. I was nervous. Ava Gardner, of course, was late in arriving, but Max told me to expect that.

  “Max, why are you so nervous?”

  He grinned. “I’m not. You are.”

  “You shredded a napkin into confetti.”

  “You know I always do that. You’re the nervous one, you, the peripatetic novelist who’s interviewed presidents and battled with Ethel Barrymore.”

  “Don’t remind me of that battle-ax. And I always check my lipstick twenty times a day. A minute. A second. I’m hopelessly vain.” I started to withdraw my compact from my purse but thought better of it.

  “Edna, you’re Show Boat.”

  “If you call me that one more time, Max, I’ll scrape the barnacles off your hide myself.”

  He scoffed. “Don’t believe Hedda Hopper’s vicious sniping at poor Ava.”

  “Well, frankly, I’ve never read a word of that harridan’s incendiary columns. I leave that to the worshipers at the Hollywood shrine. Like moon-eyed George Kaufman, who has told me that Ava’s been known to hurl dinner plates across a dining room and curse like a fishwife at quivering souls…and…”

  “All true, Edna. A hellion, to be sure. A bottle of booze in one hand, a Coca Cola in the other.”

  “I’ve little patience with…”

  “But she wants to meet you, Edna.”

  “I don’t tolerate bad behavior unless I’m doing it.”

  “She’s had more than her share of bad press, Edna. That’s true. Hedda Hopper and Louella Parsons, two destructive women, choose their victims and then go for the jugular. Hedda with her outlandish hats. She lives in Beverly Hills in a house she calls ‘the house that fear built.’ They expect you to be afraid, to tremble. But with Ava, they misjudged her.”

  “And why’s that?”

  “She doesn’t care. Her career, her public image, what Metro thinks, what you think about her. She’s a fierce woman, strong. You want to know something? Edna, she’s out of one of your novels, one of your determined heroines. She’s like you—a savvy soul who speaks her mind. She’s you with more makeup, higher cheekbones, an
d an MGM contract.”

  “And she’s called the most beautiful woman in the world.”

  “She is that.” He tapped me on the wrist. “The artist Man Ray said she could only be truly experienced in person—such is her beauty. It’s not important to her, though. Her looks. Hedda Hopper labeled her a home wrecker because of the affair she’s having with a married man, and lots of souls can’t forgive her. She shows me piles of hate mail calling her a hussy and a snake. The seducer of the boyish Frank Sinatra. You’ve heard of him?”

  “You say his name with such derision, Max.”

  “Well, I don’t care for him. He’s an annoying gnat with a blustery ego. Downright nasty at times, especially to waiters and clerks.”

  “A pleasant voice, I think. Too honey-toned for my taste. He sang ‘Ol’ Man River’ in that horrible movie, Till the Clouds Roll By, Sinatra perched up on a white Grecian column, that skinny man lost in that oversized white tuxedo…a travesty. People in the theater laughed out loud. What was MGM thinking?”

  “Laughable. Truly. Frankie going on about toting that barge, lifting that bale. Only the part about drinking and ending up in jail rang true to some. And Metro now knows it. That finished him. He’s out of a contract now, his career kaput.”

  “A disgrace.” I went on. “I knew Jerome Kern. He played his songs on my grand piano. Thank God he died before the release of that grotesquerie.” I bit my lip and announced, happily, “I’m prepared to dislike Sinatra.”

  Max smiled. “You won’t be disappointed.”

  The waiter refilled our cups, paused, and then swept up the shredded napkin Max scattered on the table. The young man whistled softly, clicked his heels deliberately, and shuffled off, looking back over his shoulder.

  “A bad habit.” Max shrugged. “Sorry.”

  Suddenly Max called out to a man strolling across the lobby. “Larry. Larry.” He waited. The man paused, deliberated, seemed ready to bolt out the door, and then thought better of it. Hurriedly, he glanced around the crowded lobby, eyes narrowed, searching, then hesitantly moved toward us. He wasn’t happy. “Larry, you’ve been a stranger.”