Make Believe

by Ed Ifkovic

  Yes, Lorena kept saying, she felt sorry for the poor bruised Max. Yes, as she patted Alice’s wrist, she was happy he was on the mend, luckily nothing broken, just an ego sorely compromised, a man who now insisted it (and everyone) go away.

  “Thank God Max can’t hear us carrying on,” Alice said. Then, smiling, she mimicked Max with affection: “‘Please leave me alone to lick my wounds.’”

  Lorena raised her voice. “Poor Louella. Tsk, tsk. It was all very sad for her to witness. Wasn’t Frank Sinatra a downright thug and a bounder? She worked herself into a Victorian lather over the blood-splattered white napkin—‘An affront to the refined Polynesian eatery, an elegant watering hole.’” Lorena’s voice cracked, and we all erupted into gales of silly hilarity.

  She’d underlined the particularly enlightening phrases and insisted on reading aloud. “She saved the coup de grace for the last paragraph,” Lorena added, even though I’d already read the tripe more times than I cared to acknowledge. In her Margaret Dumont operatic singsong, “‘I had to witness this travesty. I’m used to sophisticated dining, with candlelight and crystal, not gladiator bloodletting and profane language. Dear Reader, I now draw a discreet Edwardian curtain over that crude farce.’” Lorena raised a glass. “To Louella, the best show in town.”

  Alice bit her lip and confided in a low tone, “You know, Frank carries a gun on him.”

  A chill swept up my spine. “What?”

  “It’s hidden.”

  “But why?”

  “Ava told me.”

  “But he sometimes travels with a bodyguard.” I thought of the gentle giant I’d met, the dapper thug in a double-breasted suit, gun hidden.

  “Yeah, that same bodyguard threatened to kill a photographer unless he handed over the film in his camera. But Frank likes his own gun. No one knows.”

  I whispered. “Has he ever used it?”

  Alice shrugged. “He’s shot it off a few times. He likes to play cowboy. Once, in New York, when he and Ava battled, he called Ava to say he was killing himself, and then fired two shots into a mattress, holding the phone close. She came running, hysterical. And in Indio, outside L.A., Frank and Ava, both drunk as skunks, shot up the town’s streetlights with two .38 caliber Smith & Wessons, his guns, and…Frank grazed this man and…”

  I raised my hand. “Enough. No more. This is frontier out here, no man’s land. Barbaric.”

  “Welcome to the wild west, Edna,” Lorena quipped.

  I looked at Alice. “So Max is all right?”

  “Right now he’s sleeping like a baby. What the doctor ordered.”

  “Poor Max.” But I smiled. Poor Max, that performance so out of character last night. Well, a man who could still surprise me.

  “He should never have kissed Ava,” Alice whispered. Then she grinned. “I didn’t like the drinking, of course, but I’ve never seen him so…frivolous, flirtatious. It was…delightful. Until the end.”

  Lorena chuckled. “I used to hope Ethan would do something spontaneous. During the three years of our fragmented marriage, even his husbandly kisses seemed measured out, charted on a military map. It was maddening. A drunk with a slide rule.” She leaned into Alice. “I didn’t tell you that I called your home a little while ago. To make sure you were coming.”

  “I decided to walk over.” Alice looked perplexed. “Max answered?”

  “Yes, but he said he was feeling queasy and was headed for bed. He said you’d just left.” A pause. “He told me something interesting. He mentioned that he’d heard through the grapevine that Tony lost his stand-up job at Poncho’s. Lord, I just heard about it late last night. Ethan called me. But just like Max to worry about others! He told me he’ll get Tony a job.”

  “Sounds like Max,” Alice said. “Turn the other cheek. Did you tell Tony?”

  Lorena nodded. “I was calling just as Ethan and Tony came in. Ethan whispered to me that Tony started drinking early this afternoon—he’s so depressed. When I told Tony about Max’s kindness, he refused to believe it—said Max was playing a game. Imagine! God, you can’t please him. But a few minutes later I saw Tony on the phone, so I thought he was calling Max. No, he told me when he hung up, he was calling Liz to tell her what Max was up to.”

  “How did she react?”

  “She wasn’t home, which bothered him. Ethan told me—‘What does it matter?’ he said. ‘He’ll only lose that one, too.’”

  Alice looked pleased. “Max’ll do what he says.”

  “Ethan is right—Tony will lose another job.” Lorena tilted her head to the side. “You know, Max didn’t hang on the phone. He said someone was knocking at the door.”

  Alice looked worried. “What? He wasn’t expecting anyone.”

  “He thought it might be his doctor.”

  Alice glanced toward the pay phone near the entrance. “Well, maybe…”

  “It’s all right, Alice,” Lorena assured her. “He’s probably asleep now.” She pointed across the room. “Well, speak of the devil-may-care. The co-owner of Paradise. Adam is here…with, of course, the sequined snake.”

  We watched Ethan and Tony Pannis walk in from the kitchen, settle into the corner booth near the kitchen. Ethan spotted us, nodded formally to me, but avoided looking at Alice. He purposely turned his back on us. Tony seemed lost in his own world, leaning into his brother and blubbering about something.

  Lorena whispered a little too loudly. “I feel for Ethan, frankly. This is gonna be a long evening, I mean, with Tony/Tiny fired from that club. He’s already soused. It was just a matter of time. Lately he’s only been filling in a couple nights a week. He’s lost his steam, really. That, and the fact that he is just not funny.”

  Alice fidgeted. “Ethan is not happy I’m here, Lorena.”

  Lorena lit a cigarette and blew sloppy rings in the air. “Who cares? You’re my friend. He’s begrudgingly accepted that fact.”

  “Still…”

  “Forget it, dear.”

  Lorena leaned into me, confidentially. “On nights like this, Ethan’s sole purpose is to keep Tony from getting too drunk and staggering crazily down Wilshire Boulevard. Ethan works on his account books and plots out his burgeoning real estate empire while Tony drinks and gets loud and unruly. Then Ethan drives him home to Liz Grable’s waiting arms. A sad spectacle. Ethan doesn’t know what to do, I guess.”

  Alice broke in. “Tony seems to be getting worse, no?”

  Lorena bit her lip. “A shame, really. Two or three times a week he’s here getting plastered. It never was like that before. Liz won’t be around him when he’s drunk, so Ethan takes over.”

  “Brotherly love?” Alice offered.

  She smirked. “Yes, loyalty to a dead brother.”

  Alice whispered, “Lenny.”

  The name hung in the air, filled the room, explosive.

  Lorena eyed her. “Sorry, honey…didn’t mean to bring that up.”

  “I don’t understand the power of Lenny’s ghost over everyone.” I glanced at Alice, who wasn’t happy.

  Lorena also glanced at Alice but answered me. “You see, Ethan, well, created the problem. Sorry, Alice, but I want Edna to understand. When Lenny died—the so-called murder at the hands of the lovely Alice”—she reached out and caressed Alice’s hand—“one chapter of the universe ended. Ethan was a drunk who got slapped awake. Lenny had said he’d be divorcing Alice here and bringing the boys into the business. Whatever that meant. Untold riches. Tony was a decent comic, mildly funny with his offbeat humor, endearing at times, a little dumb but cagey enough about his career. Sarcasm and dumbness sometimes go hand in hand. A social drinker, that’s all.”

  Alice spoke up. “I remember Tony as a cheerful sort, a jokester.” She glanced toward Tony. “And quiet.”

  Lorena went on. “A nice guy. But somehow, maybe inadvertently, Ethan played Dr. Frankenstein and created the monster we have before us. Ethan hammered on and on about the murder, the money, the power they were now deprived of. The Ho
llywood triptych: gold, glory, clout. Lost now. Tony, depressed, started eating and drinking. Now he’s a mess—and sad.”

  “And the insult comic was born,” Alice added.

  “Tony stopped being the bumbling, goofy comic onstage, so Ethan talked him into becoming an insult comic. The chubby guy in the sequined outfits attacking his audience.”

  “And a drinker,” Alice said.

  “In here, mostly,” Lorena insisted. “Guarded by Ethan who, I suspect, feels guilty for his creation. His cookie-cutter mind can’t deal with the new and vastly deteriorated version of a harmless brother. Ethan is afraid because Tony—now Tiny Sparks—has these spurts of anger, out of control. So he plays…warden at the prison he built.”

  “And Liz?” I asked.

  “She loved him—the old Tony. She can’t understand what’s happened these past few years. So she makes him stay away when he’s—like this.” She pointed to Tony slouched in his booth.

  “Watching Tony at Ava’s the other night—that drunken spiel—bothered me. He struck me as an overgrown child, but a beaten child—an innocuous lad given to pouting. The brother who always expected to be duped, to be hurt, so he tries to be cagey. He ends up—miserable.”

  Alice was nodding at me. “Now, grownup, he hides behind a bottle.”

  Lorena clicked her tongue. “Ethan doesn’t know what to do. He’s not good with sloppy emotion.”

  “It’s a wonderful life,” I commented, wryly.

  Ethan had taken a sheaf of papers from a portfolio and was circling numbers with a pencil, ignoring his restless brother. Tony, suddenly staring back at us, was calling out to the bartender. Ethan looked up and frowned.

  “Absurd,” I said.

  “The bartender,” Lorena informed us, “knows to bring a drink only when Ethan nods at him. That way…”

  I surveyed the vaudeville duo. “There is something wrong with those two. They’re…clowns.”

  “Of course there’s something wrong,” Lorena roared. She threw back her head. “And yet it took me three long years to realize it.”

  I was disturbed by noise behind me. Turning, I watched a group of chattering women sit down at a table. They all seemed to be talking at once. Alice and Lorena glanced at each other. “Lord,” Lorena muttered.

  Alice whispered to me. “Sophie Barnes.” She indicated the woman nearest to me.

  Lorena spoke softly. “Ah, Max’s infatuated secretary. Ex-secretary, I should say. She’s seen Alice but is ignoring her.”

  I shifted in my seat, watching.

  Sophie Barnes and her three friends were celebrating one of their birthdays. Sixtyish, bosomy, showy in flowered summer dresses with enormous brooches, they seemed unhappy to see Alice, who avoided their stares. Poor Alice, I thought: Ethan and Tony, and now Sophie Barnes. The nondescript housewife, so roundly maligned. One woman carried a bunch of flowers and a balloon, a tableau that seemed incongruous in a place called PARA ISE BAR & GRILL. Loudly, she ordered a bottle of house champagne while another talked shrilly of her boss, a martinet worthy of slaughter; and they all roared. I noticed a white pastry box placed at the edge of the table. I was glad we’d be gone when the candles were lit and a shaky chorus of Happy Birthday depressed the already dismal room.

  A buxom woman now fiddling with the contents of an enormous black patent-leather purse, Sophie was probably early sixties, with a long horse face containing small bird-like eyes, her graying wispy hair coifed into a helmet of Shirley Temple spit curls. A rhinestone-studded pair of eyeglasses were suspended from a chain around her neck. She dipped into her purse and took out a handkerchief. As she drew it to her nose, she glanced toward us.

  Our eyes locked. A flash of naked cruelty covered her face, the lips curled as her eyes darkened. I swear she mouthed those tantalizing words: Louella Parsons.

  Good for you, Sophie. Fight back.

  But I’m not an enemy you should make.

  By the time we left to take in a movie, Tony could be heard arguing with Ethan, who seemed resigned to Tony’s attempts to put himself into a drunken stupor. “Do what you want,” Ethan hissed, disgusted. “Drink yourself into an early death. Die for all I care. One more brother of mine dead…”

  Tony was yelling something to the bartender.

  Lorena leaned into my neck as I walked in front of her. “Did I tell you that Ethan has a histrionic streak? He’s good at playing martyr.”

  “It’s a thankless pursuit,” I offered.

  “Yes,” Lorena agreed, “but martyrdom has a way of enslaving everyone in its path.”

  “Let me call Max first,” Alice said as we passed a pay phone at the entrance. We waited. Finally she replaced the receiver. “He’s not picking up. Good. He’s asleep.”

  “Or not answering,” Lorena teased. “I imagine his friends are having a field day with this.”

  Alice pursed her lips. “What friends? Sol Remnick? Everyone else has disappeared. Max is a man without a country.”

  “I’m his friend,” I insisted.

  “I know, I know. And folks like George Kaufman. S. J. Perelman called. But…out here among the natives…you know.”

  I did know.

  On the sidewalk, headed to Lorena’s car, I began, “So that’s the redoubtable Sophie Barnes.” I’d spoken to her on the phone over the years, and Max had often commented on her importance to his office. “She runs the place like a military base,” he once told me. But I’d never met her. She looked exactly as I’d imagined her.

  Alice chimed in. “His one and only secretary, from day one of his agency. A bulldozer of a woman, efficient as all get out. A prickly spinster, that one, and wildly, madly, insanely in love with the oblivious little Max. They were a team, the two of them.”

  “I remember her. So friendly on the phone. Not chatty…but kind. Max hasn’t mentioned her in years, and I never thought to ask about her.” I looked back at the Paradise. “What happened?”

  “Well, simple story, Edna. Max married me. The earthquake that rocked California. It was a big surprise for everyone, including the woman who quietly adored him. Sophie collapsed, hysterical, took to her bed. Suddenly she quit her job and hasn’t spoken to Max since that day. That’s when Max closed his office on Melrose Avenue to work out of his home. He wasn’t taking on new clients, and he’d meet the old ones in the bungalow. A month later Sophie wrote him a weepy letter that talked of his betrayal. A befuddled and miserable Max tried to reach her but to no avail. It still breaks his heart. He talks of her with such…melancholy. Whenever they cross paths in town, she makes a grunting sound, heaves those determined shoulders and storms away.” She glanced back toward the bar. “Max still worries about her.”

  “What can Max do?”

  “Well, nothing. Since the blacklist troubles erupted, she sent a brief note, along the lines of—‘I warned you, Max. I would have stopped you from sending out that letter. You reap what you sow. The Bible warns you, too.’”

  “Another soul who has abandoned Max,” I lamented.

  “Friends disappearing.” Alice touched me on the wrist. “You know, Edna, the disappearing act is the most popular form of entertainment in Hollywood these days.”

  ***

  The movie delighted the three of us. Jimmy Stewart in Harvey, a new showing at the Wiltern Theater down the street. Only Lorena had seen it when it was released by Universal back in October. I’d relished the stage version, and I had invited the delightful ingénue Josephine Hull to my apartment for a dinner with George Kaufman and playwright Mary Chase. Happily, Josephine reprised her Broadway role in the movie, garnered a Best Supporting Actress Oscar this past March, and I welcomed the chance to see the talented woman playing the sister of daffy Elwood P. Dowd, a man whose imaginary best friend is a pooka named Harvey.

  Jimmy Stewart’s antics were a welcome tonic after the last couple of tense days, an antidote to the Hollywood wars I’d encountered. Weak from laughter, I realized how much I needed that diversion. I rarely went to the mo
vies. Stage plays, yes, on the arm of George Kaufman or Noel Coward or Moss Hart. But Times Square movies held little attraction for me. I’d never seen the film version of my Cimarron, winner of an Oscar for Best Picture, though I’d told no one that. I didn’t want to go. Perhaps I was the mother who didn’t want to see her children leave home. And yet here I was, a frequent visitor to Hollywood, having lunch with the likes of Carl Lammaele or Louis B. Mayer, watching avariciously as they cut enormous checks with my name on them.

  Strolling out of the Wiltern, we bumped into one another, silly and giggly, malt shop girls. It felt good, that feeling: getting old somehow meant that it was too easy to forget how to laugh. A rabbit everyone was hungry to see taught me a lesson.

  Not wanting the evening to end, Lorena insisted we return to the Paradise for a nightcap, but Alice was anxious about Max and begged off, waving goodbye to us. “Please, Edna,” Lorena insisted. “Join me.” So…yes, why not? One drink. A little sherry. “It will help you sleep.”

  A few stragglers lounged at the bar, but all the dining tables were empty, some of the chairs upended on them. Ethan was packing away the ledgers, capping his fountain pen, but seemed glad to see us. He called out to the bartender, “Harry, tell them about Sophie.” He pushed an empty high-ball glass to the edge of the table.

  Harry walked out from behind the bar, a broad smile covering his face. He placed tumblers of sherry before us. Yawning, stretching, Ethan yawned and nudged a snoring Tony, his body slumped back in the booth. Harry was a large pot-bellied man with a walrus-moustache and side-of-beef hands, and he seemed eager to share his tale. “By the time the birthday cake was lit, this woman—Sophie, Ethan told me she was—is in a huff with this other gray-haired lady, the two swearing back and forth like combat troops. And Sophie starts grunting and heaving and springs forward, and, you know, she takes her huge black pocket book and swings it over the table.” He shook his head as he demonstrated the move. “Like this. She knocked all those lit candles all over the room and a whole lot of frosting on the other lady’s puss. Then she made for the door, pushing chairs out of the way. This Sophie was steaming mad.” He bowed. “Like out of a movie.”