Make Believe

She turned to me. “Edna, I’m a superficial woman. Truly. I see things black and white. I like my friends. I don’t like reporters. And I like Max. So it’s simple for me. Black and white. I’m …superficial.”

Chapter Four

On the phone later that day Ava insisted drinks that night at her home would be fun. “Just a few friends. Alice and Max, of course.”

“I’m not good at cocktail parties,” I told her.

“I swear I won’t throw anything, Edna. I’ll behave.”

I hesitated, uncertain. I planned a quiet evening in my suite, reading Kathleen Winsor’s Star Money, though I fully planned to despise it. I’d avoided Forever Amber, but I found her newest potboiler at the airport, and for some reason I bought it. I’d already dipped into it and didn’t like it. Sentimental balderdash, overwrought emotions, but, said Kitty Carlyle, a boiling read. I’d see about that. “No, Ava, I’m planning to order a pot of coffee with whipped cream and…”

Someone grabbed the phone from her. “I promise I’ll behave.” Frank Sinatra spoke rapidly. “It’s time we met, Miss Ferber. Don’t believe what the gossip sheets say about me.” Ava said something to him that I couldn’t catch. “I’ll send a car with my personal bodyguard.”

An image of some simian lug head flashed into my mind, some monster with greasy-black hair, his knuckles dragging the ground. A vocabulary of four-letter words grunted at me. A toothpick stuck between his missing front teeth and an odoriferous cigar dancing merrily from his drooling lips.

“Sounds like fun to me.” My voice was a little too sarcastic.

“You will?” Ava was surprised.

A small cocktail party at her Nichols Canyon home, a few friends. Three or four people. George Sidney, the director of Show Boat, promised to attend but I wasn’t to believe that. He always promised and then never showed up. Howard Keel and Kathryn Grayson, possibly. “Edna,” Ava said in what sounded like an afterthought, “I live in the country. You have to see my yard.”

“Sounds like fun to me,” I repeated, softening my voice.

“Edna, don’t be mean to me.”

“I’m mean to everyone, especially my friends.” But I was beaming.

“So you’ll come?”

I breathed in, eyed the already dog-eared copy of Star Money lying on the nightstand. “I’ll come.”

Ava’s small house nestled among towering palm trees on a knoll above a wooded canyon beyond Ogden Drive, high up a steep chaparral-banked hillside, a quirky pink stucco house that seemed a prop in a Disney cartoon: a splash of brilliant color against a fantasyland grove of impossibly well-positioned tropical foliage. A white-washed picket fence, incongruous as a frilly bonnet on a streetwalker, surrounded the place, with clumps of brilliant purple and yellow ice plants dotting the landscape. Yellow roses climbed the picket fence, pungent honeysuckle covered a trellis, and beds of petunias lined the driveway.

Odder still, I spied a clothesline behind the small house on which some lace blouses flapped and bellowed in the slight early-evening breeze.

Who was the bizarre woman, Ava Gardner? None of these trappings struck me as femme fatale accoutrements, the battler in the nightclubs. Well…maybe the pink stucco. A Negro maid opened the door, and Ava rushed over and introduced her as Mearene. “My Reenie.” For some reason Ava squeezed her shoulder, an affectionate gesture that brought a smile to the maid’s face, though she scurried away into another room.

“Max and Alice are already here,” Ava told me. “Come in.”

The walls of the front rooms were painted a daffodil yellow, a burst of springtime that jolted, yet oddly soothed. I expected sleek, chrome-studded Italian sofas and polished glass tables with faux Archipenko statues. I discovered overstuffed sofas and armchairs, and stolid wooden tables that I’d expect to find in some old-guard oceanview cottage in Massachusetts. Ava the night owl, always out on the town, doubtless found sanctuary here when she straggled back home, exhausted, at four in the morning.

“I chose everything,” she stressed. And she pointed to a row of exquisite Degas prints gracing the walls, ballerinas silhouetted against pastel backgrounds. I complimented her.

She led me to the hallway in back-I waved at Alice and Max, sitting on the huge charcoal sofa with drinks in hand-where one wall had floor-to-ceiling walnut bookcases filled, most likely, with Thomas Mann and Charles Darwin. My fingertips grazed volumes of Sinclair Lewis and Hemingway. Madame Bovary.

The opposing wall held a succession of black-and-white photographs mounted in simple black frames: stills from earlier productions of Show Boat. There was Helen Morgan sitting atop an upright piano, looking forlorn; a doe-eyed Laura La Plante emoting before a handsome Joseph Schildkraut; Jules Bledsoe on a cotton bale chanting the universal dirge, “Ol’ Man River”; a stern Edna May Oliver admonishing a rapscallion Charles Winninger, the irascible Cap’n Andy. A kaleidoscope of Julie and Joe and Queenie and Magnolia and Gaylord Ravenal and Parthenia Hawks and Cap’n Andy. On and on, an awesome collection.

“A gift from Max,” Ava whispered. Then she winked. “More good omens, Edna.”

By the time I returned to the living room Max and Alice were talking to a newly arrived guest. Max stood. “Edna, this is Lorena Marr.”

The woman rushed over and grasped my hands. “I only came because Ava said you’d be here. Cocktail parties-even Ava’s-made me take to my bed, so much posing and…” She stopped. “Just as I’m doing right now, the first culprit.”

Alice spoke up. “Lorena is a reader at Paramount.”

Ava added, “And the ex of Ethan Pannis. One of Francis’ Hoboken buddies.”

A slender woman in a gold lame cocktail dress and a small sequined hat planted to the side of her close- cropped hairdo, she dropped my hands, half-bowed, and picked up her martini with one hand, a cigarette in the other.

“Shaking hands, Miss Ferber, gets in the way of my cultivating my only two vices.” She bowed deferentially. “I’ve read Show Boat so many times there are nights when I return from Ciro’s after imbibing too much bubbly that I swear I can hear the iron-throated calliope all the way from the mighty Mississippi.”

Ava handed me a martini that I gingerly sipped. Ice cold, perfect.

“That calliope is the sound of coins being deposited in my bank account,” I quipped.

“Lord, Miss Ferber, you searched for a gold mine in the muddy river beds while foolish men hammered at rocks in the Rockies.”

“Pure luck.”

“I doubt that.” She grinned. “You’ve played with the big boys-and won. I admire that.”

I liked her, I decided: sharp, quick, clever, attractive. A slick Hollywood concoction, perhaps, but funny. Something about her words seemed practiced and nervous-a desire for my approval? — but the clipped words couldn’t disguise the warmth in her eyes.

Ava broke in. “Lorena is a strange Hollywood divorcee. She kicked Ethan out, but still goes out to dinner with him. They’re best friends.”

“Who exactly is this Ethan Pannis?” I asked.

“Ethan and Tony Pannis. Brothers,” Lorena told me in a tone that suggested I should know them. “Frank Sinatra’s loyal entourage. Scattering rose petals in his path.”

“I was a Pannis bride, too,” Alice suddenly announced.

“I don’t understand.”

Her voice was hesitant. “I was married to Lenny Pannis, their older brother.”