Make Believe

“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.”