Make Believe

Exasperation in her voice. “Nothing. No work. He has a studio on Hollywood Boulevard for the summer. He’s got a tiny room in New York on Fifth Avenue most of the year when he has to be there. So little money saved-I know that. Thank God his parents are dead, and recently-he took care of them. They hardly spoke English, he told me, laughing about it; but they turned on the television he bought them to laugh at Cousin Irving, their pride and joy. And”-almost a smile-“he told me they didn’t get any of the jokes but they laughed like crazy. Cousin Irving, their boy, the Yiddisher bumbler with the wisecrack and the good heart.” Alice sobbed and, for some reason, picked up a pen and drew a large circle around the article in Variety.

“He has to come back home.”

“His phone call to me scared me, so I kept calling back. I don’t know what to do with myself, Edna. I bang around the house like a crazy lady. I worry about Sol, but my mind sails to…Max. Max is everywhere. I can smell him here when I touch a book. It’s as if he just handed it to me. A piece of paper. A kitchen plate reminds me. I look at his side of the bed and I’m afraid I’ll forget the way he slept, the way he sighed in his sleep, the way he curled his fingers around the pillow. And now I’m alone here. I can’t get back to the quiet life I loved.”

“Alice.” I didn’t know what to say.

She tilted back her head, a longing gesture. “I married Lenny when I was a girl, a foolish girl, and he kept me away from his world of syndicates and showgirls and mobsters and men who knocked on the doors late at night with wads of cash. I hid in my kitchen. After a while, though, I felt on edge, like any minute I was going to be slapped awake. A cop knocking on the door. Some goon with a pistol. An empty-headed showgirl showing me his love letters. When he died, I was glad.” She smiled. “I didn’t kill him, but I was glad.” She paused. “Edna, I will confess something to you.”

Dear Lord, I thought: No. When people confess things to me, invariably I have sleepless nights and need a late-night run to the drugstore for bicarbonate of soda. Emotional confessions only give pain to the listener.

“Of course, Alice. Tell me.” I closed my eyes.

“That night we fought out on the balcony. I was sitting out there when he came home. He was drunk, nearly tottering over the railing. Something had gone wrong with some deal, I guess. The FBI was breathing down his neck. I don’t know. He slapped me. I wanted him to fall, Edna. When I rushed back inside, he screamed, ‘Get back out here, you whore,’ and I slammed the glass door as he rushed at me, fist raised. He ran into it, reeling, then staggered back and toppled over the railing. I watched him fall.”

There was nothing I could say. The clock on the mantel was too loud now, the minute hand barely moving.

She stared into my face. “He was dead. And Max was the one who allowed me to breathe again, to look out a window and see nothing and enjoy that nothing so much. He filled up my life with…a good nothing. You know what I mean, Edna? The nothing that is peace and serenity and…” She stopped. “My God, Edna, I can’t stop talking.”

“It’s all right.” I patted her wrist. “Of course, it’s all right.”

She pointed to the workroom. “I’m afraid of that room.”

I peered through the open door at a desk covered with folders and books and accordion files. Leaning against it were tall wobbly stacks of papers and newspapers and cardboard boxes. The Hollywood agent as hoarder of every scrap of the industry, as though when he closed his office downtown he simply emptied that world into this small, impossible space.

“Tell me about Max’s agency,” I said suddenly. Tell me, and maybe I can begin to understand what happened.

“Why?”

“I’m curious. You know, he never discussed his clients with me. We talked musical scores, openings, closings, tryouts. The nitty gritty work of an agent-he said it was too tedious for conversation with friends.”

She smiled. “That sounds like Max. He’d tap dance to a Golddiggers routine, but forget to file his tax return.” She glanced at the room. “I had some money squirreled away from Lenny’s accounts after he died-not the fortune his brothers still dream of and blame me for-so we did all right.”

I smiled. “So you’re not as rich as the Pannis brothers insist?”

“The government took nearly everything when the dust cleared.” She waved her hand around the room. “Look where we’re living, Edna. Lenny Pannis had a huge home in Beverly Hills, right near Pickfair. He was into lavish spending, vulgar clothes, flashy jewelry. He treated his little brothers like princelings, feeding them dreams and bits of cash. They got besotted with the idea of wealth. ‘We’re all family,’ he told them. ‘If I’m filthy rich, you will be, too.’ Only Tony bought that line.”

“Not Ethan?”

“Tony is the romantic. Ethan counts the pennies in his loafers. What happened is that the IRS tapped into this account, that one. The house. The pool. The cars.” She grinned. “That damn spiral staircase. Gone, all of it. And I said thank God.”

“Talk to me some more about the agency, Alice.”

She looked at me, puzzled, then considered her words carefully. “Well, let’s see. Many small fish, you know. People you’ve never heard of. Juggling acts for television, ventriloquist acts for Ed Sullivan or Milton Berle. No big acts. He didn’t want that kind of responsibility. The performers were all like the ones you’ve met, Edna. Tony or Tiny, whatever he calls himself. At one time a fresh comic with some promise. I went to a couple of his shows-with Max. Early on. He had an innocence that warred with a slightly sardonic tongue. Very funny. I mean, Max always insisted Tony didn’t understand how his humor worked-it just did. But ruined now by drink and gluttony. After Lenny died, he forgot who he was. And Ethan reinvented him as an insult comic.”

“Ethan?”

“Ethan got tired of having him hang around, moody and bitter. ‘Go on stage with that attitude.’ So…the reinvention of the failed comic…comical no more.”

“I’m interested in Liz Grable. How does she fit into all this?”

“Tony’s sometime girlfriend. Liz Grable was a favor, bit parts, but she got to be a nuisance. She was a pest, knocking on our door because his office is here now. Calling all hours of the night. Tony fed her the idea that she was an undiscovered talent, some sort of chubby Clara Bow with a cutesy giggle and an intense stare. A couple parts, and then Max couldn’t place her.”

“So Max had to deal with these…small-time egos…”

“He even read Ethan’s script when he first got here from New Jersey. Max told me it was painfully sophomoric, stale. Ethan thought that Hollywood was waiting for him to show up. He already had a spot on his mantel for the Oscar for Best Screenplay. Ethan was drinking then, filled with hubris by way of Lenny. Lorena told me he was angry that he failed at something, but then, you know, she said he read parts to her-they used to act out skits together-and they ended up laughing about it.”

“I remember their impromptu moment from Othello.”

“How they amused themselves, I guess.” She shrugged. “Those were the kind of clients Max had. He supplied the extras in Sunset Boulevard, for example. The one-line actors. Small fry, people needed in this vast dream factory out here, bit players never destined to shine up the night sky.”

“Yet he represented Sol and not Larry.”

She nodded. “With his looks, Larry thought he had a chance for big time, so he got a bigger name agent. Max didn’t want to deal with him-he knew Larry would burn out. Directors always ended up hating Larry. Sol turned out to be his really important client, I suppose, who stayed with Max out of loyalty. Sol was small-time before The Goldbergs. Sol piddled around with bits on radio, played some old vaudeville dates, lots of grade B movies out here. Gertrude Berg had seen him at the Yiddish theater on Second Avenue, loved him, and talked to him-and Cousin Irving was born. A success story.”

I needed to move around…to grapple with the questions that buzzed in my head. I stepped toward the workroom, stopped in the entrance. “May I go in?”

“Of course.” She looked uncertain, though.

Inside I glanced at Max’s stack of clippings on the blacklist, a chronicle of his fall from grace, on cronies like John Howard Lawson and Doc Trumbo. A pile of old scripts, one for Trumbo’s Kitty Foyle, inscribed to Max with affection. An open loose-leaf notebook, with Max’s scribbled notations, lines drawn, marginal