Make Believe

half-bow. “I did it effortlessly.”

“Infamous,” Alice muttered. She reached over and gently touched her husband’s hand. It was a sudden gesture, instinctive, but it seemed so necessary at the moment, a lover’s reassuring pat, sheltering. Just for a second they glanced at each other, excluding me, and in that instant I witnessed real affection, love, concern. And, to my horror, a little fear. I felt a lump in my throat because I realized, like a blow to the face, how treacherous and precarious their peaceful life had become. Trouble in a sun-drenched paradise.

Max breathed in, once again anxious to shift the conversation. A thin smile, teasing. “Ava Gardner can’t wait to meet you.”

I gasped, a histrionic Victorian reflex I detested in myself, though these days the grim specter of humanity seemed to warrant it more and more. “Whatever for?”

“Think about it, Edna. You wrote Show Boat, the movie she thinks will define her career, showcase her as a real actress. The movie that, like The Killers a while back, will finally convince the world she’s more than long legs, curvy body, and sex-goddess appeal. A breakthrough movie, that one. Hemingway himself sent her roses. But Metro has a track record of dumping her into grade B movies. They don’t believe her power. Both Hedda Hopper and Louella Parsons wrote wildly insane columns protesting Metro’s casting, can you believe? Keep her out of the classic. ‘Show Boat is America…Ava is…cheesecake.’ But she can act, you know.”

Alice chimed in, “She’s mentioned you a number of times.”

“Ava Gardner?”

They both laughed. “Edna, Edna.” Max leaned forward. “She’s not what you think.”

Frankly, I never liked it when people told me what I was thinking. A little too arrogant, such a presumption. Max, however, I’d forgive. “Well, to be honest, she doesn’t strike me as…dimensional. I mean…” I faltered. “Sex goddess, hellcat, those nightclub scenes that make the papers…” I suddenly realized my narrow image of the beautiful woman was the product of George Kaufman and Marc Connelly blathering their puerile adoration for the voluptuous woman. George, I knew, regularly devoured Photoplay and Modern Screen, though not in front of me. He knew better.

“You’ll love her,” Alice confided with certainty. She wrapped her arms around her chest, twisted her body into the cushions of the chair. “She gives the greatest hugs.”

“I don’t allow strangers to hug me,” I announced, imperious.

“You won’t have a choice.” Alice giggled like a schoolgirl.

“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. Ingenue 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 protege. 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.”