Make Believe

“Don’t ‘Now, Edna’ me,” I said in my best Parthenia Hawks spinster’s voice, arch and shrill, delivered from the deck of the Cotton Blossom.

“Wait and see, Edna.”

“I’m too old to be patient…or even tolerant of fools.”

“I bet you were always like that, Edna,” Alice said.

“It’s a talent I developed early in life.” I sighed. “Frankly, it saves time in an imperfect world.”

Alice served an elaborate supper. Max had decided we’d have a Show Boat feast, a meal described in my book-Queenie’s sure-fire, bang-up sensation, a ham stuffed with cloves and cinnamon and peppercorns and a host of other aromatic herbs, all jammed in with a sharp knife so that the swollen meat, baked, glazed, sliced, formed an ornate mosaic of color and design. Luscious, tasty, and gratefully savored by me. I allowed myself another glass of wine. Alice served coffee and homemade pecan pie smothered in whipped cream spiked with brandy. Succulent, rich. I groaned under the pleasure. There was little talk during supper, idle chatter, catching up with news of old friends.

Max was especially fond of George Kaufman, who’d recently been on the West Coast, and he recounted George’s scandalous caper with some frivolous and gaudy studio starlet. “George the saturnine puritan,” I babbled. A character flaw in an otherwise exemplary man.

While we were still at the dining room table, the doorbell chimed, and Max invited in a short, stocky man, a shock of spun-white hair curling over tiny ears, a pale ashy face, and a thin hard mouth that seemed shaped by a razor. A cigarette bobbed in the corner of his mouth, the ash long and unchecked. Barney Google eyes behind oversized eyeglasses. “This is my old friend, Sol Remnick,” Max told me. “The first friend I made when I moved here from New York. He comes from the same old Brooklyn neighborhood, but I didn’t know him there.”

Sol nodded hello, a mumbled greeting, his eyes wary, as he pulled out a chair across from me, watching my face. Alice poured him a cup of coffee. After the greeting, he said nothing but quickly downed the coffee, almost in one hasty gulp. He sat back. “So I’m interrupting, yes?”

“It’s all right.” Max waved a hand at him.

“So you’re Edna Ferber.” Still no smile, but another respectful nod. “An honor. Max…values you.” A strange remark, I thought, though true. As I did Max. Still I said nothing. He started to stand. “I’ll be back tomorrow.”

“No, sit, Sol,” Max insisted. “For God’s sake. We’re all friends here.”

Sol leaned into him, confidentially. “The Screen Actors Guild is meeting tonight, Max. Someone told a reporter that it’s lousy with Communists. Everyone is panicking. Ronnie Reagan threatens to…something about a loyalty oath…He’s been talking to the FBI in secret, they say.” He paused and glanced at me. “I’m sorry.”

Max grinned at me. “Sol and I stay up all night discussing Hollywood and the witch-hunt.”

He shrugged his shoulders. “It’s my only story, I’m afraid. Miss Ferber, I helped organize the Committee for the First Amendment to fight back. We need to do battle. I’m…driven.” For the first time he grinned, and his face came alive, wrinkled, rutted, but filled with vitality and force. You saw a man who seemed a hard-boiled sort but was really a softie out of a Dashiell Hammett novel, a stocky man in a baggy double-breasted seersucker suit with a Hoover collar, an ex-boxer type, the pugnacious man who stops to play with children. But a man who could not disguise his nervousness.

Alice pointed at him. “Your Cousin Irving.”

That made little sense to me. “What?” I had no cousins named Irving. I’d know. I did have a pesky older sister named Fanny, and she was trial enough.

Max explained, “Sol plays Cousin Irving on The Goldbergs. You know, Gertrude Berg’s wildly popular television show. He started when it was on the radio, but now he’s on television. A star, can you imagine? Molly Goldberg. You know, the nosy woman hanging out of the tenement window, yelling, ‘Yoo hoo, come in, you’ll have a nice glass tea and we’ll talk some.’ Irving is her nebbish cousin, the sad sack in an unpressed, oversized suit, a blunderer…”

“I don’t have a television. Never will. A full meal of no nourishment.”

Sol burst out laughing, enjoying the moment. “For that, all Hollywood moguls like Louis B. Mayer will applaud you.”

“Cousin Irving’s hugely popular, Edna,” Alice added. “He fights with his son, Moshe the doctor.”

“I’ll bet.” I spoke too quickly and, I feared, too snarkily. I could envision the hapless Sol with his Borscht Belt vaudeville slapstick, all buffoon and droopy face.

“Did you read Max’s letter?” Sol suddenly asked me.

“Of course,” I answered. “I can recite parts by heart.” Max wrote of being an American, and deeply proud of it, and the need for a voice of reason in the savage wilderness of accusation and calumny. By law, he stressed, American citizens could not be forced to disclose their political viewpoints, and yet, perversely, these poor men were commanded to do so. “My favorite line: ‘Now we will create American concentration camps for the honest naysayers.’” I liked that. “Noble.”

“They want him to recant,” Sol told me.

“What does that mean?”

“To join a patriotic organization like the American Legion, I guess. To sign a loyalty pledge. To apologize. He should admit any errors he made. Penance.” Sol turned to Max. “But he’s unrepentant.”

Max shrugged, the Yiddish comic by way of Jack Benny. “So what’s to repent?”

“Metro unloaded Doc Trumbo, others. Fox booted out Ring Lardner, Jr. Hollywood has few heroes these days. But Max is one.” He saluted him.

“For God’s sake, Solly, I’m not a saint. I said what I had to say. You got to speak up for your friends. I’m not Thomas Paine.” He grinned. “Just your garden-variety pain in the tuckus.”

“A hero.” Sol looked at me, awe in his voice. “I couldn’t have written that letter.” Then, slowly, “Max’s touch is all over Show Boat but his name has been erased.”

I harrumphed, grandly. “I aim to see about that.”

“Edna, don’t. Not for me.” From Max, pleading.

“You’ll be blacklisted, Miss Ferber, and branded a Commie sympathizer,” Sol said.

“I’ve been called a lot of things, sir, but I think my Americanism speaks for itself.”

Max hesitated. “I thought mine did, too.” A gleam in his eye. “Though I did cast a vote for FDR.”

Sol added, “America has become a dangerous place.”

Silence: the weight of the declaration, awful and raw.

I sat there, staring from one to the other, my gaze taking in these decent folks, good people, earnest, hard- working, loyal, trustworthy. For a split second my pulse raced, wildly. My heart fluttered. In this modest home, drinking coffee with an old friend, I was hit suddenly, as if by a lightning bolt. Fear flooded my soul.

“Are you in danger, Max?” Fear gripped me.

Max didn’t answer.

Alice looked worried. “Well, there have been threats. Some phone calls, nasty hate mail. Death threats.”

“Dear God!”

“Witch-hunt,” Sol muttered.

“What about your friends?” I prodded him. “Years of work in town. In New York. On the road. Your agency, respected. Your tradition with Show Boat-all those crews you worked with. Your name means something in this town. Your friends?”

“You.” Max had a wispy smile on his face.

“You’re exaggerating, no?”

Serious: “Edna, there are days I seem only to have enemies. Just enemies.”

Chapter Three

The next day Max and I sat at noontime in the crowded coffee shop adjacent to the Cocoanut Grove ballroom at the Ambassador. We’d been there a half hour, fiddling with empty coffee cups, Max twisting a napkin into