Make Believe

shredded bits while I ceremoniously checked my lipstick and hair in a compact mirror. I was nervous. Ava Gardner, of course, was late in arriving, but Max told me to expect that.

“Max, why are you so nervous?”

He grinned. “I’m not. You are.”

“You shredded a napkin into confetti.”

“You know I always do that. You’re the nervous one, you, the peripatetic novelist who’s interviewed presidents and battled with Ethel Barrymore.”

“Don’t remind me of that battle-ax. And I always check my lipstick twenty times a day. A minute. A second. I’m hopelessly vain.” I started to withdraw my compact from my purse but thought better of it.

“Edna, you’re Show Boat.”

“If you call me that one more time, Max, I’ll scrape the barnacles off your hide myself.”

He scoffed. “Don’t believe Hedda Hopper’s vicious sniping at poor Ava.”

“Well, frankly, I’ve never read a word of that harridan’s incendiary columns. I leave that to the worshipers at the Hollywood shrine. Like moon-eyed George Kaufman, who has told me that Ava’s been known to hurl dinner plates across a dining room and curse like a fishwife at quivering souls…and…”

“All true, Edna. A hellion, to be sure. A bottle of booze in one hand, a Coca Cola in the other.”

“I’ve little patience with…”

“But she wants to meet you, Edna.”

“I don’t tolerate bad behavior unless I’m doing it.”

“She’s had more than her share of bad press, Edna. That’s true. Hedda Hopper and Louella Parsons, two destructive women, choose their victims and then go for the jugular. Hedda with her outlandish hats. She lives in Beverly Hills in a house she calls ‘the house that fear built.’ They expect you to be afraid, to tremble. But with Ava, they misjudged her.”

“And why’s that?”

“She doesn’t care. Her career, her public image, what Metro thinks, what you think about her. She’s a fierce woman, strong. You want to know something? Edna, she’s out of one of your novels, one of your determined heroines. She’s like you-a savvy soul who speaks her mind. She’s you with more makeup, higher cheekbones, and an MGM contract.”

“And she’s called the most beautiful woman in the world.”

“She is that.” He tapped me on the wrist. “The artist Man Ray said she could only be truly experienced in person-such is her beauty. It’s not important to her, though. Her looks. Hedda Hopper labeled her a home wrecker because of the affair she’s having with a married man, and lots of souls can’t forgive her. She shows me piles of hate mail calling her a hussy and a snake. The seducer of the boyish Frank Sinatra. You’ve heard of him?”

“You say his name with such derision, Max.”

“Well, I don’t care for him. He’s an annoying gnat with a blustery ego. Downright nasty at times, especially to waiters and clerks.”

“A pleasant voice, I think. Too honey-toned for my taste. He sang ‘Ol’ Man River’ in that horrible movie, Till the Clouds Roll By, Sinatra perched up on a white Grecian column, that skinny man lost in that oversized white tuxedo…a travesty. People in the theater laughed out loud. What was MGM thinking?”

“Laughable. Truly. Frankie going on about toting that barge, lifting that bale. Only the part about drinking and ending up in jail rang true to some. And Metro now knows it. That finished him. He’s out of a contract now, his career kaput.”

“A disgrace.” I went on. “I knew Jerome Kern. He played his songs on my grand piano. Thank God he died before the release of that grotesquerie.” I bit my lip and announced, happily, “I’m prepared to dislike Sinatra.”

Max smiled. “You won’t be disappointed.”

The waiter refilled our cups, paused, and then swept up the shredded napkin Max scattered on the table. The young man whistled softly, clicked his heels deliberately, and shuffled off, looking back over his shoulder.

“A bad habit.” Max shrugged. “Sorry.”

Suddenly Max called out to a man strolling across the lobby. “Larry. Larry.” He waited. The man paused, deliberated, seemed ready to bolt out the door, and then thought better of it. Hurriedly, he glanced around the crowded lobby, eyes narrowed, searching, then hesitantly moved toward us. He wasn’t happy. “Larry, you’ve been a stranger.”

“Max,” the man mumbled, as his icy stare took me in.

“Larry Calhoun,” Max told me. “My oldest friend in Hollywood.”

A strange line, considering Max’s assertion last night that Sol Remnick was his oldest West Coast crony. Yet the words betrayed a hint of sarcasm, bitterness I’d never heard before from Max.

“Mr. Calhoun, a pleasure,” I smiled, though I added, “except for the fact that you seem a jumpy rabbit ready for the bush.”

He didn’t smile back, though Max chuckled. “Larry, sit down.” A command, out of character from the soft- spoken man, though Larry-again with the furtive glance around the small room, peering out the French doors into the lobby-slid into a chair. “This is Edna Ferber.”

“I know.”

“You do?”

Again, the sour frown. “Everyone knows you’re in town. You’re…Show Boat.”

I glanced at Max. “I really need to reassess my public image.”

Larry sat there, dutiful, hands folded neatly in his lap, a penitent schoolboy. “How are you, Max?”

“Getting more famous by the hour, it seems.”

“I mean…”

Max addressed me, warmth in his voice. “When I first came to L.A., Larry, Sol, and I were inseparable, happy-go-lucky young guys, the three musketeers, tackling Hollywood, making money, climbing up the tinsel ladder, dreaming, dreaming. Back then we invested in an apartment house or two in the valley, some property in the hills, too. Retirement planning, we called it. The three of us shared the little money we had. Years back, of course…when Hollywood was an uncharted Eden and we were three Adams thrashing through the undergrowth. There were no snakes in the garden.”

Larry looked into his face and said in a small voice, “That was then.”

“And now we have a paradise…if not lost, well, at least in the hands of creditors.”

Larry snapped at him, “I don’t see you refusing the monthly check from the real estate folks.”

“True.” Max shrugged. “Edna, Larry was in a few Betty Grable movies. One movie, if I remember, with Myrna Loy. Bit parts, but a line or two. God, how we cheered him on back then! Our friend on the movie screen. The handsome cad. The suave hidalgo, the continental gigolo.” He smiled innocently. “Typecasting.”

Larry squirmed in his seat. He looked the faded actor, the square-jawed juvenile lead, romantic, with his tall lithe body, the chiseled bronzed face, the full head of carefully combed black-gray hair, an elegant Roman nose a little too red these days with blood vessel speckles. Yet he sported unfashionable sideburns, a pirate’s affectation, as though he’d just tottered off the set of an Errol Flynn movie. I imagined he inflamed a few fluttering hearts, even these days, this man with the matinee idol carriage. But his eyes betrayed callowness, a grubbing meanness. They darted too much, the caged animal; their blackness was dull and flat. I didn’t like him, though I didn’t know him.

“I gave up acting, though I get called for parts-small parts-now and then.”

“Are you his agent?” I asked Max.

“God no,” Max said. “Larry set his sights on high ground-his first wife knew somebody who knew Paulette Goddard…”

Larry started to stand, then slipped back into the chair. “Sorry to hear about your troubles, Max.”

Max shrugged his shoulders. “So I’ll live.”

“These are tough times.” He sucked in his breath and glanced away. “But you asked for trouble when you fired off that foolish letter. Christ, what were you thinking?”