Make Believe

Max’s voice was rushed. “I was thinking about my friends.”

“And you signed that petition against that mouthy senator, and Red Channels listed your name…” He seemed to be checking off a list in his head.

“I didn’t see your name on it.”

Larry snarled, “Nor will you ever. I don’t want to lose my job. I got three ex-wives to support.”

“Just what do you do, Mr. Calhoun?”

My question seemed to take him by surprise, a puzzler, because he furrowed his brow and seemed unable to answer. Then, with pride, “I’m a manager at Grauman’s Egyptian Theatre, where, by the way, Show Boat will shortly hold its West Coast premiere. It’s a real coup for us.”

Max interrupted. “You don’t come around the house any more.”

Larry stood now, rocked on one leg. “And you wonder why?”

“I know why.” But Max was looking at me.

“You can’t bring us down with you, Max. You have to understand that. The hint of scandal these days, names bandied about like crazy, the mere suggestion of Communist stuff, sympathies-you know, a death sentence.” He swallowed the last two words. “Miss Ferber, good day.”

He hurried into the lobby and he didn’t look back. Pausing at the registration desk, he seemed to be asking for someone, and then idly glanced back at us. For a second my eyes locked with his. Even from that distance, I could detect fear there, palpable, stark. He turned away, his shoulders hunched as he leaned on the desk.

“A coward,” Max grumbled. “The older he’s gotten the more frightened he’s become. He used to be a roustabout soul like the rest of us. I mean-the three of us had the times of our lives. Then he got scared. Now he plasters photos of Joe McCarthy into a scrapbook.”

“I’m so sorry. Some friend.”

Max reached across the table and held my hand, tightened his fingers. His touch was oddly cold, stiff.

A low hum swept through the lobby and into the lunchroom. People walking by stopped, their steps frozen, heads tilted. Everyone seemed to be in motion yet, strangely, no one moved. Nearby a busboy, a freckled, red-faced lad with a hawk nose, had been refilling a water glass from a pitcher but now, oblivious, poured water sloppily onto the table. A comic scene, some foolish Marx brothers routine, but the hum got louder still, almost a titter, until I wondered…earthquake?

When I looked at Max, he was grinning.

Every head had turned, as though on oiled ball bearings, toward the center of the lobby where Ava Gardner, striding across the floor, momentarily stopped and looked around. As epicenter of that seismic shift in the earth’s rotation, she stood there, checking her watch, as all those around her seemed to lose their minds.

It was, frankly, awesome. This presence one woman could have, electric, galvanizing, stupendous. Everyone was smiling, wide-eyed, like little children surprised by a treat. Only Ava herself, standing there naturally in the center of that space, bringing one hand up to check on her hair, seemed unaware of the rumbling sensation she caused. This was Movies, writ large; this was melodrama on the wicked showboat stage; this was Theater; this was, perforce, a blinding of the noontime sun.

I held my breath, enthralled.

She spotted us and smiled, gave a slight, tentative wave that struck me as oddly insecure. The lonely girl in town who spots an old friend at the bus station.

As she approached our table, the busboy dropped the pitcher, and was immediately admonished by the truculent patron whose lap now was sopping wet. The boy didn’t seem to care.

She held out a hand to me, and I shook it. Politely, she’d first slipped off her elbow-length white cotton gloves before she gave me her hand. A nice gesture, and correct. She dazzled, truly, but I was unprepared for her… radiance. A run of movie-magazine catchphrases sailed into my head, and I smiled at them all.

Now I’ve never favored my own plain looks, not back as a young woman with bushel-barrel hair, and certainly not as I approached my seventies. A part of me had always irrationally resented the easy and fashionable beauties who glided through life. But now, slack-jawed, I found myself watching her. The most beautiful woman in the world, they called her, Hollywood exaggeration and utter blather. Now, frankly, I didn’t know who else came close, Helen of Troy having long departed from the world stage.

You saw a woman put together with exquisite care, a black-and-white ensemble of geometric patterns, a white lacy blouse under a sleek black silk jacket with green oriental stitching, over a tight black skirt that hugged her curves at the hip but dramatically flared out at the knee, lampshade style. It was her face that arrested yet excited: those high cheekbones, lightly rouged; the emerald almond-shaped eyes with a slight yellow mote that caught the overhead light; that seductive dimple on her chin, a face encased in a swirl of chestnut curls. Wide, sensual lips, coated in a deep passion crimson, a color so bloodlike it seemed enamel. Luminous porcelain skin with an opalescent cast, vaguely foreign.

“Miss Ferber, I’m sorry I’m late.” A low, husky voice, and I thought of Greta Garbo speaking in Anna Christie. She leaned in and I smelled exotic perfume, pungent jasmine perhaps, a sweet elixir, heady as thick wine.

Such women were dangerous.

Deadly, but they compelled one to draw close. Ships were wrecked on the coasts of their attention. You had no choice.

I smiled, stammered, “So you’re the new Julie LaVerne.”

Those green eyes gleamed, catlike. “It’s a wonderful part, Miss Ferber. I don’t have to show my long legs, and there’s even a scene where I’m allowed to look haggard, worn, without makeup. I don’t have to look like the glossy prints in Photoplay.” She struck a model’s artificial pose, held it, and then burst out laughing. Her roar was raucous, whiskey husky, a late-night voice, closing time at the bar.

“When Max”-she reached over and touched his cheek, and I swear he blushed-“told me you were his old friend and would be coming out here, I demanded a meeting.” She winked. “Men don’t refuse me anything.” She narrowed her eyes. “Except, of course, loyalty. Fidelity. Men seem to be missing those parts of their character.”

Somehow I found my voice. “I’ve never married…”

But she spoke over my words. “And I’ve married two times and will probably marry over and over and over, like a punch-drunk sailor looking for one more open tavern.”

“Why?” I asked.

The question surprised her, so she didn’t respond.

Max looked into her face. “So how’s Frankie?” His tone was not friendly, and Ava picked up on it, wagging her enameled finger at him.

“Now, now. Francis is Francis, you know. The boy who would be a menace to society. Read Louella Parsons who has her spies working overtime at Ciro’s and the Trocadero. Every time we have our spitfire public battles, I read a different version of it the next day in the Hearst tabloids. Frankly, her version of my life is much more interesting than mine.”

“Fiction usually is more interesting than real life.”

She leaned into me. “Max finds Francis an irritant. Which, of course, he is. But Max doesn’t love the scrawny singer. I do. Sadly. Max keeps telling me-Ava, he’s a married man. Separated, I say. I may stretch the morals clause in my Metro contract but I don’t fully snap it apart.” She reached for a cigarette, and, out of nowhere, a waiter bounded across the room to light it.

We ordered lunch-she had chicken salad on rye and a pineapple and cottage cheese salad, and scarcely picked at both, though she ordered two martinis-as I quietly contemplated this Hollywood siren. No fool, this beauty, I realized. In fact, she struck me as quite smart, even witty, a woman in full possession. No, that’s wrong- not full possession because there was something amiss here, some little-girl desire to be noticed. Helen of Troy with a tragic flaw: insecurity. Vulnerability. Because her stream of words, delightful to listen to, dominated the conversation while laced with something else: she was hell-bent on making me like her. She had no way of knowing that I already did.

I sat back, the warm spray of her words covering me. She and Max gabbed about the industry, inside gossip, internecine warfare, who was sleeping with whom, who’d lost favor with Louis B. Mayer, who passed out on the dance floor of the Mocambo last night, the night Howard Keel got juiced on martinis, her photo in that girlie magazine Wink. The day before, she’d bumped into Mickey Rooney, her first husband,