“What Show Boat creator visiting on the coast to add her fire power in support of a local Commie is now planning his funeral?”
I stared at the abrupt, cruel line. Furious, I paced my hotel suite. When I passed an inconvenient mirror, I spied a maddened old woman, her permed white curls in disarray. Worse, it was the face of a woman not used to being stunned-and certainly not bested by lesser forms of humanity.
And Hedda Hopper filled that bottom-feeder niche so perfectly.
Of course, I hadn’t read the silly gossip item in the morning paper because, frankly, I valued the English language and, as well, the innate decency of man. I came upon the scurrilous item by chance.
In my rooms all morning, I munched idly on an apple and read the Los Angeles Times. No comfort there, to be sure, because a front-page article explored Washington’s renewed investigation into Communist influence in Hollywood. In the light of the renewed attention from Congress, Red Channels, disingenuously chronicling pinkos on radio and television, was becoming influential. More sad souls would be grilled, ruined, maligned, jailed, ostracized. Max’s friends, John Howard Lawson and Doc Trumbo, were headed to prison, appeals denied. Wronged American writers.
So I would have missed Hedda Hopper’s snide diatribe had I not wandered out to the Sun Club Pool, dressed in my floral summer dress with a floppy Anne of Green Gables hat on my head. I was intent on sitting quietly under an umbrella. But left behind on a deck chair was the offending column, which I read. Enraged, I carried it back upstairs and read it over and over, fury rising in me like floodtide. When Alice called late in the morning, she asked whether I’d read the column.
“Of course.”
Alice spoke angrily, “Max is dead and they won’t let him rest in peace. They want to hurt you now. You have that new book coming out next year.”
“Giant. My take on Texas braggadocio.”
“Are you afraid?”
“Of Texas? Please. Overgrown boys with their lassoes twisting high in the air.”
“Let’s hope one of those lassoes doesn’t ring your neck.”
I touched my ancient but much loved neck, pearl adorned. An ugly image, my fragile body swinging from a cottonwood tree. “I’ve had bad press before.”
“But you haven’t been called to defend yourself before the HUAC.”
That remark gave me pause. My novels had covered a sweep of American geography-Chicago, Oklahoma, New England, Minnesota, Seattle, elsewhere-and I was praised as a robust chronicler of American life, my fiction a sweet hymn to American ingenuity, resilience, fortitude. I relished my reverential-if occasionally caustic and accusatory-love affair with the Republic…for which I certainly stood.
“I’m not worried,” I told her.
A long silence. “Edna, I had the strangest phone call.”
“From whom?”
“Larry Calhoun. He said he had a nasty fight with Sol. He said Sol accused him of being a snitch. Of naming names.”
I fumed. “Alice, he shouldn’t be bothering you at this time. The man has no scruples. What does he want from you?”
“He wanted to know what I’ve heard.”
“About what?”
“I don’t know. I gather Sol threatened to expose him.”
“That makes no sense.”
“I told him I didn’t want to talk about it.”
“The man makes me nervous.”
“He makes everybody nervous these days. The older he’s gotten the more…distant he’s become. Nowadays he’s running scared. Max could never understand the change in him.” Alice sighed. “Edna, I hung up on him.”
“Good for you.”
***
Early afternoon, back in a deck chair under an umbrella by the Sun Club Pool, I sipped iced tea and sorted through a batch of galleys for Giant, zooming in on typos in my epic of Texas oil and cattle and overweening ego. But Texas seemed so far removed from the tin-plated patina of Hollywood life. All that big sky and gushing oil wells and acres of buffalo grass seemed so alien from the plastic palm trees and piped-in Paul Whiteman strings. I missed Manhattan with its black-and-white grittiness, its taxi blare.
Instead, I drifted to the restaurant and ordered a sandwich and coffee. I daydreamed in the nearly empty room, and then spread out my galleys and got to work. Looking up, I suddenly realized that the palm trees lining the room possessed stuffed monkeys, peeking through the polished fronds. Echoes of Don the Beachcomber and that horrible evening. What was with Los Angeles? Did everything have to look like a zoo?
I was placing a mark in the margin when I heard someone grunt. Vaguely familiar and annoying, like a buzzing mosquito in your bedroom. My eye was riveted to a paragraph about some ugly Texas vainglorious boasting. Ten-gallon Stetson ego and ranch-hand swagger. I shivered. Another furor, this novel. Another state I’d risk my life visiting thereafter.
Like that vicious carping when Cimarron was published. All of Oklahoma ready to tar and feather me, the intrepid chronicler.
American Beauty. Colonial Connecticut. That book brought out the crazies. What did that Danbury newspaper spout? How dare a Jew vilify Connecticut? Nice touch. So much for my First Amendment rights.
My mind sailed to the Hollywood Ten, the blacklist, the dark shadow of accusation, the intolerance. Max, now dead. Murdered.
Something bothered me. Something nagged at me. I needed to do something about it…because, well, I’d come here to support Max. The fact that he was dead simply reinforced my resolve. Now a murderer needed to be identified.
Willy nilly, my mind shot to a ludicrous image: Liz Grable, overfed Oklahoma maiden, spewing lines from Cimarron during the legendary land rush. Liz the renegade Sooner, slathered in pancake makeup and hobbling on stiletto heels. What was her story? What part did she play in all of this?
The grunting got louder, immediately followed by a boyish titter. Tony and Ethan Pannis were at a table just beyond a bank of English ivy and flowering hibiscus. I put down my galleys when a third voice spoke up. It was Larry Calhoun’s. I hadn’t realized Max’s old friend and business partner-revealed by Sol as a paid informant for the Examiner-was friends with the Pannis brothers. Of course, there was no reason why not. After all, they all knew one another-friendships formed in the halcyon days of Hollywood, before war and coldness and backstabbing became the rule of the day.
Tony said little, save for the nervous ripple of laughter-someone uncertain of what was happening at his table. He suffered a brief assault of hiccoughs. Admonishing him to be still, Ethan was clearly irritated, talking in a measured voice. When he spoke, Larry Calhoun seemed tentative, unsure, his voice halting as though he were learning to speak after long silence. The reason was clear: he wasn’t happy. Eavesdropping, I leaned so far back in my seat that the waiter eyed me suspiciously and I feared toppling into the hibiscus planter, where, most likely, a stuffed marmoset was waiting to pounce on me. From fragments of chatter, I learned that Larry owned a small three-family rental in the valley, a modest investment from years back, now fallen into disrepair; and Larry was reluctantly deeding it over to Ethan for what he termed “a pittance.” This little luncheon was to finalize the deal. Ethan was handing over a check. His voice was ice cold. “You’re the one who came to me, so stop whining.”
Larry grumbled. “Only because I need cash.”
“Who cares?” Tony muttered.
“This has nothing to do with you,” Larry sneered. “Ethan, you got to bring Tony everywhere you go?”
“He’s my brother.”
“He’s a zero.”
Tony whined, “That ain’t nice.”
“Boys, boys.” Ethan admonished. “Let’s keep this civil.”
“It’s worth more than you…”
Ethan interrupted, icy. “You don’t have to sign this. You don’t have to take this check from me.”
Silence, then, “I got in over my head.” A tone of resignation, though mixed with anger.
Tony spoke up again. “Seems to me you still owe my dead brother Lenny some money. Didn’t you borrow from him?”
Larry’s voice was laced with venom. “That’s how I got in trouble. Through him. Your cutthroat brother. And it only got worse.”
“Who cares?” Tony said again.
Ethan spoke sharply. “Tony, shut up.”
“I want nothing more to do with any of you,” Larry announced.
Ethan, matter-of-fact, an edge to his voice, “Hey, you can walk away now. You think we want to see you? I told you to drop off the papers at the Paradise. My check was there waiting for you. We got sick of waiting for you.”
Larry wasn’t buying it. “Oh, really? I’m supposed to pick up a check from your resident drunk?”
Tony grumbled, “Screw you, Larry.”
Ethan’s voice dropped. “Okay, let’s all calm down. I’m here with a check. We can wrap this up now.”
I decided to be nosy, depositing my galleys into my purse, standing, adjusting the brocade jacket I’d worn and checking my three strands of pearls. I scurried around the hibiscus planter, and feigned surprise. Fancy meeting you here. Small world, wouldn’t you say? My, my, my. I was just one more Hollywood actress, the redoubtable Parthenia Hawks on the Cotton Blossom, intrusive fussbudget accosting some smarmy deckhands.
Everyone looked startled. Larry was frowning.
“May I join you?” I used Magnolia’s Southern drawl, syrupy and coy, the aging ingenue.
Clearly the answer was no, but I sat down anyway. Tony reprised his recent battle with hiccoughs, but beamed at me, as though I were an old friend. “Miss Ferber, you do pop up in places.”
“The pleasure is all yours, surely.”
“A little sarcastic, no?” Larry said.
“I wasn’t being sarcastic.”
Tony grinned. “You’d make a good insult comedienne.”
“I’m more at home being an…insult tragedienne.”
“What?” From Larry, annoyed.
Tony laughed. “Miss Ferber, you and I, on the road. The new Burns and Allen.”
“Tony. Tiny. Whoever. I don’t think the world is ready for our little vaudeville routine.”
“I should have met you years ago, Miss Ferber.”
“Then we wouldn’t be having this friendly conversation now.”
He looked perplexed, but Ethan burst out laughing.
“Give up, Tony.” He punched his brother on the sleeve.
Tony sat back, looking content, although he had to suppress a new round of hiccoughs. He didn’t take his eyes off me, I noticed-that little-boy stare somehow questioning what was happening here. The family pet, long shunned or ordered about, no longer sure when it was okay to wag a happy tail.
Ethan, uncharacteristically effusive, probably because he’d favorably concluded a business deal, signaled for more coffee. The same waiter had served me on the other side of the hibiscus planter and now looked confused, though he nodded when I requested that the skimmed milk for my coffee be whipped first with an eggbeater. “Of course.” As I spoke to the young man, Ethan quietly tucked the signed papers into a briefcase and placed it beside his chair, out of sight.
“Are you enjoying Hollywood, Miss Ferber?” Larry asked. A rude and tasteless question, coming from someone who knew I was grieving for Max…indeed, his old friend.
“As much as I expected to.” I breathed in. “You’re aware, Mr. Calhoun, that Max is dead?”
He started, his face reddened, and he reached for a glass of water. Nervous, unable to sit still, twisting a napkin, rocking back and forth, he refused to look at me. Suddenly, while Ethan was in the middle of some blather about the news accounts of Max’s death and, to my horror, his astonishment that Hedda Hopper was skewering me in her columns at such a painful time, Larry jumped up, sputtered something about obligations, and nodding toward me, spun around and left us.
“Was it something I said?” I smiled at the brothers.
“A squirrelly guy, that Larry,” Ethan mumbled. “Never liked him.” He glanced at Tony. “And now I don’t have to deal with him in business anymore.” A thin smile as he tapped the briefcase at his side.
“How is Lorena?” I addressed Ethan. “I’ve been meaning to call her. I really like her…”
He broke in. “I like her, too. We like each other.”
“And yet you divorced.”
He grinned foolishly. “Timing, Miss Ferber. I married Lorena at the wrong time. I was a different person then. Driven, ambitious, gonna set the world on fire. Scriptwriter to the stars. My name up in bright lights. Fame-the empty drug.” For some reason he pointed to the ceiling where, I assumed, stuffed monkeys nested. “The cruel reality stunned, frankly. And I lost myself in booze and depression.” He glanced at Tony.
“So what happened?”
He looked sheepish. “I got mean with Lorena, a woman who doesn’t tolerant meanness. Nor, I discovered, do I. I didn’t like myself.” He looked at Tony. “I come from a family of drinkers. It took every ounce of resolve to…to stop. When Lenny died, I woke up to the emptiness of the life I was leading. But by that time Lorena had unceremoniously waved goodbye. My knowledge came too late. Wisdom sometimes takes a later train.”
“But at least you were ready for its arrival.” I sipped my coffee slowly.
“Indeed. But, as I say, Lorena was gone from my life.”
“Yet you’ve salvaged a friendship.”
“Indeed, we have.”
“I don’t like it,” Tony blurted out. “You can’t be friends with your ex-wife.”
Ethan snapped, “It’s none of your business, Tony.”
“She’s too opinionated,” Tony said. “I don’t like women telling me what to do. Liz gets that way, you know.”
Ethan grinned. “Only on nights you get drunk.”
I had something to say. “When women speak their minds, they are viewed as town gossips. When men blather about their digestive surprises, they consider themselves newly-arrived from the oracle at Delphi.”
“Jesus! What?” From Tony.
“It’s curious how Frank keeps his old cronies close by,” I said slowly.
The remark puzzled Ethan. “Meaning?”
“Loyalty to the past even though I’ve heard him say the past is dead.”
Ethan frowned. “Frankie is afraid of the future.”
“Come on, Ethan,” Tony pleaded. “Leave Frankie out of this. He’s…our best friend.”
“What do you mean, Ethan?”
He sat back, breathed in. “Something went off kilter with Frankie’s career, so he’s stopped thinking about others-like Tony’s career. About our lives. Things have stalled. The wartime bobby-soxers are buying Guy Mitchell records. He used to sell ten million records a year. Just like that.” He snapped his fingers. “Now Columbia is gonna drop him. Do you know why? He sabotaged his career when he hooked up with Ava.”
“I always blamed Max,” Tony offered. “He introduced them.”
Ethan raised his eyebrows. “Nonsense. That’s just not true. Max had nothing to do with Frankie. For God’s sake, Tony. The man is dead.”
“I don’t care.”
“Yeah, sure. That small-time agent nobody heard of until he became a pinko poster boy. I don’t know where you…”
“You don’t like Ava?” I broke in.
Ethan shrugged. “She’s all right. A fighter.”
“I used to think she liked me,” Tony said. “I made her laugh. But she’s too much a hellcat. A crooner’s supposed to have a girl, you know, like…”
“Like his wife Nancy,” Ethan went on.
“Ah, the fireside Madonna,” I said.
“You know, Frankie is a womanizer, plain and simple. But he’s not a man to divorce the mother of his three kids. Think about it. His Nancy is a beautiful woman herself, a hometown bride, good Italian Catholic girl, homemade tomato sauce you can weep over-well, you got a girl on the side, that’s okay. Next week you go back to Nancy. Another girl, some nightclub tramp. Always back to Nancy, who sits there piling up pasta in front of you. You eat so much you can’t leave the house. That’s marriage in Hoboken.” Ethan laughed now, a long rumbling chuckle. “Ava comes along and changes the rules. She says…you have to divorce her.”
“The nuns in New Jersey are praying for Nancy.” Tony was dropping sugar cubes into his cup of coffee and stirring with his finger.
“It’s true,” Ethan added. “Catholics don’t divorce.”
Tony stammered loudly, “Ava made him go crazy. That’s the problem. With her looks and that temper, she…” He trailed off.
“You know,” I concluded, “Frank is a big boy. And from what I’ve seen of him these past few days, he likes to call the shots. He does just what he wants to do.”
Tony sipped his coffee but sloshed some on the table. Ethan frowned and blotted the spill with his napkin. “Be careful, Tony.”
Tony ignored him. “He got a weakness, Miss Ferber. Beautiful women. I mean, when he came to Hollywood he made a list of the gorgeous actresses in town and taped it to his dressing room mirror. Lana Turner. Marlene Dietrich. And he’s checked them off, one by one…”
Ethan slammed his hand into Tony’s shoulder. “Don’t tell Miss Ferber that. She’ll think little of him.”
“I couldn’t think less of him than I already do.”
Ethan eyed me suspiciously. “We’re loyal to Frankie. No matter his…his weaknesses. He’s only human. Frankie and Lenny were blood brothers. A bond to the grave.”
“Is his career really over?”
Tony started to sputter, but Ethan got reflective. “Let me tell you a story, Miss Ferber.” A hint of sarcasm laced his drawn-out words. “I know you like stories. You make your living at it, no?”
“And a good one, I assure you.”
“I had to be in New York earlier this year. Some work at the Metro offices in Times Square. Frankie happened to be playing a date there. He’d performed somewhere in the city to a half-empty house, which made him depressed as all get out. So one night I went with him out to Hoboken, some rinky-dink piss-water joint where he sang as a favor to some local hood. Well, that night he had no voice, scratchy, off-key. Nothing comes out. A blank. The audience booed and hissed and drove him off the stage.”
Tony interrupted. “Nobody got class there.”
Ethan squinted his eyes. “In Hoboken? Anyway, Frankie, he’s down in the dumps. So that night, back in the city, the two of us are walking through Times Square. A cold March night, snow showers, nippy. Suddenly there’s crowds of screaming, hysterical girls, a wild scene, these girls pushing against a police barricade. Dumbfounded, we stood there. I looked at Frankie and he looked at me. ‘What the hell?’ he asked. And then we looked up at the marquee and you know what it said?”
I shook my head.
“Eddie Fisher. It said Eddie goddamn Fisher. Some new headliner on the block. Fresh-scrubbed, brand-new. I’d never heard of him.”
“And Frank?”
“Frankie got drunk and smashed his fist through a hotel wall. I had to call a doctor.”
“It’s because of Ava,” Tony stammered. “They want that small-town boy who’s wholesome in the tux and bow tie, the boy next store, married to the good Catholic girl. Not a slut who breaks up marriages.”
I rolled my tongue into the corner of my mouth. “Ava is a plain, simple girl right off the farm. At heart.”
“A Jezebel,” Tony thundered. “I used to like her. That was when she liked me.”
“Shut up, Tony,” Ethan said.
“It’s a shame you missed my act at Poncho’s in the Valley, Miss Ferber. My stand-up show. I was damn good.”
Ethan was frowning. “I doubt that Miss Ferber would be entertained by your brand of humor.”
Tony bristled. “Everyone liked me.” He peered into my face. “Miss Ferber, I was real good at insults-real funny. People came back for more. I tell a dumb joke, the audience heckles me, and I insult them. Pick people out. You should have seen me.”
“Tiny, in my social circle I’m the one who delivers the insults. It’s never the other way around.”