Ava was going on about Bappie’s husband, a Manhattan photographer who’d taken the first photo of her, displaying it in his Fifth Avenue window where it was spotted by some scout. Ava as virginal country girl, with sunbonnet and a faraway look in her eyes. MGM offices, located in Times Square, called for a screen test and…and a Hollywood contract. Fifty dollars a week, Ava and Bappie traveling west by bus. The dream began.
Suddenly Frank’s hand swept across the table and sent the shoes flying. They landed at the foot of a blazing tiki torch.
Ava screamed. “Damn you.” Leaning across the table, she slapped Frank’s face, and he recoiled, rubbing the scarlet patch on his cheek. Immediately Ava crumbled. “Oh, Max, this is not the evening I planned for you.”
I said nothing.
Welcome to Hollywood.
Frank was unrepentant. “Ava, for Christ’s sake, do I gotta listen to that story again? You drag out those…those moldy shoes in a restaurant…like…I don’t know. It’s…boring. Remember that night you babbled about showboats and tobacco fields and your mama’s cooking to Louis B. Mayer? Christ, his eyes glazed over.” He inhaled his cigarette. “I wanna get you on a showboat to China.” He must have thought the line uproariously witty because he guffawed-and then sang it out, trilling the cadences. I wanna get you on a showboat to China. He rubbed his cheek.
Everyone in the restaurant was staring. Quietly, a waiter returned her shoes, and Ava tucked them away.
“Edna understands my…omens.”
“The past is over.”
“As good a definition of ‘past’ as I’ve heard,” I sniped. He glared at me.
“Omens, my ass.” He was still staring at me. “You think some old lady cares a damn for this claptrap.”
I sat up, spine erect. “I certainly do, young man. I make my living going into the past.”
Frank ignored me, though his look suggested I was a foolish old ninny, out to final pasture.
Silence, uncomfortable, the room settling back to normal, glasses clinking, laughter across the room, sporadic tinkling ukulele music suddenly piped in and obviously amplified. Tiki magic, again.
Over coffee Max picked up the clipping from the Examiner, but now he was smiling. “I don’t like being photographed from this angle. Did you know that Hedda Hopper recently called me a nervous ferret?”
I could tell he wanted to discuss the violation. His fingers drummed the sheet.
“Perhaps we shouldn’t discuss it now.” Alice tapped his sleeve affectionately.
Ava smiled thinly and half-waved at me, shrugging her shoulders. It was a gesture suggesting fatalism, the price you paid for living out here; but in the next moment she reached across the table and gently touched Max on the cheek. Immediately he quieted, grinned sheepishly, and closed his eyes dreamily. Lord, I thought: Circe and her exquisite charms. The ravishing Lorelei leading men to rapturous shipwreck.
The last time I touched a man’s cheek it was, unfortunately, a crackerjack slap. The offending cheek was Aleck Woollcott’s chubby one, just after he informed the dinner guests that one needn’t call a dog a bitch when Edna Ferber was in town. Of course, I’d begun the conflagration by calling him, this three-hundred-pound mountain of sarcasm and salt-water taffy, a New Jersey Nero who mistook his pinafore for a toga. Ah, the old days at the Algonquin when our frivolous battles and repartee were chronicled in F.P.A.’s “The Conning Tower.” Now my name appeared in Hollywood gossip sheets as an East Coast busybody. And Commie sympathizer, at that.
Ava’s sensual touch was something I’d never acquired-nor, frankly, wanted.
“This is all getting to Max,” Alice said. “I’ve suggested we go to New York for a visit. See friends. Some theater.”
I stared into Max’s beaten face, his eyes red-rimmed and tired.
“Well, I’m here another week. Fly back with me, you two. We can do theater…”
Max spoke quickly. “No. I can’t leave my friends.”
Frank sneered. “Why not? They’ve all left you.”
Ava pointed her cigarette at him. “Francis, be nice.”
He gave her a sickly-sweet grin and actually winked, some conspiratorial gesture that elicited a groan from her.
“I could care less about any of this nonsense in the gossip columns, especially Hedda Hopper’s twaddle,” I began. “The woman is trying to sell newspapers, having already surrendered her soul. What alarmed me was today’s front-page article in the Los Angeles Times that discussed the ratcheting up going on in Washington now. Did you read that? And now this Joseph McCarthy yammering about Red infiltration in government offices. I feel as though the country I love-know to my marrow-is in danger of irreparable transgression. More transgression. Lord, we weathered that madman Hitler and the concentration camps and the A-bomb and now…” I waved a hand in the air, helpless.
“Does anyone really care about Hollywood?” Alice asked.
“I don’t,” Ava announced, midway through lighting a cigarette.
I reached for a cigarette and Frank cavalierly lit it for me. As he leaned in, I smelled musky cologne that reminded me of wood shavings. The blue-gray smoke oddly calmed me as I went on. “According to the article, when the Hollywood Ten went to Washington in 1947, they left L.A. with a crowd cheering them on at the airport but, arrived there, they realized how alone they were in Washington, once removed from this…this celluloid cocoon out here. The rest of America-all those Saturday Evening Post and Coronet readers in the heartland-think Hollywood and imagine scandal, deception, intrigue, unbridled sex, infiltration, Commie this, pinko that.”
“If you want to know what I think…” Ava started.
But I wasn’t finished and raised my voice. “But it’s a contradiction, don’t you see? Hollywood is, perversely, America itself. The studios invent an America for the world to look at. Not a real place but a movie hall oasis-The Wizard of Oz, Gone with the Wind, John Wayne’s Rio Grande, the Busby Berkeley dance spectaculars. Cinderella. Even Show Boat, a fantastic portrait of an America that’s sugar-coated and inviting.” I stopped. “The capital of the United States is not Washington D.C. In some bizarre sense it’s Hollywood.” I crushed out my cigarette and sat back.
Listening to me, Frank sat back, a cigarette bobbing between his lips. He had a wise-guy smirk on that skinny face, and those marble-blue eyes twinkled. Suddenly, mockingly, he began a slow handclap: one two three four. Space between each resounding clap.
Ava squirmed. “Francis, for God’s sake.”
“I think it’s a bang-up speech,” he protested. “Worthy of that bastard Louis B. Mayer. Jack Warner couldn’t have topped it-better than that weepy apology he delivered before the HUAC, in fact.”
Max looked at me with utter admiration. “You said it, sister.”
I roared. Max’s clipped voice, exaggerated now with a squeak in it, had the same amused tone he’d employed, years before, at the National Theater in Washington D.C. at the Show Boat tryout. Echoes of: “This is all your fault, Madame Show Boat.” At that moment we must have been thinking the same thing, for he mouthed the very words at me: Madame Show Boat. Only I noticed. I tilted back my head and winked at him.
Ava turned to Alice and nodded toward us. “Darling, those two have something going on.”
“I hope so,” Alice answered. “And I’m happy about it.”
Ava put down the cigarette she’d been toying with for a minute or so. “This’ll all blow over.”
“What will?” Frank asked, testily.
“You know, this Commie stuff. Every so often a bunch of dizzy gnats swirl around the picnic table, irritating everyone, making everyone think it’s a plague of Biblical locusts. Then the sun shines and they’re gone. America is like that-we got good people here.”