A message was being delivered to me, small cog that I was in its world.
Desmond Peake spoke not at all until the chauffeur pulled up in front of a building. Smiling thinly, he escorted me to a projection room in Sound Stage Four, seated me third row center-“Are we on Broadway?” I quipped to his stony face-and then excused himself. I sat alone in that shadowy room. No popcorn? No juju beads? Was I an exile in paradise? Not that I expected to be greeted by Louis B. Mayer, for I was given to understand that he’d been squeezed out of the organization, though he was an early advocate of Show Boat and of Ava Gardner herself. Perhaps Dore Schary, the new head honcho, would greet me. But no bigwig appeared. I didn’t hold my breath. I understood that I was a trespasser in an alien landscape.
Of course, I’d already registered my disapproval at Max’s cruel removal from the credits, messages met with silence. After all, having flown across the country to lend Max support and having publicly trumpeted my disillusion with this Show Boat remake, I fully expected to sit alone at this courtesy screening for the originator of the money-bags product, the unwed mother of Show Boat who now wasn’t on speaking terms with her wayward and flamboyant offspring. So be it.
The lights in the room flickered, on and off, a hidden projector behind me groaned, hiccoughed, whirred, and then the lights popped back on. I heard a door open, a rustling in the aisle and, to my surprise but utter delight, Ava Gardner slid into a seat next to me. She leaned over and smelled like fresh oranges. A quick, friendly hug-yes, I’d come to expect those spontaneous hugs-and vastly appealing at the moment. Dressed in a floral sundress with baggy sleeves and turquoise beads that hugged her neck, her feet encased in jewel-covered strip sandals, she looked ready for a beach party, cocktails on a deck overlooking the Pacific in Malibu. I grinned back at her.
“Bastards,” she muttered. “They told me the wrong time. On purpose, I assume.” She laughed, a whiskey growl. “Lucky I have spies in this house of illusion.”
“But why?”
“You’re tied to Max.”
“Pinko high tide in Hollywood?”
Ava leaned in. “I wanted to be here with you today.” Her cigarette voice got low, confiding. “Edna, I’m nervous about what you’ll think of me in the movie.”
“Why? For heaven’s sake.”
“Because I’m given crappy parts at Metro. I’m a face and legs and bosom. Cheesecake you don’t get at Little John’s Steak House. If I see disapproval in your face…” She breathed in. “It was Max who suggested to the director that I’d be good as Julie. Pop Sidney had worked with me before and liked me. I expected Lena Horne to get the role. She lobbied for it, but she’s also suspect these days, hints of being pinko. And she’s a Negro. Don’t forget that. Black on the outside, pinko inside. She’s a friend of mine, so she understands the politics-she’s been around the block. God, Edna, she looks the part of Julie. The mulatto.”
“Why not her?”
“They’d have trouble distributing the film down South. But she sings the Negro songs like Julie should sing.”
“I can’t wait to hear your version.”
“You won’t, I’m afraid. My rendition of ‘Can’t Stop Lovin’ Dat Man’ is good. It is. But they’re using Annette Warren’s high-pitched soprano, dubbed in. They don’t believe in me.” She snarled, “They’re bastards.”
A hum, a click, a man’s voice yelling something inarticulate, and the lights dimmed. The credits rolled in glorious Technicolor, a wash of vibrant color that pleased me. Ava and I grew silent, though she was leaning so that her shoulder brushed mine. A delight, this wayward daughter comforting a mother who is about to be abundantly disappointed. Magnolia Ravenal at the side of her carping matriarch, Parthenia Hawks. The ingenue and the puritanical mother.
What thrilled, of course, was the music, especially William Winfield’s basso rendition of “Ol’ Man River.” Paul Robeson in 1936 had been brooding, elegiac, gripping, and I confessed to liking that moment in the movie. How could I not? This version was more hopeful, exuberant. Both caused the hair to rise on the back of my neck. Kern’s elegant yet sing-along score haunted me, carried me off. Prepared as I was to dislike the movie, I found I couldn’t: its sheer sweep and color and range held me. It was a big budget extravaganza, no holds barred melodrama. This movie was why they invented a place called Hollywood.
Not that it lacked faults, to be sure-after all, they’d abandoned Oscar Hammerstein’s pithy, intense libretto for some pay-through-the-nose hack’s turgid dialogue. And, of course, they brutalized the last part of the story. The charming cad Gaylord Ravenal had wooed the lovely Magnolia, an onstage romance that became love-and then marriage. My line in my book: “Their make believe adventures as they lived them on the stage became real.” But real life paled, ultimately, when the bounder deserted her.
In this oh-so-happy version Ravenal returns to the boat when they are both young and vital, with daughter Kim still a young child. They warble “Make Believe” as hymn to their blissful reunion, the showboat sailing down the Mississippi into the new and glorious day for all. That was what they called a Hollywood ending.
What truly amazed, though, was Ava as Julie, the half-black, half-white doomed beauty. This new version paradoxically played down the racial underpinnings of my novel and the stage hit, but then, ironically, framed the entire movie around Julie LaVerne, Ava’s presence dictating the narrative. Julie and Steve, the married performers, are turned into the sheriff for the crime of miscegenation. In a dramatic move Steve takes out his switchblade and slashes her finger and drinks her blood. It’s a thrilling moment, staggering melodrama. When the sheriff arrives to arrest them, Steve insists he has Negro blood. After all, one drop of Negro blood makes a soul a Negro in the Old South. So they’re not arrested, but cruelly exiled, the beginning of Julie’s downward path of destruction. Brothels and honky-tonks and alleys. That scene was at the heart of my Show Boat. That scene said something important about America.
In this new movie Steve uses a pin to prick her finger-and it’s out of camera shot. Someone not conversant with my book or the stage version might wonder what in the world was happening, this cryptic mixing of blood. Let’s not offend any viewer. God forbid. Please. How bizarre: a Victorian sensitivity to phony propriety in a shell-shocked age that just went through cataclysmic war and holocaust and nuclear annihilation. Please.
But…Julie. Ava. Ava Gardner. A luminous presence, staggering. A beautiful woman in person, even sitting next to me with almost no makeup on, but someone who, captured magnificently on that huge celluloid screen, mesmerized. Her movements, fluid and sulky, demanded your full attention. Kathryn Grayson was pretty and sweet as the girl next door, if next door was traveling on a lumbering showboat. Rebecca of Sunnybrook Farm. Pollyanna. The ingenue was the wholesome lass from an operetta. Ava Gardner could never be that girl next door. No, she was the dark of the moon; she was a total eclipse of the sun. You could not take your eyes off her. It helped that I was sitting next to her, experiencing some sort of doppelganger moment. She was an actress, surely. I’d not expected that. Helen Morgan, an earlier Julie on Broadway, sat atop an upright piano in a Chicago dive, singing the torch song “Bill.” Just my Bill. Just plain Bill. The ache in your heart when you love so much…Ava moved around the piano, seductively, forlornly. You watched her.
It was Ava’s movie. Howard Keel and Kathryn Grayson could warble, but Julie’s exile and decline defined the movie. You wait, anxious, until she reappears on the screen. When she and Steve leave the showboat, a scene filmed in murky darkness with the ponderous strains of “Ol’ Man River” rising solemnly behind them, you have the movie’s rawest moment. Suddenly, startlingly, I thought of Max, expelled from Metro and Hollywood. Like Julie, a soul dispossessed of life. Exiles from the garden of earthly delights.