With an excited Max, Alice said she’d recently seen The Squaw Man there, a creaky, grainy print of the legendary first Hollywood movie ever made, back when L.A. was rolling acres of avocado and orange farms and the locals were none too friendly to the fancy New York actors suddenly invading their sunny landscape with megaphones and tin lizzies. “Max used to bring people here to look at the deco trappings.”
On the day of his service, a breezy Thursday afternoon, the sky loomed a dull gray, a clammy mist lifting slowly as we sat in cars in front of the theater. Three cars, with Alice, Lorena, and me in the front one, Lorena’s clunky Buick. The sun hovered high above the red-tile roof of a pink stucco building at the corner, suspended there, tantalizingly, fogged over by a dense yellow haze. “In Hollywood,” Alice noted, “movie funerals never take place in sunshine.”
Three or four reporters and photographers were stationed at the curb, leaning against cars, smoking cigarettes, gabbing, and joking. One snapped a photograph of me. I snorted at him, and he tittered. They kept looking up and down the street. If they were waiting for Ava Gardner and Frank Sinatra, they’d wait in vain.
Inside, as we gathered in the lobby, the Reverend Smithson appeared from a side door and looked for the crowd that wasn’t there. A Unitarian minister, he’d known Max for years. They’d served on a committee together-to save a deco movie palace on Hollywood Boulevard from the wrecking ball, and now and then they played cards. The two men liked each other, Alice told us. When they played cards, they chatted about the news of the day and inevitably, as the night went on, they abandoned their card playing and simply talked and talked about old movies, about Francis X. Bushman, about Cecil B. DeMille. All night long. Neither one ever cared who won a card game.
We waited, fidgeting. The echoey lobby seemed too vast for such a smattering of souls, maybe ten, no more. Alice, Sol, Lorena, me. A couple of old men in rumpled suits, one of whom Alice whispered was H. C. Porter, who’d directed The Time of Your Life with James Cagney. “I wouldn’t have expected him,” she told me. No one else. Space between us, uncomfortable.
At the last minute the front door opened and Desmond Peake hurried in. For a moment, startled, he stood in the entrance and surveyed us all with a jaundiced, squinty stare, oddly accusatory. All conversation halted. Alice let out a raspy gulp and turned to me, a helpless expression on her face. Standing on my left, Sol Remnick bristled and looked ready to approach the Metro rep.
“No,” I whispered to him, a hand on his elbow.
“Mr. Peake,” I raised my voice, “I’m surprised you’re here.”
Looking at Alice, Desmond stammered into the awful silence, “I came to pay my respects.”
No one believed that. I certainly didn’t. Of course, I’d been expecting the brazen reporters to sneak in among us, masquerading as anonymous keeners, though the minister had purposely spoken to the few gathered on the sidewalk and forbade it.
Desmond stood close to me, this telephone pole of a man, and bent into my neck. “I’m here because Metro assigned me…suggested I…”
“You’re checking to see whether the troops have obeyed orders.” I waved my hand across the small space. “Anyone under a Metro contract here?” I smiled cruelly. “Besides you?”
I turned my back on him, facing the others who were staring at him.
To my stiff back he muttered, “I got a job to do.”
I swung around to face him, my words even and chilly. “I’ve heard those words before. And in the not-so-distant past. You’ve heard of the Nazis?”
Desmond’s face blanched as he shuffled past me, grazing Sol’s shoulder, headed into the theater. Everyone was looking at me, but Lorena, her face hidden by a black contour veil, moved to my side. “Good for you, Edna.”
“I was hoping Ava would come,” I murmured.
“I spoke to Ethan last night…”
I broke in, testy, “And where is he? And Tony?”
“I didn’t expect them to come. Max…Alice…you know.”
“A sad commentary, no?” I stopped. “I interrupted you, Lorena. You were saying?”
“Just that Ethan told me that Ava was ordered not to show up today. She wanted to. Orders from the top brass, loud and clear. Dore Schary, he thought. They can’t afford one more embarrassing photo in the papers. Her careless abandon-God, how she loves to thumb her nose at Metro! — can cause real harm, and if she showed up here, with that gaggle of photographers outside ready to pounce…”
Sol had neared and was now peering into my face. Lorena smiled sadly at him and then drifted away, standing at Alice’s side. “Yes, Sol?”
For a moment he said nothing as he stared into my face. A short man, we saw eye to eye; and what I saw now disturbed me, for here was a man’s craggy face ravaged by grief. I started, so intense was the anguish there, the bleak loss. Trembling, his hands flapping like wild birds against his sides, he’d clearly dressed in a fog. A button was undone on his shirt. There was a dried smear of shaving cream on his lower cheek, a dime-sized spot of pale white. That vagrant spot, stuck there, seemed such a violation, such a token of his absolute sorrow, that I did something I’d never done before. “Give me your handkerchief, Sol.”
He squinted, confused, but extracted a large white linen cloth from a pants pocket and handed it to me. I took it and rubbed the spot on his cheek, wordlessly, quickly. He realized what I was doing, and for a moment a silly smile surfaced, the inveterate comic’s sense of absurdity, Cousin Irving cavorting with Molly Goldberg on a television soundstage. “Even at my age, go figure, people got to dress me.”
“You all right, Sol?”
“No.” Serious again, the words fierce. “Max’s death is beyond the pale, Miss Ferber. I’m awake all night long. I keep saying to myself, what could I have done? Did I…was I in some way responsible-all those talks we had about the blacklist, my encouraging him to send that letter.” Then, as though he just had a revelation, “No, that had nothing to do with this.” A wash of tears leaked out of his eyes, ran into the wrinkles of his cheeks. He reached for the handkerchief and, realizing I’d just used it, he smiled and said, “Perhaps I should keep it out.”
“You were ready to attack Desmond Peake.”
His lips drew into a razor-thin line. “That bastard. How dare he come here? God, he walked Max out of the Metro gates and to his car. Like Max was a misbehaving child in school.”
“Mr. Peake told me he was only doing his job.”
Sol grunted. “The job you do sometimes is a snapshot of your own character.”
“Yes, the butler who takes on the airs of the master of the house.”
Sol lowered his voice. “He’s a top dog in America First. Him…and that traitor Larry.”
“I know about them, Sol. Boys with their vendettas and intolerance.”
Suddenly, a shift in his tone, the voice gravelly, halting. “Max was my last friend, Miss Ferber.”
What could I say to that? Could this talented man, this popular television comic adored by millions-I assumed so, though I had no idea, never having heard of Cousin Irving before-lead so solitary a life? A man who spent his lonely nights in an apartment somewhere in this sprawled-out city? Or back in New York, lost in some small walk-up as he readied for the Monday night broadcast at NBC?
“I’m so sorry,” I said.
“They will never find his murderer,” he suddenly announced.
That startled. “Why? For heaven’s sake, Sol.”
“Because the cops don’t really care.”
“Of course, they do.”
“You have more faith in authority than I do, Miss Ferber.”
“What else is there that we have, Sol?”
The others were filing into the theater, so I nudged Sol. Yet he stood there, eyes brighter now, determined. “They think it’s some obsessed patriotic fanatic. You know, all those death threats Max got. Some America First zealot, armed with a gun and a head filled with delusions. Why should the cops care? One more Red sympathizer bites the dust.” He took my arm and we walked toward the open doors of the theater. “Or,” he added, “it was Frank Sinatra or one of his goons.” A sickly smile. “I guess the cops could believe that scenario.”