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, who begged her to go home with him. She’d walked away. I took it all in, delighted by her words. With her flashing eyes and infectious laugh, she was, emphatically, my tragic heroine Julie LaVerne, exiled from the
Cotton Blossom
.
The meal finished, she sat back, stirred her black coffee with a shot of brandy poured in. “I’m reading
So Big
, Edna. You know, when I met my second husband Artie Shaw, well, I’d only read
Gone with the Wind
. I
am
from the South, Edna. You
had
to read that book. Every parlor had a copy placed next to the Bible. We all told our boyfriends we’d…think about it tomorrow. Artie insisted I read Darwin’s
Origin of Species
on our honeymoon. I’m not making this up. Quite the aphrodisiac, let me tell you. Can you imagine? Talk about your survival of the fittest. And Thomas Mann,
The Magic Mountain
. One page of that and I’m asleep. No magic there, just a mountain of a book. Too thick a book. My arms sagged…”
I volunteered, “Frankly, a strain on the stomach muscles, such a book.”
She laughed. “You said it. To this day I cringe when I see the spine of
Buddenbrooks
in my bookcase. But he did make me into a reader. Sometimes husbands can actually be good for a marriage.” Then her voice dipped. “But, unfortunately, he also made me a divorced woman out on the town.” She sat up straight and held my eye. “Edna, I’m talking a blue streak, dizzy with being here with you, when I only want to ask you one thing. How can we help Max? This brouhaha about that letter to the
Reporter.
This nonsense of the blacklists. Metro knocking him out.”
Taken aback by the sudden shift in conversation, I shrugged my shoulders. “I’ve been thinking about it…”
That didn’t satisfy her. “Too many good souls crushed by this Red menace nonsense. Max a Commie? Preposterous. I’ve known him for years. Lord, he voted for FDR.” She grinned widely. “We all did. Hedda Hopper called my Francis a pinko last week, right after she named me the new tramp in town.” She stopped, out of breath.
I fumed. “She should be blacklisted for wrecking the English language.”
We all laughed, Ava choking on cigarette smoke.
“We have to think of something.” Her fingernail with the red polish tapped her lower lip.
“Enough,” Max implored. “Let’s talk of
Show Boat
, my
real
passion.”
“No, it’s
my
real passion, Max. Yes, you’ve certainly left your mark on each new version, but this movie is my chance of a lifetime.” She reached into her purse. “But I have something here to share with Edna. You know what it is already, Max, but keep quiet.” She winked at him. “Something that trumps your
Show Boat
stories, dear Max. Even that dried flower you keep from Helen Morgan.” She shrugged. “A weed stuck in the pages of your diary. Such a sentimental fool.”
Max teased her. “What is it now? An autographed picture of Rita Hayworth?”
She gently tapped him on the cheek. “Fresh boy. Now, Edna, I come from a small dirt town in North Carolina called Grabtown, a desolate red-dirt tobacco town with a whole lot of poverty. Dirt roads, no running water, no electricity. I was a scrappy tomboy who picked the worms off the bright-leaf tobacco and washed the black sap off with lye soap. Back in 1924, when I was two years old, my mama’s cousin Minnie worked at a boardinghouse over to Bath by the Pamlico River where a certain lady novelist came to board Charles Hunter’s James Adams Floating Theater. Do you remember that?”
I sat up, caught by her words.
A fond memory, of course. I nodded, smiling. “I remember my stay on that wonderful boat, selling tickets, hauling props around, spooning out food, and listening to Charley’s amazing memories of life on a showboat as we sailed to Belhaven. It was a goldmine of information and lore from a great storyteller.” I grinned. “But when I lit a cigarette in town at lunch, I saw shock on everyone’s faces. Women don’t smoke in tobacco country.
My
Show Boat
grew out of that visit.” I scrunched up my face purposely. “But I remember that boardinghouse, Ormond’s—the boat was delayed two days in Elizabeth City. I had to rent a room. A smelly place, an old brick house that took in transients, moldy with mice and indigestible food. Gray, grim sheets on the bed that…” I shuddered.
Ava was laughing. “Cousin Minnie delivered eggs and milk daily to that place. She got your autograph.” Ava slid a slip of paper across the table, a sheet torn from a school tablet, stained in one corner, wrinkled, but prominently in the center was my thick-inked name: Edna Ferber, followed by a resolute period after the “r.”
Edna Ferber period. Always a statement.
I shook my head and passed it to Max.
“When she died,” Ava went on, “I got it. My treasure. And now I’m Julie, the best goddamn Julie there will ever be. Helen Morgan and Broadway my foot.” She reached out and took the slip from Max and tucked it back into her purse. “An omen, Edna. In the stars, you know. I was crawling through tobacco fields, barefoot and snotty, while in Bath you were creating an empire.” She bowed.
Max groaned. “Ah, barefoot girl with cheek of tan. Barefoot girl with plenty of cheek.”
“You said it, brother.”
“I don’t remember Minnie.”
“Of course not. No reason to. You hopped around town in an old Ford driven by a Negro boy, plodding through the overgrown graveyard. Everyone
watched
you. Minnie was scared to death of you, she told my mama. You were…famous.”
“Well, now you’re famous.”
She sat silent a long time. “True, but fame isn’t what it’s cracked up to be, is it, Edna?” Those gleaming green eyes held me.
“No, it isn’t.”
She was getting ready to leave. “Let me see more of you while you’re here, Edna. Max told me you’ll skip the premiere—you’re a sensible woman—but I’m gonna make you my Southern fried chicken one night. I’m a dammed good cook, though no one believes that. In ten years I’ll weigh three hundred pounds, and love it. Not only that but…”
A flash of blinding light, disorienting. I turned to see a photographer bent on one knee, a few feet from the table, his camera aimed at us.
“Damned fool,” Ava screamed.
Within seconds a reporter in a wrinkled white linen suit, pad open, pencil at the ready, was next to her. “Ava,” he blurted out, “lunch with a Commie?”
Max started to rise but Ava’s hand held him down. Her eyes flared, furious, her neck muscles pronounced, scarlet. “Leave us alone.”
The hotel manager, alerted, scurried over, frantic, dragging on the reporter’s sleeve, blocking the photographer. “Out, out,” he yelled.
The reporter announced to no one in particular, “Max Jeffries and Ava Gardner…and some old lady.”
I bristled at that. Well, this old lady had a few things to say, so I threw back my head and snarled, “You and your simian crony have the manners of barnyard swine.”
Ava looked at me and giggled.
The manager shooed them away, though the gawky reporter, his hat askew and his tie undone, yelled over his shoulder, “Read the
Examiner
tomorrow. Commie at lunch at the Ambassador. Sex goddess turning pink before our eyes…”
Ava, to my horror, stuck out a tongue at him, and the flash went off again.
Watching their retreating backs, I spotted Max’s old friend Larry Calhoun still standing by the registration desk, shielded partly by a garish potted palm, one hand pulling a frond across his face.
“I’m so sorry, Ava,” Max began.
She stopped him. “I have lunch with whoever I want.”
“But your career…this photo…tomorrow…”
“What are they going to do? Fire me?”
His eyes got dull, tired. “Yes.”
“Of course not.” A ripple in her laughing voice. “After all, I’m their resident love goddess.”
“Ava…”
She turned to me. “Edna, I’m a superficial woman. Truly. I see things black and white. I like my friends. I don’t like reporters. And I like Max. So it’s simple for me. Black and white. I’m …superficial.”
On the phone later that day Ava insisted drinks that night at her home would be fun. “Just a few friends. Alice and Max, of course.”
“I’m not good at cocktail parties,” I told her.
“I swear I won’t throw anything, Edna. I’ll behave.”
I hesitated, uncertain. I planned a quiet evening in my suite, reading Kathleen Winsor’s
Star Money
, though I fully planned to despise it. I’d avoided
Forever Amber
, but I found her newest potboiler at the airport, and for some reason I bought it. I’d already dipped into it and didn’t like it. Sentimental balderdash, overwrought emotions, but, said Kitty Carlyle, a boiling read. I’d see about that. “No, Ava, I’m planning to order a pot of coffee with whipped cream and…”
Someone grabbed the phone from her. “I promise I’ll behave.” Frank Sinatra spoke rapidly. “It’s time we met, Miss Ferber. Don’t believe what the gossip sheets say about me.” Ava said something to him that I couldn’t catch. “I’ll send a car with my personal bodyguard.”
An image of some simian lug head flashed into my mind, some monster with greasy-black hair, his knuckles dragging the ground. A vocabulary of four-letter words grunted at me. A toothpick stuck between his missing front teeth and an odoriferous cigar dancing merrily from his drooling lips.
“Sounds like fun to me.” My voice was a little too sarcastic.
“You will?” Ava was surprised.
A small cocktail party at her Nichols Canyon home, a few friends. Three or four people. George Sidney, the director of
Show Boat
, promised to attend but I wasn’t to believe that. He always promised and then never showed up. Howard Keel and Kathryn Grayson, possibly. “Edna,” Ava said in what sounded like an afterthought, “I live in the country. You have to see my yard.”
“Sounds like fun to me,” I repeated, softening my voice.
“Edna, don’t be mean to me.”
“I’m mean to everyone, especially my friends.” But I was beaming.
“So you’ll come?”
I breathed in, eyed the already dog-eared copy of
Star Money
lying on the nightstand. “I’ll come.”
***
Ava’s small house nestled among towering palm trees on a knoll above a wooded canyon beyond Ogden Drive, high up a steep chaparral-banked hillside, a quirky pink stucco house that seemed a prop in a Disney cartoon: a splash of brilliant color against a fantasyland grove of impossibly well-positioned tropical foliage. A white-washed picket fence, incongruous as a frilly bonnet on a streetwalker, surrounded the place, with clumps of brilliant purple and yellow ice plants dotting the landscape. Yellow roses climbed the picket fence, pungent honeysuckle covered a trellis, and beds of petunias lined the driveway.
Odder still, I spied a clothesline behind the small house on which some lace blouses flapped and bellowed in the slight early-evening breeze.
Who was the bizarre woman, Ava Gardner? None of these trappings struck me as
femme fatale
accoutrements, the battler in the nightclubs. Well…maybe the pink stucco. A Negro maid opened the door, and Ava rushed over and introduced her as Mearene. “My Reenie.” For some reason Ava squeezed her shoulder, an affectionate gesture that brought a smile to the maid’s face, though she scurried away into another room.
“Max and Alice are already here,” Ava told me. “Come in.”
The walls of the front rooms were painted a daffodil yellow, a burst of springtime that jolted, yet oddly soothed. I expected sleek, chrome-studded Italian sofas and polished glass tables with
faux
Archipenko statues. I discovered overstuffed sofas and armchairs, and stolid wooden tables that I’d expect to find in some old-guard oceanview cottage in Massachusetts. Ava the night owl, always out on the town, doubtless found sanctuary here when she straggled back home, exhausted, at four in the morning.
“I chose
everything
,” she stressed. And she pointed to a row of exquisite Degas prints gracing the walls, ballerinas silhouetted against pastel backgrounds. I complimented her.
She led me to the hallway in back—I waved at Alice and Max, sitting on the huge charcoal sofa with drinks in hand—where one wall had floor-to-ceiling walnut bookcases filled, most likely, with Thomas Mann and Charles Darwin. My fingertips grazed volumes of Sinclair Lewis and Hemingway.
Madame Bovary
.
The opposing wall held a succession of black-and-white photographs mounted in simple black frames: stills from earlier productions of
Show Boat
. There was Helen Morgan sitting atop an upright piano, looking forlorn; a doe-eyed Laura La Plante emoting before a handsome Joseph Schildkraut; Jules Bledsoe on a cotton bale chanting the universal dirge, “Ol’ Man River”; a stern Edna May Oliver admonishing a rapscallion Charles Winninger, the irascible Cap’n Andy. A kaleidoscope of Julie and Joe and Queenie and Magnolia and Gaylord Ravenal and Parthenia Hawks and Cap’n Andy. On and on, an awesome collection.
“A gift from Max,” Ava whispered. Then she winked. “More good omens, Edna.”
By the time I returned to the living room Max and Alice were talking to a newly arrived guest. Max stood. “Edna, this is Lorena Marr.”
The woman rushed over and grasped my hands. “I only came because Ava said you’d be here. Cocktail parties—even Ava’s—made me take to my bed, so much posing and…” She stopped. “Just as I’m doing right now, the first culprit.”
Alice spoke up. “Lorena is a reader at Paramount.”
Ava added, “And the ex of Ethan Pannis. One of Francis’ Hoboken buddies.”
A slender woman in a gold lamé cocktail dress and a small sequined hat planted to the side of her close-cropped hairdo, she dropped my hands, half-bowed, and picked up her martini with one hand, a cigarette in the other.
“Shaking hands, Miss Ferber, gets in the way of my cultivating my only two vices.” She bowed deferentially. “I’ve read
Show Boat
so many times there are nights when I return from Ciro’s after imbibing too much bubbly that I swear I can hear the iron-throated calliope all the way from the mighty Mississippi.”
Ava handed me a martini that I gingerly sipped. Ice cold, perfect.
“That calliope is the sound of coins being deposited in my bank account,” I quipped.
“Lord, Miss Ferber, you searched for a gold mine in the muddy river beds while foolish men hammered at rocks in the Rockies.”
“Pure luck.”
“I doubt that.” She grinned. “You’ve played with the big boys—and won. I admire that.”
I liked her, I decided: sharp, quick, clever, attractive. A slick Hollywood concoction, perhaps, but funny. Something about her words seemed practiced and nervous—a desire for my approval?—but the clipped words couldn’t disguise the warmth in her eyes.
Ava broke in. “Lorena is a strange Hollywood divorcée. She kicked Ethan out, but still goes out to dinner with him. They’re best friends.”
“Who exactly is this Ethan Pannis?” I asked.
“Ethan and Tony Pannis. Brothers,” Lorena told me in a tone that suggested I should know them. “Frank Sinatra’s loyal entourage. Scattering rose petals in his path.”
“I was a Pannis bride, too,” Alice suddenly announced.
“I don’t understand.”
Her voice was hesitant. “I was married to Lenny Pannis, their older brother.”
Max cleared his throat and spoke rapidly, his voice hollow. “Edna, Lenny died from a fall, and his brothers blame Alice to this day. It’s all foolish stuff. Lots of anger there.”
Suddenly I remembered George Kaufman’s description of Alice: the black widow. George had shown me a sensational clipping from a tabloid: a hollow-eyed Alice sitting in a Los Angeles squad room. Those nasty accusations of willful murder. I’d paid so little attention. Rag-tag journalism, yellow at the edges.
“Well,” Lorena confided, “I had to leave darling Ethan. He’s somewhat of a prig, a man who measures life with algebraic equations and a calculus disposition. I found him delightful…for three years. Actually
two
of those three years. The third was bitter lemon. I liked his drive and ambition—at first. Cutting back the sails on his dreamboat lessened the man, I’m afraid—made him petty. Nasty.” She grinned. “Now that we’re divorced, I find him amusing.”
Ava jumped in, grasped my elbow. “Don’t you love cocktail parties, Edna? We can talk about our exes with abandon. Wait till I get started on Mickey Rooney. My first Hollywood lover. The chipmunk with bedroom eyes. The boy next door as Casanova. Love finds Andy Hardy.”
Lorena raised her eyebrows. “Randy Andy by the picket fence.”
Alice was the only one who didn’t laugh. “Ethan was a mean drunk, Edna.”
Lorena defended him, shaking her head vigorously. “That was then, Alice. A bad time. He’s a teetotaler now. Ethan paints all his pictures inside the lines. A kindergarten teacher would
love
him.” She sipped her drink, but I noticed she watched Alice over the rim of her glass.
Alice frowned. “It took a slap across your face to crash down your house.”
Lorena looked annoyed. “All right, Alice. All right. I walked out.” She shrugged her shoulders. “So now we’re friends. Dinners, movies. We
like
each other. We didn’t when we were married.”
Alice was shaking her head. “I’d never be comfortable…”
The two women stared at each other, eyes wary, bodies tense.
“Lenny’s death sobered him up—a dose of cold water in the face. But by then our marriage had crumbled.” She took a drag on her cigarette. “We’re different people, you and me, Alice.” She glanced my way. “You’ll meet Ethan…and his brother Tony.” A little chuckle. “You won’t be happy.”
Alice smiled now. “Lorena and I have become best friends, Edna. Exiles from the Pannis clan.”
Lorena grinned at her.
A yelping dog came barreling in from the kitchen, a pudgy corgi Ava introduced as Rags. The dog yipped and spun around, circling the maid who walked in with a tray of appetizers, passed them around, and then, bizarrely, sat next to Ava, chitchatting and smiling. She munched on a canapé. For a second Ava and Reenie giggled about something. Oddly pleasing, that sudden tableau, which told me a lot about Ava.
From across the room Max asked, “And where’s Frank?”
Ava stood and looked out the window. “God knows. He
promised
to be here early. It’s going to be the few of us. Pop Sidney backed out. So did my manager. So did Howard and Kathryn. Everyone waits for a better invitation.” She bit her lip. “The last time they were here Francis insulted them all.” Ava lit a cigarette and sat back down. “Max, you know you’d like it if Francis didn’t show up.”
Anxious now, Ava kept glancing out the front window, biting her lip, distracted. From where I sat, I could watch the driveway. Finally I heard the prolonged blare of a horn, a teenage boy’s shrill announcement of arrival, and a sleek Cadillac convertible swerved off the street, breakneck speed, and slammed to a stop on the pebbly driveway alongside a privet hedge. The trellis of honeysuckle shook.
I could hear raised voices from inside the car, shrieks of laughter, someone bellowing what sounded like
barroom barroom barroom
.
Ava, her face pressed against the window, was trembling, her face hard, severe. She sucked in her breath. Her glance took in Max, then Alice, then me, a sweep that communicated apology and sadness.
“Goddamn it.” Under her breath.
Frank trooped in, followed by three other souls lined up behind him. “Guess who was hiding out at mi casa, dipping into my liquor cabinet.” Frank addressed all of us—all, that is, except Ava, who was fuming, arms folded, her back to the window.
So this was the bobby-soxer phenomenon, this crooner of dreamy hit-parade ballads. The Voice smoothing its way through Italian bel canto rhythms. So scrawny and bony, a pencil, emaciated, a protruding Adam’s apple, his body hidden in an oversized black tuxedo jacket, a floppy red bow tie under a hard chin. He flashed an onyx pinky ring. He smiled at me while he was talking to Ava about something I didn’t catch, and those riveting deep-sea blue eyes electrified the otherwise skeletal face. A skinny little man, I realized, with a pronounced receding hairline and ears that reminded me of a New York taxi cab barreling down Broadway with both doors wide open.
Ava gulped down a drink and smiled at me. “Time for the floor show, Edna.”
Frank approached me. “Miss Ferber, we haven’t met. A pleasure.” He shook my hand with a surprisingly weak grip.
Then, betraying nervousness I didn’t expect, he nodded at the two men standing near him. “Edna, my two buddies, Ethan and Tony Pannis.” He didn’t introduce the bizarre woman who’d flounced in behind them, now standing in a corner. Both men abruptly moved too close to me and I tried to shrink my already diminutive self. “From New Jersey. Although I knew their big brother Lenny first. He was my good old buddy from the neighborhood—and got me through some tough jams. He saved my life, really.” He stopped, seemed in awe of his own words. “These two were youngsters then. Ethan”—he indicated the slender, twitchy man in a severely pressed gray linen suit—“is an accountant at Metro, a money man. And this is Tony.” He pointed to a chubby man, his India-ink black hair permed into a Little Orphan Annie bowl of curls, a man dressed in a sequined tuxedo jacket that barely contained his protruding belly. “His younger brother.”
“You probably know me as Tiny Sparks, the, you know, comic.”
“I’ve never heard of you.”
“You got to get out to the valley. I headline at Poncho’s Comedy club.”
Frank sang a line, his voice a little shaky, “Down in the valley, the valley so…so…very, very low…”
Ethan shot Frank a puzzled glance, then leaned into him, motioning toward Alice and Max. “You didn’t tell us
they’d
be here.” Frank shrugged and chuckled. He’d obviously had a few belts at his…casa.
I didn’t know what to think of this contradictory duo. The slick accountant with the neat haircut and horn-rimmed glasses, the sensible pale-blue necktie, a conservative feathered fedora held discreetly in hand. And the carnival act, all glitter and riotous confection and blubber.