For a moment, startled, I let my mind play with images of Julie and Steve and Pete on the showboat. Julie, the beautiful mulatto with the melodious voice, a doomed woman, hungered after by men like Pete, a lowlife towboat worker, himself haunted and driven. And Steve, the possessive husband, jealous of any man’s attention to his wife, pledging a love that was to last forever but would crumble on the mean Chicago streets after exile from the Cotton Blossom. Two men, maddened by jealousy and lust. Pete who squeals to the local sheriff to punish her-punish them. He would destroy her if he can’t have her. Frank and Ava, jealous and possessive and…destructive.
Ava singing her dirge as night shadows covered her. Can’t stop lovin’ dat man of mine…fish gotta swim…birds gotta…
I came out of this idle reverie with a start: something was happening at the table. Max, tipsy, was flirting stupidly with Ava, half-serious and a little self-mocking. He rolled back and forth in his seat, a pale dervish, and babbled something about Harold Porter (space…now ten seconds, though no one laughed) Junior getting a chaste kiss from Ava, a young man who fantasized about kissing the screen goddess.
“Dreams to last a lifetime,” he babbled.
Ava looked amused, though she kept shaking her head. “Max, what’s got into you?” She tapped the back of his wrist.
Alice whispered, “Okay, Max, you’ve had enough to drink.” Idly, she fiddled with her purse, snapping it open and shut.
And then, bouncing in his seat, Max whooped like a moon-besotted Indian and leaned over and kissed Ava on the mouth. It happened so suddenly that nothing seemed to register immediately. Watching the violation, I thought how innocent it was, passionless, perfunctory, the ah-shucks apple-cheeked boy kissing the pretty girl in school on a frivolous dare.
Ava pulled back, wide-eyed, and waved a schoolmarm finger at him. She giggled, “Now, now, young man, do I have to tell your mother?” She winked at Alice.
I was laughing.
Max slumped back into his seat, eyes nearly closed now, a simpering smile plastered to his face. I thought he’d drifted off into a catnap.
A sudden grunt, mean, thick, as Frank shot out of his seat and lurched around the table, his arm brushing my sleeve. He hovered over the drowsy Max as Ava squealed, “Francis, what are…”
She got no further. Another coarse grunt as Frank’s fist flew out, a missile, and slammed hard into Max’s jaw. The crack of bone on bone. Max’s head revolved like a puppet’s head unhinged. A spurt of purple blood splattered on the white tablecloth.
Alice screamed. She started to stand but slipped back into her seat.
Surprised and wounded, Max toppled backwards, the chair crashing onto the floor and spilling him onto the carpet. He lay in an ungainly heap, doubled over, his hands cupping the bleeding jaw. He hunched there, looking up at Frank who rocked back and forth, his eyes flashing, his hard blue eyes now brilliant purple. He hadn’t unclenched his fist, smeared now with blood.
“I never liked you,” Frank sputtered.
Max opened his mouth to speak but he dissolved into a fit of nonsense giggling. Blood oozed through his fingers, down his neck, onto his shirt. “Thump thump thump,” he burbled. I had no idea what that meant. He gave a drunkard’s idiotic smile. “Happy birthday to me. Happy birthday to me.”
Thump thump thump.
Giggling.
Alice and Ava crouched on the floor next to him. Whimpering, Alice cradled his head in her lap while Ava dabbed the blood with a linen napkin. Ava’s fingertips glistened with Max’s blood.
“Damn you, Francis.” She looked up at him.
Silence in the restaurant.
Someone screamed, a woman, hysterical.
Frank looked around, his eyes zooming in on the screaming woman.
He looked down at Max.
“I could kill you in a heartbeat.”
“Francis…”
“A goddamn heartbeat.”
He stormed away.
At the nearby table the anonymous woman screamed and screamed. And Louella Parsons smiled.
Chapter Six
My day began, of course, with Louella Parsons’ insidious but tremendously entertaining column.
The gossip queen devoted her entire column to our sad escapade, given the fact that she had a front-row seat and, to use her words, “was close enough to see spittle at the corners of Frank’s mouth.” Obviously she’d been dizzy with delight, fueled by her own intake of zombies, tottering to her typewriter minutes after Frank’s outburst, her column probably delivered by midnight to the yellow journalistic presses. Her prose dripped with giddiness, though she loaded her paragraphs with tut-tut phraseology-“ignominious shame,” “truly a sad spectacle,” “a waste of talent,” a “wanton disregard of civilized behavior,” “a low point in Hollywood history.”
On and on, an endless and platitudinous array of admonishment. “And then, while we all watched, Frank threatened to kill the hapless man.” She italicized the infinitive.
But in her stream of consciousness narrative, she most likely rued her use of the word “hapless,” for in the next paragraph she described Max Jeffries as a “lamentable pinko” who “defends the indefensible.” Oddly, her easy condemnation of Frank, though over the top with venom, then paled by comparison to her depiction of Max, whose treasonous behavior clearly trumped Frank’s gangland fisticuffs.
Louella Parsons, I realized, carelessly assigned folks to various rungs of her own perversely conceived hell. She knew who should suffer the most heat in Hades. Like Dante, she buried the traitors at the bottom.
My phone never stopped ringing, yet I never answered. Slips of paper in my cubbyhole mailbox downstairs identified the writers as reporters from the Los Angeles Times, the Examiner, and even, to my horror, the New York Times. Someone provided me with clippings from the Examiner. My name was mentioned, which surprised me. I was labeled the activist writer, some latter-day Upton Sinclair or Ida Tarbell. “Edna Ferber, whose Show Boat is to be premiered July 17, is an intimate of Max Jeffries.”
Hmmm, I considered: MGM just shuddered. Walls shook. All of it made very little sense.
I hid away.
When I called, Alice informed me that Max was nestled in bed, sipping orange juice. His doctor had patched him up, and would be returning shortly. Max, whimpering, kept asking for more pain medication. He was, she insisted, impossible to be with. Lorena Marr, checking in, invited her out and Max, overhearing the invitation, insisted Alice leave him be. He’d hole up with the radio on-“Burns and Allen,” she said, “will shut him up”-and drift into a hazy, drug-induced slumber. Girl’s night out. Alice consented, though Ava begged off. She wanted no limelight this evening, secluded in her Nichols Canyon home where, she told Alice, Francis knew he was not wanted.
“Lorena has convinced me to go out,” Alice told me.
“Good idea,” I told her. “Men who are ill believe the earth’s rotation must immediately be adjusted to suit their desires.”
She laughed. “Oh, I know. Poor Max. I love him dearly, but…” She stopped. “We’re catching a movie. Please join us, Edna,” Alice pleaded. “An early dinner at the Paradise. You can see it from your hotel. A movie. The three of us.”
So I found myself strolling a half-block up from the Ambassador and opening the doors of the Paradise Bar amp; Grilclass="underline" Steaks and Chops! A modest eatery with the capitalized “d” of “Paradise” blacked out on the neon sign. The “i” of “Grill” flickered madly. PARA ISE. Lorena and Alice were already there, and waved me over.
“Everything is free,” Lorena announced. “I own the place. Well, we own the place. My ex-husband Ethan and I. We’ve yet to make a penny off the place and I’m intent on unloading it.”