“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?”