Make Believe Read Online Free Page B

with my work. I’ve sent off letters to MGM, in fact. Letters ignored, for the most part. They run from me like the plague. Show Boat is meant to be a simple story, a romantic look at life on a Mississippi floating theater, though with an underbelly of darkness—the mixed-blood tragedy of the South. Cap’n Andy and his wife Parthy shelter their innocent daughter Magnolia who falls for a ne’er-do-well gambler Gaylord Ravenal, marries him, and leads a life of sadness and penury until she returns to her home on the Cotton Blossom .”
    “It’s a slice of Americana.” Max was nodding. “Melodrama, vaudeville, minstrel show, song and dance.”
    “Remember that early script I got my hands on, thankfully abandoned?” I grinned. “I believe it may have come from you . Ingénue Magnolia blames herself for Ravenal deserting her and their baby. ‘I must have done something very wrong.’ Her fault, the failed wife, not the wastrel gambler and huckster. Lord! In my novel Magnolia grows as a strong, purposeful woman, not a simpering, weak-kneed woman fawning before a prodigal husband.” My voice was rising, my cheeks flushed, so I stopped. “I’m sorry. I’ll never be happy with what they do to my work.”
    “It’s a different movie now. Romance, yes, and sweeping ballads and dance, but with a dark thread of sadness, discrimination, loss. A lot of the movie now focuses on Ava Gardner, the doomed siren exiled from the boat because she’s mixed blood and married to a white man. Julie LaVerne frames the movie, the tragic mulatto who has a heart of gold, sacrificing her career for her childhood friend, Magnolia. Ava’s damned good…”
    My spine rigid, I stared at Max. “That remains to be seen.” I shook my head slowly. “Max, you’ve made a life of helping the enemy destroy my work.” But I smiled, and so did he.
    “Hey, I’ve done my best.”
    As a young man in Manhattan, Max had apprenticed on the Broadway hit with Jerome Kern and became the great composer’s protégé. I didn’t know Max then, of course, though I’d faithfully haunted the rehearsals of Show Boat at the Ziegfeld Theater. A clever, gifted young man, he’d migrated to music from dance, even writing a ragtime hit for Sophie Tucker that no one now remembered. Jerome Kern liked him—a rarity, given the composer’s notorious isolation. Over the years Max found his most comfortable place with the frequent versions of Show Boat —in one excruciating form or another.
    Alice cleared her throat. “Edna, tell me how you two became friends. Max tells me a silly version…”
    Max had started to sip his wine but stopped, eyeing me over the rim of the glass, a twinkle in his eyes. “Absurd but true. Tell her, Edna.”
    “A preposterous beginning, I suppose,” I began. “The tryouts for Show Boat were in Washington D.C. A freezing November. Everyone was a nervous wreck. After all, Ziegfeld had done a slew of zany, popular musical revues, with leggy chorus girls and madcap vaudeville comedy skits. Here was a novelty—a musical play , with the music and routines built around a real story, in fact, based on genuine American history. We had no idea how it would go over. We didn’t anticipate the…the hysteria. A jam-packed play, too long, too much music, opening night it ran hours over, with people stamping their feet and roaring. ‘Ol’ Man River’ had them screaming out loud. When the audience left, exhausted, at nearly one in the morning, we were stunned. No one had left the theater early. The next morning the line for tickets wound around the block, and we knew we had a smash hit. But they had to slash music, dialogue, scenes.”
    Max jumped in. “I was inside cutting a scene, debating which music had to go, listening to Hammerstein curse us out and Kern tinkling the keys of a piano like a bratty child, so I took a break, strolling outside. And there, wrapped in a puffy shocking-red scarf, buried in a full-length mink coat, was Edna Ferber,