The Property of a Lady (65 page)

“Since she had left the clinic after the incident with Solovsky, Azaylee had never answered to that name again. She really became ‘Ava Adair,’ and it seemed she had left all her problems behind with her old name. She was making film after film and Zev warned Jakey he was squeezing her dry, putting her into the same thing over and over again; only the titles and the leading men ever really changed. ‘She needs a new style, a new look,’ he told him after viewing the rushes of her latest epic. ‘She’s got more to offer than just her beauty.’

“But Jakey just shrugged. ‘That’s what the public wants,’ he said. ‘They’re lapping it up.’

“When Zev mentioned it to Azaylee she just gave him that vague smile and said Jakey must know what he was doing, and then she rushed off again to rehearse for some charity concert she had promised to take part in.

“After the war was over movies seemed to change, even the musicals were different, there was a harder edge to them. Her latest movie was a flop and lost Magic some phenomenal sum. Zev was really angry and called Jakey into his office to explain, but he just blamed it on her. He said she had refused to change with the times and insisted on playing it her way.

“They had a wonderful house on Crescent Drive and Jakey loved to give parties. We would put in an occasional appearance at their Sunday poolside brunches, and I couldn’t help noticing how things had changed. When they first met, Azaylee had been unattainable for a man like Jakey. She was the beautiful star—and the stepdaughter of C. Z. Abrams—while he was the unattractive, untalented, broke young scriptwriter with his feet on the shaky first rung of the Hollywood ladder. Now he was the Hollywood movie mogul, squat, loud, and flashy in his Italian silk suits and his big cigar. And she had become the movie actress with the reputation of being unstable, eclipsed by a new generation of beautiful starlets who would stop at nothing on their climb to success. And there were always plenty of those around at Jakey’s parties.

“He treated her more brusquely, cutting her off in the middle of sentences, turning away from her as if she weren’t there. Or he would ignore her all afternoon, chatting to everyone else, the jolly host full of bonhomie. And Zev heard stories that he was out most nights at ‘poker games,’ or at least that’s where he told her he was.

“Life jogged along for a few more years. Zev and I were still as happy as the day we had married, and because of the war I thought that finally the threat from the Cheka had ended, that by now they must have forgotten all
about the Ivanoffs. I pushed it to the back of my mind and tried to forget.

“In the spring of 1950 Zev and I decided to take a trip to Europe. It was the holiday of a lifetime: London, Paris, Rome. My early memories of Oxford clashed with 1950s reality and I barely recognized it, only the colleges were the same. But I found our old house, and the professor who lived there kindly allowed me to look around. At least that hadn’t changed much—even Papa’s worn old chair was still there. When I told him how I remembered climbing on to my father’s knee on that very chair, the professor kindly gave it to me and I had it shipped back to California. My father was buried in Russia so there was no grave or other memory there for me. It was just another ghost laid to rest from the past.

“We arrived back in California feeling wonderful. Zev was rested and completely revitalized. After the war when the full horrors of the concentration camps were revealed, he had donated large sums of money to international charities and had given most of his time to supporting them. Now he said he was going to get back into the business again. He was going to take back control of Magic and run it his way.

“The telephone rang as we walked through the door and I picked it up and said hello.

“’Matiushka
, ‘she said, ’ it’s Azaylee.” It was the first time she had called herself that in twelve years, and I knew it meant trouble.

“We went over to see her right away. She was sitting on a sofa with her legs tucked under her, twisting a handkerchief in her hands, and she looked pale and shrunken and afraid.

“She stared at Zev as if he were a ghost. ‘You don’t look ill!’ she exclaimed.

“‘Of course I’m not ill,’ he said with a laugh. ‘I’ve never felt better in my life.’

“‘Oh, thank God!’ A look of relief replaced the tension
on her face and she smiled. ‘After what Jakey was saying I thought you were dying….’

“He sat beside her and took her hand. ‘And what is Jakey saying?’

“’That you are getting old, that your era has come and gone, that it’s time for new blood in Magic’s veins. He said you’ve slowed down, that you have some mysterious illness no one wants to talk about. I overheard it at a poker game he held here a few weeks ago. It wasn’t the usual sort of poker game. There were important men there, money men….’ She looked at him, as clear-eyed and alert as I’d ever seen her, and said, Oh, my God, Zev, now I see what he’s doing, now I see why he’s telling everyone you are sick…. He wants Magic!’

“Word flew around Hollywood that C. Z. Abrams was ill. He hadn’t gotten where he was in the business without making enemies, and now they were snapping at his heels like a pack of wolves eager to snatch the prey from their rival. Jakey had played a dirty maneuvering game. Magic was a corporation with millions in assets, mostly their lot on Cahuenga, but as their movies—and the business—got bigger, so did their borrowings. Jakey had been in control for the past few years, and he had been switching the company’s business to new banks he told Zev were eager to finance the big productions he had in mind. He had become very friendly with a particular young banker, Alan Rackman, who was always there with the big loan when he needed it.

“Jakey told Zev that Magic was in trouble. Their year’s profits had fallen by sixty percent but not only that, the accountants said that large sums of money were unaccounted for: They had ‘gone missing.’ He said it was a good thing Zev was back because they needed to talk to him urgently. When Zev asked about the stories that he was ‘ill,’ he said he’d just been repeating what he’d heard around town—he’d even read it in
Daily Variety
. And there it was: ‘C. Z. Abrams dashes to Europe for treatment
for a mystery “illness.” Worries about brain tumor said to be affecting his business decisions.’

“It went on to say how Magic’s performance had been declining since the long absence of its chairman, along with the death of Dick Nevern, but that despite rumors of hefty financial trouble, its president, Jakey Jerome, was going ahead with production of three major movies that season as planned.

“Everything happened quickly after that. Jakey’s friend Rackman, the banker, accused Zev of diverting large sums of company money to his ‘charities,’ insinuating that they were not charities at all but had simply ended up in Zev’s foreign bank accounts. He produced ‘doctored’ checks on Magic’s accounts to prove it. It was what they used to call in gangster movies a ‘frame-up,’ but they were piling up the evidence against him as well as citing loss of competence and accusing him of being responsible for the company’s financial disasters, even though Jakey had been running the company for the past few years. They even threatened to cite senility as a cause of his supposed ‘actions.’

“‘It would be a hell of a scandal, C. Z.,’ Jakey said smoothly. ‘The headlines alone would kill you, even if you spent ten years trying to prove none of it was true. And it would kill Magic. Why don’t you just give in gracefully and let us run the company? You’ve had your day—now it’s mine.’

“Zev stared at his grinning face and he wanted to punch his teeth right down his throat, but he knew it wasn’t worth it. He suddenly realized that Jakey had never loved Azaylee, it had all been an act. That’s what you wanted right from the beginning, wasn’t it?” he said.

“Jakey stared back at him with that cocky grin. ‘You betcha!’ he replied.

“The next day Zev announced his resignation as chairman of Magic. Filmmaking was not the way it used to be in the beginning, now it was all big corporations, television,
takeovers, and money men. He wanted no part of it. He had bought a winery years ago and now he decided to take an interest in that.

“Nothing was ever heard about any enormous sums of money supposedly ‘missing’ from Magic’s accounts, and Alan Rackman was appointed as the new president with Jakey as chairman. Suddenly Magic had all the money it needed and Jakey had exactly what he wanted.”

Missie smiled sadly as she looked at Cal and said, “That’s why C. Z. Abrams died a forgotten man. And Jakey Jerome became a legend in his own time.”

“Azaylee walked out on him. She stayed at the Lexington Drive house alone except for her dogs and the servants. Jakey barred her from Magic’s lot and sued for divorce, claiming she was mentally unstable. It was the cruelest thing he could have done and he knew it, but he didn’t want any counterclaim and he also knew she could not contest it.

“The divorce went through quickly but it certainly hit the headlines, and there were those awful pictures of her hiding behind dark glasses and a big hat, looking as if she were playing a role in a bad movie. Of course she cracked under the strain and ended up in another clinic, and once again we had to try to put her back together. Eventually, when she was allowed home, she went to live with Rachel and her boys at their new house in Beverly Hills. Rosa had finally married again, a builder by trade, and had gone to live in San Diego. And Zev and I were at the winery in northern California.

“He had bought it years before as an ‘investment’ but it had never made a penny, and we used to laugh about how bad the wine was. Now, with Magic gone and nothing to occupy his mind, he decided to take it up again. But being Zev he was going to do it properly, just the way he had with the movies. He wanted to learn everything about
making wine so of course that meant another trip to France to see how it was done there.

“We went to all the big châteaux, and I was thrilled to see how quickly he put his mind away from Hollywood and concentrated on his new business. Without Magic and Zev’s enormous salary we were no longer as rich as we had been, and we decided to sell Lexington Drive and build ourselves a new house on a hill overlooking our five hundred acres of vineyards. While work was going on we lived in a little ranch house and Zev went to work every day with his estate manager to watch the planting of his new French vines. He had a ten-year plan and then he said the world would really start to hear about California wines, especially ‘C. Z. Vineyards.’

“He liked to drive over there in the evenings to show me how his new little vines were growing. He was so proud of them, I swear he knew every single one. The climate is different in northern California, especially in those long valleys where you get a chill wind, like the French mistral, blowing in from the northwest. Zev still behaved as if he were living in the south and rarely wore a jacket or a sweater. One night when we went to the vineyards and strolled around as we usually did, chatting about the crop and the type of wine he wanted to produce, I saw him shiver in the wind. It was October and really quite raw, and I wanted to leave. But there was just one more thing he wanted to show me and then another and another. The next day he came down with a bad cold, shivering and coughing, and that evening his temperature shot up. I called the doctor and he said it was bronchitis and it looked bad, and then it turned to pneumonia.

“They took him to hospital and shot him full of the new wonder drug—penicillin—but he didn’t improve. I sat by his bedside holding his hand and I knew he was dying. We had known each other for thirty-four years and had been married for twenty-three of them. The happiest years of my life, even with all their problems.

“They put tubes in his throat to help him breathe but they could not cure him, and it only made him more distressed because now he couldn’t speak. I knew what he wanted to say and I said it for him. ‘I love you too, Zev,’ I told him. ‘We will always love each other.’

“I took his body back to Hollywood and buried him there, the place where he had found himself as a man. It was where he belonged. His death rated a headline in
Variety
and a long obituary listing his achievements, and they were charitable enough to say that he had retired from his role as Magic’s Chairman for ‘health reasons’ and not mention Jakey’s takeover. But he had always been a man who shied away from publicity, and his death didn’t merit more than an odd column in the international press. I thought the ceremony would be a small one but I was astonished how many people showed up. Zev was well respected and liked, and he had more friends in the business than he knew. I still think if he had fought Jakey his friends would have supported him and he would have won. But Jakey Jerome was a street fighter and he knew exactly how to kick a man where it hurt him most psychologically.

“I was left a fairly rich widow, and I sold the vineyard and bought a small, rambling ranch-style house in the suburb of Encino in the San Fernando Valley. I bred borzois and played bridge and involved myself in charity work. And I tried to keep Azaylee out of trouble.

“She had always been so professional and the rumors were cruel, they said that without C. Z. and Magic behind her she was no good. They said she was drinking—but it wasn’t true, she was just Azaylee again, instead of Ava Adair. She drifted between her two personas, and the studios never knew what to expect from her. One day she would be fine, the next she couldn’t even remember what she was supposed to be doing. But she was still very beautiful and there were always men. And in bad times, the clinic.

“She was in the Valley Loma Clinic when I went to see her one day in 1959. She had not worked for several years, and I always took care of her medical expenses. I didn’t want Azaylee to be burdened with money worries on top of everything else. She had been in and out of the clinic on an almost monthly basis that year, fluctuating between bouts of riotous living and deep depression.

“She was sitting in a wicker chair on the porch and I sat beside her. She smiled at me as I gave her the roses I had brought and said, ‘Hello,
matiushka
. Guess what? I’m pregnant.’