The Property of a Lady - Elizabeth Adler [207]
“She would seem quite normal and happy for long periods of time, and then there would be another crisis. Zev masterminded her career and she was an enormous star, and as long as he was in charge she never made a bad movie. But then the final disaster happened. She met Jakey Jerome—and Grigori Solovsky.”
“On screen Azaylee was always the open, sunny girl everyone adored, but in private life she seemed to have a penchant for bad characters—good-looking, pimplike men who exploited her. Jakey Jerome seemed different.
“He was short and ugly but with a kind of charm. He had a ready smile and was an easy conversationalist, and he worked at Magic as a scriptwriter. Not a great one, just a regular hack turning out reissues of other people’s ideas, but he was good at that. He worked hard and, unlike a lot of the other writers, he didn’t drink too much. Zev liked him well enough. It was he who introduced them, and he thought no more about it until he heard they had been seen together in a corner booth at the Brown Derby. But he still wasn’t really worried about Jakey. He knew he wasn’t Azaylee’s type.
“Their friendship progressed and she began to bring him to the house to visit us. We saw he treated her gently, not bullying her like the others, and he didn’t seem to want to use her. He hadn’t moved in with her as her boyfriends usually did. By this time Rachel was married to Dick Nevern and they had two children—boys. I often caught Azaylee looking at them longingly, and I felt so sorry for her because she knew she would always be childless. We began to wonder if this was serious, if she was really in love at last.
“Zev gave Jakey a new position as a script supervisor with a raise in salary, and the first thing he did was spend his entire month’s paycheck on a pair of antique Venetian mirrors Azaylee had admired in a store. She was so thrilled that he had bought her such a wonderful gift that she decided to have her sitting room redesigned around them. When it was finished she invited us to dinner, just Azaylee, Jakey, Zev, and myself.
“He was casual, easy, relaxed, and so was she. I thought I had never seen her look so well and I was grateful to him for being so good to her, helping her. It was 1937 and Azaylee was still only twenty-four years old, but of course she had been a star since she was sixteen. Jakey was twenty-nine and an unknown quantity. He never talked about his family except to say they were Jewish, that he was from Philadelphia, and that most of his family still lived in Poland.
“We admired the new all-white and crystal sitting room and the beautiful mirrors, and then Azaylee announced that Jakey wanted to say something. He stood up, cleared his throat, and then asked Zev formally for Azaylee’s hand in marriage—though of course he only knew her as ‘Ava.’ He was the perfect gentleman, deferential, even shy, though if you ever knew Jakey Jerome you would never believe that. Azaylee looked imploringly at me and said, ‘Oh, please, please, Missie, say yes …’ just the way she had when she had wanted to be in the movies. So of course we laughed and said yes and champagne was drunk and a wedding planned for October. A big one with all the trimmings. Azaylee seemed happy and completely rational, and we thought if Jakey could do that for her, then he would make her a good husband.
“After supper he said he had come across a script—a play, which he thought had the makings of a great musical. ‘How about letting Ava do it on Broadway first?’ he asked Zev. ‘And maybe do the movie later. That way you would have a double-header success. Besides, Ava says