The Property of a Lady - Elizabeth Adler [215]
Maryland
“So, there we were,” Missie said to Cal, “living in the big house on Lexington with Rosa, Rachel, and the children, and instead of masterminding the studios Zev was acting like a father to them, taking Dick’s place. He went to their school meetings and inspected their report cards, got them tennis and swimming coaches and took them to baseball games. And more and more, he let Jakey Jerome take over Magic. At first Jakey used to make a great show of consulting him, but it soon became apparent that it didn’t matter what Zev said: He was running it his own way. Zev would go there two or three days a week to check production and sit in on the meetings they told him about, but he knew nothing about the other meetings—the secret ones.
“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