Max (57 page)

‘Who is we?'

‘Sally, myself, Byron.'

‘Who gets my job?'

‘I do. We'll have the votes for it.'

‘You won't have them. I can still swing a majority.'

‘No. You see, you will give us a proxy voting right that gives us the majority. No negotiating, no bargaining. The stakes are too high, and we're prepared to go down to the wire. Either you agree, or we walk out of here and drive to the office of the district attorney of Los Angeles County, turn Humboldt's statement over to him, and initiate proceedings. At that point, it is doubtful that you can survive the scandal and continue to run the company. Life is not over, Max. You still come out worth over a hundred million dollars.'

‘Bert, Bert, you're a patient son of a bitch. How long have you been planning this?'

‘Ever since Ruby and Benny and Jake began to steal you blind. First I tried to warn you. Then I decided to use it. If Jake hadn't died, I would have sprung it next year.'

‘And now you and my darling Sally got it all.'

‘More or less.'

‘All right, Bert, you got it all, the whole kit and kaboodle. You also got Max Britsky on the other side, not a nice man to have as an enemy. So we'll see what the future brings. As of this moment, I don't want to talk to or look at either you or that bitch who's your partner. Freddy!'

The table had been silent, silent as a windless sea. Now Feldrrian said, ‘Yes, Max?'

‘Work up the papers for this shithead. Meeting's over.' And with that, he stalked out of the boardroom.

[
E L E V E N
]

 

Max passed away very quietly, sitting in the last row of the Bijou Theatre on West Broadway in New York City, about four o'clock in the afternoon in the year 1937. He was fifty-eight years old, and as the autopsy later revealed, he had two heart attacks of which he was probably unaware prior to the one that killed him. He died very quietly, in his seat as if he were asleep, and everyone said it was like Max to depart without putting anyone to very much trouble.

Max had left Los Angeles two weeks after the board of directors meeting in which Bert Bellamy replaced him as president of Britsky Productions. His friends had expected Max to mount some kind of counteroffensive which would undercut Bellamy and restore Max to leadership in the company, but nothing of the sort took place. Max packed his bags and left Los Angeles, and from that moment until the day he died, he did not see or speak to any member of his family, including his mother. Britsky Productions was one of the few stocks that rode through Black Thursday and the Depression that followed with scarcely a tremor, and Max was never in want of funds. Indeed, he was quite wealthy. He took a suite of rooms at the old Murray Hill Hotel at Park Avenue and Thirty-ninth Street, and he never returned to Los Angeles. He made no attempt to return to the film business, nor did he interest himself in any other financial venture. He walked a good deal, always fascinated by the city which had produced him, astonished by the changes that had taken place while he was away. He joined the Players club, and he became a familiar figure in the lounge, a small man in a large leather chair, reading his newspaper, smoking a cigar, and sipping at a glass of beer. But he invited no intimacy, and aside from the handful of people who knew him, he was left alone.

He went to most of the openings, both plays and film, and always with an attractive woman, usually middle-aged, on his arm. The women were old friends from the days of the New York studios – bit players, supporting players, women who had been married and divorced, married and abandoned, and sometimes never married, just kicked from pillar to post – but they all enjoyed being with Max, because he spent freely and he was never judgmental and he never rubbed salt into open wounds; and some of them were a little bit in love with him but also aware that he was alone and would remain so.

About once a year, in the beginning, Sam Snyder or Freddy Feldman would come into town, and Max would take one or the other to a good restaurant and hear the news from the Coast. But a few years after Max came East, Feldman left the studio and Sam Snyder decked Bert Bellamy as a result of an argument on the studio street. For all his fat, Snyder was a powerful man, and Bellamy suffered a cut face and lost a tooth, and while he did not bring assault charges against Snyder, it was plain that Snyder's tour at the lot was over. Snyder retired, set up his own workshop, and made several significant improvements in the camera. Fred Feldman opened his own legal firm in Los Angeles, and Clifford Abel burned down the design studio at the lot and then went off on an around-the-world cruise. It was never proven that he had torched the place, but it was a sort of open secret.

In America, the public has a very short memory, and no one was too curious about what had happened to Max Britsky. He preferred it that way. If he had gone to a psychiatrist, he would have learned that he was living in a state of depression, but then he probably would have denied it. He would have pointed out that he did not feel particularly depressed, but neither was he very interested in anything. Since the last years of his life were Depression years, he was constantly approached for money. He never turned down a request for a charitable contribution, and he always had a coat pocket loaded with half-dollars, whereby he was known to every panhandler between Park Avenue and Ninth Avenue and south from Forty-second Street. Curiously enough, he died intestate. His fortune had shrunk to a few hundred thousand dollars – understandable, since he had Fred Feldman continue payments to his mother at the rate of five hundred dollars a week and since he had given away several million dollars.

After Max died, a reporter from the
New York Times
was sent to see Clifford Abel, who had returned to New York. Abel was sixty-two. He was quite wealthy and too old, he felt, to return to architecture. He opened a studio and looked around for Broadway plays he might design. The reporter found him at his studio.

‘We're trying to put something more than the ordinary obit together about Max Britsky. I understand you knew him well?'

‘You might say that. I met Max in nineteen twelve. For the next fifteen years we worked together. Max was not an easy man to know – I mean deeper than the surface. I would say that in his entire life, he had only two very close friends, myself and Sam Snyder.'

‘You liked him?'

‘Adored him, respected him. He was a great man utterly without any sense of his own greatness.'

‘I wish you would explain that.'

‘I'll try,' Abel said. ‘But you must think of Max as I thought of him. I saw Max, not in that damn blue serge he always wore, but in a damask robe over silk and satin. He sits upon a white horse and wears a turban pinned with diamonds and rubies, and he is followed by twelve sumpter beasts loaded with silks and spices and other things wonderful. Well, that's a bit fanciful; let me bring it down to earth. Max brought something new into the world, and because of him, for better or worse, the world will never be the same again. Oh, I know there were others, but Max was always a step ahead. Of how many men can that be said?'

A Biography of Howard Fast

Howard Fast (1914–2003), one of the most prolific American writers of the twentieth century, was a bestselling author of more than eighty works of fiction, nonfiction, poetry, and screenplays. Fast's commitment to championing social justice in his writing was rivaled only by his deftness as a storyteller and his lively cinematic style.

Born on November 11, 1914, in New York City, Fast was the son of two immigrants. His mother, Ida, came from a Jewish family in Britain, while his father, Barney, emigrated from the Ukraine, changing his last name to Fast on arrival at Ellis Island. Fast's mother passed away when he was only eight, and when his father lost steady work in the garment industry, Fast began to take odd jobs to help support the family. One such job was at the New York Public Library, where Fast, surrounded by books, was able to read widely. Among the books that made a mark on him was Jack London's
The Iron Heel
, containing prescient warnings against fascism that set his course both as a writer and as an advocate for human rights.

Fast began his writing career early, leaving high school to finish his first novel,
Two Valleys
(1933). His next novels, including
Conceived in Liberty
(1939) and
Citizen Tom Paine
(1943), explored the American Revolution and the progressive values that Fast saw as essential to the American experiment. In 1943 Fast joined the American Communist Party, an alliance that came to define—and often encumber—much of his career. His novels during this period advocated freedom against tyranny, bigotry, and oppression by exploring essential moments in American history, as in
The American
(1946). During this time Fast also started a family of his own. He married Bette Cohen in 1937 and the couple had two children.

Congressional action against the Communist Party began in 1948, and in 1950, Fast, an outspoken opponent of McCarthyism, was called before the House Un-American Activities Committee. Because he refused to provide the names of other members of the Joint Anti-Fascist Refugee Committee, Fast was issued a three-month prison sentence for contempt of Congress. While in prison, he was inspired to write
Spartacus
(1951), his iconic retelling of a slave revolt during the Roman Empire, and did much of his research for the book during his incarceration. Fast's appearance before Congress also earned him a blacklisting by all major publishers, so he started his own press, Blue Heron, in order to release
Spartacus
. Other novels published by Blue Heron, including
Silas Timberman
(1954), directly addressed the persecution of Communists and others during the ongoing Red Scare. Fast continued to associate with the Communist Party until the horrors of Stalin's purges of dissidents and political enemies came to light in the mid-1950s. He left the Party in 1956.

Fast's career changed course in 1960, when he began publishing suspense-mysteries under the pseudonym E. V. Cunningham. He published nineteen books as Cunningham, including the seven-book Masao Masuto mystery series. Also,
Spartacus
was made into a major film in 1960, breaking the Hollywood blacklist once and for all. The success of
Spartacus
inspired large publishers to pay renewed attention to Fast's books, and in 1961 he published
April Morning
, a novel about the battle of Lexington and Concord during the American Revolution. The book became a national bestseller and remains a staple of many literature classes. From 1960 onward Fast produced books at an astonishing pace—almost one book per year—while also contributing to screen adaptations of many of his books. His later works included the autobiography
Being Red
(1990) and the
New York Times
bestseller
The Immigrants
(1977).

Fast died in 2003 at his home in Greenwich, Connecticut.

Fast on a farm in upstate New York during the summer of 1917. Growing up, Fast often spent the summers in the Catskill Mountains with his aunt and uncle from Hunter, New York. These vacations provided a much-needed escape from the poverty and squalor of the Lower East Side's Jewish ghetto, as well as the bigotry his family encountered after they eventually relocated to an Irish and Italian neighborhood in upper Manhattan. However, the beauty and tranquility Fast encountered upstate were often marred by the hostility shown toward him by his aunt and uncle. “They treated us the way Oliver Twist was treated in the orphanage,” Fast later recalled. Nevertheless, he “fell in love with the area” and continued to go there until he was in his twenties.