Downtown Strut: An Edna Ferber Mystery (Edna Ferber Mysteries) Read Free

slipping into a tan Chesterfield overcoat.
    But in that moment I noticed Bella narrowing her eyes at Ellie, her mouth set in a grim line, though she immediately turned and touched Roddy’s elbow, so quick a gesture as to seem accidental. Lawson, buttoning his coat, stepped toward her.
    Suddenly, jarringly, there was a confident rat-a-tat on my door, just as Rebecca stepped back into the room. “Mr. Harris is here to see you, Miss Edna. Joseph told him you were back. I insisted you’d just got back…” She paused. “Well, he…”
    The rapping on the door swelled, insistent. An impatient man, this Jed Harris, a man used to getting his way. Rebecca hurried to open the door, and Jed stood there, one knee slightly bent, one hand cradling his feathered fedora against his chest, the other fanning a sheaf of papers. For some reason there was a scowl on his face. He stepped into the foyer, barely glanced into the room, his back turned away from the staring young folks, dismissive. “Edna, I was gonna leave the dialogue changes downstairs but the doorman said you’d returned.” He frowned. “You didn’t tell me you were coming back so soon.”
    I made a joke of it. “You didn’t get my wire?” But his face was tight, the eyes unblinking. “I was tired, Jed. I…”
    He kept frowning. “Thought I’d hand them to you, explain the changes. I think my changes are important .” A sly grin covered his face. “I know you don’t like changes to your words, but Ann Andrews can’t deliver some of your complicated…” He stopped and for the first time turned to look at the young folks in the living room, all of them staring at him. He wasn’t happy. “But it looks like you’re having a party.” He fairly snarled the line.
    “Parties only begin when you arrive, Jed.”
    He narrowed his eyes. “That’s because I’m the only person I enjoy talking to.”
    One of the young girls laughed—I think it was Harriet—and Jed flinched, threw a smoldering look in her direction.
    “Leave the pages with me,” I told him. “We’ll talk later.”
    He didn’t like that. He stepped back, deliberately lit a cigarette, and proceeded to blow thin wisps of blue-gray smoke into the air, purposely creating crude circles that escaped from his lips and drifted to the ceiling. A performance, I thought—one from a pouting child. “Sure,” he whispered, and I knew from experience that his whispers were dangerous.
    Jed was the brash, young producer of The Royal Family , and already he’d provided George and me with frayed nerves, bilious indigestion, and the occasional insidious migraine that puts me in bed for a day. The new and improved wunderkind of Broadway, Jed Harris had experienced an unparalleled string of recent SRO hits with the likes of Coquette and the urbane Broadway , and he insisted that The Royal Family was the ultimate hat trick.
    An insomniac, he also had the misguided habit of phoning me at three or four in the morning to discuss cast changes, the disgruntled stage crew, his detestation of the actors—he famously announced that intelligence was wasted on actors—and his disaffection with my co-playwright George Kaufman. I put up with it a few times, but finally demanded he stop. With someone else, I’d have slammed down the receiver the first time he called, indignant; but Jed Harris, with the low tantalizing voice, had a way of charming me. Glib, suave, using that mesmerizing voice, he kept me on the line. Foolishly, I let him. He wooed me. I let him. I disliked the power the man had over me, and I disliked the fact that I found him—well, appealing. No one else liked him, a situation he relished. He cultivated hostility like a gardener who coveted only weeds. Ina Claire once resoundingly slapped him in the face, which immediately qualified her for Great White Way sainthood. People feared him.
    But a whole part of me got quiet and scattered whenever he was around. I was too old for such puerile shenanigans. The