All That Glitters (11 page)

In the old days there used to be a joke around the business: Frankie Adonis never took things lying down but Babe Austrian always did (big laff). Both were scrappers, both could take it as well as dish it out, and neither was a quitter. What followed, therefore, in the colorful career of Babe Austrian came not as a matter of course, but as the result of hard work on Frank’s part, as well as some shrewd maneuvering. There was all this talk that Babe was slipping; talk she’d slipped; talk that she was washed up. One month, in her fan-magazine column, Parsons took Babe to task in a typical Open Letter to a star in need of chastisement. (“What Can You Be Thinking Of, Ann Dvorak?” was one of Lolly’s choicer items, a spanking in print because Ann had been turning down parts and quarreling with her studio.) This letter of Lolly’s was entitled “Quo Vadis, Babe Austrian?” and it went:

“Dear Babe, Whatever is happening to you these days? That’s the question your many fans want to have answered. Whither goes thou, Babe? After saving our famous relic, AyanBee Studios, and making them more money than they’d seen in years, after adding to the everlasting glory of Leo the Lion in that too too funny Marx fellows picture, and now suddenly we have this parade of stinkeroos. What can you have been thinking of by doing
Son of a Gun
? And what can Frankie Adonis be thinking of, letting you appear in such a dud? If that’s a comedy I’m a monkey’s aunt!”

The letter went on in this vein, exhorting Babe to find a suitable script and get her act together: millions of people were just sitting and waiting for her to make them laugh again. What Lolly had not known at the time, nor had her colleague and rival, Hedda, was that even as the Fat One was typing out her letter, Frank Adonis had been doing just that; finding a good script for Babe. Sticking his neck way out, he was about to launch his own personal production, to star Babe in what was to become the classic
Camellia.

Louella might well have wondered where Frank was going to get the money to finance such a move, but Frank wasn’t telling. It wasn’t too long, however, before the news leaked out that he intended financing his picture in a co-production deal between some Mexican gamblers and some of his Vegas friends, including Al “Vegas” da Prima and da Prima’s pal “Ears” Satriano. There was a hitch in the proceedings, though—an “unfortunate” death aboard da Prima’s yacht, anchored off Ensenada, where he and some of the boys had been whooping it up with a covey of girls from Gina’s in Tijuana.

Da Prima’s current light-o’-love was none other than Babe’s stand-in, Patsy Doyle, who’d been running for Congress with the boys for some time. There was a fracas aboard the yacht, and the unlucky Patsy caught a bullet. Her body got washed up on Rosarita Beach, while the yacht hightailed it beyond the twelve-mile limit. Nobody paid much attention until the dizzy Louella came up with the garbled rumor that it wasn’t really Patsy who’d been shot, but Babe herself. When Frank heard this he merely laughed, reminding everyone that Babe was at that moment more than three thousand miles away, in South America. Louella was obliged to eat her column for breakfast. But then she turned around and stung Frank’s behind, charging that he was the one who’d deliberately started the rumor in the first place and that he’d done it as a cheap bid for some badly needed publicity to boost Babe’s sagging career.

Ever one to take potshots at Lolly, Hedda declared the whole thing a tempest in a teapot; she had the real scam: not only was Babe a continent away from the scene of the crime, but she was romantically involved with the Peruvian Tin King, Conçon “Rollo” de Hualada, with whom she was currently whooping it up down in Buenos Aires.

The movie business rejoiced that Babe hadn’t been the victim but, rather, her lowly stand-in, just another Hollywood trollop who’d got it through the heart with an Italian Biretta. Peroxide tootsies like Patsy were a dime a dozen, but to lose Babe Austrian and have her body washed up among the sand crabs, even though her career had been heading for Endsville—well, nobody wanted to see her go down the tubes. The unfortunate Patsy was buried near Caliente, where she loved to play the ponies, and is remembered mainly for her appearance among thirty other blonde chorines in a little opus called
Moonlight and Pretzels
, which hit the screens back in ’34.

Maybe Frank
had
actually begun the rumor; I wouldn’t have put it past him. By fair means or foul, a healthy boost was what he intended to give Babe’s career, though few knew then, as few know now, exactly how far he was willing to go to make it all pay off for Babe. You might say it had become a mania with him—that her star that had shone so brightly for so long should continue shining undimmed. And there was no doubt that she was badly in need of some rethinking. The aging process is generally accepted as being far more cruel on the female of the species than on the male, and this certainly was true for Babe, as for any other Hollywood sex symbol. Her career had been floundering, and it was a measure of Frank’s entrepreneurial shrewdness that he erased her from the scene at precisely the moment when such a removal was most appropriate, then returned her to the scene at an equally opportune moment.

However Frankie managed it, there was a media “leak,” noting that Babe Austrian had been seen several times in Buenos Aires being squired about by this Sr. Conçon de Hualada, and later visiting some of the hill villages whose narrow thoroughfares she negotiated in a white Rolls-Royce, a vehicle hardly likely to obscure her presence south of the border.

Speculation and wonderment again became rife as the old image of Babe Austrian suddenly took on a whole new aura. She was no longer the shopworn article the press had been making her out to be—passé, full-blown, even tarnished—but, rather, some striking, elusive creature whose voice and intonations were the more precious for having been lost to us for a period; a national treasure, the more highly to be cherished because she had lately been treated so indifferently, cast off like an old shoe.

Babe certainly was having a time of it with her Tin King, and the press had a field day. Her swain lapped up the headlines gladly, seemingly bent on keeping their names and pictures in the papers. They called him “Rollo” of the Argentine, and the “Calf of the Pampas,” suitable epithets, both. No beauty, Rollo was short and plump, he had a little twist of a mustache, and he enjoyed bowing and kissing ladies’ hands, Alphonse and Gaston rolled up in one. (Maude Antrim was heard to say that he looked like a cross between a May Company floorwalker and Thomas E. Dewey.) It was reported that in one month he’d sent Babe over seven thousand dollars’ worth of flowers. Harking back to earlier days when Babe was seen up and down Broadway in the limousine belonging to the butter-and-egg man from Ho-Ho-Kus, she was now to be viewed everywhere riding in Rollo’s Rolls-Royce, an amusing euphony which got plenty of play in the world press—which was exactly what Frankie wanted. For, despite all the doomsayers of Hollywood, he was determined to star Babe in his production of
Camellia
, a send-up version of the Dumas classic.

The matter of the feud between Babe and Garbo, reports of which filled the columns of
Photoplay
and
Screenland
—this, too, was the promotion of studio flacks. It all started with this hilarious take-off on Garbo’s famous
Camille.
If she had never played another role, her interpretation of the worldly, doomed courtesan would assure her a ranking place in cinema history, and the decision to spoof the film had obvious merits so far as the box office went. The by-now-hoary work of Alexandre Dumas
fils
had provided cinema fodder for the great Bernhardt when she was in her seventies; her death scene in the flickering celluloid is a moment of high camp in the way she spins her body like a top into the arms of her lover and then expires,
clunk
! Others had played the fated lady, too, but Greta Garbo had made it her own, and fifty years later there still is nothing dated or stagy in her performance—her every moment rings true and sure, imbued with a tragic irony. It was never Babe’s intention to hold her fellow artist up to ridicule, but merely to satirize the kind of archaic, hothouse flavor of the original work. With her familiar bag of tricks—the batting eyelashes, the rolling hips, the barroom tones—with the exaggerated curves of the period costumes, the whole overblown concept that made
Camellia
what it was, she produced a prodigious hit that remains the high point of her art.

It was also one of Hollywood’s first runaway productions; not a foot of film was rolled in town but, rather, all was shot at the Charabusco Studios in Mexico City, where Frank had set the star up in the villa of an ex-president of the country who’d taken it on the lam when a four-million-dollar deficit was suddenly discovered.

The country was delighted to play host to America’s famous blonde and gave her a warm welcome.
Sí Babe
!
Sí-sí-sí
!
Qué muchacha allegra
!
Olé Babe
!

“O-lay yourself,” came the goof-retort.

This “south of the border” period of Babe’s life marked the beginning of her whole later epoch, in which the canon was fully laid down that was to produce the legend. First came
Camellia
, then a new nightclub act, carefully planned and overseen by Frankie, and it was no shock to him at least when
Variety
’s report under “New Acts” hailed the appearance of Miss Babe Austrian at Las Floridianas in Acapulco as a noteworthy event.

The review appeared on the usual Wednesday, in typical
Variety
ese:

That blonde bombshell and glittering symbol of old-time show business, the intrepid and still-sexy Babe Austrian, hit the stage of Las Floridianas like a bolt of lightning. Spanked out in a blue spangled dress, coiffed and gemmed like the queen she is, she took stage center and belted number after number for a fast-paced fifty minutes that had the audience falling over itself to give her kudos. The array of flowers at the last were enough to see the Ali Khan married again. Among old faves were the Babe’s trademark, “Windy City Blues,” as well as “She Had to Go and Lose It at the Astor,” “I’se a-Muggins” (a borrow from old Thomas “Fats” Waller himself), and “When It’s Bedtime Down in Boom-Boom Town,” and certainly not for the kiddies’ ears.

Wearing a collection of dazzling gowns that would turn the eye of Josephine Baker, our Babe paraded herself before a hosanna-laden audience of international figures who were spellbound by the songs, dances, and yaks being handed them by this trouper, looking younger than springtime and twice as fresh. Her curtain speech is a masterpiece of witty rhetoric, it warms the heart and brings the act to a smash finale. Talk is she’ll next take it to London then Europe. On hand was Old Faithful himself, Frank Adonis, pulling the strings and bringing us a Babe we’ve hungered for. Oldtimers wept sentimental tears while tyro viewers applauded themselves silly. New Yorkers, cry your hearts out, ’cause the word is Babe ain’t a-comin’ home.

The review was signed “O’Brien,”
Variety
’s Mexico City stringer and an astute critic. People began sitting up to take notice. If Babe Austrian
had
retired, or in all seriousness intended to, that retirement had now ended and she was back doing business—that’s show business, folks! And it was that same act that was to form the cornerstone of the remainder of Babe’s life and career, which to my mind were one.

By the time Babe had fully reemerged, it was the spring of 1963. That winter I’d gone to North Africa to do a picture, and when I was finished shooting Jenny joined me in Morocco while I polished off my loops in a dingy sound studio in Madrid. Then we ventured across the Mediterranean, eventually heading for Rome, which at that time seemed to be the heart of the whole movie industry, and where Frank’s other clients, Kit Carson and April Rains, were already working on a major spectacle. It was no secret to anyone that Frank and April were seriously involved, and clearly there was trouble waiting in the wings. But as Jenny and I followed the spring north into Sicily, all was yellow daffodils and happy prospects. We put up at the Risorgimento in Taormina, waiting for Frank to arrive in Rome, where we were to join him. But first he had to stop in London to see to matters concerning Babe Austrian, the final, carefully planned step in her magical restoration.

Those were the four months which later became known to us as The Summer of the Purple Grape, token to the amounts of red Italian Valpolicella, Barolo, and Chianti Reserva that were consumed. Taken all in all, it was an unforgettable time, as bad as it was good, and we all came in for our share of headlines. When September came round, it found me on the Dalmatian Coast making another picture. Jenny was still with me, and when we finished we headed for London, where we sublet a coldwater flat behind Harrod’s while I waited out yet another film, to begin in Paris late that Winter. In the meantime Frank had arrived in England with Babe in tow, prior to her opening at the Café de Paris. All London was geared up for Babe’s appearance, Frankie having managed his promotional work well; the advance notices from Mexico and Lisbon were sufficient to stand the town on its ear. This was the time of the Beatles’ invasion from Merseyside, the time of “I Wanna Hold Your Hand” and “Puff (The Magic Dragon),” of miniskirts and Carnaby Street.

And now into the very heart of swinging London stepped that artifact of another, earlier age, Miss Babe Austrian. What had Frankie done? Why had he decided to bring her into that city at just that time? The international headliners of the period were the same ones we’d been seeing for years—Noel Coward, Marlene Dietrich, Danny Kaye, Judy at the Palladium—those surefire headliners who were like money in the bank to their managers, the scent of whom was like a sizzling T-bone steak to the public at large. Oh yes, Master Frank knew well what he was up to that winter when he came across with the Babe.

These are some of the things he did to promote his star—the same old star, but a whole new ballgame. First, he four-walled the old Maiden Lane Cinema for a month’s period prior to Babe’s club opening. He rented the space and put on his own sensational show, bringing to London ten of Babe’s best-known films, all the way from
Broadway Blue Eyes
, her first hit, to
Fiji Fifi
and the ill-fated
Windy City Blues
, along with the justly famous
Sheik of Araby
, not forgetting the three well-beloveds with Crispin Antrim,
Pretty Polly
,
Delicious
, and
Manhattan Madness.
Also to be viewed were
Peaches and Cream
,
USO Girl
, and
Mademoiselle de Paree,
those latter-day efforts that showed Babe in glorious Technicolor, films that hadn’t played London since the war. (Noticeably absent was
Dixie Belle
, her biggest flop.) All these to play simultaneously with the opening of
Camellia
in the West End. And to several evening screenings at the Maiden Lane Frankie invited a symposium of cinema buffs and critics who were admirers of Babe’s film work and voluble on the subject of her special brand of comedy.