All That Glitters (2 page)

Speaking of heat, today it would soften an interstate highway. Not a healthy, bright heat, like a hot Fourth of July in Missouri, not even the humid heat of the Eastern Seaboard in August, but a thick, greasy heat, rancid, like oleomargarine on a slab of moldy bread. Cut it with a knife. Look at the way those gardenias are already wilting around the bier. I notice how the priest is managing a little savvy. He’s donned smoked glasses, along with the rest of us. They look good on him, too, real Movieland stuff. The smog gets to us all, even Holy Mother Church. And even the limo drivers in their badly wrinkled suits of sweaty broadcloth leaning against the black cars lined up along the curve are wearing them. Surely this isn’t merely Babe Austrian’s funeral; they must be sodding down some Mafia chieftain, a
capo da capo.
I’m reminded of the demise of Frank’s famous mobster pal, Bugsy Siegel, lo these thirty years ago; funny, wasn’t it, how Frankie left Bugsy at the rented residence of Miss V. Hill a scant six minutes before the guns began blasting away. I mean, he was
out
of there—had a hot date, otherwise he’d have been perforated, too.

As I understand it, Bob Hope’s been asked to say a few words today
in memoriam.
This is good, I think. Babe should not be laid to rest without a touch of Hopian gallows humor—Babe always loved a good gag. Did she ever! Glancing around among the somber and attentive faces, I see Phyllis Diller’s; she appears to have the church giggles, as befits. Oh, Phyllis, if you only knew. Dean Martin is as tanned as a cigar-store Indian, but looks strangely sober and a bit sheepish. Dino loved the Babe. Does he want a drink? I wonder. I know I do. And I’m A. A.

My wandering mind tends to wonder what those two news hens–gosspists, Hedda Hopper and Louella Parsons, would have made of this scene. Hedda, née Elda Fury of Altoona, Pennsylvania, was a terror, a badly biased “reporter” of Hollywood Didos, but I think she’d have gotten a bang out of this ersatz pageantry. (Hedda was sharp as the proverbial tack; Lolly, usually sauced, never knew her spigots from her sprockets; but both had long been amused by Babe Austrian, as indeed who among us gathered here was not?)

Bob has finished his bit and now they’re wheeling the coffin away. It’s on a cart something like a hospital gurney; its wheels squeak. Into the crypt goes Babe, just like your stock certificates and the family jewels. Everybody’s splitting now, can’t wait to get home to the pool. A vodka-tonic awaits. I bet even the priest could go for a tall, frosty Tom Collins about now. Spike heels are sinking into the turf all over the place. Notice how everybody’s talking at once? Nobody’s wiping any eyes or blowing any noses or going prostrate from grief. George Burns dies, you cry a little, maybe. “Poor George, we’ll sure miss him,” sniff, sniff. But not with Babe Austrian. With Babe you say, “What a great old broad,” and you drag out one of the old jokes—“Babe Austrian’s car breaks down, see, and there’s this hick farmer driving a load of hay, see, and so Babe says, ‘Hay, fellow—’”

Like that.

When I was six or seven I heard my first Babe Austrian joke. My brother told it to me; we were sliding down the cellar hatchway doors and I got a sliver in my behind. And I saw my first actual picture of her on the back of a Dixie Cup cover. I peeled off the paper disk with its tab and there she was, an ice-cream icon, radiantly platinum, flashing those pearly-whites, with this prominent pair of tits, curvy in a way that gave seven-year-olds big ideas, not that we could do anything about it…

I saw my first feature movie in the year 1931. Babe Austrian was not in it. Jackie Cooper was. I was led by the gentle, callused hand of our hired girl, Jessie, following my older brother with his hand in my mother’s, across the marble lobby of the Loew’s Poli Theatre, the premier movie palace of our city, whose wondrously tall mirrors reflected glittering sights I had never thought to see in this lifetime. I have vivid impressions of crystal chandeliers, dripping prisms, a bubbling fountain, also marble, a grand staircase, broad, with many narrow steps and brass railings polished to a gleaming finish, and standing easels advertising scenes of garish or alluring form from the Coming Attractions. In the eye of memory, that movie lobby seems large as the municipal railroad station waiting room, and as glamorous as the Hall of Mirrors at Versailles.

Our arrival at the Poli Theatre had been timed to coincide with the commencement of the early-evening show. My father was to meet us there after business hours, but when we got to the theatre he was nowhere to be seen and Mother said we would just go ahead on in. Walking past the discreetly located candy counter (no popcorn at Poli’s—yet), we encountered a broad bank of closed brass-framed doors, at one of which an usher appeared, dressed in a nifty bellboy’s red uniform with frogging and gold buttons, a navy-blue stripe down each trouser leg, and a trim pillbox on the side of his head anchored by a strap under his chin, and reeking of aplomb. When the door closed behind us, I found myself drowning in the most palpable darkness I had ever experienced. The newsreel was on. I instantly panicked; my ears were assaulted by the deafening sounds of rapid gun and cannon fire, while a soundtrack voice accompanied by imposing blasts of music intoned a majestic narration (I think the Japanese had invaded Manchuria that spring), and I clung the tighter to Jessie’s hand.

Another usher, picking out the way by the discreet pencil beam of flashlight, conducted us past the top of the first aisle, across the rear of the theatre to the farther aisle, where I glimpsed my first sound-film image: a heap of civilian corpses in a blasted railroad station. Still clutching Jessie’s hand, I followed obediently down the sloping, carpeted aisle to perhaps midway, where the pencil light directed us to four seats at the side. The others went in first, I the last, with the aisle seat saved for my father. As my eyes adjusted to this velvet void, I became aware of rows of human heads protruding in front of me, and wildly leaping images on the screen that seemed to my young mind scrambled, almost abstract, and it was all I could do to look, so overwhelmingly huge did they seem, so filled with light and shadow, so far beyond my powers to conjure or imagine.

At length the newsreel ended and I felt a sense of relief and a return to some sort of reality as the curtain closed across the screen and the footlights came up to warm the spangled pleats in shades of pink. Patrons filed out; others entered and were seated. As I gazed about, I saw theatre boxes above, to right, and to left, and a lofty rococo ceiling whose gorgeousness in retrospect defies description. I recall giant frescoes sprawled across that blue plaster expanse with gods and goddesses contending
à la
Tiepolo in Venetian grandeur. The plasterwork was a riot of rococo and there was a giant chandelier hanging down from the center of the medallion.

As I was staring up at this astonishing sight, the lights went slowly down again and I was once more plunged into that overwhelming, womb-like darkness. Always sensitive to my moods, Jessie patted my hand reassuringly and slipped a comforting arm around me, drawing me close as though firming me up for greater shocks to come. Then, while the curtains were still closed, a pattern or design was flashed on the folds of material, which, as they began to travel apart to a fanfare of music, revealed more and more clearly on the white screen the image of a bearded lion that moved its head and gave off ferocious roars. Was this lion real? I believed it not to be, yet it seemed very real to me at that instant. The lion’s head was framed by a circlet of scroll-like tapes with lots of little print that I couldn’t read. Poli’s played only MGM and Fox pictures, and already the
Ars Gratia Artis
of Metro-Goldwyn-Mayer was impressed on my fevered brain.

On this particular occasion we were on hand to be entertained by the MGM studio’s latest hit release,
Fanny and Kiddo.
The film starred the famous acting team of Crispin and Maude Antrim as well as Jackie Cooper, and it was solely because of Master Cooper that we were present at all; in 1931 young boys could be taken to see Jackie Cooper more or less with impunity. He had a grin like a yard of picket fence, and he could cry buckets; I never saw a kid-actor cry the way Jackie Cooper could. Our second movie was
Oliver Twist
, our third
Skippy
, to be succeeded by a seemingly endless string of “literary” offerings—
Great Expectations
,
David Copperfield
, and the like, with maybe a
Tom Sawyer
or a
Huckleberry Finn
tossed in for good measure. Though he never held any great brief for the movies, Dad nonetheless believed in “the classics,” and he believed that Jackie Cooper was a Good Influence.

But where
was
Dad? The credits were unrolling and still he was nowhere to be seen. Even my mother, usually the soul of calm, evinced signs of anxiety and was peering over my shoulder. I saw her relieved smile; and I looked up as a tall figure, picked out in the reflected light falling from the screen, materialized out of the darkness and slid into the empty seat beside me. How had Dad found us in that enormous cave of night? Wasn’t that clever of him? He gave my thigh a friendly squeeze, set his straw hat with its jaunty band of maroon-and-navy-blue grosgrain on my lap, and with a wink turned his Arrow Collar Man profile up to the screen, and at that same moment, returning my attention to the picture, I experienced the miracle of movies as I saw and heard my first talking actor. Jackie Cooper, aged ten, was talking to a confederate as they went about setting a pail of whitewash on the doortop—the idea being to drench the enemy—but the plan went awry when “the colored maid” entered instead. She let out a scream as she was doused with the stuff, and Jackie and his chum ran off. As I said, a miracle.

Anyway,
Fanny and Kiddo
, adapted from the children’s classic of the same name by Ginna Josepha Johnson, was a step up in Jackie’s budding career, while Maude Antrim was essaying one of her first “older” parts. Maude played the part of Fanny Mallotte, owner-manager of a traveling show, and her equally famous husband, Crispin, played the part of a carnival barker. As I recall it, I was able to follow the simple story with little trouble. Fanny comes across Kiddo (Jackie) crooking money from the box-office till and, rather than snitching on him, she endeavors to make a good boy of him. After many misadventures, Kiddo turns over a new leaf and at the fade-out, wearing an Eton collar and a cap with a tassel, he marches off to school to learn how to be a man while Fanny bids him a tearful farewell at the picket gate.

We had no time to be disappointed at the end of the movie, for there immediately followed the Coming Attractions, wherein I was first exposed to the actress the world has come to know as Claire Regrett. She wasn’t a star then, just a featured player in a Warner Baxter movie, and I could read the bannerline printing that leaped out at me: “Hollywood’s up-and-coming star—Claire Regrett at her temptingest!” (I heard my father groan at this solecism.) “This woman is bad but dying to be good,” said the announcer; then there was a brief shot of Claire in the gutter, being helped to her feet by Warner Baxter, followed by: “Sinner or saint? Only God knew the truth.” Then she’s in church talking about becoming a nun and I hear Dad groan again and he puts a hand over his eyes.

Finally he leaped up and jerked his head at us, and we dutifully followed him up the aisle and out into the spring darkness. We didn’t even get a soda at the ice-cream parlor next door, but were summarily paraded to the car, parked nearby. If it hadn’t been for Claire and the preview, we’d have had ice cream, and I held this grudge against her for a long time to come. Instead, we were hustled home, where Jessie had a shepherd’s pie on
Lo
in the oven, then packed off to bed. And for the next thirty-five years I don’t recall ever watching another movie in the company of my father, until it was me up there, and even then he was hardly what you’d call “keen.”

Quite simply, he didn’t like the movies. A rabid individualist, he wasn’t susceptible to their charms, and his shrewd Yankee intellect pierced the best of their obvious artifice and sham. Movies
were
sappy. Even as children we knew that the stories were mostly lousy, the actors lousier. But what we
did
know—and my father may have also vaguely realized, but didn’t care to admit—was that the movies were here to stay.

In particular, his opinion of movie actresses was low, you could even say narrow-minded. Those he condemned ranged from Theda Bara to Joan Crawford to Jean Harlow, for her bra-less interpretations of tin-plate blondes, and, of course, Claire Regrett, for her boilerplate sluts and easy-virtue ladies. “A glorified lingerie model,” he called her. He didn’t even like Fedora, something I
never
understood. I don’t think he actually even saw her in anything, certainly not her sound films, but he considered her screen image scandalous. Fedora was a femme fatale like Pola Negri and the rest of that spiderwebby sisterhood. Two screen females he could stomach: Sonja Henie and Minnie Mouse.

Nevertheless, within four or five years after that first dip into the movies I knew the inside of every first-run house in the central city area, the Poli (MGM and AyanBee, later 20th Century-Fox), the Poli Palace (in the next block north on Main, where the holdovers played), the Strand (Warners and RKO), the Allyn (Paramount, exclusively), E. M. Loew’s (Columbia and Universal), and the Regal (holdover Warners and RKO). Then there were the second-run, outlying houses—the Princess, the Rialto, the Crown, the semi-distant Colonial, as well as the cheap grind houses on North Main, all beyond the moral pale, and that local nadir of moviedom, the Proven Pictures Theatre, where drunks spat in the aisles and the older guys felt up girls in the back rows. And last, the State, at the far North End, where the touring swing bands played, along with a Republic or Monogram feature—if you could call any Monogram a feature!

Before long we had our weekend moviegoing down to a near-science. As soon as Saturday chores were done, we lit out for whichever show had been picked. Properly managed, you could watch two shows straight through (two ninety-minute features, two co-features, the Coming Attractions, the newsreel, a cartoon, and sometimes even a “featurette” in Cine-color). All this sandwiched in between eleven and five, with a hotdog and a malt at Kresge’s five-and-dime, while you listened to the latest hits being played by a skinny lady sporting hennaed hair seated at the baby-grand piano with an ebony finish that had seen a better day.