All That Glitters (20 page)

If Perry Antrim were alive today, as his mother was until only a few years ago, how many tales would he have to tell about his exploits, his adventures, his travels, his many meetings with the famous of the world? I always thought
The Seven Pillars of Wisdom
read like Little Orphan Annie compared to
Olympus Crowned
and
Letters from My Raft
, Perry’s two most popular books.

No wonder the ladies were dazzled by him—what didn’t he have? Background, fame, prestige, money, brains, looks, and an intrepidness not to be seen short of the exploits of Paul Bunyan. For a girl, to have grown up in the thirties was to have been charmed and fascinated from afar by this young god, and for a lad who’d never stepped in front of the camera—movie acting wasn’t for him, he said—Perry Antrim was every bit as famous as Jackie Cooper or Mickey Rooney. For a decade and more, pictures of him had appeared regularly, Perry on the back of his famous horse, Ready-Go, aboard the
Guinevere
, performing prodigious feats with his archery set or his rifles, boxing with one of the professional pugilists his father had picked out for him to spar against, or showing some famous visitor or other through his equally famous “Playhouse.”

As anyone over fifty knows, this Playhouse, so-called, was every bit as celebrated as the individual for whom it had been created. It was an amusing conceit of Crispin Antrim’s that his son should be provided with a magical kingdom of his own on the grounds of Sunnyside, a boy’s playhouse as might be imagined by some great artist. Consequently the building called “the Lodge,” which had been built by the original owner as a guesthouse, was revamped into a boy’s idea of heaven. The walls had been frescoed by Howard Chandler Christy in fanciful visions of castles with golden turrets flying scarlet pennants, broad green moors where silver-mailed knights jousted with lances before their ladies fair, a forest where Robin Hood robbed the rich to give to the poor, and where a rainbow arched across a vault of sky painted cerulean blue. From the carved beams were hung bison heads and the horns of moose and stags, there was an indoor slide from the second story to the first, there was a billiard table (gents shot pool, gentlemen played billiards), and in the lower room, surrounded by mullioned windows set with panes of colored glass, was a wide, deep window seat where a boy could loll over picture books containing tales of pirates and buried treasure or of balloon flights to the face of the moon. The Playhouse sat perhaps three hundred yards from the main house, and it was here that Perry always claimed he had spent his happiest boyhood hours. And it was here, to the Playhouse, that he brought his first bride, Claire Regrett, following their elopement. The house was enlarged, a kitchen was installed, as well as a nursery, and it was there that Claire, unaware of what lay in store, was obliged to live cheek by jowl with her in-laws. An impractical arrangement, for the couple did little more than sleep there; their real, practical life was lived at a three-hundred-yard remove, over at the big house, where the currents of the outer world stirred the curtains and Aldous Huxley and Stella Campbell came to lunch on squab under glass.

There were times to come when Claire would be heard publicly to damn the Playhouse and all its Bavarian gimcrackery, and while she herself had sewed the curtains for the rooms, it was Maude who’d picked out the chintz. The big conflict was over the Christy murals: a sacrilege to paint them out, declared Crispin, and so they remained, and Claire studied her Fanny Farmer cookbook amid medieval damsels and men of derring-do.

Finally the murals were taken down, their canvases carefully rolled and packed away, the plaster was painted Perry’s favorite shade of blue, and all vestiges of a boy’s playhouse were done away with, though it retained its designation for the rest of its natural life. The whole thing was a cunning idea, but of course fatal to budding matrimony. Better they should have begun housekeeping in a West Hollywood bungalow than to reside in that charming domicile under the benign wing of Maude and Crispin.

I can still recall a layout from an early
Photoplay
, showing the younger Antrims hanging out the windows of their bide-a-wee. And there was Perry in a Tyrolean hat, and Claire in a rickracked apron, whipping up popovers. And there were the two of them smiling skittishly in their bedroom, which featured a giant-size porcelain stove brought from Stockholm and converted from coal to gas to keep them warm.

It was all Crispin’s doing, of course; he would have it so. He wanted his son close by, so they could talk things over every day and go riding together. It was an idea he had of family unity. Poor Claire was a novice when it came to such matters, and there was no way she could have successfully vetoed Crispin Antrim’s plan. In fact she adored living there—at first. To be a member of the Antrim clan was a great step upward, socially speaking; to be living at Sunnyside, where kings and queens regularly swung in and out the doors, was an even greater coup. No woman in her right mind would have declined the opportunity—think of the publicity! And she suffered accordingly.

Not so Perry’s next wife. When it came Belinda’s turn she was able to profit from her predecessor’s error. Also, by that time, after the war, Perry was older and more mature and realized that his father’s romantic fancies could no longer rule the son’s life, and so the younger Antrims purchased the Mandeville Canyon ranch where the senior Antrims could come and be entertained—and then leave.

It was judged a wise move, and with Perry as her husband it seemed that Belinda was finding happiness at last. That it was a love match there was no disputing. Theirs was one of the great love stories, on a par with that of the Windsors, though it may have lacked the same historical implications. But the Windsors were by now aging and middle-drawer, while the Antrims were set squarely in the top one.

They went to Chichén Itzá for their honeymoon, where Perry partook in a dig for ancient shards, since he was interested in Mayan history and culture. They took ship for Nome, where Perry studied the composition of the Alaskan tundra. His wife was photographed by
National Geographic
, wearing a parka of mink. Then they sailed for Genoa, and in Rome Perry was honored by the government for his bravery during the Italian Campaign. Field Marshal Montgomery himself arrived to be on hand when the young warrior was decorated, and a shot of the old warrior bussing the young warrior’s wife hit the cover of
Life.

During the seven-year period of this, her second and most blessed union, Belinda Carroll appeared in only two films,
I Only Loved You Twice
, opposite Jimmy Stewart, and
Tarnished Angel
, with Van Heflin. She did, however, star in a production of her own when she gave birth by Caesarean section to a female child, the adorable Faun, whom she had named after the cunning fawn sent her by a fan as a christening present. And if it was in any way prophetic that the spelling of the child’s name differed from the beast’s, referring instead to the mischievous goat-footed, horned creature who plays a flute and dances in the moonlight, no one realized it at the time. But of course no one was even thinking of such things as they all smiled down at the little swaddled darling in the antique cradle, the same cradle that had once held her own father. Maude had had the cradle put safely away in the attic, saved against the day when it would be needed again; it was brought down, refurbished, and the new infant placed inside, and Nana herself rocked it to sleep.

Half a decade of wedded bliss was all they had, one of the most famous couples in the world. The Lindbergh kidnapping having blighted his own youth, Perry had decreed that no photographs were to be taken of his daughter, that she was never to be present at interviews, and that she was to be kept out of the public eye. Belinda agreed; she didn’t want her baby stolen by some madman. So the child was sheltered and kept apart, and no pictures of her were ever printed until Faun became interesting to the press for all the wrong reasons.

In 1950 Perry heard about Dr. Keynes, an English missionary who had gone into the Borneo jungle in order to bring the gospel to the native tribes, known to be hostile, and had not been heard from again. The desperate pleas of his wife for some brave man to go in and find her husband, dead or alive, moved Perry, and he announced to the press that he would undertake the dangerous mission; so good a man as Dr. Keynes should not be left to perish if it was possible to save him. It was fully two years before Perry was able to mount his expedition, and in June he kissed Belinda and his daughter goodbye, flew to Honolulu, thence to Sarawak, and on the first of July he and a team of seven men boarded small craft at the mouth of the Oroyocco and began motoring upstream. It was the last time any of the party was ever seen alive, and finally word came down via a local trader, one Lazarre, that the search party had fallen victim to a party of Dayak headhunters.

Belinda was devastated, and from her secluded widowhood she announced her retirement from the screen. Louis B. himself stated in the press that he would never hold her to her contract; she didn’t have to come back to work unless she wanted to. She retired behind the gates of the Mandeville house, seeing no one but her closest friends and the family.

People began calling her the “bad-luck girl.” That’s a lousy sobriquet to hang on any woman, but especially on someone like Belinda. After she had lost two husbands, each of whom she’d loved, and given the unwelcome misfortunes that were to follow, you could say she’d had bum luck, but why underscore it with such a label? It started in the press, and it dogged her heels for years as she reeled from pillar to post, attempting to pick up the pieces of her life and only shattering it into smaller pieces.

For more than two years she withdrew into the protective shell of her sorrow, maintaining a stolid silence. For a while eager reporters had camped on her doorstep, hoping for a word, something, but it was time wasted. She never came out and few went in. One who did go in, and often, was her mother-in-law, Maude, who’d become widowed herself. A year following Perry’s final expedition, Crispin died of an aneurism at age seventy-one. In keeping with his character, a modest funeral was conducted, the grand old man was interred at Forest Lawn, and Maude settled down to observe the rites of her newly acquired widowhood. Now she had lost so much, an only son plus her beloved husband of forty years. In their mutual sorrow the two women came closer and closer together, forging bonds that were to stand Belinda in good stead throughout the remainder of Maude’s lifetime.

Then came the unfortunate business of the man Lazarre, who appeared on the scene to make his grotesque bid for fame. A letter from him had arrived at Mandeville addressed to Belinda Carroll Antrim, declaring that he was in possession of his remains and requesting an interview. Excited and unwary, Belinda agreed to see the man, and he came to the house. She received him in the living room, where she offered him tea and they talked. At some point he produced a small box, saying it contained the proof of her husband’s fate, and when she removed the box lid she found a shrunken head inside. They took her away in hysterics and the man was thrown out.

That bizarre episode has been seen as the breaking point for Belinda Carroll. She went into an emotional tailspin from which she was not to emerge for a long time, a descending spiral, faster and faster. She began her heavy drinking at this point; there followed a series of minor scandals and run-ins with the police, pictures in the papers, even a story in
Confidential
, that notorious scandal rag of the period. There was even a suicide attempt, in reality more of a cry for help than an attempt to do away with herself.

Unable to deal with being a mother, she sent Faun away to a fashionable boarding school where she had many classmates who also came from movie-star households. Summers she was provided with a governess, and when her grandmother gave her her first horse, Faun seriously took up riding around the ranch and the hill paths of Mandeville Canyon.

Then came the unhappy night when Belinda went to a party at Malibu, got smashed, quarreled with her escort, left with his car, and on the way home ran the light at Pacific Coast Highway and Sunset. She struck another car, crashed through her own windshield, and became a statistic.

After that Maude persuaded her to go into a sanitarium, and she was away for nearly a year. She concluded this unhappy chapter in her life by renting out the Mandeville house to friends of Frank’s, sending Faun to stay with Maude at Sunnyside, and leaving for New York. Why New York? She didn’t know, really, but New York was big; maybe she could get lost there. Lost? She was lost before she ever quit L.A., but in New York she got more lost. Lost on a barstool at Goldie’s, drowning in one big long Manhattan cocktail, with the cherry missing.

Belinda Carroll had a middle name, but you never saw it in print or on a theatre marquee. Her middle name was Trouble with a capital “T” and you’d hear people muttering, “God, Belinda Carroll’s in trouble again.” And you could usually believe it. New York was not generally prone to the Hollywood gossip—New York had its own gossip, and the recent escapades of Belinda Carroll didn’t matter much in the face of local scandals. Frank flew in and talked with his old pal Ed Sullivan, and in no time Belinda was announced for a Sunday-night video spot. The nation watched in fascination as an obviously distracted Ed appeared in front of the curtains to say that, while he had looked forward to saying hello to that “wonnaful Hollywood storr, Miss Blinda Car’l,” he must unfortunately forgo such pleasure, since “Miss Car’l” had been stricken by a backstage attack of unspecified illness and could not appear. An act of trained dogs was substituted. Next day everyone read in Dorothy Kilgallen that Belinda had been stricken by an attack of Vat 69. Blotto. After that she became a sort of joke. Miss Bad Luck again.

By then she’d racked up a collection of movies rivaling those of any other major star of the period. Seven Honey pictures, interspersed with other examples of the MGM product, playing opposite the top male stars on the lot, Gable, Stewart, Taylor, Tracy, Johnson, and Fred Astaire. She made her first Technicolor production,
Dancing on the Ceiling
, in 1945, and from then on she never made a film in black-and-white. She hoofed it with Fred in
Good Girls Go to Heaven
, with Gene in
After the Ball.
But bad luck dogged her. She was to have played Milady de Winter in the
Three Musketeers
remake until she slipped and fell downstairs, and Lana went in for her. A film opposite Orson Welles started up, then fizzled; she wasn’t even paid. She was replaced on two other films, once when she contracted pneumonia after jumping into an ice-cold river in Saskatchewan
(King of the Royal Mounties
, opposite Jimmy Stewart), another after a near-fatal motor accident. She was secretly assigned the role of Annie, to replace Garland in
Annie Get Your Gun
, but her lymph glands swelled and she went into St. John’s, while Betty Hutton got to sing “They Say That Falling in Love Is Wonderful.”