All That Glitters (39 page)

I felt devastated. More, I was angry. Here I’d thought I was bringing her tidings that could alter her entire life, and she’d just steamrolled the whole thing. Down, down, she was on the down escalator. I couldn’t get her off it.

I left her in the garden and drove despondently back to New York. The car radio wasn’t playing but I kept hearing music in my ears, sad, bitter music. I was being forced to acknowledge something I didn’t want to believe: no matter what help she was getting at the Retreat, it wasn’t going to be enough. Nothing was ever going to be enough now; there wasn’t any cure for what ailed her.

Donna did come on; she stayed in the Hartford area for over a month, doing her best, but her best wasn’t good enough. She had a job and was obliged to return. It was through Donna that I learned that Bud Ayres had taken over the watch, was in fact staying at a nearby hotel to be close to April. This news naturally made its way into print, and soon reporters began descending on the place from New York and Boston. By this time Bud was adept at dealing with the press, and, using his considerable charm, he fended off the reporters as well as anyone could. You had to hand it to them, though; the guys were sympathetic to his plight, for he made it plain that he loved April and wanted to marry her as soon as she was well enough. The old saw rang true, “All the world loves a lover,” and April and Bud had everyone rooting for them. People wanted them to win out, to get together and be a married couple; they wanted them to have the success and happiness that were supposed to accrue to them by virtue of their being movie stars. It went with the package: there
was
a pot of gold at the end of the rainbow.

As for the other leading couple in the drama, the matter of divorce between Frances and Frank, of course, hung fire as she faced her illness and eventual end. And if Frank had any idea of what was going on in Hartford, he certainly wasn’t saying—not to me, not to anybody. With time Frances’s condition had become stabilized and she was reported to be in remission. He spent hours, days, at the hospital, where there was little he could do to help. But he was there.

Then he had a bad blow, a terrible one. Maxine Fargo died unexpectedly. He’d gone down the week before and taken her out to dinner; afterward they’d stopped by the Buckaroo to have drinks with Angie, then started for San Bernardino and home. He noticed that Maxine looked tired, but she kept insisting she was all right. Three days later Chui Alvarez, the Mexican on the place, telephoned to say that she was real bad and Frank should hurry. He’d promised Frances to come to the hospital, and this delayed him, so that by the time he got to San Bernardino, Maxine was gone. Chui took him out to the garden to show him where she’d had her attack.

“There, Señor Frank, in the tomato patch.” He pointed to the flattened plants where she’d been stricken. Frank sank down on an overturned peach basket and wept. “
Mamma mia
,
Mamma mia
.” He was not to be comforted, and Chui had to drive him back to town. For weeks after, he remained profoundly shaken, trying to encompass his loss. It was as though Maxine dead meant that everyone in the world was fallible, everyone’s time must come, including his own.

Desperate to do something, he declared that his mother was going to have the biggest and best funeral anyone ever had, though his mother had expressly asked for a quiet end. He argued with the priest for hours, but finally gave in. The obsequies were limited and circumspectly handled. He wanted her buried at Forest Lawn, but Father Mendoza said that her desire was to rest in the desert, the closer to her garden the better.

Among the host of condolences he received was one he showed me. It was a typical Hallmark type card with suitable sentiments inside, signed not with a name but simply as “a friend.” He asked me to look at the handwriting; was it April’s? I examined the words, but truthfully I couldn’t tell. I even compared it with the signature on a birthday card she’d once sent me, but still I couldn’t tell.

One day Feldy Eskenazy telephoned, asking if she could come and see me; she had something to tell. Yes, I said, come up soonest.

Feldy was much more a part of our lives in this period than I’ve probably indicated. Far more than just my acting coach, she’d become a friend. There was no nonsense to her, and she told me straight out what she’d come to say. Yesterday afternoon April and Kit Carson had married in Connecticut and were honeymooning in Nassau. Our first thought was naturally of Frank: had he heard, and how would he take it? Feldy thought it better for me to break the news—that was what April had wanted. I stopped by his office that evening and relayed the details. He took it philosophically, but I could see how badly it hurt him to hear it. Despite everything that had happened, he had hoped against hope that things would somehow iron themselves out, but now she’d turned to Bud, and that was that.

Later he went to Orgell’s and sent them a classy Georgian wine cooler as a wedding gift.

We stood by, along with all his other friends, helpless to do much more than stay close. He handled everything with strength and sureness. A stranger couldn’t have told from his calm demeanor that he was being torn to pieces inside. At the office it was business as usual, and he had a new girl he’d discovered and was going to bring along. He did things—went to dinners, or down to the Springs overnight to play some tennis with Angie, see his friends, have a few laughs with Alice Faye and Phil Harris at the Racquet Club, then hop back to town and take up his chair at the hospital again.

And he was always interested to hear news of April and Bud. By now Bud was doing a picture in the East (this was
Red Coat Hunt
, being shot in the Tidewater and fox-hunting country of Virginia) and his co-star was none other than his bride. It was April’s wedding present to him, her promise to do the film, since she’d already said she wouldn’t make any more pictures. It proved to be a lucky gamble. Bud had talked her into it as a therapeutic device, the doctors had approved, and the result was the most popular picture either of them ever made—as well as the last.

Frank never said anything about it to me, but I learned through his office that, although he’d found the story and originally set Bud up in the deal, before shooting began Bud had written asking for his agency release and April’s as well. I thought then that it was a lousy thing for him to have done, but later I saw that he was probably right, that they both should have representation elsewhere. Things were much too close with Frank, and they needed a less personal professional environment. Frank took it all with good grace. Then, when the picture was finished, Bud and April stayed on in the East, having fallen in love with the state of Virginia; soon afterward, they bought a farm there and took up being horse folk.

Almost at once the Carsons were in solid with the hunting set, and would make another picture only if they really liked the script. Meanwhile, they were enjoying country life and starting a herd of Herefords. The apple trees blossomed pink and white in May at High Farm, the purple clover came in and the alfalfa, and the two-year-olds threw their foals, and Squire Carson and wife were out in rough-out boots, chopping kindling and digging postholes for a new paddock. There was never talk anywhere of any baby; there was no nursery room at High Farm. Remembering Passy, I already had the answer there: no little Kits or Kats would be running about the pastures of High Farm in Virginia.

Then Frances died in California. By now Jenny and I had made up our differences and she’d returned from London. We’d taken a jaunt down to an isolated little spot in Mexico we were fond of, and one afternoon a boat carried over a message from Frank. We caught the next plane out of Puerto Vallarta and arrived home in time to catch him on the eleven o’clock local news. He looked haggard, and a host of reporters and cameramen were shoving microphones at his face.

With Frances’s death, he was bound to assume the burden of guilt. He’d experienced a lot of anguish, bad health had dogged him through the preceding four or five years, and he was feeling the strain. He’d set himself a Spartan vigil to see Frances through to the end, knowing it was what she wanted, to go out as though nothing had ever come between them, nothing had happened in their married life to cause the least rift, the slightest pain. With her, appearances were everything, even the passage through Death’s Door. She had herself well buttressed with the Church, the Bishop, the Archbishop, the old family priest, Father Mallory, the nuns, and of course her own blood sister, Sister Mary Rose, all gathered around, joining hands as though to ward off the evils attendant on her for having been for over twenty-five years the devoted wife of the well-publicized and controversial Hollywood figure, the loving, patient, and understanding wife of Frank Adano.

Frances was laid to rest in the family vault at her aunt’s house in Pasadena. I was there, and when I saw those bronze doors swing shut on the sepulcher I thought of that poor, unhappy woman and all the misery she’d caused in one lifetime. Afterward, Frank asked me to ride back in his car and I sat beside him amid the gray velvet upholstery, watching the freeway traffic hustle by on both sides. Most limousine drivers are such careful drivers, pokey, even, wouldn’t speed if their lives depended on it. We crept and thought, and he swigged some from the flask he’d brought along. I’d brought a flask. He didn’t talk, neither did I. But I thought we must be thinking the same thing: Frances was dead, Frank was free. But where was April? Foxhunting in Virginia.

Back at the Bristol house, Frank invited me in and told the driver to wait. I followed him into the front hall, where he stood looking around into those rooms that were perfect marvels of beauty, utility, and convenience. The hand of Frances Deering Adano lay everywhere. Suddenly he turned to me with a fierce expression. “I’ll sell it, you know,” he muttered as we went on to the bar. He cursed and flung off his coat. “God, how I hate this place. It’s like a Ross Hunter set.” He raised his glass. “To the Short Happy Life of Frances Adano,” he said in his low, dark voice. “
Pax vobiscum
and R.I.P.” He lifted it again to the Alexander Brooks portrait of Frances above the mantel, then made a pistol of his thumb and finger and shot at it.

“Do you hate her?” I asked.

He looked out the window and gulped some of his Scotch, hiked his shoulders, then wearily let them fall. “No. It might be easier, but I can’t. And at the last she was sorry. She really was. She’d come to dislike herself. But…” He ran his fingertip along one side of his mustache. “I knew what I was getting into, right from the start. I’m no rose, you know. She used me, I used her, that’s how it was. She had the class, the money, she was upper-crust; I had the glamour, I was Hollywood. But oil and water, never the twain. Hell, looking back, I think I must have been out of my mind. I’d have been better off with Claire. Or—” He jammed his fists in his pocket. “What the hell,” he said, “we all make our own beds, don’t we?”

People who saw Bud and April together after they were married said they’d never seen two more contented people; they were a modern Adam and Eve, happily playing in their Eden, ignoring both apple and serpent. And their loyal fans admired Bud as the All-American Man, while loving April for being a survivor, for having weathered her tragedies and having found love at last.

In the spring of their second year of marriage, while they were still living in the East, basking in the success of
Red Coat Hunt
, they were invited to go on a promotional junket to Hawaii, Bud to be photographed by
Sports Illustrated
for a six-page color layout called “Sports Hawaii.” They would be guests on the famous Parker Ranch on the Big Island. There, amid parties and publicity chores, April learned to eat Rocky Mountain oysters, knowing full well they were bull’s balls; she went into the rain forest, rode a horse along the surf, and played water polo on horseback with the paniolos, the island equivalent of Texas cowboys. She even caught a marlin leaping in the blue waters off the roads.

Along on the junket were the magazine photographer, a studio-unit publicist, a wardrobe man, and a sports equipment specialist. Bud was a hotshot with bow and arrow, and the idea was to get him knocking down some of the wild boar that were to be found in the hillside bush. He’d already done one archery layout with bull’s-eyes in the butts, but this was to be one of action, showing his skill with the ancient weapon.

They started just after early breakfast, fortified with coffee and oatmeal, thirteen people on the trail that wound itself upwards along the slopes of Mauna Kea. The accident happened on the last foray of the day, while the paniolos were readying the camp for the trek downhill again. Mickey, the sturdy Portuguese-Hawaiian whose task it was to look out for April at all times, had performed his assignment admirably, but just at that one moment he was occupied, digging a stone out of the hock of her horse. April was seated on a stump in the middle of the clearing when the dogs began a scuffle in the underbrush. Suddenly and with shocking speed, like some short-legged hairy hound of hell, an alarming shape came rushing out of the brake, head down, grunting, snorting, rushing forth into the waning light. Four ambitious hounds harried the boar, two on a side, leaping in to sink their jaws into the pig’s tough hide, nimbly escaping those angry tusks as it continued its mad charge, heading straight for the figure on the stump. Bud saw it, shouted, April leaped up, jumped onto the stump, while the boar rushed toward her.

In a flash Bud had sent three feathered arrows into its back and neck, yet still it came on, screaming with pain and fury, the arrows sticking out like the
banderillas
from a bull’s neck at a
corrida.
Bud ran headlong into the clearing like a matador into the arena, to do battle, waving his jacket to distract the boar’s attention from April, shouting, until, just shy of the stump, the beast swerved, then pulled up short, uncertain, its wet nostrils quivering as it scented another prey. Then, backing one or two steps, making its ugly snuffling sounds, it leaped forward at Bud, and as they closed, with both hands Bud enclosed the snorting head with his jacket, then threw his weight on the boar’s back and wrestled it to the ground.