All That Glitters (47 page)

As a family of actors, the Antrims went back to the Civil War, to old Colonel Antrim—that would be the great Ned—who’d distinguished himself at the Battle of Bull Run, where he’d been a brevet colonel and had commanded troops that routed the Yankees and brought victory to the men in gray. That same fellow, Ned, had become an actor when the war was over. Having lost his first wife to pneumonia, he married a beautiful actress in his stage company, one May Forlorna, by whom late in life he had two children, Crispin and Daisy. Ned Antrim was the leading actor and star of the old Redpath Stock Company in Chicago, and his Hamlet had been applauded throughout the whole Midwest. When he married his leading lady, who was a good many years younger, they were drawn down Michigan Avenue in a flower-draped carriage, with four white horses that were taken from the traces while men seized the shafts and pulled them through the streets to the steamship landing, where they boarded a private yacht and cruised the Great Lakes on their honeymoon. Crispin Antrim was born in a Loop hotel in 1883.

In my boyhood there were two film actors of prime distinction: one, the charming and ever-British Ronald Colman, the other, Crispin Antrim. They were both figures of glamour, breeding, and style, and a boy would do well to emulate them, though he did not do well to imitate their diction and manners. From silent flickers to wide-screen sound with color, Crispin grew up, grew old, died before our eyes. From
Tom Hill of Phelps Hall
, through
Gallant Raleigh
and
Bonnie Prince Charlie
,
Alfred the Great
and
Trafalgar
, his bravely dying Major Ecuyer in
Fort Pitt
, all the valiant British heroes he had essayed with such verve and success, he had found his place in America’s heart. Crispin Antrim was noble in a time when there were few noble men to be found. When he died in 1952, he left a gap no one has since filled—or stands likely to.

Even as an infant Maude seemed destined for fame. At four her smiling face was on every box of Purity Soap Flakes, every bar wrapper. Her blonde mop of curls became almost as famous as Shirley Temple’s decades later. At age six, she danced, sang, told jokes, did monologues. It was to Al Christie, that movie cowboy director back in New Jersey, that Crispin owed his debt of thanks; otherwise he might never have met the love of his life. Under Al’s tutelage, Maude Fagan had begun her professional career, and when Christie headed west, much against her father’s wishes Maude and her mother joined the troupe. And where did Christie head? Straight for Mrs. Wilcox’s Hollywood. Many people, especially the younger ones, won’t believe it when told that Maude worked in
early
silents, the ones where they used to wear puttees and crank the camera with the cap turned round and shoot five scripts on one studio floor at the same time. In the Land of Eternal Sunshine little Maude acted child-ingenues in a number of hootenannies for Christie, later leaving him to join the Nestor Company, for whom she revealed a budding flair for comedy, graduating to the early Vitagraph Company where she played an engaging miss who in one flicker sat upon the plump knee of the great John Bunny.

Not only was Maude Antrim in the first movie
I
ever saw, she was also in the first movie my mother had ever seen on the silver screen. The film was a two-reel silent version of
Uncle Tom’s Cabin
, and Mother saw it in a nickelodeon in Germantown, Pennsylvania. I saw that same
Uncle Tom’s Cabin
not so long ago—they ran it at the L.A. County Museum—and I was fascinated to view the twelve-year-old Maude Fagan being carried up to heaven on plainly visible wires, while her wings drooped tiredly and her wire halo jerked above her head. In this fashion had Maude Fagan ascended to heaven, transporting Little Eva’s soul to the Pearly Gates.

When movie work slackened in Hollywood, Momma Fagan took her child to San Francisco, where she was engaged to essay more of the winsome misses she was becoming so adept at portraying, and when the company went on tour, Maude and Momma went along, too. After a money-quarrel with the management, the irate Mrs. Fagan insisted they leave the company in Bismarck, and eventually they ended up in Chicago, where she marched her little girl around to the doors of the AyanBee Company, later to move its operation to the Coast but just then filming in a warehouse on the shores of Lake Michigan.

Crispin Antrim was obliged, however, to wait half a dozen years or so before clapping eyes on the woman who was to become his third wife. This meeting occurred aboard an overnight train out of Chicago, bound for New York. Having gone to the dining car, where he found the young woman listening to a lecture from her mother, Crispin stopped, introduced himself to Mrs. Fagan, and was permitted to sit down. Within an hour he had captivated the mother and enchanted the daughter, and for the balance of the trip he stayed close to them. By the time the train arrived at New York, he had the girl signed to a personal contract and was announcing his plan to make her a star. He gave her a diamond ring, bought her a fur coat, and called her his little golden wolf. The papers played it up big. He engaged the bridal suite at the old Waldorf-Astoria and began changing her image. He taught her to eat oysters on the halfshell, snails, and caviar; he gave her her first maid to button her shoes and engaged teachers to educate her where she was most lacking, and soon he declared himself pleased as Punch with his new little wife.

Within three years Maude Antrim was playing opposite the great star in
Sherlock Holmes
, and in another year Crispin brought his production of
Romeo
into New York, with his wife as Juliet. That year she and he had performed prodigies of salesmanship in the matter of U.S. bond sales all over the East (a tour in which the young Babe Austrian had also participated), after which they sailed for Europe to entertain the troops as they came out of the trenches. They returned only six weeks before the Armistice.

Life was gay, and no one was happier than this new acting team that America was fast taking to its heart. In the next few years the lissome Maude played a wide variety of roles that caught the fancy of the public. Back to Chicago for more “flickers” at AyanBee, then on to Hollywood, for Crispin’s own Sunshine Company. Crispin Antrim had fallen under the spell of Sir Walter Scott’s works, and it was his Sunshine Pictures that brought to the screen such works as
Ivanhoe
,
Lady of the Lake
, and
The Bride of Lammermoor
, in which his wife, Maude, distinguished herself with a mad scene that is still talked about.

When Hollywood fell into panic with the coming of sound, the Antrims were ready to face the microphone. In fact, the miracle of sound only enhanced their screen personalities, and they were to earn even greater stardom. It was at that time that many of those persons whom I was subsequently to meet, and who were bound to come together and have their effect on one another, were gathering in the movie capital to make their names. Sam Ueberroth was by now a top producer. His sister, Viola, had already discovered Fedora; Frank Adonis had hit town with Babe Austrian in tow; Claire Regrett, still Cora Sue Brodsky, was on her way west.

Maude’s autobiography brought it all back in its modest, direct, lighthearted way. Others might take her seriously; she did not. I was surprised when I got to the last page. Having read my way through the book in three hours flat, I fell instantly asleep. I awoke with Bones whining to be let out. I jumped when a fist pounded on my door.

“You got a dog in there?” came the bald question, followed by more banging. Dick Tracy was working late. I heard his key in the lock as Bones and I disappeared out the window, me with my bag and duffel, down the fire escape. We slept in the car that night, Bones and I; next day I paid up and checked out. I saw the gumshoe standing by the door and hollered, “Take an animal to lunch!”

Sunnyside, here I come.

One thing I’d forgotten with the passage of the years. I had always thought the name of the house had some connection with Sunshine, Crispin’s old production company, but no. Sunnyside was named after the estate Washington Irving had built on the Hudson in New York, but owed its architectural debt to the great houses of Florida, those
palazzi
that Addison Mizner erected in Palm Beach and Miami and that inflated the Florida bubble back in the twenties—another bubble that went bust.

I drove out Sunset Boulevard to Benedict Canyon and hung a right at the Beverly Hills Hotel. I passed Tropical Drive, where Hedda had lived, went by Tower Road, at whose top David Selznick had lived with Jennifer Jones in one of Hollywood’s most handsomely unpretentious houses, now razed to the ground by a rock-and-roll “artiste” with pretensions to Borgian grandeur. I kept a sharp lookout for the street, Caligula Way, since Frank had said watch carefully, it was hard to find. I turned at Cielo Drive—up there was Falcon Lair, Valentino’s house, and across the way the house the French actress Michele Morgan had built when she was married to one of Ginger Rogers’s husbands, a French country farmhouse where the Manson gang’s bloody massacre had taken place, and over there the fabled Harold Lloyd estate, now dug up like a field of turnips.

I must have missed my sign, because I did get lost, and finally had to ask directions of a Japanese gardener. To my chagrin I was actually on Caligula, smack in front of the place, though you’d never have known it. A little farther up the hill I saw the gates I’d had pointed out to me twenty years before, the gates of Sunnyside.

Remembering Frank’s injunction to use the lower gates, I left the crest of the hill and drove around the descending curve until I passed another pair of gates, one of these left ajar. I backed up, stopped, got out, pushed both gates open, and drove in. And there was the guesthouse under a tall shady tree, the door wide open, and a maid in white uniform running the vacuum around the living room.

She was Chinese-Hawaiian—called Suzi-Q—and she most generously offered to help me get settled in. Since I had brought so few things, I decided instead to have a look around the place while she finished up. The lawns to the guest cottage were spare, and to the side of the house an escarpment of some sort climbed away steeply, as though to discourage investigation of the upper grounds. When I went back inside, I asked Suzi-Q if I could drive her up to the main house, but as we approached the main gate she thanked me and slipped out, to disappear through a smaller gate to one side. Like a Dickens lad, I got out and peered through the wrought-iron portals. Secretly I had hoped for a glimpse of my new landlady, but Frank had said she’d be away until after New Year’s, and according to Suzi-Q there was only a male servant and herself in the house.

I soon settled into a new sort of life. I defy anyone not to have felt at home in the “Cottage,” as it was called, a low-ceilinged set of nicely proportioned rooms with heavy beams of adzed oak, a large stone fireplace with cobra-shaped firedogs whose yellow eyes gleamed in the flames, and mullioned windows and windowboxes planted in varicolored impatiens. The bed was hard, the bathroom a tiled glory in black and Nile green, with a six-nozzle shower stall and a tub large enough to wash a horse in. It was like living in a country lodge cloistered in a patch of green country forest, like a chateau at Fontainebleau, and I blessed whoever had kept this section of Beverly Hills from being built up. I hung my things neatly in the closet, put others away in drawers, placed my copy of
Girl of the Golden East
in the window niche. Then I set my typewriter on the heavily carved table and sat myself down in front of a casement window where I could gaze out across the canyon vista and dream up whatever might occur and try to get it down on paper.

Christmas came on in a burst of fine weather, blue skies and warm temperatures. Southern California was Sunny California and those unbelievable pink- and blue-flocked Christmas trees in the little park across from the Beverly Hills post office loomed in the Yuletide heat. I was reminded of the first time I’d ever seen Maude Antrim in person. This was also at Christmastime, nearly twenty years ago: Jenny had sent me to the post office with some packages for last minute mailing to the East, I’d pulled into the parking space outside the post office and there was a car just backing out—a Rolls-Royce. I’d cut in rather close and I saw the driver lean across and roll down the window. “Would you mind moving a bit, I can’t get out.” I did so, with alacrity. “Merry Christmas, Miss Antrim,” I called as the car drove off. She’d nodded, that was all.

But this Christmas, not a sign of her. Enjoying my new digs, my new freedom, I found I was impatient for her to come, as if something wonderful were waiting in the wings. Frank had invited me to spend the holidays at his house in the Springs, but I declined; I liked my new house. I spent New Year’s Eve there, Bones my only companion. Dumb, but that’s how I wanted it.

The rains came, went, and came again. It was an excessively wet winter that year, but there I was, snug as a nickel. There were no leaks anywhere; a roof at Sunnyside wouldn’t dare leak! I ordered up a full cord of wood and kindling with which to stoke my fireplace; there was a venerable system of forced heated air, even in the bathroom, whose tiles stayed dry and toasty.

Bones reveled in the place. The floors of thick varnished stone flagging were impervious to all dogdom, the click of his twenty nails on the slates was pleasant to my ear, becoming silent again as he moved from the stone to one of the braided rag rugs that were strewn about, while in front of the fire lay a large fur rug, the skin, paws, and head of a Kodiak bear that Crispin had shot in the Klondike; the animal must have stood twelve or fourteen feet tall. Here I lay on my back, my head pillowed on the skull, staring at the ceiling, while the rain pattered briskly on the roof. Ah, the joys of solitude. The only drawback I could come up with was that the drive-in gates were not automated; I had to get out every time to open and close them, a nuisance of major proportions because of the rain. I had to go out and buy an umbrella. No one in California ever carried an umbrella—umbrellas were for New York.