All That Glitters (8 page)

So there I am all duded up in my best pressed whites downing my rye-and-ginger-ale. I’m feeling hot and sharp and all man, and who do I see sitting across the aisle from me reading
Look
, with these itty-bitty shoes and a silver fox chubby over the shoulders, but this movie blonde. I counted back the years; only seven had passed, but though I was now grown up, she hadn’t changed at all. As I sat debating whether it was appropriate to refresh her memory, she kept flipping the
Look
pages and absently tugging the hem of her skirt over her kneecaps. Every time she bent forward she showed her cleavage and I knew she knew I was looking at her.

She got up, dropped the magazine in her chair, and ankled on out of there without a look left or right, up or down. That evening, after dinner, I went back to the club car. It was around ten-thirty and there were few drinkers on tap. But there she was, this time reading
Photoplay.
The car was swaying and I sort of let it throw me into a seat, not right next to her but one chair away.

“Yeah,” she says to me, “take a load off.” Then she asked me my name and I told her. Then I said, “I guess I don’t have to ask yours.”

Heh heh. Oh, really? Who did I think she was? Her name, she said, was Gladys Lillie, “but just call me ‘Glad.’” She came from Battle “Crick” and was the Popped Rice heiress—“you know, exploded out of cannons?” Where was I going? What was my ship? What did I do? Like that. She could have been Axis Sally, but she wasn’t. Neither was she “Gladys Lillie.” But I called her “Glad” anyway. I told her my life story, she told me hers, part, anyway, but longer than mine. She kept crossing and uncrossing her legs. She had real nylons on, or maybe it was her underwear that made slicky sounds, and she was wearing the same perfume as seven years before. Tigress, she said, and made a noise like one. Grrrrr… Every time she moved her legs she moved her purse, this giant-sized pocketbook, and every time it moved it clinked. I was wondering what was in it that made it look so weighty and made such a noise. By now we were somewhere west of North Platte and she and I were about the only passengers in the car. Finally the porter came with his little round tray and said it was last call. We had a nightcap. Pretty soon they began shutting off the lights and giving us looks. The next time she moved her purse she unclasped the flap and I took a gander inside. It was filled with bottles, those miniatures they sell on planes and trains—Smirnoff and Vat 69 and Johnnie Walker Red Label. She said it was always well when traveling to be prepared.

“Like a Boy Scout?” I ventured.

“Don’t mind if I do,” she replied pokerfaced.

Ha ha. She was a card. Then she suggested that since they were turning out the lights on us, I might care to come back to her stateroom and have another nightcap. Maybe I’d like to change from rye to brandy, it made a nice nightcap. Would I? I did.

The next day found me at breakfast with a minister from Indianapolis. Talk about the Reverend Davidson in
Rain.
I got a heavy morals lecture with lots of hellfire and brimstone thrown in; penises were designed by the Almighty for purposes of procreating and urinating only,
nothing
else! I asked him if he was acquainted with “Old Lady Five-Fingers,” but this geezer was a real coconut.

Shortly after I returned to my seat the conductor arrived with a note.

“From Miss Lillie,” he said almost in a whisper.

I read,

Dear Charlie, it was nice meeting you as we did. Didn’t we laugh a lot? You’re very smart, very. You’ll go places some day. I won’t be able to see you again this trip since I’m having a migraine, they usually last a couple of days. I wish you well and don’t forget, the club car’s air-conditioned. Yours truly, Gladys Lillie.

And I didn’t even get an autograph; she hadn’t signed her real name. But I wasn’t despondent for long, because when we went through the next tank town, there were people lined up on the station platform and along the tracks with placards reading “War Ended!!!” “Japs Surrender!!!” “It’s All Over!!!”

Boy, I thought,
was
it all over.

And now, seven years later, I was about to go into rehearsal with her. No one could blame me for my trepidation, because even though the play was a so-called pre-Broadway tryout, everyone concerned knew going in that the thing was a stinker.

Babe was a tartar to work with. Being the acknowledged star, she loftily appropriated anything good out of anybody else’s lines, if she thought she could get a laugh with it. At one point I devised what I believed to be a catchy piece of business with a bunch of flowers, and when the director chuckled at it, she whirled on him and said, “Don’t you think it might be funnier if I smelled the bouquet?” Our director, a notorious alkie, didn’t care if she or Garbo smelled the roses, so Babe kept my bit. By the end of the day a distinct
froideur
had arisen between us.

We rehearsed to little avail, but there was no help for it, open we must, and did. This was up in Connecticut, and everyone from the city came up to see this “pre-Broadway tryout.” It was Turkey City all the way; they were gobbling “disaster” everywhere. Babe got out her trusty pencil and began cutting, rearranging, and rewriting. Her jokes were corny, but she got more laughs than before. In the second act she came on in this monster fur coat—it was monkey fur, looked more like a gorilla suit, she’d bought it out of a Paris fashion show—and when she appeared in it, she brought down the house. Strictly a sight gag. She entered stage right, stopped, got her laugh, then crossed to left and lit a cigarette, then shed the coat, handed it to me, and said to put King Kong in the hall closet “and don’t forget to feed him.” That kind of stuff. They lapped it up.

The young actress who played the other half of the love interest was cute and pert and we began sleeping together right off. Her name was Jenny Burton and she simply moved into my room at the inn where we were staying. But when Babe got word of this arrangement she didn’t like it and made no bones about it. I stood my ground. She could steal my flower-smelling onstage, but offstage my life was my own. “Besides,” I told her prophetically, “we plan to get married.”

“What’re you talkin’? You just met her.”

“Haven’t you ever heard of love at first sight?”

Her fuse began to sputter. “Never mind the hell about love at first sight or anything else, just you don’t let anything get in the papers you’re shacked up with this piece-goods.”

Thereafter our relationship grew more and more icily polite. By now I wasn’t so sure but that she remembered the Super Chief and didn’t want to let on, which was okay with me, since I didn’t want Jenny to get wind of my brief relationship with the star.

It was during that initial week’s run that I met Frank Adonis for the first time. He’d come up to Westport to catch Babe’s show and he stuck his head in my dressing room while I was making up. He gave me this maybe/maybe-not look of appraisal, then told me I was going places. “Maybe I’ll catch you in Hollywood, kiddo.” I didn’t want him to catch me in Hollywood, I wanted him to catch me now—and sign me and make me a goddamn star! But he shot me with his finger and was gone, whistling a tune. I caught him passing my window and hollered that he’d been whistling in my dressing room and we were in for nothing but bad luck.

I wasn’t wrong, either. Our concerted efforts would never see the bright lights of Broadway. Yet as we continued our tour, every management insisted we fulfill our obligations, and because of Babe’s name we played to packed houses at every performance. Even the blue-haired matinee ladies tittered at the risqué lines she had interpolated into the script, and some of her ad libs brought down the house. We never, any of us, lost track of the fact that we were on a stage with the famous Babe Austrian.

When we traveled, the rest of the cast, myself included, went by bus or train, while Babe rode alone in her car, always with the trusty Sluggo at the wheel and with her little Chihuahua, Tiny, in her lap. Everywhere we played, it was a scandal among the theatre apprentices that the star was doing it with her chauffeur, which managed to add a certain
frisson
to what was otherwise a boring, in fact embarrassing, tour. Only once or twice did she allow her reserve to break down. It was just hello, good morning, good night, have a nice day off, and that was about it. Everyone called her “Miss Austrian,” including myself, who’d known her more intimately. She never mingled, either with the cast or the backstage crews, never gave a party, never bought anyone a token good-luck present. Never let her hair down—except once.

Passing her dressing-room door one night, I glanced in and saw her at her makeup table, staring into the mirror at herself. Her robe was partly open and those major boobs were hanging out. Without looking at me she extended a hand to halt me; then, covering herself, she asked me to come in. “Sit down,” she said, “take a load off. You know, you’re pretty funny out there. I ought to squash you like a bug, but I let you have your head. You know why? There’s only one star in a show, but the star’s got to have support. The better the support, the better the star; the better you are, the better I am, get it?”

I said I got it, and soon we were getting along better. She wasn’t so bad, when you got to know her. Problems—she had problems, like all those ladies, wanting love and acting neurotic as hell. She needed someone around to talk to, to make her laugh, tell her she was terrific. I did all three. It wasn’t so hard; she
was
terrific, after her fashion. She started writing this play about an older star and a young man—said we’d take it to Broadway, her and me. I suggested she write in a part for Jenny. That was the end of that.

One night, in the middle of a scene, a very Lubitschy one—Babe and I were supposed to be dancing and drinking champagne—she dropped her glass and swooned outright in my arms. I stood there staring blankly at the audience with this dead weight hanging on me, while the stupefied stage manager merely goggled. I hauled Babe to the couch, where she lay softly moaning and clutching her abdomen, then I hustled offstage and rang down the curtain.

She was suffering an appendicitis attack and was in need of immediate attention. She couldn’t walk, but lay there sweating on the sofa until a hastily summoned ambulance carted her off to the local hospital. The rest of the cast went back onstage; the wardrobe girl read Babe’s role, tendering one of the more interesting performances of a femme fatale known to the American theatre.

We were scheduled to end the tour over in the Poconos, but due to Babe’s unexpected surgery, we found ourselves back in New York before the end of August. I started pounding the pavements, occasionally with Jenny Burton at my side. This was in the days of “making rounds,” going to each casting office and putting in your bid for a part, making sure they had your résumé and pictures. By the time September was out, Babe Austrian and summer stock were things of the dim past; Jenny had moved in with me on West Thirteenth Street; we were going to be the new Lunt and Fontanne. Before long things began to break for me. Max Hollywood landed me a part, I was seen by an important casting person, was sent to be interviewed by an even more important Hollywood figure, and pretty soon I was on my way west. Jenny went, too, not just for the ride: we were Mr. and Mrs. Lunt by then.

If my troubles seemed to be ending, Babe’s seemed to be just beginning—medically, anyway. We read that she was going into Harkness Pavilion for tests. The papers hinted that she was having the whole thing tucked, but I got it straight from our director that she was having female problems and that her ovaries were being offed. It was hysterectomy time for Babe Austrian.

When I was still a toddler, I learned to tell my right hand from my left by my mother’s dressing-table drawers. “Get me my red dotted scarf out of my lefthand drawer,” she’d say, or “Bring me my pocketbook from my righthand drawer.” In similar fashion I identify past years from the women in Frank’s life: he had a date with Cora Sue Brodsky on the night the stock market crashed, he was seeing Babe Austrian in 1930, he brought her out to California in the winter of 1932 and was her more or less constant companion until around 1938 (excluding several amorous interludes with Claire Regrett), when Babe took to the road with her drums (and I pinched her in the parade). Then, just before Pearl Harbor, he met Frances Deering of the Seattle lumber Deerings, and married her in 1942 after a whirlwind courtship. But life with Frances was no bed of roses. For another husband she probably would have made a perfectly good wife—for a magnate, a captain of industry—but not for Frankie Adonis. Frances was smooth as Parian marble, and just as chill, awf’lly Upper Bryn Mawr, and she ran a taut ship. Her mock-Tudor house on Rockingham in Brentwood was neat in the way a museum is neat, everything kept under glass, including her spouse.

Not surprisingly, it wasn’t long before Frank started straying, taking up first with Belinda Carroll, who held the inside track until the early fifties, when he began a sketchy affair with Belinda’s best friend, Angie Brown, whom he most likely would have married if he’d ever been able to get free of Frances. Except that in the early sixties along came Miss UCLA, April Rains—four years, no more, for that one, though it almost sent him around the bend—and then nothing serious until the last years, when he and Belinda finally got back together. And Belinda, having been really crazy about Frankie since she was a kid, now couldn’t make up her mind; then when she did, he got himself shot. But that’s another story.

Babe, Claire, Frances, Belinda, Angie, April, I count six; that’s almost one and a half per decade of Frank’s entire adult life. It sort of makes me wonder how he fitted them all in.

When Jenny and I arrived in Hollywood we booked in at the Villa Lorraine, a hotel on the Sunset Strip where many New York actors stayed while doing a picture. We came in the spring and it was really Southern California weather, clear skies, warm sun, people in shorts and sandals. You expected to see Alice Faye and Tony Martin out for a stroll, or maybe Robert Taylor and Barbara Stanwyck horseback riding along the old Beverly Hills bridle path. We went to a sneak preview in Studio City—it was Jimmy Dean in
Rebel Without a Cause
—and we were standing in the lobby after the screening when a woman came flying out crying, “A star is born! A star is born!” She was Ann Warner, wife of Jack, and she was right. We guessed that’s how it always happened in Hollywood. We stopped to chat with a group, one of whom was Jimmy Dean’s agent, Dick Clayton (Jimmy wasn’t there), and when the group broke up I got a friendly wave from a familiar figure: it was Frankie Adonis.