All That Glitters (18 page)

“God damn it, I can’t.”

“Why not?”

He began to blather and blabber and we sat there listening while it all came out. He couldn’t possibly appear because the award was meant for Babe, not for him; the real Babe, not the fake. Babe was dead and he, Dore, was a fraud and how could he go and accept it when it wasn’t his, it was hers, and he wasn’t her, he was him, and she was Babe, and when he had to face Lucille Ball, Queen of Comics, in front of a TV camera and accept the award as if it were hers he meant his—it was too much.

“Bullshit,” pronounced Angie and let him have it. “Look, pismire, you’ve been fooling everyone for years, and a good job, too—nobody ever tumbled, not even in Chicago, when Sluggo was dragging you out of the presidential suite and you didn’t have a face on or a wig or anything but your own jockey shorts. Then was the time you should have been scared, but you weren’t. Not for yourself, and not for being discovered. Fraud? Sure, if you want. But Dore gives good fraud, remember? Nobody better. Chazz is right; you haul your ass out of bed and get your act together.”

Still he protested. “But I didn’t earn it—it’s not mine, I tell you.”

“And we say it is! Maybe yours more than hers. Think about that. Anyway, she’s not here to get it. But you are. And while it seems not to have occurred to you at all, there’s one person you ought to be thinking about right now.”

“Oh God, don’t tell me, let me guess. The Virgin Mary. Pope John the Twenty-third. Alaric the Hun. Peaches Browning. Mickey Mouse. Madonna.”

“Don’t be an idiot. You know who I’m talking about. And if Frank is the one who snared you into this life of deception to begin with, think how he’d feel, knowing you were being offered a place in the Hall of Fame for it all. It’s a first, a real first Frankie would love it. He’s up there looking down and saying, That shithead gets the plum and hasn’t even got the guts to pick it.”

Dore shot his brows. “Somehow I tend to doubt that Frankie is ‘up’ anywhere looking down. Still…” He frowned and bit his cuticle while he thought. “I suppose you’re right; Frankie would be mad. And I’d be an asshole. How often does a broad—or should I say fraud—ever get this laid on him?”

“Her.”

“If you like. It’s still confusing.”

“Will you do it?”

“I have to sleep on it.”

“You’ve already slept on it. Yes or no?”

His expression brightened. “All right, ducks, let’s do it. There remains, however, the question of wardrobe. In the words of Marie Antoinette, I haven’t a thing to wear.”

I scoffed. “You’ve got a closet full of rags in there. Whatever happened to that gold lamé?”

“The Claire Regrett? You must be crazy—my Claire would never fit me now.”

He was referring to his weight loss. It was his illness that kept getting in the way. I tended to forget this was a dying case, that the Dore—or Babe, rather—the one I’d seen in Chicago, was not the same person. This was a sixty-year-old man who’d bought his ticket for the Big Drag Show in the Sky and was soon to be on his way. Yet for now, just now, the last now he’d ever know, it all had to come off smooth as silk. Angel cake frosted with Dream Whip.

In the annals of filmdom the rites of passage from this world to the next are often accompanied by extravagant, even bizarre, obsequies. On film, a plump, crazed movie fan tears off the veil of Mrs. Norman Maine and Janet Gaynor shrieks and faints in the arms of Adolphe Menjou. Norma Desmond in tapestried lamé has Eric Von Stroheim inter her pet chimpanzee in the rose garden. Trench-coated and dry-eyed, Humphrey Bogart watches Ava Gardner buried, bare feet and all, amid a sea of black umbrellas in the Tuscan countryside. Offscreen it’s much the same: Hollywoodites like to bid adieu to their dear departed with richest pomp and no little circumstance; a really top drawer funeral will pull a score of limousines, easy; maybe forty or even fifty. A horde of devotees falls upon Campbell’s Funeral Parlor on New York’s upper Madison Avenue, where Judy Garland is coffined and blanketed under gardenias, though there’s no dough to lay her away. At other funerals the called-upon stand up at the mike and say kind things about people they hated. As a wag once said when the services were packed for an unloved movie mogul, “Give ’em what they want and they’ll all turn out for it.” The histrionics of the grief-stricken Pola Negri at Rudy Valentino’s funeral were nothing compared to those of Claire Regrett at Frank Adonis’s, and while today we don’t seem to have anyone prostrating himself over the Lucite coffin of the departed Miss Austrian (I have to tell you, the glass coffin bit was all Dore Skirball’s own idea; he claimed it was the Snow White coming out in him), but I’ve been noticing the Instamatics clicking all over the place.

Yes, we’re back at
that
funeral again: several Babe-mourners have had their photos snapped at the head of the corpse, braving the glare of those shining locks. You can’t blame her fans for wanting to memorialize the moment—how often does a Babe Austrian die? Well, in this instance twice, if you get what I mean—but this is a special case. I’ll say this for Babe, repose becomes her.

There’s this woman, a real looneytune, her name is Sarah Walsomething, her whole damn life is funerals, nothing but funerals. She spends her every waking hour either going to funerals or scaring them up. The obituary page in the
Los Angeles Times
is her Bible. She doesn’t subscribe to the paper, nor does she ever buy it; she grubs it out of trash cans and is reputed to spend endless hours jotting down the names of the deceased, the time of burial, and the location. She particularly enjoys reading the obits in
Variety
and
The Reporter
, for here the names of the Hollywood famous are more likely to be found.

To read “… Burial plans pending” annoys Sarah no end. She wants to know where they’re being buried and when. The more famous, the harder she tries. She’s even been heard to say that when Garbo dies, she plans on flying all the way to New York to be on hand for the burial. I have a hunch about that: I don’t think Garbo will want a public display. But right now I’m wondering if she’s here—not Garbo, Sarah whosis—here at Babe’s funeral. I mean, this thing is something to tell your children about. You want to write home about this one. They’d never believe it in Keokuk.

And what wouldn’t Sarah give to know the truth? If she reads this she’ll shit little green bugs. Is it really to be believed, that over there in that glass—plastic?—box lies the earthly remains of Babe Austrian a.k.a. Dore Skirball? I mean, how Monogram can you get?

I know that when what I’ve written here gets around, the cat will be out of the bag for sure. I told Dore I wasn’t much interested in cats and bags, but he made me promise. It was part of the deal: if he got up there and accepted the award from Lucy Ball, I’d write the whole thing down, start to finish. And I have. There’s no guarantee they’ll print this, of course, but there’s always the chance.

To the last he did a bang-up job. Really sensational. He was a super riot at the Comedy Hall of Fame thing, he had them rolling in the aisles. Gave them “Windy City Blues,” a little “I’se A-muggins boomp-dah-de-ah-dah.” The voice cracked once, but only once, and it never fazed him for a second. He just plowed right on through to the end. Ethel Merman nerves, that’s Dore.

Th-th-that’s all
,
folks
! Time to get back to the old drawing board. Let’s hear it for Hollywood Memorial. Bye, Bob; bye, Phyllis; bye, Dean. The media are interviewing Hope. “One of the really true show-business greats,” I hear him proclaiming. I squeeze Angie’s elbow as we pass; she stifles a snigger. “Truer words were never spoke,” says Aunt Bob.

As we wend our way along to the parking lot we hear the carillon ringing, its clear, silvery notes that float out across the green grass, their sound reminding me of something Dore once said about Claire Regrett: being married to her must be like being married to Saint Patrick’s Cathedral, because she clanged so loudly—“usually on the hour.”

Ding-dong ding-dong.
Pax vobiscum
, Babe.

I
THINK I HAD
always been a little in love with Belinda Carroll, or something akin to love. What name do you put to the passionately inchoate feelings of a thirteen-year-old for a young screen goddess recently discovered by him? So it was for me, back in the late thirties when her newly fledged career was just sort of bumbling along and I first saw her in
Honey Brewster.
In the next few years I and thousands of others like me watched her shed the last of her baby fat, grow breasts, find her waistline, lighten her locks, drive a sports roadster with wire wheels and balloon tires, wear an angora sweater, put flowers in her hair, and dance the rhumba. I applied myself zealously to Belinda-watching, and since I loved her desperately, I looked for a way to advertise my feelings.

One winter the cellar of our modest Dutch-colonial house flooded. This was weird, its flooding, when we lived on a hill, but there it was, water up to the knees of the Kelvinator washer, and when those waters receded, plumbers had to be brought in to do some work. When they left, there was a small patch of wet cement, some twelve by twelve inches, on the floor. On a whim I took a large spike and with loving care inscribed the initials B.C. over my own, with a plus sign in between, and enclosed the whole with a crudely drawn heart.

In those days there were three prime beauties in Tinseltown, three MGM beauties. Garbo was going or gone, likewise Claire Regrett, but there were Hedy Lamarr, incredible creature, Lana Turner, ditto, and Belinda Carroll. All three were favorite pin-up girls during the war, along with Columbia’s Hayworth and Fox’s Grable, but though the war was to bring me into contact with several stars, there was nothing doing with Belinda. I never laid eyes on her for another ten years.

I remember the first time I ever saw her in the flesh. It was at North Cadman Place, soon after I first went out to Hollywood to try my luck. I was waxing my surfboard in the alley, and when I heard a car behind me I turned to see this big white Caddy barreling along, kicking up a cloud of dust. The car screeched to a halt, and she stood up in it and grinned at me, this blonde creature in an angora sweater and a scarf tied cowboy style around her neck. “Hi, Charlie,” she calls like we’re old friends, “can I leave my jalopy here a sec?” She jumps out and hustles upstairs to Angie’s. Then I hear them giggling up there and after a moment Angie hangs her head over the windowsill and says, “She wants to know if you’re married.”

I say to ask Jenny.

But I hurried my wax job along and when I went in again Angie’s apartment was quiet; they’d gone off somewhere in her car, which was always parked out front on the street, while the white Caddy stood blocking the alley. The keys were in the ignition, so I moved it—one more movie star was nothing to the Beverly Hills cops—and I held on to the keys so she’d have to come and get them. When she came, it was Jenny who handed them over; I was in the shower. But she got the picture that I was married.

She’s had a sad life, a rotten life in a lot of respects. Not many girls would have survived all the crap she went through in the forty-odd years since Frankie discovered her—the men, the binges, the nightclub fracases, the jails, the headlines—the murder—the comebacks, one two three comebacks, each one historical, each one again proving that you can’t keep a good girl down.

The Belinda of today is hardly the Belinda I first fell for; of course she’s not, none of us is the same as we were so many years ago. But though so greatly altered, she still has that same spark, that wonderful glow, that magical, impalpable Thing that made her a star. After everything else was burned away in the crucible, what remained was pure gold, and that’s Blindy today, pure gold.

Claire Regrett was a self-made creation. She invented herself, and when one model went to the junkheap, a new model quickly appeared in its place, auto-incarnated, more modern, more streamlined, more in tune with the times. Claire was the phoenix, arising to new life from the hot ashes of its own immolation, feathers intact, her song renewed.

Belinda was another story. Belinda was nearly always the same; the basic model saw a few changes, a bit of updating, maybe a few of the latest attachments, but it was always the same—Belinda, through and through. Claire went on for nearly forty years, like Old Man Moses, and when she was done she was done and that was it. After her last vampire movie she pulled the plug on her career and curled up in her Manhattan penthouse and died. Belinda’s still going strong, though, and she’s not about to curl up anywhere unless it’s on a Chesterfield sofa. If you could see her you’d know she’s happy; she’s put the past where it belongs, in the past, and bygones are all bygones. She may not always have been the most sensible girl, but she’s fairly practical now; I might even say she’s sage.

It was Frankie, of course, Frankie who made her. Belinda Carroll was really his creation, though many people still don’t realize how much his creation she was. He loved her in a way that was so special, he had such high regard for her; even at her very worst he seldom got mad at her, the way he did with Babe or Claire or Frances or any of the rest—except April, of course; April was always that special case, wasn’t she? But Frank discovered Belinda, got her established, had her trained; he even thought up her name—Belinda after Belinda Cox, a girl he’d known in high school, Carroll from Madeleine Carroll, the stately blonde English actress; he put up with her stage mother of all stage mothers, Eunice, who never received anything but good from Frank and who never paid him back in kind; he took Belinda to Metro, saw her set there, then because of her mother’s machinations saw her booted out, only to make them take her back again. He found the Honey Brewster series for her, convinced the studio brass that she was a lot more than just another pretty face, a nice pair of boobs, then later saw her through so many of her troubles, her broken romances, her downslides, her vicious bout with alcoholism in the sixties, all the troubles that came from her fatal desire to do herself in any way she could manage it.

Frank was Belinda’s storm anchor through so many years, the person who understood her best and who never stopped trying to make something wonderful of her. He did it, too. The shame is, he never lived to see her at the pinnacle she at last attained. Today she’s retired, she’s a hausfrau; all her homemaking instincts finally emerged—she makes scrap quilts, she sews baby clothes (for other women’s babies), she does charity work (“The Frank O. Adonis Foundation for the Underprivileged of New York”), she leads the life of a solid citizen. No, no, she has no plans to return to the screen.