All That Glitters (30 page)

Frances had a way with her that people found charming, a refinement combined with a natural ease and good humor that Frank recognized as a highly desirable and marketable property. On the other hand, his own smoldering good looks, his racy background, the
frisson
of gangsterism at a safe distance, his reputation as a boudoir Romeo (by this time a reputation well sampled by Frances), and his charming demeanor all combined to make him Frances’s idea of a good catch. There was a jumbo wedding on the typical Hollywood scale, a honeymoon in Waikiki, the well-publicized return, lei’d to their ears, suntanned and smiling, to settle down in domestic bliss in a fake-Tudor house on Bristol Avenue in Brentwood.

The wise among us appreciate that it’s always well to take life on its own terms, to make use of what it offers and not try to bend it to one’s will; this Frank knew, and this is why he was probably so free of unhappiness for so many years. Except for April Rains I think he may have got nearly everything he ever wanted, and certainly everything he deserved. I think it fair to say he married Frances in good faith and with the best of intentions. I won’t say he was crazy in love with her, but he always had a finely honed appreciation of his womenfolk and I’m sure this stretched to his own chosen mate and helpmeet. Frances was class, and class was the name of the game so far as Frank went.

The trouble was, Frances played the game according to some weird set of rules she alone seemed to comprehend. She married the man, but she didn’t really want
that
man, our Frankie, the guy she got; she wanted to get him and then make him over into her private vision of what she thought he
ought
to be. She regarded him as an attachment to herself, possibly even something she had bought and paid for, an expensive toy. It couldn’t possibly have worked.

But Frances was Catholic, remember, and it was for better or for worse. Her own younger sister had taken vows and been ordained as Sister Mary Rose. Frances also maintained a particularly close relationship with Father Mallory, who later became Monsignor Mallory, and who made sure Frances was on good terms with the Bishop and that His Grace could be counted on to honor her table three or four times a year. It was within this snugly carpentered framework that she became known for her charitable works and generous contributions to the sundry charities of the diocese.

And because of this, divorce was always out of the question. The only time in their more than twenty years together she apparently ever considered such a thing (in this instance it was annulment) was in 1947, after Frank’s casual connection with Bugsy Siegel was made public. In time, Frances even got the Pope involved, but nothing ever came of that, because in the end she wouldn’t give Frankie up. No more than she would give him up years later when April came along, although in that case it was more than her strict convent upbringing at work: she had no intention of presenting her gossiping friends with the chance to laugh and say Frank had dumped her for someone younger. No, Frances was determined to hang on until the last gong rang, the last whistle blew, and when the going got really bumpy and Frank simply “refused to see the light,” she showed her truest colors.

Frances certainly said and did all the “right” things, dressed the part right down to the little white gloves and hats the matronry of Brentwood and Bel Air copied from San Francisco ladies hot out of the Garden Court at the Palace. Her speaking voice, low, dulcet, just a tad Junior League, was always one of her charms. More than one Hollywood stud fell victim to it, to say nothing of the great Frankie himself.

But you could draw a black line right down through Frank’s years with Frances and mark them B.A. and A.A.—Before April and After. Because when April came along, she changed him, changed his life and changed the way he acted and thought about things, and after she was gone he was never the same. Not ever. After seeing that picture of her on the cover of
Look
he tracked down the photographer, who told him the girl’s name was Anna Thorwald, and that since graduating from UCLA in June she’d been working as a model at I. Magnin’s. Frank checked it out, found the girl in a Norell, purchased the dress, then slipped her his card. She’d never heard of the Adonis Agency. “Would you like to be in the movies?” and like that ensued, and No, came back the answer, the young woman wasn’t interested. Now, this was an odd thing, for if there’s one ineluctable law of nature at work in the universe, it is that every girl under the age of thirty wants to be in the movies. Not April. She only did it for Frank. Frank was persuasion walking.

Like Babe, like Claire, like Belinda and Angie and Julie Figueroa and all the rest of that elite sorority, April was susceptible to the male of her species. Certainly she was susceptible to the charms of a Frank Adonis. He was then past fifty, temples silvering, but looking foxy, and he’d lost none of his charm or skill with the ladies, still the kind of dynamite-looking dude who gets under a woman’s skin right away and starts her juices trickling. Those sooty-soft Italian eyes never made any secret of his amorous feelings; they told a woman that for that one single moment she was the most important and exciting thing in his life, the most beautiful, the sexiest, the most desirable and intelligent and worthwhile he’d ever come across. And so it was with Anna Thorwald, soon to become April Rains. She and Frank were—as we all later came to believe—destined to meet. And when they did, everything sat right there in the well-known lap of the gods.

No sooner had Frank secured his newest client a contract at Metro and changed her name than he proceeded to fall in love with her. Maybe it would have been better if he had taken her to Zanuck over at Fox, or even Harry Cohn at Columbia. Unhappily, she fell under the tutorial eye of the Great Mogul himself, Samuel B. Ueberroth, who, having heard about her through Vi, deigned to interest himself in her budding career. The name alone enchanted him. And with her golden hair and fresh-scrubbed look, April Rains was perfect MGM fodder, and he blithely confided to Frank that the girl’s stardom was practically guaranteed. He himself would see to it.

But Sam had troubles in more ways than one. I can hear him screaming, “Whaddya mean she doesn’t
wanna
be in the movies? Fa Chrise sakes, is she out of her mind?”

No, she wasn’t; not then. But Sam’s question was valid. When Frank had first started giving her the “You ought to be in pictures” routine, she’d only laughed at him; it seemed so farfetched, such an unlikely career for her to pursue. “Who, me? Don’t be crazy.” At the beginning, whenever anything came up about movies, she always disclaimed any real connection. “Oh, I’m not
really
an actress, I’m just playing around for fun.”

But Frank was Frank and that meant never taking no for an answer. He saw that Thing in her; she had it, too, the Star Quality they always talk about. And the more she said no, the more determined he was to prove he could do it. And fell in love at the same time.

That wasn’t very bright of him. There were plenty of other girls around if he wanted to get laid, and there were plenty of other blondes to make into screen tootsies if
that
was what he wanted. But April Rains had that extra spark that demands full attention, that catches the eye or the mind, that goes beyond tootsie-ism, that gets a girl’s face in
Photoplay
and keeps it up there on the silver screen.

Would he have insisted, had he known just how it was all going to turn out? I don’t think so, he wasn’t that kind. He really believed in his Italian heart of hearts that he was showing her the way to a good life, the grand life, that which he himself had craved. The trouble was that she just wasn’t ambitious; what
she
wanted was marriage, motherhood, two cars in the garage. But before she knew it, there she went, through that old sausage grinder, and out came Metro product, Metro glossed and coiffed, Metro pretty.

She had a boyfriend or two, actually “beaux,” as Donna enjoyed calling them (Donna was April’s mother). So April didn’t sit home Saturday nights watching Lawrence Welk. She went out—sat in the balcony and ate popcorn while Elvis abused his guitar and sang “Hound Dog.” A good sound crack at a Ph.D. might have done her a world of good, whereas getting a scene from
Barefoot in the Park
to heart seemed a waste of time. But she did it, and others beside, Julie from
Jezebel
, Regina from
Little Foxes.

She was then studying acting with Feldy Eskenazy, the celebrated European actress who’d won two Academy Awards yet been dropped by Metro. Feldy was earning a living by giving acting lessons and doing special coaching at the Stage Society Workshop in a rundown building on La Cienega, and, as it chanced, I too was studying with her. In fact, I was working on Essex to April’s Queen Elizabeth. One evening we “performed,” and Frank and Sam both came, along with Vi, and April was a complete wreck. She flubbed her lines and dropped her prop mirror and generally made a mess of things. We’d also worked on a scene from
The Glass Menagerie
, and after we’d bombed as Elizabeth and Essex I told them we were going to do the other one, with April playing Laura to my Gentleman Caller, and that went much better. April even got a laugh, which delighted her. Sam went out chortling, and wanted to drive her home. Vi said no. Vi knew her brother; his antennae were already buzzing, and while he was that Hollywood oddity, “a happily married man,” Sam’s eye swiveled for a pretty girl, and Vi didn’t want him playing pattycakes with the newest discovery.

At this point in his long career Sam was one of the last mainstays of the studio system. He had started as a two-bit shill, barking for a downtown theatre in Los Angeles. Sam eventually found himself a studio flack at the old AyanBee Studio, where his sister, Viola, a then-secretary, had procured him a job, and in time he became a moneymaking, and therefore powerful, producer. Later he moved to Metro, where, following the death of Irving Thalberg and the departure of David Selznick for
Gone With the Wind
and greener pastures, he held down the number-one producing spot. In those days a film with the credit

A Sam’l B. Ueberroth Production

meant lines around the block and money in the bank, and many is the blonde tootsie who put in her lap time, sitting cozily with Sam while he told her the story of his next script and checked out the glands.

Then to the cast of the brewing melodrama was added that up-and-coming young thespian Floyd “Bud” Ayres, rechristened Kit Carson, the lad who really took it on the chin. Bud was a beauty, and not only in the physical sense. It’s true, when the girls got an eyeful of that Nordic face, that beach-tanned body, that cornsilk hair, and the green eyes, they creamed their undies. But Bud was not merely that famous Hollywood commodity, the Boy Next Door; he was made of rarer stuff, the guy everybody thought would become the next hot rave after Van Johnson and Monty Clift. For a kid from El Segundo, son of a plant worker at Hughes Tool and Die, whom Jenny and I first saw parking cars, Bud did okay for himself.

It was our wedding anniversary and Jen and I decided to celebrate at La Rue, our then-favorite restaurant. As we pulled up to the entrance, a young man appeared in a red jacket and took the car away. On our way in Jenny squeezed my arm, remarked on how gorgeous he was, then, to my annoyance, mentioned him again during dinner. Later, when he returned our car to us, I decided to give him the once-over. Jen was right, he was impressive—tall, wide shoulders, blonde hair bleached to white from sun and surfing, a whalebone smile, and kind of funny eyes; by funny I mean with something intrinsically interesting in them, something hidden, a bit inscrutable, a definite oddity in a Santa Monica beach type.

Certainly he was a good bet for pictures, and when I next saw Frank I casually made mention of the fact to him, then promptly forgot about it until another evening, when we returned to La Rue and a different attendant took our car. When I commented on the change, Jenny said in her blithe way, “Oh, Bud’s not here anymore; Frank has him working at the office.” I soon learned that Frank had also signed his newest find to an actor’s-representative contract, and it wasn’t long before he had located cheap digs for him in our own neighborhood, a few turns down the hill, in the guest apartment above a friend’s garage.

Even with Jenny’s enthusiasm, which was enough for both of us, I had to admit that this new beach jock of Frank’s had it over most Hollywood hopefuls that I’d come across; “star quality” it’s called, and almost against my will I found myself liking him. He was twenty-two that year, which gave him a good ten years on me, and we made him part of the household, along with the dog and the cat and the cleaning lady.

In those early years Bud was like an apple ripening on the bough. He dressed like a beach bum and drove around in an old Ford woodie with a rack on top for skis or his surfboard, and if he stooped to wearing shoes it was a pair of battered sneakers, and in a time of short hair, his was always in need of a trim. He was nature’s boy, an unsophisticate with a degree in engineering from the Colorado School of Mines. But he was the raw material that movie stars are often fashioned from, one who if there was justice in the world should have become a big, big star. He did, too—for a while, until life intervened. That oft-repeated agents’ and producers’ cliché “You don’t have to act in the movies” is just so much agent-producer canned crap. Someone who looks like Bud Ayres may not
have
to act but it damn well helps—and, oddly, he could, a little.

And no sooner had Frank taken on this diamond-in-the-rough and changed his name to Kit Carson than he turned him over to Feldy Eskenazy, who took him under her wing and began the process of “polishing” him until he was ready to be sprung on a world hungry for blonde, six-foot, green-eyed heroes, just like in the comic strips. It was at Feldy’s studio that Kit, like Frank before him, would take one look at April and go the same head-over-heels route. And by the time the whole thing was over, it would be this “Kit Carson” who would pay the ultimate price, the loss of his career and worse—and for what? For having faithfully loved the girl of his dreams and lost her? And, by the way, not to Frank, not altogether to him, but more to screaming headlines and bad press, and to being in the wrong spot at the wrong time.