Authors: Thomas Tryon
“We had
faces
,” says Gloria Swanson, and is photographed amid the baroque plaster ruins of the old Roxy, crushed beneath the wrecker’s ball; gone but not forgotten. They also had glamour then, and a veil of mystery, and attraction and elegance and a sinful purity, the innocence of nursery babes, and the overpowering loftiness that elevated them to that heady Olympian realm where they dwelled, and not their most sullied or foolish acts could degrade the diadems they wore like the haloes of ten thousand virgins. Gloria was right: they
did
have faces then. And class. Didn’t they? Lotsa class. When weren’t the guys in white tails—Gary, Cary, Melvyn, Randy, Fred? Swank, pure swank.
In the matter of screen “type,” as they like to call it, Babe always fell between stools. Neither the rare exotic of her middle movie period (Dietrich, Garbo, Fedora), nor the all-American girl (Janet Gaynor, June Allyson), nor the Perfect Wife (Myrna Loy), nor the generously endowed Florodora blonde on the
Police Gazette
(West, Grable), nor the floozy-
cum
-nun (Claire Regrett), a Babe Austrian could have flowered only in the U.S. during the second quarter of the twentieth century, and by her own admission could never have done it without Frankie Adano. Generous to the last, Babe was still proclaiming the same thing on her deathbed, for the same—yet far, far different—reasons.
In addition to being Babe’s manager in the early days, Frank was also generally and elliptically referred to as her “boyfriend.” This meant to grownups that they shared a bed, while to us young fry it meant something like cherry Cokes on Saturday nights after a roller-skating party. But everybody knew about Frankie Adano, and you’d hear talk about his underworld connections (he’d grown up with Benjamin Siegel, better known as Bugsy; later he had truck with Al “Vegas” da Prima, “Ears” Satriano, and “Moonskin” Spaccifaccioli), though the manicurists used to say Frank was better-lookin’ than Clark Gable or Bob Taylor. And just at this time—Babe’s visit to our town—everybody knew Frankie had dumped her for Claire Regrett, whom Louella Parsons said he was “squiring” and the guys joked he was “screwing.” Doubtless some of each.
People like to ask what Frank was “really” like, as though I or anyone would really know. Frankie was Frankie, a little like Caesar, all things to all men—but seldom like Caesar’s wife, above suspicion. Frankie was always suspect, even when he was innocent—like that rap he did a year and a half for. Frankie was what he was. He was lucky, that’s one sure thing. In his time he’d ducked more than one bullet and lived to tell the tale. And he always came up smelling like a rose, no matter what—at least until the end.
For me his name still conjures up the Golden Age of Moving Pictures. Anyone who knows anything about Hollywood knows how truly he was always at the dead center of things, from way back in the early thirties clear through the sixties, even the seventies. Hook or crook, Frank was certainly one of the most dramatic, colorful, powerful, and imposing figures in the whole industry, a crackerjack agent who was wooed and courted and deferred to, who was ass-kissed and ass-kicked, loved and hated, who made or remade movie stars by the fistful. Think of them—Babe herself; Maude Antrim; her husband, Crispin; April Rains; Kit Carson; Belinda Carroll; Julie Figueroa; Claire Regrett; and all the others. His was a stylish career that managed to survive unsavory Vegas alliances, his friendship with Bugsy, scandals of sex and murder, even the Senate crime hearings.
To me Frankie was a saint. He was my agent, and I respected and appreciated him. He was always four-square with me—a little nutty maybe; still, you had to admire him—love him, even. Generous to a fault. Thoughtful, considerate—a really classy gent—he used to remember to wire my mother flowers on her birthday, or he’d send her theatre tickets when she was in New York. Once, when a picture of mine was playing at Radio City Music Hall, he had her whole bridge club limo’d down from Hartford to see the opening, with lunch in the Rainbow Room afterward. Mother declared that outside of her husband, Frankie Adano was the best-looking guy who ever lived, and that
he
was the one who should have been in the movies. Mother was not alone in her opinion. People always used to say he could have had a Hollywood acting career himself if he’d wanted to—look at George Raft. But Frankie was too smart for that bull. He knew which end of the trombone the music comes out of.
Frankie had a genius for recognizing the potential in actors before the studios ever laid an eye on them, sometimes before the personalities themselves even knew what they had. Take Babe, for example, his first big success; or April Rains, who was a total unknown; then there’s Kit Carson, the ex-beach bum; or look what he did with Claire Regrett, who was only Cora Sue Brodsky when he first knew her, behind the hosiery counter at Gimbel’s; or Belinda Carroll, found singing for nickels on a street corner across from Echo Park.
There are those who still claim he was nothing but a two-bit opportunist, but he had the manners of a duke. Why else would spectacular dames like Barbara Stanwyck and Roz Russell have had him for a friend? For a while, after Thalberg died, he dated Norma Shearer before she remarried. A guy doesn’t pull the wool over the eyes of ladies like that; they’ve been around the hall, they know the score. They could always spot a three-dollar bill.
And Babe Austrian? Well, there are a few—more than a few—interesting sidelights to
that
fifty-year career, most of which Frankie was a party to. Babe adored him—in her younger days, that is—worshipped the ground he walked on, even after he dumped her for Claire Regrett, and after Claire, Frances Deering, the beautiful lumber heiress, who of all the beauties was finally the one to snare him. Think of the long list of women he had—who else could have juggled them all, and with his finesse? What Frankie knew, you don’t learn. Putting it Babe’s way, “Honey, you either got it or you don’t. And if you don’t, don’t come around.” Oh
yeah
!
Certainly it’s not giving away any secret to state that Babe Austrian and Frankie Adonis were two parties in an open-ended romantic relationship existing without benefit of clergy, a relationship of such duration and depth that it seemed like a fact of life. Nor did it seem to be any secret that they were getting it on. We knew it, even back then. In a day when the overworked tag of “sex symbol” hadn’t been thought of, those two were just “sexy,” and that was a given. Winchell was always writing them up; the local newspaper carried Walter, and I chewed up the lines looking for BABE (in caps; all celebrities were in caps in our paper) or FRANK ADONIS, as he was later known, “the Italian Clark Gable.”
Frankie was dark and slick, all patent-leather, Italian flash; Babe was blonde and diamond-flashier. She could have seen her face in his hair, so brilliantined was it, while he could probably catch his mustache in her lavallière. It was Frank who got Babe her first Hollywood contract. Sure,
you’ll
say she was signed when she was in New York, playing in
Lola Magee
, but you’ll be wrong. When Babe was grabbed for pictures it wasn’t in New York or anywhere near it, and nobody but Frankie could have pulled off that clever job of work.
There are many versions still making the rounds concerning how they met, including both published autobiographies. In his,
Just Call Me Lucky
, Frank states, with surprising discretion, that they were “introduced” by a “mutual acquaintance,” whose name he assures us he has forgotten, but claims this introduction took place at Risenweber’s. Babe, on the other hand, states in
Oh Babe
! that they met at the Belmont race track, which heaven knows they both frequented often enough. Either story might be true; neither is. I’m putting this down for the record: this is the version Frankie himself confided to me not long before he died, and swore was gospel.
The facts were these. Frank’s ma, Maxine Fargo (Maxine had remarried after old Tony Adano’s death), was living on West Fifty-fourth Street, and I mean
West
, right in the heart of Hell’s Kitchen, as they called it then. Frankie Adano, a second-generation Italian with both Neapolitan and Sicilian connections, was a small-time grifter and chiseler, out to make a buck and do himself whatever good he could manage. He was a street kid, a regular Dead Ender, good-looking and smart. One of his best friends was a guy named Benny Siegel, nicknamed Bugsy, who at a later time all by himself invented a place in the Nevada desert called Las Vegas. The pair of them used to snitch ladies’ alligator bags and Kolinsky scarves or swipe counter merchandise from Manhattan department stores. Once they picked on some dame in the subway, beating her up and yanking her pocketbook off its strap. The woman was an off-duty cop; she nailed Frankie, Benny ran away, Frankie did his eighteen months.
But that didn’t stop him. In time he and Bugsy gave up petty crime and worked their way up to bootlegging and became bag-runners for a numbers racket. They rubbed shoulders with the mob and won reputations for being sharp, dependable, and ruthless. Frank’s then-girlfriend was a hot little Jewish number named Cora Sue Brodsky, a girl with the makings of a broad. As I said, she sold lingerie at Gimbel’s, and she lived with her family in Bensonhurst and yearned like crazy to be a movie star. Frankie promised Cora Sue he could do the trick. He snapped his fingers to show how easy, got her moved into a flat on East Twenty-third Street, and Saturday nights often found him in the basement of her building, stirring up in set-tubs the gin that his customers claimed to like but which more often than not tasted of soap, bluing, and bleach. Cora Sue would hang around, waiting for the next batch to be bottled, even helping him do it, and when the janitor was off-premises Frankie would take her to the janitor’s bed and give her a good weekend
shtup
, which helped her complexion and kept down her level of complaints. Cora Sue was willing, nay, eager, to stick her legs in the air, because Frankie was going to make her into this big movie star—that’s what he told her anyway. But this was B. B.—Before Babe. After Babe, Cora Sue never stood a chance. But she loved him anyway.
Babe was a baby vaudevillian. She came out of Chicago, having grown up in Cicero, where the infamous Saint Valentine’s Day Massacre took place. She was known variously as “Baby Polly,” “Pretty Polly,” sometimes “Chicago Polly,” and she recited cute verses, did comic and dramatic monologues, danced with her own shadow in a Pierrot outfit, and worked in living tableaux, until she was too old to be “Baby” anything anymore and she became Babe, which, fortunately, she had the curves to merit. But she didn’t get rid of “Baby Polly” altogether; she made her into a character, a parody of a cute, lisping child who asked risqué questions and supplied her own humorous answers. Babe or Baby, the act was big-time all the way.
When she and Frankie met in 1930, she was appearing on Forty-second Street at the Julian Eltinge Theatre in her play
Lola Magee
, and her star was waning. She’d been in several editions of the Follies, Ziegfeld having become intrigued with her Polly character as well as her ability to belt out a song and hit the last row in the balcony. She’d been in editions with Fields, with Will Rogers, even old Trixie Friganza. Fanny Brice had been her nemesis.
But her current vehicle,
Lola Magee
, was strictly for the beer-and-pretzel trade. It had boffo laughs, but its main attractions were Babe’s husky voice, her baby-blues, and that rollicking set of curves. In a three-month period Frankie saw the show seventeen times. At that time he was working at a tango parlor on West Forty-sixth Street where you could go and get your exercise in the new imported dance craze. Of all the studs who were available as partners, Frankie was
primo
, and the girls used to fall over themselves getting his arm around their waist. He was a snaky dancer, smooth and elegant and completely serious about it, as though in exhibiting the subtle but sexual innuendos of the tango he were undergoing some profound metaphysical experience. It was no joke. He was crazy about dancing, he loved displaying his agility and grace—the grace of a black panther, according to some who saw him. He had a wasp waist and wore spray-on pants, so tight he couldn’t sit down, and those yellow pearl-button shoes; spats, too. The girls went cuckoo when he got his thigh in their crotch and rubbed them up until the honey dripped. Between his dancing and his gambling instinct he was pretty well set up for the life work he was already carving out for himself, and in this year of 1930 he had privately decided that a cute little trick named Mabel Osterreich from Cicero, Illinois, was just the meal ticket he was looking for. The way Frankie reasoned things, he had what she wanted, he was perfectly willing to give it to her, and he would make her what is today called a superstar. So he dumped Cora Sue Brodsky on her Brooklyn keester and went all-out for Babe.
Always a ladies’ man, Frankie had in fact what the girls were looking for, what Cora Sue had panted after. That is to say, though relatively slight of stature, he was hung like a horse. He sometimes referred to that particular portion of his anatomy as his “pride and passion,” and was boastful of his endowment. In fact, he enjoyed showing it off, and in typical Neapolitan style he sincerely believed he was put on this earth to make the opposite sex happy. He didn’t have any name whatever at the time, except as this hot tangoist, but in his tight striped pants, his yellow shoes, his chamois vest, his Borsalino, he cut a dashing figure around Broadway, where the lights were bright.
One day he made up his mind that he was going to treat Babe to some of his “pride and passion,” and he hiked over to the Eltinge before the matinee and flashed his personal engraved card at the stage door. The obliging doorman carried the card inside, then came back and gave him the gate. This made Frankie angry. But he was always the type of guy to make his own luck when things didn’t fall his way, so he took the bull by the horns, and in the most literal sense. One Wednesday afternoon he waited at the end of the stage-door alley until he saw Babe’s private car arrive for the matinee. She was then the “great and good friend” of a certain Waldo Niemier, a burly sub-contractor from Ho-Ho-Kus, New Jersey, and after every performance Waldo’s driver would take Babe to Ruby Foo’s, or to Sardi’s, or the old Delmonico’s. On this particular afternoon, just as the car started up, Frankie stepped out of the shadows, opened the door, and jumped in, announcing to the startled passenger that he had a present for her; it was right there in his fist. So declaring, he flung himself back against the pearl-gray upholstery and exhibited for her delectation his rampant “pride and passion.”