All That Glitters (51 page)

“What’s going to happen now?” I asked, stopping to undo the gate that helped keep Bones out of mischief.

Angie shrugged. “I don’t honestly know. But I’m worried, Charlie.”

I asked her in and we sat in the window seat, talking. Angle’s fears were solid ones. Apparently Frank was right—Belinda was terrified of starting on the picture and had even been talking about wanting out. “But she mustn’t, she’s got to do it,” Angie said. “Not for the money, she’s okay financially, but for her self-esteem. If she backs out—I’m afraid.”

“Afraid of what?”

She pantomimed chug-a-lugging a drink. I understood. It had already struck me that, fine job though Belinda had done, there was always the chance that something would hit her hard and she’d quick grab a drink or two, and that would be the beginning of the long slide—wouldn’t be the first time, either. A.A. history was full of such hairy tales.

“And there’s more, Charlie,” Angie went on, slipping a pillow behind her back. “She’s writing this goddamn book.”

“Belinda’s writing a book?”

“
Faun
is. I don’t know what it’s called, but it’s all about Belinda—what a rotten mother she was, her drinking bouts, her boyfriends and love affairs. The usual tripe served up again. ‘How I became Hollywood’s Star Brat,’ that sort of thing.”

I nodded. Naturally there’d be a chapter on the Summer of the Purple Grape, when Belinda was carrying on with the “flamingo dancer.” And one about the dude in Harlem that took the razor to her, the story that had made
Confidential
magazine. And a lot of stuff about her and Frank. Just a royal paint job, smut and smear.

“Has she a publisher?”

Angie lit another cigarette and blew a stream of smoke through the open window. “I don’t suppose she does. But even if she doesn’t, she wouldn’t have too much trouble getting one, would she? I mean, these days they’ll publish anything that’s juicy, won’t they? I don’t think it’s just talk, Chazz. And I hate to see Blindy go through any more, honest I do.” She also touched on what such a book might do to Maude’s state of mind, especially if it dragged in the subject of Perry’s marriages to Claire and Belinda. “I was wondering,” Angie went on, “if you couldn’t talk to her, steer her onto something else; then maybe she’d forget about the book.” She was clearly worried.

“Have you mentioned this to Frank?”

She nodded. “He doesn’t think she’ll ever go through with it. Says she’s rattling sabers. But I’ve got news. This young woman’s got a memory like an elephant and she’d do the whole town in if she could. Charlie—you don’t know what she’s really like.”

I said I’d think about it, but I honestly didn’t know what I could do.

Over the past five or so years it seemed that Faun Antrim had experienced an alarming number of emotional reversals, which her mother and grandmother had been forced to deal with. Faun had been financially well off by most standards; her father’s will had provided her with a substantial sum of money, to be held in trust and released to her in part when she was eighteen, the balance when she turned twenty-one. To everyone’s shock, the first amount she’d turned over in its entirety to the Maharishi, not an uncommon practice among his devotees. It wasn’t long, however, before she had had a falling out with the entire cult, after which she’d shaken them and gone to live in a commune at Telluride.

It was there that her child with Dane Potter had been lost, another devastating blow to the entire family. Faun had had her boy with her in a van at a drive-in movie, where she and her male companion had gone one evening. They’d left Dane untended while they went to the refreshment stand, and during the space of those few minutes someone had made off with the child. There were witnesses who stated that the abductor had been a black woman; in any case the boy was never seen again.

In the end, it seemed to friends that it was Belinda who suffered more from the loss than the actual mother, who more or less brushed the matter aside, refusing to talk about it and destroying all pictures of the baby.

Shortly after that period she’d come home, tail between her legs, and proceeded to go through the rest of her money as well as two or three shrinks over on Bedford Drive. Having given up the search for divine wisdom, on a more worldly tack she’d next decided to go to New York in search of work as an actress. Considering her notable theatrical background, you might think she’d have found some success, but nothing much materialized except when a couple of unscrupulous producers attempted to capitalize on the name. Her reviews were not encouraging, one critic writing that he found her vapid, while another said her stage personality was sharp and abrasive. Claire Regrett had been photographed attending a performance of
The Petrified Forest
in which Faun was playing Gaby, and was quoted as saying she was a chip off the old block; but which block or which chip she didn’t explain.

After her New York “phase,” Faun headed for London, where she camped so extensively with the parents of a school-friend that she was asked to leave. After further ups and downs she’d wired for money, which Belinda sent, and she’d come home to take up residence again in the Playhouse. In an attempt to establish a better relationship with her daughter, Belinda had been keeping her close by—in Palm Springs, in Acapulco, in Phoenix—hoping she’d get interested in some attractive young man but so far the score was strictly nothing to nothing.

Angie and I were still gassing when we heard the sound of a motor, which I recognized as Maude’s little golf cart; I went to investigate, Angie behind me. It wasn’t Maude, however, but the subject of our conversation, the Princess Faun herself, who came tootling up to my door, switched off the ignition, and stuck tanned legs out in an attractive pose.

“Mummy’s looking for you,” she told Angie. “I think she needs you to help her with her hair.”

“Her hair?” Angie gave me a suspicious glance. “What’s wrong with her hair?”

“How should I know? Probably the roots need a touch-up. Don’t they always? I’m just playing messenger.”

“I’d better run up and see,” Angie said to me. She bent to kiss my cheek and whisper in my ear, “Don’t forget—see what you can do.”

“Angie dear, you don’t have to go whispering about me behind your hand, you know,” Faun said sarcastically.

“Does your grandmother know you’re using her cart?” I inquired, after Angie had started the climb up to the house.

“She lets me drive it. She doesn’t care.”

“As long as you’re going back, why didn’t you offer Angie a ride?”

“Because I’m not going—not just yet, that is,” she said suggestively as she walked toward me. “I thought you might ask me in for a drink. And don’t say you haven’t got anything. I brought this.” She held up a bottle of champagne—Dom Pérignon, if you please. “Ice cold, too. Aren’t you going to invite me in?”

I was about to send her packing; then I thought, What the hell. “Sure, why not? But, I’m afraid you’ll be drinking alone. I don’t indulge.”

“That’s all right, it won’t be the first time.” She obviously thought that was a good one. I found it odd: here was a young woman of twenty-four, divorced and a mother, to all intents and purposes a grownup, yet I kept getting the impression of a much younger person, almost a teenager. It was in her baby voice, the way she used her face and body, her pouty expression, as if she were somehow afraid of becoming mature.

“So this is where the great writer lives and works,” she said, brushing by me into the Cottage and looking around.

“This is it, kid.”

Her look was sharp. “Don’t call me ‘kid.’”

I apologized and went to find a glass. “We’re not really equipped for champagne around here,” I said, going into the kitchen. When I came back again I found her poking around my bedroom. “Just what is it that you’re looking for?”

“I’m looking around for all the girls you’ve probably got hidden away here.”

“Look away, you won’t find them. I’m getting cured of a separation.”

She picked up on this. “Are you heartbroken? I heard she treated you shitty.”

“Where’d you hear that?”

“Mummy. You certainly have her sympathy, don’t you? Of course, she cries at card tricks. You have to carry a sponge.”

“You know—you ought to speak more generously about your mother.”

“Oh, God, are you going to tell me she’s this absolutely fabulous creature, a goddess? Well, you’re wrong—she’s just another old movie broad. No one cares about her anymore—if they ever did. She’s a has-been, that’s all.”

“They did, believe me,” I said softly. “People loved her. Still love her. And I don’t see how you can say someone’s a has-been when she’s about to take on a plum film role.”

“Oh. That. Don’t you know she only got that picture because Frankie has something on one of the producers? They wouldn’t have touched her otherwise. It’s simple: Frankie gets her work, so she puts out for him. She goes wild for that big thing of his.”

“You seem to know a lot about Frankie.”

“Oh…”—she shot me a little sidewise glance of naked prurience—“I know lots of things. You pick them up, specially around here. My mother may be old, but she’s still no better than she should be.”

“And you, are you better than you should be?”

“Not unless I absolutely have to be. I’m just what you see. Me. You don’t like it, that’s your problem, not mine.”

“Forget it. Your champagne’s getting warm.”

“That’s all right, I like it that way. But… most men would pour it for a lady.”

“I might have, were there a lady in the room.” Sorry, Belinda, I couldn’t resist.

I poured her some more and it foamed over the lip. She dug into her bag and brought out a sparkly little gadget. She slid the handle and it expanded into a little gold metallic brush—“for the bubbles,” she explained. Her stepfather had sent it to her for her fourteenth birthday. I asked myself what kind of father sends his daughter a gold swizzle stick on her fourteenth birthday.

“From Tiffany’s,” she added. “I have breakfast there all the time. Ha ha.” She used her pink tongue on the swizzle.

Before today I hadn’t spoken a dozen words to this young woman, yet I felt that I knew her, and I realized that to know her wasn’t necessarily to love her. Yet I wanted to like her, to make some contact—if only for Belinda’s sake, and Maude’s. Seeking neutral ground, I volunteered the information that we’d once met.

Her brows quickly arched above the plastic rims of her glasses. “Oh? Clue me in.”

I described the occasion a dozen or so years before when Frank and I had seen her with friends at the Beverly Boulevard pony ride. She frowned, then dismissed my recollection with “You must have me mixed up with someone else.” I let it go.

After she went putt-putting off in Maude’s golf cart I was left thinking about Belinda. The fact that she’d birthed this maverick, this voluptuous creature with a snake’s tongue, both interested and troubled me. Certainly they were nothing alike, mother and daughter. Faun was like the squalling changeling whom the wicked fairies had left in the cradle after stealing away the good child. Maybe the parents were to blame; it’s a generally acknowledged fact that celebrities don’t necessarily make the best mothers and fathers in the world, but you couldn’t go through life shoving the blame onto them; you had to take some of the responsibility yourself. Setting fire to the house and stabbing your riding instructor weren’t the best ways to get on in the world, particularly if you then falsely accused him of rape. As it happened, Bucky Eaton was a really decent sort; I’d met him once when he was riding at Madison Square Garden and I was doing some research on dressage, and over drinks he told me the real story; he’d never touched her, while she kept coming on with him, wearing tight jodhpurs and turtleneck sweaters that shoved her tits at him every time he came over a jump.

Well, I promised myself that I’d make the attempt, I’d give it the old college try, but really what chance was there? The twig was bent, the tree grown; I thought its fruit would be bitter.

As the days went by, I watched her. Sometimes she’d put on her cutesie act and be pleasant and beguiling—quite effective, except you could tell that she was after something. She was clever enough not to come right out with it, but sooner or later out it would pop—could she borrow a hundred bucks, take your car, would you drive her somewhere, take her to dinner at the beach? It was amazing how she could turn it on and off, the same way she did with the tears. It was her way, probably the only one she knew. God knows she had learned it superbly.

She didn’t seem to choose her companions with much care. Her boyfriend these days was a self-styled rock musician named Bobby Spurting, the wastrel son of a Beverly Hills movie producer. A couple of years younger than Faun, scrawny, with a prominent Adam’s apple and riotous red hair, Bobby quickly became
persona non grata
at Sunnyside—which, of course, made Faun all the more determined to parade him before us. She ran him, nagged him, told him off, threw him out, but always back again he’d come for more. Maude was stiffly polite, while Belinda made no pretense of hiding her feelings.

It was plain from the moment she came home that where she set her foot, disharmony and discord were sure to follow. One thing seemed clear: since learning of the current closeness between her mother and Frank Adonis, Faun had fostered an intense dislike of Frank. Behind his back she referred to him as “Al Capone” and “Legs Diamond.” She called Belinda “Bonnie Parker” or “the gangster’s moll,” and kidded her unmercifully. “I’ve got to hang up now,” she’d say on the phone to a friend, “Mummy’s waiting for a call from her hood,” or “We’ve got Dillinger coming for lunch today,” things like that. The family ignored all this, but that didn’t deter our Faun.

The rest of us were happy for Frank, happy that he and Belinda were together. After Frances died and he lost April, he had suffered in ways none of us really could understand. He never talked about it, but his close friends could tell that he’d been enduring the torments of hell. The months had become years—one year, two years, three, four, five years—while he traveled that road out to Libertad to the dreary building with the green walls. Five years of devotion to a dream that had become an unending nightmare, or, if it had an end, he was the one who had to write it. And he had. Suddenly, after the Christmas of the fifth year, he simply stopped going. He’d been beating his head against a stone wall, and he cut her out of his heart as she’d cut him out of hers when she was in the Retreat; and amen to that.