All That Glitters (53 page)

Bobby rolled out of the window seat and swaggered over to me. “Hey, look, man,” he said, doing his Brando act. “That’s no way to act. We weren’t doing nothing.”

“You’re in my home, uninvited. And since I don’t want you as a guest here, I’d appreciate it if you’d get the hell out.”

Faun had been taking in this dialogue with apparent amusement. “I think your play is really kind of funny,” she said. “But only in spots. It needs lots of work.”

“I’m real happy you think so. Now, if you’d please get out I’d like to do some work.”

“Okay okay—we weren’t going to stay, anyway. Come on, Bobby.” She nudged him and they moved together to the door, giving Bones a wide berth. On the threshold she whispered something; Bobby sauntered off across the gravel toward the stairs, while she turned back to me.

“Yes?”

“I was just wondering,” she began. “I really need to talk to you. It’s important.” I gave her a hard look, then told her to wait in the arbor. I changed into a pair of cut-offs and went out to join her.

“Look, I’m sorry,” I apologized, “I don’t like to play Billy Goat Gruff around here, but you’ve got to understand you can’t just go barging into people’s houses. This isn’t your place, you know, it’s mine while I’m renting it from your grandmother. So after this let me know when you’re coming, okay?”

She nodded in her most endearing way and I determined to put the incident behind me. “Now, what did you want to see me about?”

Her writing, she said.

“Yes? What about it?”

“I’ve really been thinking and I feel I could finish my book if I had the right kind of help on it. Some really professional help. And I was thinking, well—I was just wondering if maybe you couldn’t sort of steer me right on some things.”

Boy, could I ever!

“Doing an autobiography’s not the easiest thing, you know,” she said, affording me some amazing tidings. “It’s so personal, you know? You really have to have the right way of expressing yourself. Don’t you think that’s true?”

“Yes,” I said, “it calls for a certain style. You call this work an autobiography. Why?”

“Well, because it’s about me and my life.”

“I see. What makes you think people—that is, the book-buying public—are going to be interested in your twenty-four-year-old life?”

She gave me a nervous little laugh. “Well, I don’t know, I mean—well, I am Faun Antrim, aren’t I? I mean, I’m famous, sort of, aren’t I? Why wouldn’t people be interested in what I have to say?”

“Okay, let’s assume they are. Let’s say everybody’s panting to read what you have to say—though most people wait to write their autobiographies until they’ve done something important in their lives. What have you done that’s really notable or of interest to a reader?”

“Well—people are always asking me what it’s like to be the daughter of a famous star. What it’s like to live in Hollywood, have the upbringing I did. And they always want to know about that whole business—”

Here it came. “Which whole business, Faun?”

“You know. About Bucky Eaton, the fire, all that. Raping me the way he did.”

“Yes, I see; yes, of course you’d want to include that, wouldn’t you?”

“Well, of
course
! That’s the whole point. I want to give the real slant on that.”

“Yes, well, I suppose to a certain type of reader there’s a definite interest in lurid events like those, but—”

“But what?”

“Well, since they’re bound to be so upsetting to your mother, your grandmother as well, it seems to me that you’d do better not to rake over the coals, so to speak. Some things are better off left alone, don’t you think?”

Her face took on that expression I hated so, that small-mouthed, mean look. I thought, I don’t give a rat’s ass how pleasant she can be sometimes, I don’t like her and I never will. “What do you say we just put our cards on the table, hm? I’ll tell you what I think and you tell me what you think, okay? Good. I think this book you’re presumably writing—”

“What do you mean, presumably? I
am
writing!”

“Good. Okay. Fine—you’re writing. But why not be honest and say you’re writing it just to get back at your mother? That you’re doing it as a sort of blackmail to frighten her with. She’s still in the public eye, you know.”

“I know, but that’s not why I’m doing it.”

“Why, then?”

“Well, as a sort of ca—ca—what’s that word?”

“I suppose you mean ‘catharsis.’”

“That’s it—catharsis. You’ll see. One of these days you’ll all see. You think I’m just Miss Stupid fucking around with a pencil and paper. But you’ll see. One day…”

Yes, one day her prince would come, or maybe Tuesday would be her good-news day. Faun lived for “one day” and hadn’t learned yet what a mistake that was for man, woman, dog, or cat. But what was the point of explaining anything to Faun? When I reminded her that Bucky Eaton
hadn’t
raped her, she fuzzed that little episode over, then declared sanctimoniously that she hoped her book would make Belinda “see the light” and force her to admit she’d been a bad mother. When I suggested it might be in bad taste to chastise publicly someone who loved her, she said it was for Mummy’s own good and in the end she’d be a better person for it. Catharsis, shit. No, there was no talking to our Faun.

But in the days that followed I noticed a slight shift in her view of Frank, or maybe in her relation to Frank. Since his return she hadn’t acted so obviously contemptuous and scornful. Instead of sniping at him the way she used to do, she fell into affected silences (though I also noticed that she seldom took her eyes off him).

When she was wearing her shades, I wondered what feelings hid behind those Lolita lenses, but it didn’t take much imagination. Her libido was doing its little dance of the seven veils, her genes were giving battle. There was one afternoon—Maude and I had been painting side by side in the studio, and I was attempting a view of the pool as seen from inside the studio. The picture was bright, very California, David Hockney-ish: the aqua-tinted water in the pool, the scattering of pool furniture, the fountain, the tubbed petunias and geraniums, the sloping hill view beyond the wall. Frank had driven up to be with Belinda (it was a Saturday), and they lay paired side by side in two of the chaises, sipping eleven o’clocks from tall frosted glasses. They made a handsome couple, their two heads cocked toward each other, dark and light together, speaking quietly and holding hands.

Then—this was creepy—a shadow fell across them and I saw Faun appear around the three tall cypresses that formed a clump there. I say “creepy” because there was something actually sinister in the way she hovered over them, casting this shadow that fell across the chaises. They didn’t know she was there, Frankie was leaning forward and touching Belinda, and I grabbed up Maude’s birdwatching glasses and trained them on Faun. In close focus I could see her look of—what?—disgust, contempt, loathing, ridicule? All were there, and more. I studied this display for several moments; then, setting down the glasses, I strode from the studio and called out, “Hey, you guys—” and then, pretending to have just noticed Faun, I waved—“jump in, the water’s fine.”

By then Frank and Belinda had both sat up and were talking to Faun, who eyed them a second longer, then slouched to the far end of the pool, where she spread out her things and began sunning.

What was there in Faun’s furtive appearance that had made me uneasy? As if she were plotting some further mischief? There was no reason, yet I had been alarmed—a little, anyway. I didn’t know exactly what Maude might have seen; she said nothing, I said nothing, and the incident was soon forgotten.

Frank and Belinda went on being together every chance they got, and occasionally invited Faun to join them, once to dinner, another time for a Bowl concert—Pinchas Zuckerman was playing. “I just
ha-a-a-ate
fiddle players,” she complained the next morning. “Why did you go, then?” Maude asked. “Because Mummy made me,” was the reply, in which there was not a word of truth. How do you force a twenty-four-year-old to go to a concert? Besides, Mummy never made Baby
do
anything; Baby did as she wanted. That was the trouble.

She seemed to think she lived some sort of super-enchanted existence by virtue of her name. This was odd, because half the time she complained about it, saying it embarrassed her and people were always asking her about her grandfather Crispin, who’d died when she was still a young child. But whenever Maude talked about Crispin, Faun would frown and express vast indifference, even boredom. If Maude noticed, she never said anything.

I recall one evening in the Snuggery when Maude had just come down, and Faun made some remark about all the framed photographs of Crispin and why so many? Maude smiled, saying there could never be too many for her, she never tired of looking at his handsome face. “Your grandfather was the kindest, dearest man in the world. I was a lucky woman to get him.”

“And he never tried getting it on with other women?”

“Good heavens, whatever made you ask a thing like that?”

Faun’s look was arch, her tone insinuating. “Just wondering. He must have been quite something if he stayed faithful all that time. He made those movies with Babe Austrian, didn’t he? I bet he had a tough time keeping his hands off her.”

“Babe Austrian had her admirers, but she was hardly your grandfather’s type. And I believe, if you were to dig into your grandfather’s past, you’d discover that so far as the opposite sex are concerned, his hands are lily white.”

“That’s because he had
you
.” Faun got up and went to give her a kiss. I wondered what she was planning to ask for this time.

It came out at the dinner table: she had a friend in town, they were going to a party, and to impress the friend she wanted Nana to ask Ling to get out the Rolls and chauffeur them. I was pleased when Maude declined on Ling’s behalf. I always liked it when people said no to Faun; I thought it was good for her character. It probably wasn’t, though.

When Faun’s twenty-fifth birthday came round, Maude gave a small dinner party at Perino’s. Her present to her granddaughter was a bracelet, a narrow circlet of pearls and diamonds, ultra-understated—apparently a bit too understated for the recipient. The recipient’s pretty mother, in a skirt and top of contrasting purples, was wearing some of the family jewels, the Antrim rubies that had become Maude’s upon the death of her mother-in-law. It was clear from Faun’s sulky attitude that she felt shortchanged with a mere wrist’s worth of pearls and diamonds.

I’d like to be able to say that when she was in residence, occupying the Playhouse that had been her father’s, things were pleasant and lively around the old homestead, that she added something vivid to our humdrum lives; but not so. If you enjoyed the tooth-loosening dissonances of hardcore rock, the eternal complaints of that shrill voice a man could easily come to hate, the raucous blat of telephone gabble, the noisy comings and goings of what looked to me like a herd of escapees from the cages of the municipal zoo, the rudeness, the cheapo cracks, the embarrassing language featured for its own sake, the general disruption of the lovely calm that had existed before she showed on the scene—well, you can see how it all went down the drain. It made me angry that Belinda put up with it for a minute, but that was the way things were. Angie had spelled it out for me: having ignored Faun in her formative years, Belinda was now determined to make things up to her, come what might, believing that love and a slack leash would finally do the trick.

It was apparent to me that though Maude held her own views she was going along with it, mostly for Belinda’s sake. If it had been up to her alone, she would have employed sterner measures, a little more rod, a little less spoiling, but she left any disciplining to Belinda. I thought it an unhealthy situation all the way around. The most peaceful moment could be instantly shattered by an ugly or tearful scene that seemed to erupt out of nowhere—and only to keep things stirred up.

She applied herself to two things, her “book” and her tan. The tan worked out okay, the book was something else. She talked a lot about the fad for Hollywood memoirs, talked more about the money such efforts could rake in. But as the weeks went by, I convinced myself that nothing would really come of it.
Tap-tap-tap
was all well and good if you wanted to impress the help, but, knowing a little about the business, I didn’t think “See Jane run, see Dick lower his trousers” was going to do it. I was waiting for the nudge of her friendly elbow about my own publishing house and would they be interested, etc., etc., etc. (Only I noticed that she wrote “ekt ekt ekt.”) She’d tap away for maybe an hour, sometimes longer; then the lure of the sun was too great and she was in her bikini and on the float. She had a cute behind and liked showing her muffins off, but she wasn’t doing a cookbook and muffins weren’t it if you wanted a golden book contract.

The pity, of course, was that Frank might have made her the best kind of father. Frank’s domestic side was not well known. His public image was one of a carefully fostered glamour: the playboy, the gambler, the tireless lover of beautiful women, the man with “underworld connections,” is hardly to be viewed as the finest parental material. That Frances had been barren, that April’s baby had died, that Frank had longed for children—these were things unknown to the public. And no one knew that when he and Fran were married, he’d wanted to adopt a couple of babies, but she’d balked every time, something about “bad blood.” Where kids were concerned, he had lived by a cold fire.

The idea of his becoming stepfather to a girl like Faun isn’t really so farfetched as it may sound. I thought he could make her a good stepfather; with his cement and trowel he could patch up that tumbledown wall that had left her so defenseless; he could have created what she probably needed most, a home.

But that was hindsight, which always comes cheap. Right now things were just sort of cooking along, not one thing, not another. For months Belinda had been getting ready to go back to work, dieting and exercising, working with Feldy, getting psyched up for facing the camera again, and except for the occasional explosion, a hastily contrived dramatic scene when Faun felt thwarted or wanted to call notice to herself, life was pretty much on an even keel.