Authors: Thomas Tryon
Yet when it came to casting, Sam proved a hard nut to crack, especially since his wife, Pauline, was one of those Hollywood spouses who eyed Babe with disapproval. But Vi soon took care of that, and upon Pauline’s discovering for herself that Babe wasn’t at all like her projected image, but a sweet-natured girl with a good sense of humor, she began adding her own blandishments to Viola’s. Together they persuaded Sam to drag out the script of
Pattycake
, with Babe in mind; Vi slipped a copy to Babe to look over, and in a weekend she’d completely rewritten the thing, calling it
Broadway Blue Eyes
, giving it a stronger plot line and surrounding herself with four or five leading men to cast her spell upon. Harry Shine, one of Mack Sennett’s old comedy directors, was dragged out of mothballs to perform director chores, and in no time AyanBee Studios had the moneymaking hit it had been looking for. In fact, it could be said that Babe Austrian saved the lot (Fort Knox with tits, indeed), and with this resounding success her star was catapulted high into the Hollywood firmament. In hardly any time at all Babe’s name was a household word, and Babe Austrian jokes quickly replaced the farmer’s daughter and Little Audrey variety, and shopgirls across the country began peroxiding their locks and wearing ankle socks and a hair ribbon to match their outfit.
Then came
Pretty Polly.
It had been Frank’s original idea of teaming the two unlikeliest show-business personalities anyone could hope to find, and he came up with a winning combination that led to three of the biggest laugh riots of the thirties and did much to foster the illusion of the so-called screwball comedy. One evening he’d taken Babe down to the Biltmore Theatre to see Crispin Antrim and his wife, Maude, in a play, and sometime during the second act the idea struck him. With Crispin’s droll wit and impeccable manners, his high style and crisp, gentlemanly airs, the great Shakespearean actor seemed the perfect foil for a Babe Austrian. Frankie envisioned a story in which the two could rub up against each other (after a fashion) and produce laughs. Never especially noted for his comedy performances, Crispin Antrim nonetheless proved an adept farceur in the old tradition, while Babe’s broad delivery of a socko gag was already well demonstrated. After the curtain fell, Frankie conducted her backstage to meet the famous actor, and was pleased to see how well they got on.
Next day Frank huddled at Metro with Irving Thalberg, who quickly got the message. The fact that Crispin was years older than Babe only added spice to the idea, and Frank went away to think some more. Sometime later he came up with the idea for a backstage story, called
Footlights
, which eventually became
Pretty Polly
, the story of a newcomer to the Follies who meets a broken-down actor whom she turns into a slapstick comedian and who ends up the star of the show. The critics dismissed it as cheapjack Hollywood stuff, but nonetheless it made customers everywhere weep buckets.
Frank’s idea of teaming Babe and Crispin paid big dividends.
Pretty Polly
was followed by the even more successful
Delicious
, about a boardinghouse keeper and his daughter running off counterfeit bills on an abandoned printing press, and the third,
Manhattan Madness
, contained some of the funniest screwball scenes ever filmed—the story of a rich playboy producer of Broadway musicals who bets his theatre that he can make a star of the girl who works in the hashhouse around the corner. His efforts to create a singing comedienne out of little Mitzi bear fruit and—guess what?—he ends up marrying her.
Crispin Antrim, who lived at Sunnyside, the palatial house he had built for his wife, Maude, and that rivaled Pickfair as a royal palace and Hospitality Hall for visiting firemen, made a small fortune from his comedies with Babe, but for unspecified reasons the lady never set foot inside those lofty precincts. People said Maude herself was the cause of this rejection, though I never found reason to give the report credence.
By now Babe’s career was in high gear. In less than three years she’d got a beach house in Santa Monica and had become one of the biggest and most dependable attractions in movies. Thalberg, then turning out the elite glamour product of MGM, thought he saw in the comedienne further possibilities as yet untapped, and when Crispin Antrim suffered an accident, it was Irving who had the idea that resulted in Babe’s being cast with the four Marx Brothers in what was to become their biggest hit after
A Night at the Opera.
Far more than merely the love interest, Babe played the wily Flaxie de Mer, alias Gladys Smith, who managed to steal from Groucho every scene she played in
All at Sea.
It was also during this period that Babe, needing a place in town, moved to the Sunset Towers, a notably glamorous landmark on the Hollywood scene. As you drove west along Sunset Boulevard toward the section known as the Strip, you passed, among other remarkable sights, Schwab’s Drugstore (where Lana Turner was not discovered), Frascatti’s of happy memory, the Garden of Allah and the Villa Lorraine, and farther west, on the south side of the street, the Sunset Towers. Financed by a prominent industrialist and motorcar magnate, its
moderne
style and extravagant exterior embellishment were pure Art Deco, and its eleven stories were surmounted by a spacious penthouse where for a number of years the industrialist had housed his inamorata, a celebrated beauty and ex-chorine. The apartment had a marvelous view of the hills to the north and the flats to the south, and to the east and west the Sunset Strip snaked like a well-trafficked ribbon between Hollywood and the old Beverly Hills bridle path.
In a later epoch, movie fans driving past would point aloft to where Babe Austrian was at home, as though the late-burning lamp in her bedroom were a beacon—a beacon that declared to the world that Babe Austrian was alive and well, living in sin with no one knew which, or how many, oversexed studs.
By the mid-thirties, with her easy, freewheeling style, her unblinking candor, her high humor, her oft-quoted wit, she was the hottest thing to hit Hollywood since Lupe Velez. In addition, she had stuffed her head with all sorts of information and if she played dumb, believe me, it was only playing. Along with Connie Bennett and Claudette Colbert, she was one of the top female moneymakers in the years 1934–37. Only Maude Antrim beat her out in ’37. And by then she’d become a fashion plate as well; Adrian was dressing her, in a much more subdued style than her former gaudy image, and when he got her out of those long skirts, she was discovered to possess two of the most shapely legs God ever gave a woman, legs that a Grable might envy.
During the war years she easily maintained her position as a mainstay of the studio, and by the time June Allyson came on the lot in 1942, Babe had been there for eight years, and the Marxes were long gone to Eagle-Lion and film oblivion. In the famous
Life
shot of the celebrations of twenty-five years of MGM, it is a startling omission that Babe Austrian is not among the luminaries. “More stars than there are in heaven” was the slogan, and she was assuredly one of those. The fact was, Babe
is
in many of the shots from that
Life
sitting—she is positioned on the left, next to Arlene Dahl, wearing a navy-blue tunic and skirt and surrounded by ostrich feathers—but the shot that was used in the magazine and became famous doesn’t show her. Promptness was never Babe’s long suit; people had been waiting for her all her life, and she figured they’d wait for her that day to begin. They didn’t, the editors chose one of the early shots, and here is the result.
Meanwhile, the redoubtable Vi Ueberroth was greatly responsible for the new Frank Adonis who was emerging, chick from embryo. To look at her today, it’s not easy to imagine Vi as ever having been physically attractive or having had a high-tech sex life, but the chances are strong that for a period she and Frankie enjoyed intimacies, though neither of them was the type to kiss and tell. Whatever the real relationship, theirs was a friendship of long standing, and as the secretary from AyanBee on lower Sunset rose in the eyes of the industry and became the doyenne of North Carmel Drive, she continued to enjoy a special friendship with the Black Wolf, as Frank was sometimes called.
In 1932, when he first arrived in Hollywood, Frankie Adano had one client, Babe. In just a few years he had changed his name to Frank Adonis, had formed the Adonis Actors Agency, and had a client list the length of your arm. He hadn’t, however, done it entirely on his own. And he’d had strong support from others besides Vi. One of these, an unlikely benefactor and sometime mentor, was none other than the kingpin of MGM, Mr. Louis Burt Mayer himself. No one knew how this strangely matched combo had got its start; some say it was because of their frequent meetings at the track, some claim it was because Frankie knew the prettiest ladies in town. But however it began, from Mayer Frankie went on to enjoy the acquaintanceship of much of Hollywood’s royalty, and to see him making an entrance at one of their parties in a well-cut suit of tails was a sight to behold. In the early thirties every movie actor worth his salt wore white tie and tails in his parlor, bedroom, and even bath pictures. Cary Grant, Gary Cooper, Georgie Raft, Warren William, Edmund Lowe, Astaire, Gable, all sported their best soup-and-fish, but few of these idols of the silver screen were ever so dashing as Frankie Adonis in his evening rig. He was in fact buried in his, and why not, since he’d lived so much in it?
But the major change in Frank’s life at this time was in relation to Babe. There was a series of public quarrels, soon he was looking for surcease elsewhere, and he found it in the arms (and bed) of Claire Regrett, née Cora Sue Brodsky, who had in just a few years become one of MGM’s leading female stars.
Cora Sue’s miraculous transformation from lingerie salesgirl to chorus cutie to ranking star was the start of what was to become one of the great screen legends. After Frankie split for Hollywood with Babe, Cora Sue grew more determined than ever to make it big “out there,” so she quit the chorus line and hopped a train. And on that train, the story goes, she met a Hollywood producer, our friend Vi’s brother, Sam, who said he could make Cora Sue a star as well as Frankie Adonis could. She let him. How much she let him or how often remained a matter of conjecture for some years, but the fact remained that in not too long a time Cora Sue Brodsky’s dreams came true. Claire Regrett was born, and before long she left Sam’s AyanBee Studios for Metro, eventually won the Oscar, and stayed a reigning Hollywood star for almost forty years until she retired and died, alone and all but forgotten, in a New York penthouse.
Certainly there’s no denying that Claire formed an important, even integral, part of Frank’s life, and it’s a matter of record that their liaison continued off and on for more than thirty years. The embarrassing scene she made at his funeral has become part of Hollywood lore, and the rivalry between her and Babe has passed into the pages of the town’s history.
As far as Babe was concerned, Claire Regrett had stolen her lover, if not exactly out from under her then possibly from on top of her. Babe was a faithful soul: if she liked you, she liked you for good, no matter what others might say. By the same token, if she didn’t like you, nothing was going to change her mind. And that’s how she felt about Claire. She’d disliked Cora Sue Brodsky when they were both back in New York, and she hated Claire Regrett even more. Though she was then enjoying a huge personal success of her own, it rankled in her breast that Cora Sue had managed to become this larger-than-life Hollywood figure already on her way to having her own cult and her own legend. When Frank came into a room now he went first to Claire, then to Babe, and then, most important, back to Claire again—during a highly public dinner they were observed by Louella to be holding hands and twice he leaned to kiss the back of her neck. Babe, seated with a pair of studio flacks and a hairdresser, pretended not to notice, but it was plain that she was furious and could easily have taken an axe to Miss Regrett’s scalp.
Claire took much pride in the fact that she had got her old lover back, and at Babe’s expense. When Frank visited her set, Claire would wait for a break, then haul him off to her portable dressing room, where she’d tell her maid to get lost and lock the door; then she and Frank would go at it while people op the set joked at the way the trailer rocked as Frankie gave her the same business he used to give Babe. One day someone walked past and, through a window whose curtains Claire had neglected to close, glimpsed her feet shod in spike heels sticking straight up in the air while she moaned, “Oh, Daddy, give baby that big lollipop.”
But the day came when Babe had the last laugh, for Frank’s interest in Claire again dwindled down to the last of the wine. He refused all invitations to join her in her trailer, having started dallying with a little Latin tootsie he’d brought to Mayer, who’d given her a part in a low-budget picture; her sensational bust was already attracting attention. Her name was Julie Figueroa, a girl he’d found checking hats at the Florentine Gardens on Hollywood Boulevard. Now Babe and Claire had something in common; they were both yesterday’s news and might have enjoyed commiserating, but they still would have nothing to do with each other, while
la señorita
Figueroa was lapping up the cream.
Frankie’s reputation as a swain, lover, and general, all-round Hollywood cocksman increased in direct ratio to the large number of females he was servicing at this point. Some twenty years hence, he would engage in a rivalry with Sam Ueberroth over the affections of a pretty UCLA coed, and Frank would get one of his testicles shot off for his trouble, but until then he was letting no grass grow under his feet; at least not until he met Frances, who would be the one to get him to the altar.
Yet even though in this period he no longer shared Babe’s bed, Frank still played an important part in her life. There were no recriminations; she kept the jewelry he’d bought her—a not inconsiderable treasure—as well as the famous Reo motorcar. And soon she began her search for a new man, a search that took her through a motley series of lowbrow types, consisting in the main of prizefighters, pool sharks, muscle-enhancers, and the like. There was even a bullfighter or two. Occasionally these athletic figures gave way to even lesser-lifes, to known frequenters of Mafia hangouts, dese, dem, and dosers with scars and police records. Babe never had pretensions about herself (unlike Claire Regrett, who had many and hoarded them all), and, being the queen of Cicero, she’d had plenty of exposure to gangland types. Now it seemed as if, having had Frank Adonis, there was no other man for her, no one of any class. Give her a jug-eared welterweight any day, or a blackjack dealer with a diamond on his pinkie finger. She always claimed “Moonskin” Spaccifaccioli was, despite his bad complexion, a great lay, and maybe he was.