All That Glitters (74 page)

“You know what was the giveaway with Frank? His eyes. Oh, those eyes! They were deadly. One look and you were a goner. They could be so maddeningly sexy—‘bedroom eyes,’ they used to call them back then—and they could get so little-boy, so really innocent and honest, as if they’d never seen a rotten trick in their life.

“They’ll never be able to tell Frankie’s story, not the whole story, the
real
story. I know plenty, but even after all those years I don’t know it all. No one does, really. It makes me laugh, how he peeled off the streets right here in New York and went out there to Hollywood and made them set up and beg. Had them eating out of his palm, the whole goddamn bunch.

“Sure, he was connected, everyone knew that, he was tied into the mob, here in New York, out there, too, especially the Vegas bunch. He and Ears Satriano were chummy. And Bugsy—he and Bugsy were just like this, the two of ’em. They’d grown up together. In those days Bugs wasn’t such a slicker. Big ears, big nose, a real thug. He worshipped Frankie, he’d have done anything for him.” She chuckled to herself, drank, puffed, blew smoke, tossed her hair. Certain of my attention, she went on:

“You want to hear something funny? Something
really
weird? It’ll show you on what little hooks our lives hang, you know? You’ve heard about the night they sprayed Bugsy Siegel, at his house on Angelo Drive? Well, you know that Frank had stopped by. He was sitting right on that sofa where Bugsy got hit. But Frank had this rendezvous and so he split, and less than ten minutes later they blew Bugsy away. Rat-a-tat-tat on the glazed chintz. You saw the pictures, it was like the Chicago stockyards, blood all over the place.” She leaned toward me. “But listen to this, baby. Frank had left a little early ’cause he needed to make an important stop. Know where? Schwab’s Drugstore. Know why? For a pack of French ticklers. He had a date, he wanted to be up for a big night. Know who the date was? You’re looking at her, buster, you’re looking at her.

“There we were in my bed, Frankie was catching his second wind or maybe his third. The radio was on. A bulletin came over. Christ, did he pull out and fly out of my place. Jumped into his pants and he was gone in six seconds. I mean—
he was gone
! He borrowed Howard Hughes’s private plane and flew up to Frisco, then hotfooted it straight for Waikiki Beach. The manager of the Royal Hawaiian was a friend of his, he backdated the registration card so Frank had an alibi—perfect. Then he called me and told me to get to Honolulu quick. I was there in fifteen hours; I got on the
China Clipper
and took the heat off him. Nobody believed that big-mouth maid who told the cops she’d let him into my house that evening. I really fired her ass. Frank was solid alibi’d, they couldn’t touch him.”

She emptied her glass, wiped the bottom on her napkin, and set it aside. “Louis B. gave us these glasses for a wedding present, Sky and me.” She looked up suddenly. “Damn it, I almost forgot!” she exclaimed. “It’s time for din-din. Hope you like it.”

Presently she returned, wearing a frilly apron with a poodle stenciled on the pocket, and ushered me into the formal dining room, where we sat across from each other at the table, in whose center rested a ceramic head from which protruded at varying angles a dozen plastic anemones. The meal had already been set out in plastic serving dishes and Claire urged me to help myself.

“I hope you’re hungry. I like my men to eat. Pretend you’re Jewish and I’ll be your
yiddische mama
.” Any self-respecting
yiddische mama
would have blanched to see our plates: a small casserole, a seafood dish with bread crumbs and sliced hardboiled eggs paprika’d on top. I complimented her on it, and she beamed, saying it was just an old “o-grotten” thing she’d been doing for years. Salad with cottage cheese and pineapple topped with a green maraschino cherry, and gluten bread eked out the sumptuous menu.

As we ate, and since I didn’t want to waste a minute, I led her on to other topics and she talked willingly, eagerly, toasting me with the vodka-rocks she’d brought along to the table. The liquor was having its usual effect on her. Sometimes she slurred her words, her eyes glittered. She ate with care, remembering the table manners she’d so assiduously taught herself. By now she was into her Lady of the Manor, and I marveled at her little touches: how she used her “serviette” and cutlery with studied elegance.

While we ate, she painted pictures for me, her brush again favoring scenes from her youth. She relished talking about her Brooklyn childhood and what life had been like in Bensonhurst.

“Saturday, after
shul
, we’d always gather in the front room—front room, hah, it was practically the
only
goddamn room we had, I slept in a closet in the back—and the rabbi would start reading from the Torah. Everybody’d be squashed in like sardines, Ma, Pa, me, Ira, Bella, the aunts and the uncles, ten or fifteen in that tiny room, and everybody’d be praying together. And that goddamn rabbi—we called him Uncle Casimir, only he was a cousin—what a creep. He was the original dirty old man. He always insisted that Ma sit me next to him and all through the boiled beef he’d have his hand stuck up my dress.”

“The rabbi?” I asked in some surprise.

“You better believe it. I really had to laugh, you know—Pa was so religious, during Rosh Hashanah he’d always have someone come in and turn off the lights or start the bathwater. And there’s Uncle Casimir copping a feel while he passed the potatoes. But I fixed him good.”

“What did you do?”

“One day I was passing around the cabbage soup; it was hot off the stove, and I just dumped the whole bowl right in his lap. You never saw anything like it, the way he jumped out of that chair.

“‘You done dat on poipose!’ he screams at me. ‘Oh no, Uncle Casimir, it slipped,’ I say in my most innocent voice. You’d of thought he’d finally learned his lesson with his scalded crotch, but no, he kept on snatching and grabbing at me every chance he got.”

“Did you ever tell your father what was going on?”

She heaved a sigh. “What use? He’d have said I was only making it up. He said I made everything up.” She giggled. “He didn’t know how right he was. I made up my whole life, I kid you not.” She placed her knife and fork beside her plate rim and used her “serviette” to good purpose.

“What became of Uncle Casimir?”

“He went to matzoh ball heaven, and I’ll bet he’s still copping feels off little girl angels. Perry used to really break up hearing me talk about Uncle Casimir. He thought it was funny. I said—‘You should live so long!’”

“Let’s talk about your marriage to Perry Antrim. Were you happy with him?”

“God, yes, at first it was divine, he was the handsomest man you ever saw—even better-looking than his father. One look and I was a goner. I mean, I flipped, right out of my gourd. I thought, ‘Screw you, Frankie Adano with your high-society wife, look what I got now!’ I’d caught the brass ring first time out. But time proved me wrong—as it has so many times since.”

“Explain that for the tape.”

“Listen, our marriage didn’t stand a chance in that hospice on the hill. It was like Shepheard’s Hotel in Cairo, sooner or later everyone in the world showed up. You try living directly under the eye of your in-laws, eating their food at their table, sleeping on their sheets and pillowcases, having their laundress iron your clothes, driving in their cars, swimming in their pool. We even had their dogs.

“I begged Perry, Let’s go out and buy a house of our own, but he wouldn’t hear of it. He said that when he went off on one of his adventures he wanted to know that I was protected and looked after. So he kept me plunked down right there at Sunnyside, and off he’d skip, looking for tsetse flies or lost missionaries or whatever, and there I’d be, having dinner with the Mountbattens or some potentate. Ye gods, how I hated it.

“Sure, I know I made a big stink, saying he wanted his freedom to go out and conquer the world, swim the deepest ocean, climb the highest mountain, all that crap, but we’d no sooner divorced than I turned around to find out he’d married our little Miss Carroll, and I thought that was really dirty pool. And god damn if the
next
thing I read in Hopper isn’t that he’s gone into the jungle looking for some goddamn doctor and he ends up missionary pie.

“First I lost Perry, then Frankie. Of course, Frankie was my great love, you know that. And… Charles”—here she changed gears, her voice dropped, became ultra-grave—“I know you’ll understand this.
That’s
why I got so terribly upset at Frank’s funeral. You remember what happened. I’m so sorry it turned into such a spectacle, a farce, really, wasn’t it? Come on, you can be honest with me, it really was a farce. But I didn’t know what I was doing, I was
so-o
upset. Honestly, Charlie, I wasn’t even going to attend—really, I thought it would really be
de trop.
I had to knock back a couple of tall ones, just to get up the nerve to go. Then we were slowed up by the rain, and when I saw that sea of umbrellas, I just plowed on through. I wanted to get to the casket, but the goddamn idiots wouldn’t move, the slobs, so I just shoved them out of the way, those Hollywood phonies who didn’t even give a rat’s ass about him when he was alive, and now he was dead and they all wanted to weep over him and—oh, I don’t know, it all just got to me. And then I saw Belinda. There she was, plunked right down in front for the world to see, all done up in black with this darling hat and a veil—I mean, she looked like Jackie Kennedy or something. And then they said I was trying to steal the limelight, but that’s a goddamn lie. I mean, if anyone knows how to behave at a funeral, this little gal does.”

“It must have been quite a blow, losing Frank,” I ventured sympathetically.

“You can say that again.” She stubbed out another cigarette, then got up, stretched, and opened the terrace door. I could see her standing at the parapet, gazing out over the city. When I joined her, without looking she handed me her glass for a refill. As I carried it to her, I glanced at the tape recorder that had been taking everything down. Should I bring it outside or give it a rest? Deciding on the latter, I rejoined her on the terrace, where she was stretched out on a chaise. Her red nails glinted as she took the glass and pointed for me to sit at her foot—that famous foot at which so many other men had sat. “Thanks,” she said and put her lips to the rim of the glass, tilted her head, and drank. “That’s what I thought,” she said moodily, though I’d lost the thread of the talk. “Perry being a grand guy, I mean.”

“You were happy with him? Or not?”

“Depends on how you look at things. I guess we were, all things considered. For a while, anyway.” She chuckled, then spun round, eyes sparkling. “Well, biographer mine, are you enjoying these confessions of a movie queen?
Ex
-movie queen, I should say.”

She held out her empty glass again, but I seized that as my cue to
partir.

“Golly, it’s late,” I puffed, looking at my watch with consternation. “Sorry, but tomorrow’s a working day.”

She stood and faced me. “All right, scribe of mine, I guess that’ll hold you for tonight. Tune in tomorrow night for another chapter in the continuing saga of Claire Regrett, girl-wonder. God, haven’t I banged on, though?” She gave my cheek an affectionate pat. I went inside, slipped my recorder and my notes into my briefcase, and started out. Catching up, she put her arm through mine and we traversed the passageway while her little dog trotted in our footsteps, its nails clicking on the parquet squares. Before opening the front door and allowing me to escape, Claire lifted her brows to ask, “What time shall we expect you tomorrow? I’m really going to cook up a storm, my special stuffed pork chops. Sound yummy?”

I had intended to effect an orderly exit from Fortress Claire. Though this was only my first “interview,” I’d known it would be tough sledding. One night, okay—two nights in a row, no. I had my excuse prepared. “I’m afraid I can’t meet tomorrow. Sorry.”

“Whaddya mean, you can’t meet? Not at all?” came the granite voice.

I explained I had a complex series of meetings, morning, lunch, and afternoon.

“What about tomorrow night? I thought at least the nights would be mine. We’ve only just begun.”

I had a dinner engagement with an “old friend,” a fact I frankly would have preferred to conceal, but she was ahead of me there. “Don’t tell me, you’re having dinner with Madame Nhu.
Old
is right.”

I confessed that this was true, like it or lump it.

“Damn it, I should think that a serious author would regard his work as all-important. Maybe you could come by afterward? It’s Friday. At Belinda’s age you don’t want to keep her up too late; all her nuts will loosen and the bolts will fall out and then her ass will drop off. By the way, I heard that Her Nibs has had her face done again.”

“A little nip and tuck, nothing major.”

Her brassy laugh rang out. “Come on, Charlie, get real. She’s had the whole road resurfaced like the Alcan Highway.”

With a bad show of grace she yanked open the door and buzzed for the elevator. “It takes a year sometimes.” She scowled as she inspected the mirrors, then removed the handkerchief from my jacket pocket and rubbed off some smudges her ever-keen eye had discerned. It didn’t take much to see that she was pissed off.

On the way down in the car I gave my trusty tape recorder a friendly pat. Panasonic gives good Claire… nice stuff tonight.

The days went by and I labored like a Trojan. I was probably deceiving myself that I was searching for the key to her character. That key had been tossed away long ago. When I asked one day if she’d ever been psychoanalyzed, she blew up at me and did twenty minutes on what she thought of the profession of psychiatry, all that Freudian bunk. She didn’t need to be stuck on a couch, she goddamn well knew who she was; what’s more, she’d read an article in
Reader’s Digest
exposing all that nutty dream stuff. The problems weren’t in people’s dreams but in their diets. Low cholesterol and wheat germ would do a lot more for her than remembering how the grocery boy once tried to stick his finger in her panties.