Authors: Thomas Tryon
When I’d met him in Westport when I was with Babe’s show, he’d predicted I was going places. So? Here I was, ready to see my name in lights, but if he meant to do anything to ensure that, I hadn’t heard a word about it. Still, to be a client of the Adonis Agency was a cherished hope, and I was theirs for the asking. Anyway, after a brief exchange (Babe was right, Frances was like the Polar Cap), as a parting shot Frank said, “You’ll be hearing from me, kiddo.” Jenny was thrilled, but I told her that was all Hollywood talk, it didn’t mean a thing.
I’d hate to hang for as long as it took me to hear from Frank. It happened, though. I pulled up at the stoplight at Doheny and Santa Monica one day (the same intersection where one day many years later I would see Elizabeth Taylor in her Rolls-Royce heading west, and Richard Burton in his Rolls-Royce heading north, both talking on the telephone in their respective cars—one assumed, to each other—as they waited for the light to change), and I heard my name bawled out (we didn’t have car phones in those days). It was, of course, Frank, and in his passenger seat sat none other than Sir Laurence Olivier, to whom, in Frank’s cool fashion, he introduced me.
“Listen, kiddo,” he shouted across Sir Laurence, “why don’t you follow us to my office and I’ll sign you up, whaddya say?”
Nonplussed, I blinked and nodded. Within the hour I was a client of the Adonis Actors Agency, and Frank was my agent for the next sixteen years.
At the time Jenny and I were still parked at the Villa Lorraine, and it was Frank who dug us up our first Hollywood apartment. Someone owed him a “favor,” and since a tenant was moving out, and Frank’s girl at the time, Angie Brown, was still living on the premises, we found ourselves on North Cadman Terrace, lessees of a one-bedroom domicile with one garage. My car got dirty, a lot.
Our building, though spacious, had only six units, very chic, done in California Regency—putty beige, black and white, understated elegance with lots of dentil moldings, bull’s-eye windows, and a couple of good French lead statues. The front, or more spacious, quarters were known by the tenants as the Grand Trianon, while the back studio apartments over the garages were known as the Petit Trianon, separated by an unpaved alley where the trash cans were kept. These alleys were the kind that crisscross behind all the apartment dwellings in that section of Beverly Hills—except that where we were, on North Cadman, wasn’t B. H.; we were B. B. H., Barely Beverly Hills. You could
say
you were Beverly Hills but technically you weren’t.
Floyd Judson and Marie, his wife, a team of psychologists, lived downstairs in the front; upstairs was a hard-of-hearing duffer whose bathroom was directly behind our bedroom, and when we were in bed we could hear him splashing around in his tub—“the bather,” we called him. Elsewhere in the small complex was an assortment of types, including a Mocambo “hat-chick” girl named Fern, and a talented young actress under contract to Warners, and her untalented newlywed husband. In the back, over the alley, were two studio apartments, each occupied by a colorful tenant. The north apartment was inhabited by a terrific-looking tootsie; sure, Angie probably looked to most people like one more Hollywood bottled blonde, but you can believe me, she was special. Movie fans may recall her as Angelina Brown, one more pretty Columbia starlet who didn’t make it. But, then, in Hollywood there are ways and ways. She’d had a whirl at the movies ten years earlier, had given it all up to marry Eddie LaStarza, the Most Famous Baseball Player in the World, had a deep sexy voice and figure to match, wore Don Loper clothes, and did some modeling on the side, while her son by the MFBPITW went to a military academy. Like Frankie, she came of Italian stock and she maintained a gorgeous figure—she had the greatest pair of legs since Betty Grable, was in fact a good friend of Betty’s; they occasionally played poker together. She always had a tan; her hair was the color of cornsilk, but out of a bottle: the roots were often darkly telltale. And she had cheekbones to rival Colbert’s.
By this time Frank had been married to Iceberg Frances for a dozen years; things hadn’t worked out well, but she wasn’t about to divorce him—nor did he seem particularly to want a divorce. That dilemma would come later, with April. But just then, in the mid-fifties, he was happy seeing Angie; he kept her tucked away, and if people knew about the relationship, they weren’t saying much. There seemed to be some kind of gentlemen’s agreement where Angie was concerned, not to involve her publicly or link her in print with Frank’s name.
It’s logical and fitting that Angie should have been on that extensive list of Hollywood beauties being “squired” about town by Frankie Adonis, but she wasn’t called “The Mother of Us All” for nothing. Angie was great of heart, profoundly wise in a way some women do well to be wise, sympathetic and understanding. She took a very wry view of life, not jaundiced, just ironic. She had pushed her talent as far as it would go and she knew it; smart lady, after co-starring opposite Ross Hunter in a Columbia B flick, she “retired.”
These days Angie was moonlighting. She’d got a job singing in a West Hollywood nightspot called the Trey Deuces. She didn’t know it then, but it was Frankie who’d stopped by and held parley with the proprietor, who, after some “persuasion” and having his palm well crossed with silver, auditioned Angie and hired her. She sang two shows a night and kept her Loper job, too. But she didn’t move out of the Petit Trianon—said she couldn’t bear to be away from Dore.
This guy Dore lived in the other studio apartment, and if Belinda Carroll was Angie’s best girlfriend, her best “boy”friend was her next-door neighbor. Dore Skirball was the house character, and his relationship with Angie was a warm and abiding one; indeed, they were friends to the bitter end. Dore loved Angie like—well, a sister, I suppose. He’d had a sister once; she’d died in a car crash, and he looked on his gorgeous neighbor as a kind of substitute. Dore loved to chatter, so did Angie, but Angie was a good listener, too; I think this is one reason they got on so well. His campy, bawdy jokes and outrageous behavior kept her in tears, and they seemed to send and receive on the same wavelength. Many’s the night when we were trying to get to sleep after an evening, and me with an early call, Jenny and I would hear those two laughs ringing out from across the alley into the wee hours.
Something more should probably be said about this character, Dore Skirball, a.k.a. Dore Oddball and Dore Screwball, both of which epithets were, to say the least, fitting. Dore was “family.” You couldn’t help liking him, though not everything about him was likable. Despite his outrageous behavior, his desire to shock, his need to attract attention, his giddy frivolity and love of luxury, underneath all the glitz he was solid and sober, sharp as a tack, sometimes even wise as an owl.
In his time he’d been a jack-of-all-trades, a crack fighter pilot with three Jap planes to his credit and medals which he almost never acknowledged, a piano player (once the accompanist of a famous singer), and he had a sketchy dance background, having once studied with Martha Graham. He’d finally settled on an antique business because he’d known period furniture all his life, had picked it up in museums and galleries during his travels, and he knew a cabriole from a gateleg, a
pompadour
from a
duchesse brisée.
Dore hadn’t spoken to either of his parents for years (they didn’t approve of his lifestyle), and he had no living brothers or sisters, but he was beloved of an aunt who lived in the town of Torreon, just across the state line near Yuma. Aunt Bobbie kept a chicken ranch there and ran a roadside stand specializing in “Aunt Bob’s Ribs and Chicken,” and according to Dore, she was the only relative he really gave a damn about. He wrote her faithfully and remembered her birthday and Christmas with lavish if inappropriate gifts—one year an expensive negligee with maribou trim, another year a Georgian silver wine cooler that set him back hundreds. The woman neither drank nor entertained, but she used it to cool her Dr. Pepper. Dore was “different”—a lot different, especially back in the uptight fifties. Gay as pink ink, and you either liked him or you didn’t, take your pick.
He was often misunderstood, people were frequently offended by his flamboyance, but he didn’t care. “Take me as I am, ducks, because that’s the only way you’ll get me,” he seemed to say. He wasn’t arrogant, he wasn’t above it all, he simply made no bones about life, and if he caused pain and trouble for himself, he was prepared to face the consequences.
Having lost his shirt in his antique business due to an unethical partner, he was currently working for an upholsterer employed by all the top decorators in town. He was also a chef of note. He loved to bake, called himself “Betty Crocked,” and he
was
that a lot of the time, for when he baked there was always a shot of vodka in a tumbler at his elbow. He was generous with his time, his abilities, and his talent, and he possessed that rare gift that Noel Coward employed to denigrate his own considerable powers, “a talent to amuse.” Dore’s was no small talent. He was outrageous, he was charming, he was witty, and, first, last, and always, he was funny. He had framed the famous
Life
shot of Gloria Swanson in evening gown with cigarette holder posing amid the ruins of the Roxy theatre. Below it he had written the caption: “They should have left the theatre and torn Gloria down.” Even when in the dumps and wanting to cut his throat, he could find something to joke about (often himself), even if it was gallows humor. It was what got him through, he said. Once he stuck his head in the oven, gas on, thinking to kiss the world goodbye, but when Angie found him and called the fire department, who brought him back from the brink of the abyss, as he came to and saw a uniformed fireman in the doorway, all he could say was “Get the name and phone number, ducks, and find me something pretty to put on.”
In addition, his taste was impeccable, if a trifle
exquise.
His apartment—a one-room studio with bath and pullman kitchen—sparkled with mirrored screens, white-painted fake brick, whitewashed ceiling beams, bleached and pickled shutters, deep slipper chairs done in a natural linen stripe, the floor covered in coco matting. In 1956 Dore Skirball was far ahead of his time in matters of decor. A small mirrored bar was crammed with glittering crystal and silver, and a surrounding mural executed by a friend, ersatz Venetian scenes with white monkeys cavorting across painted panels, hung on the linen white walls.
He also had a pair of goldfish in a bowl on the piano, whose names were pronounced “Sy
-philis
” and “Gon
-oria
” and who had been given to him by no less a personage than Claire Regrett, for whom he’d done a quantity of decorating on the side and whom he referred to as “Miss Clutch” when she wasn’t present. It was of Claire that Dore had conceived the remark “To really know her you have to read between the lines in her face.” He used to be in and out of her house all the time. He loved telling wicked stories about her and her studs, the real dish, and you knew he couldn’t be making it up, not a word. Like the time she met a marine gunnery sergeant at a USO party, took him home, sneaked him into the house, and kept him locked in her bedroom until the Shore Patrol came and hauled him away and gave him a general court-martial and six months at hard labor. (Brown Derby wags said they’d rather take the six months in the stockade than a week locked in Claire’s bedroom.) Or the time she laid out a grand buffet whose centerpiece was two huge blue tins of Persian caviar, and when one famous guest allowed as how she might have some, the serving attendant said, “Oh no, Miss Hellman, those cans are both empty. She just puts them out for show.” Or how her sense of etiquette dictated the use of place cards in little silver holders when there were only four guests for dinner; the way she called a napkin a “serviette,” curtains “drapes,” and a house a “home”—“
Thank
you
so
much for visiting us at our lovely ‘home,’ bless you, darling”—attempted her shaky French on Italian waiters, “studied”
Romeo and Juliet
every morning until she could more or less recite the balcony scene, then cadged the great Olivier into playing opposite her in her living room; how she picked out a dress at Don Loper’s, then bought everything to match, creating symphonies of chartreuse, cerise; how she sent illuminated copies of the “Desiderata” to everyone at Christmas, then collected them again and sent them the next year as well—“These words have so much meaning to me, I hope you may find something among them as well, bless you darling and a Merry-Merry Happy-Happy.” How she spent half her life at a desk replying to mail in her own hand, on her famous amethyst stationery, scribbling scribbling away, with no sign of writer’s claw; how she ran a mail depot out of her garage and entertained her fan club at a yearly gala when she gave a conducted tour of the premises wearing suit, high heels, hat, bag, and gloves. One day when she encountered Dore before going to a lunch, dolled up to the nines with furs, gloves, jewels, hankie, and asked him “How do I look?” Dore replied, “Go back upstairs and take off any three things.”
They were always having little spats, “lovers’ quarrels,” Dore called them; Claire would get mad and begin throwing whatever came to hand, and sometimes Dore would come back with cuts or bruises. But on the occasions when they
were
speaking he’d go out to her house and try on her latest headgear, her Walter Florells, her Lily Dache’s, her John Frederickses. She must have had a hat collection in the hundreds, and it was from Claire that Dore got a lot of his drag: beaded dresses, fur pieces, gloves, wigs, and those anklestrap shoes she loved and made famous. Claire indulged him because he was a great convenience to her; he’d do anything she asked and she kept him busy waiting hand and foot on her. He was enslaved to her stardom but he didn’t care. Who else was as close to such a luminary, and if he had hitched his wagon to a star, that was his business, wasn’t it? He could get mad at her, too: “Look up ‘bitch’ in the dictionary,” he said to Jenny one day, “you’ll find her picture.” And “She’s the only witch who rides around on a whisk broom.”