All That Glitters (29 page)

Her brittle, coarse voice has softened a little, she appears less nervous, almost docile, always a good sign. A meek Anna’s easier to cope with than a belligerent one. I’m relieved, and pretty soon I start my Scheherazade act, telling endless stories to occupy her mind, maybe snare a flicker of interest. Because of the Easter card, I mention that I’ve been to see Vi a day or so ago; dropped by her house in Beverly Hills. Vi’s indestructible, always a good role model; Anna shows a gleam.

“How old can she be anyway, Vi?” she asks seriously.

I hazard a guess: eighty if she’s a day, maybe eighty-five? Sam’s younger by a good ten years, but retired to Cathedral Wells. This oblique reference causes Anna to ask about Angie; have I seen her? No, I lie, not a glimpse. These days Angie’s far sicker than Anna; in Desert Springs Hospital and not expected to live. Big C. But Angie’s one of the ones Anna enjoys remembering. Sometimes Frank, though Frank’s actually sort of a phantom, this dark, mysterious phantom, like Rochester or Heathcliff. And Bud’s taboo, absolutely. Belinda’s name pops up sometimes—and Claire’s, ha ha. With Anna, Claire’s always a joke; Anna claims Claire will bury us all. I find it tricky negotiating these conversational reefs and shoals, where some people—many people—are dangerous to mention.

I confide what I hope is an edifying item. Mrs. Kraft has told me they’ll show
Brighter Promise
sometime in the Community Room, if Anna likes. Unfortunately Anna doesn’t like, not a bit. I explain that the audience will probably ask questions afterward; she still doesn’t like. She doesn’t even remember the movie, which comes as no big surprise to me.

Showing the movie turns out to be the doctor’s suggestion. Dr. Kern has been on this case since he was a young man. He doesn’t seem discouraged, either, and you have to envy such zealousness. As if tomorrow Anna would somehow suddenly spring back to life and say, “Hey! I remember! I remember it all!” I don’t know, though—if I were Anna, would
I
want to remember what
she
has to remember? As far as she’s concerned, her whole life’s been one great big Freudian slip.

Dr. Kern’s a Jungian, though. At least
he
claims he is; you couldn’t prove it by me. Frankly, I don’t see what difference it makes; she’s mad as a hatter any way you cut it. There’s no way she’s ever going to get out of here. I know it, the doc knows it—so, I assume, does Anna. This is the last stop on the line, where the pavement ends, grass growing out of the cement and all that. You don’t go home from here. Here is home.

After a while it’s time for lunch, and we adjourn to the cafeteria, more institution green with homey little touches—violet Easter bunnies scissored out of construction paper adorning the walls, multicolored egg cut-outs pasted on the windowpanes, little yellow chicks, and so on. The echoing clatter of mass food consumption, the chink and clink of heavy chinaware, the blat of many voices, raucous, high-pitched, agitated, sometimes unrestrained.

Even though it’s Easter, the luncheon menu holds little attraction. I have my choice of Virginia ham with raisin sauce or the cold plate. I take the salad on my pressed-pockets plastic tray. Plastic knife, fork, spoon—what did lunatic asylums do before the age of plastic? Those around us take no more notice of Anna than anyone else. If they “know,” there’s hardly any sign of it. I once heard her referred to as “Virginia.” Someone pointed at her and screamed, “Virginia’s on the rug!” They could only have been referring to Olivia de Havilland in
The Snake Pit.
Interesting, how they had a rug on the floor in that movie but no one was ever allowed to walk on it, and here there’s not a rug in sight; only miles of industrial linoleum, enough to cover the tarmac at a jetport.

The good Dr. Kern stops by the table, sits with folded hands, pencil tops and pens picketed along his pocket edge. Serious glasses, white coat, white buckskin shoes, nylon socks, professional demeanor. I forgive him; what else can he do? There are over five hundred patients incarcerated here and he’s responsible for a lot of them.

“Well, how are things today, Anna?” he asks in his Leo Genn-ish voice, edged with wry humor. Thank God he never says “How are
we
?” the way one of the nurses, Miss Pope, does. Despite the gluey manner, he’s really trying his damnedest. Nothing’s easy at Libertad, present company not excepted. The doctor has only so much time; he consults the wall clock and then with regrets pushes on to another table.

“You can go, too, if you like,” Miss Pope comes and tells me flatly. She’s “Popey” around here. I ask Anna if she wants me to leave. “I don’t care.” I know she means it; she doesn’t care.

“I’d like to stay,” I say and ask her how she might like to pass the afternoon. She thinks, shrugs, sighs.

“Ohhh… I don’t know….”

Carefully, with malice aforethought, I drop a name—a name not unknown in Hollywood annals—just to observe what her reaction is today. “What do you hear from April?” I ask blandly.

She gives me a blank stare. “Who?”

“You know—April—your friend April Rains?”

“I don’t know any April Rains.”

Alas.

That’s the way it is on Easter Sunday of 1982. April Rains is strictly out to lunch. The only thing Anna is likely to remember about April is that she had a pretty name, a camel-hair polo coat with a belt in the back, and is dead. Asked if she remembers April’s husband, she signifies no in a decisive manner. “Why does everyone keep asking me about her?” she demands. “What business is it of theirs, anyway? Why is she so important? You’d think I murdered her or something.”

“Did you?”

“I never murdered anyone, much less someone I scarcely knew.”

“How well
did
you know her?”

“I don’t know. Stop asking me. I—you—stop—”

I can see she’s getting upset again. No more along these lines or they’ll be putting her back in the rubber room.

The doctors have for years been pursuing the all-important relation between Anna Thorwald and April Rains. She can’t get beyond the obvious fact that both names begin with an “A.” Show her a movie still or a snapshot; she may or may not recognize the pretty blonde actress, a movie queen of the early sixties. Sometimes I think, “
I
can’t remember what happened
yesterday
, how’s
she
supposed to remember twenty
years
ago?”

One thing’s for sure: she’s dead, April. Everyone agrees on that—those who know the whole story, those who don’t but may suspect. But those who know best are all gone now, except me. As for Anna, she’ll be dead, later if not sooner, and she’ll take the story with her when she goes. Like the cast of
Gone With the Wind
; after over forty years, who’s left? Butterfly McQueen, Olivia de Havilland, and some ex-gaffer named Rudy Hatch who lives in Panorama City and won a cup playing miniature golf.

One who does know the story is Irene Fender. Irene’s another of the looneytunes, but whenever she chances across Anna the mere sight of her presses every one of Irene’s buttons. She salivates like Pavlov’s dog and begins to twitch and her voice skids up an octave and a half.

“I know you!” she’ll scream, pointing. “I know you! Look, everybody, it’s April! April Rains! I ain’t kiddin’, girls! I seen her in the movies! She was fuckin’ Frankie Adonis!”

God help you, Irene Fender, you’ve got a rotten mouth. I know you have your problems, you’re a classic pathologue, but, God, I wish you’d put a sock in it. Anna doesn’t need that kind of stuff, though most days Anna doesn’t really know what Irene means, because she simply
isn’t
April. I mean, honest to God, she
isn’t.
April Rains is as remote to her as the surface of the moon.

Unlike Peg Entwhistle, April didn’t come to Hollywood
from
anywhere. She was born right here, raised here, went to school here, a native Californian—one of those local girls who made good. And she was a real hot Frank Adonis discovery. You’ve probably forgotten it by now, but you first saw the face of April Rains on the June 1959 cover of
Look
magazine. The caption read: “America’s Loveliest Coeds.” Frank said actually it was Vi Ueberroth who spotted “that puss” in the Turf Club at Santa Anita. A copy of the magazine was lying on a cocktail table when Vi sat down in the lounge, and for once she found something of greater interest than the next race. That appealing face with its freckles and suntan, the sunstreaked hair done in a Ginger Rogers pageboy roll, the exuberant, all-American-girl smile with its perfect teeth—a natural, is what Vi thought, and set out to prove herself right. She showed the cover to Frank, who was quick to agree.

She
was
a natural, April. You can see it in that first film she made, the same sweet, healthy winsomeness that Esther Williams had, that gorgeous, well-constructed American chassis that made guys sit up and take notice, all kinds of guys; the kind of healthy outdoors girl that only the state of California seems able to breed so well. Only Esther, smart girl, never made the mistake of falling in love with Frankie Adonis, married guy. And if you just drove up and asked Esther whether it had all been fun, she’d probably say, Yeah, sure it was fun, I had a ball. Not so April. You could never say it was fun for her. She never had a ball. In fact she hated it. “Just
like
some people,” I remember hearing one Hollywood cutie say. “Give some people the world on a silver platter and they don’t want it. Imagine not wanting to be a star!”

But April didn’t. Never wanted it, never liked it, never enjoyed it. She used to break out in rashes before starting a new picture. Had to stop a take to go and throw up before she could continue. Couldn’t wait to get off the soundstage, out of the sight of people, all those eyes watching, the grips trudging around with boxes and cables, men she was too shy to talk to or become friendly with. Claire Regrett knew the names of every crew member on any of her pictures, their wives and kids, too, she made it part of her business; but April was plain scared and they called her stuck-up, snotty, above-it-all. It wasn’t that way at all. She just wasn’t cut out for the game.

April was Frank’s own creation. She was a lovely piece of marble that he shaped, cut, and chiseled into something beautiful to look at, that he breathed life into and that he had the failed wit to fall in love with, his Galatea. With Babe, Claire, others, it was business with a little love tossed in; with April Rains it was the real thing. There ought to be a law about married men and little girls who don’t know enough to come in out of the rain.

If she’d been something else, a secretary, a commercial artist, or if she’d remained a scholar, which is what she wanted to be—English literature, classical history—she might have been all right; it was the combination of living at the back end of Back Street and being a highly visible personality—a star—that did her in. Hollywood is like the beast in nature that eats its young; it has little sympathy for the weak or frail, certainly none for those who refuse to play the game the Hollywood way, and the seeds of disaster were sown right from the beginning. Even if there hadn’t been a Frances in the picture, even if Frank could have simply swept April up and made her the little missus, it would have been stormy weather. As it was, they all lost, Frank, April, even Frances.

People today say, “Oh,
I
remember
her
!” like they’d forgotten her totally, but suddenly it all comes back again—Frances Deering, of course! “The Wife.” Frank’s wife, the one who made all the stink, caused all the trouble; sure, you remember. Frances, “The Other Woman.” Since when was the wife ever the other woman? The
other
woman is always the other woman.

Let’s go back:

Frank had married Frances Deering in October of 1942, to much Hollywood fanfare and panoply. It certainly was
not
a marriage made in heaven, but it was nonetheless the legal union of man and woman, sanctified by Holy Mother Church (Frances was also a Catholic and a staunch one), and whom God hath joined together let no man—or woman—put asunder. By 1960, the year Frank began to feel the stirrings of love for April, his marriage was badly foundering. More than once Frances had consulted her lawyer (Greg Bautzer, then everyone’s fashionable attorney-about-town, ex-swain of Joan Crawford and other filmdom beauties). Though if anyone thought that a little college coed from Westwood was going to pop out of the shrubbery and snatch Frank Adonis away from his Frances, she had another thing coming; Frances never gave up anything without a struggle, least of all a husband. But by then Frank was primed to go and it was to be a struggle to the death.

Everyone makes mistakes, we know that—some large, others small, but we all make them. In his lifetime Frank Adonis obviously made his share, mistakes like Claire Regrett, like the little carhop at Dolores Drive-in, or the cowgirl at the Buckaroo Bar-bee-cue in Cathedral Wells, but those were relatively minor didos, quickly forgotten in the face of Frank’s magnetic persona, which demanded leeway for little lapses of taste or judgment. No, without question, the biggest mistake of his life was marrying Frances in the first place. Some people simply aren’t good mates, aren’t “meant for each other,” and in the opinion of many, me included, Frank and Frances were oil and water, east and west, day and night, black and white. They were as mismatched a couple as you could hope to see, while Frank and April fit hand and glove, ham and eggs, like that. Frank, a product of the slums, a tough New York kid whose family had come steerage from Naples and Salerno, whose father never learned to speak English and whose mother still said, “
Mamma mia
!” The careful polish Frank had so assiduously acquired, the quiet, gentlemanly manners, the air of swank about his dress, the high-class and high-power circles he moved in, his appreciation of the finer things in life, much of this veneer stemmed from his attachment to Frances Deering, who, recognizing a diamond in the rough, took the trouble to polish and make it sparkle.

Frances herself had all the polish in the world. The Deerings, a lumber family out of the Great Northwest, were socially prominent, Frances had made her debut at the Gold Circle Ball in Seattle, and while in London had been presented at Court and been taken up by the elegant Cliveden Set. Frances was one of those super-cool, patrician beauties, to the manner born, wallowing in the wherewithal, and she was long used to getting what she wanted. She wanted Frank and, like Barkis, Frank was willing.