All That Glitters (34 page)

“Yes. Yes, darling, I love you, too.”

Words, merely, but a comfort to say them. How long since he’d said them to any woman? Common everyday movie words, but so great a comfort. The most important words.

They went in, lovers, not married, into Frances’s house, his and
hers
, not his and hers. Inside the still room the fire was there and the shadows, safe, enveloping, blessed dark, and where they lay and how, that was love’s old story. People should be happy? Yes, happy, men and women making babies by the firelight.

At the thought she pulled suddenly away.

“What?” he asked, drowsy with the gin.

“Nothing…” Her Mona Lisa smile in the firelight.

To have his baby! Terrifying, wondrous thought—to bear her young for him, fruit of his loins. What Fran could never do, give him babies, little
bambini
in diapers, rompers. Toddlers all over the place. How pleased and happy Maxine would be.

Then, finally, disaster. They were asleep and a hot coal must have jumped onto the flokati rug. The neighbors saw billowing smoke, called the fire department; strangers came dashing into the house from everywhere, “to the rescue,” and the lovers were caught—not even “doing anything,” but
in flagrante
was
in flagrante
, even in the Malibu Colony. The dead whale was one story; a better one was the fire.

“Conflagration… house of Frank Adonis… present on the scene was Frankie… with a business associate.” Hedda was on the phone posthaste, going racka-racka-racka. The power of the press, the printed word. It went from the Hat to the Fat One and pretty soon everybody was playing guessing games. Who was the lady at the house of Frances Deering Adano when it caught fire and burned on the Sunday of the Big Storm?

The real reason Frank had been able to spend a whole weekend alone with April was that Frances had gone to Seattle to visit her father in the hospital. A mild stroke had him bedded and she wanted to be at his side in the emergency. Also she wanted to discuss her current domestic situation with her mother, a conversation that may be easily imagined.

But Frances’s absence was not prolonged, and it was some time before Frank was able to spend another such interval in April’s company. It happened the following spring; by then Frances was occupying the Bristol house alone and Frank was temporarily in rooms at his club. It being Maxine’s birthday, he ran down to San Bernardino to surprise her, and with him came April, whom he introduced to his mother as his client, adding nothing more. But Maxine Fargo was smarter than that. She wanted to hear all about April, knowing perfectly well that there were things her son wasn’t telling her. It made her sad to think that her Franco was doing things he shouldn’t, and with a girl not yet half his age, beautiful though she was. In her own Maxi-way she went straight to the heart of things. She took April to see her garden, and while they walked among the rows of butter lettuce and tomato plants she interrogated her, in a kind, pleasant way, but her intentions were clear. She wanted to know if this willowy college blonde was a home-wrecker, someone who was bad for her Franco, someone who would bring him pain and misery. But by the time they got to the Swiss chard, Maxine was convinced that April was an angel from on high. Her mother’s heart told her that this was the one who could erase that look from her Frankie’s eyes, that empty look that frightened her and made her ill.

As things fell out, Maxine saw April only once again. This was on the eve of April’s departure for Italy that summer, during which time, by a perfectly natural arrangement, she would see Maxine’s son, also summering on the Boot.

This European venture came about as follows:

One afternoon as Frank came in from the track, he bumped into Kit Carson in the agency parking lot and invited him up to the office where he’d once been an office boy. As they stepped into the elevator another passenger entered behind them. This was Tonio Gatti, the assistant to a large-scale Italian producer, the famous Alessandro Cannis (
Cave
Cannis, as he was known along the Via Veneto). Top dog among the producer’s underlings, Gatti, a good-looking, amiable Latin with an atrocious accent, was in Los Angeles scouting American talent to fill several roles in the gargantuan epic now in pre-production in Rome,
The Trojan Horse.

“Thees ees-a quite amusing,
amico mio
,” Tonio greeted Frank, “but I was just-a now on my way to see you. And, tell me, who ’ave we ’ere? An actor, no doubt.” He took in Kit’s six-foot-three frame, ending with the blonde hair and green eyes. Frank introduced the two and the upshot was that within days Kit was signed to play Hector in the Trojan epic and was packing to fly off to Rome.

Soon after, Frank arranged for Tonio to meet another of his young, attractive clients, April Rains, who instantly captivated the Italian. Though married, Tonio was something of a Lothario, and almost before she knew it, April likewise found herself preparing for an extended junket to sunny Italy. Cannis was borrowing her from Metro, at three times her normal salary.

April and Kit flew together to New York, where they performed the usual studio publicity chores, and when they were done they went on to Rome. Then, after a discreet lapse, Frank himself followed, ostensibly to Britain, to pave the way for yet another client, Babe Austrian, soon to make her debut at a London nitery. Naturally he would drop down to Rome to check on the progress of the
Horse.
A trip with pleasant prospects all around, inasmuch as he was to travel unhampered by Frances, who was in the throes of redecorating the Bristol house (yet again); besides which, her father hadn’t fully recovered from his stroke.

That year, Rome was a beehive, and it seemed as if everyone was in town, including Jenny and me. I’d wrapped my picture in North Africa a few weeks earlier, and Frank wanted me in Rome to see if he could squeeze me into
The Trojan Horse
as well. In any case, he’d already had a firm offer for me to start another picture in Europe, so one way or the other I was career-carefree and on hand for the duration.

This was the great time of Italian picturemaking. Rome was Hollywood-on-the-Tiber, and every last foot of production space was leased to filmmakers, foreign and otherwise. These were the glorious days falling on the heels of Fox’s
Cleopatra
, the days of the Burton-Taylor-Fisher debacle and the field day the press had enjoyed, ringing their chimes on that triangle. Now
la prezza di Roma
was hungrily searching for another tasty pudding to dish up. On the Via Veneto the faces sitting in the cafés drinking espressos were just like all the faces at Pupi’s on the Sunset Strip drinking café espressos. You saw everyone you’d left at home, stars as well as nobodies. Many had come trying to wangle a job; they were all beating a path to Tonio Gatti’s door; Tonio, it seemed, had invented the better mousetrap.

By now Kit and April were deep into the film, currently on location at Ostia, where the embarkation of the Greek army was being shot.
The Trojan Horse
is one of those Hollywood extravaganzas of twenty-odd years ago that you never hear anything about these days. Mercifully, it seldom turns up on the
Late Show
, and isn’t the sort of picture you’re likely to come across in the revival houses. It featured the usual cast of thousands, an unending number of battle sequences, plus some equally stunning love scenes between Paris and Helen, but that’s about it for the
Horse.
By now it’s long since joined that boneyard of unmourned Hollywood turkeys like
Solomon and Sheba
, Tyrone Power’s swansong, like
Samson and Delilah
, like
Pandora and the Flying Dutchman
, like
King Richard and the Crusaders
and the late, unlamented second version of
The Charge of the Light Brigade.

There came a time when the company moved farther down the Boot, to where the city of Troy had been raised in rubber and plaster along the Pontine Marshes. With the switch in scheduling, April wasn’t being carried on the callsheet, and no sooner had she been given her temporary release than she disappeared and no one but Tonio Gatti knew anything of her whereabouts.

In the meantime Jenny and I had come up from Sicily to Naples and had hopped the
motoscafo
over to Capri, where we put up at the Quissisana Hotel to indulge ourselves in a bit of well-earned
dolce vita.
Shortly after our arrival we were discreetly joined by a friend who signed the register as “Anna Thorwald,” and she occupied the room on our left. Shortly after that a gentleman signed in as one “Orlando Gatti” and he took the room to our right. Since all the rooms connected, the balconies as well, we were a merry troupe, indeed we were.

And thus commenced the famous Summer of the Purple Grape, the name we later gave to those weeks, those happy, sun-filled weeks of Italian summer, a little less than paradise—but only a little. And in those weeks we watched a beautiful flower come slowly, gorgeously, into full blossom. The flower’s name was April, and I thought this must be what watching a night-blooming cereus was like. I was no gardening buff, but I knew horticulture when I saw it.

Seeing lovers together wasn’t anything so new, I’d observed my share, but this was a rare piece of drama we were witnessing, Jenny and I. Romance was in the air, night and day. They were like two young lovers, yes, yet at times they looked like the oldest married couple we knew, two old shoes, so comfortable and relaxed they were, at ease with each other and with us and with the world. There’s that tired old cliché you still hear a lot, “meant for each other,” but we had the feeling that in this case it really applied. Somehow you knew it, they were God’s couple, but what made it really poignant to me was knowing how close to zilch were their chances of making a go of it. Even if April gave up her career, which I knew wouldn’t have bothered her much, even if she left the public eye, what were the chances of Frances’s ever bending enough to give Frankie the divorce he so desperately wanted? And while April was radiantly happy in the role of young lover, she was not the type to last as Official Mistress to a married man.

Realizing this, Frank told us he was resolved that upon returning to California he would absolutely force Frances to divorce him. Jenny and I thought this a fairly unrealistic approach on his part. That he did not perceive, or simply chose to ignore, the truth wasn’t much to his credit, but he was a man deeply enamored, and what could anybody do about that?

But during this interval of enchantment—it’s true, they were both enchanted—they acted as if a divorce were the likeliest event in the world; it was only a question of time before things worked out and they’d be man and wife. To look at them no one would have guessed there was anything amiss, they seemed so happy, so natural together. As I say, meant for each other.

I see them still, hand in hand as they stroll along the narrow cobbled streets of Capri, in shorts and shirts and straw hats, dark glasses, sandals, touches of gold jewelry, he dark as mahogany, she a glorious tawny gold with just that touch of pink lipstick, white teeth flashing, blonde hair—she twenty-four, he—fifty-three! Almost thirty years older, yet you could see how little it really mattered. How could it? She might be a widow before most girls her age, but who could think about that now? Who could think about anything except that they belonged together, they were already married to each other even though no papers had been signed, no ceremony had been performed.

I watch them walking by the seaside and try to distinguish them from teen-agers, two sweethearts poised on the threshold of life, poor but honest, as they say; see how they duck their heads and smile or lean toward the other’s cheek. See them pick up a shell, examine it, carry it to the ear, listen for the wave that lies within, forever sounding. The Mediterranean laps their tanned ankles, blue water under bluer sky, a movie’s blue lagoon—it could be Long Island Sound but for the drying nets festooning the stone walls of the breakwater, the pink and blue houses. They go hither, thither, buy a bangle, buy a bead, buy a watch. She spends all of a thousand lire for a watch; he has only the one Frances had given him, she’d rather he went timeless than see it. This one has “Mikee Maus” using yellow gloves to tell the time.

See the
signorine
in the windows above them, nodding, laughing—pretty girls with flowers in their hair, they know
amor
when they spot it.
Ah
,
il americano
,
com’è bello
,
com’è sexy. Ciào
,
bello
!
Buon giorno
,
bella signorina
! They laugh and chatter and comb their hair and put in ribbons. Where will they find such a
bello
for themselves?
Ma, è italiano
,
non è verro
,
questo ragazzo
?
Ma cinquante
?
Non è possibile
!
Ciào
,
bello
!
Ciào
,
Franco
! No man looks like that at fifty!

Who can imagine how happy they are, how they are blessed? These are golden hours, stolen from the great world. But for how long? Not very…

At this point the whole Boot of Italy was swarming with a clamoring horde of international press. Had anyone divined the arrangements that were operational on Capri, there would have been hell to pay, and April was not the kind of girl to deal with that kind of hell. That her career might be in jeopardy wouldn’t have worried her—it might actually have been a relief. But the thought of all the pressure, the scandal, the publicity—it didn’t merely worry her, it terrified her.

One evening Jenny pleaded fatigue and went to bed early. I had been doing a little writing and stuck my nose in some pages while Frank and April took the funicular up to Anacapri. Later I went out and sat on the balcony, enjoying the view. I heard April’s door and presently their voices. Someone had recognized April in the chapel up above; now she was upset and Frank was trying to calm her down. Then she began to weep, and I realized how badly she was troubled by her situation. She was telling him she would rather end it now, here at Capri, clean and cold, than go on hoping he was ever going to marry her while they went on sneaking around, always afraid some photographer would pop out and take their picture together and it would come out in the papers.