All That Glitters (43 page)

He went out and paced the deck, then went up on the highway and stood under the streetlight, as if she might take it into her head to reappear. We knew different, Jenny and I. Frank was wasting his time; she wasn’t coming home. And she never did, not to that house. She was picked up next day loitering at the magazine stand of a local supermarket. She’d been reading movie magazines for hours; the cashier got suspicious. But he had no idea who she was, just another cheapskate smudging the pages.

The Malibu cops were good guys, they knew Frank; he came and got her, drove her back to town. That evening she was back at UCLA Medical Center, and no one the wiser that she’d had another breakdown. She stayed there for maybe two months; then Frank had her transferred to a private sanitarium in Woodland Hills.

No sooner did he have her settled in than he had to leave town; he came to me, asking if Jenny and I would keep tabs. Alas, our marriage was really on the fritz, and I said I didn’t think Jenny would be around much, but that I’d stay close. And I did. I went nearly every weekend to have the midday meal with April, bring her the latest magazines, keep her company. She wasn’t in good shape, but nothing like she became later. I tried to establish a bridge to the doctor, and he came to trust me, as I did him. He was an April fan from way back and he was worried about her, more than he let on.

Frank kept in touch by phone; I gave my weekly reports and tried to buoy him with any good news I could drum up. When he came back he drove out to Woodland Hills directly from the airport and spent the weekend assessing for himself exactly how things were. I already knew what he was busy finding out: things weren’t good. He’d been shocked to see how she looked—she’d really let herself go, her body was badly run down, her appetite bad. When he left she handed him a small parcel, asking him not to open it until he was home. He didn’t wait, but opened it in the car; it held the diamond unicorn pin he’d given her that night at Malibu. The brief note the package contained asked him not to come anymore; it was too painful and his visits left her distressed.

So there it was: she wasn’t going to marry him; worse, she held no hope now for the future. He wrote her a letter, saying he understood, and releasing her from any previous understanding they’d had. He loved her and would be there for her any time she needed him. But the awful truth was, she didn’t need him anymore. What she needed was her sanity, and if she stood any chance of getting that back she couldn’t go on seeing him.

It was a brutal blow for Frank, and he really took it on the chin. In the passing months I saw a lot of him, because I too was nursing wounds of my own. One night we had dinner, he and I, and in a booth at Frascatti’s I saw him weep for a second time. He’d lost Maxine, now he’d lost April; there wasn’t much else to lose, except his own life, and that, too, waited around the corner.

As a result of Bud’s manager’s crooked shenanigans, the till was all but bare, and Frank was picking up the tabs. He’d previously arranged to pay for April’s upkeep at Woodland, relying on monies left him by Frances, but the family had successfully contested the will, leaving him in somewhat straitened circumstances. April stayed on at Woodland for nearly two years, with horrendous expenses that drained Frank’s pocketbook, and then, after he was killed and her own money ran out, she made the trip to Libertad, taking the road to Simi Valley, the long road that led to nowhere. And I began my pilgrimages, the Sunday and holiday trips that have gone on for so many years. Read it and weep, as I do.

What with one thing and another, my life changed drastically in the next year and a half. Somewhere along the line I’d begun writing, and I’d started in on a small book, I felt the work suited me and I kept a typewriter in my trailer and worked during setups and at nights. Jenny was in Kenya, doing a safari picture, and we were pretty well out of touch. When the book was nearing publication, I found myself spending more and more time in New York, where I’d begun it all so many years before, and enjoying it. I had an apartment with a colossal view, and so sure was I that I’d be sticking to Manhattan that I had boxes of expensive stationery engraved with my new address. No sooner was I at home than who should appear on my doorstep but Jenny; we kissed and made up, swore we’d never part. She went out and bought me a purebred German shepherd we called Bones; I remember we used to walk him a lot and meet all kinds of friends along Central Park West. Jenny started to get itchy; she stayed only a month, we waltzed all around town, East Side, West Side; then she asked me to come back to Los Angeles.

By now I was hard at work on my second book and didn’t want to be uprooted. The fact that I was having an unlooked-for success in my new career wasn’t necessarily helping our home life. I’d fly to the Coast for a fortnight, sometimes just the weekend, but it wasn’t working. We crabbed and bickered and were both exhausted from the energy spent in futile argument. I was also fed up with Los Angeles and wanted to make a clean break, so I went back to my apartment in New York, to work cheek-by-jowl with my editor. Absence failing to make our hearts grow fonder, when I returned to Los Angeles the next time, it wasn’t to our Sunset Plaza Drive house but to a solitary room at the Villa Lorraine on the Strip.

Not too long after that, I made yet another quite astonishing move when, thanks to Frank, I found myself living in the hallowed precincts of Sunnyside, the Crispin Antrim showplace, where my landlady was none other than Maude Antrim herself. Stranger things have probably happened in my life, though I can’t think of them right now. And it was there at Sunnyside that I got to observe firsthand the last days of Frank Adonis.

With Frank’s death had gone all that remained of the old April, the girl you see up there on the screen or on the
Late Show.
Upon hearing the news that he’d been shot, she became uncontrollable and had to be placed under restraint.

Though we’d tried, there was no way to keep it from her—headlines were plastered everywhere, you couldn’t turn on the TV without catching a late bulletin, and no one in Hollywood talked about anything else. His death was big news, and naturally April was getting raked over the coals right along with him, and with Belinda, even with Maude; with just about any woman who’d ever had anything to do with him. Notoriety had dogged him all his life and he went out in the most scandalous manner possible. When the police photographs taken at the murder scene began circulating, one of the supermarket gossip-sheets published a spurious “Life of Frank Adonis,” featuring a strip gallery of all his “ladies”: Babe Austrian, Belinda Carroll, Angelina Brown, Norma Shearer, Hedy Lamarr, Claire Regrett, Frances; and of course April.

Frank’s funeral had some distant echoes of the Valentino spectacle, including an emotional female—in this case, Claire Regrett—dramatically throwing herself on the flower-laden bier, sobbing and collapsing so she had to be carried from the place, the kind of hysterical display so dear to the tabloids. April, of course, wasn’t there, but she heard about it anyway. And it didn’t help—though by then nothing could have.

It was a perfectly natural thing that Frank should have had quantities of mourners, being loved and admired as he was. I doubt, however, that he’d have appreciated the vulgar circus the whole thing became. It really did look like a gangster’s funeral, with tons of flowers, the bier covered in a blanket of roses from you-know-who, and in attendance seemingly every Italian in every black suit in the City of the Angels. It even rained, and the black silk umbrellas all came out on cue; you could have walked on them for a tenth of a mile, umbrella to umbrella. But I was touched to catch among the mourners a face I recognized; it was the gateman from MGM, holding his hat over his heart and crossing himself as he knelt by the casket. But, Jesus, the crowds of people, their emotions all geared up—it was like a bad movie. Myself, I was disgusted by the whole thing and couldn’t wait to get away, thinking how Frank would have been disgusted as well.

And California dreamin’ is becomin’ a reality
….

Right now I’m in the same chair as before and my friend Anna Thorwald is dozing in that decrepit hammock that’s ready to fall apart. She’s listed fourth among the ten longest-staying residents at Libertad, brick and bars and hospital green out here, off the Ventura Freeway on Route 101. Happy Dell Acres, as I call it. Thirteen years, seven months, and twenty-three days on the funny farm. And bunny shows at Easter. I don’t know, maybe it beats paying taxes.

Anyway, we’re still here under the pepper tree, Anna and I. The small red berries litter the hardpacked dirt where no grass grows, as if the earth had been sown with salt. I know Anna sleeps badly at night, and a sleepless night in this place I wouldn’t wish on my worst enemy. God help the ones who can’t sleep. You try whiling away the wee small hours unable to snap on the
Late
,
Late Show
any time you like, lying among the other looneytunes and staring into the darkness, the darkness you live in and breathe in but can’t sleep in, the clockless creeping dark that is a world unto itself for the nonsleeper.

She’s sleeping now, though. Her face is turned aside, one arm thrown across it as if to hide her identity. How vulnerable she looks, how poorly armored for this life. It was her own idea to revert to her former name: Anna Thorwald of Tennessee Avenue in Westwood. I live in hope and at the same time I despair. The odds are so lousy. She is truly alone, there’s no one. Me? I don’t matter; she doesn’t identify me with any of the events I’ve just narrated. It’s true, sometimes she really believes she’s Frank’s wife, that they got married, even that there were children. As we know, there might have been one at least, if the cards had been stacked differently. But most of her dreams are wrapped up in a single soiled doll, Clarabelle. That’s an end for you, a forty-three-year-old woman with a doll. I can see the way she holds it, lightly, even maternally, as though not to injure it. Baby—the one she had with Frank. Her Gift.

God, how I always liked her. What a great girl, what a really wonderful person. The kind of girl you’d like to have for your sweetheart or you’d want your boy to marry, the famous girl-next-door they used to talk so much about. Her laugh; of course, it’s not the same anymore, but I remember the way it used to sound when we were all in Italy those many years ago. I look at her now and think, Where did she go? What happened? Why is she this person now, not the other one, so changed that even I sometimes have trouble recognizing her? People change, sure, we pass them on the street and may not recognize them for a second or two, but finally we do. But not April. I defy her neighbors on Tennessee to say, Oh sure, I know her still. Maude Antrim’s close to ninety, but she hasn’t changed, she’s still Maude, only older. She’s
there.
Not April, April flew the coop. That face, that glow, gone. All gone.

I catch Nurse Popey tiptoeing across the lawn. Coming close, she asks
sotto voce
if I wouldn’t like to slip along before “Anna” wakes up. No, I say, she might be upset if I didn’t say goodbye. I wait. The patient stirs, awakes, tries to sit up, not an easy maneuver in that hammock. I help her out and to the other chair, into which she sinks gratefully. “How are you feeling?” I ask. She nods agreeably, as if she didn’t want me worrying about her. She certainly is game. Again I’m wondering what Frank would say if he were alive and here. How would he handle it all? I look her over for signs. Are her cheeks a little less pasty? Have they a hint of color? Does she seem the least bit more relaxed?

She throws one hand out with an alarming abruptness that makes me shy, as if I thought she meant me harm. No harm, though; she merely lays her hand on mine and pats it gently. For the first time she calls me by my name. She’s recognized me.

“Charlie?”

“Yes?” My heart skips a beat; I’m “Charlie” again.

“How are
you
? Are you okay?”

“Yes, sure, fine, really fine,” I hastily assure her. You may not think so, but I’m telling you this is a major breakthrough, her calling me by my name.

Hints of satisfaction, traces of a smile. “I’m glad, really glad. Frank always worried about you, you know. He always wanted to be sure everything was all right for you. He was always so proud of you.”

Frank was quite a guy, I counter, leading the talk away from myself.

“Oh
yes
, he
was
,” she says with conviction. “Misunderstood. He was completely misunderstood by so many people. All the things he used to do for people. He kept them secret. I’ll never forget him.”

“Good girl. You loved him a lot, didn’t you?”

“Yes. Yes. Yes, I really did love him. What a… pity… pity…” She trails off, shaking her head as though to clear it. “Strange. I guess that’s how things work out sometimes, isn’t it? Some things just aren’t meant to be.
That
wasn’t meant to be. You know? It just never could work. I kept hoping—we
both
kept hoping—but… I kept telling my mother he was the best thing for me. She wouldn’t ever believe it. You wouldn’t believe how she wouldn’t believe it. The way she looked at it, he was the villain in the melodrama. You know?”

I nod. “The guy with the long twisted mustaches? ‘Pay the rent!’ I can’t pay the rent!’ ‘
I’ll
pay the rent!’”

She blinks. “Who’ll pay the rent?” she asks, suddenly confused.

I say I supposed that would probably be the hero: “Bud.”

I say the name on purpose, to see her reaction. The doctors always tell me to get her to talk about it. I’m taking advantage of this lucid moment that could turn off at any given time. “You remember Bud,” I prompted.

Oh yes, she replies blithely, she remembers Bud all right. Her husband. The guy she married.

“He loved you, too,” I suggest.

“Oh yes,” she agrees, he did indeed. “What a nice boy,” she says with the same conviction. “Really nice. I used to call him ‘True Blue Bud.’ Why do parents call their boys ‘Bud’ anyway? I guess it’s sort of like ‘Junior,’ huh?”

Now a very strange phenomenon starts to occur, and I’m made aware that she has come to a sudden grasp of matters. For the first time in years I feel there may yet be some hope, that even at this late date the damage could be repaired, that she could be made well, that I could even get her out of here. I feel now that’s she’s actually human and real, a living person, not some android out of a sci-fi movie, a pod-person or a zombie. God help us all, I pray silently, and silently urge her on.