All That Glitters Page 10

  There was a personal encounter of sorts, cleverly staged by Babe herself. Upon learning that a prominent public figure was having his son and heir baptized at Saint Patrick’s Cathedral, Babe called in a favor and wangled an invitation. She arrived early, in a big hat with plumes—you couldn’t have missed her in a crowd of ten million—and when His Eminence got a load of her, he reddened with anger.

  “How’m a doin’, guy?” came her question as she slipped him a wink. Her question elicited no reply from His Eminence, but Babe had made her point, and the incident made the afternoon editions. Later she reported that she thought the Cardinal looked great and that he had “a real swell place there. And we were all crazy about his hat.”

  Head on a Silver Platter copped a Tony that year, so did Babe, which seemed to surprise nobody but herself. Everybody else took it as a foregone conclusion that she would win. She donned a man’s black tuxedo for her appearance—nothing new in that, Dietrich had been doing it for years—but when she came out from the wings, cleverly disguising the slight limp she still had after her Paris fall, her reception was tremendous. It was as if the New Yorkers, those hard-nosed, jaded denizens of Broadway, had been too long denied the opportunity of applauding her. Her thank-you speech got an undeniable quota of laughs, to wit:

  “Gee, I don’t know what to say. In fact I’m nonplussed. Honest, I’ve been plussed by a lot of guys but tonight I’m really nonplussed.”

  Further words followed in which she offered heartfelt tribute to Frankie:

  “All I am I owe to Frank. Frank Adonis made me—and don’t one of you crack a smile.”

  The public gratitude she paid Frankie was generous and well deserved, so filled with good humor and honest affection that it stole the show, and people spoke of it feelingly for long afterward. All she was she owed to herself and the God-given talent that had kept her a star for forty years, but without Frank, where would she have been? Frank knew better than anyone what he had wrought, the jewel he had polished, and just what it had taken to keep her name up there in lights.

  With the huge success of Head on a Silver Platter, plus a newly recorded album, and the bounty of free publicity given her by the Cardinal, Frankie now sent the Babe off on what became the first of three highly successful tours, reminiscent of her vaudeville beginnings and was as carefully plotted and executed as the road tours of such self-managing attractions as Katharine Cornell and the Lunts—and every bit as triumphant.

  When her show reached Los Angeles, Jenny and I were again in attendance. You never got tired of seeing it; it was that kind of evening. In New York she’d had Reggie Gardiner to bring her on and compère the show, but Reggie hadn’t wanted to tour, and Cyril Ritchard had gone in before she opened in Atlantic City. Opening night at the Los Angeles Biltmore was one more triumph in a parade of triumphs, this an especially piquant one in the wake of being labeled a has-been, and Louella’s Open Letter. If Lolly ever wanted to know what had happened to Babe Austrian, here was her answer: packed houses, sensational reviews, and as warm a welcome as she’d had in New York. And she deserved every bit of it. Babe was still big-time all the way.

  Since her fall in Paris she’d never again used a pozzarella, but remained safely behind the proscenium arch. By the same token, she’d kept aloof from her fans, terrified that a similar mishap might occur. Still, I thought it would be okay to stop back and say hello to her, but when we arrived, her manager, Pepe Ventura, refused us entry to the dressing room. “Miss A is not receiving visitors this evening,” he informed us grandly; “she’s going directly to her apartment. She’s very tired.” If I found this behavior odd, Jen shrugged it off as mere temperament. “After all, she is getting on, isn’t she?” So much for old friendships, I thought.

  She played a full eight weeks in L.A., then went up to San Francisco for another six, and closed in Seattle at Christmas. After that Frank got her to lay off. But not for long…

  At some point during these various comings and goings, Jenny and I had begun experiencing domestic troubles. Nothing really earth-shattering, but not just spats, either. Having decided she wasn’t in love with the idea of acting but was interested in other aspects of the movies, she’d got a job assisting an important costume designer and she was working on a western shooting up in Kanab. After I’d put her on the plane to the location, I came back to our house on Sunset Plaza (which we lovingly called “Sunset Placid” because our life had been so tranquil there) and our German shepherd, Bones, who whimpered for days after his mistress flew away.

  Nor was I the only one around town to be feeling the yoke of domestic dissatisfaction. Frank was showing signs of severe home wear. His affair with April had gone sour, following a series of breakdowns—she had been in and out of sanitariums—but he still would have married her except for the fact that Frances had refused to divorce him.

  And then there was Angie Brown. She’d been wearing her heart on her sleeve for years, but she, too, had finally given up on Frank, realizing hers was a one-way street called Back and there was no chance of her ever getting together with him again. Five years ago she’d moved, first to Palm Springs, eventually to Cathedral Wells where she and her second husband, a rodeo clown named Cloud Howdy, owned a roadhouse on the outskirts of town that served the best barbecue and chili west of the Pecos.

  People used to gas a lot about Angie, saying she was going to pot down there in the desert, putting on weight and forgetting to dye her roots, and to this sad end had she come, a sleazy saloon and chili joint in Cat Wells, but I knew differently. Angie loved that hokey old place; it held lots of happy memories for her, and she somehow suited it, I thought, not the movie Angie of Too Many Girls and Three Men on a Horse, but the real Angelina Brunetti; just as Cloud Howdy, this rodeo character she’d been sleeping with for some years, suited her, too. And she’d more than proved the deep affection in which she was held by the natives: she ran for public office and found herself elected mayor of the community. It’s true, Angie was now Her Honor.

  Sure, she’d spread a bit; sure, she had a big butt—so what? What woman hasn’t by the time she hits sixty? (That figure is approximate; nobody ever really knew how old she was. The records state that she’d married Eddie La Starza at age twenty; make of that what you will.) In any case, her age doesn’t matter, for what I really want to mention here has to do not with Angie so much as certain others.

  By this time I’d begun writing, and I’d gone over to a location in Tucson, where a picture I’d had a hand in scripting was before the cameras. Angie called me there to say she was close by in Scottsdale, playing in a golf tournament, that Cloud was back in Cat Wells minding the bar, and why didn’t I come see her when I was finished?

  I said I had a better idea. As long as we were in the neighborhood, why didn’t she meet me in Yuma and we could do a surprise drop-in on our old chum Dore Skirball at his chicken ranch in Torreon, which I knew was somewhere south of Yuma. I hadn’t seen him in years, but from Angie I’d heard that he’d taken up his ranching chores with uncharacteristic seriousness, that his aunt hadn’t succumbed to her attack, and that he’d apparently found his niche in life and was making the most of it. It seemed that, rather than clamoring to get back to the bright lights of West Hollywood, he was more than happy to stay put down on the farm.

  Angie and I met on the outskirts of Yuma and stayed overnight at a Ramada Inn, from which she telephoned Dore in Torreon. Next morning I was awakened by a pounding on the door, which came bursting open. When I groggily came to a sitting position, I was greeted by what seemed an apparition. Standing on the threshold was Dore Skirball.

  “Howdee, pardner! Could anyone please give me the time o’day?”

  It wasn’t really him but a sort-of-Dore, certainly not the Dore we’d known at the Trianon. He’d lost most of his hair, what remained was white, and he looked like one of his old comedy characters, Cowboy Bill, in his pipestem jeans, his high-heeled cowboy boots, bandana, and ten-gallon hat of white straw, bowing his
legs and talking in a thick Texas drawl.

  The three of us had breakfast at a coffee shop on the highway, and while we dunked our bear-claws, Dore brought us up to date on his doings, and his Aunt Bob, who was now in her seventies. Afterward, he stopped at a drugstore to buy Bobbie some hair color; then I followed him in his van while Angie rode with him out to “Cactus Gulch,” which is what Bobbie called Torreon, some twenty miles away.

  From afar I saw the sign we’d heard so much about in the old days: “Aunt Bob’s Texas Fried Chicken & BBQ Ribs.” We left the highway a hundred or so yards before, driving over a newly rolled road to a ramshackle house set back among some tamarisk trees, by a bend of the Torreon River, which wasn’t much more than a muddy creek—but, according to Dore, was loaded with the biggest, most succulent catfish to be had anywhere. And there on the porch was this good ale pioneer lady jest a-settin’ and a-rockin’: Aunt Bobbie herself. She jumped up and sort of loped out to meet us with long butch strides, and in her good-natured, down-home way she reminded me of Charlotte Greenwood, a real Aunt Eller type.

  She gabbed with us for a good hour, repeating all the latest cowboy jokes; then she and Angie trooped inside to oversee lunch, while Dore showed me around the “ranch.” I found it difficult to act impressed by the layout, but he was so proud of the place I mustered up a show of enthusiasm. And, in truth, the roadside stand, “Aunt Bob’s Chicken Inn,” was doing a land-office business. I could see how Dore must be raking in the dough, because during the whole time we were there, no fewer than half a dozen vehicles were parked in front.

  Later, while Angie took Aunt Bobbie upstairs to give her hair a touch-up and set, Dore led out some horses and we went for a desert ride. I could see why he liked the place so much. Torreon was a lovely spot, the roads arrowed straight to the horizon “thisaway and thataway,” the only thing showing above ground being the ragged lines of tamarisks, with their feathery branches like the lacy trees in Chinese T’ang paintings. The West seemed to suit Dore somehow. The sight of him on horseback seemed an odd one, yet he sat his horse well. In his jeans and wide-brimmed Stetson, the squash blossom silver-and-turquoise belt, the printed orange bandana at the throat, he looked a real hand. He took me down to a bend of the river which he called the Snake’s Back, where we sat in the shade and did a bit of fishing with poles he’d thought to bring along. While I never got a bite, he hooked three big ones in a row—“For your lunch,” he told me. I wasn’t much on catfish, but I kept my mouth shut. Angie could have my share.

  Back at the chicken spread, I stood amazed as Dore cleaned and cooked the fish himself, breaded them in cornmeal and some tasty seasoning. And if he’d cooked up a beef Wellington for us, he couldn’t have served it with more pride and panache. We ate lunch on a picnic table under the trees; in addition to the catfish there were crispy, golden sections of chicken, along with hot buttermilk biscuits, the best cole slaw I ever ate, as well as beefsteak tomatoes drenched with a zesty dressing, and baked Texas barbecued beans, raring hot and of a far different sort from the calmer Boston brown beans I was used to. For dessert there was homegrown Casaba melon and home-churned ice cream.

  I’d already fallen in love with Aunt Bob—but that was no news: everyone did. Bobbie was one of those old-fashioned, down-to-earth women who, having worked hard all their lives and having blessed little to show for it, were bent on squeezing every last bit of enjoyment out of what time was left to them. We got along from the start, and after lunch, while Angie and Dore sat talking in the porch shade, Aunt Bob invited me to look around. As she led me upstairs she confided to me how much it meant to Dore to see me again and that I’d taken the time to pay him a visit.

  “But I came to see you, too, ma’am,” I said, and she gave me a playful slap.

  “Don’t you ‘ma’am’ me, you big Hollywood galoot. Call me Aunt Bob like everyone else.”

  Dore’s room was surprisingly spare and plain, but crammed with his usual welter of books and magazines, and on the bed a primitive patchwork quilt that must have been worth a piece of change. I thought what a far cry this was from his old digs over the trash cans of B.B.H., and from all those endless drinks and dinners, those nutty evenings at the Petit Trianon.

  “’Twas a long time ago, I guess,” Aunt Bobbie agreed soberly as we went along the hall. “I do urge him to go over to Hollywood and visit his friends, but he don’t seem to want to leave.”

  “Doesn’t he ever miss the city?” I asked.

  “Not so’s you notice,” she said philosophically. “I must say, I do favor having him around. You get my age, you like a bit of comp’ny. And he does make you laugh, don’t he? And if he gets cabin fever he can fly himself straight to Yuma, or if he gets bigger ideas, Houston-Dallas is only a skip away.”

  I had to confess, it was good seeing Dore again, and I was amazed to see how he’d come to terms with life; it isn’t always easy for a person to give up “the show business,” as Aunt Bob called it. When I asked Dore if he missed the old days at the Trey Deuces, if he didn’t yearn to come back and start in again, he shook his head. He said that the Sunday evening when Frank had brought Babe around and she’d proved such an embarrassment had pretty well scotched him. The only thing he did of that nature now was to call the square dances at the monthly hoe-down in town. When Angie joined us we spent an hour or so talking about the old days on North Cadman—happy reminiscences, but for Dore no regrets.

  Next morning both Angie and I felt a real letdown at leaving Cactus Gulch and the muddy Snake’s Back, and especially sad to say goodbye to Aunt Bobbie. Later I wrote her, thanking her for a good time; she wrote back, and as it turned out we corresponded for years. With time, Aunt Bobbie became a kind of presence in my life.

  When Jenny came home from location and learned about this little jaunt to Arizona, she was even jealous that I’d found this new friend, and she took it in bad part that Angie had “lured” me over to Torreon. It went so far, actually, as to become one of the wedges that time and circumstances were driving between Jenny and me. Our difficulties, far from being over, seemed to be only beginning.

  These days Frankie was in many ways changed from the old Frankie of the thirties and forties. Things had been gnawing at him around the edges. Life was earnest, life was real—and getting realer every minute. In sum, Frankie’s vaunted luck had changed. The scandals and personal tragedies that had beset him, starting with the loss of April, then Frances’s death, then that of his beloved mother, Maxine, and the changing tenor of the entire movie industry, all had worked their miseries on him. He was fatigued; life, once so varied and colorful, had lost a lot of its savor. The old rules no longer applied, and he didn’t like having to play by the new ones.

  Yet always there was Babe, the great Babe Austrian, who was greater than ever. She had been his first great creation, and maybe she would be his last, too, for at the business of the Comeback, Frankie Adonis was a past master. He seemed to know exactly when to unveil the “new” Claire Regrett, the “new” Belinda, the “new” Babe. His unerring instinct in such matters all but guaranteed success.

  Having closed in Platter, Babe had filmed the movie Frank had been working on for her for four years, and again the fact that Gracious Me became a hit had as much to do with Frank’s involvement as Babe’s own. Babe Austrian and Walter Matthau made as good a comedy team as Babe and Crispin Antrim or Babe and Groucho, and audiences were convulsed. That year there was an inordinate amount of excitement in the six weeks preceding the Academy Awards, and already the odds were being chalked up in Vegas, where a substantial claque of Babe fans was betting on her. Comedic performances seldom if ever beat out the heavyweight dramatic roles—there were only a few like Judy Holliday in Born Yesterday, and she probably won because the opposition was split between Swanson in Sunset Boulevard and Davis in All About Eve—but this time a lot of the odds-givers were looking for a major upset in the Oscar derby. Unlikely as it seems that any adult would not have seen Gracious Me, for the sake of the f
ew I herewith include bits of the New York Times notice by Bosley Crowther, who made it clear that here was no average Hollywood bio epic, another Jolson Story or Night and Day, etc. “Not necessary to adhere to facts for facts’ sake. A loose jumble of fun-filled events with musical cues abounding. Aldo Ray never better. Produced by Frank Adonis, etc., etc.”

  By the time Gracious Me reached the nation’s screens, thanks to Frank, Babe was so solidly launched along the comeback trail that she’d become a household name. It was astonishing, the way she was knocking them dead in Vegas, on the road, and, as importantly, on television, which meant that she was finding her way into the middle-American living rooms of Kalamazoo and Cedar Rapids. Babe never minded hitting the common denominator—so long as it wasn’t the lowest one—and she thought a box with dials and a screen in every parlor was jim-dandy; she’d grace the invention any chance she got.

  She didn’t win the Oscar, of course; Maggie Smith got it that year, but the loss never fazed Babe; she was always a good loser. She continued making TV guest appearances, she played the Vegas clubs on a more or less regular schedule, she wrote her second book of memoirs—Life Is Just a Bowl of Cherry—and her version of the Jerry Herman song “The Man in the Moon Is a Lady” made all the charts for a whole summer.

  Everything was spinning like a top, but like a spinning top, in time things lost their momentum, Babe’s career as well, for on a certain night—a famous night, as it later turned out—of Christmas week in 1973, Frank Adonis was shot to death in his Palm Springs garage, and with his end came a lot of other ends. With Frank gone, the spark seemed to go out of Babe’s career and she entered into a period of virtual retirement. She withdrew to her penthouse, where she sat in isolated splendor, sometimes going out for a drive to the beach house at Santa Monica. Friends of mine would sometimes see her touring in the back of the old black car, her features swathed in net, hidden from the world, while Sluggo with his shiny suit and fifteen-hundred-dollar watch drove her where she willed or they would stop by the pier and she would sit staring out at the water for hours at a time. Once or twice they saw her get out of the car to use the public toilet.