All That Glitters (19 page)

The lady who lives in Manhattan now and lunches and leads a useful, prosperous, happy life is a far cry from the twelve-year-old kid who was discovered singing Pentecostal hymns outside the Four-Square Gospel Temple across from Echo Park in downtown Los Angeles. Leave it to Eunice Apper to be a devotee of Aimee Semple McPherson—Aimee, who couldn’t keep her hands off the buttons on a man’s fly if she tried. There was some kind of service going on inside; this was on Good Friday of the year 1935—historic date—and Frank had been downtown for a court proceeding. He happened by in his new car and saw this kid on the corner; she even had a tambourine in her hand; there was a small crowd around her and she was belting out “Nearer My God to Thee” as if she were going down on the
Titanic.
He tore around the block to check her out again, then parked and went over to speak to her, found out her name and that she’d been singing nearly all her life. She had that golden hair and those cornflower-blue eyes and he liked her manner. She was pretty, she was merry, she was ingratiating—she had
STAR
written across her forehead. He asked her the sixty-four-dollar question, would she like to be in the movies? Sure, why not? came the reply. He had a camera and was grabbing off a couple of shots when here came this broad-hipped Valkyrie flying down the steps, flailing at him with her pocketbook. That was Eunice, her mother, off to a bad start.

Eunice was a holy terror, and much has been written about the way she pushed her talented daughter, pushed hard at all the people who had her best interests at heart, how she finally got herself barred from the MGM lot, attempted to influence the child’s career through a highly unsatisfactory home life, and in the end produced the neurasthenic teenager who thought life on a dance floor was much more important than life lived on the square. At sweet eighteen Belinda was already a frequenter of the Sunset Strip nightclubs, of which there were many in those days, and since she was past the age of consent nobody could do a thing about it. Unless it was Louis Mayer himself, who talked until he was blue in the face, though in the end even his fatherly pats did no good.

While it was Frank who’d brought Belinda to MGM, it was Sam Ueberroth who’d kept her there, even after her option was nearly allowed to lapse (at a drop of the hanky by Miss Claire Regrett; at that time they were still listening to Claire). Upon learning that Belinda was on her way out, Sam rushed from his offices on the other side of the lot straight to the Thalberg Building, where, the story goes, he shed real tears before the mighty L.B., pleading with him not to drop the girl, and threatening that if she was let go, he, too, would leave: he would take her to Universal or some such place and make her a bigger star than Deanna Durbin. L.B. never liked hearing about Deanna Durbin, who had slipped through his fingers but whom he always regarded as rightfully an MGM property, and while he had his Mickey and his Judy and his Lana, he thought again and had his secretary, the all-powerful Ida Koverman, call down to Casting and rescind the fatal pink slip.

The moviegoing public had already been treated to Judy Garland’s sentimental singing of “You Made Me Love You” to an 8 x 10 glossy of Clark Gable in a
Broadway Melody
picture, but when Belinda Carroll danced with a dummy of Fred Astaire, audiences applauded the screen. This was in the justly noted Technicolor dream sequence from
The Prince and the Chambermaid
, when Sissie the chambermaid falls asleep in the royal suite and dreams that she’s Ginger Rogers and that a mannequin in white tie and tails is Fred. Where did she learn to dance, this little girl of so many talents? A dance director taught her on her lunch hours, in the alley; she was learning camel walks and buck-and-wings between her Studies of the Ancient World and her English grammar.

Frank later confessed to me that he’d been awarded a secret bonus by Mayer himself for bringing Belinda into her own, with an extra five grand tossed in just for thinking up her name. Frank guided her career for nearly forty years and was responsible for most of her hits; but there was more than that to the picture, as we all know. The morning after Frank had been killed, when the papers were full of the thing, people liked to remember how Belinda Carroll had had that girlhood crush on him, her discoverer.

“I’ll never marry anyone else,” she was quoted as saying back then. “I don’t care how much older he is, I want him to wait for me to finish growing up.”

Schoolgirl crush, yes; but a bad one, very serious for her. It lasted for quite a few years, and if Frank had been in any way inclined to wait for her to mature, who knows what might have happened? When she was sixteen, he gave her a silver heart studded with baby diamonds, and she wore it for years. She saved every card, note, telegram he ever sent her, and had as many pictures of him as fans had of her in their collections. To her, the goddess, Frank was a god—Zeus, highest on Olympus, whose dark head was always surrounded by golden clouds.

Later on, when she was grown and Eunice was causing her all that unnecessary misery, Frank would be her sometime escort at one affair or another—this was before he married Frances, and it didn’t hurt for him to be seen with his own discovery on his arm—but Eunice hated it. She detested the man, mainly because he’d wrested away from her any control over Belinda; but of course by that time it was too late, the damage was done.

Those were Belinda’s plum years, the apple-pie years in which she made her fullest mark as that juicy, fruity blonde, that luscious creature from whose cherry lips “the honey fairly dripped.” In those mad forties Sunset Strip evenings when the beat was Latin and the hips and asses swung in jungle prints on white crepe and the girls all wanted to look just like her, she was It. I mean
It
; Clara Bow couldn’t hold a candle, and forget Ann Sheridan and her “oomph,” whatever that was. There was Blindy-baby fanning her pretty tail around the floor at the Trocadéro while the gardenia in her hair wilted and she danced with Ty and Hank and Butch and Bob and the rest of the wolfpack, little dreaming that, like the Trocadéro itself, her life would become just another parking lot.

Of course, it was the famous “Honey” pictures that did it—that Louis B. blend of vanilla milkshake, all-American-girl sex and flunked algebra—that really launched Belinda into the big leagues. This is interesting because the author of the first “Honey” script was none other than Frankie Adonis himself. The movie Honey was his creation, he drew the pattern of the character to fit Belinda’s shapely shape, the role was surefire. (True,
Honey
’s were programmers, along with the Hardy pictures and the
Dr. Kildare
’s and the
Maisie
’s before them, but like those series, these were immensely popular. They were also Louie Mayer’s pets. He adored the character of Honey, who was the world’s great innocent, with that baby voice and those big blue eyes, the way she batted her lashes and showed off that glorious fanny. She was every guy’s dreamgirl, and even before she’d become a full-fledged star, G.I.s were making her their favorite pin-up.)

People used to say she was just another dumb Hollywood tootsie cast in the dimwitted mold, but people would learn to eat their words. Maybe she wasn’t a brain like Myrna Loy; what education she had she’d got at the studio school, but when it came to the abc’s, she had something the customers were buying, and she put it all in a stack of angora sweaters two feet high.

When her life, personal and professional, began coming apart at the seams, no one was sadder than I, though what happened took on a quick, knifelike inevitability. No one that joyful and bursting with the juice of youth could have avoided being one more movieland statistic; she was in love with life, Romance was her courtier, illusion the pillow where she laid her pretty head. She was the girl of any man’s dreams; she attracted men the way molasses gets flies. She was also the natural prey of unscrupulous males, and this was her lifelong problem. No—her
real
problem was in making up her mind among all her husbands and boyfriends and lovers, the ones she wanted and then didn’t want and then wanted again, then didn’t after all. It probably sounds crazy to say she was a one-man woman, but I really believe that way down deep she was, right from the beginning. The man, naturally, was Frank Adonis, only the two of them didn’t know it; or maybe she did and he didn’t. He was older, but not that much. She told me once that the other men in her life were only interludes, Frank was the main event, he was what she’d always really wanted. And I can believe it, even in the face of all the rest that happened.

What she most wanted was to be loved, really and truly loved. She craved love. She reached out for it everywhere she went, and when she was without it she went looking for it, often in all the wrong places.

She found it, of course, in Frank. I always thought she did. After that wild and restless careering around the movie curves, that long and fruitless search, all those scary romantic collisions she kept having over twenty-five, no, thirty years, to find everything she’d been looking for in Frankie Adonis, man of her dreams—there were palpable ironies involved there, and worse ones later, when he lay dead on a slab in the morgue and she’d lost him for all time.

He’d been first and he’d been last, first among the many, last above all. And, in between, the others: no. 1 Dick Pritchard, no. 2 Perry Antrim, no. 3 Grant Potter, no. 4—well, no. 4 would have been Frankie if Frankie’d ever made it.

Everybody says Dick was a real sweetheart of a guy, would have made her a terrific mate—if she hadn’t been an up-and-coming movie star and he hadn’t been killed. Dick, alas, was short and sweet. She met him on a Government Bond Tour; they got married in Chicago when Eunice wasn’t around; she followed him back to the training base and lived with him in the married men’s barracks. Then she followed him to another base and lived in a Quonset hut; then she followed him to San Francisco and waved her hanky while he shipped out through the Golden Gate. Afterward she went back home, cried her eyes out, made peace with Louis B. and the studio. They stuck her in
Honey Goes to Mexico
, last in that series. She announced she was pregnant and Hedda said she was knitting booties, hoping for a boy. Dick Junior. Louis B. himself flew south with the bad news: Dick’s PBY had been downed in the Lingayen Gulf.

She had to be sedated, she swore she didn’t want to live, then she miscarried. Production on the movie location shut down, Honey finished going to Mexico on the Culver backlot, but there was no fiesta. Louella called her “Movieland’s most tragic widow.” Louis B. got one of his hot ideas and they came up with a script called
Wartime Widow
, the poignant story of a poignant small-town girl who poignantly faces widowhood, mostly in poignant black, until Young Doctor Malone moves onto the block and things lighten up. Van Johnson was the doc, and he carried the real-life widow to even greater heights of stardom. Black-and-white, made for 250 thou, big grosses, opened at the Capitol on Broadway, she did PA’s nationwide, sold lots of bonds, got voted “Girl We Most Want to See Victory In With,” forget the syntax.

In 1945, after the German collapse in France, they sent Perry Antrim home as one of the nation’s most decorated heroes. Frank and Frances Adonis gave a party in his honor and the whole town turned out in best bib and tucker. Belinda was on hand. “I took a look at all that fruit salad and I just flipped,” she was quoted by Ruthie Waterbury in
Photoplay.
Having allowed her to admire his ribbons, Perry drove her home. She invited him in; they sat in the sunporch and necked until Eunice came down and threw him the hell out. “My little girl is still widowed,” she informed Perry, pushing him toward the front door, “and she doesn’t put out for servicemen, I don’t care how many goddamn ribbons you got.”

On the weekend Belinda kissed Eunice goodbye and went off—she said—to Catalina on a fun cruise with some friends. Actually she headed for Union Station, boarded the Lark for San Francisco, and en route was joined to Perry Antrim in the legal bonds of holy matrimony, standing up in the club car with Frankie Adonis and Angelina Brown for witnesses. Whom God hath joined together let no man put asunder. They honeymooned at the St. Francis and made every paper in North America. Eunice wept like Lot.

Now, forty years later, Perry Antrim remains that same glamorous figure whose name and face ring in the memory, reminding us of our lost youths and of the other great adventurers of that same generation, Lindbergh, Wiley Post, Richard Halliburton. As Hollywood’s Crown Prince, heir to that great family of actors, whose likeness appeared regularly in the magazines from the day of his birth, he acquired that permanent ermine-tipped mantle of fame and glory that few may wrap themselves in. When Lucky Lindy set his
Spirit of St. Louis
down in Paris, Perry was only a boy, hiking at Yosemite (American rotogravures of the period show him perched on the top of Half Dome after scaling its granite face), a boy who enjoyed sports, especially sailing—when he was fourteen his father had bought him the
Guinevere
, that trim sloop which at twenty he traded in for the
Maude
, which he took round the world, visiting celebrated figures and heads of state.

When Belinda married Perry, he was the all-American warrior, the most talked-about and decorated hero of the war. At this time nobody had even heard of Audie Murphy, while the whole world knew who Perry Antrim was; they knew almost everything there was to be known about him—twenty years of Perry-watching had informed anyone who cared to know what he ate for breakfast (hot oatmeal, a banana, raisin-cinnamon toast), what he wore to bed (flannel pajamas), what his favorite color was (blue, like his mother’s eyes), his favorite song (“Red Sails in the Sunset”).

He kept on making headlines—right up to the end of his life, and after. From the grave he came back in black-and-white 5.0-pica print. That time he’d disappeared for good, and it was one of the saddest tales ever told, how the famous playboy-explorer went up the headwaters of the Oroyocco and never came down again until they brought his head out of the jungle, shrunk to the size of a croquet ball. I know you remember the grisly story that swept the nation in ’54, but no one knows to this day if it was true that the head was indeed Perry’s, even though the man who brought it out guaranteed its provenance when he tried to sell it to Perry’s widow.