All That Glitters, Page 2

  As I was staring up at this astonishing sight, the lights went slowly down again and I was once more plunged into that overwhelming, womb-like darkness. Always sensitive to my moods, Jessie patted my hand reassuringly and slipped a comforting arm around me, drawing me close as though firming me up for greater shocks to come. Then, while the curtains were still closed, a pattern or design was flashed on the folds of material, which, as they began to travel apart to a fanfare of music, revealed more and more clearly on the white screen the image of a bearded lion that moved its head and gave off ferocious roars. Was this lion real? I believed it not to be, yet it seemed very real to me at that instant. The lion’s head was framed by a circlet of scroll-like tapes with lots of little print that I couldn’t read. Poli’s played only MGM and Fox pictures, and already the Ars Gratia Artis of Metro-Goldwyn-Mayer was impressed on my fevered brain.

  On this particular occasion we were on hand to be entertained by the MGM studio’s latest hit release, Fanny and Kiddo. The film starred the famous acting team of Crispin and Maude Antrim as well as Jackie Cooper, and it was solely because of Master Cooper that we were present at all; in 1931 young boys could be taken to see Jackie Cooper more or less with impunity. He had a grin like a yard of picket fence, and he could cry buckets; I never saw a kid-actor cry the way Jackie Cooper could. Our second movie was Oliver Twist, our third Skippy, to be succeeded by a seemingly endless string of “literary” offerings—Great Expectations, David Copperfield, and the like, with maybe a Tom Sawyer or a Huckleberry Finn tossed in for good measure. Though he never held any great brief for the movies, Dad nonetheless believed in “the classics,” and he believed that Jackie Cooper was a Good Influence.

  But where was Dad? The credits were unrolling and still he was nowhere to be seen. Even my mother, usually the soul of calm, evinced signs of anxiety and was peering over my shoulder. I saw her relieved smile; and I looked up as a tall figure, picked out in the reflected light falling from the screen, materialized out of the darkness and slid into the empty seat beside me. How had Dad found us in that enormous cave of night? Wasn’t that clever of him? He gave my thigh a friendly squeeze, set his straw hat with its jaunty band of maroon-and-navy-blue grosgrain on my lap, and with a wink turned his Arrow Collar Man profile up to the screen, and at that same moment, returning my attention to the picture, I experienced the miracle of movies as I saw and heard my first talking actor. Jackie Cooper, aged ten, was talking to a confederate as they went about setting a pail of whitewash on the doortop—the idea being to drench the enemy—but the plan went awry when “the colored maid” entered instead. She let out a scream as she was doused with the stuff, and Jackie and his chum ran off. As I said, a miracle.

  Anyway, Fanny and Kiddo, adapted from the children’s classic of the same name by Ginna Josepha Johnson, was a step up in Jackie’s budding career, while Maude Antrim was essaying one of her first “older” parts. Maude played the part of Fanny Mallotte, owner-manager of a traveling show, and her equally famous husband, Crispin, played the part of a carnival barker. As I recall it, I was able to follow the simple story with little trouble. Fanny comes across Kiddo (Jackie) crooking money from the box-office till and, rather than snitching on him, she endeavors to make a good boy of him. After many misadventures, Kiddo turns over a new leaf and at the fade-out, wearing an Eton collar and a cap with a tassel, he marches off to school to learn how to be a man while Fanny bids him a tearful farewell at the picket gate.

  We had no time to be disappointed at the end of the movie, for there immediately followed the Coming Attractions, wherein I was first exposed to the actress the world has come to know as Claire Regrett. She wasn’t a star then, just a featured player in a Warner Baxter movie, and I could read the bannerline printing that leaped out at me: “Hollywood’s up-and-coming star—Claire Regrett at her temptingest!” (I heard my father groan at this solecism.) “This woman is bad but dying to be good,” said the announcer; then there was a brief shot of Claire in the gutter, being helped to her feet by Warner Baxter, followed by: “Sinner or saint? Only God knew the truth.” Then she’s in church talking about becoming a nun and I hear Dad groan again and he puts a hand over his eyes.

  Finally he leaped up and jerked his head at us, and we dutifully followed him up the aisle and out into the spring darkness. We didn’t even get a soda at the ice-cream parlor next door, but were summarily paraded to the car, parked nearby. If it hadn’t been for Claire and the preview, we’d have had ice cream, and I held this grudge against her for a long time to come. Instead, we were hustled home, where Jessie had a shepherd’s pie on Lo in the oven, then packed off to bed. And for the next thirty-five years I don’t recall ever watching another movie in the company of my father, until it was me up there, and even then he was hardly what you’d call “keen.”

  Quite simply, he didn’t like the movies. A rabid individualist, he wasn’t susceptible to their charms, and his shrewd Yankee intellect pierced the best of their obvious artifice and sham. Movies were sappy. Even as children we knew that the stories were mostly lousy, the actors lousier. But what we did know—and my father may have also vaguely realized, but didn’t care to admit—was that the movies were here to stay.

  In particular, his opinion of movie actresses was low, you could even say narrow-minded. Those he condemned ranged from Theda Bara to Joan Crawford to Jean Harlow, for her bra-less interpretations of tin-plate blondes, and, of course, Claire Regrett, for her boilerplate sluts and easy-virtue ladies. “A glorified lingerie model,” he called her. He didn’t even like Fedora, something I never understood. I don’t think he actually even saw her in anything, certainly not her sound films, but he considered her screen image scandalous. Fedora was a femme fatale like Pola Negri and the rest of that spiderwebby sisterhood. Two screen females he could stomach: Sonja Henie and Minnie Mouse.

  Nevertheless, within four or five years after that first dip into the movies I knew the inside of every first-run house in the central city area, the Poli (MGM and AyanBee, later 20th Century-Fox), the Poli Palace (in the next block north on Main, where the holdovers played), the Strand (Warners and RKO), the Allyn (Paramount, exclusively), E. M. Loew’s (Columbia and Universal), and the Regal (holdover Warners and RKO). Then there were the second-run, outlying houses—the Princess, the Rialto, the Crown, the semi-distant Colonial, as well as the cheap grind houses on North Main, all beyond the moral pale, and that local nadir of moviedom, the Proven Pictures Theatre, where drunks spat in the aisles and the older guys felt up girls in the back rows. And last, the State, at the far North End, where the touring swing bands played, along with a Republic or Monogram feature—if you could call any Monogram a feature!

  Before long we had our weekend moviegoing down to a near-science. As soon as Saturday chores were done, we lit out for whichever show had been picked. Properly managed, you could watch two shows straight through (two ninety-minute features, two co-features, the Coming Attractions, the newsreel, a cartoon, and sometimes even a “featurette” in Cine-color). All this sandwiched in between eleven and five, with a hotdog and a malt at Kresge’s five-and-dime, while you listened to the latest hits being played by a skinny lady sporting hennaed hair seated at the baby-grand piano with an ebony finish that had seen a better day.

  Weekdays, the movies were definitely out, but that firmly stated parental ukase never deterred me. At “Rise and shine,” I’d sometimes report in sick, claiming to have a sore throat and a headache, I couldn’t possibly make it to school. No sooner was my mother out of the house, however, leaving me in Jessie’s care, than I was up and dressed and out on the yellow trolley car, heading uptown to catch the latest “Gold Diggers” when the movie house opened at ten o’clock. Twenty minutes to town, ninety for the picture, twenty minutes back, I’d be safely tucked in bed by the time Jessie appeared with lunch on a tray, and nobody the wiser. That’s how smartass kids got to the movies in 1935. If this kind of illicit traffic had ever been discovered by my father, the consequences ar
e unthinkable.

  Actually, there were moments when he did own up to having enjoyed the performances of, say, an Irene Dunne, maybe a Claudette Colbert—not as in Cleopatra with her snaky hips and cast-iron bra, not as in Sign of the Cross, either, with her asses’-milk baths, but as in It Happened One Night. Irene might act a little jazzy, as in Theodora Goes Wild, but everyone could see she was a lady, he said, and she did a neat little trick with her teeth that he liked. Once he even admitted to liking Roz Russell, who hailed from nearby Waterbury, and he certainly enjoyed Maude Antrim a lot. Maude was his latter-day Bernhardt, and if she’d ever come to town he might even have asked for her autograph. (She did but he didn’t.) Maude Antrim, he claimed, always reminded him of Mother—ours, not his—and he admired Cary Grant extravagantly, especially Cary’s swank wardrobe—the two-tone spectators, pleated slacks, swing-back jackets, Prince of Wales plaids, pencil stripes in his shirtings. Babe Austrian movies, of course, were anathema.

  But the time was fast approaching when not only Babe’s movies but the lady herself were to take an important part, not merely in my education, but in my life. Later, Dad was heard to bemoan the fact that it was Babe Austrian who’d come to town and not Maude Antrim. (They said, untruthfully, that I’d assaulted her and shouldn’t be let loose on the community without a collar and leash. Not true.)

  It had recently become the weekly parental practice to dispatch my older brother and me to art classes at the Hartford Atheneum, where each Saturday morning, in company with twenty-five or thirty other students, we would perch on stools with charcoal stubs, sketching from the “undraped” form. Undraped plaster form. The Atheneum was a good (bad?) example of the dolorous Gothic style that was in flower when the building had been erected over a century earlier, with ivy-covered stone and mullioned windows, but it was nevertheless just there that I had my first live sight of the Babe. And it was at this point that I discovered to my amazement that even the Babe Austrians of the world had their woes. It was along about this time, the spring of 1938, that Babe’s name made that notorious list put out by the motion-picture theatre owners of the country and published in Variety, the so-called Box Office Poison list, which should have written finis to her movie career. Truth to tell, it did her no end of harm, even though she had plenty of elite company—Dietrich was on that same list, so were Katharine Hepburn and Fred Astaire, as well as Claire Regrett. Garbo would probably have been eligible, except she had Camille in second runs around the country and Camille was doing well. (Camellia, Babe’s famous parody, would do even better, but that came much later on.)

  But if you ever knew Babe, you knew she wasn’t about to be flattened by a bunch of cigar-chomping, pot-bellied Kiwanis chiefs from Terre Haute and points west. When her latest picture, The Girl from Windy City, went into release, to sorry reviews and sorrier box-office receipts, she simply faced the music—and in the most literal sense. Against his better judgment, she persuaded Frankie Adano to book her into whatever vaudeville houses survived in that mid-Depression era of radio’s Jack Benny and Amos ’n’ Andy. And, of all things, she took up playing the trap drums. No kidding, you can check the newspaper files in any large city around the country and you’ll see that in the year 1938 Babe Austrian was indeed playing a new live act, seated up on a platform with that peroxided hair, beating out double paradiddles, and chewing hell out of her trademark bubble gum while she flashed her teeth, beat the dumbo with her foot, and rolled the sticks between her fingers. Oh yeah!

  And she sang her famous “Windy City Blues”:

  “Oh I got those Windy City blues,

  They send a chill right down my spine,

  Oh I got those Windy City blues,

  ’Cause I lost that man of mine….”

  As it happened, a bunch of us went to see Windy City on the afternoon of the day it opened, and you could have shot moose in the theatre and never hit an antler. The place was plenty empty, and we saw the theatre manager gnashing his teeth when we came out into the lobby after the Coming Attractions. He did his gnashing with good reason, too; the picture really stank, one of the worst Babe ever made. But there she was, big and brassy as ever, in the “My Idea of Heaven” number, sashaying about a celluloid paradise, switching those hips and tossing one-liners at the colored actors, who wore big white wings and played golden harps while a celestial choir kept going “Yeah Babe, oh Babe.”

  By now everyone in the Greater Metropolitan Area was more or less aware not only that this turkey was limping along at the local theatre but that Babe herself was also set to appear “In Person” at the State Theatre up on North Main. To promote both the movie and her live stage appearance, she was scheduled to arrive on Saturday morning at the municipal train station, where she would be met by the Mayor, who’d present her with the official key to the city, and afterward there would be a motor cavalcade from the depot up to Main Street and right through the center of town.

  Ah, for the feverish thoughts that swam through the air of my room that night, like so many fishes in the sea, and, oh, for the fetid dreams my perverted fancy concocted as I slept. That doll-like face my eyes knew so well, those platinum ringlets, those bejeweled fingers, those twitching lips and rolling hips, that inviting honkytonk voice—did I really sleep that night? I wonder. And, oh God, the tits… I wasn’t fourteen for nothing!

  Next noontime, at the Atheneum, when the bell rang releasing us from our two hours’ enslavement to the Muses, we stampeded from the place into the bright sunlight and exciting holiday pandemonium of Main Street. Few scenes in my life have ever made such a dent on my impressionable mind as my first taste of what the Hollywood brand of hoopla and ballyhoo was and still is capable of. Bands played, flags waved, crowds cheered, there were photographers, reporters, policemen, remote units from the local radio stations. Both sides of Main Street were lined with a horde of screaming, bawling, shouting, gesticulating, popeyed gawkers standing tiptoe to see—what? Little, so far as I could tell, since I saw nothing but a beef trust of backs in front of me. A rusted drainpipe ran up one wall at the Atheneum entrance, and by some adroit maneuvering I managed to elevate myself above the heads of those in front, where I beheld a sight I shall never forget.

  Out in the street, proceeding at a measured rate of speed along the thoroughfare, was an automobile—the automobile of our mayor, George Allen. I recognized him from his pictures in the paper, as well as the fact that he occasionally played golf with my father. The windows of the long, dark green automobile were rolled down, and behind his trademark pince-nez on a black silk ribbon he sat beaming and nodding, and at his side sat—BABE!!! Oh yeah!

  If the Virgin Mary herself had been sitting beside Mayor Allen in his hammer-claw morning coat, his top hat, pearl spats, and spectacles, I for one could not have been more impressed. Less, actually, because I never really imagined the Virgin to possess breasts, while Babe—oh, there they were, those twin headlights, that gorgeous set of clydes sticking out to there. She was wearing a big cartwheel hat of black Milan straw (once or twice she turned her head and you could see it was a cut-out; her hair showed in the back). Her dress was shiny, cut low, with diamond clips in the corners, and she had ice on her arm up to the elbow. That was the arm she waved with; the other hand lay anchored in her muff—a silver fox muff that matched the fur chubby that was tossed over those shoulders—and it was hot that day. Hot, I’ll say.

  She smiled. Those pearly-whites flashed as if there were diamonds set between them, and you could see her eyes as they rolled about in her head like bb-shot. I felt myself stricken, then I went berserk on the spot. Heedless of my brother or our schoolmates, I leaped down from my perch and in seconds was shoving my way through the crowd, feeling hot and cold, as if I might burst or faint dead away. The slow-to-move were ruthlessly pushed from my path, the immobile became suddenly active as I weaseled my way through the press of bodies until I emerged at curbside just as the official vehicle, preceded by a marching brass band, drew abreast.

  Lookin
g neither left nor right, I plunged from curb to street, launching myself in a beeline for the main attraction. I saw nothing else, I had eyes only for her and the cartwheel hat, the flashy dress, the agreeably demonstrated pulchritude, that darling pink-and-white face, those flaxen curls. Nearer I came and nearer to the goddess; perhaps I was reaching out with my hands as though to grab—something!—I don’t remember, but forward I went, closer, until I was beside the car, onto whose running board I, without so much as a by-your-leave, sprang! I wrapped one arm around the doorpost and stuck my head inside the car! I could smell her! Jesus, what a whiff! What a scent! Was it “Midnight in Paris,” the dimestore perfume in the dark blue bottle, or the one with the man bending the lady backward in her ball gown over the piano? I stared for what seemed minutes. I was aware of eyelashes about a foot long and curled like the tines on a hayraker. I saw a coat of heavy orange stage makeup, and a startling nakedness, an alarming vulnerability in the person of the goddess, as if mere mortals such as I were not supposed to be seeing her in such close proximity.

  She was a lot smaller than I’d imagined (Babe was only five-two without her platforms); Mayor Allen, not so tall himself, dwarfed her. But I was hardly aware of him as I stared at my quarry. She had a jeweled bag in her lap, and gloves, and the rocks on her free arm gleamed and coruscated like crazy. Her eyes were large and china blue and reminded me of the eyes in a doll. But though the eyes may have been large, the hands and feet were small. Teeny-tiny. I saw this right away. And—gad!—her little shoes were toeless, with tiny bows and spike heels.