Not so Perry’s next wife. When it came Belinda’s turn she was able to profit from her predecessor’s error. Also, by that time, after the war, Perry was older and more mature and realized that his father’s romantic fancies could no longer rule the son’s life, and so the younger Antrims purchased the Mandeville Canyon ranch where the senior Antrims could come and be entertained—and then leave.
It was judged a wise move, and with Perry as her husband it seemed that Belinda was finding happiness at last. That it was a love match there was no disputing. Theirs was one of the great love stories, on a par with that of the Windsors, though it may have lacked the same historical implications. But the Windsors were by now aging and middle-drawer, while the Antrims were set squarely in the top one.
They went to Chichén Itzá for their honeymoon, where Perry partook in a dig for ancient shards, since he was interested in Mayan history and culture. They took ship for Nome, where Perry studied the composition of the Alaskan tundra. His wife was photographed by National Geographic, wearing a parka of mink. Then they sailed for Genoa, and in Rome Perry was honored by the government for his bravery during the Italian Campaign. Field Marshal Montgomery himself arrived to be on hand when the young warrior was decorated, and a shot of the old warrior bussing the young warrior’s wife hit the cover of Life.
During the seven-year period of this, her second and most blessed union, Belinda Carroll appeared in only two films, I Only Loved You Twice, opposite Jimmy Stewart, and Tarnished Angel, with Van Heflin. She did, however, star in a production of her own when she gave birth by Caesarean section to a female child, the adorable Faun, whom she had named after the cunning fawn sent her by a fan as a christening present. And if it was in any way prophetic that the spelling of the child’s name differed from the beast’s, referring instead to the mischievous goat-footed, horned creature who plays a flute and dances in the moonlight, no one realized it at the time. But of course no one was even thinking of such things as they all smiled down at the little swaddled darling in the antique cradle, the same cradle that had once held her own father. Maude had had the cradle put safely away in the attic, saved against the day when it would be needed again; it was brought down, refurbished, and the new infant placed inside, and Nana herself rocked it to sleep.
Half a decade of wedded bliss was all they had, one of the most famous couples in the world. The Lindbergh kidnapping having blighted his own youth, Perry had decreed that no photographs were to be taken of his daughter, that she was never to be present at interviews, and that she was to be kept out of the public eye. Belinda agreed; she didn’t want her baby stolen by some madman. So the child was sheltered and kept apart, and no pictures of her were ever printed until Faun became interesting to the press for all the wrong reasons.
In 1950 Perry heard about Dr. Keynes, an English missionary who had gone into the Borneo jungle in order to bring the gospel to the native tribes, known to be hostile, and had not been heard from again. The desperate pleas of his wife for some brave man to go in and find her husband, dead or alive, moved Perry, and he announced to the press that he would undertake the dangerous mission; so good a man as Dr. Keynes should not be left to perish if it was possible to save him. It was fully two years before Perry was able to mount his expedition, and in June he kissed Belinda and his daughter goodbye, flew to Honolulu, thence to Sarawak, and on the first of July he and a team of seven men boarded small craft at the mouth of the Oroyocco and began motoring upstream. It was the last time any of the party was ever seen alive, and finally word came down via a local trader, one Lazarre, that the search party had fallen victim to a party of Dayak headhunters.
Belinda was devastated, and from her secluded widowhood she announced her retirement from the screen. Louis B. himself stated in the press that he would never hold her to her contract; she didn’t have to come back to work unless she wanted to. She retired behind the gates of the Mandeville house, seeing no one but her closest friends and the family.
People began calling her the “bad-luck girl.” That’s a lousy sobriquet to hang on any woman, but especially on someone like Belinda. After she had lost two husbands, each of whom she’d loved, and given the unwelcome misfortunes that were to follow, you could say she’d had bum luck, but why underscore it with such a label? It started in the press, and it dogged her heels for years as she reeled from pillar to post, attempting to pick up the pieces of her life and only shattering it into smaller pieces.
For more than two years she withdrew into the protective shell of her sorrow, maintaining a stolid silence. For a while eager reporters had camped on her doorstep, hoping for a word, something, but it was time wasted. She never came out and few went in. One who did go in, and often, was her mother-in-law, Maude, who’d become widowed herself. A year following Perry’s final expedition, Crispin died of an aneurism at age seventy-one. In keeping with his character, a modest funeral was conducted, the grand old man was interred at Forest Lawn, and Maude settled down to observe the rites of her newly acquired widowhood. Now she had lost so much, an only son plus her beloved husband of forty years. In their mutual sorrow the two women came closer and closer together, forging bonds that were to stand Belinda in good stead throughout the remainder of Maude’s lifetime.
Then came the unfortunate business of the man Lazarre, who appeared on the scene to make his grotesque bid for fame. A letter from him had arrived at Mandeville addressed to Belinda Carroll Antrim, declaring that he was in possession of his remains and requesting an interview. Excited and unwary, Belinda agreed to see the man, and he came to the house. She received him in the living room, where she offered him tea and they talked. At some point he produced a small box, saying it contained the proof of her husband’s fate, and when she removed the box lid she found a shrunken head inside. They took her away in hysterics and the man was thrown out.
That bizarre episode has been seen as the breaking point for Belinda Carroll. She went into an emotional tailspin from which she was not to emerge for a long time, a descending spiral, faster and faster. She began her heavy drinking at this point; there followed a series of minor scandals and run-ins with the police, pictures in the papers, even a story in Confidential, that notorious scandal rag of the period. There was even a suicide attempt, in reality more of a cry for help than an attempt to do away with herself.
Unable to deal with being a mother, she sent Faun away to a fashionable boarding school where she had many classmates who also came from movie-star households. Summers she was provided with a governess, and when her grandmother gave her her first horse, Faun seriously took up riding around the ranch and the hill paths of Mandeville Canyon.
Then came the unhappy night when Belinda went to a party at Malibu, got smashed, quarreled with her escort, left with his car, and on the way home ran the light at Pacific Coast Highway and Sunset. She struck another car, crashed through her own windshield, and became a statistic.
After that Maude persuaded her to go into a sanitarium, and she was away for nearly a year. She concluded this unhappy chapter in her life by renting out the Mandeville house to friends of Frank’s, sending Faun to stay with Maude at Sunnyside, and leaving for New York. Why New York? She didn’t know, really, but New York was big; maybe she could get lost there. Lost? She was lost before she ever quit L.A., but in New York she got more lost. Lost on a barstool at Goldie’s, drowning in one big long Manhattan cocktail, with the cherry missing.
Belinda Carroll had a middle name, but you never saw it in print or on a theatre marquee. Her middle name was Trouble with a capital “T” and you’d hear people muttering, “God, Belinda Carroll’s in trouble again.” And you could usually believe it. New York was not generally prone to the Hollywood gossip—New York had its own gossip, and the recent escapades of Belinda Carroll didn’t matter much in the face of local scandals. Frank flew in and talked with his old pal Ed Sullivan, and in no time Belinda was announced for a Sunday-night video spot. The nation watched in fascination as an obviously di
stracted Ed appeared in front of the curtains to say that, while he had looked forward to saying hello to that “wonnaful Hollywood storr, Miss Blinda Car’l,” he must unfortunately forgo such pleasure, since “Miss Car’l” had been stricken by a backstage attack of unspecified illness and could not appear. An act of trained dogs was substituted. Next day everyone read in Dorothy Kilgallen that Belinda had been stricken by an attack of Vat 69. Blotto. After that she became a sort of joke. Miss Bad Luck again.
By then she’d racked up a collection of movies rivaling those of any other major star of the period. Seven Honey pictures, interspersed with other examples of the MGM product, playing opposite the top male stars on the lot, Gable, Stewart, Taylor, Tracy, Johnson, and Fred Astaire. She made her first Technicolor production, Dancing on the Ceiling, in 1945, and from then on she never made a film in black-and-white. She hoofed it with Fred in Good Girls Go to Heaven, with Gene in After the Ball. But bad luck dogged her. She was to have played Milady de Winter in the Three Musketeers remake until she slipped and fell downstairs, and Lana went in for her. A film opposite Orson Welles started up, then fizzled; she wasn’t even paid. She was replaced on two other films, once when she contracted pneumonia after jumping into an ice-cold river in Saskatchewan (King of the Royal Mounties, opposite Jimmy Stewart), another after a near-fatal motor accident. She was secretly assigned the role of Annie, to replace Garland in Annie Get Your Gun, but her lymph glands swelled and she went into St. John’s, while Betty Hutton got to sing “They Say That Falling in Love Is Wonderful.”
But you couldn’t keep Belinda down; it became a constant source of amazement to all Hollywood how she managed to get laid out flat, then rise and stand again, and face the cameras, and have another hit. Good story, bad story, the audiences loved her. I Don’t Care, the film biography of Eva Tanguay, seemed to put the whole thing in a nutshell. Belinda didn’t care.
Or didn’t seem to. The fact was, she cared too much. But sometimes a person can slip, or fall, and not get up again, just lie there flat out, out for good. That’s how it seemed in the late fifties, when she and her studio of so many years agreed to disagree, and she drove through the MGM gates for the last time, leaving her “Belinda Blue” dressing room to n’importe qui. And, just as when Claire Regrett had gone before her, it was the end of an era.
The next time I saw Belinda I was back in New York, having got one of the leads in a new play. Also, through Frank, Jenny had been hired to do the clothes for a costume epic at Fox, and so she’d stayed on the Coast—relieved, I suspected, to be seeing the last of me for a while; we’d been having a bad case of the seven-year jitters. Anyway, I’d lucked out and the play, having garnered some good reviews, was in for a run. I had this sublet over on East Thirty-second Street, and one night after the theatre I’m walking south on the west side of Lexington Avenue when the skies open up with no warning and it begins raining fish. I duck into this little bar, the Nag’s Head—it’s an unpretentious, cozy kind of place, the usual well-Manhattaned characters slouched at the bar, and a friendly bartender, providing you’re not out to burn the joint down or pinch asses or anything; Freddie was his name. I grab a stool till the rain blows over, Freddie makes me a dry martini, and he and I have a chat. He hasn’t seen my show, so I promise him a pair of house seats; he pays. Some guy is noodling the piano in the back and I see this blonde tootsie hanging over his shoulder, picking out notes on his keyboard. Then she slings herself up onto the piano, Helen Morgan style, and starts to sing “It’s a Big Wide Wonderful World,” but real slow and lowdown, sort of the way Streisand does “Happy Days Are Here Again.” This dame’s got a nice smoky tone and good diction, nice mike work, and I say to Freddie, Who’s that? His answer floors me. It’s Belinda.
“But don’t tangle with her,” Freddie says. “She’s a creature of mood; she may take your head off.”
I pick up my drink and move in closer; it’s not easy accepting the fact that here’s this big movie star, twenty-five years of MGMing under her belt, and she’s singing “Big Wide Wonderful World” in the Nag’s Head saloon. And I don’t even recognize the voice. Her hair keeps falling across her eyes and she either kicks it back with a chin jerk or she does this really sensational gesture, slipping her fingers through it and casually drawing it back, only to have it fall again.
After “Wonderful World” she segues into “Gone with the Wind,” not the “Tara’s Theme” of Max Steiner but the Allie Rubel pop number Martha Raye recorded back in the forties,
“Gone with the wind,
Just like a leaf, you have blown away
Gone with the wind,
Our romance has flown away.
Yesterday’s kisses are still on my lips,
I found a lifetime of heaven at your fingertips,”
a real torchy little number, and Belinda sang it really well, in a voice that by now had acquired this husky, whisky crackle in it.
Later, when she got tired of singing, she sat alone at the far end of the bar, well out of the light, and Freddie angled down and talked a little with her, and I saw her looking my way. Freddie came back and jerked his ear at her.
“She wants ta talk with ya.”
Outside it had stopped raining. I had a radio gig in the morning and I was full of suppressed yawns, but I told Freddie to bring me another martini and I went down the bar and took the empty stool next to Belinda.
“Hi,” she said, putting her hand in mine. It was soft and warm and very small as hands go. She didn’t make a big deal out of anything; I complimented her on her singing, she accepted my praise gracefully, we spoke of Frankie, she cadged a drink from me, then another. I didn’t mind; I enjoyed the idea that I was buying Belinda Carroll drinks.
She banged on in this Old Crow voice, calling out to Freddie for cigarettes, getting up to go to the john, stopping to shmooze with some people on the way back, and all I could think was, This is Belinda Carroll? I wanted to get away, but I was fascinated and I couldn’t leave. She hiked herself back on her stool again and punched my arm.
“Charlie, Charlie—I know all about you. You used to live at the Trianon, din’ you? With my friend Angie?”
“Well, we didn’t exactly live together,” I told her.
“I bet you’d of liked to.”
I agreed.
“Angie’s a good-looking woman. You got a wife still?”
Yes, I said, I had a wife, though I was in need of a pumpkin shell. “There I’ll keep her very well.”
She guffawed at that one. She said she thought a well-kept wife was an attainment. “All wives should be kept well.” She giggled.
Yes, I said, and I guessed she was one who had been. I also knew she’d been a well-kept widow, since it was general knowledge that Perry had left her a trust fund that would see her well off for the rest of her life.
“Where is your wife, anyway?” she demanded. When I explained about the movie Jenny was working on, she grew scornful. “Huh—that smells of turkey already, don’tcha think? And I guess I know a turkey when I smell one. God knows I’ve done enough of them.” She slurred her words and kept repeating her gesture of tossing back her hair, but it wasn’t half so engaging as when she’d been singing.
It was getting late. The clock said two-twenty and I was wiped out, but she wouldn’t let me go. She had things to get off her chest; she was like the Ancient Mariner, I the wedding guest, and I was obliged to hear her tale. I didn’t really mind; at her very worst Belinda Carroll was always someone I enjoyed spending time with. I had a private word with Freddie, he got the kitchen to throw a couple of sandwich steaks on, I coaxed Belinda to a booth and tried to get some food into her. She poked at the steak and pretended to eat the sliced tomatoes, and when the waiter brought coffee she turned her cup over and demanded another drink; so it was steak and Scotch.
When I realized she’d eaten all she intended to—it wasn’t much, and the Belinda of that era usually insisted on getting her own way—I suggested cutting things short. Then t
he real trouble began; she wanted to go on talking, first in the booth, then back at the bar, where Freddie was yawning and rolling his eyes at me to get her the hell out of there.
“Can’t we go somewhere else?” she asked, when we stumbled out into the wet street. I gave her a flat no, I definitely had to be in bed. I asked her where she lived: the Elysée, she said; the Elysée was one of those small but smart East Side hotels; it boasted the famous Monkey Bar, where Nancy Noland used to sing. The Elysée was twenty blocks up Lex, and I wondered what she was doing down in Murray Hill.
Because of the late hour we had no trouble finding a cab, and on the ride uptown she was both humorous and talkative, keeping at me like a bulldog pulling on a rope. “I guess you think I’m a real mess, hm?” she said, powdering her nose in the overhead light. “I guess you’ll be on the horn to Frank, telling him his Blindy’s all screwed up, hm?”
I said I had no plans in that direction and she snapped her compact shut and gave me a sidelong look. Her hip was next to my thigh and I could feel the heat in it through the beat-up trench coat she had on.
“Listen, I was wondering,” she went on. “Could you meet me sometime? I mean, could I see you? I’d like to talk with you. Unless you’re too busy or something.”
I said I had time. “Anything in particular you wanted to talk about?”
“No. Just, you know—talk. When?”
“Whenever you say. Would you like to come see the play some night?”