But it seemed to me that, despite everything, Belinda must have retained some filial devotion, since she had with her several keepsakes of her mother: a vanity set with cheap silver backings, and some snapshots, pictures I looked at carefully, studying that rawboned, rubbery face that reeked of the kind of hopeless belligerency you sometimes find in photographs of the lower-class women of Depression America, the Okies out of Steinbeck. The wonder was, I thought, how did the woman ever give birth to such a beautiful child?
Belinda talked about her sister, whom she’d loved and who had died of meningitis at an early age, and her brother, who’d been killed in a strike riot at the Ford plant after being clubbed down by company goons. The loss of these two obviously had affected her own early upbringing and I was inclined to think it also affected her later behavior, both bad and good. Certainly it added to her fear of being alone in the world and her constant need of a man. Even if it was a one-night stand, that would do; she had a horror of sleeping alone.
I think maybe if she’d had a relatively decent and affectionate mother, things might have been different for her, certainly in relation to her own daughter. Maybe the cavalier treatment she’d given Faun had its origins in the way Eunice had treated Belinda. And maybe if Eunice hadn’t tried to cram all that Pentecostal Bible-thumping down Belinda’s throat, she might have found her own path much earlier than she did. Fifty years is a long time to wait to discover that there’s a Higher Power looking out for you.
I’d always heard a lot about Belinda through Angie Brown, who was her closest friend, going all the way back to the forties. Angie wasn’t only man’s best friend, she could be a girl’s best friend, too. Maybe I haven’t given Angie her proper due; some people say I ought to be writing about her instead of Belinda. It must have seemed to me back then that Angelina Brown was indestructible, though in the end, of course, she wasn’t. In those early days she’d modeled dresses at Don Loper’s establishment. An ex-chorus boy and Copa dancer, Loper had appeared in several wartime movie musicals performing “specialty numbers.” Now he was “couturier to the stars,” and many women, including Jenny, bought their clothes, evening wear especially, at his South Rodeo Drive emporium, several doors away from Romanoff’s Restaurant. Angie was his top model and brought in lots of customers. And she and Belinda were best friends.
Belinda seemed to be a bird with a broken wing, in need of Angie’s help. Angie was madly in love with Frank, but so was Belinda—it was a kind of bond. By now she’d been around the block a time or two. She was a “friend of Howard’s.” There were lots of “friends of Howard’s” in those days, the girls Howard Hughes had stashed away in houses and apartments around town, for he was justly reputed an indefatigable girl-chaser. People whispered that someday he’d marry Belinda, but Howard evidently had other ideas; no ring was forthcoming, though he did buy her a car, a blue convertible—“Belinda Blue,” as it would become known, her favorite shade, which he’d had custom-mixed at the factory.
She called the car “Baby.”
There was little doubt that the studio had big things in mind for its new blonde star. Now people were pointing her out as she tripped around the lot, angora sweater, sharkskin shorts, and plastic heels. She was everybody’s darling, everybody’s dream, and over in the Thalberg Building executives were rubbing their palms and counting their shekels.
One who blanched when Belinda came on the lot, however, was Claire Regrett. Claire was still one of MGM’s top leading ladies, but about to become that worst of all things, an ex. When Belinda arrived, Claire was already poised to depart, her Metro days were numbered—but not Claire herself. Far from it. There was plenty of good mileage left on that chassis, and, being Claire, she was out to beat the world. But that didn’t mean she had to be nice to this little stock girl Howard Hughes was banging.
It was true that Mayer gave Claire Regrett the shaft, that he told Frank he’d renew the option, then dropped it with one of the loudest crashes in all show business. One moment Claire was making five thousand a week, the next week zip. The next time she drove on the lot she found her dressing room being repainted and decorated—in baby blue to match the convertible parked in front. Claire fled in tears and later sent her maid to retrieve her effects. A comment of hers started making the rounds, and though it didn’t get into the columns, it nonetheless did her a lot of harm. She was reported to have said that she was glad to have left MGM since it had become nothing more than a pastry shop selling cream puffs and tarts. The idea of Claire’s calling anybody a tart was pretty funny, and she took a lot of flak about it, even denying—via Louella—that she’d ever said anything of the kind. Whether she had or hadn’t was no longer the point. The point was that people said she had.
Still later Claire managed to have words with Angie over Belinda. This was at Loper’s salon, where Claire also bought some of her things, and while Angie was modeling a number, Claire came out with something like, “I don’t think so, dear—it makes you look cheap—like Belinda Carroll.”
Angie saw red. She marched up to Claire, letting her have it with both barrels. “Look, little Miss Has-Been, where the hell do you get off calling anybody a slut when they invented the word for you? You, whose first movie was as blue as the blue Pacific, who got started tossing her legs for every producer on the lot, and who’s got a mouth like a truck driver! Don’t try to kid me; everybody knows you park up on the Ridge Route and do the late-night traffic as it comes over the hill.”
Claire, who was not one to take such talk lying down, let Angie have it right in the chops. Loper came dashing in to stop the carnage, but not before nails got entangled in hair and a real kick, bite, and bitch fight took place between the two contenders. People talked about it for years.
As for Angie and Belinda, the paths of their lives took vastly divergent turnings, but the two women went on for years, best of friends, supporting each other, providing a shoulder to cry on. It was one of the most satisfying friendships in Hollywood, a rare thing among the kind of women who were used to being best friends at one moment, then not on speaking terms the next. Not Belinda and Angie; and both of them in love with the same man. These days I was wishing Angie weren’t three thousand miles away in Cat Wells but right here in New York, helping take care of her friend. If ever anyone needed help but wouldn’t ask for it, it was Belinda. And it wasn’t Trouble in only the grand-scale things, major tragedies and the like; it was in everything, even the smallest.
I remember going down to her apartment one spring noontime; she was out on the fire escape sunning herself. We’d had a robust winter and she was reveling in the warm sunshine. She’d dragged out cushions, she had a magazine, the cat was there with a saucer of milk, and it was a scene of sweet contentment. Then I saw what she’d done to herself—she’d given her hair one of those home perm jobs and she looked God-awful. I always liked her with the simple shoulder-length hair she’d worn in the late forties, but short hair was in, and she was obeying the edicts of Paris. Now the home perm had really messed her up. The hair had been cut short, and that was okay, but she’d dyed it and it was all kinky and uncontrollable and she looked like an albino. I didn’t say anything because I knew she’d get upset, but she pried it out of me anyway and we had a row. Finally I called a girl I knew who was doing the hair for a couple of big Broadway stars, and she took Belinda in hand; Belinda ended up wigging it for weeks until the kink grew out and she could be herself again.
She was fun, though, especially when she wasn’t totally plotzed. We were good for each other; she made me laugh and gave me good advice (I thought) about Jenny, and I got her to put on the brakes with the booze. She said I was a party-pooper; and referred to me as “Mr. Toad of Toad Hall”; in return I called her “Mother Russia,” because drunk or sober she was indefatigable.
It wasn’t so long after this that the winds of change began blowing. First Jenny showed up unexpectedly in New York, wanting to know what the hell was going on. There’d been those items in Winc
hell and elsewhere, and she had blood in her eye. I didn’t have to confess to any sins; she already knew all there was to know and was quick to say so. Needless to say, she and Belinda did not get on and consequently I wasn’t seeing anything of my downstairs friend. Then Ronnie came back from Tennessee, forcing Belinda to move out. Then my show closed, and since there wasn’t any sense in staying east when we had a house in California, we abandoned Manhattan Dreams and the theay-tuh and headed for home.
Though Jenny’s nose was out of joint, Belinda did the noble thing. She sent us flowers and champagne and showed lots of class in the way she eased out of an awkward and potentially dangerous situation. I breathed easier, and the first week back in Hollywood I was cast in a Playhouse 90. Since doing live TV always made me a wreck, I had my hands full. I’ll say this for Jen: angry as she was at my philandering, when it came to the work she was Jenny-on-the-spot all the way, cuing me and keeping dinner hot when rehearsals ran late. She always was a great hand-holder.
Meanwhile, back in New York: no sooner did I pick up sticks than Belinda went all to pot. I don’t mean it had anything to do with my leaving, it wasn’t that, but she entered a most difficult and shameful period. Everyone remembers the stories, the headlines, that made the news for weeks, one more juicy scandal attached to that famous name and face. She’d gone on with her classes, attending the Studio sessions regularly and even performing a couple more exercises in front of the group. They used to laugh at her, pooh-poohing the idea of some Hollywood blonde becoming any kind of actress, but I really believed she could do it and I always encouraged her. Well, she met that creep Benny Vidor, that phony no-talent would-be actor-director and all-purpose bullshit artist. Benny tied knots in her brain, and what others hadn’t already done to her, he managed to do now.
First he got her to move in with him—she always liked to wake up with a man next to her, even a hairy ape like Vidor—but he treated her like dirt. Did she crave it? I don’t know, but she sure stood up and took it. “Mother Russia” again. He used to bounce her off the walls and she’d have bruises, and when Strasberg heard about it he kicked Vidor out of class. Oddly enough, Belinda took his side and stuck up for him, even in the newspapers. Then there was The Scene. You remember.
A Friday night, they’d been to Downey’s, had a few, gone home, started the usual argument, which evolved into a physical contest. He beat her up good, left her on the couch, and went to bed. Was awakened by neighbors below, complaining of water leaking into their bedroom. Investigation found the bathtub overflowing, Belinda floating in it, passed out, her life’s blood running over the top and onto the pink chenille bathmat. They only just managed to save her.
Of course, in those troubled times there was always a sturdy bulwark for her: Maude, her ex-mother-in-law, who loved Belinda because she’d been so devoted to Perry; Maude would have done whatever was needed to help her, but Belinda was having none of that. She was standing on her own two feet even if she was falling down every four, and she wasn’t about to cry uncle and go running home to any mother-in-law.
And where was Faun Antrim during all this? Mercifully, Faun was well out of things. By now she’d become Maude’s responsibility, but the girl was awesomely precocious, and nobody was pulling any wool over her eyes, not even Nana. After I went back to L.A., I had a minor encounter with Faun, one I long remembered with feelings of distaste and regret. She must have been twelve or thirteen at the time. In those days there used to be a toy-town pony ride at the corner of Beverly Boulevard and La Cienega Boulevard, where the Beverly Center rears up now. Two of my married friends, Al and Bea Smith, used to take their kids to ride the ponies there, and one Saturday when I was helping Frank with some chores, we were downing hotdogs across the street at the little stand that’s built to look like a real hotdog in a bun. After our lunch on the run I took Frank over to say hello to my friends, Al and Bea. They had two girls, around eleven or twelve, and with them was a playmate their age, and she was introduced to us as “Faun.”
“Not Faun Antrim?” Frank asked. The girl stared up at him with the oddest look, really weird.
“What’s wrong with that?” she demanded, her eyes snapping.
“I know your mummy,” Frank said. “I saw her not so long ago.”
“I have no mummy,” she said. “My mother is a drunk and they’ve locked her up where she belongs.” To this astonishing statement she added an even more shocking one. I felt my ears burn red and I moved away from the group with Al.
“Holy Christ, what’s going on around here?” I asked. “Who’s been filling her head with that kind of stuff?”
“She gets it at school,” Al said. “Bad stuff, really terrible.”
“Does she really think those things about her mother?” Frank asked, joining us.
“I’m afraid so. And worse.”
“What’s worse than a twelve-year-old calling her mother a whore?”
Then the fit really hit the shan. I’d seen how precocious Faun seemed to be, but how precocious she actually was soon came to light. She ran away from school, not once but two or three times, she cracked up a car, then she was caught in a theatre balcony in Westwood making out with a UCLA collegiate seven years her senior. After this, something far more shocking. First she damn near burned down the whole of Sunnyside: she’d left a burning cigarette on a two-by-four in the stable, some hay caught fire, the place went up, the whole hillside was burned black; this was during the dry season and the grass was like tinder. Though the fire department managed to extinguish the flames before they spread too far, two valuable horses died of smoke inhalation, and the stables themselves were destroyed, those handsome buildings that Crispin himself had designed, with the name of each horse above its stall glazed on an enameled oval.
Worse followed. Since Faun had made a major hobby of riding horses, Maude had engaged a riding instructor, a young Britisher named Buckminster Eaton, who came with the best credentials. One night when Maude arrived home after a dinner with friends, she found the hysterical girl, her face bruised and bloody, screaming that Bucky had tried to rape her and to protect herself she’d stabbed him.
Bucky later turned up after having driven himself to the clinic in Beverly Hills for emergency treatment; he’d lost a lot of blood and eleven stitches had been taken. Quite a gash. It was a dirty business, all right, one that served to send Faun’s mother flying west on the next plane. Belinda was out of the sanitarium by this time, and in fair shape, and when she arrived she took charge. It was she who elicited the information that there was no rape involved, at least not on the part of Faun’s riding instructor. It came to light that for months Bucky Eaton had been fighting off the sexual advances of his young pupil, and when he finally rebuffed her by announcing his engagement to a Pasadena Rose Bowl beauty, the infuriated Faun had taken her revenge. The case was settled out of court, but everyone knew that a large sum of money had changed hands between Maude and Eaton. It didn’t really matter—the money, I mean; there was plenty to cover such incidentals—but the thing took its toll. Bucky left town under a cloud, and Belinda, who’d arrived so calm and collected, began spinning like a dervish.
In 1963 she went to Rome to make a picture, Zenobia, Queen of Palmyra. As everybody knew, she really needed a job; she wasn’t getting a nibble in Hollywood. In fact it looked as if no one anywhere would touch her, but Frank pulled another of his magic acts and got her signed on the dotted line. It was an Italian-French co-production, it paid only so-so, but she’d get the billing and they were going to find a top male star to play opposite her. (This turned out to be Jack Palance, but what the hell.) The Biblical epic was then in its heyday; they were grinding them out as fast as someone could come up with an idea. The old Fedora Zenobia had made money, so why not give it another whirl with the works: color, stereophonic sound, wide screen? They shot it in something called Cinema-Aspect 75, which was a lot of bunk; the prints were grainy, the color was washed out, but Belinda’s face was up there on the screen again,
which was what counted. There she was, back in the beads and feathers, cast-iron tits and a double lipline, with eight yards of braided falls, sexing it up at Cinecittà. Frank had told her that if they liked her, there might be a two- or three-picture deal, and to keep her nose clean, no booze. He subsequently found out that clean noses had nothing to do with no booze.
This was in the early part of ’63, a year Jenny and I both remember with mixed emotions. Frank got me signed for a spy film to shoot in North Africa; mine was a dual role and looked interesting, and I’d get to ride a camel, not so interesting. Jenny would go, too. We’d been having more and more problems, the fights were coming thick and fast, we almost split up, but now we decided to try to save our marriage, and rather than costume another film, she’d take a break and go over with me. I was glad; I just couldn’t see us hitting the divorce courts and doing the mental-cruelty bit. If we’d had trouble, it was my fault as much as hers; our careers had a habit of getting in the way of things, and when she made this generous offer I was pleased.