“You can go, too, if you like,” Miss Pope comes and tells me flatly. She’s “Popey” around here. I ask Anna if she wants me to leave. “I don’t care.” I know she means it; she doesn’t care.
“I’d like to stay,” I say and ask her how she might like to pass the afternoon. She thinks, shrugs, sighs.
“Ohhh… I don’t know….”
Carefully, with malice aforethought, I drop a name—a name not unknown in Hollywood annals—just to observe what her reaction is today. “What do you hear from April?” I ask blandly.
She gives me a blank stare. “Who?”
“You know—April—your friend April Rains?”
“I don’t know any April Rains.”
Alas.
That’s the way it is on Easter Sunday of 1982. April Rains is strictly out to lunch. The only thing Anna is likely to remember about April is that she had a pretty name, a camel-hair polo coat with a belt in the back, and is dead. Asked if she remembers April’s husband, she signifies no in a decisive manner. “Why does everyone keep asking me about her?” she demands. “What business is it of theirs, anyway? Why is she so important? You’d think I murdered her or something.”
“Did you?”
“I never murdered anyone, much less someone I scarcely knew.”
“How well did you know her?”
“I don’t know. Stop asking me. I—you—stop—”
I can see she’s getting upset again. No more along these lines or they’ll be putting her back in the rubber room.
The doctors have for years been pursuing the all-important relation between Anna Thorwald and April Rains. She can’t get beyond the obvious fact that both names begin with an “A.” Show her a movie still or a snapshot; she may or may not recognize the pretty blonde actress, a movie queen of the early sixties. Sometimes I think, “I can’t remember what happened yesterday, how’s she supposed to remember twenty years ago?”
One thing’s for sure: she’s dead, April. Everyone agrees on that—those who know the whole story, those who don’t but may suspect. But those who know best are all gone now, except me. As for Anna, she’ll be dead, later if not sooner, and she’ll take the story with her when she goes. Like the cast of Gone With the Wind; after over forty years, who’s left? Butterfly McQueen, Olivia de Havilland, and some ex-gaffer named Rudy Hatch who lives in Panorama City and won a cup playing miniature golf.
One who does know the story is Irene Fender. Irene’s another of the looneytunes, but whenever she chances across Anna the mere sight of her presses every one of Irene’s buttons. She salivates like Pavlov’s dog and begins to twitch and her voice skids up an octave and a half.
“I know you!” she’ll scream, pointing. “I know you! Look, everybody, it’s April! April Rains! I ain’t kiddin’, girls! I seen her in the movies! She was fuckin’ Frankie Adonis!”
God help you, Irene Fender, you’ve got a rotten mouth. I know you have your problems, you’re a classic pathologue, but, God, I wish you’d put a sock in it. Anna doesn’t need that kind of stuff, though most days Anna doesn’t really know what Irene means, because she simply isn’t April. I mean, honest to God, she isn’t. April Rains is as remote to her as the surface of the moon.
Unlike Peg Entwhistle, April didn’t come to Hollywood from anywhere. She was born right here, raised here, went to school here, a native Californian—one of those local girls who made good. And she was a real hot Frank Adonis discovery. You’ve probably forgotten it by now, but you first saw the face of April Rains on the June 1959 cover of Look magazine. The caption read: “America’s Loveliest Coeds.” Frank said actually it was Vi Ueberroth who spotted “that puss” in the Turf Club at Santa Anita. A copy of the magazine was lying on a cocktail table when Vi sat down in the lounge, and for once she found something of greater interest than the next race. That appealing face with its freckles and suntan, the sunstreaked hair done in a Ginger Rogers pageboy roll, the exuberant, all-American-girl smile with its perfect teeth—a natural, is what Vi thought, and set out to prove herself right. She showed the cover to Frank, who was quick to agree.
She was a natural, April. You can see it in that first film she made, the same sweet, healthy winsomeness that Esther Williams had, that gorgeous, well-constructed American chassis that made guys sit up and take notice, all kinds of guys; the kind of healthy outdoors girl that only the state of California seems able to breed so well. Only Esther, smart girl, never made the mistake of falling in love with Frankie Adonis, married guy. And if you just drove up and asked Esther whether it had all been fun, she’d probably say, Yeah, sure it was fun, I had a ball. Not so April. You could never say it was fun for her. She never had a ball. In fact she hated it. “Just like some people,” I remember hearing one Hollywood cutie say. “Give some people the world on a silver platter and they don’t want it. Imagine not wanting to be a star!”
But April didn’t. Never wanted it, never liked it, never enjoyed it. She used to break out in rashes before starting a new picture. Had to stop a take to go and throw up before she could continue. Couldn’t wait to get off the soundstage, out of the sight of people, all those eyes watching, the grips trudging around with boxes and cables, men she was too shy to talk to or become friendly with. Claire Regrett knew the names of every crew member on any of her pictures, their wives and kids, too, she made it part of her business; but April was plain scared and they called her stuck-up, snotty, above-it-all. It wasn’t that way at all. She just wasn’t cut out for the game.
April was Frank’s own creation. She was a lovely piece of marble that he shaped, cut, and chiseled into something beautiful to look at, that he breathed life into and that he had the failed wit to fall in love with, his Galatea. With Babe, Claire, others, it was business with a little love tossed in; with April Rains it was the real thing. There ought to be a law about married men and little girls who don’t know enough to come in out of the rain.
If she’d been something else, a secretary, a commercial artist, or if she’d remained a scholar, which is what she wanted to be—English literature, classical history—she might have been all right; it was the combination of living at the back end of Back Street and being a highly visible personality—a star—that did her in. Hollywood is like the beast in nature that eats its young; it has little sympathy for the weak or frail, certainly none for those who refuse to play the game the Hollywood way, and the seeds of disaster were sown right from the beginning. Even if there hadn’t been a Frances in the picture, even if Frank could have simply swept April up and made her the little missus, it would have been stormy weather. As it was, they all lost, Frank, April, even Frances.
People today say, “Oh, I remember her!” like they’d forgotten her totally, but suddenly it all comes back again—Frances Deering, of course! “The Wife.” Frank’s wife, the one who made all the stink, caused all the trouble; sure, you remember. Frances, “The Other Woman.” Since when was the wife ever the other woman? The other woman is always the other woman.
Let’s go back:
Frank had married Frances Deering in October of 1942, to much Hollywood fanfare and panoply. It certainly was not a marriage made in heaven, but it was nonetheless the legal union of man and woman, sanctified by Holy Mother Church (Frances was also a Catholic and a staunch one), and whom God hath joined together let no man—or woman—put asunder. By 1960, the year Frank began to feel the stirrings of love for April, his marriage was badly foundering. More than once Frances had consulted her lawyer (Greg Bautzer, then everyone’s fashionable attorney-about-town, ex-swain of Joan Crawford and other filmdom beauties). Though if anyone thought that a little college coed from Westwood was going to pop out of the shrubbery and snatch Frank Adonis away from his Frances, she had another thing coming; Frances never gave up anything without a struggle, least of all a husband. But by then Frank was primed to go and it was to be a struggle to the death.
Everyone makes mistakes, we know that—some large, others small, but we all make them. In
his lifetime Frank Adonis obviously made his share, mistakes like Claire Regrett, like the little carhop at Dolores Drive-in, or the cowgirl at the Buckaroo Bar-bee-cue in Cathedral Wells, but those were relatively minor didos, quickly forgotten in the face of Frank’s magnetic persona, which demanded leeway for little lapses of taste or judgment. No, without question, the biggest mistake of his life was marrying Frances in the first place. Some people simply aren’t good mates, aren’t “meant for each other,” and in the opinion of many, me included, Frank and Frances were oil and water, east and west, day and night, black and white. They were as mismatched a couple as you could hope to see, while Frank and April fit hand and glove, ham and eggs, like that. Frank, a product of the slums, a tough New York kid whose family had come steerage from Naples and Salerno, whose father never learned to speak English and whose mother still said, “Mamma mia!” The careful polish Frank had so assiduously acquired, the quiet, gentlemanly manners, the air of swank about his dress, the high-class and high-power circles he moved in, his appreciation of the finer things in life, much of this veneer stemmed from his attachment to Frances Deering, who, recognizing a diamond in the rough, took the trouble to polish and make it sparkle.
Frances herself had all the polish in the world. The Deerings, a lumber family out of the Great Northwest, were socially prominent, Frances had made her debut at the Gold Circle Ball in Seattle, and while in London had been presented at Court and been taken up by the elegant Cliveden Set. Frances was one of those super-cool, patrician beauties, to the manner born, wallowing in the wherewithal, and she was long used to getting what she wanted. She wanted Frank and, like Barkis, Frank was willing.
Frances had a way with her that people found charming, a refinement combined with a natural ease and good humor that Frank recognized as a highly desirable and marketable property. On the other hand, his own smoldering good looks, his racy background, the frisson of gangsterism at a safe distance, his reputation as a boudoir Romeo (by this time a reputation well sampled by Frances), and his charming demeanor all combined to make him Frances’s idea of a good catch. There was a jumbo wedding on the typical Hollywood scale, a honeymoon in Waikiki, the well-publicized return, lei’d to their ears, suntanned and smiling, to settle down in domestic bliss in a fake-Tudor house on Bristol Avenue in Brentwood.
The wise among us appreciate that it’s always well to take life on its own terms, to make use of what it offers and not try to bend it to one’s will; this Frank knew, and this is why he was probably so free of unhappiness for so many years. Except for April Rains I think he may have got nearly everything he ever wanted, and certainly everything he deserved. I think it fair to say he married Frances in good faith and with the best of intentions. I won’t say he was crazy in love with her, but he always had a finely honed appreciation of his womenfolk and I’m sure this stretched to his own chosen mate and helpmeet. Frances was class, and class was the name of the game so far as Frank went.
The trouble was, Frances played the game according to some weird set of rules she alone seemed to comprehend. She married the man, but she didn’t really want that man, our Frankie, the guy she got; she wanted to get him and then make him over into her private vision of what she thought he ought to be. She regarded him as an attachment to herself, possibly even something she had bought and paid for, an expensive toy. It couldn’t possibly have worked.
But Frances was Catholic, remember, and it was for better or for worse. Her own younger sister had taken vows and been ordained as Sister Mary Rose. Frances also maintained a particularly close relationship with Father Mallory, who later became Monsignor Mallory, and who made sure Frances was on good terms with the Bishop and that His Grace could be counted on to honor her table three or four times a year. It was within this snugly carpentered framework that she became known for her charitable works and generous contributions to the sundry charities of the diocese.
And because of this, divorce was always out of the question. The only time in their more than twenty years together she apparently ever considered such a thing (in this instance it was annulment) was in 1947, after Frank’s casual connection with Bugsy Siegel was made public. In time, Frances even got the Pope involved, but nothing ever came of that, because in the end she wouldn’t give Frankie up. No more than she would give him up years later when April came along, although in that case it was more than her strict convent upbringing at work: she had no intention of presenting her gossiping friends with the chance to laugh and say Frank had dumped her for someone younger. No, Frances was determined to hang on until the last gong rang, the last whistle blew, and when the going got really bumpy and Frank simply “refused to see the light,” she showed her truest colors.
Frances certainly said and did all the “right” things, dressed the part right down to the little white gloves and hats the matronry of Brentwood and Bel Air copied from San Francisco ladies hot out of the Garden Court at the Palace. Her speaking voice, low, dulcet, just a tad Junior League, was always one of her charms. More than one Hollywood stud fell victim to it, to say nothing of the great Frankie himself.
But you could draw a black line right down through Frank’s years with Frances and mark them B.A. and A.A.—Before April and After. Because when April came along, she changed him, changed his life and changed the way he acted and thought about things, and after she was gone he was never the same. Not ever. After seeing that picture of her on the cover of Look he tracked down the photographer, who told him the girl’s name was Anna Thorwald, and that since graduating from UCLA in June she’d been working as a model at I. Magnin’s. Frank checked it out, found the girl in a Norell, purchased the dress, then slipped her his card. She’d never heard of the Adonis Agency. “Would you like to be in the movies?” and like that ensued, and No, came back the answer, the young woman wasn’t interested. Now, this was an odd thing, for if there’s one ineluctable law of nature at work in the universe, it is that every girl under the age of thirty wants to be in the movies. Not April. She only did it for Frank. Frank was persuasion walking.
Like Babe, like Claire, like Belinda and Angie and Julie Figueroa and all the rest of that elite sorority, April was susceptible to the male of her species. Certainly she was susceptible to the charms of a Frank Adonis. He was then past fifty, temples silvering, but looking foxy, and he’d lost none of his charm or skill with the ladies, still the kind of dynamite-looking dude who gets under a woman’s skin right away and starts her juices trickling. Those sooty-soft Italian eyes never made any secret of his amorous feelings; they told a woman that for that one single moment she was the most important and exciting thing in his life, the most beautiful, the sexiest, the most desirable and intelligent and worthwhile he’d ever come across. And so it was with Anna Thorwald, soon to become April Rains. She and Frank were—as we all later came to believe—destined to meet. And when they did, everything sat right there in the well-known lap of the gods.
No sooner had Frank secured his newest client a contract at Metro and changed her name than he proceeded to fall in love with her. Maybe it would have been better if he had taken her to Zanuck over at Fox, or even Harry Cohn at Columbia. Unhappily, she fell under the tutorial eye of the Great Mogul himself, Samuel B. Ueberroth, who, having heard about her through Vi, deigned to interest himself in her budding career. The name alone enchanted him. And with her golden hair and fresh-scrubbed look, April Rains was perfect MGM fodder, and he blithely confided to Frank that the girl’s stardom was practically guaranteed. He himself would see to it.
But Sam had troubles in more ways than one. I can hear him screaming, “Whaddya mean she doesn’t wanna be in the movies? Fa Chrise sakes, is she out of her mind?”
No, she wasn’t; not then. But Sam’s question was valid. When Frank had first started giving her the “You ought to be in pictures” routine, she’d only laughed at him; it seemed so farfetched, such an unlikely career for her to pursue. “Who, me? Don’t be crazy.” At the beginning, whenever anything came up about
movies, she always disclaimed any real connection. “Oh, I’m not really an actress, I’m just playing around for fun.”
But Frank was Frank and that meant never taking no for an answer. He saw that Thing in her; she had it, too, the Star Quality they always talk about. And the more she said no, the more determined he was to prove he could do it. And fell in love at the same time.
That wasn’t very bright of him. There were plenty of other girls around if he wanted to get laid, and there were plenty of other blondes to make into screen tootsies if that was what he wanted. But April Rains had that extra spark that demands full attention, that catches the eye or the mind, that goes beyond tootsie-ism, that gets a girl’s face in Photoplay and keeps it up there on the silver screen.
Would he have insisted, had he known just how it was all going to turn out? I don’t think so, he wasn’t that kind. He really believed in his Italian heart of hearts that he was showing her the way to a good life, the grand life, that which he himself had craved. The trouble was that she just wasn’t ambitious; what she wanted was marriage, motherhood, two cars in the garage. But before she knew it, there she went, through that old sausage grinder, and out came Metro product, Metro glossed and coiffed, Metro pretty.
She had a boyfriend or two, actually “beaux,” as Donna enjoyed calling them (Donna was April’s mother). So April didn’t sit home Saturday nights watching Lawrence Welk. She went out—sat in the balcony and ate popcorn while Elvis abused his guitar and sang “Hound Dog.” A good sound crack at a Ph.D. might have done her a world of good, whereas getting a scene from Barefoot in the Park to heart seemed a waste of time. But she did it, and others beside, Julie from Jezebel, Regina from Little Foxes.
She was then studying acting with Feldy Eskenazy, the celebrated European actress who’d won two Academy Awards yet been dropped by Metro. Feldy was earning a living by giving acting lessons and doing special coaching at the Stage Society Workshop in a rundown building on La Cienega, and, as it chanced, I too was studying with her. In fact, I was working on Essex to April’s Queen Elizabeth. One evening we “performed,” and Frank and Sam both came, along with Vi, and April was a complete wreck. She flubbed her lines and dropped her prop mirror and generally made a mess of things. We’d also worked on a scene from The Glass Menagerie, and after we’d bombed as Elizabeth and Essex I told them we were going to do the other one, with April playing Laura to my Gentleman Caller, and that went much better. April even got a laugh, which delighted her. Sam went out chortling, and wanted to drive her home. Vi said no. Vi knew her brother; his antennae were already buzzing, and while he was that Hollywood oddity, “a happily married man,” Sam’s eye swiveled for a pretty girl, and Vi didn’t want him playing pattycakes with the newest discovery.