So there I am in not completely unfamiliar surroundings. I’d been lucky enough to be invited to a number of these fabled Sunday nights of Frank’s, where you could suddenly find yourself side by side on a piano bench talking with Judy Garland, or off in a corner listening to David Selznick recount his problems in trying to mount a new production for Jennifer. (Imagine if Gone With the Wind had been made three years later; goodbye, Vivien Leigh!)
I remember noting as we entered that there were at least a dozen ranking film stars in the room, and every one of those heads swiveled in our direction as we crossed the threshold—it wasn’t me but April. Frank was at our side on the instant, welcoming us. He was making small talk when we saw Frances bearing down on us and I wondered what all this boded. Nothing, apparently; it was a smooth entry into space; the two women shook hands and bussed cheeks and were conventionally polite. Then, as Frank spirited April off to meet Clark Gable and Bill Holden, I was left facing Frances. Frances in her simple gown of ice-blue crepe, Frances with her pale gold hair turned in a French twist, her pale blue eyes made no bluer by the handsome circlet of turquoises around her neck, Frances at her hostess-best. Her look told me she knew exactly what was going on, and she offered her little joke about what would my wife say when she learned I was out with a Hollywood beauty, and I made the rejoinder that April and I were joined at the hip since we were working on An Enemy of the People in class, and her bright, blank, yet telling expression as she listened said that Frances considered me a party to the crime, as well as a traitor to her personally. We successfully avoided each other the rest of the evening.
Later I was talking with Kay Gable, no slouch herself when it came to beauty, and she said, “Charlie, I’d bet money that girl’s going to be the next big star in this town. Frank is going to do magic with her.”
“Frank is doing magic with her, darling, lots of magic,” sang a passing voice: Claire Regrett went wafting by in a red satin dress with a bustle and a new short haircut, and her naughty laughter trailed her out onto the patio.
Later I was confronted by Vi Ueberroth, who insisted I was in collusion with Frank and a deliberate party to a conspiracy equal to the Guy Fawkes Gunpowder Plot. “What on earth does he want with her here of all places?” she demanded when she caught me at the bar and pinned me against the wall. “Is he trying to let the whole world in on what’s happening?”
I played dumb as only one who is in the soup can play dumb. I said I supposed Frank wanted April to get a taste of the Beverly Hills social scene. And I must say, that evening at Frank’s house she looked as if she belonged, April. It was ironic that the home of Frances Deering Adano was the perfect setting, but April was pearls on velvet that night. The most interesting thing to me was that those same people, all movie pros from the word “go,” already recognized what April had, they all could recognize star quality on the hoof, and they accepted her as a peer, not just some dumb starlet someone was pushing into the studio sausage grinder. Before we left, Kay Gable slipped me the word that already Clark wanted her for his next. Frank knew he had a new Grace Kelly, but what he didn’t know was that neither he nor she would be living out a fairy tale.
Frank in love was something to see. Like others truly in love, he couldn’t hide it, couldn’t hope to. It was there in his eyes, the open book for all to read. There was a drugstore downstairs from his office and one day I heard the girl behind the register say to a friend, “Frankie Adonis has got it real bad, kid. He better not let the little woman find out; she’ll have him sent up for thirty years.”
That’s the way it was. I mean, it wasn’t any secret; the butcher, the baker, the candlestick maker, everybody knew—though everyone was pretending he didn’t. Certainly Frances knew. But, being Frances, she kept her mouth shut, bided her time, and waited for her chance to give April the shiv. You could definitely see what was coming, though no one thought it could go to the lengths it did.
The one who was really concerned was April’s mother, Donna, a really nice woman, one of those typical independent widows who keep things going. Having buried two husbands—April’s father, and after him April’s stepfather, A. J. Curry, who’d left her an annuity—she was comfortably off. Still, she was in charge of the “Knitting Corner” at Magnin’s and stayed in the everyday world, wearing smart clothes, having her hair done every Friday, a smiling, happy woman with lots of friends. Everyone liked Donna Curry. The thing that most deeply interested her was her daughter’s own happiness, and if a married man was going to make April happy, who was her mother to object?
Yet she worried. “Will she divorce him, do you think?” she asked me one time when I was picking up April (her Ford was in the shop). I answered as diplomatically as I could—it was no secret that Frank and Frances were running on a one-way street, and in Hollywood who could tell who would stay married and who wouldn’t? I didn’t drop a hint of my own true thoughts in the matter, but already I was convinced that things weren’t going to end up well; I just never believed April and Frank would make it to the altar. And secretly I wondered how Donna, a Methodist, and Frank’s mother, Maxine Fargo, devout Catholic, would get on together.
Born and raised in Hollywood, Donna was on to its various cat-claw ways, and when the question of April’s going into the movies first came up, she raised no objections, though that firm, quiet character of hers harbored a-many. The plain fact was, she never cottoned to the idea of her daughter’s becoming a movie actress—worse, a star. Donna’s keen intelligence was sufficient to appreciate the sacrifices that would have to be made, and if April was going to be placed in the harsh limelight glare, nothing good could ever come from an affair with her married agent. His being unhappily married had nothing to do with it, and though Donna was always pleasant to Frank Adonis, she was wary. She wanted to like him, marriage would have been fine if he’d been single or if a divorce were in the offing, but Back Street was no place for her little girl. Ten other girls could be up there on the silver screen, but somehow she never thought it was right for “April”—a name she could never quite accept as natural; she found it just a little contrived, which of course it was.
“I’d really rather she just went on and got another degree and married some nice fellow,” she said to me one evening (the Ford was still in the shop and I’d dropped April home). While she made coffee, Donna and I were talking about the screen test Frank had arranged for April in the Sam Ueberroth picture she was up for. “It won’t wash, you know,” she said.
What wouldn’t wash, I asked.
“Anna, being in the movies. Oh, it’ll be all right on the surface, I guess, but she really isn’t made for all that—” She said “nonsense” but meant “bullshit.” She was savvy enough not to express her misgivings either to April or to Frank, but she was hoping that, given the practicality she accorded both Jenny and me, we’d be able to talk some sense into April’s head. Since I was going to do the test with her, we were often together; I’d promised Frank I’d help as much as I could.
We shot the test, Sam gave her the part (by then Sam was head over heels in love with her himself, and truthfully no other actress even came close to playing it but April). As director Sam hired the great Mamoulian, who easily exploited every bit of beauty and talent placed in his hands; neither Frank nor April could have hoped for more. And I give her credit, she really tried. (Remember, she was a total beginner; she’d done a “personality” test, sitting on a stool and talking to someone off camera, but this was a job of acting.)
At some point along in here Frank had faced the astonishing realization that his happiness now depended on her happiness, depended on it utterly and without argument. April had become the keystone to his existence, the one that held up the arch. Here was a guy used to having almost every woman he set his sights on, who never wasted much time getting a lady into bed, and now he found himself in a hot froth but couldn’t, or wouldn’t, do anything about it. Though he was determined to possess her, he revered her, and it was touching to
see him acting for a change like a high-school kid on a date, as if he were courting her in the old-fashioned way, with Benny Goodman records and white gardenia corsages and necking dates in the balcony Friday nights.
Maybe his was a calculated approach, maybe he knew exactly what he was doing—but I don’t think so. At fifty-odd he’d fallen into the grip of something primitive, something so powerful and overwhelming that he simply couldn’t stop himself. Fault? Is there fault in these things, the eternal triangles? I know this: it was a beautiful thing to see; beautiful to watch, even to be a part of. It’s what they wrote the book of love for.
April was like nothing he’d ever known before; her freshness and honesty made their convincing appeal, especially after glitzy dames like Babe and Claire, with their heavy doses of sex and glamour, their crepe gowns and slubbed satin sheathes and needle-heel sling pumps and combed upsweeps. April was like a spring freshet, a sweet, cooling rain in the face.
And April was that true Hollywood oddity, a virgin. She’d never been made love to by a man and wasn’t especially anxious to do so. (Remember, we’d just come through the fifties.) Bud’s eager advances she easily repelled, even though his ideas of conquest were perfectly plain. Frank, on the other hand, was a surprise, since he hadn’t made the least overture. A connoisseur of woman-flesh, he had found the all-time prize and he wasn’t going to rush it.
If it had been up to Donna, she’d a thousand, ten thousand, times, have picked Bud Ayres over Frank Adonis. An unscrupulous mother might well have jumped at the chance to see her daughter mistress to such an important movie figure; not Mrs. Curry. She had her feet on the ground and, as I said, she didn’t want her little girl mixed up in the movie business in the first place. Yet week by week she watched April slip more desperately, more eagerly, in love with the dark figure regarded by many as notorious, by some even as dangerous.
By this time Sam’s picture The Scarlet Roan was being previewed in San Bernardino, and, having learned of the sneak, Maxine Fargo had tucked herself away in the movie-house balcony, her eyes straining as she watched this all-important performance by the girl her son loved. “Well, she’s got it, she’s got it,” she said to herself on the way home, and the evidence was indisputable; what Maxine had seen was soon to be seen by the whole town, the country, and the world: “She had it.” However hard it was for April to stand the gaff, she had stood it. Under the lights, in front of the lens, she had blossomed, her little touches of awkwardness and nervous giveaways had been skillfully disguised by the director, and she had emerged just as Frank had decided she would, not quite a star, but the next-best thing to; another picture would put her over the top. She was on her way.
With only ten days off she went from Scarlet Roan into her next picture. By now there seemed little doubt about her future. Hedda by this time knew how the wind was slanting, and that anything to do with April Rains was a hot item, especially where it concerned Frankie—Hedda and Frances Adano were let’s-have-lunch-and-wear-hats buddies—and she was sniffing around, trying any way she could to dig up enough dirt to plant some bulbs.
Meanwhile, April was thinking that maybe it wasn’t so bad, maybe she could be a star. Acting comes harder to some than to others, and to yet others, like April, it comes even harder. But once she got in front of the camera, under those lights, she was okay. What she really didn’t like was all the claptrap, the heavy glitz, the tinsel glamour. She hated the klieg lights, the parties and premieres, the personal appearances, the interviews, that whole fox-fur-and-rhinestones part of the act. It’s a job, like any other job, but there are ways and ways of performing it. Hepburn did it one way—her way—but her way would not have been possible for many, since you have to be a rugged individualist and utterly true to some inner force or posture: Certainly that way was not for April. She couldn’t tell an autograph seeker to go screw or simply not go into public restaurants. Claire Regrett had her own way, too, which was to take the tiger by the tail and shake the son-of-a-bitch until he yelped, but Claire’s long gone from the movie scene, while Hepburn’s still hard at it, whatever that may prove.
The thing was, everybody liked April. You couldn’t help liking her. She had no pretensions, she was just toe-to-toe with whoever you happened to be. She never put on much of an act; they had to make up things for her to say to Hedda and Louella, things to say in interviews; otherwise she came over a little flat, and God forbid any starlet should ever come over a little flat. Better she should screw her way from bed to bed, from producer to producer, than be a shrinking violet.
“You’ve got to get out and sell yourself, honey,” the studio publicity gang used to tell her. “And don’t be so brainy. Forget the music, show your tits a little. Give ’em the ole Marilyn wiggle.”
In three years she played parts in nine major films, supporting parts, then starring parts. When her name went up in lights she cried. They opened her second picture at the Bruin in Westwood; local girl makes good was the theme, a sell-out, but despite everything it came as a surprise to me that she was a star. I still tended to think of her as the girl who’d come in out of the rain, the greenhorn Feldy had struggled to turn into a screen actress. Because April herself always joked about her inability to act, it constantly surprised me to see that she could. She wasn’t Eleonora Duse, but she had this natural quality that came over well on the screen.
They put her in light stuff mostly—The Scarlet Roan, Skies of the West, Pretty Peppy—nothing to tax her abilities. It wasn’t until she played the lunchstand waitress in Thirty-six Hours and got terrific reviews that they really began to take notice. In Hollywood, when a star is born, I mean, it’s BORN! They really let you know about it; you couldn’t pick up a magazine or a paper and not read about or see a picture of April Rains.
Frank wasn’t merely happy; he was ecstatic. This was his new superstar, the girl whose footprints would go down in Sid Grauman’s cement. One girl like this was worth the grief and misery of all the rest, God rest their boobs. Louella wept tears of joy in welcoming her to the pantheon, the greatest potential star since Audrey Hepburn, since Marilyn, since—gee, Lolly couldn’t think of another. Sidney Skolsky, who was reputed to do his news column from a booth at Schwab’s Drugstore, became April’s knight in shining armor; hardly a day went by when he didn’t byline one or more items about the rising star.
She did make a pretty light, you know. She was gracious and friendly, always trying to smile, waving at the camera; she seemed to be there for you, for everybody. When she attended premieres she often went with Donna, because there was no main squeeze for her; Bud came in for his share of squiring, but it was the old “just friends” routine. And that was true; just friends. Not so with Frank, however; a little more than friends, I’m afraid, though everybody was running around trying to stifle that item, asking Sidney not to print it, muzzling Hedda, putting a sock in Louella.
Because I’d been her acting partner, because I knew her so well by the time she began getting better known, because she was so likable, so lovable, I took a strong interest in her rising career. Though Jenny was by nature a jealous sort, where April was concerned she only dittoed my encouragement and support; April wasn’t just my friend but Jenny’s as well. I remembered how the four of us—we two, April with Bud—went one night to see Green Hills of Kentucky at the old Picwood movie house over on Pico Boulevard, where you could sit in those big soft rocking-chair seats and smoke your heads off; we heard the comments of others around us, whispering about how beautiful she was, how terrific, and believe me, they wasn’t talkin’ about the horse!
There was a new star up there in the Hollywood sky, and as I say, it made a lovely light. And the light had turned green, it was GO all the way. She won the Photoplay Award, then the Look Award; Life did a cover story backing up the original cover shot; she was made guest of honor at a Foreign Press Association Christmas luncheon (she came and left with Hedda); she’d been on three cross-country publicity tours, two of them with Bud (well chaperoned,
of course). She went on working with Feldy at the Stage Society, and was taking her work very seriously. Then the head of studio publicity took her to lunch at the Derby “for a little private talk.” He talked about careers and how hard they were to build and how much stood at risk by unsavory personal associations, and why didn’t she give some thought to tying the knot with Bud, who adored her anyway. And the fans would eat it up. The studio would foot all the bills, including two weeks at a first-class hotel of their choice.
Over her Cobb salad, April explained that she wasn’t interested. Dore Schary, then top dog at MGM, had a talk with her: Stop seeing Frank on a private level. Remember, he was a married man, his wife was a prominent figure in her own right and had the Bishop in her pocket. April accepted Dore’s warning with thanks but chose to ignore it.
By this time there was no stopping either the career or the affair. Each was going its own way, soaring up among the stars, where when you fell you fell a long way. Until the release of Brighter Promise the affair hadn’t in the strict sense been consummated. But sooner or later there comes a time for everything, especially lovemaking, and the point at last arrived when they mutually agreed that the time had come. Jack’s-at-the-Beach was okay for quiet talks and furtive hand holding, but the moment had arrived to put away childish things and act grown up about it all. The place they decided on for this consummation was Frankie’s beach house.
They drove out to Malibu. Since Frances had decided she really didn’t care for the beach, Frank had the place to himself, and it was here that the big romance really took fire. The beach house was romantic and invested with a sort of trembling aura of magic. The weather report was lousy, but if you thought about it, it really didn’t matter. He was with her, she was with him, they were together. They had the whole weekend. Only fifteen miles from town, but no one would know where they were.