By now Kit and April were deep into the film, currently on location at Ostia, where the embarkation of the Greek army was being shot. The Trojan Horse is one of those Hollywood extravaganzas of twenty-odd years ago that you never hear anything about these days. Mercifully, it seldom turns up on the Late Show, and isn’t the sort of picture you’re likely to come across in the revival houses. It featured the usual cast of thousands, an unending number of battle sequences, plus some equally stunning love scenes between Paris and Helen, but that’s about it for the Horse. By now it’s long since joined that boneyard of unmourned Hollywood turkeys like Solomon and Sheba, Tyrone Power’s swansong, like Samson and Delilah, like Pandora and the Flying Dutchman, like King Richard and the Crusaders and the late, unlamented second version of The Charge of the Light Brigade.
There came a time when the company moved farther down the Boot, to where the city of Troy had been raised in rubber and plaster along the Pontine Marshes. With the switch in scheduling, April wasn’t being carried on the callsheet, and no sooner had she been given her temporary release than she disappeared and no one but Tonio Gatti knew anything of her whereabouts.
In the meantime Jenny and I had come up from Sicily to Naples and had hopped the motoscafo over to Capri, where we put up at the Quissisana Hotel to indulge ourselves in a bit of well-earned dolce vita. Shortly after our arrival we were discreetly joined by a friend who signed the register as “Anna Thorwald,” and she occupied the room on our left. Shortly after that a gentleman signed in as one “Orlando Gatti” and he took the room to our right. Since all the rooms connected, the balconies as well, we were a merry troupe, indeed we were.
And thus commenced the famous Summer of the Purple Grape, the name we later gave to those weeks, those happy, sun-filled weeks of Italian summer, a little less than paradise—but only a little. And in those weeks we watched a beautiful flower come slowly, gorgeously, into full blossom. The flower’s name was April, and I thought this must be what watching a night-blooming cereus was like. I was no gardening buff, but I knew horticulture when I saw it.
Seeing lovers together wasn’t anything so new, I’d observed my share, but this was a rare piece of drama we were witnessing, Jenny and I. Romance was in the air, night and day. They were like two young lovers, yes, yet at times they looked like the oldest married couple we knew, two old shoes, so comfortable and relaxed they were, at ease with each other and with us and with the world. There’s that tired old cliché you still hear a lot, “meant for each other,” but we had the feeling that in this case it really applied. Somehow you knew it, they were God’s couple, but what made it really poignant to me was knowing how close to zilch were their chances of making a go of it. Even if April gave up her career, which I knew wouldn’t have bothered her much, even if she left the public eye, what were the chances of Frances’s ever bending enough to give Frankie the divorce he so desperately wanted? And while April was radiantly happy in the role of young lover, she was not the type to last as Official Mistress to a married man.
Realizing this, Frank told us he was resolved that upon returning to California he would absolutely force Frances to divorce him. Jenny and I thought this a fairly unrealistic approach on his part. That he did not perceive, or simply chose to ignore, the truth wasn’t much to his credit, but he was a man deeply enamored, and what could anybody do about that?
But during this interval of enchantment—it’s true, they were both enchanted—they acted as if a divorce were the likeliest event in the world; it was only a question of time before things worked out and they’d be man and wife. To look at them no one would have guessed there was anything amiss, they seemed so happy, so natural together. As I say, meant for each other.
I see them still, hand in hand as they stroll along the narrow cobbled streets of Capri, in shorts and shirts and straw hats, dark glasses, sandals, touches of gold jewelry, he dark as mahogany, she a glorious tawny gold with just that touch of pink lipstick, white teeth flashing, blonde hair—she twenty-four, he—fifty-three! Almost thirty years older, yet you could see how little it really mattered. How could it? She might be a widow before most girls her age, but who could think about that now? Who could think about anything except that they belonged together, they were already married to each other even though no papers had been signed, no ceremony had been performed.
I watch them walking by the seaside and try to distinguish them from teen-agers, two sweethearts poised on the threshold of life, poor but honest, as they say; see how they duck their heads and smile or lean toward the other’s cheek. See them pick up a shell, examine it, carry it to the ear, listen for the wave that lies within, forever sounding. The Mediterranean laps their tanned ankles, blue water under bluer sky, a movie’s blue lagoon—it could be Long Island Sound but for the drying nets festooning the stone walls of the breakwater, the pink and blue houses. They go hither, thither, buy a bangle, buy a bead, buy a watch. She spends all of a thousand lire for a watch; he has only the one Frances had given him, she’d rather he went timeless than see it. This one has “Mikee Maus” using yellow gloves to tell the time.
See the signorine in the windows above them, nodding, laughing—pretty girls with flowers in their hair, they know amor when they spot it. Ah, il americano, com’è bello, com’è sexy. Ciào, bello! Buon giorno, bella signorina! They laugh and chatter and comb their hair and put in ribbons. Where will they find such a bello for themselves? Ma, è italiano, non è verro, questo ragazzo? Ma cinquante? Non è possibile! Ciào, bello! Ciào, Franco! No man looks like that at fifty!
Who can imagine how happy they are, how they are blessed? These are golden hours, stolen from the great world. But for how long? Not very…
At this point the whole Boot of Italy was swarming with a clamoring horde of international press. Had anyone divined the arrangements that were operational on Capri, there would have been hell to pay, and April was not the kind of girl to deal with that kind of hell. That her career might be in jeopardy wouldn’t have worried her—it might actually have been a relief. But the thought of all the pressure, the scandal, the publicity—it didn’t merely worry her, it terrified her.
One evening Jenny pleaded fatigue and went to bed early. I had been doing a little writing and stuck my nose in some pages while Frank and April took the funicular up to Anacapri. Later I went out and sat on the balcony, enjoying the view. I heard April’s door and presently their voices. Someone had recognized April in the chapel up above; now she was upset and Frank was trying to calm her down. Then she began to weep, and I realized how badly she was troubled by her situation. She was telling him she would rather end it now, here at Capri, clean and cold, than go on hoping he was ever going to marry her while they went on sneaking around, always afraid some photographer would pop out and take their picture together and it would come out in the papers.
“But what does it matter?” I heard Frank say. “The only important thing is that we love each other, isn’t it? A picture in the paper isn’t going to hurt us, is it?”
He cajoled her until her tears subsided; then I heard her laugh, that pretty sound that was so much hers. Leave it to Frank to get her smiling again, and so quickly. Still, I knew this little episode was only the precursor to others, the foreshadowing of further tears to be shed.
The low murmur of Frank’s voice went on; I didn’t catch the words but I could imagine them.
“Darling, we belong together, that’s all that’s important. The hell with the rest of them. Frances is only playing a waiting game, but in the end she’ll come round. She’ll try to make us miserable as she can for a while, but in the end she’ll give in, you’ll see.”
And April’s bright response: “Yes, of course, you’re right, you’re always right. I’m just being foolish. Let’s forget the whole thing.”
And of course it was forgotten; at least no one spoke of it, though I doubt anything was really forgotten. You didn’t just forget about Frances, even though she was ten thousand miles away… ex
cept, damn it all, she wasn’t ten thousand miles away, but a lot closer, as events were shortly to prove.
Though Frank had brushed off the incident, nonetheless their having been recognized at Anacapri had its effect. Somehow the word got out, the paparazzi arrived in swarms, and the lovers decamped while Jenny and I laid a general smoke screen. They went into hiding again. What little dignity remained to them was spent in fleeing by car up the Autostrada del Sol, heading for a safe haven and the high walls of a villa belonging to Frank’s kind friend, the celebrated and newsworthy Contessa Dodi Ingrisi.
Dodi was a rich American heiress who owned a luxurious antique villa at Civitavecchia, built on the ruins of one of the Emperor Tiberius’s play spots. Sixty-five and more, Dodi was gay and charming, wore lots of Puccis—screeching pinks and parrot greens and lavenders—and ran about her estate in a pink-painted golf cart. She was a doyenne of the Rome social scene, but was as the veritable tomb when it came to keeping a secret.
It was here at the ochre-tinted Villa Pinati that the lovers managed to catch their breath. Here no one bothered them; few even knew they were in residence. Dodi was happy to share their company if they were so inclined; otherwise she gave them the widest kind of berth. And for eleven days they remained sequestered, safe from prying eyes and the probing lenses of the paparazzi. They strolled in the cool gardens that were filled with blank-eyed tufa statues and tall palms, played games of bocci on the lawn that looked like a billiard table, rode horseback along the ragged Mediterranean shore, climbed among the rocks looking for crabs, or went out in the little pink-hulled ketch that Dodi had supplied them with.
This pink ketch was their undoing. Christened the Dodo Bird by its owner (who never boarded the vessel; Dodi hated being on the water), it was for Frank the answer to a prayer. Once at her helm he could put himself entirely at ease, cutting himself off from everything except the sun, sky, and salt water he loved. And by dint of lashing her tiller and setting her a straight course, he could contrive to enjoy his inamorata in the cozy cabin below decks, where there were two narrow bunks, one of which they appropriated for their own uses.
One afternoon while they were love-wrapt in the cabin, a squall sprang up out of nowhere and came rushing across the bay to fling itself upon the little boat. Taken unawares, Frank staggered above deck to find his craft about to capsize. While he jumped to unlash the rudder, April gamely hauled down the flapping mainsail, and together they tried to muscle out the driving squall that seemed bent on destroying both the boat and themselves. The sky had gone an eerie black, the waves were dangerously high, and there wasn’t another vessel in sight. And while they were in full view of the beach, a quarter mile distant, there were no people in sight.
Frank was a good sailor and he put up a brave fight, but though he kept his bow headed close into the wind, the waves were choppy and the gale sprang now from one quarter, now another. They began shipping water, bailing became a hopeless necessity, and soon the boat started to go down.
They abandoned the sinking craft and struck out for the shore. The waves were strong, and when April tired, Frank put his arm around her and hugged her close, certain the wind would carry them to the shore. April couldn’t speak, but Frank kept muttering in her ear, “I love you, baby,” over and over. “I love you, baby, love you, baby.”
This misadventure ended happily when they washed up on the sand, where they were helped by locals whom an anxious Dodi had dispatched in search of them. The ketch was gone forever, beneath the Civitavecchian waves, not so far from the spot where the poet Shelley had suffered a more fatal mishap 150 years before.
This dramatic business of the shipwreck led to notable results. First, it served to strengthen the ever-deepening love between Frank and April. Having faced the peril of the storm in each other’s arms, they were more than ever resolved to cleave together, whatever this might entail. Nobody could prevent their being together, and if Frances wouldn’t give him the divorce he demanded, so be it. He’d find another way; he had to.
Second, and worse luck, the mishap again set the bloodhounds on their tails. Not unnaturally, such an incident was bound to attract the attention of the press, and upon learning that the lost vessel had belonged to the Contessa Ingrisi, reporters gathered to investigate. Since April was still presumed to be with Jenny and me at Capri, and Frank in London, no connection was yet made between them and the pair on the boat, whom Dodi passed off merely as relations of her former husband. The reporters bought it, all but one droll type who, with considerable resourcefulness, made a friend of the cook’s scullery boy and learned from him that an “American couple” was being sheltered under la Contessa’s roof—no names, but the boy thought maybe il cinema, maybe, they talked molto molto about the movies—and in no time the wind was up. Accompanied by his photographer, the reporter camped out in a van in a nearby pine grove until Dodi called up the local carabinieri and had them dislodged.
Still their identities went undetected, and after a day or two they relaxed vigilance. They were idling on the villa’s terrazzo; April was trimming Frank’s hair. Out in the bay a yacht was lying calm in the water; Frank recognized it as the Calliope but paid no attention as his black curls fell about his chair seat, an antique bronze lion on which she’d perched him. Too late he saw that the yacht had been slipping closer inshore. He could make out figures along the rail, and he realized that binoculars were trained their way; maybe even cameras? The barber and her customer hightailed it inside, but the damage was done: pictures of this intimate domestic scene appeared in Thursday’s Oggi with suitable comments.
Now the jig was up for sure and they fled in earnest and nocturnally, this time in the Contessa’s Karman-Ghia. With Dodi herself chauffeuring them, they crouched ignominiously on the floor, covered by blankets and some valises, arriving in Rome during the early hours, before the heavy traffic had begun its din. At a convenient corner Frank was let out to get back to his hotel by taxi, while April was driven straight to the Stazione Termine, where she boarded the rapido for Naples. By lunchtime she was again with us on the terrace of the Quissisana.
Meanwhile, when Frank came strolling into his hotel he found a worried Tonio Gatti in the lobby. He’d been there for nearly two whole days, waiting to warn him. The word was out all over town, and, worse, Frances was upstairs. “And, Franco, I’m-a sorry to tell you this, but you must know. She ’ave brought un amica. Ees ’Edda ’Opper.”
Grounds for suicide.
It was true, with Frances had come the GrassHopper, Hedda herself, all ready to twang her legs and bare her pancaked breast to the world. The whole thing stank of trouble, the serious kind that makes headlines and ruins careers—and lives. Hedda would doubtless sharpen up her pen and pillory Frank and April the same way she had Ingrid Bergman years before. Frank would be made the villain of the piece, the philandering playboy-agent husband, while April would be painted up in shades of scarlet, the conniving home-wrecker, leaving Frances to continue in her adopted role as the long-suffering wife, come to extricate her poor blind spouse from the clutches of this collegiate femme fatale.
As a background for drama, Rome now became a potential setting for public exposure, denouncement, and shame. How we hated to let Frank face it alone, but he was determined to protect April however he could.
The plan was, we would stay on Capri until the coast was clear; then, when the Dread Hopper had been disarmed or otherwise knocked out of commission—Frances, also—we would return to Rome, where we would be met by Kit Carson, at which point we would then all four reappear along the Via Veneto, a happy young American quartet returning after a private holiday. Let Hopper write what she wanted, no one could really be sure what had happened. We thought it was very clever.
Frank’s call was long in coming, and though he treated serious matters with his usual bantering style, I knew he was being made to run the gantlet. When he glibly reported that he had Hedda eating from the palm of his hand, I had a good idea what that must have cost.
It had cost plenty. In exchange for the columnist’s solemn agreement not to break the story of Frank’s errant holiday, he had promised not to see April again. Rather, he must reestablish himself with Frances as her spouse—in all senses of that word—and when his current business was finished in Rome, he was to depart without having made an attempt to get in touch with April by any means whatsoever.
There was no help for it; Frank had already heavily impressed this fact on me. He would keep his end of the bargain at all costs, as he knew Hedda would keep hers. Bitchy though she could be when it came to handing out public reprimands and scourgings, bigoted and contentious in her opinions and political beliefs, Hedda had a good side as well as a bad; she could be both a good friend and a dangerous enemy, but at least you pretty much knew where you stood with her. And she had always had a warm spot for the Swanky Wop.
The hot wind cooled, the whole storm blew over—for the moment. April’s career, along with Frank’s marriage, was saved, and only the parties involved were privy to what had actually taken place. When the three of us sneaked into Rome, tails between legs and still scared to hell that something would leak out, we learned that Frank and Frances had already departed, but the lady scribe was still in town. We took rooms at the Hotel de la Ville, next door to the Hassler atop the Trinita de Monte.
The day after our arrival, April announced that she was going shopping. Not with Jenny, who occasionally accompanied her on such forays, but with Tonio and his wife, Djiberta, who called promptly at ten and off they went to the Via Condotti. Jenny was rinsing out some things in the washbowl and I was sitting out on the balcony when who knocked at our door but the GrassHopper herself! She looked like a Helen Hokinson club lady in her dotted shirtwaist dress, with a giant garden hat tied under her chin and a large bag of dyed raffia clutched in her hand. Grim as iron, she marched to the center of the room, where she stood in that bandy-legged stance so inimitably hers.