Back at the Bristol house, Frank invited me in and told the driver to wait. I followed him into the front hall, where he stood looking around into those rooms that were perfect marvels of beauty, utility, and convenience. The hand of Frances Deering Adano lay everywhere. Suddenly he turned to me with a fierce expression. “I’ll sell it, you know,” he muttered as we went on to the bar. He cursed and flung off his coat. “God, how I hate this place. It’s like a Ross Hunter set.” He raised his glass. “To the Short Happy Life of Frances Adano,” he said in his low, dark voice. “Pax vobiscum and R.I.P.” He lifted it again to the Alexander Brooks portrait of Frances above the mantel, then made a pistol of his thumb and finger and shot at it.
“Do you hate her?” I asked.
He looked out the window and gulped some of his Scotch, hiked his shoulders, then wearily let them fall. “No. It might be easier, but I can’t. And at the last she was sorry. She really was. She’d come to dislike herself. But…” He ran his fingertip along one side of his mustache. “I knew what I was getting into, right from the start. I’m no rose, you know. She used me, I used her, that’s how it was. She had the class, the money, she was upper-crust; I had the glamour, I was Hollywood. But oil and water, never the twain. Hell, looking back, I think I must have been out of my mind. I’d have been better off with Claire. Or—” He jammed his fists in his pocket. “What the hell,” he said, “we all make our own beds, don’t we?”
People who saw Bud and April together after they were married said they’d never seen two more contented people; they were a modern Adam and Eve, happily playing in their Eden, ignoring both apple and serpent. And their loyal fans admired Bud as the All-American Man, while loving April for being a survivor, for having weathered her tragedies and having found love at last.
In the spring of their second year of marriage, while they were still living in the East, basking in the success of Red Coat Hunt, they were invited to go on a promotional junket to Hawaii, Bud to be photographed by Sports Illustrated for a six-page color layout called “Sports Hawaii.” They would be guests on the famous Parker Ranch on the Big Island. There, amid parties and publicity chores, April learned to eat Rocky Mountain oysters, knowing full well they were bull’s balls; she went into the rain forest, rode a horse along the surf, and played water polo on horseback with the paniolos, the island equivalent of Texas cowboys. She even caught a marlin leaping in the blue waters off the roads.
Along on the junket were the magazine photographer, a studio-unit publicist, a wardrobe man, and a sports equipment specialist. Bud was a hotshot with bow and arrow, and the idea was to get him knocking down some of the wild boar that were to be found in the hillside bush. He’d already done one archery layout with bull’s-eyes in the butts, but this was to be one of action, showing his skill with the ancient weapon.
They started just after early breakfast, fortified with coffee and oatmeal, thirteen people on the trail that wound itself upwards along the slopes of Mauna Kea. The accident happened on the last foray of the day, while the paniolos were readying the camp for the trek downhill again. Mickey, the sturdy Portuguese-Hawaiian whose task it was to look out for April at all times, had performed his assignment admirably, but just at that one moment he was occupied, digging a stone out of the hock of her horse. April was seated on a stump in the middle of the clearing when the dogs began a scuffle in the underbrush. Suddenly and with shocking speed, like some short-legged hairy hound of hell, an alarming shape came rushing out of the brake, head down, grunting, snorting, rushing forth into the waning light. Four ambitious hounds harried the boar, two on a side, leaping in to sink their jaws into the pig’s tough hide, nimbly escaping those angry tusks as it continued its mad charge, heading straight for the figure on the stump. Bud saw it, shouted, April leaped up, jumped onto the stump, while the boar rushed toward her.
In a flash Bud had sent three feathered arrows into its back and neck, yet still it came on, screaming with pain and fury, the arrows sticking out like the banderillas from a bull’s neck at a corrida. Bud ran headlong into the clearing like a matador into the arena, to do battle, waving his jacket to distract the boar’s attention from April, shouting, until, just shy of the stump, the beast swerved, then pulled up short, uncertain, its wet nostrils quivering as it scented another prey. Then, backing one or two steps, making its ugly snuffling sounds, it leaped forward at Bud, and as they closed, with both hands Bud enclosed the snorting head with his jacket, then threw his weight on the boar’s back and wrestled it to the ground.
Muffled in the coat of heavy corduroy, the boar pulled away, freed itself, then, as Bud rolled free in the opposite direction and struggled to his knees, it sprang at him, landing full-force on his back and bearing him to the ground, where with cries of fury it gored him with its tusks. In another second two shots rang out and the boar crumpled on top of Bud, where both lay still.
Mickey came running, he and April, and together they dragged the boar from Bud’s back. He was alive, but he couldn’t move. April cradled his bloodied head while Mickey ran for help. The sun was already going by the time they’d got a stretcher made up and were able to begin the difficult descent; it was full dark by the time they reached base camp.
The boar had done wicked damage before it died. Raking Bud’s back with its tusks, it had torn the flesh and bone and severed important nerves, so that he had lost the use of his body from the waist down. Time would tell if the damage was reparable. In any case, it was already a tragedy. April stayed by Bud’s side, refusing to leave him for an instant while the doctors worked over him, patching him up.
One of those soonest apprised of the accident was Frank, who flew out aboard Howard Hughes’s Monitor Six, loaned for the occasion. And what were Frank’s thoughts during that mournful flight across the Pacific? With the surprise marriage of April and Bud, he’d seen the end of his own dream of happiness; now there was an end to hers, too.
Being Frank, upon arriving he assumed full charge of the tragedy, as if it were his own. And in a way it was, Bud being almost like a son. Though the studio had sent out its own representatives, and though an invisible wall was set up so the media couldn’t trample the story into the ground, the thing was headline news and had to be treated as such. Restrained bulletins were given out, but no photographers were permitted. The governor of the state, a friend of Frank’s, himself stepped in when the press became antsy over the paucity of details, both threatening and cosseting them. All too soon the truth came out in big black headlines: Kit Carson would not walk again.
The success of the Hollywood star system is built mainly on publicity, but publicity of this sort is publicity nobody needs or wants. For four days the eyes and ears of the world were glued on the drama as it unfolded on the Big Island of Hawaii, which hadn’t had so much attention since the volcano erupted. And since both participants in the drama were liked by both press and public, the matter was regarded as a double tragedy. So young to be so stricken; never to walk again, never to make another movie appearance.
I happened to be in Arizona at the time, with a unit filming outside Phoenix in the Superstition Mountains. I heard the news from the wardrobe man who handed me the afternoon edition of the Arizona Republic. I managed to track Frank down through Viola, and reached him by phone at the Mauna Kea Hotel. We talked for over half an hour, and next day, the local press having been alerted that I was on the horn to Hawaii, I was besieged by the media people. Soon our outdoor location was being overrun with reporters from as far away as Kansas City, until Jenny and I fled our hotel and took refuge in Scottsdale.
We’d flown back to Hollywood by the time Frank returned with Bud, and of course April. The plane set down on the private Santa Monica airstrip near Hughes Tool and Die, where reporters had been staking out the place for days. It was a mob scene that not even hardened veterans of such shoddy circuses were prepared for, and Howard himself showed his face in an effort to assist Frank. April’s own exit from the plane was screened as much as po
ssible, but so slowly executed that the wolf pack descended with slathering jaws. Worse came when Bud was brought off the plane on a stretcher. Though every precaution was taken—the reporters and photographers had been cleared from the tarmac by Hughes uniformed guards as well as Santa Monica police—the victim was pounced upon by two newsmen pretending to be security officers as he was being transferred into the waiting ambulance. That was when April started to scream. And then no sooner had the arriving party left the airport than the press began howling at the doors of the hospital, whose entrances were now shut to all visitors without special passes.
Nothing of what had happened was easy on Frank. He was enormously fond of Bud, and, unhappily, he was still wildly in love with Bud’s wife. A man doesn’t get over something like that just because the woman in question goes off with some other guy. Though Frank tried to hide it, you could see the suffering in his eyes. By then he’d sold the place that Frances had redecorated a total of four times, and was living at Regency House on Doheny Drive, and I saw him frequently. He’d aged, that was plain—the flop picture that bore his name as producer, the heavy toll that Frances’s and his mother’s deaths had taken, and now this, all had wreaked their havoc.
But it was lovely to see the way he behaved around April, the kindness and consideration he showed, helping her along every way he could, trying to cheer her up. We were all terrified of another breakdown, but she seemed to be making it through, mostly for Bud’s sake. She even stood up to a press conference, explaining in detail how the accident had happened, giving another medical report on Bud’s condition, and informing one and all that they’d decided to leave Hollywood, they’d go and live in Santa Fe; Virginia could only remind them of the past, and Bud liked the great open spaces. And it was in those great open spaces that Bud Ayres got lost, and with him, April, his wife.
The great trouper throughout all this had been Donna, I believe if it hadn’t been for her there was no chance that April would have ever got through Bud’s accident and the aftermath. Like Frank before him, Bud sang Donna’s praises to the sky, and he made sure she was a frequent visitor to New Mexico, especially at holiday times, periods when April was often victim to a lingering depression.
After a while you didn’t hear so much about the couple who were starting a new life at Santa Fe. From time to time there might be some mention of them in Time or Newsweek, or there’d be a shot of them in Life, Bud in the mechanical wheelchair to which his paralysis had confined him, both of them looking cheerful and content. Occasionally a report would make its way into the papers, there’d be a halfhearted interview, but these somehow fell flat; there was only so much you could say about them now, America’s Sweethearts, who were living out their life together according to some undisclosed plan. Happy? Sure, why not? Snug as two bugs in a rug. People were really surprised at the nimble way Bud got around on his wheels and the way April had shrugged off the tragedy and was forging ahead.
When movie queens abdicate, they tend to lose that movie-queen look, that patent Hollywood gloss that was so much a part of them up on the screen; they revert to a more ordinary state—not an unnatural thing, since they are, after all, only mortals, they’d come from a common clay to which they’d now elected to return. This is how it was with April; she wasn’t as strikingly beautiful, the glow that made her famous had been dimmed; she was just one more inhabitant of the town. And that, she always said, was fine with her; she had no desire to get in front of a camera again. She was still pointed out—“There goes April Rains… you know”—but she took it all in stride.
Her hair got darker, at least in photographs, and she was showing definite signs of strain. Bud was drinking—heavily, Donna told me; he had put on weight, there were spats, then quarrels. Then one day everything ended when the gun he used for skeet-shooting went off accidentally and killed him.
So this was the end he was fated for, his destiny—carelessness with a loaded weapon. When Donna called me, I was more shocked by this news than I had been by Bud’s accident. Yet I could understand it, we all could: one moment’s negligence and it’s all over. We said goodbye to the great guy who had been Kit Carson, Frank’s Kit Carson, who had made his marks on the Hollywood track; Bud Ayres, Hollywood nice guy, never to be forgotten, but what a way to go.
But not even such tragedies can hog the headlines forever, and—with time—the media hustled other stories and little by little the names of April Rains and Kit Carson slipped from view, and for a while April had at last achieved the privacy she had craved for so long. No one was interested, and that was fine with her, just fine.
But now, with Bud gone and Frances gone, the big question became, What would happen between her and Frank? Would there be wedding bells for the unhappy couple? There was little reason to think so. On the contrary, April appeared to be going out of her way to avoid Frank. Leaving Bud buried in Tesuque, she moved back to Los Angeles, where Frank tried every way he could think of to see her, to manage a word with her. But she cut herself off completely, refusing to speak to him and returning each of the letters he sent her. Pleas from Jenny and me proved futile; she listened, but was adamant. At Hartford she’d told me she wanted nothing more to do with him, and if I hadn’t been able to believe her then, I had good reason to now. As far as April was concerned, Frank Adonis was a chapter in her life that was over and done with; she had performed surgery on herself, she was cut off from him forever.
When Bud died, movie offers had come flooding in from hotshot producers trying to cash in on all the publicity, but she had turned thumbs down to everything. No more movies for April Rains. She moved back to Hollywood—it was where she came from, after all—and found a small apartment in Georgian House, off Doheny, a mile and a half away from where Donna lived and not far from where Frank had been living since selling his house. She went on rebuffing any effort on his part to reach her, however, and though I saw her from time to time, she seemed to rate me as Frank’s friend and as such to be shunned. I felt sorry for her, I thought she needed friends around her, but I could see she was determined to change things as much as possible, back to the simple life she’d planned before Frank Adonis had come along. She was back in school, working toward her M.A., and there were few discernible traces of April Rains about her, though I noted she hung on to the name, and I wondered why.
I felt sorriest for Frank. He was in a pretty bad way these days. Though business had improved, he was often moody, the victim of fits of black depression, so unlike the Frank we had known for so long. It was easy enough for some people to kiss him off, but I couldn’t do that; I kept in close touch and stayed as near as he’d allow. Once he got me so angry I let go with both barrels; afterward he told me I was right and we shook, but it had driven a wedge between us that left a big crack, a crack I wasn’t sure was ever going to get repaired.
Then one day—Bud had been dead for well over a year—he and April ran into each other. It was at the Beverly Hills post office—the old revolving-door bit, he was going in, she was coming out. Each stared in wordless surprise at confronting the other’s face, the beloved’s face.
It’s not so surprising that the coals of love, however heavily banked, may again leap into sudden flame if they are given a breath or two, a touch of the bellows. The two of them stopped right there on the post-office steps like old friends; then they walked a bit, as far as the little park on the other side of Big Santa Monica, where the gardening force was changing the plantings in the city flower beds, putting down the canna lilies that always look so ratty a week later.
They sat on a bench and talked some more. He said his car was parked over in the municipal lot, would she go for a little ride, maybe out to the beach?—it was such a fine day. They drove out through the Wilshire Corridor to Santa Monica, then headed south down through all the little beach communities, Venice, El Segundo, Manhattan Beach, Hermosa and Redondo, and so on.
They continued on down to Palos Verdes, where they stopped for lunch. They looked in a
t Marineland and saw the whale and the talking porpoises. They saw the glass cathedral, which was closed, then drove some more, past Long Beach, Newport, San Juan Capistrano, as far as La Jolla, 120 miles from Los Angeles, where he tried to convince her to go with him over to the peninsula and take a room at the Del Coronado, but she wouldn’t. He found her very changed, but there was enough of the old April there to break his heart with longing.
They turned around and headed back. At Torrey Pines they pulled onto the palisade and sat there in the car, talking while the sun went down. It was anguish of the worst kind. He had her, she was here now beside him, close, but he didn’t really have her at all. There was no way he could reach her. His sense of the fitness of things told him not to try to make physical love to her—it wasn’t the time and she wasn’t responding in the old ways—and he kept his ardor under control. To a certain degree she frightened him—she seemed like a bird trapped in a cage, desperately beating its wings against the bars in a struggle to get out. Yet he thought that, having come across her in this unexpected way, he saw a chance and he would take it if he could. And so he poured out his heart to her, told her of his unhappiness, the loneliness he had felt for so long. It had never ended for him, would never end, not while he—and she—lived. He loved her, she had captured his soul, he existed for her alone, couldn’t she—wouldn’t she?
She was listening, he could tell, listening intently to every word. She wept and clutched his hand and her hot tears fell on his flesh. And she told him how she’d missed him and how glad she was he’d found her again. She’d been so unhappy. She wanted to be with him, she really did, no one could know how much, if only—