And yet… and yet. Something wasn’t quite right, I could tell. And it wasn’t just the vestiges of her illness, either. She appeared perfectly well, at least to my untrained eye. She seemed well, put it that way. And Frank stated that she was. But mental illness is a tricky business.
I took care not to intrude on them, but they seemed eager for my company, so I’d drive out at least once a week, sometimes more. It was then—sitting outdoors in sweaters, for it was in the winter and though there weren’t any storms it was chill and gray, “unicorn” weather, as April called it—it was then that she told me about the Aiken poem, and about the time she’d come to this same house with Frank and had lost her virginity. Not “lost” but voluntarily surrendered.
Frank was nervous about leaving her alone in the house, but he was buried in business deals at that point and had to be at the office every day. Sometimes I’d take my work along and spend the day with her; she’d make lunch, we’d talk, go for walks, but it was strange—the more time I spent with her, the more I realized just how much she’d changed. Subtle changes, admittedly, sometimes you couldn’t put your finger on them, but changes nonetheless. Small wonder, I told myself, after what she’d been through; but now where was she heading?
They were to be married in the spring, in April, which coincidentally was her birth month, too. She was making bridal plans, picking out a dress and so on. They would be married right there in the beach house, with just a few friends present; then they were going to honeymoon in Italy. They wanted to go back to Capri, where they’d been so happy, and see Civitavecchia again. Dodi Ingrisi had died several years back, but friends had bought the villa and would make it available to the bridal couple for two weeks in June.
On a Friday, Jenny and I drove out to Malibu for the weekend—mainly at April’s insistence. Frank, too, seemed happy to see us, though I thought we’d end up as fifth wheels. Things went pleasantly enough. We got there an hour or so before sunset; Jenny and I threw on our sweatsuits and joined Frank and April for a run on the beach. When April lagged, Jenny hung back with her, while Frank and I huffed and puffed until we were winded. We returned to our blankets, where we sat wrapped in them, our bare toes dug into the damp cool sand, to watch the sunset. The sun was going down behind a silvery veil of cold mist. The light died slowly at first, then more and more quickly.
“Say, what was that poem, anyway?” Frank asked suddenly, speaking to April. “The one about the white unicorns, the guy with the sore back?”
She laughed, and Jen squeezed my hand: that was good. April remembered the Aiken, those romantic lines from the Evening Song of “Senlin.”
“The stars hang over a sea like polished glass…
And solemnly one by one in the darkness there
Neighing far off on the haunted air
White unicorns come gravely down to the water….”
April recited the lines in a hushed tone, as though afraid to put her voice to them. But they resonated in the quiet air, and though I was warm in my blanket I felt a chill. “The haunted air,” that was it. Was that what Frank was asking? I didn’t know. The lines floated away with the spindrift. I had never read the poem, but Frank had told me about that time—right over there on Seal Rocks—and I wondered if he was reliving it, the night they first made love.
Glancing at them side by side, I could see their two profiles in silhouette; they looked like bedouins in their blanket, she tanned but without makeup, he with his five o’clock beard that made him look so swarthy. He had her hand resting on his knee, and he kept touching it with his lips as if it were his most treasured and precious possession. He told me afterward that he was trying to believe his good fortune, that she was well again and they’d soon be married.
Jenny had a call to make, so, leaving the others, we went on inside. While she telephoned her sister I made a fire, then went outside to bring some things in from the deck. I could see the dark huddled shape Frank and April made, sitting where we’d left them, eerily frozen in that same spot as they stared out to sea. Together, finally, and I breathed my own calm contentment at the sight.
It was full dark before they came in, still blanket-covered, teeth chattering as they hopped around in front of the fire. As she passed me, April paused to give me a quick kiss on the cheek. “That’s for being you,” she said. I glanced over at Frank, still at the fire, watching with an intent expression, his dark eyes flashing in the firelight.
“Ain’t she somethin’?” he muttered when she’d gone upstairs. He came toward me with his buccaneer’s grin. “She’s fine, Chazz,” he said in a low voice, “she really is.”
“And you? You fine, too?” I asked.
“Believe it, kiddo. I’m right as Rains.”
I winced at the pun, he put up his dukes, then gave me two playful jabs, one on each cheek.
“I’m hitting the showers,” he said, and disappeared upstairs two at a time.
By seven dinner was on; the girls made the salad and coffee, Frank let me cook the steaks; he was on the phone now. He came in with a joke about Sam Ueberroth, whose house was a stone’s throw up the beach. “Sam wants us to come down after dinner,” he said.
“I’m not budging,” April said. I thought, Good god, don’t tell me Sam’s still chasing after all these years? Jen must have read my thought; she smiled at me and Frank caught it. His look was noncommittal. We dined right there around the fire, off pewter plates, with a deep-red burgundy that had plenty of tang and matched itself well to the rare beef. Frank and April sat as close as possible. It crossed my mind that Frank hadn’t enjoyed himself like this for many moons. He kept cracking the latest office jokes and telling how Sam had made a fool of himself at the last Producers’ Guild meeting, when he got up to make a speech and couldn’t remember his words. Vi had to lean over and prompt him. I decided Frank looked younger, healthier, and more relaxed than I’d seen him in a long time, and I told myself this was the big turnaround, from here on in everything would be fine.
As things turned out later, Frank was thinking the same himself. The fact that we were all together again, a reliving of the Summer of the Purple Grape, that we were laughing and having fun, seemed to put things in their proper perspective. They even talked us into being in the bridal party, I best man, Jenny matron of honor.
During coffee he brought out a small box, the kind jewelry comes in; she opened it to find inside a pin in the shape of a unicorn, encrusted with diamonds, the horn a shaft of platinum.
“That’s why you wanted to hear the poem,” Jenny said. “It’s a set-up.”
Jenny and I carried out the dishes and cleaned up the kitchen, taking lots of time; then by prearranged agreement we came in yawning and saying it was time for bed. “Wait a minute,” Frank said, grabbing the last bottle of wine, “we want to drink a toast, April and I.” He filled glasses and Jen asked whom we were toasting.
“You, woman,” Frank said. “And Chazz here. We want you to know how grateful we are, April and I, that while all the rats were deserting the ship, you stuck by us. We haven’t forgotten it, and we won’t. Just promise us you’ll let us go on sharing our happiness with you.”
I never heard anything so touching, especially from Frank, who wasn’t the kind to vent his sentiments. But he was Italian, and he felt things, and Jen and I were both flattered to have him express them in this manner.
Before going to sleep, we lay under the down comforter, talking about that touching moment, how well they both looked and how happy, and how swell it was that things were finally coming together.
Meanwhile, downstairs, Frank and April lay stretched out in front of the embering fire, also talking. He couldn’t believe that his prayers finally were being answered; he wished Maxine were there to see it.
“Don’t say that,” April said, laying her fingers across his lips. “We mustn’t wish for too much. Let’s just be happy with what we’ve got.”
He put his nose in her hair, the way he always loved doing, and held her
closer. They talked about their coming trip to Italy, waxing nostalgic about places they’d been, things they’d seen and done. It was good to laugh again, freely and without constraint, and not have to glance nervously back over their shoulders to see what monsters were traveling in their footsteps. He kissed her over and over, while she whispered love words in his ear. They laughed about the time the flokati rug caught fire and the fire department came and embarrassed them, here in this same room. What a long time ago that was. They even spoke of Frances and felt sorry for her. It was a luxury they could afford, now that she was gone.
The sound of the waves lulled them, the clattering rocks under the foundation; they didn’t want to make physical love, they were just happy being together like this, in the place that had meant so much to them. Feeling as he did, with the euphoria that comes from knowing that the heart’s desire has at last been won, he began talking about how he was going to find the perfect role for her, that he was going to see her make her comeback in a really big way, that if he could work things right she’d end up with an Oscar. She grew alarmed at his words, saying she didn’t want an Oscar, didn’t want to act again. He should have read the signs, but he was too happy, too far out on a pink cloud; all he could think of was making her happy and putting her back on top. Those were the terms he was used to thinking in; he wanted to see his filly back at the gate, wanted her to run the race and win it; he forgot that the filly was gate-shy and never wanted to run again. She wanted to be put out to pasture, not to stand in front of an audience hoping to be liked.
What happened next might have happened anyway, in some other time; the fact was, it happened that night, and, regrettably, it was Frank’s fault. We heard the door slam, heard Frank’s call after her; then the door opened and he ran out. We sat up, frozen with alarm, straining to hear something. Jenny shoved me out of bed and urged me to go see. I hiked on my pants, and sweatshirt and crept down the stairs. The wind was rushing through the open door, which swung on its hinges without banging. I ran out onto the deck and looked. I could make out the small figure of Frank way up the beach, but he was alone. I thought, If he goes that way, I’ll go the other.
I walked north to the far end of the Colony, but there wasn’t a sign of her. The houses were mostly dark; a dog barked at me and followed me a ways, then disappeared.
I was out of the house for an hour, and when I came back Frank was having coffee with Jenny, so worried he could hardly talk. I had never seen him so upset; he simply came undone at the seams. Wouldn’t call the police, didn’t want her name in the papers again; she’d come home, we’d just wait it out. He blamed himself, over and over; he smote his brow for a fool. Why hadn’t he seen what he was doing? What could possibly have come from his foolish desire to see her a star, Oscar in her hand? What had possessed him to even bring up such a thing when he knew how much she’d hated it all?
He went out and paced the deck, then went up on the highway and stood under the streetlight, as if she might take it into her head to reappear. We knew different, Jenny and I. Frank was wasting his time; she wasn’t coming home. And she never did, not to that house. She was picked up next day loitering at the magazine stand of a local supermarket. She’d been reading movie magazines for hours; the cashier got suspicious. But he had no idea who she was, just another cheapskate smudging the pages.
The Malibu cops were good guys, they knew Frank; he came and got her, drove her back to town. That evening she was back at UCLA Medical Center, and no one the wiser that she’d had another breakdown. She stayed there for maybe two months; then Frank had her transferred to a private sanitarium in Woodland Hills.
No sooner did he have her settled in than he had to leave town; he came to me, asking if Jenny and I would keep tabs. Alas, our marriage was really on the fritz, and I said I didn’t think Jenny would be around much, but that I’d stay close. And I did. I went nearly every weekend to have the midday meal with April, bring her the latest magazines, keep her company. She wasn’t in good shape, but nothing like she became later. I tried to establish a bridge to the doctor, and he came to trust me, as I did him. He was an April fan from way back and he was worried about her, more than he let on.
Frank kept in touch by phone; I gave my weekly reports and tried to buoy him with any good news I could drum up. When he came back he drove out to Woodland Hills directly from the airport and spent the weekend assessing for himself exactly how things were. I already knew what he was busy finding out: things weren’t good. He’d been shocked to see how she looked—she’d really let herself go, her body was badly run down, her appetite bad. When he left she handed him a small parcel, asking him not to open it until he was home. He didn’t wait, but opened it in the car; it held the diamond unicorn pin he’d given her that night at Malibu. The brief note the package contained asked him not to come anymore; it was too painful and his visits left her distressed.
So there it was: she wasn’t going to marry him; worse, she held no hope now for the future. He wrote her a letter, saying he understood, and releasing her from any previous understanding they’d had. He loved her and would be there for her any time she needed him. But the awful truth was, she didn’t need him anymore. What she needed was her sanity, and if she stood any chance of getting that back she couldn’t go on seeing him.
It was a brutal blow for Frank, and he really took it on the chin. In the passing months I saw a lot of him, because I too was nursing wounds of my own. One night we had dinner, he and I, and in a booth at Frascatti’s I saw him weep for a second time. He’d lost Maxine, now he’d lost April; there wasn’t much else to lose, except his own life, and that, too, waited around the corner.
As a result of Bud’s manager’s crooked shenanigans, the till was all but bare, and Frank was picking up the tabs. He’d previously arranged to pay for April’s upkeep at Woodland, relying on monies left him by Frances, but the family had successfully contested the will, leaving him in somewhat straitened circumstances. April stayed on at Woodland for nearly two years, with horrendous expenses that drained Frank’s pocketbook, and then, after he was killed and her own money ran out, she made the trip to Libertad, taking the road to Simi Valley, the long road that led to nowhere. And I began my pilgrimages, the Sunday and holiday trips that have gone on for so many years. Read it and weep, as I do.
What with one thing and another, my life changed drastically in the next year and a half. Somewhere along the line I’d begun writing, and I’d started in on a small book, I felt the work suited me and I kept a typewriter in my trailer and worked during setups and at nights. Jenny was in Kenya, doing a safari picture, and we were pretty well out of touch. When the book was nearing publication, I found myself spending more and more time in New York, where I’d begun it all so many years before, and enjoying it. I had an apartment with a colossal view, and so sure was I that I’d be sticking to Manhattan that I had boxes of expensive stationery engraved with my new address. No sooner was I at home than who should appear on my doorstep but Jenny; we kissed and made up, swore we’d never part. She went out and bought me a purebred German shepherd we called Bones; I remember we used to walk him a lot and meet all kinds of friends along Central Park West. Jenny started to get itchy; she stayed only a month, we waltzed all around town, East Side, West Side; then she asked me to come back to Los Angeles.
By now I was hard at work on my second book and didn’t want to be uprooted. The fact that I was having an unlooked-for success in my new career wasn’t necessarily helping our home life. I’d fly to the Coast for a fortnight, sometimes just the weekend, but it wasn’t working. We crabbed and bickered and were both exhausted from the energy spent in futile argument. I was also fed up with Los Angeles and wanted to make a clean break, so I went back to my apartment in New York, to work cheek-by-jowl with my editor. Absence failing to make our hearts grow fonder, when I returned to Los Angeles the next time, it wasn’t to our Sunset Plaza Drive house but to a solitary room at the Villa Lorraine on the Strip.
&nbs
p; Not too long after that, I made yet another quite astonishing move when, thanks to Frank, I found myself living in the hallowed precincts of Sunnyside, the Crispin Antrim showplace, where my landlady was none other than Maude Antrim herself. Stranger things have probably happened in my life, though I can’t think of them right now. And it was there at Sunnyside that I got to observe firsthand the last days of Frank Adonis.
With Frank’s death had gone all that remained of the old April, the girl you see up there on the screen or on the Late Show. Upon hearing the news that he’d been shot, she became uncontrollable and had to be placed under restraint.
Though we’d tried, there was no way to keep it from her—headlines were plastered everywhere, you couldn’t turn on the TV without catching a late bulletin, and no one in Hollywood talked about anything else. His death was big news, and naturally April was getting raked over the coals right along with him, and with Belinda, even with Maude; with just about any woman who’d ever had anything to do with him. Notoriety had dogged him all his life and he went out in the most scandalous manner possible. When the police photographs taken at the murder scene began circulating, one of the supermarket gossip-sheets published a spurious “Life of Frank Adonis,” featuring a strip gallery of all his “ladies”: Babe Austrian, Belinda Carroll, Angelina Brown, Norma Shearer, Hedy Lamarr, Claire Regrett, Frances; and of course April.
Frank’s funeral had some distant echoes of the Valentino spectacle, including an emotional female—in this case, Claire Regrett—dramatically throwing herself on the flower-laden bier, sobbing and collapsing so she had to be carried from the place, the kind of hysterical display so dear to the tabloids. April, of course, wasn’t there, but she heard about it anyway. And it didn’t help—though by then nothing could have.
It was a perfectly natural thing that Frank should have had quantities of mourners, being loved and admired as he was. I doubt, however, that he’d have appreciated the vulgar circus the whole thing became. It really did look like a gangster’s funeral, with tons of flowers, the bier covered in a blanket of roses from you-know-who, and in attendance seemingly every Italian in every black suit in the City of the Angels. It even rained, and the black silk umbrellas all came out on cue; you could have walked on them for a tenth of a mile, umbrella to umbrella. But I was touched to catch among the mourners a face I recognized; it was the gateman from MGM, holding his hat over his heart and crossing himself as he knelt by the casket. But, Jesus, the crowds of people, their emotions all geared up—it was like a bad movie. Myself, I was disgusted by the whole thing and couldn’t wait to get away, thinking how Frank would have been disgusted as well.