“He was tryin’ to stick me up, Officer. Take him away and book him.”
A citation for disturbing the peace and impairing public morals was written, and Frankie spent the balance of the day in jail before he found a mouthpiece willing to bail him out.
Furious, he plotted his revenge, and at the next Saturday matinee a phalanx of ferocious harpies was seen marching from Broadway toward the Eltinge Theatre, where they stormed the box office. Calling themselves “Mothers for a Moral America,” they carried signs reading “Babe Osterreich sinister influence on young America,” things like that, and ringed the lobby so no one could buy a ticket. There was also a gang of news photographers and reporters on hand, and as a fracas ensued between the irate “Mothers” and the would-be audience, mostly male, one of the photographers managed to sneak into Babe’s dressing room, where he snapped her in the embrace of a fifteen-year-old boy whose nether quarters beneath his shirttails appeared to be bare. The resultant picture is the comical one everybody knows today. “Broadway star in flagrante delicto with under-age son of boiler superintendent,” read the florid caption. Babe’s show never played that matinee, the Black Maria arrived, and she was hauled off to the pokey, to that identical jail where Frankie had been incarcerated earlier that same week.
Lola Magee had been what might be called a so-so hit. After this, however, all was changed, and Babe was never the same again. The box office was mobbed, this time by sensation-seeking audiences, the play became famous, all New York was fighting for seats, and the theatre was sold out weeks in advance. Babe remained in her cell two nights instead of the single one that was required, and, knowing a bad thing when she smelled it, she later held a press conference outside the jail. The “Mothers for a Moral America” were exposed by a traitor in their midst, who declared that each of the bogus “Mothers” had been paid five bucks a head to storm the theatre, while the “under-age son of the boiler superintendent” was disclosed as being a forty-three-year-old dwarf from a Forty-second Street flea parlor. And the whole farrago was exposed as a hoax perpetrated by none other than Frankie Adano!
Tit for tat. For years afterward, Frankie wore Babe’s pearl stickpin in his cravat and loved to tell the story to friends, though it never got into print. While nursing his injured “pride,” he also nursed a grudge against Babe, now his declared quarry. He went up and down Broadway betting that he would give her the business before the week was out, and what was more he’d take her to Havana for the weekend and screw the hell out of her at the Nacional. He bided his time, waiting for his chance, which he seized on another matinee day when the doorman was still at lunch, slipping the relief man a box of Corona Coronas to look the other way, and sneaking into Babe’s dressing room.
Hiding himself behind a painted screen, he waited until Babe entered with her maid. When the maid stepped out to fill the water pitcher and Babe was in the can, Frankie locked the door and was waiting for her.
From all reports it was quite an encounter, a noisy brouhaha in which Babe lobbed the entire contents of her dressing table at him, Frank fielding the rouge pots and cold-cream jars until he managed to get close enough to tackle her and by sheer force bear her to the floor—except it wasn’t the floor but a pillowed chaise longue where he fell on top of her, and pretty soon there were no more protests from the lady. Frank, a smart businessman, was finally giving her the business.
They held the curtain nearly an hour that day “due to technical difficulties,” and when Babe finally went on it was said she gave the best performance of her career as Lola. That night there was a champagne supper at Luchow’s at which Frankie reputedly downed three and a half dozen oysters—“for purposes of fortification only”—and the next day Babe returned Mr. Ho-Ho-Kus’s car and uniformed driver. The morning papers reported that she would be taking a short hiatus—in Miami Beach, as it happened—and that her understudy would not go on in her place.
After that Frankie collected the bets he’d chalked up and it became quickly known that Babe Austrian was strictly his territory and that he was running the whole show, his intention from the beginning. He went into his Pygmalion act, revamping her from top to bottom; he changed her name, redesigned her figure, and sent her to Pelletti, who saw to such streamlinings in those days. He got her top salary for the show, got her dressing room redecorated, got her a new wardrobe, onstage and off, got her a bigger, brighter sign on the marquee, and ran the show to sold-out audiences for eleven more months.
The rest is, as they say, history. Babe Osterreich was no more; Babe Austrian was born, and within a year had become a major star on Broadway, one of the prevailing sex images of the time. The next step, inevitably, was Hollywood and the movies. Frankie saw to that, too, and at the train station the “Mothers for a Moral America”—the same contingent of belligerent females he had corralled to storm the Eltinge Theatre—were on hand to send Babe off on the 20th Century Limited with a floral wreath, this time naming her “Star Performer of the Year.” To say the least, Frankie’s ex-girlfriend Cora Sue was miffed—Frankie was supposed to have made a star out of her. Before leaving town, however, he did pay for some rhinoplasty and dance lessons, then gave her a kiss and said toodle-oo; he and Babe were off to Lotusland.
It was an interesting coincidence that the Broadway house Babe had packed in Lola Magee was the Julian Eltinge, named in memory of the most celebrated female impersonator of the period, whose genteelly rendered portrayals of fashionable “ladies” carried him to vaudeville stardom and eventually to Broadway, where he was regarded, not as any sort of show-biz freak, but as a genuine “artiste” plying his legitimate and hard-learned craft.
Eltinge bowed offstage in 1941, after a long and successful career that spanned some forty years, from vaudeville and the Palace to his name in lights on the Great White Way. Having retired from the scene, he staged a comeback during the war at Billy Rose’s Diamond Horseshoe, where he succumbed to a heart attack, just coming offstage, still in high drag. Julie died for his art.
I mention this merely as a sidelight, since Babe Austrian was indubitably the most imitated performer of the century. Her clothes were copied, her millinery; her punchlines were famous. “Got something for me, boy?” was as famous as Greta’s “I vant to be alone,” while “Get off my porch” was the catchphrase of the day. She popularized the tam-o’-shanter so it sold by the millions, and when she took up golf, women from Maine to California hit the fairways with their five irons and caddies. Her collection of French Impressionists rivaled that of Edward G. Robinson’s, while her absence from the track on race day was judged a bad omen. But this is getting ahead of the story; the Monets and handicappers came later.
In the year preceding their arrival in Hollywood, Frankie Adano had discovered his center of gravity, and when he and Babe rolled into Tinseltown he was determined to be taken seriously. They put up at the Beverly Hills Hotel in “adjoining rooms” and made sure they were seen everywhere together. It was at Santa Anita that they made their initial splash, where they posed for pictures and Frankie made his oft-quoted comment, “We came to shake the grapefruit from the trees and the stars out of the skies.” And shake they did. Together or separately they created the kind of flurry that the town adored. Frank’s first purchase of note was an expensive car, a landau with enclosed cab, open driver’s. He hired a chauffeur, stuck him in maroon livery with black froggings, and told him to drive Babe around town, from Hollywood to Beverly Hills and clear out to Santa Monica. And just as he planned it, her advent amid the coconut palms of Hollywood caused its share of comment and speculation among the natives, who like most natives were of a fairly restless nature.
One thing seemed most apparent: Babe Austrian was made for the movies, just as the movies seemed to have been invented for her. So that no one was more surprised than she and Frankie to find the studios behaving standoffishly. Rather than the hot ticket she’d been in New York, Babe was perceiving herself to be a little frog in a big Hollywood pond. It didn’t se
em to matter, the length of her car, the number of her furs, even the square inches of diamonds she sported; she was treading water, getting nowhere fast, and neither she nor Frankie seemed able to break the logjam.
In addition, there was a curious social situation prevailing in the environs of Beverly Hills: the stardom conferred on Babe in the East did her little good in a town that was as caste-conscious as Calcutta. Because of her naughty image, there was an unfortunate stigma attached to Babe’s person, and it was preventing her entree into the front parlors of the rich and famous where deals were made, parts cast, careers made.
Frankie was quick to note the openly offered snubs, though it was being made clear that he himself was welcome almost anywhere (they should only have known about his checkered past), and he was frequently invited to gatherings without Babe, which made for some difficulty. But since it was a basic tenet of the industry that a lot of movie deals were cut at Saturday-night social gatherings, and since everything depended on his getting Babe a picture as quickly as possible, they discussed the matter between themselves and were in accord: when Babe might attend a gathering, she would; when not, Frankie would go alone and try to harrow the arid fields of Beverly Hills.
Besides, her day would come. If the smart matrons of Beverly Hills, Bel Air, and Brentwood chose to snoot her, she didn’t care; she wasn’t there to be social anyway; she was there to get famous and make pots of money. “I don’t take things lying down unless I happen to be,” was to become one of Babe’s famous lines, and she went on making herself as conspicuous as she could. Not only was she seen regularly at the race track, she lunched at the hotel pool and let the tourists snap pictures of her, she tooled around town in her car, she went regularly to the theatre, and took in a bunch of movie matinees. All in all, a far cry from the oddball recluse she would become in later years, when people went mad to catch even the tiniest glimpse of her.
There are several famous personalities, among them we can include the Babe, who owe their film careers, at least the start of them, to one person unique in Hollywood annals. You probably don’t hear much too much about her these days, but Viola Ueberroth, intimate of the greats and the famous (one-time mistress of Clark Gable; she paid to have his ears pasted back), “discoverer” of the great Fedora, doyenne of the Bel Air circuit, operator of the infamous Friday Night Carmel Drive Poker Battalion, renowned Beverly Hills hostess, and intimate of the movers and the shakers of the town, was and remains a filmdom institution. Still going strong in her late seventies, she’s part of the old Hollywood, the one that’s dead and gone and isn’t likely to return.
Having got her early start as a lowly steno at the old AyanBee Studios on lower Sunset Boulevard (where her brother, Sam, was first a publicist, then a producer), by the time Babe and Frank arrived in town Viola had established herself as a shrewd and canny agent as well as an intimate of the powers-that-be. Already her regular Friday-night poker game was an institution, and the fact that Sam was one of the more prestigious producers at AyanBee Studios hurt her not at all. Some years before, it had been Viola’s unfailing eye that had fallen upon the forlorn, unknown figure of Fedora on a streetcar en route to the beach and had been instrumental in getting her her first Hollywood part, setting her on the road to international stardom. What Vi had done before, Vi could do again.
As luck would have it, Viola was already well known to Frankie, and he to her. He’d met her in New York at a Lamb’s Frolic and they’d managed to get on so well that he’d asked her for a date, one that had ended up, as he’d planned, in her bed. It was a fact that Vi, not one of God’s prettiest creatures, had been made love to by some of the biggest studs in Hollywood, and if he’d wanted to, at the time Frankie could have carved his name right there on her thigh. So no wonder that it was Vi who now came to Frank’s rescue.
The fact that Constance Bennett as well as certain other screen royalty wouldn’t offer Babe the time of day held no water with Vi, nor did it keep her from jumping wholesale on Frank’s bandwagon. Besides, she was shrewd enough to realize that Babe Austrian was a walking gold mine, a Fort Knox with tits, as her brother Sam would one day put it.
So, standing up to the beldames of the film colony, Viola proceeded to invite both Frankie and Babe to her Friday-night poker sessions. And if there was one thing Babe knew, it was cards. She’d been a hard-nosed player since her teens, when she’d get into a game with the stagehands, and this had been one of the things that had helped cement her relationship with Frankie. And now it helped provide her with her first movie role, at AyanBee Studios, and under the aegis of Sam Ueberroth.
AyanBee, that crumbling silent-picture studio, which was said to be held together with a little spit and lots of adhesive tape, was definitely in need of a hit, and a prodigious hit at that. Vi happened to recall a script that her brother had bought years ago and that had ended up on a shelf collecting its share of dust. The property was called Pattycake, Pattycake, the saga of a naive girl straight off the farm who falls in love with a medicine barker in a traveling show and ends up a star on Broadway. Certainly not an original story, but there was a character there that Babe could play, a wisecracking know-it-all who was always on top of everything.
Yet when it came to casting, Sam proved a hard nut to crack, especially since his wife, Pauline, was one of those Hollywood spouses who eyed Babe with disapproval. But Vi soon took care of that, and upon Pauline’s discovering for herself that Babe wasn’t at all like her projected image, but a sweet-natured girl with a good sense of humor, she began adding her own blandishments to Viola’s. Together they persuaded Sam to drag out the script of Pattycake, with Babe in mind; Vi slipped a copy to Babe to look over, and in a weekend she’d completely rewritten the thing, calling it Broadway Blue Eyes, giving it a stronger plot line and surrounding herself with four or five leading men to cast her spell upon. Harry Shine, one of Mack Sennett’s old comedy directors, was dragged out of mothballs to perform director chores, and in no time AyanBee Studios had the moneymaking hit it had been looking for. In fact, it could be said that Babe Austrian saved the lot (Fort Knox with tits, indeed), and with this resounding success her star was catapulted high into the Hollywood firmament. In hardly any time at all Babe’s name was a household word, and Babe Austrian jokes quickly replaced the farmer’s daughter and Little Audrey variety, and shopgirls across the country began peroxiding their locks and wearing ankle socks and a hair ribbon to match their outfit.
Then came Pretty Polly. It had been Frank’s original idea of teaming the two unlikeliest show-business personalities anyone could hope to find, and he came up with a winning combination that led to three of the biggest laugh riots of the thirties and did much to foster the illusion of the so-called screwball comedy. One evening he’d taken Babe down to the Biltmore Theatre to see Crispin Antrim and his wife, Maude, in a play, and sometime during the second act the idea struck him. With Crispin’s droll wit and impeccable manners, his high style and crisp, gentlemanly airs, the great Shakespearean actor seemed the perfect foil for a Babe Austrian. Frankie envisioned a story in which the two could rub up against each other (after a fashion) and produce laughs. Never especially noted for his comedy performances, Crispin Antrim nonetheless proved an adept farceur in the old tradition, while Babe’s broad delivery of a socko gag was already well demonstrated. After the curtain fell, Frankie conducted her backstage to meet the famous actor, and was pleased to see how well they got on.
Next day Frank huddled at Metro with Irving Thalberg, who quickly got the message. The fact that Crispin was years older than Babe only added spice to the idea, and Frank went away to think some more. Sometime later he came up with the idea for a backstage story, called Footlights, which eventually became Pretty Polly, the story of a newcomer to the Follies who meets a broken-down actor whom she turns into a slapstick comedian and who ends up the star of the show. The critics dismissed it as cheapjack Hollywood stuff, but nonetheless it made customers everywhere weep buckets.
Fra
nk’s idea of teaming Babe and Crispin paid big dividends. Pretty Polly was followed by the even more successful Delicious, about a boardinghouse keeper and his daughter running off counterfeit bills on an abandoned printing press, and the third, Manhattan Madness, contained some of the funniest screwball scenes ever filmed—the story of a rich playboy producer of Broadway musicals who bets his theatre that he can make a star of the girl who works in the hashhouse around the corner. His efforts to create a singing comedienne out of little Mitzi bear fruit and—guess what?—he ends up marrying her.
Crispin Antrim, who lived at Sunnyside, the palatial house he had built for his wife, Maude, and that rivaled Pickfair as a royal palace and Hospitality Hall for visiting firemen, made a small fortune from his comedies with Babe, but for unspecified reasons the lady never set foot inside those lofty precincts. People said Maude herself was the cause of this rejection, though I never found reason to give the report credence.
By now Babe’s career was in high gear. In less than three years she’d got a beach house in Santa Monica and had become one of the biggest and most dependable attractions in movies. Thalberg, then turning out the elite glamour product of MGM, thought he saw in the comedienne further possibilities as yet untapped, and when Crispin Antrim suffered an accident, it was Irving who had the idea that resulted in Babe’s being cast with the four Marx Brothers in what was to become their biggest hit after A Night at the Opera. Far more than merely the love interest, Babe played the wily Flaxie de Mer, alias Gladys Smith, who managed to steal from Groucho every scene she played in All at Sea.