All That Glitters Read Online Free PDF Page A

star the great ones of Hollywood’s Golden Age, those blinding, glitzy, rhinestone days of platinum hair, of lamé gowns, white fox furs, belted polo coats and pale fedoras, bearskin rugs, glass brick and chrome by the acre, of oversized upholstered furniture, tinted mirrors, and white rococo plaster, of wide shoulder pads, top hat, white tie, and tails, of silver cocktail shakers and satin mules and swimming pools shaped like Acapulco Bay, of running boards and white sidewall tires, of klieg-light premieres and Medici mansions, of Deco and dating and Coconut Groves and eating inside the crowns of Brown Derbys, of the pogrom-sent moguls of Panatella and Casting Couchdom, of toe-tapping, finger-snapping, Busby-crapping Bakelite and Mickey Mouse (before Disneyland), of rat-a-tat gangsters and Gary Cooper tall as stilts and Carole Lombard acting screwy, in a time when the inmates did not run the asylum but were kept where they belonged, in padded cells, when if youth ever had its fling it was only at the whim of its elders, when the very worst product the majors could crank out was somehow more satisfying than most of what’s squeezed today from the Melrose Avenue sausage factories.
    “We had faces ,” says Gloria Swanson, and is photographed amid the baroque plaster ruins of the old Roxy, crushed beneath the wrecker’s ball; gone but not forgotten. They also had glamour then, and a veil of mystery, and attraction and elegance and a sinful purity, the innocence of nursery babes, and the overpowering loftiness that elevated them to that heady Olympian realm where they dwelled, and not their most sullied or foolish acts could degrade the diadems they wore like the haloes of ten thousand virgins. Gloria was right: they did have faces then. And class. Didn’t they? Lotsa class. When weren’t the guys in white tails—Gary, Cary, Melvyn, Randy, Fred? Swank, pure swank.
    In the matter of screen “type,” as they like to call it, Babe always fell between stools. Neither the rare exotic of her middle movie period (Dietrich, Garbo, Fedora), nor the all-American girl (Janet Gaynor, June Allyson), nor the Perfect Wife (Myrna Loy), nor the generously endowed Florodora blonde on the Police Gazette (West, Grable), nor the floozy- cum -nun (Claire Regrett), a Babe Austrian could have flowered only in the U.S. during the second quarter of the twentieth century, and by her own admission could never have done it without Frankie Adano. Generous to the last, Babe was still proclaiming the same thing on her deathbed, for the same—yet far, far different—reasons.
    In addition to being Babe’s manager in the early days, Frank was also generally and elliptically referred to as her “boyfriend.” This meant to grownups that they shared a bed, while to us young fry it meant something like cherry Cokes on Saturday nights after a roller-skating party. But everybody knew about Frankie Adano, and you’d hear talk about his underworld connections (he’d grown up with Benjamin Siegel, better known as Bugsy; later he had truck with Al “Vegas” da Prima, “Ears” Satriano, and “Moonskin” Spaccifaccioli), though the manicurists used to say Frank was better-lookin’ than Clark Gable or Bob Taylor. And just at this time—Babe’s visit to our town—everybody knew Frankie had dumped her for Claire Regrett, whom Louella Parsons said he was “squiring” and the guys joked he was “screwing.” Doubtless some of each.
    People like to ask what Frank was “really” like, as though I or anyone would really know. Frankie was Frankie, a little like Caesar, all things to all men—but seldom like Caesar’s wife, above suspicion. Frankie was always suspect, even when he was innocent—like that rap he did a year and a half for. Frankie was what he was. He was lucky, that’s one sure thing. In his time he’d ducked more than one bullet and lived to tell the tale. And he always came up smelling like a rose, no matter what—at least until the