All That Glitters Read Online Free PDF

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    For me his name still conjures up the Golden Age of Moving Pictures. Anyone who knows anything about Hollywood knows how truly he was always at the dead center of things, from way back in the early thirties clear through the sixties, even the seventies. Hook or crook, Frank was certainly one of the most dramatic, colorful, powerful, and imposing figures in the whole industry, a crackerjack agent who was wooed and courted and deferred to, who was ass-kissed and ass-kicked, loved and hated, who made or remade movie stars by the fistful. Think of them—Babe herself; Maude Antrim; her husband, Crispin; April Rains; Kit Carson; Belinda Carroll; Julie Figueroa; Claire Regrett; and all the others. His was a stylish career that managed to survive unsavory Vegas alliances, his friendship with Bugsy, scandals of sex and murder, even the Senate crime hearings.
    To me Frankie was a saint. He was my agent, and I respected and appreciated him. He was always four-square with me—a little nutty maybe; still, you had to admire him—love him, even. Generous to a fault. Thoughtful, considerate—a really classy gent—he used to remember to wire my mother flowers on her birthday, or he’d send her theatre tickets when she was in New York. Once, when a picture of mine was playing at Radio City Music Hall, he had her whole bridge club limo’d down from Hartford to see the opening, with lunch in the Rainbow Room afterward. Mother declared that outside of her husband, Frankie Adano was the best-looking guy who ever lived, and that he was the one who should have been in the movies. Mother was not alone in her opinion. People always used to say he could have had a Hollywood acting career himself if he’d wanted to—look at George Raft. But Frankie was too smart for that bull. He knew which end of the trombone the music comes out of.
    Frankie had a genius for recognizing the potential in actors before the studios ever laid an eye on them, sometimes before the personalities themselves even knew what they had. Take Babe, for example, his first big success; or April Rains, who was a total unknown; then there’s Kit Carson, the ex-beach bum; or look what he did with Claire Regrett, who was only Cora Sue Brodsky when he first knew her, behind the hosiery counter at Gimbel’s; or Belinda Carroll, found singing for nickels on a street corner across from Echo Park.
    There are those who still claim he was nothing but a two-bit opportunist, but he had the manners of a duke. Why else would spectacular dames like Barbara Stanwyck and Roz Russell have had him for a friend? For a while, after Thalberg died, he dated Norma Shearer before she remarried. A guy doesn’t pull the wool over the eyes of ladies like that; they’ve been around the hall, they know the score. They could always spot a three-dollar bill.
    And Babe Austrian? Well, there are a few—more than a few—interesting sidelights to that fifty-year career, most of which Frankie was a party to. Babe adored him—in her younger days, that is—worshipped the ground he walked on, even after he dumped her for Claire Regrett, and after Claire, Frances Deering, the beautiful lumber heiress, who of all the beauties was finally the one to snare him. Think of the long list of women he had—who else could have juggled them all, and with his finesse? What Frankie knew, you don’t learn. Putting it Babe’s way, “Honey, you either got it or you don’t. And if you don’t, don’t come around.” Oh yeah !
    Certainly it’s not giving away any secret to state that Babe Austrian and Frankie Adonis were two parties in an open-ended romantic relationship existing without benefit of clergy, a relationship of such duration and depth that it seemed like a fact of life. Nor did it seem to be any secret that they were getting it on. We knew it, even back then. In a day when the overworked tag of “sex symbol” hadn’t been thought of, those two were just “sexy,” and that was a given. Winchell was