All That Glitters Read Online Free PDF Page B

always writing them up; the local newspaper carried Walter, and I chewed up the lines looking for BABE (in caps; all celebrities were in caps in our paper) or FRANK ADONIS, as he was later known, “the Italian Clark Gable.”
    Frankie was dark and slick, all patent-leather, Italian flash; Babe was blonde and diamond-flashier. She could have seen her face in his hair, so brilliantined was it, while he could probably catch his mustache in her lavallière. It was Frank who got Babe her first Hollywood contract. Sure, you’ll say she was signed when she was in New York, playing in Lola Magee , but you’ll be wrong. When Babe was grabbed for pictures it wasn’t in New York or anywhere near it, and nobody but Frankie could have pulled off that clever job of work.
    There are many versions still making the rounds concerning how they met, including both published autobiographies. In his, Just Call Me Lucky , Frank states, with surprising discretion, that they were “introduced” by a “mutual acquaintance,” whose name he assures us he has forgotten, but claims this introduction took place at Risenweber’s. Babe, on the other hand, states in Oh Babe ! that they met at the Belmont race track, which heaven knows they both frequented often enough. Either story might be true; neither is. I’m putting this down for the record: this is the version Frankie himself confided to me not long before he died, and swore was gospel.
    The facts were these. Frank’s ma, Maxine Fargo (Maxine had remarried after old Tony Adano’s death), was living on West Fifty-fourth Street, and I mean West , right in the heart of Hell’s Kitchen, as they called it then. Frankie Adano, a second-generation Italian with both Neapolitan and Sicilian connections, was a small-time grifter and chiseler, out to make a buck and do himself whatever good he could manage. He was a street kid, a regular Dead Ender, good-looking and smart. One of his best friends was a guy named Benny Siegel, nicknamed Bugsy, who at a later time all by himself invented a place in the Nevada desert called Las Vegas. The pair of them used to snitch ladies’ alligator bags and Kolinsky scarves or swipe counter merchandise from Manhattan department stores. Once they picked on some dame in the subway, beating her up and yanking her pocketbook off its strap. The woman was an off-duty cop; she nailed Frankie, Benny ran away, Frankie did his eighteen months.
    But that didn’t stop him. In time he and Bugsy gave up petty crime and worked their way up to bootlegging and became bag-runners for a numbers racket. They rubbed shoulders with the mob and won reputations for being sharp, dependable, and ruthless. Frank’s then-girlfriend was a hot little Jewish number named Cora Sue Brodsky, a girl with the makings of a broad. As I said, she sold lingerie at Gimbel’s, and she lived with her family in Bensonhurst and yearned like crazy to be a movie star. Frankie promised Cora Sue he could do the trick. He snapped his fingers to show how easy, got her moved into a flat on East Twenty-third Street, and Saturday nights often found him in the basement of her building, stirring up in set-tubs the gin that his customers claimed to like but which more often than not tasted of soap, bluing, and bleach. Cora Sue would hang around, waiting for the next batch to be bottled, even helping him do it, and when the janitor was off-premises Frankie would take her to the janitor’s bed and give her a good weekend shtup , which helped her complexion and kept down her level of complaints. Cora Sue was willing, nay, eager, to stick her legs in the air, because Frankie was going to make her into this big movie star—that’s what he told her anyway. But this was B. B.—Before Babe. After Babe, Cora Sue never stood a chance. But she loved him anyway.
    Babe was a baby vaudevillian. She came out of Chicago, having grown up in Cicero, where the infamous Saint Valentine’s Day Massacre took place. She was known