All That Glitters by Thomas Tryon

make her laugh, tell her she was terrific. I did all three. It wasn’t so hard; she was terrific, after her fashion. She started writing this play about an older star and a young man—said we’d take it to Broadway, her and me. I suggested she write in a part for Jenny. That was the end of that.
    One night, in the middle of a scene, a very Lubitschy one—Babe and I were supposed to be dancing and drinking champagne—she dropped her glass and swooned outright in my arms. I stood there staring blankly at the audience with this dead weight hanging on me, while the stupefied stage manager merely goggled. I hauled Babe to the couch, where she lay softly moaning and clutching her abdomen, then I hustled offstage and rang down the curtain.
    She was suffering an appendicitis attack and was in need of immediate attention. She couldn’t walk, but lay there sweating on the sofa until a hastily summoned ambulance carted her off to the local hospital. The rest of the cast went back onstage; the wardrobe girl read Babe’s role, tendering one of the more interesting performances of a femme fatale known to the American theatre.
    We were scheduled to end the tour over in the Poconos, but due to Babe’s unexpected surgery, we found ourselves back in New York before the end of August. I started pounding the pavements, occasionally with Jenny Burton at my side. This was in the days of “making rounds,” going to each casting office and putting in your bid for a part, making sure they had your résumé and pictures. By the time September was out, Babe Austrian and summer stock were things of the dim past; Jenny had moved in with me on West Thirteenth Street; we were going to be the new Lunt and Fontanne. Before long things began to break for me. Max Hollywood landed me a part, I was seen by an important casting person, was sent to be interviewed by an even more important Hollywood figure, and pretty soon I was on my way west. Jenny went, too, not just for the ride: we were Mr. and Mrs. Lunt by then.
    If my troubles seemed to be ending, Babe’s seemed to be just beginning—medically, anyway. We read that she was going into Harkness Pavilion for tests. The papers hinted that she was having the whole thing tucked, but I got it straight from our director that she was having female problems and that her ovaries were being offed. It was hysterectomy time for Babe Austrian.
    When I was still a toddler, I learned to tell my right hand from my left by my mother’s dressing-table drawers. “Get me my red dotted scarf out of my lefthand drawer,” she’d say, or “Bring me my pocketbook from my righthand drawer.” In similar fashion I identify past years from the women in Frank’s life: he had a date with Cora Sue Brodsky on the night the stock market crashed, he was seeing Babe Austrian in 1930, he brought her out to California in the winter of 1932 and was her more or less constant companion until around 1938 (excluding several amorous interludes with Claire Regrett), when Babe took to the road with her drums (and I pinched her in the parade). Then, just before Pearl Harbor, he met Frances Deering of the Seattle lumber Deerings, and married her in 1942 after a whirlwind courtship. But life with Frances was no bed of roses. For another husband she probably would have made a perfectly good wife—for a magnate, a captain of industry—but not for Frankie Adonis. Frances was smooth as Parian marble, and just as chill, awf’lly Upper Bryn Mawr, and she ran a taut ship. Her mock-Tudor house on Rockingham in Brentwood was neat in the way a museum is neat, everything kept under glass, including her spouse.
    Not surprisingly, it wasn’t long before Frank started straying, taking up first with Belinda Carroll, who held the inside track until the early fifties, when he began a sketchy affair with Belinda’s best friend, Angie Brown, whom he most likely would have married if he’d ever been able to get free of Frances. Except that in the early