All That Glitters by Thomas Tryon Page A

sixties along came Miss UCLA, April Rains—four years, no more, for that one, though it almost sent him around the bend—and then nothing serious until the last years, when he and Belinda finally got back together. And Belinda, having been really crazy about Frankie since she was a kid, now couldn’t make up her mind; then when she did, he got himself shot. But that’s another story.
    Babe, Claire, Frances, Belinda, Angie, April, I count six; that’s almost one and a half per decade of Frank’s entire adult life. It sort of makes me wonder how he fitted them all in.
    When Jenny and I arrived in Hollywood we booked in at the Villa Lorraine, a hotel on the Sunset Strip where many New York actors stayed while doing a picture. We came in the spring and it was really Southern California weather, clear skies, warm sun, people in shorts and sandals. You expected to see Alice Faye and Tony Martin out for a stroll, or maybe Robert Taylor and Barbara Stanwyck horseback riding along the old Beverly Hills bridle path. We went to a sneak preview in Studio City—it was Jimmy Dean in Rebel Without a Cause —and we were standing in the lobby after the screening when a woman came flying out crying, “A star is born! A star is born!” She was Ann Warner, wife of Jack, and she was right. We guessed that’s how it always happened in Hollywood. We stopped to chat with a group, one of whom was Jimmy Dean’s agent, Dick Clayton (Jimmy wasn’t there), and when the group broke up I got a friendly wave from a familiar figure: it was Frankie Adonis.
    When I’d met him in Westport when I was with Babe’s show, he’d predicted I was going places. So? Here I was, ready to see my name in lights, but if he meant to do anything to ensure that, I hadn’t heard a word about it. Still, to be a client of the Adonis Agency was a cherished hope, and I was theirs for the asking. Anyway, after a brief exchange (Babe was right, Frances was like the Polar Cap), as a parting shot Frank said, “You’ll be hearing from me, kiddo.” Jenny was thrilled, but I told her that was all Hollywood talk, it didn’t mean a thing.
    I’d hate to hang for as long as it took me to hear from Frank. It happened, though. I pulled up at the stoplight at Doheny and Santa Monica one day (the same intersection where one day many years later I would see Elizabeth Taylor in her Rolls-Royce heading west, and Richard Burton in his Rolls-Royce heading north, both talking on the telephone in their respective cars—one assumed, to each other—as they waited for the light to change), and I heard my name bawled out (we didn’t have car phones in those days). It was, of course, Frank, and in his passenger seat sat none other than Sir Laurence Olivier, to whom, in Frank’s cool fashion, he introduced me.
    “Listen, kiddo,” he shouted across Sir Laurence, “why don’t you follow us to my office and I’ll sign you up, whaddya say?”
    Nonplussed, I blinked and nodded. Within the hour I was a client of the Adonis Actors Agency, and Frank was my agent for the next sixteen years.
    At the time Jenny and I were still parked at the Villa Lorraine, and it was Frank who dug us up our first Hollywood apartment. Someone owed him a “favor,” and since a tenant was moving out, and Frank’s girl at the time, Angie Brown, was still living on the premises, we found ourselves on North Cadman Terrace, lessees of a one-bedroom domicile with one garage. My car got dirty, a lot.
    Our building, though spacious, had only six units, very chic, done in California Regency—putty beige, black and white, understated elegance with lots of dentil moldings, bull’s-eye windows, and a couple of good French lead statues. The front, or more spacious, quarters were known by the tenants as the Grand Trianon, while the back studio apartments over the garages were known as the Petit Trianon, separated by an unpaved alley where the trash cans were kept. These alleys were the kind that crisscross behind all