All That Glitters Read Free Page A

signs of anxiety and was peering over my shoulder. I saw her relieved smile; and I looked up as a tall figure, picked out in the reflected light falling from the screen, materialized out of the darkness and slid into the empty seat beside me. How had Dad found us in that enormous cave of night? Wasn’t that clever of him? He gave my thigh a friendly squeeze, set his straw hat with its jaunty band of maroon-and-navy-blue grosgrain on my lap, and with a wink turned his Arrow Collar Man profile up to the screen, and at that same moment, returning my attention to the picture, I experienced the miracle of movies as I saw and heard my first talking actor. Jackie Cooper, aged ten, was talking to a confederate as they went about setting a pail of whitewash on the doortop—the idea being to drench the enemy—but the plan went awry when “the colored maid” entered instead. She let out a scream as she was doused with the stuff, and Jackie and his chum ran off. As I said, a miracle.
    Anyway, Fanny and Kiddo , adapted from the children’s classic of the same name by Ginna Josepha Johnson, was a step up in Jackie’s budding career, while Maude Antrim was essaying one of her first “older” parts. Maude played the part of Fanny Mallotte, owner-manager of a traveling show, and her equally famous husband, Crispin, played the part of a carnival barker. As I recall it, I was able to follow the simple story with little trouble. Fanny comes across Kiddo (Jackie) crooking money from the box-office till and, rather than snitching on him, she endeavors to make a good boy of him. After many misadventures, Kiddo turns over a new leaf and at the fade-out, wearing an Eton collar and a cap with a tassel, he marches off to school to learn how to be a man while Fanny bids him a tearful farewell at the picket gate.
    We had no time to be disappointed at the end of the movie, for there immediately followed the Coming Attractions, wherein I was first exposed to the actress the world has come to know as Claire Regrett. She wasn’t a star then, just a featured player in a Warner Baxter movie, and I could read the bannerline printing that leaped out at me: “Hollywood’s up-and-coming star—Claire Regrett at her temptingest!” (I heard my father groan at this solecism.) “This woman is bad but dying to be good,” said the announcer; then there was a brief shot of Claire in the gutter, being helped to her feet by Warner Baxter, followed by: “Sinner or saint? Only God knew the truth.” Then she’s in church talking about becoming a nun and I hear Dad groan again and he puts a hand over his eyes.
    Finally he leaped up and jerked his head at us, and we dutifully followed him up the aisle and out into the spring darkness. We didn’t even get a soda at the ice-cream parlor next door, but were summarily paraded to the car, parked nearby. If it hadn’t been for Claire and the preview, we’d have had ice cream, and I held this grudge against her for a long time to come. Instead, we were hustled home, where Jessie had a shepherd’s pie on Lo in the oven, then packed off to bed. And for the next thirty-five years I don’t recall ever watching another movie in the company of my father, until it was me up there, and even then he was hardly what you’d call “keen.”
    Quite simply, he didn’t like the movies. A rabid individualist, he wasn’t susceptible to their charms, and his shrewd Yankee intellect pierced the best of their obvious artifice and sham. Movies were sappy. Even as children we knew that the stories were mostly lousy, the actors lousier. But what we did know—and my father may have also vaguely realized, but didn’t care to admit—was that the movies were here to stay.
    In particular, his opinion of movie actresses was low, you could even say narrow-minded. Those he condemned ranged from Theda Bara to Joan Crawford to Jean Harlow, for her bra-less interpretations of tin-plate blondes, and, of course, Claire Regrett, for her