All That Glitters by Thomas Tryon Read Free Book Online Page A

regularly to the theatre, and took in a bunch of movie matinees. All in all, a far cry from the oddball recluse she would become in later years, when people went mad to catch even the tiniest glimpse of her.
    There are several famous personalities, among them we can include the Babe, who owe their film careers, at least the start of them, to one person unique in Hollywood annals. You probably don’t hear much too much about her these days, but Viola Ueberroth, intimate of the greats and the famous (one-time mistress of Clark Gable; she paid to have his ears pasted back), “discoverer” of the great Fedora, doyenne of the Bel Air circuit, operator of the infamous Friday Night Carmel Drive Poker Battalion, renowned Beverly Hills hostess, and intimate of the movers and the shakers of the town, was and remains a filmdom institution. Still going strong in her late seventies, she’s part of the old Hollywood, the one that’s dead and gone and isn’t likely to return.
    Having got her early start as a lowly steno at the old AyanBee Studios on lower Sunset Boulevard (where her brother, Sam, was first a publicist, then a producer), by the time Babe and Frank arrived in town Viola had established herself as a shrewd and canny agent as well as an intimate of the powers-that-be. Already her regular Friday-night poker game was an institution, and the fact that Sam was one of the more prestigious producers at AyanBee Studios hurt her not at all. Some years before, it had been Viola’s unfailing eye that had fallen upon the forlorn, unknown figure of Fedora on a streetcar en route to the beach and had been instrumental in getting her her first Hollywood part, setting her on the road to international stardom. What Vi had done before, Vi could do again.
    As luck would have it, Viola was already well known to Frankie, and he to her. He’d met her in New York at a Lamb’s Frolic and they’d managed to get on so well that he’d asked her for a date, one that had ended up, as he’d planned, in her bed. It was a fact that Vi, not one of God’s prettiest creatures, had been made love to by some of the biggest studs in Hollywood, and if he’d wanted to, at the time Frankie could have carved his name right there on her thigh. So no wonder that it was Vi who now came to Frank’s rescue.
    The fact that Constance Bennett as well as certain other screen royalty wouldn’t offer Babe the time of day held no water with Vi, nor did it keep her from jumping wholesale on Frank’s bandwagon. Besides, she was shrewd enough to realize that Babe Austrian was a walking gold mine, a Fort Knox with tits, as her brother Sam would one day put it.
    So, standing up to the beldames of the film colony, Viola proceeded to invite both Frankie and Babe to her Friday-night poker sessions. And if there was one thing Babe knew, it was cards. She’d been a hard-nosed player since her teens, when she’d get into a game with the stagehands, and this had been one of the things that had helped cement her relationship with Frankie. And now it helped provide her with her first movie role, at AyanBee Studios, and under the aegis of Sam Ueberroth.
    AyanBee, that crumbling silent-picture studio, which was said to be held together with a little spit and lots of adhesive tape, was definitely in need of a hit, and a prodigious hit at that. Vi happened to recall a script that her brother had bought years ago and that had ended up on a shelf collecting its share of dust. The property was called Pattycake , Pattycake , the saga of a naive girl straight off the farm who falls in love with a medicine barker in a traveling show and ends up a star on Broadway. Certainly not an original story, but there was a character there that Babe could play, a wisecracking know-it-all who was always on top of everything.
    Yet when it came to casting, Sam proved a hard nut to crack, especially since his wife, Pauline, was one of those Hollywood spouses who eyed Babe with disapproval. But Vi soon