Fante Read online

  Dedication

  © JOHN V. FANTE

  FOR JOHN AND JOYCE FANTE.

  The demons are all gone—

  little more than echoes

  in a newly painted room.

  All that remains is my love.

  Epigraph

  It is not flesh and blood but the heart which makes us fathers and sons.

  FRIEDRICH VON SCHILLER

  He not busy being born is busy dying

  BOB DYLAN

  Contents

  Dedication

  Epigraph

  Chapter One: Italy to America

  Chapter Two: The Fante Family

  Chapter Three: John and Joyce in Hollywood

  Chapter Four: The Death of Ask the Dust

  Chapter Five: Dan Fante

  Chapter Six: Two Brothers

  Chapter Seven: Malibu and the Hollywood Ten

  Chapter Eight: Rocco

  Chapter Nine: Diabetes

  Chapter Ten: School and Baseball

  Chapter Eleven: Zanuck and Saroyan

  Chapter Twelve: The Tailenders

  Chapter Thirteen: Working as a Carny

  Chapter Fourteen: Life of a Salesman

  Chapter Fifteen: New York City

  Chapter Sixteen: Mo and Johnnie Beard

  Chapter Seventeen: John Fante Writes Again

  Chapter Eighteen: Taxi Taxi and Uncle Spit

  Chapter Nineteen: Batshit Crazy and a Bad Leg

  Chapter Twenty: Smoke and Sexy Vonnie

  Chapter Twenty-one: The Cure

  Chapter Twenty-two: A Real Private “Dick”

  Chapter Twenty-three: Real Detective Work

  Chapter Twenty-four: Hollywood “Luck”

  Chapter Twenty-five: Skinning a New Cat

  Chapter Twenty-six: Help from Uncle Spit

  Chapter Twenty-seven: A Good Novel Can Change the World

  Chapter Twenty-eight: Dodging the Bullet

  Chapter Twenty-nine: The Limoscene

  Chapter Thirty: A Novelist Again

  Chapter Thirty-one: Dav-Ko Hollywood

  Chapter Thirty-two: Another Shot at Detox

  Chapter Thirty-three: Not Even Fifteen Minutes of Fame

  Chapter Thirty-four: Bukowski, Ben Pleasants, and the Rediscovery of John Fante

  Chapter Thirty-five: Now a Phone Guy

  Chapter Thirty-six: The Death of John Fante

  Chapter Thirty-seven: Into the Boiler Room

  Chapter Thirty-eight: From Success to Filthy Socks

  Chapter Thirty-nine: An Unwanted Lodger

  Chapter Forty: A Published Author

  Chapter Forty-one: Dealing with a Family’s Alcoholism

  Chapter Forty-two: The Death of Joyce Fante and John Fante’s Legacy

  Epilogue

  Acknowledgments

  P.S. Insights, Interviews & More . . .

  About the Author

  About the Book

  Read On

  Author’s Note

  Also by Dan Fante

  Credits

  Copyright

  About the Publisher

  Chapter One

  Italy to America

  Winter comes early to the Apennines mountains in Abruzzo, Italy. Snow covers the land for months on end. What little farming is done in this rocky terrain becomes impossible. The few withering vineyards and olive orchards that dot the land must wait months for the sun’s return. Men like my grandfather, Pietro Nicola Fante, angry, bad-tempered young men from the little town of Torricella Peligna, had to learn a trade, something other than farming, in order to survive. Nick hated the cold and he hated farmers because he felt they didn’t have the guts to find a more interesting trade, and he spit at them as they headed toward their fields on their horse-drawn wagons. So my grandpa became a bricklayer/stonemason instead.

  When it was too cold to build, young Nick spent his nights in one of the two saloons on the town’s main street. He had no girlfriend and was not known for being outgoing, so he boozed and played cards deep into the night. He and his paesanos spent the cold nights telling stories, tales passed down by their fathers, and their fathers’ fathers, dreaming of departing Torricella Peligna for anywhere. And with each telling of a story and another glass of grappa, the horses and riders became more fierce, the battles of the bandits defending the Spanish monarchy became bloodier, until finally these recitations turned into fables and their heroes became godlike.

  Anywhere turned out to be Argentina. One cold spring morning Nick had had enough of the poverty in Torricella Peligna and took a mule train over the hard mountain pass to Naples. He’d vowed to catch a boat. It was the late 1890s. And, as the story goes, in less than a year, Grandpa got an uncontrolled infection in his eyes and lost his vision. He had to return to Italy, where a local gypsy woman cast a spell and decreed that if he would bathe his eyes in the Adriatic Sea beneath a certain phase of the moon or something like that, he might be cured. The improbable miracle somehow came to pass and a few months later the angry little shit decided to take another stab at ocean travel. This time the boat he boarded was pointed toward North America, where he hoped to find his own father, Giovanni, who had immigrated to the U.S. a few years before.

  In 1901, Ellis Island immigration was run by the Irish, who had escaped their own poverty and famine several decades before. Many of these working poor now inhabited New York City and—unluckily for Pietro Nicola Fante, who arrived on December 3—held civil service jobs.

  On entering the U.S., Grandpa Nick had a passport and was armed with a preposterous letter from the aunt of Giovanni stating that his papa owned a successful pasta factory in Colorado. Grandpa spoke but a few words of American and had a tough time when confronted by the Irish immigration guys. These civil servants took pleasure in morphing the names of non-English- speaking arrivals. Eastern Europeans, Russian Jews, and Italians were the hardest hit. Horowitz became Harris. Italian surnames like Petracca became Peters. Sporato became Stevens or Smith. Mastriano—Martin. That kind of stuff.

  Grandpa Nicola finally made it to the head of the long line, and the immigration boys decreed that his last name would change from Fante to Foy or something similar. Then, with his limited knowledge of the native language, so the story goes, Nick, through translation and clumsy American syntax, refused. Head-shaking and hand-gesturing wouldn’t cut it, so an argument evolved into a fistfight wherein Grandpa was set upon and humiliated by several of the Ellis Island gatekeepers. Finally, a frustrated captain intervened and the decision was made to allow the little hothead to keep his correct name. Fante managed to remain Fante.

  Nick’s New Jersey relatives let him know that his long-lost papa had settled in Denver or Boulder. It was then that he learned the real truth about Giovanni. His father was not a successful factory owner. He was not successful at anything. Giovanni’s trade was knife-sharpener in the railroad yards. So my grandfather made the trip from New York to Denver and Boulder, Colorado, and began a search of the Italian sections of both towns that lasted for weeks until finally, in Denver, in an Italian saloon, with his red immigration tag still hanging from a string around his neck, Nick asked a bartender if he’d ever met anyone using the name Fante. The barkeep cursed in Italian and gestured toward a back hallway. There, on a bed of discarded newspaper, lay my grandpa’s father, Giovanni, drunk and penniless. Nick shook him awake. When he opened his eyes, Nicola’s papa uttered the first words the two had exchanged in ten years. In Italian he said: “Gimme a buck, kid. I need a drink.”

  My grandfather had good qualifications as a stonemason, but before he could ply his trade in Colorado, he had to learn a better command of the native language. So he took menial jobs—whatever he could get. And, of course, in conformity with family tradition, when he could, he drank too much. And when
grandpa’d had a few too many, he usually lost his temper and mayhem ensued.

  After a month or two of living in a rooming house in Denver, Nick spilled the blood of two Irishmen. He now spoke several more words in English, but not enough to have a real conversation. One night in a bar, two boozed-up descendants of the Emerald Isle, strapping tough teamsters, made the mistake of taking my drunken grandpa outside to a snowbank and stealing his pants. This practical joke apparently amused the juiced-up Irish guys, but when Nick came to his senses and reentered the bar, he struck one of the men over the head with a bottle, then bit the ear off the other. All his life Nick was prone to carrying a grudge, never forgetting a slight or a humiliation. Even in his seventies, he often pronounced “American” A-merda-di-cane. In Italian the phrase means “dog shit.”

  Grandpa was in court the next day. His sentence was seventy-two hours in the local slam and a three-dollar fine.

  My grandmother’s maiden name was Capolungo. She was born in Chicago and her parents came from Potenza, in Italy. As a girl, Mary Capolungo studied to become a nun and was stubbornly devout until the day they nailed down her coffin lid. At first Nicola was smitten with Grandma’s sister, but when that didn’t pan out, he settled for the more homely Mary.

  In Grandma’s last years, when I was a kid and she was living with our family in Malibu, if she wasn’t interrogating my old man about why he’d been away from home on one of his three-day jaunts, she would be continuously mumbling Hail Marys, her ever-present rosary clenched in her white fist.

  Apparently her endless novenas to the Blessed Virgin were aimed at the wrong cell tower. Nicola Fante never changed from being an irredeemable hothead, a lousy father, and a peeled zero as a husband. After their marriage in Colorado, Grandma began a fifty-year quest to raise rent and bail money. John Fante always maintained that the only two words his father spoke to his mother during the last twenty years of their marriage were “SHUT UP!”

  Over time Nick Fante’s English improved, and after five years in America and a dozen menial jobs to support himself, he began plying his trade as a stonemason. The family settled in an Italian section of Denver. Many of Nick Fante’s churches and school buildings still stand in Colorado and Northern California. My grandfather was always paid well, but because of his wine consumption and his pitifully bad skills at poker, the family was forever in debt. He lost or drank up whatever he made as a contractor. So deals were struck—trade-offs to settle debts—with monsignors and school board presidents and homeowners who needed brick or stonework done. Barter became the mortar that enabled Nick and Mary to keep a roof over their heads and their children in school.

  Toward the end of his life, at seventy-two, Grandpa Nick made one last effort at evening accounts with the guys from the land of the three-leaf clover. A bartender named Kelly Flynn made a serious mistake. After getting into a beef over the bar tab, old Nick stabbed the Irishman. Luckily the case was dismissed when Flynn took pity on Grandpa, said he was drunk too, and then refused to press charges.

  His personality notwithstanding, when Nick Fante came to America, he brought along something priceless that wouldn’t fit into his ratty, rope-tied suitcase, something that even he could not desecrate. Those bitter winters in Torricella Peligna, the nights in saloons telling tall tales with his paesanos, eventually produced a superb storyteller. Give the snarling old reprobate a couple glasses of rosé and he could go on for an hour or more, hypnotizing those around him with images of absurd bravery; of battles and blood vendettas where dozens met their end; of full-breasted maidens and swords of fire; of fearless, wide-chested Uncle Mingo, with his long red mustache and feathered white hat, leading his gang of horse-mounted thugs on to glory.

  With each new rendering of a heroic account, Grandpa Nick’s stories became more epic. His villains’ villainy became more villainous and their treachery more diabolical. To kids like me and my older brother Nicky, the stuff was magical.

  As boys in L.A. we would sit on the floor by our fireplace (a ten-foot-wide stone monster that Grandpa had built himself to replace the termite-infested original) and listen to his fables, never missing a word. We would laugh and we would cry and allow our minds to float with him back to old Abruzzo.

  One of Grandpa’s favorite targets was aristocratic treachery. We were treated to evolving versions of one particular yarn. The original incident probably happened in the town of Roccascalegna, a one-hour walk from Torricella Peligna. There is still a stone tower in Roccascalegna above a castle, and for a long time a baron named de Corvis Corvo was the overlord. Legend has it that this knucklehead had a less than deferential way of exacting tribute. Before giving his consent for maidens in the area to be taken in marriage, the barone’s tribute to himself was to spend the wedding night with the bride-to-be. In Italy this aristocratic privilege was euphemistically called prima notte.

  This nonsense went on for years until one of the bridegrooms, after hearing the price exacted for matrimony, decided that enough was enough.

  As Grandpa Nick’s account evolved, the bride, Lucia, grew more beautiful—into a near-princess—and young Giuseppe more like Robin Hood than the stocky teenage son of a shoemaker. Eventually, Grandpa managed to endow the kid with a splendid black stallion and a silver-tipped stiletto.

  Giuseppe and Lucia had traveled a full day to get hitched at Roccascalegna. In the wedding trunk in Giuseppe’s wagon were two handmade dresses.

  That evening, when Lucia was supposed to be escorted to the tower to service her patron and dispense with her virginity prior to her wedding, she had a stand-in. Giuseppe was wearing the second dress and veil from the wedding trunk. The royal chamber was candlelit and dim. Because the baron was drunk, Giuseppe’s impersonation worked, and the baron’s chickens finally came home to roost.

  Giuseppe slashed the baron’s throat, then hung him out of the tower window to allow his blood to flow down to the rough stones of the street, a hundred feet below.

  Of course, according to my Grandpa, the town was liberated from tyranny and years of injustice and everyone celebrated for days on end. That is, until the next knucklehead of royal ancestry took his place. But Grandpa never got to that part.

  Old Nick always acted out all the characters as he told his stories. He would move a step or two, then change his voice and facial expression so that we would know which character he was playing. My favorites in his stories were always the bad guys, because Grandpa had a decided flair for evil and villains, how their faces looked and how they spoke. For the baron he always gnarled his hands and made a twisted face. The performance was pure theater and could last an hour or more as long as there was wine left in the kitchen jug.

  “Danny-boy, you like you Grandpa tell you da Giuseppe storee?”

  “Sure, Grandpa. I like that one a lot. The Giuseppe guy, what happened to him? Did somebody kill him because he got even with the baron?”

  “I done kno, kid. Too many questions. How ’bout Uncle Mingo? You wanna hear ’bout Uncle Mingo and da bandits again?”

  “Sure, Grandpa.”

  “Okay, go pour me some more vino . . . You know, Danny, Uncle Mingo had one thousand cats.”

  “C’mon Grandpa. A thousand cats?”

  “Get me the wine—I’m-a tell you da whole story.”

  Chapter Two

  The Fante Family

  The union of Pietro Nicola Fante and Mary Capolungo spawned four children: John, Peter, Josephine, and Thomas.

  My pop was the eldest and managed to inherit temperament characteristics not unlike those of his father, along with a few of the old boy’s more troublesome vices.

  John Thomas Fante was born on April 8, 1909. When he was a boy, during World War I, pop-psychological phrases and TV-speak were not yet on the lips of every American. Terms like ADD and dysfunctional and bipolar and manic-depressive were still eighty years away from dinner conversation. Fuckup and ne’er-do-well better described troubled youth early in the new century, if anyone spared himself the ti
me to discuss the subject at all. The Fante boys were rough, poor kids, and each of them inherited a bad temper, a nasty tongue, and the tendency to punch others when provoked.

  Pete, the second oldest of the children, had it tougher than my old man and his other siblings. Unlike my dad, as a boy Pete was shy, moody, and withdrawn—but also frighteningly vengeful, like his father. He was a good athlete but a lousy student. Grandpa’s rages and verbal batterings ultimately produced a self-hating, depressed railroad laborer and drunk. Pete died of cancer in his fifties, his nagging wife hounding his sorry ass every step of the way to the boneyard.

  Josephine (Aunt Jo), the third of the children, was a quiet, decent woman, but prone to long silences and melancholia, not unlike her mother. Aunt Jo married a good man named Bud Gould and raised three healthy children but eventually became overwhelmed by chronic periods of sadness and was forced to endure several series of shock treatments. In her seventies, Aunt Jo died a quiet death.

  Thomas (Tom) Fante was the baby of the family. He somehow managed to dodge the family bullets of booze, gambling, and depression. He finished school and became an executive with the Southern Pacific Railroad, where he had a long career. Tom Fante is credited as the inventor of double-decker commercial railroad transport. He and his wife Dale had three well-adjusted, well-educated kids who went on to have their own families and become successful in their own right.