Fante Read online

  One night at dinner years later, my mom, trying to match me drink for drink, let slip a telltale statistic: For the first several years of their marriage, she and the old man had sex an average of five times a day. Being a virgin bride in 1937 was not uncommon, and well-turned-out young women didn’t swap sexual tidbits the way they do today, so Joyce Fante could only assume that screwing her new husband every couple hours was normal behavior.

  His personality notwithstanding, John Fante grew to have a true passion for Los Angeles. He describes his desert princess in Ask the Dust:

  Los Angeles, give me some of you! Los Angeles, come to me the way I came to you, my feet over your streets, you pretty town I loved you so much, you sad flower in the sand, you pretty town.

  Before his marriage, he’d tramped its streets by foot for months as a penniless young writer, spent his days in Pershing Square playing chess and listening to crackpot preachers and anarchists, roamed the Grand Central Market, and ridden every red car to the end of the line. Pop often slept one off at night at the ten-cent downtown movie houses on “Nickel Street.”

  His favorite route via electric car was from downtown to the ocean at Santa Monica, where he would pass the expanses of open land west of Western Avenue and end up at the cool blue sky above the Pacific.

  My father loved the beach and hoped one day to live there. On the way west from downtown L.A., a rider could watch a city bloom upward from its sandy, cactus floor. Homes, buildings, apartment houses, and new shops sprang up before his eyes. He felt a new city being born around him and saw himself as part of it. There was freedom in Los Angeles, an inborn enthusiasm that new California residents had brought with them. There were no restraints for the son of an immigrant. Anything seemed possible. Pop would tell anyone who would listen that one day he would make his mark there as a famous author.

  John Fante began getting steady screenwriting work again and was picking up a paycheck every week. Pop had many short stories and two books to his credit: Wait Until Spring, Bandini and Dago Red. Sadly, his earliest novel and one of his best works, The Road to Los Angeles, would not see print until long after his death. In hindsight the book was ahead of its time, more postmodern than modern fiction, an early and unprintable Catcher in the Rye, full of anger and the madness of a young writer surviving in Los Angeles. After he wrote the book, my father was uncomfortable with the rawness of the narrative and the manuscript remained in his filing cabinet for over fifty years. He never wanted it published.

  In the early part of his marriage, John Fante and his carousing pals, Carey McWilliams, Ross Wills, Frank Fenton, Jo Pagano, Al Bezzerides, and Jack Leonard, were regulars at Musso & Frank Grill, where many Hollywood writers of the period hung out. Bill Faulkner, Nathanael West, Raymond Chandler, and Dashiell Hammett were often visitors, and even the reclusive F. Scott Fitzgerald stopped in from time to time. In 2011 Musso & Frank Grill still stands on Hollywood Boulevard, its interior virtually unchanged from how it looked over ninety years ago.

  Stanley Rose, a big, smiling Texan and ex-bootlegger who always claimed he was illiterate, owned the bookstore next door to Musso & Frank Grill. Slender Yative Moss was the bookstore’s manager. Stanley once said, “Books? I hate books. I only opened this store to hang out with my pals.” Stanley counted Nat West and John Fante as two of his best friends.

  Across the street and down the block on Las Palmas Avenue, later in the 1960s, a renegade L.A. poet named Charles Bukowski frequented the Baroque Bookstore, owned by a guy named Red Stodolsky. Buk and Red were great friends. Bukowski knew the history of Musso & Frank Grill and also spent many an evening between Red’s bookstore and Musso’s bar, often bending his elbow in homage to a forgotten author named John Fante. Across from where Baroque Books existed, Miceli’s Restaurant still stands, and has for more than six decades. This area of Hollywood, for years, by reputation, attracted writers and artists from across the country. The fact that Musso & Frank Grill and Miceli’s still remain in Hollywood today is a tribute to accident and little else.

  Frank Fenton was one of Dad’s closest friends and went on to become the highest-paid screenwriter in Hollywood, despite having the disposition of a rattlesnake and the tongue of a hungover crocodile. Early on he and my father established a diabolical method for selecting their male acquaintances. Both possessed predatory emotional instincts and could detect weakness in another man the way, for instance, a Hollywood pimp can identify a straight girl during a brief conversation at a party and within days have her in an alley on her knees in front of a paying john. When Fante or Fenton would meet a man for the first time on their sacred turf at Musso’s, drinks in their hands, they would probe the interloper in conversation, find a weakness in his personality, and then insult him, usually within the first five minutes of their introduction. “Look, I realize we’ve just met, but having listened to what you have to say, there’s nothing about you that I would consider remotely interesting. You don’t belong here.”

  If a man could hold his own with either writer, eventually they might become friends.

  Once at a party I heard my father confront a man by saying, “If I wanted to, I could destroy your life in twenty words or less.” This was no glib aside or idle threat. John Fante and Fenton took no prisoners.

  The back room of Stanley Rose’s bookstore became the place where poker was played and many a tongue-lashing was administered. Hollywood was now well stocked with transplanted novelists and playwrights from the east who had moved west to cash in on the big paychecks Hollywood offered. Most disliked being uprooted and having their talent misused, and they endlessly berated the film industry and each other. Blistering arguments over everything from their studio bosses and politics, to Broadway and the Pulitzer candidates, to the best whorehouses in Laurel Canyon bounced off the walls. Aside from literature and booze and poker and studio work, this crew had one vital thing in common: They cashed their fat paychecks every week without fail.

  In the late thirties, drinking and hanging out with his pals at Musso & Frank Grill became a daily habit for my father. At that time an incident took place that perfectly describes the Hollywood writer lifestyle of the era: My father’s friend, the screenwriter Al Bezzerides, had been assigned by a studio boss to “watch” William Faulkner. Faulkner was being paid handsomely to write movies, but his drinking was out of hand, and more and more frequently he was becoming a no-show on the studio lot. His producer needed someone to escort Faulkner to and from work. Bezzerides, a junior writer, got the job.

  One early afternoon Bezzerides burst into Musso & Frank and, in a panic, grabbed John Fante by the shoulder. Faulkner wasn’t answering the phone at his Hollywood bungalow and it would mean Bezzerides’s ass if he didn’t get “the little prick” to a script conference by one o’clock. He desperately needed help and was sure Faulkner was drunk and it would take at least two guys to sober him up and deliver him to Gower Street.

  My father agreed to help, and he and Bezzerides set off to Faulkner’s bungalow. When they arrived, a drunken row between Faulkner and his wife Estelle was in progress. The couple refused to answer the door.

  Bezzerides forced a window open and the two men climbed in. Bill was dressed for work but drunk. Estelle was naked on the bed, a fifth of bourbon between her legs, screaming and throwing whatever was handy at her husband.

  John Fante went to Faulkner’s aid, pulled him into the living room, and then returned to assist Bezzerides.

  Estelle was on her feet now, swinging her bottle at Bezzerides. The two men subdued her, covering her nakedness with a sheet. At least for the moment all seemed under control.

  Then a drunk and angry William Faulkner reentered the room and the battle commenced again. Estelle flung the sheet aside, emptied her bottle of bourbon onto the mattress, grabbed a box of matches, and screamed, “You leave this house, you shit, and I’ll burn it to the ground!”

  “I’m going to work,” slurred Faulkner. “I told them I’d be there. I made a commitment and I
’m going to keep it.”

  No sooner had the words escaped his lips than Estelle struck a match and the bed was in flames. “You shit!” she screamed while laughing and dancing naked on the bed. “Now you can go to work. Have a swell day.”

  My father loved Faulkner’s screenplays. They were endless. Sometimes four hundred pages. Format was out the window and only style remained. The studio bosses and the director would edit them to a manageable size of under one hundred fifty pages, then shoot the film.

  Some of the best writing talent in America had migrated to the City of Angels, chasing a fast Hollywood buck. Men of great talent neglected their own writing careers in order to cash in. Almost all his life John Fante would be torn between these two masters.

  Before his death F. Scott Fitzgerald, a notorious lifelong boozer, commented that he’d made more money in one year writing bad film scripts in Hollywood than he had from all his successful novels combined.

  Chapter Four

  The Death of Ask the Dust

  John Fante wrote his first story collection, Dago Red, and his fine novel Ask the Dust during his first years of marriage to my mom. Both books were well reviewed and the old man’s stock as a respected writer seemed to be on the rise. Then came the whammy. In 1939, the year Dust was released, his publisher, Stackpole Sons, made the dumb and costly blunder of publishing Hitler’s Mein Kampf without the author’s permission. The promo money that should have gone to publicize Ask the Dust was spent in New York City courtrooms fighting a protracted lawsuit with the Führer. The novel would sell fewer than three thousand copies and then go to sleep for the next forty years. John Fante went back to writing screenplays, but rage, alcohol, and depression were beginning to take their toll. It has been written that bad luck played a major part in the near demise of my father’s literary career. Certainly that is true, but his bad temper, intolerance, and nasty tongue didn’t help either.

  It was during this time that my father paid a serious price for his boozing. John and Joyce were living in what was then the tiny coastal town of Manhattan Beach. Pop had been drinking heavily as usual, fell asleep at the wheel, and crashed his car into a telephone pole. He was hospitalized for several days with a crushed cheekbone and a deep gash to his arm. Years later, when we talked about the incident, he blamed that night’s coastal fog for the crash. Keen boozer’s logic.

  During the latter part of 1941, the financial fortunes of the Fante family took an upward turn with the death of my grandmother Louise Smart from a heart attack. Her passing brought an inheritance, including significant land holdings, to my mother. Grandma Louise had reversed herself and decided to put Mom back into her will, so now Joyce Fante and her unemployed, bad-tempered, golf- and poker-playing husband had money. The Fante family began to live off Mom’s income.

  Pop was spending most of his time on outside activities—golf and all-night gambling—but he somehow managed to squeeze in a few minutes at home in the sack, enough to impregnate his wife.

  During that pregnancy my father briefly ended his literary dry spell by writing World War II propaganda for the Office of War Information. His task was to cheer the troops by inventing heartfelt tales of wives and their kids struggling mightily at home for the war effort.

  In November 1941 Joyce and John were in Roseville to see old friends and family. A day or so after they arrived, my dad and his brother Tom were having dinner with their wives at a local restaurant when a boozed-up patron and his sidekick chose to pay pregnant Joyce Fante a provocative compliment. Not a good idea. The old man’s best punch was his left hook and he could use it to damaging effect. He decked his adversary quickly. Uncle Tom wasn’t so lucky. His opponent had broken his nose. My father and his brother wound up paying the tab for a bar mirror and a couple of broken chairs.

  My older brother Nicolas Joseph Fante arrived on January 31, 1942. Pop had great affection for his firstborn.

  Nicky Fante had his grandpa’s name, and his father’s Italian features and coloring. As a small child he was precocious, an early walker and talker, and showed signs of excellence in art. By age six, Nicky had become a more than talented chess player. He was an introverted, sensitive kid and a budding genius. His personality traits seemed opposite those of my father.

  In the beginning my brother’s appearance in the family modified Pop’s carousing and decreased his absences from home, though his mood swings became even more violent and frequent as his boozing increased. John Fante now considered himself a failure as an artist, but he took pride in his new son and never failed to list the kid’s accomplishments to the friends and neighbors who were still speaking to him. Nicky was not gregarious and was prone to silence and emotional distance, not unlike my father’s brother Pete.

  Pop’s nasty mouth and rages were taking a toll on his life. In the spring and summer of 1943 he worked for the film producer Val Lewton rewriting an old script property from the 1930s called Youth Runs Wild. On the set Lewton could be sneering and contemptuous of his production staff, and he made one too many snide remarks about the old man’s scriptwriting ability. My father punched him in the nose in front of the crew.

  John Fante was now also reckless as a gambler, and he frequented downtown L.A.’s seedy dice games, often accompanied by his manic pal, the fine writer William Saroyan, who, not long before, had thumbed his nose at the Pulitzer Prize.

  By any standard Bill Saroyan was a loose cannon as a gambler, and on one visit to a Temple Street dice game, after he’d gotten hot and cleaned out six competitors, he returned the money to these complete strangers so he could continue to play and prolong his streak. Two hours later he was broke and begging my father for a loan.

  On another occasion several years later, Saroyan signed a deal for fifty thousand dollars—the equivalent of half a million bucks today—to adapt one of his novels to film. He owed money to everybody, including years of back alimony and child support. His inspiration upon pocketing this windfall was to cash the check, stuff the bills in his pockets, and drive to Las Vegas and double his money. He remained in the craps area at the Riviera Casino for thirty hours straight until he’d lost everything. Slamming his drink down, Saroyan jumped up on the table and delivered a line as pithy as anything he’d ever written: “I don’t give a shit what Freud says—I want to win!”

  During much of the early 1940s, gambling with his pals, golf, and the pursuit of late-night female companions would set the tone for John Fante’s life.

  Chapter Five

  Dan Fante

  I was born Daniel Smart Fante on February 19, 1944, two years and twenty days after the birth of my brother.

  My mom had developed a strong friendship with the novelist and screenwriter Daniel Mainwaring (pronounced Mannering), who became famous for his novels and film work, including the movie Invasion of the Body Snatchers. Dan had worked at the studios as a contract writer with my father, and they were neighbors briefly.

  John Fante didn’t like Mainwaring and considered him a “fake poet-intellectual,” but tolerated him for my mother’s sake because she had few friends at the time. According to Joyce, her husband was never hesitant to berate the guy and his aesthetic posturing. My mother never had sex with anyone other than my father, but Mainwaring’s friendship to her was deep and emotionally fulfilling.

  During my father’s increasingly long absences, when he was making the rounds with his pals, Mainwaring was a frequent visitor at the Fantes’ apartment. I was forty years old when Joyce Fante told me that she had named me after Daniel Mainwaring.

  When the old man discovered the extent of his wife’s friendship with this guy, he threw him a nasty curveball. Mainwaring was broke and not working at the studios, and, out of necessity, had moved to another part of the state. A steady correspondence had begun between him and my mother, with two or three letters passing between them each week. My father somehow intercepted one of these, and one day, without giving a reason, he abruptly decreed that the Fante family was moving. Pop had rented anoth
er apartment without telling his wife. What John Fante hadn’t copped to was that he had typed a note to Mainwaring and signed my mother’s name—in print. Writing as Joyce Fante, my father described a terrible argument between her and her abusive husband. A deal-breaker. The letter implored Dan to come for a visit to help her sort things out.

  Of course Mainwaring took the bait and arrived at an empty bungalow with no forwarding address. That, as they say, was that.

  A few months passed and the Fantes bought a home outside Hancock Park, at 625 South Van Ness Avenue. Years later my mother would tell me that she was suicidal during her pregnancy with me. After their move to Van Ness, the old man’s drinking and rage fits became especially frightening. He would spontaneously rampage at the idea of another kid—me. Their relationship at the time consisted of him arriving home drunk in the middle of the night several times a week. His gambling losses of Mom’s inheritance money only made matters worse.

  Fortunately for Joyce Fante her husband was not a physically violent guy with women, but his disgust with my mother for her pregnancy and the state of their lives together was worse than ever.

  The night I was born my father was boozing at a club in Hollywood. The next day he played golf. It took forty-eight hours before he finally made an appearance at the hospital. By that time Mom had named me Daniel Smart (her maiden name) Fante, and John Fante had no say in the matter.

  The craziness that had been going on between my parents during my mother’s second pregnancy apparently transferred itself to me as an infant. Hours of nonstop crying and my refusal to eat became a concern to Mom and her doctors. When I would finally concede to take a bottle I would puke it up immediately. This condition persisted for months.