Fante

by Dan Fante

  John Fante continued to regard my arrival as less than a blessed event. He was now shackled like a shipboard slave to a thoughtless wife and a sickly, crying problem brat.

  I sported the opposite of my father’s and brother’s coloring. I was towheaded and light-skinned. Not good. Mom’s English-German genes were dominant. Pop regarded me as some sort of all-American, Gerber-baby misstep. In his eyes I was the embodiment of the kind of person who had discriminated against John Fante and the Italian people all his life.

  As a result of not being able to keep food down, I was especially frail and unhealthy. Three weeks into my life a specialist cautioned my mother that I might not survive.

  Then, as the weeks passed, so the story goes, I cut back on the vomiting. This gave way to overfeeding by my mother, and by the time I was a year old I was the fattest baby on Van Ness Avenue.

  After being raised a Protestant, Mom decided to make the conversion to my father’s faith: Catholicism. She began taking religious instruction at St. Brendan Church three blocks away. Looking back on her decision to change religions, I have to assume it was partly the result of my physical turnaround. Mom had caught religion. Getting Jesus somehow softened the effects of a rough marriage and a demanding new child.

  Surprisingly, my father was greatly moved by his wife’s religious efforts. He wasn’t much for church himself, but he had always maintained a good relationship with a few priests and had a kind of grudging truce with his Maker. Briefly, John Fante began to clean up his act.

  Despite my gradually increasing good health, my father hit the low point of his literary career shortly after I was born. He had been hard at work on a draft of a novel entitled The Little Brown Brothers, a story about Filipino immigrants in Los Angeles. He felt the book would finally give him the literary recognition he so badly craved. He wanted to get out of the movie business and back to what he loved—writing novels.

  This was not to be. Upon reading John Fante’s book proposal and nearly a hundred pages of The Little Brown Brothers, his publisher delivered a kick that landed south of the border. In a letter my father was told that the story idea was off base, that he had missed the boat. His editor saw him as talking down to his characters, not emancipating them. As a result, John Fante would not write creatively for the next five years. His drinking and depressions and rages took the place of writing fiction. My father came to hate the manuscript, and The Little Brown Brothers was permanently consigned to a lower file drawer in our dusty garage.

  The failure of this book and the bizarre glitch that killed the promotion and success of his finest novel, Ask the Dust, a few years before became typical of the kind of searing bad luck that would continue throughout his literary career. John Fante’s instant ability to piss people off didn’t help much either. With the exception of his novel Full of Life, published in 1952 and then made into a successful film, until nearly the end of his life John Fante would not make his living as a novelist again. Were it not for the rediscovery of his work in the late 1970s, my father’s name and writing would have been forgotten.

  The following dedication that John Fante wrote on the flyleaf of his short story collection Dago Red around this time shows the contempt and frustration he felt at his perceived failure as a writer.

  For Esther: From that Hollywood whore, that stinking sell-out artist, that sublime literary pervert, that thwarted lyricist—that stinking scene artist, that Paramount cunt-lapper who gets paid for the sweet scented vomit whispered by Dorothy Lamour—Dedicated with the hope that someday soon he can write some less bitter inscription on the flyleaf of a really great book.

  Chapter Six

  Two Brothers

  As it turned out, my moody brother Nick was not particularly delighted with the arrival of his younger sibling either. Having a sickly competitor around who was copping the attention of his mama left Nicky lonely and jealous. Though it is fair to say that John Fante eventually made the adjustment to my presence and eased into his version of a family man, my brother Nick was having none of it. Because of all the attention I’d received in the first few months of my life, he saw me as competition—a trespasser.

  Nicky, of course, had no choice but to put up with me, but he did everything he could to edge his way back into the number-one slot with his mother. Because my brother had a quick mind and an artistic bent, he would always remain the apple of his father’s eye. And, as it turned out, I would spend most of my childhood avoiding him.

  I got drunk for the first time when I was four. Most people remember their birthday parties or their best friend or their favorite pet. Not me. My fondest memory as a kid was how I felt after downing two partially full, tall, ceramic-handled beer steins that were on the coffee table in our living room. Mom and her pal Iris McWilliams (wife of the fine writer and migrant workers’ champion Carey McWilliams) were celebrating a coming exhibition of Iris’s nude sculptures. Iris was pretty and sexy. I remember that too. I also recall what she was wearing that day: a black sweater and silver hoop earrings beneath her long dark hair, which was fastened behind her head with a wide tortoiseshell comb.

  When Mom and Iris left the room to go into the kitchen, I downed both mugs of beer. Within minutes I was tanked. I remember trying to stand upright under our grand piano, banging my head, and then thinking that this was the funniest thing I’d ever done. But most important of all was what happened inside my head. I felt lifted above the fear in my life, above my snarling older brother and my raging, intolerant old man. For the first time I was 100 percent okay. I didn’t hate Nicky or fear my father. My brain was no longer a muddy field of razor blades. No more was I some kid who’d been dropped off by accident at the wrong house. I was free. Let’s call it my first spiritual experience. A ride like that stays fresh in the memory for a lifetime.

  And I wasn’t punished. The old man was not at home and Mom and Iris thought my drunkenness was funny. Many years later, when I got sober, I would remember the event vividly and mark it as a major transition in my life. Alcohol had become a life-changing elixir.

  At about five years old I began to spend most of my waking time in fantasy. By myself. Thinking. Dreaming. This never stopped. I’m not sure whether my need to be within myself was motivated by my living conditions or whether it just became a natural outgrowth of a developing imagination, but I felt separate and preferred to be alone.

  As a boy of five or six I recall making half a dozen attempts to get away from my family. I would load my clothes and toys into my wagon and head out into the neighborhood. On one of these journeys, I was interrupted by the local cops. When they questioned me I insisted that I had no parents or family. No such luck. The boys in blue returned me to 625 South Van Ness Avenue, where my mom had been frantically calling her neighbors.

  During the same time period, Mom was taking a course in college and would drop me off in the afternoons and early evenings at the home of the Eckhardt family, a few houses away. I have no memory of the adults in the home other than that they were older and quiet, but the faces of their three daughters are vivid to me, even today. The girls were ten, twelve, and fifteen.

  My mother had been raised with turn-of-the-century Victorian appropriateness. I would never see her unclothed. Not so with the Eckhardt girls. They were sweet and endlessly fawned over me.

  The girls occupied two large upstairs adjoining bedrooms in a big, circa 1900 ten-room Craftsman house. I soon became their Ken doll. While their mom and pop spent the afternoons gardening or in their den reading, the girls were assigned the task of caring for little Danny. These girls were innocent and playful. There was plenty of nudity. They loved posing in front of the mirror and trying on their clothes and bras. They would dress me and undress me and let me romp naked with them. The eldest girl, Bridget, was the one who got into the bath with me and never missed a chance to wash little Danny’s thingy. I was permitted breast touching and the exploration of all private places with the two oldest girls.

  As a kid my relationshi
p with Nick never improved or became close. Years later, when I was tested, it was discovered that I was dyslexic, which may account for my disinterest in school, but in 1950 the term for my condition was backward, as in retarded.

  While I was slow and had trouble learning and paying attention, my brother was the opposite—a star. Nick was always the pride and joy of his teachers in school and never had anything less than straight A’s.

  I was between six and seven years old when the boy genius conned me into poisoning the family cat’s food bowl with a DDT spray, then dimed me out to my father for a nice thrashing. I was his adversary, a fat, sullen little shit, a bully at school, and a behavior problem.

  Nick made three attempts on my life that I can remember. He and the Strobel kids next door were great pals and romped in our L.A. neighborhood having their adventures. But it surely annoyed Nicky when our mother made him take me along. Possibly my brother even considered it a public service when he tossed one of my cap guns into an active neighborhood construction ditch in front of an oncoming bulldozer, then pushed me down into the hole. Accident number one. My leg was gashed and I spent the night at the hospital. The scar still remains on my leg.

  But even then my brother was a master at putting on the shuck and jive with our parents and covering his ass nicely. “A mistake,” he said. “Danny slipped.” Right.

  Another time he and Johnny Strobel were throwing hunting knives at the fence in our backyard. One of Nick’s tosses lodged an inch into my chest. Accident number two.

  Not long after, I was riding up our driveway on my three-wheeler, going as fast as a kid can go. My big brother, star pupil and child chess prodigy, was sitting in my father’s heavy-doored ’48 Buick watching me in the outside rearview mirror. When I reached the side of the car he swung the door open as hard as he could. The protruding metal handle caught me in the center of the forehead. The result was a blood-soaked shirt and eleven stitches at the ER.

  This last attempt to end my life happened too soon after the knife incident and Nicky had to cop a plea. My brother wept like a Shakespearean con man, but his “Aw, geez, Mom, I’m really sorry” number didn’t fly. Mom wasn’t convinced.

  As a result, my brother was trotted off to a husband-and-wife shrink team who lived on the next block. Dr. Raman rattled out some stuff about sibling rivalry and my brother was made to cop to the fact that it wasn’t an accident. Nick knew the old lady was on to him and the attacks finally stopped.

  Then I went deaf. Stone deaf. The good news was that I was permitted to stay out of school for nearly a year. My parents’ doctor diagnosed the condition as an adenoidal blockage and advised them against surgery because I was as yet too young. Later, necessity dictated that I repeat first grade. John Fante, who by now had classified me as an incipient dunce and a troublemaker, resigned himself to the news.

  So I stayed home until the doctors decreed that I was old enough to have my tonsils and adenoids removed. This period might have been great—I was quickly becoming a loner anyway and hated school—but as it turned out, the old man was around during the day too, at least a couple times a week, working on his Full of Life manuscript, erupting regularly, so I remember being miserable.

  Years later, during one of my recoveries from booze, a shrink informed me that my deafness was really an emotional survival tactic to shut off my father’s rants and madness. Maybe, maybe not. That’s just what happened.

  Chapter Seven

  Malibu and the Hollywood Ten

  John Fante, after a three-year absence from the movie business to gamble and play golf, was getting writing assignments again in 1945. The job of screenwriter in Hollywood was fast becoming a closed shop limited to those who had worked steadily in the business or had a good track record.

  In those days Hollywood had contract writers, guys who worked at the studios every day and picked up a weekly paycheck. But the political wind was changing. If you were working at a studio as a screenwriter and wanted to continue working, you now needed to become a friend. Screenwriters who had been deemed “unsympathetic” to the cause of “the common good”—whatever that was—were finding it nearly impossible to get a gig.

  Frequent gatherings of “in” movie business friends at swank homes in the Hollywood Hills had become the weekly norm. At these meetings those present were sometimes asked to pledge their support and become better and more active friends. Were these communist meetings? According to my father, the word “communist” was not used, but if you were an L.A. screenwriter and didn’t attend and were not sympathetic to the common good, you would soon discover that there were no film assignments.

  My father once told me that he grudgingly dragged me and my brother to one of these gatherings. We were his out. Pop hung around for twenty minutes, then told the host that one of us was sick.

  It’s interesting to note that several years later, in the early fifties, meetings like these still existed in L.A., though on a more subdued scale. I recall dozens of film people at a barbecue at the home of Joe Aidland, who was left-wing and very active in radical politics. Carey McWilliams was the co host. Carey, as mentioned, was an early champion of migrant farm workers and very left-wing as well.

  In 1945, a couple years before the McCarthy commie witch hunt got into full swing, John Fante had already decided that joining anything in Hollywood wasn’t for him. Like his mentor H. L. Mencken, my father was repelled by posturing and mock loyalty and he ran quickly from anything involving a lofty collective consciousness. He considered the “in” Hollywood people who attended these events to be elitist frauds. Even though he was repeatedly urged by his studio writing buddies to improve his chances of getting more screenwriting work by conforming, my dad simply would not do it.

  Whatever books have been written and documentary films made about the valiant, long-suffering Hollywood Ten during this period have strangely omitted the fact that these same men, many also members of the Writers Guild, had blackballed my father from screenwriting work because he refused to become their friend. At a meeting of what later became the Writers Guild of America, Lester Cole (one of the more famous Hollywood Ten) publicly called my father “a fucking fascist.” And that was that. Lester had flip-flopped on an issue, and Pop and a couple other holdouts had refused to re-vote the way he dictated they should. After that meeting John Fante’s Hollywood career came to a screeching halt.

  It wouldn’t be until 1947 that the political wind shifted and comsymps like Lester Cole were suddenly being eaten for lunch in the land of make-believe and doublespeak. John Fante, of course, was a novelist at heart, and the forced hiatus gave him time to return to fiction writing, something he had not done seriously for years. My mother’s income from her mother’s property allowed our family to get by while Pop became a biweekly visitor to the unemployment office in Santa Monica.

  In 1950, my father began to work again, full-time, as a contract writer. Being an outcast and a nonjoiner had, for once, worked for John Fante. There was more than one sad note to the McCarthy period for my dad. One of his Malibu Inn bar pals, a very witty television writer named Leo Townsend, was a wonderful guy and a heavy boozer. Leo was a pioneer in early TV and wrote comedy and worked almost constantly on one show after another. Sadly, to save his own ass and support his family, Leo named names to the McCarthy people. When the worm turned and the purge was over, he became known as a rat and was hard-pressed to work in TV again. Though many of his former TV and movie friends now refused to talk to Leo, John Fante’s house was always open. They remained good friends until Leo died.

  My sister Vickie and my brother Jim came along in 1949 and 1950, respectively. After being a hellion as a child, Vickie grew into a beautiful woman and a smart businessperson. Vickie became a homecoming queen and went on to make her mark as a fine salesperson, a shrewd stock investor, and a cosmetologist. My little brother Jimmy would become a best friend and one of the enduring pleasures of my life. Jimmy, though he was capable of doing so, refused to talk until he was s
even years old. He is probably as bright as our brother Nick was, but because he was the last child and had spent his youth reading sports textbooks and becoming a math whiz, he was largely overlooked in a family where his father was to be the only star. At ten, Jimmy could solve any mathematical problem. Any.

  In the early fifties John Fante was working at MGM in Culver City and had sold the book and film rights to Full of Life. His daily routine was strange and memorable: He’d punch in at the studio at nine, then tell his secretary to take messages. Sometimes he would work for an hour or so at his desk, but his morning time at the studio was usually devoted more to checking in with his boss or roaming the halls to make sure people knew he was present for the day.

  Pop’s tee-off time at one of the three good L.A. golf courses was eleven a.m. MGM was nicely positioned a few minutes from all three.

  He would arrive back at the studio late in the afternoon, clock out, meet his pals for dinner, and then move along to whatever gambling activity was planned for that evening.

  His closest friends during this period were golfer-gambler-screenwriters: Jack Leonard (born Giovanni Pollito), Joe Pigano, Joe Petracca, and Frank Fenton. Another close friend was Dr. Sherman Miller. Sherman was a par golfer whose house was five minutes away from MGM in the Beverlywood section of West L.A., near the Rancho Park Golf Club. For several years Fenton was Sherman’s next-door neighbor. Many of the card games my father and his pals participated in were now held in either Fenton’s or Miller’s home. Sherman always drove a red convertible and had no problem prescribing whatever pharmaceuticals his pals needed. Sadly, his own wife died a few years later of an overdose.

  John Fante confined most of his writing work to his home and to the middle of the night. Novels, screenplays, correspondence—all of it. As a young writer he’d discovered that his daily sleep requirement was less than four hours, so he could usually knock out a dozen pages of a scenario between three and six a.m.