Fante

by Dan Fante

  As a boy John Fante had boundless energy. He loved all sports and had a precocious mind. The nuns started in early on my father and guilted him into becoming an excellent student, a devout Catholic, and, later, an altar boy. In fact, as previously mentioned, all the Fante children were recipients of a charity education, a trade-off for construction work done by their father.

  Dad was barely five foot three, but he managed to become a star pitcher on his high school baseball team, a left-handed quarterback in football, and, for a short time while attending a Jesuit college in Colorado, a boxer—with Grandpa Nick as his goading corner man.

  Then, when Pop was eighteen, came the left turn that would change everyone’s life—all bets were off. As often happened to him while he was under the influence, Nick let his “johnson” speak louder than his common sense, and one cold November he took up with a well-heeled Colorado widow and hastily departed for California, leaving Mary and his children behind.

  It took young John Fante weeks to track Nicola down. Enraged and armed with a baseball bat, my dad was determined to kill his profligate papa. He found him in Roseville, outside Sacramento, in a cheap hotel, his door unlocked. The smell of stale Toscanelli cigars had been a dead giveaway.

  “Buffone. Sei una vergogna per la nostra famiglia e la nostra gente,” he yelled. “Get out of that bed! Stand up! I’m gonna break your head open!”

  “I’m dyin’, kid. You see me here? I’m dyin’.”

  Standing above the broken, penniless, unwashed reprobate in this seedy railroad town changed my father’s mind. His heart filled with pity.

  Eventually, after fate played the joker card, the Fante family found themselves reunited and picked up where they’d left off in Colorado. The smells of Parmesan cheese, Italian cigars, and vintage basement rosé permeated their rented home. Life went on. Nick went back to work as a builder and bricklayer and his three younger children finished school, but family brawls, angry neighbors, bar tabs, and scrapes with the law were again par for the course.

  My father’s Uncle Paul Capolungo had a successful small business in San Pedro. Pop stayed at his house off and on before he met my mother, and for a few years, John Fante could often be found in both Northern and Southern California, reading voraciously and playing pinball, hustling odd jobs and writing in his spare time.

  While taking classes at Long Beach City College in 1929, he began working on the docks and as an assistant oiler on the cruise ferry between San Pedro and Catalina Island, the SS Catalina.

  Soon John Fante was on fire with the desire to have his own voice—to be a professional writer. Under the adoring eye of his college literature teacher, Florence Carpenter, he’d fallen in love with Sherwood Anderson and Nietzsche and Knut Hamsun. At nineteen, encouraged by Ms. Carpenter’s support, my father began sending rambling, handwritten letters and stories to H. L. Mencken at The American Mercury magazine.

  In the twenties and thirties, Mencken was “the man” in contemporary literature, and having a story published in his magazine was hitting the literary mother lode for a young writer. In those days in America, people still read books, and writers were the rock stars of the 1930s. The names William Saroyan and John Steinbeck and Ernest Hemingway and Thomas Wolfe and William Faulkner and James M. Cain and Edna St. Vincent Millay filled the pages of magazines, and The American Mercury was center stage.

  My father kept up a barrage of rambling longhand letters to Mencken until finally, in 1932, the great editor, tired of opening three of the damned things a week, struck a deal with the old man. “Dear Mr. Fante: What do you have against a typewriter? If you will transcribe this story in manuscript form I’ll be glad to buy it. Sincerely yours, H. L. Mencken.”

  Pop had a sports reporter acquaintance in the newsroom of what later became the Long Beach Press-Telegram, and one night after everyone had left, John Fante descended the stairs to the basement and made his way between the desks to where his friend Art Cohn was typing away furiously, a cold cup of coffee at arm’s length.

  “Hi, Mr. Cohn.”

  Cohn looked up but continued to type. “Hi, kid. I’m busy. Whaddya want here?”

  “I need a favor. This is a matter of grave magnitude. It might well advance the future of American literature.”

  Still typing. “No shit, kid. What is it?”

  John Fante held up a fistful of pages written in longhand. “I need to type out this story. Mencken assured me he would print this if I presented it to him in a typed format. He insisted that it be double-spaced.”

  Art Cohn stopped typing. “H. L. Mencken said that? The editor of The American Mercury told you he would publish that story?”

  “Correct. I speak the truth. I assure you.”

  “This newspaper has rules, kid. Our machines are for staff only. You don’t work here.”

  “My literary future’s at stake. There’s no turning back.”

  Cohn scratched his head, finished his last sip of cold coffee, and then gestured toward a bank of empty desks. “Well, we’re not exactly overwhelmed at the moment. So, sure—what the hell. Go ahead. Pick one. Knock yourself out. I guess I can break a rule or two for H. L. Mencken.”

  “There is one issue that requires immediate resolution.”

  “And what would this issue be, kid?”

  “I’ve never used a typewriter before.”

  “Jesus.”

  With that, the reporter got up and walked nineteen-year-old, scruffy John Fante, whom Cohn noticed had put on a tie for the occasion, over to a nearby empty desk. Cohn cranked a blank white page into the machine in front of him and began typing as my father watched. What he typed were the words “Now is the time for all good men to come to the aid of their party.” For the rest of his life John Fante, when testing a new typewriter, would type these same words.

  Cohn looked up when he was done. “That’s how you do it. Any questions?”

  By morning, John Fante’s first short story to appear in The American Mercury was double-spaced on white bond and my father was on his way to becoming the fastest two-finger typist in San Pedro. Eventually, Art Cohn, impressed by John Fante’s ambition and talent, would “loan” my father a typewriter.

  Several months passed and, as a result of the publication of “Altar Boy” and another story, my dad finally had money in his khakis. He relocated to the Bunker Hill district of Los Angeles, where he took up residence in a hotel named the Alta Vista, next to the world’s shortest railroad, the one-block-long Angel’s Flight.

  So it was that John Fante inherited his father’s imagination and storytelling skills. Apparently it was in the blood. Years later, as a teenager, in a room full of our Malibu TV-and-film-business neighbors, after a few gin and tonics, I would witness my father do as his own father had done. For half an hour he could spin a yarn that would cloud your eyes and make your heart thump.

  Young John Fante’s early success gave way to lean months of publisher rejections and dozens of discarded story attempts. To support himself, my dad took busboy work in Los Angeles and whatever else was available, always informing his employers at hiring that he was an established author by trade and that their association would naturally be temporary.

  “I’m a writer,” he’d say. “Here’s my work.” Then he’d unfold a tattered magazine containing one of his stories. “I’m between assignments.” Many a restaurant owner or freight manager would walk away scratching his head.

  Then John Fante’s life changed. One of his pals, Joel Sayre, had been banging out potboilers for the Hollywood film studios. He told my dad about an available screenwriting gig. Pop was broke as usual and desperate, but he was also smart and cocky. He could talk his way into almost anything. If his friend Sayre, who was barely published as a writer at the time, could write film scripts and make a buck doing it, then he sure as hell could too.

  When my dad showed up for his screenwriting interview, he came with a few rehearsed fibs about his then-nonexistent movie experience and was offered a tryout co
ntract.

  Back in his room in Bunker Hill, my father wrote to his mentor, H. L. Mencken. They both knew that movie work was crap, a literary scam, not real writing, but there was a job offer on the table that included a paycheck. What did Mencken think he should do? A few days later he tore open the great man’s reply. As usual, it was short and to the point: “Take the money.”

  At the end of his first week, when my father was handed a pay envelope and saw the numbers on his check, he went right to his boss’s office. A mistake had been made, John Fante said. There was a zero after the number 25, certainly a typing error. The guy smiled. “No, Johnny, that’s how much we pay our contract writers.”

  Two hundred and fifty dollars for one week’s work was four times what The American Mercury paid for a short story. It would be the equivalent of three grand a week in today’s money. Ba-boom! So the poor Italian kid from Colorado, the son of laborer peasants, for better or for worse, became a Hollywood screenwriter.

  Over much of his long screenwriting career, feisty John Fante would walk into a film studio head’s office armed only with his ego and an empty checkbook and come out two hours later with a yearlong film contract. These days in Hollywood they call what he did a pitch, but that word does not do justice to my father’s storytelling ability. To Pop it was more than flimflam. Like his papa’s, his ideas were always character-driven. He had a remarkable genius for oratory, and because he was a fine novelist he always spoke with conviction. Many times he’d make the stuff up on the spot.

  But my father could also be a fool and an inflexible hothead. On one occasion, years into his screenwriting career, when presenting the screen idea for his great short story “Helen, Thy Beauty Is to Me—” to the infamous King Brothers Productions, he outdid himself. Maury King, who actually chewed and consumed several Cuban cigars a day rather than light them, had my father in his office. Maury loved “Helen” and my father’s proposed adaptation and he was ready to sign the deal, but he had one suggestion: Could the main character be a Mexican rather than a Filipino? After a heated discussion Pop got up from his chair and told King to go fuck himself. End of meeting. End of deal.

  For forty-five years my father would return to screenwriting again and again. Hollywood and the movie business were simultaneously a golden goose and a literary hemorrhoid. Fear of poverty and a love of the good life is what drove my father. He despised being what he called a shitkicker—a laborer, a stock clerk, a counterman, a tradesman. He had a jonz for booze and fast cars and golf clubs and green-felt gambling tables. As a result, much of his best film work would find its way into one of several four-drawer filing cabinets in our Malibu home behind the tab labeled “Unproduced Scripts.”

  Chapter Three

  John and Joyce in Hollywood

  None of Nick and Mary Fante’s children married people of Italian blood, and it is worth mentioning that in Roseville, California, before World War II—and across small-town America—Italians and Sicilians were looked down upon and viewed as uneducated scoundrels. Thugs. Shitkickers. All Italians carried knives.

  When my father was between screenwriting assignments, he often hightailed it back to Roseville to live off his parents and conserve his gambling money. On the basis of his contributions to The American Mercury, he landed a job writing a column for the local Roseville newspaper. Pretty Joyce Smart, my mother, was shown one of his witty, iconoclastic pieces by her Aunt Addie, who had met my pop at his writing cubicle in the library. Joyce was a concert-quality pianist, a writer, and a contributing poet to The American Mercury, so John was interested in meeting her. Addie suggested the introduction.

  The name Smart was prominent in Roseville, and John Fante, never one to avoid an opportunity to move up but not yet aware of Joyce’s well-heeled status, was more than pleased to attend afternoon tea. Mom was twenty-three and my father was twenty-seven.

  The girl he met that day was brilliant and no pushover. As a result of her literary bent and her college education, Joyce had out-read John Fante by a country mile. She could debate art and history and philosophy and literature with the best. Long before graduating from Stanford, she had fallen in love with books and education, and until her death at ninety-one, Mom consistently gobbled up four books and a dozen magazines a week. For her, anything in print was fair game. Like President John F. Kennedy, her reading speed was twelve hundred words per minute. She could read an entire page, both sides, in the time it took to turn it. Scary. She was also an accomplished painter and, in her spare time, taught herself to speak fluent German. Joyce had already distinguished herself as a magazine editor, and she was one of the first women to be accepted to Stanford University. Two of her college chums were guys named Hewlett and Packard.

  The meeting of Joyce Smart and John Fante that day over tea soon ignited a relationship that would last almost five decades.

  My maternal grandfather, Joseph Smart, descended from New England settlers and counted among his ancestors the Revolutionary War hero Nathan Hale, the man who apparently regretted he had but one life to give for his country. In 1635 Joe Smart’s family arrived in what would become Rumney, New Hampshire. Joe was a nice fellow and a WASP and wasted no time on minorities or immigrants or the uneducated. His forebearers were ships’ captains by trade and eventually arrived in California by sailing around Cape Horn or walking across what was then the Isthmus of Panama to the Pacific Ocean. In 1851, they traveled north to San Francisco. They were Gold Rush settlers: righteous, intolerant, unsmiling, and hard-assed. The town of Dutch Flat (originally named Deutsch Flat), where they settled, became a hydraulic mining center in Northern California, and by 1855 the population rose from a handful to two thousand. Eighty percent of these people were imported Chinese laborers. The scars created in the countryside of Dutch Flat by hydraulic mining permanently damaged the area, but the gold they found fattened these early settlers’ pockets.

  Louise Runchel was a spinster schoolteacher of German heritage who eventually married Joseph Hutchins Smart of Roseville and Dutch Flat, California. Joe was in his forties and she was a few years younger. Louise gave birth to two daughters, Justine and Joyce.

  My maternal grandfather had a cool head for business and retired at twenty-one to become a cagey California land developer. For many years he sat on the board of the Bank of America in Roseville with its founder, A. P. Giannini. Joe Smart passed away from a stroke in his mid-sixties, when my mom was sixteen. Louise was a wiry, athletic woman of great energy who succumbed to a sudden and fatal heart attack before her seventieth birthday. Both of Mom’s parents were dead before any of their grandchildren were born.

  When Joyce Smart hooked up with the wise-mouthed, little black-eyed dago who was then essentially unemployed and the son of one of Roseville’s more notorious scoundrels, the walls of Louise Smart’s upscale home rattled and shook. Mother stopped talking to daughter. As the story goes, before Mom left for tea with John Fante that fateful day, her mother made a prophecy: “Don’t go, Joyce,” she said. “You’ll wind up married to him.”

  John Fante had recently hocked his junk-heap car and had no money. A couple months later, he and Joyce drove to Reno in Mom’s shiny Ford to tie the knot. It was July 1937.

  Louise Smart was less than congratulatory. She made no secret of her dislike for my father and wasted no time in altering her last will and testament. As far as an inheritance was concerned, Mom was now SOL.

  The newlyweds departed for L.A. after Pop and my grandmother Louise spent several evenings breaking bread and sharing their feelings toward each other. Until her death a few years later, Grandma Louise’s face would lose blood and turn to marble if she saw John Fante coming up her front walkway.

  Times were tough for my father and his wife in Los Angeles. When he didn’t have a screen assignment, Pop wrote in blizzards of energy, glued to his typewriter by the hour, dressed only in his wool bathrobe and chain-smoking Bull Durham roll-your-owns.

  The few screen credits my father had managed to accumulat
e got him a reputation for competence in Hollywood, and more and more he began to associate himself with other screenwriters. Pop also became a better than decent poker player and, not unlike his own father, spent many of his nights gambling and carousing with his screenwriter pals. During the early part of his marriage to my mother, he’d often, while boozing, donate a significant cut of his paycheck to the nightly stud game at the Garden of Allah bungalows, near the mouth of Laurel Canyon, or at the back room of Stanley Rose’s bookstore, located next door to Musso & Frank Grill on Hollywood Boulevard. Eventually, the wisdom of Hollywood developers would dictate that the wonderful old Garden of Allah be torn down and a spanking new McDonald’s erected on the site.

  During his workday, if he wasn’t at the studio knocking out rewrites for a B gangster flick or working on an occasional book, my father could be found at the racetrack or at one of L.A.’s manicured eighteen-hole golf courses chasing the little white ball, sometimes snapping his club in half after he’d blown an approach shot to the green.

  The old man had an Italian male’s sensibility toward women and relationships. He was no day at the beach as a marital partner. All his life my father would seek the company of guys with soft vowels at the end of their names who shared his social views.

  As a husband John Fante made the rules and his wife played by them. Two- and three-day absences from his bride were common. Early on my mother learned not to cross her husband or ask him where he was going. As educated and glib and liberated as she was for her time, Joyce was scared stiff of Pop’s mood swings and his often erupting personality. Bit-part actresses and typing-pool secretaries who wanted to move up on the Hollywood food chain became fair game to the old man. He was no slouch at romantic chitchat and had little trouble finding a companion when he felt like an overnighter at a local motel. Par for the course.