The Mighty Franks: A Memoir. Michael Frank
colored her eyelids blue or violet and well into the 1990s penciled a flapperish beauty mark at the top of her right cheek. She wore quantities of jewelry, and as she aged, more and more of it, often collated into thematic collections as profuse as the collections of objects in her house, ivory one day, amber the next; coral, gold, silver, crystal, malachite, lapis, pearl, or jet, depending on her mood or outfit. She treated herself, essentially, as a surface to decorate and, like the other surfaces she decorated, the finished effect asked to be noticed, always. Was noticed, always.
Her linguistic powers were inimitable. Intimidating, at times. She commanded torrents of words that merged into impeccable sentences the way raindrops collected into puddles. In story meetings she was a master of the pitch. She sat forward in her chair, elbows on her knees, a Merit smoking itself in one hand, and let fly. In fifteen, twenty minutes, to a hushed room, she would render an entire movie, from FADE IN to FADE OUT, without glancing at a single written note.
Her scent was a Caswell-Massey men’s cologne she bought at I. Magnin. When I climbed into the car its spiciness came gusting up out of her collar as she lowered a rouged cheek down to my height.
I kissed her, and she eased the Buick out of the driveway. “Reach around in back, Lovey,” she said.
I brought forward a wrapped package tied with a bow so crisp it might have been dipped in starch.
“What are you waiting for? Go ahead. Open it.”
The present was a book titled Famous Paintings. I glanced inside. Each chapter was devoted to a different subject: landscape, portraits, people working, children at play.
“Thank you, Auntie Hankie,” I said. “It’s beautiful.”
Again the cheek lowered. Again I kissed it.
“A little something to celebrate our Saturday together.” She nudged me with her elbow. “I’m sure that you will be an artist one day, Mike. I’m convinced of it. Everything you do has such style. Really and truly. It’s as if you’ve been immersed in aesthetics your whole entire life.”
I was nine.
“Make beauty at all times. It’s one of our family tenets, you know.”
“What’s a tenet?”
“A rule you live by. You build your life by.”
“Make beauty. At all times.”
“Yes. In what you draw or paint, in the houses you inhabit. In the way you speak too. And write. And of course be fast about it. Quick-quick. You’ve heard me say that before.”
I nodded.
“There’s plenty of time to sleep in the grave.”
I must have seemed puzzled, because she added, “It means no stopping, no roadblocks allowed. No naps.”
My mother took one every day.
“You must make every moment count,” she went on. “And you must never be afraid to dare. Imagine if Huffy had not dared—imagine if after ten long, horrible years of the Depression in Portland she had not seized the opportunity when Mayer granted her an interview. She piled your father and me and Pups Frank into the Nash and drove straight to Los Angeles, and she knocked the socks off old L.B.M. Everything changed after that. Everything, all of it, everything that makes us the Mighty Franks, comes from that moment, from Huffy, because of her boldness and her courage. Do you understand?”
I shook my head.
“Well, you will. One day. I’ll make sure of that.”
We had glided down out of the canyon. As she turned right onto Laurel Canyon Boulevard, she continued, “Follow your heart wherever it takes you. And always give away whatever possession is most precious to you.”
I looked down at the pages of my new book.
“You mean I have to give this to Danny or Steve one day?”
She cocked her head. “I would say not in this particular case, Lovey. Your brothers’ interests are so markedly different from yours, wouldn’t you agree? Danny—now he is a budding scientist. A logistician. It’s written all over him. He’s going to be a man of facts. I’m as sure of it as I am of my own breath. As for the little one … I see athletics in his future. He’s very skilled physically, just like my brother. Maybe like him he’ll develop a gift for business. Yes, I’m sure he will. We need that in the family, do we not? As a kind of ballast. It’s only practical. Literature, though? Art, architecture? The creative in any and all forms of expression? That’s your purview.”
Purview was like tenet, but I didn’t have to ask. “It means area of expertise. Strength.” She gestured at the book. “No, this one is earmarked for you. As is so much more.”
So much more what? I wondered. As if she could read my mind, my aunt added, “A collector does not spend a lifetime assembling beautiful things merely to have them scattered after she’s gone.”
She turned her face toward me. In her eyes there was that familiar sparkle. It blazed for a moment as she smiled at me, then drove on.
At Hollywood Boulevard we veered left onto a stretch of road that was wholly residential and lined, on the uphill side, with a series of houses that my aunt had previously taught me to identify. Moorish. Tudor. Spanish. Craftsman. Every time I watched these houses flash by the car window I wondered how they could be so different, one from the other, and yet stand next to one another all in an obedient row. Entire streets, entire neighborhoods, were like that in L.A.: mismatched and fantastical, dreamed-up houses for a dreamscape of a city.
At Ogden Drive we turned right, as we always did, and my aunt pulled up in front of number 1648. The Apartment. That is simply how it was known to us: The Apartment. We’re stopping by The Apartment. They need us at The Apartment. Your birthday this year will be at The Apartment. There has been some very bad news at The Apartment.
She never taught me to identify the style of The Apartment, but that was probably because it didn’t have one, particularly. A stucco building from the 1930s, it wrapped around an interior courtyard that was lushly planted with camellias and gardenias and birds-of-paradise, but what mattered most about The Apartment was that, for many years, since well before I was born, my two grandmothers had lived there—together.
“Quick-quick,” my aunt said as she turned off the ignition. “We’re nearly ten minutes late for Morning Time. Huffy will be worried to death.”
Huffy—the older of my two grandmothers, the mother of my aunt and my father—was sitting up in bed, reading calmly, when we hurried into her room. She was in the bed closest to the door. The two beds were a matched pair whose head- and footboards were capped with gold-painted, flame-shaped finials. She looked like she was riding in a boat, a gilded boat that was bobbing in a sea of embossed pink and white urns and wreaths that were papered onto the walls.
“I’m sorry we’re late, Mamma,” my aunt said. “Mike and I were engaged in rapt conversation, and I lost track of the time.”
My grandmother’s hair had come loose in the night, and she wasn’t wearing any makeup, but with her erect posture and her dark focused eyes she still, somehow, seemed alert and all-seeing. “It’s Saturday,” she said as she removed her reading glasses. “Today is the one day you are meant to slow down, my darling. I’ve told you that before.”
“There’s plenty of time to slow down in—” my aunt started to say. “Anyway we’re here now.”
“Is the boy going to noodle around with us this morning?” my grandmother asked.
My aunt smiled at me. “We need his eye, don’t we?”
“He does have a good one,” said my grandmother.
“Of course he does. I trained him myself.”
Morning Time was the sacred hour or so during which my aunt brushed her mother’s hair, wound it into a perfect