Remembering John Fante

By: A collection of essays written by the Fante family | Photography from the Fante Estate | August 05, 2009 | Non Fiction

On Sundays our family — my Mom, me, my brothers, Nick and Jimmy, and my sister, Vickie (excluding my moody father, naturally) — would attend Our Lady of Malibu church services. Mass was almost always dispensed by Father Burbage, a decent enough old guy, but decidedly, one of the six most boring people on the planet. Burbage still spoke with a brogue through false teeth that whistled every time his lips formed an “S” sound. When the old guy would use a phrase like “Jesus saved us from our sins,” it came out a bit like a Vegas stand-up comic doing a takeoff on a gay monk — with clattering teeth. Father Burbage always got snickers from the crowd and a full-on laugh from our pew when he started in with the “S’s.” 

We had no neighbors on Point Dume, so to entertain myself, I spent most of my weekends roaming the cliffs of Point Dume with my school buddy, Timmy Haight, whose parents had their home on Old Malibu Road. At least twice, Timmy had to run the distance from Point Dume to my parents’ home and have my mom call the fire department. I was never quite able to scale the face of Point Dume without the help of a fireman’s rope pulling me up.

It was during this time I came home with a report card from Webster Grammar School and heard my father utter the word “abomination” for the first time. It wouldn’t be the last.

In the early ’50s, the local watering holes were few. For hard-drinking Malibu residents, there was only The Malibu Inn and The Malibu Cottage. A cement plaque implanted on the planks outside The Malibu Inn’s front door read, “Many years of success to Mister Johnson and Mister White.” See, Malibu was not yet Malibu. It might be described (and frequently was) as a “hokey” beach town with a quarter mile of Hollywood expatriates crowded into a space the owner of The Marblehead Land Company had named The Colony in 1928.

The Malibu Inn had a long, winding, s-shaped dining counter outside its partitioned bar and also featured a dozen red café dining booths. Where the oak-paneled walls met the ceiling of the tall room, hundreds of 8-by-10 photographs of silent and current movie actors leered down at the customers. I always liked to sit under John Garfield.

The Inn and later The Malibu Cottage were the places my old father did most of his socializing.

In those days, John Fante, who was now forced to commute to the Hollywood studios, had cut back on his weekly poker game at The Garden of Allah in favor of the local gambling dens. After eight or 10 highballs, Pop understood that navigating home on Sunset Boulevard at 4 a.m. was less than a smart move.

At the local Malibu poker competition were guys like Herbie Babanagh, who owned the hardware store near the Malibu Jail at La Costa, and George Haight and Bill Asher from Malibu Road. Asher directed I Love Lucy, and George Haight was one of the producers of a TV show called Shower of Stars. Louie Cavilleri, a three-fingered bulldozer driver, who lived on Portshead Road, or the retired actor Alan Jenkins, whose house was near Paradise Cove, often filled the last couple of seats at the table.

A wonderfully funny blacklisted screenwriter pal of my Dad’s, Leo Townsend, also sat in at those poker games when he could afford it. Townsend had misguidedly named names to the anti-Communist House committee staff in order to continue working and feed his family. When the dust settled, his career was ruined. He moved to Malibu to start over.

But, as was later revealed, at least six of the long-suffering Hollywood Ten, of fame and folklore, at the time were well-to-do political elitists with big homes, maids and caretakers, and they wielded great influence among their peers. In fact, several of the so-called Hollywood Ten were about as far from innocence as, say, Walt Disney was from becoming a skydiver.

Turns out that in the ’40s, if you were a screenwriter in L.A. and were not what was known as “a friend,” and didn’t attend meetings and social gatherings of other Hollywood “friends” working for the “common good”  — whatever that was — then your writing career mysteriously dried up at the studios.

Around this time, the notorious activist and Hollywood organizer (he eventually became one of The Hollywood Ten), Lester Cole, singled John Fante out at a meeting of what would later become The Writers Guild and publicly called him a “fascist bastard.” This rant turned out to be not so nice for my old man’s career. John Fante was about as far from fascism as, say, Alan Ladd at the time, was from a credible screen performance. No matter, Prince Lester had spoken, and my father stopped working at the studios. Looking back, it might be called reverse discrimination. And, as might be expected, the studio bosses kept their blinders on and continued ringing their cash registers.

John Fante simply was not a joiner. He had all the “friends” he wanted at the golf courses in Los Angeles where he spent much of his time — after snapping a club or two in half on the manicured fairways. About all he could do was to spend his days living off my mother’s real estate rental income until the wind changed. So much for the self-sacrifice of the much publicized Hollywood Ten.

Johnny Fain was the local TV repairman and an excellent hand at poker. He’d originally started the Malibu game, but a few years later, his attendance ended after a night on a bar stool at the Inn. Apparently Johnny wanted to catch the night air across Pacific Coast Highway on the Malibu Pier. A speeding car ended his life and his poker playing days. His only son, also named Johnny, was my schoolmate and later became, arguably, one of the best surfers in the world.

Some years later, one night at The Cottage, my father was knocking back a few and watching the Dodgers play the Giants on the bar’s TV when a tourist from San Francisco began to pass unfavorable remarks about the L.A. Dodgers, who were losing. My old man wasn’t a big guy, but that had never censored his stinging mouth. Historically, a few of his saloon run-ins
had ended with broken bones, and, as a kid, Pop had even done some amateur boxing.

Nobody badmouthed the Dodgers. Nobody.

More words were exchanged, and my father invited the San Francisco tourist outside to continue their discussion. A couple of minutes later the guy was on his back in the parking lot, and Pop was ordering a fresh Scotch and water at the bar.
 

Somehow, soon after we arrived in Malibu in early ’50s, my father’s powers of reason regarding motor vehicles did a bungee jump from reality. Pop became a clueless mooch when it came to used cars. Twice a month, my older brother Nick and I would come home from school through our home’s driveway gates to find another “beauty” stuffed in the carport.

Pop got the double whammy when he bought the used Jaguar sedan that had belonged to former L.A. Rams football star Bob Waterfield. This racing-green, malfunctioning mechanical misfortune had only a few thousand miles on it and was “a great deal” according to the salesman at the lot in Santa Monica.

In those day, if the first owner of a foreign car didn’t “break it in” — driving the thing under 50 miles an hour for the first three months — the engine’s valves would not seat properly and eventually, as a consequence, the motor would begin to consume oil. Eventually, the perpetual billow of black smoke coming from the tailpipe of Waterfield’s ex-Jag could be seen all the way to Trancas Beach. John Fante came to hate this car and Bob Waterfield with an emotion not dissimilar to a jihad.

Until I graduated from high school, years later, my father would pursue his mania for pre-owned junkers and contaminate Point Dume with exhaust fumes and profanity. He almost always got a lemon.

For several years, a few of these beasts’ rusting carcasses — the ones that had simply quit after purchase — like ruined German tanks dotting the Sahara after WWII, remained in the weedy back lot of our Point Dume property along with an old trailer that Pop got “a great deal” on that almost instantly became a sanctuary for field mice.

The former owners of our house, the Kasalas, had left behind two 10-pound Chihuahuas as part of their real estate bail out. To this mix was added another dog: a white beast — half unborn pig, half shark — a male bull terrier pup. My father named this pink-eyed schizo dog Rocco. A year later, when full grown, he weighed 70 pounds and was great with people and kids.

He romped about our big, walled property with his two tiny companions. But, as fate would have it, this puppy eventually became the four-legged manifestation of his owner’s personality.

Rocco grew up to become a fusion of Mike Tyson and Al Capone. He, like his ill-tempered master, was prone to fits of overreaction. Eventually, he would begin a spree of carnage that went on for years.

The dog’s obsession for blood began with an incident at Rancho Fante. At the time, Pop had also become inspired by the notion of chicken breeding. My job as the family dunce was to walk out back to feed these birds every morning and then collect the eggs.

One morning I discovered a mangled, headless corpse. No one in the family had any question who the culprit might be. We tried to shrug the incident off, but a day or two later, there were several more bodies.

To cope with this problem, my father had a newer, stronger fence installed around the chicken house, but this failed badly at averting his puppy’s blood lust. In a week or two, Rocco had chewed through the posts and dug under the tightly wired mesh to continue his rampage. Eventually, an even more expensive, wood-slatted barricade was erected and more chickens purchased. In the end, none of Pops egg-laying birds managed to survive.

By now we had neighbors and two-dozen working-class homes dotted the area. On walks along the still-deserted Point Dume cliffs, with either me or my brother Nick in charge, Rocco began breaking loose to maim and dismember other neighborhood dogs: Weimaraners, Irish Setters, a Collie or two, a Mastiff and finally a champion show Boxer.

It took a few months, but the few families nearby on Point Dume, our neighbors, began to band together to put a stop to the desperado behind the tall stone walls on Cliffside Drive.

A nice fellow named Bill Melber had recently built a spanking-new house next door. Rocco’s way of greeting their puppy was to attempt to separate this dog from his right rear leg. Bill Melber wasn’t too happy.

By the age of two, my father’s pride and joy had deep scars covering his face and body, and folks in the area were beginning to show their displeasure. On walks home from the Pacific Coast Highway after school, my brother and I were shunned by the other kids.

My father was hardly a people person, but he somehow reveled in the role of Point Dume bad guy. He was never without a snappy one-liner or a stinging comeback. Occasionally, when an offended resident would bang on our front door, red faced and pissed off after their pet had encountered Rocco, they would invariably leave our property the worse for the visit, usually vowing police intervention and retribution.

I can remember two incidents that endeared my father to his dog Rocco for life. The first happened one afternoon when my brother Nick and I were in the front yard helping Pop pull weeds to plant even more cactus. Rocco was prone to repeated escapes from our walled yard, almost always motivated by a passing animal — usually a jogger or a bike rider towing their dog.

A horn began honking furiously outside our wall. When we got to our front gate we saw a frantic, riderless horse galloping past. Rocco was happily clamped to the animal’s throat.

The second episode occurred in a similar way. Nicky and I were getting into the old man’s newest used Cadillac — a vehicle that had once been blue but after an undisclosed accident, was now painted white — for a trip to the store, when again we heard the blast of a horn. This was followed by a noise — a resounding thud — and the sight of Rocco airborne after being hit by a pickup truck.

We ran to our puppy’s aid knowing the worst had happened. Rocco lay at the side of the road, motionless, his tongue dangling from a gaping mouth. He had no breath. His body was lifeless.

My father got to his knees. All three of us did. No animal could survive a front-end collision and the 40-foot punt of their body into a pile of weeds. 

The old man began to stroke his bull terrier’s thick, white body, tears welling in his eyes.

Then the miracle happened! Half a minute passed, and Rocco emitted a low wheeze, then a cough. Then another. His eyes opened. He saw his master’s loving face above him. More coughing. Then he got to his feet, unsteady and dazed.

A few seconds later there came a rustle in the nearby weeds. A self-protective lizard was departing the scene. Rocco jumped up, chased it down, scooped it up, then crushed it between his jaws.

His master’s grin was from ear to ear. Pop declared his bull terrier immortal. Saint Jude, thank you. The dog’s finale came when he was four years old. By this time, the Fantes had attained a Point Dume reputation not unlike The Manson Family. Pop didn’t care. He’d become Doctor Frankenstein, Quasimodo’s sneering jailer.

Now, outside our walls, bike riders, couples walking and joggers accompanied by their pets detoured, cutting across the wide-open fields rather than risk proximity to the evil fiend residing at Rancho Fante.

There was one unhappy exception: A rich stockbroker guy had just built his palazzo at the end of Cliffside in the cul-de-sac. The house was one of several that would eventually block my access to the strip of beach 75 feet below. I’d received most of my sexual education on the afternoons I viewed nude female sunbathers there, through my binoculars, in the arms of their happy boyfriends.

This new castle at the end of our road had three floors and was a misguided neo-Renaissance something or other, complete with a statue of Cupid pissing into a fountain. It had a high stone wall, a big swimming pool and tennis courts.

When the broker guy moved in, he also brought along his two would-be champion Doberman Pinschers. 

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