Author Dan Fante on his turbulent relationship with his father, “Ask the Dust” novelist and longtime Malibu resident John Fante.
By Michael Aushenker / Special to The Malibu Times
Dan Fante, the author of such novels as “86’d,” “Chump Change” and “Spitting Off Tall Buildings,” never intended to write his new memoir.
“It’s not a ‘Daddy Dearest,’” Fante said. “It’s as much about me as it is about my father.”
His father was the late author John Fante, who was Charles Bukowski’s favorite writer and was considered the father of Los Angeles literature with such novels as “Wait Until Spring,” “Bandini” and his 1939 masterpiece, “Ask the Dust.” Dan Fante’s memoir, “Fante: A Family’s Legacy of Writing, Drinking and Surviving,” explores his turbulent relationship with his celebrated father.
John Fante was a longtime Malibu resident from the 1950s through his death in 1983 at the age of 74. While his critically acclaimed novels by and large did not sell, he worked for Hollywood writing screenplays, many of them unproduced, and had his greatest success with the 1955 screenplay, “Full of Life,” which was based on his own book.
John could be tough on his four children: Dan, Jim, Nicholas and Victoria Fante Cohen, who today lives in Sunset Mesa. (Nicholas Fante died of alcoholism in 1991.) He had high expectations for them. He could be cranky, caustic and sarcastic. He was also known to walk out of a movie theater with his children if he thought the film was subpar.
At 19, Dan Fante hitchhiked cross-country and ended up in New York, where he worked as a cab driver. For years, he battled with alcoholism before taking up writing novels in his mid-40s. Today, Fante lives in West Los Angeles with wife Avrin and their son, Michelangelo Giovanni, 6.
Fante has touched on family history before.
“I’ve alluded to several situations in here in my own Dante novels,” Fante said. “This was a cleansing, but not an angry one.
“There’s something vain about memoir,” Fante continued. “It kind of chose me. Ben Pleasants [former poetry editor for the Los Angeles Times] was a great supporter of the revitalization of my father’s career in the mid- to late-‘70s. About 10 years ago he began to bother me about doing a memoir. That’s when it began to take shape.”
Take shape it did, as the book has garnered enthusiastic reviews from Los Angeles Times and Publisher’s Weekly.
“We had such a rough time and he was such a difficult man, and I am such a charmer, you know,” he said smiling. “This is the memoir of the journey of a father and son who were alike in some ways and different in other ways who came to love each other. It’s a left-handed love story.”
Fante also writes about his Malibu childhood at the Fante family home, where his father kept a menagerie of animals.
Malibu was a great place for a kid [to explore] in those days,” Fante said. “At my desk a few years ago I discovered a picture of Point Dume. It was taken south along the coastline toward Little Dume. There are no houses except for my father’s house. Now you have all these haciendas. He moved to Malibu to escape the studios.”
There are also plenty of excellent anecdotes.
“My father was reverse blacklisted at a meeting of what became the Writers Guild,” Fante said. “Lester Cole [a screenwriter who became one of the Hollywood 10 during the infamous Communist witch-hunt era] called my dad a [expletive] fascist because he didn’t want to vote the way Lester wanted him to vote and suddenly my dad’s screenwriting career dried up.”
There was also John Fante’s run-in with one of America’s greatest authors.
“My father and William Faulkner knew each other,” Fante said. “Faulkner was quite a drunk and my father was no slouch. A friend of my father’s came in and the studio was paying him to watch Faulkner.”
That friend was “They Drive By Night” writer A.I. Bezzerides. When Fante and Bezzerides came to take Faulkner to the studio, they found “Faulkner’s wife Estelle was naked on the bedŠ[she and Faulkner] were both completely drunk. Estelle Faulkner poured a bottle of whisky on the bed and lit it on fire.”
John Fante drank and played cards at the Cottage and the Malibu Inn with fellow showbiz folks such as TV show runner William Asher (“I Love Lucy” and “Bewitched”), George Haight, Alan Jenkins and TV repairman to the stars Johnny Fain [who was hit by a car walking out of the Malibu Inn drunk on Pacific Coast Highway and died]. His son, Johnny Jr., Fante said, was “the first really notoriously awarded surfer.”
A 12-step program saved Dan Fante’s life when he was in his mid-40s. The author said he comes from four generations of drinkers. John Fante quit drinking after he contracted diabetes in his 50s but before that, “He crashed some cars and got into fights,” his son said. Fante wouldn’t call his father an alcoholic, but “I’m six years older than my sister and seven years older than my brother, so in a sense they had different parents [as Fante had quit drinking].”
Applying his novelist instincts to writing this memoir, Fante explained, “It took awhile to find the pacing and get that right. A writer owes it to his reader to keep them involved.”