Frankie and Robin at the Capricorn office.
heart of gold and a gift of making everyone she met feel special; she was understated and unpretentious, simply known, in Macon, as "Kiki", her nickname, although few people knew she had the title of Baroness with quite a privileged upbringing. There was a movie about our family, "Out of Africa"--adopted from the book by Karen Blixen on her life, in Africa, with my great Uncle, Bror Blixen, in the 1920's Kenya. Her uncle Bror was a larger-than-life safari hunter, who lived life to the fullest and, interestingly enough, “The Great White Hunter", phrase originated from him, based on his legendary oversized per- sonality while living in Kenya. Earnest Hem- ingway, a good friend of Bror, loosely used him as his main character in the book “The Short, Happy Life of Francis Macomber”. Now, “Frankie," as I used to call him, was my stepfather, but as I already mentioned, he
was also my father, as he was the man who brought me up; he came from a completely different world than my late mother, where there were frequent dinner parties and you could use roller skates to get around the house due to its size. Frankie grew up in Jo- hannesburg, South Africa, in a small house on the other side of the tracks with a tin roof and no electricity; however, without lights, my fa- ther avidly read books with a flash light and listened to American blues music on his bat- tery operated radio. Frankie became a great boxer out of necessity- he had to walk to school crossing through other kids’ turf, and would have to defend himself. In fact, he got so good that he became a Golden Glove boxer and, had told me, was a contender for the Olympics. The guy he was going against was someone he had beaten before, but on the tri- als, the fight stopped due to Frankie having gotten cut, qualifying the other guy to go on to the Olympics. Later, Frank did a stink in the Air Force, before making plans to leave South Africa. Frank’s biological father was a butcher and
his stepfather an electrician; the family ex- pected him to follow in his stepfather’s foot- steps, but that was not in Franks master plan: he always intended to leave South Africa and move to America, were his love of blues music and Hollywood movies came from, and to also seek “fame and fortune”. He left South Africa, in 1958, on a two week boat ride, hav- ing a blast on the voyage, he would later share, but was broke when he arrived on the shores of England, while not knowing a soul. The original idea was for him to become an actor; he got a few gigs, the most notable being a BBC science fiction series called “The Big Pull”. He later co-wrote, acted and pro- duced the first South African Rock N Roll movie with the first integrated cast called “Africa Sakes”. Discovering that acting did not actually pay
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