Harlot's Ghost

by Norman Mailer

  “Under the circumstances, how could we Cubans have refused to share the risks taken to save us? It was, in the final analysis, a question of honor, don’t you agree? Don’t you believe that honor plays a role in politics? You think we are romantics, don’t you? Perhaps we are. And why not? In any event, we are militants. In a word, then, we agreed to the emplacement of the missiles. And I might add here that for us Cubans, it didn’t really make so much difference whether we died by conventional bombing or a hydrogen bomb. Nevertheless, we were not gambling with the peace of the world. The United States was the one to jeopardize the peace of mankind by using the threat of war to stifle revolution . . ..”

  The conversation now turned to Kennedy’s Alliance for Progress in Latin America. “In a way,” Castro said, “it was a good idea, it marked progress of a sort, an effort to adapt to the extraordinarily rapid course of events in Latin America. But Kennedy’s good ideas aren’t going to yield any results . . .. For years and years, American policy has supported the Latin American oligarchies. Suddenly a President arrives on the scene who tries to give the various Latin American countries the impression that the United States no longer stands behind the dictators. What happens then? The trusts see that their interests are being a little compromised; the Pentagon thinks the strategic bases are in danger; the powerful oligarchies in all the Latin countries alert their American friends; they sabotage the new policy; and, in short, Kennedy has everyone against him.”

  I asked Fidel where this is all going to end. How will the situation develop? Even if the United States used against you what you call the alibi of Communism, it still remains that you have chosen Communism, that your economy and your security depend upon the Soviet Union . . . in a world where peace depends on mutual respect for a tacit division of zones of influence.

  “I don’t want to discuss our ties with the Soviet Union,” Fidel Castro cut me short. “I find this indecent. We have none but feelings of fraternity and profound total gratitude toward the U.S.S.R. The Russians are making extraordinary efforts on our behalf, efforts which sometimes cost them dear. But we have our own policies which are perhaps not always the same (we have proved this!) as those of the U.S.S.R. I refuse to dwell on this point, because asking me to say that I am not a pawn on a Soviet chessboard is something like asking a woman to shout aloud in a public square that she is not a prostitute.

  “If the United States sees the problem as you have posed it, then you are right, there is no way out. But who is the loser in the last analysis? They have tried everything against us, everything, absolutely everything, and we are still alive . . .. Are we in danger? We have always lived with danger. To say nothing of the fact you have no idea how many friends one discovers in the world when one is persecuted by the United States. No, truly, for all these reasons, we are not supplicants. We ask nothing.

  “I have just talked to you as a Cuban revolutionary. But I should also speak to you as a peace lover, and from this viewpoint, I believe the United States is too important a country not to have an influence in world peace. I cannot help hoping, therefore, that a leader will come to the fore in North America (why not a Kennedy, there are big things in his favor!) who will be willing to brave unpopularity, fight the trusts, tell the truth, and most important, let the various nations act as they see fit. We ask nothing, neither dollars nor assistance, nor diplomats, nor bankers, nor military men, nothing but peace and to be accepted as we are! Why should it be impossible to make the Americans understand that socialism leads, not to hostility toward them, but to coexistence?”

  In conclusion, Fidel Castro said to me: “Since you are going to see Kennedy again, be an emissary of peace; despite everything, I want to make myself clear. I don’t want anything. I don’t expect anything, and as a revolutionary, the present situation does not displease me. But as a man and as a statesman, it is my duty to indicate what the bases for understanding could be. To achieve peace a leader would have to arise in the United States capable of meeting the explosive realities of Latin America halfway; Kennedy could still be this man. He still has the possibility of becoming, in the eyes of history, the greatest President of the United States, the leader who may at last understand that there can be coexistence between socialists and capitalists, even in the Americas. He would then be an even greater president than Lincoln. I know, for example, that for Khrushchev, Kennedy is a man you can talk with. Other leaders have assured me that to attain this goal, we must first await his reelection. Personally, I consider him responsible for everything, but I will say this, he has come to understand many things over the past few months; and in the last analysis, I’m convinced that anyone else would be worse.” Then Fidel added with a broad and boyish grin: “If you see him again, tell him that I’m willing to declare Goldwater my friend if it will guarantee Kennedy’s reelection.”

  35

  Hôtel Palais Royal

  November 22, 1963

  Dear Kittredge,

  It is such a while since I have written to you. So it feels. I am sitting in my room at the Palais Royal, a fustian small chamber furnished in Art Nouveau—Truman Capote even signed their guest book, “My home away from home!” (Probably does that everywhere.) It is three o’clock on Friday afternoon, and in something less than two hours, Halifax and I will get up and go to meet the special person who is the object of our trip. I am alone here sorting out my thoughts and all the while feeling the most passionate desire to talk to you. If, in referring to this project, I speak, for example, of Halifax, it is because I wish to send this out posthaste, and a pouch will not be available. My declaration must travel by ordinary mail.

  Enough! I want to tell you that I love you and will always love you. If I never forget this for a moment, not in nightmares, or even, if the inadmissible truth be told, in another woman’s arms, still I have never been able to bring myself to tell you. But I am in Paris today on an honest-to-god mission, a sense of anticipation in my chest spiced by the smallest hint of dread—my veteran companion Halifax calls this state “the tender butterflies—no better feeling.” I can barely wait for the moment when he will knock on my door and we will go out to our rendezvous. Yet I also feel a curious serenity, as if I could remain here writing to you all day. In this hour, Alpha and Omega appear to be much at peace with each other, as if dawn and evening live side by side in me, and so I am able to tell you that I not only love you but will wait for you all my life, and am prepared to live with such a state in a full understanding of the profound loyalties to others that are woven into your life, yes, I will love you with no demand greater than that you forgive me for having placed such a burden on you.

  Can this be the awesome if subtle magic of Paris insinuating itself into my confession? Today is overcast, and Paris is the only city I know whose hue in such weather is lilac-gray. The sky and the building stones, the Seine itself, are here to speak of the minor symphonies to be found in a panoply of gray, yet these same minor tones produce the most thoughtful, harmonious, and overpowering emotions. Walking on the Left Bank this morning, I came to recognize that this is the day on which I must tell you how I have loved your beauty and your fierce and passionate heart, yes, from the hour I met you.

  I will say no more. Is it calculating to hope that you will have these pages to read whenever you doubt me? I feel in so uncharacteristically wise a state (now that this confession has erupted out of me) that I wish to talk about myriads of absurd little matters. Halifax and I, for instance, had an extraordinary lunch at Tour d’Argent. You cannot go wrong when Halifax is ravenous and in Paris. Rather than bore you with the details of a meal you did not attend, suffice it that we started with champignons farcis duxelles, fortified with a bottle of St. Emilion ’53—heaven’s feather touched the Tour d’Argent. I never knew before how shallots, garlic, butter, and grated nutmeg could illumine a mushroom cap. The wine explored my throat. I had an inkling of the joy I might know if we were ever to break bread in some restaurant we looked upon as belonging secretly to us.r />
  If irony is redemptive, and one would hope it is, then let me promise you that in the midst of this superb food we wandered through topics of conversation that skirted the underwritten solemnity of our mission. I will say this much—we are going into a sit-down with an enemy agent. Of course, it is in a neutral, even friendly, environment, so I must not make too much of it, but this is a legitimate, heavy-duty sit-down. I must say it does produce levity cum solemnity.

  Halifax can always improve such a mix. His men must have loved him in the OSS. All the way across on Pan Am yesterday he entertained me with vivid anecdotes. He is a bit afraid of airplanes, which reminded me of a theory Dix Butler used to maintain, that strong men are the ones most reluctant to travel by air for fear of their own deviltry, which might find a way to work itself into the motor. On hearing Butler’s down-in-flames thesis Halifax entered an amendment: “There’s an awful fascination to be found in eliminating one’s fellow man,” he said. “It does give entrance into a select fraternity. The man we’re seeing tomorrow is a fair example of that.” Halifax then went on to tell me—and I had heard rumor of this before—of a killing binge in Italy with the partisans. Before it was over, Halifax had slain five Germans in three days, two by rifle, two by his own Luger (taken in booty), and one with his bare hands. “I never did settle down from that,” he said. “My life has revolved around it. Do you know, it has provided me with a considerable sense of superior status, a private sense of empowerment, and a great worry on occasion that I am mad.”

  “Why ever mad?” I asked.

  “Because I rather enjoyed those three days. The Headmaster surprised me once by saying that the hardest task the Lord can set on a man is to be the angel of death to the corrupt, the damned, and the evil. Only rare men qualify for that, he assured me. I couldn’t believe it. My father, a clergyman, speaking approvingly of human extermination! Of course, along with all else, he had that personal glint in the eye, that oafish strength a good many Yankees can lay claim to. I know I am in possession of it.”

  Do not be confused, Kittredge, by his use of “oafish.” It is not a pejorative as employed by Halifax, no, he is referring to sexual drive. “I am a dyed-in-the-wool Yankee when it comes to sex,” he confessed to me. “Harry, I don’t believe I ever had an erection I didn’t feel I earned and deserved.”

  “That would crimp my style altogether,” I said.

  We had a good laugh. Just then a rather attractive stewardess whom Halifax had been ogling from airborne minute one through the flight (thereby eliciting a rising glissando of smiles from her) stopped finally to chat with us. Halifax, naturally, saw it as entirely his doing, but to his chagrin, her interest was in me: “Aren’t you a friend of Modene Murphy’s?” she asked. When I allowed that the answer was yes, she said, “I used to work at Eastern with her, and Modene talked about you all the time. I recognized you from the snapshot she carried with her. She thought you were neat.”

  “Oh,” I said, “I wish she’d told me.”

  We agreed that whoever ran into Modene first would convey the regards of the other.

  Well, Halifax took in all of that, and then notified me that he had known about Modene, and had always wanted to meet her, although by dint of discreet questioning, I could recognize that all he meant was that he had heard Agency gossip to the effect that I was gadding about with a good-looking airline stewardess, bully for me.

  I don’t want to try your patience. It is axiomatic that a beautiful woman does not always wish to hear about another, but I address myself to your magnanimity for a purpose. Halifax now made an astonishing confession. He was having what he termed “erectile lapses.” I mention it not to give his secret away, but to explain him. I feel as if I begin to comprehend his monumental depressions over Mary—their last years must have been full of such lapses—and, in contrast, his present excitement about this mission. He went over to Paris on a look-see a few weeks ago and came back full of himself from being back in action. “I feel ready,” he told me, “to pull down a few stud fees again.” I assumed that he had merely resumed relations with his secretary, Eleanor (who adores him), but the old girlfriend now current again is—click your safety belt! I’ll bet she didn’t tell you—Polly Galen Smith. She does get around with the right people.

  So, yes, Halifax was in good spirits. He protects his health by walking into the crucible and out again. While there is no physical danger in our upcoming meeting, at least I don’t think so, all sorts of small and large catastrophes could arise concerning security and one’s career. A flap at this point would sound like the cranking of a giant pterodactyl’s wings. But Halifax steering toward risk is in the highest spirits. As if his blood were Mediterranean, he speaks with grave pleasure about murder and death. All the while, we are being fired up by a filet de boeuf au poivre and now a Pommard ’56. He is engaging his ongoing obsession: It is that Marilyn Monroe was murdered.

  As he goes on talking about this through lunch, my mind reels. The turn of conversation is considerably removed from what I had anticipated. We had, of course, already gone over our corollary scenarios concerning which choices to make if things take a wrong course in any way during the meeting. We had gone through that in the office and on the airplane. All the same, I had assumed that lunch would be taken up at least in part with a review of our business, but, no, “We’ve got it down,” he tells me, “let’s talk of other things.” Off he goes on his thesis. I am repelled at first, because the thought of murder in relation to that lovely, sad, and merry young comedienne will spoil my meal. I think Halifax, however, may understand me better than I comprehend myself. I think he senses instinctively that for loosening up one’s large and small reflexes, it can be tonic to contemplate someone else’s undertaking even if in this case it is a dire and hideous scheme. Facing one’s own grave possibilities, it does no harm to ponder equally weighty concerns in another fold of concealed endeavor.

  I am going to try to tell it in his words. After all, I have credentials—I have listened to the good and worthy Halifax on enough occasions to hear his voice in my ear when I write about him, and he was more than articulate on this occasion: “Do you know,” he told me, “I was absolutely convinced in the beginning that she was either done in by a word from the Kennedys, or, conceivably, by their direct act. It is not difficult to give an injection if a person trusts you. Either Jack or Bobby could have said to her, ‘This is a dynamite mix of vitamins. Works wonders.’ The poor girl was ready for anything in pill or needle form.”

  Kittredge, I believe I had better explain to you that this has been Cal’s ongoing preoccupation for fifteen months, and he has not only collected all the limited evidence, most notably the coroner’s report, but it is as if, after working in Intelligence all his life, he has made the case of Marilyn Monroe his hobby. He assures me that all the facts in the coroner’s report point to murder. To account for the barbiturate level in her blood, she would have had to take at least fifty capsules of Nembutol and chloral hydrate. This would have been bound to leave a large residue in her stomach and small intestine. In the stomach, however, reports the coroner, there is only a teaspoonful of fluid.

  Now I am not going to put down any more of these details since I think they would repel you. Besides, he has cited them to me enough times to provide me with the uneasy suspicion that he has a case. What made the talk novel at this lunch is that he has finally changed his conclusion. You see, Halifax has suspected Jack for these last fifteen months—which may give you an idea of how much animosity is loose in the Agency these days toward our President. Once in a while in the middle of the night, I would find myself in the graveyard of vile assumptions long enough to think: “What if he is right?”

  Mind you, all the while that Halifax is furnishing these clinical items, he is cutting his filet precisely, one quarter-inch slice at a time, touching it lightly to the au poivre gravy, feeding himself English style, fork in his left hand, deft cuts with the knife, expressive lifts with the fork, the minutia
e of autopsy procedure being laid out all the while carefully for me. In the guise of a reporter, he had actually done an interview with the coroner by telephone, managing to accomplish this small feat by dragooning one of his cronies on the Washington Post to agree to allow him the use of his name.

  “Mind you,” says Cal, “I had it fixed in my mind from the first that it had to be the Kennedys. I wanted it to be them. I would not have minded chopping this administration into the smallest shreds,” and at that moment, his face was red enough to suggest that his jaws were working on moose-hide. “I will only remind you that Kennedy dealt CIA a blow at the Bay of Pigs from which we may never recover. We were slathered with shame. No, I will never forgive Jack Kennedy for not knowing his mind. On the other hand, I am an officer in Intelligence, and we do not go off half-cocked. So, I began to face up to the likelihood that the Kennedys would not have had an unmanageable fear of Marilyn Monroe exposing their escapades. My God, Jack reached the presidency with as long a tail of big and little loves strewn behind him as the tin cans tied to a newlywed’s flivver. Yet, never a hint in the major newspapers. A man running for high office is sacrosanct: twice so, once he is President. If Marilyn had come forth to the public with her tale, the Kennedys would probably have replied that she was their friend, and a remarkably talented woman, and they could feel unhappy along with the rest of her fans that she had had a nervous breakdown. Ergo, why should the Kennedys risk everything by killing her? One had to face it—one’s thesis wasn’t walking too well on its own feet.

  “Then I learned by way of one of Bill Harvey’s less savory contacts who goes back, in fact, to our Maheu days—that Jimmy Hoffa had managed to get a sneaky into Marilyn’s bedroom, and a tap on all her phones. Hoffa, apparently, has a fellow named Bernard Spindel who is the preeminent wiretapper in America. A little more skillful, you may believe it, than our Vegas folk.