by John Rechy
“How the hell do you know about the letter Enid left me!”
“What letter did Enid leave you, my dear?” Mildred’s eyes clasped Normalyn’s.
Normalyn attempted to withdraw: “I— . . .” She could not think now. “What letter are you talking about?”
“Why, the letter given to J. Edgar Hoover accusing John and Robert Kennedy of immorality, and the subsequent letter naming Monroe as one of their women—the letter that began it all!” Mildred’s greedy fingers conquered her goblet. “My dear, were you thinking of other letters? Which? Which!”
Normalyn controlled her panic. This woman was not talking about the letter she was carrying with her this very moment. That meant David Lange did not know about it either! He, too, knew only of those Mildred Meadows had just identified. But now Normalyn wasn’t entirely sure of that, not sure. She tried hurriedly to reconstruct David’s words. Their meaning altered. . . . She had told this cunning woman—almost told her, she reassured herself—she had almost told her about Enid’s letter!
Deny it all, dearheart! Miss Bertha found her voice.
Inspired, Normalyn said easily, “And so, dear baroness, I have tested you back!”
“Oh, so you have, so you have,” Mildred Meadows said. “And because you have, and so cleverly, my dear, now I will tell you everything you need to know.”
“Need? For what?” Normalyn was aware that the certainty she had regained moments earlier was escaping her voice. She revised its tone: “Need for what purpose, my dear?”
“For your purpose, of course,” Mildred glided over her words. Again a tiny smile lurked over the composed lips. “You’ve convinced me that you do deserve information.” Mildred moistened her lips with sherry, careful to touch them only with the edge of the crystal. She poured a few more drops into the goblet. “This will sweeten my account,” she said to Normalyn. This time her smile shaped, then swiftly fled. Mildred Meadows leaned sightly forward from her throne: “Now listen carefully, my dear, listen very carefully . . .
“Joan—”
Twelve
—Crawford paused to adjust her lipstick before knocking at the door of Marilyn Monroe’s small duplex. She would remark later to Mildred Meadows that had it not been for her close attention to her lips—Mildred approved of special attention to beauty—she would not have heard the harsh voices of two women emerge out of the house; her knocking would have interrupted them.
Joan and Marilyn had become friends a few weeks earlier when Joan, who was forty-seven but looked no more than thirty-five when makeup and light were exact—and her great-star’s instincts made them so—learned that the twenty-five-year-old starlet considered her one of her “idols.” Joan telephoned the thrilled starlet at the studio—“Is it really you? It is really you?” Marilyn kept asking. Yes!—and Joan had invited her to Sunday brunch.
Crawford was a smart woman whose beauty toughened as she grew older, so imposing that she appeared much larger than she was—actually petite. Star-instincts told her that Marilyn Monroe might become a contender for the crown Crawford was certain she still wore, though battered in the wars. How better to deal with a potential rival than to befriend her?
At brunch, Joan graciously guided Marilyn about her Art Nouveau home; shiny black and white floors reflected shrill windows. Remarking on Joan’s kindness in adopting several children, Marilyn won the star over by saying she wished she had been “this lucky” during the many times she was in homes. “M-m-my mother is dead, you know,” she said sadly, in the slight stutter she would never lose. Joan assured her, with a squeeze of her hand, that if Marilyn had been up for adoption she would have “chosen” her as a daughter “despite the closeness in our ages. We would, of course, have been more like sisters.”
Overhearing them, a small girl with yellow curls lunged headlong down the stairs toward them. Marilyn veered, wrenching her ankle. The child glared at the two women.
Marilyn adored children. “Please don’t be angry with her. I’m sure she didn’t mean us harm,” she said to Joan.
“I did!” hissed the angered child.
Joan suggested the girl go upstairs. Later, she promised, they would have dinner together: “Perhaps some of that rare roast beef you enjoyed last night.” When the child ran off, Joan said, “I do so worry about what she’ll do when I’m gone.”
In the following days of their friendship, Joan gave Marilyn expert advice—who knew the pitfalls of Hollywood better than the great Crawford? She even offered the younger woman some of her own clothes, knowing that Marilyn was just getting by, but the clothes were too small for the lusher actress.
All this came to the attention of Mildred Meadows when Darryl Zanuck, chief of production at 20th Century-Fox, told her that he was terminating Monroe’s contract. He had never championed her, or even helped her. He’d hired her only at the instigation of a retired executive who believed in her. Zanuck—who had discovered Rin Tin Tin and years later fired his own son from the studio—did not like to be proven wrong. An item in Mildred’s column would offset any studio criticism, especially from the East, where the starlet’s champion still claimed some power with the Board of Directors. At the same time, Meadows’s loyal confidante—Crawford—was befriending the starlet. How to satisfy both loyalties?
Item: That great actress and sublime beauty, the ageless Joan Crawford, is giving that blonde waif—inexperienced starlet Marilyn Monroe—a lesson in true stardom with generous guidance. Will the waif be grateful? Studio chiefs have reason to wonder, too, about the difficult starlet.
There was yet another purpose for the item in Mildred’s column, the most important one. Mildred was used to being courted by the most powerful in Hollywood, and lesser aspirants knew they had to petition dutifully for her attention, granted or not. Monroe had made no overture. The item was intended to correct that oversight.
It did not.
Marilyn’s friendship with Crawford thrived. In her silver limousine, Joan went to Marilyn’s apartment to pick up the needful starlet, exiled by Zanuck, taken in uneasily by Columbia Studios. The two women were going on a picnic, a drive along the dramatic Malibu coastline. Joan had Chasen’s prepare an extravagant lunch, with champagne. Hoping to arouse the childlike pleasure the starlet expressed at surprises, Crawford arrived early—and walked to the door herself. Before knocking, she stopped to freshen her lipstick—
—and heard the raised voices of two women!
Crawford had a superb memory. She learned the script of Rain in one day and of Mildred Pierce in two and a half. When she was humiliated into having to audition for the latter role, she won it easily by performing key scenes without glancing at the script. So she recounted—verbatim, she swore—to Mildred Meadows the strange exchange she overheard in those moments before she announced her presence.
“She’ll never leave you!”
“She’ll never leave you! I’ve left her.”
“It’s not possible, you know that. You can’t.”
“I already have. I don’t want to play any more.”
“You can never stop.”
The angry altercation—and Crawford was not sure who had . said what; the voices jumped on each other as if this dialogue had occurred before—ended in tense silence. Suddenly the two women burst into girlish laughter! Seconds later, a woman emerged from the back of the apartment house and drove away in a nearby car. Joan had been able to see her: pretty, very pretty, with dark hair; about Marilyn’s age.
Joan knocked, deeply puzzled by what she had heard. A game?
Marilyn made no reference to the matter. The chauffeur drove them to a secluded cliff, a miraculous patch of grass shaded by a cluster of palmtrees. Below, the ocean swept the blue horizon. Marilyn became heady with the chilled champagne she was not used to—later she would acquire such a taste for it that she would adjust any time of day to allow for “champagne brunch!” Joan suggested they drive back to her home, where Marilyn might take a nap and then join her for dinner. Within the
intimacy of the limousine, Marilyn told Joan how badly she wanted children—a daughter, more than anything else in the world.
“It’s difficult being a mother,” Joan said seriously, sadly. “Sometimes you can try and try and still fail.”
“I know, but I’d be a good one. I know I would.” But she was afraid, Marilyn told Crawford, because “there’s a history of insanity in my family. My own mother is in a state institution.”
Joan held the actress’s hand. But she was baffled. Previously, Marilyn had told her her mother was dead; studio releases emphasized it.
After dinner the two actresses sat on a puffy couch and drank champagne. Joan let her hand slide . . . slowly . . . along Monroe’s leg. Marilyn pushed it away and stood up in panic. The blonde little girl stared at them from atop the swirl of steps.
Crawford shouted at Marilyn, “Why the fuck are you pretending to be shocked, you bleached slut! I heard you with that woman in your house today!”
Marilyn looked bewildered. “You assumed that she and I were—” She laughed. “You’re so wrong. I almost wish that’s what it was!” She moved unsteadily toward the door, then turned around. “And I wasn’t shocked or offended, Joan. Just surprised.”
Crawford swayed up the stairs, feeling old, defeated. Her blonde child stood before her like a tiny judge.
Joan Crawford recounted all this to Mildred, explaining how deeply hurt she was that her attempt to comfort the insecure actress had been misunderstood. All was being slimed further by her own maid and chauffeur, who claimed to have overheard the incident and were now offering an ugly exaggeration of it to Confidential Magazine, then terrifying Hollywood with ruinous “exposés.”
Mildred had had occasion to give the magazine choice items about subversives. She had often bartered: two exposés of those considered expendable by the studios in exchange for one to be protected. . . . Mildred suggested that perhaps Joan might provide her “more background” on Monroe: “Something about her mother, some ambiguity about whether she’s dead or not; there’s gossip—” Detecting the star’s reticence, confusion about “loyalty,” Mildred pointed out that—“unfairly”—Joan’s own career was teetering. Joan knew that; she knew that Hollywood furies were eager to announce her fall. Mildred reminded, “You’re almost fifty; the fall of a queen is a sad spectacle. A damaging article about you now will destroy you, Crawford. She will survive it with admiration. And the article will appear unless—”
Crawford told Mildred that, yes, there was “ambiguity” about Marilyn’s mother.
The article Joan feared did not appear. Another replaced it, the first in a series about “leftish actor-turned-writer Mark Poe” and his “strange fascination for a leading male heart-throb.”
In an alcoholic haze, Crawford wrote Marilyn a note, apologizing for what she had told Mildred—without saying what, because she could not remember: “It was extorted. I didn’t mean to harm you. I was hurt and scared, you understand that!” She tore up the letter. “What the hell,” she said aloud, “I’m still the Great Joan Crawford!”
Mildred learned that from Joan’s new maid, who pasted the letter together. Mildred did not mention the matter to Crawford, because she despised the sentimentality that had led the aging movie star—once so beautiful!—to such terrifying excess. Besides, Mildred knew that even better encounters would occur between Crawford and Monroe—and Mildred could use Crawford’s confidence.
Then Marilyn Monroe became a star!
A bit role as a kept girl-woman had sent sexual shivers down the spines of her fans; she sighed her dialogue sensually as if only to one listener. Everyone was certain he was the listener. Despising what he had to do, but being a crafty businessman, Zanuck accepted Marilyn back into the fold, although he made it clear to studio president Spyros Skouras that he considered her success an “inexplicable fluke.”
Photoplay Magazine, the most prestigious fan publication, announced that its coveted Gold Medal for best new star of the year would go to—
Marilyn Monroe!
To throttle lingering rumors, and to show she was forgiving, Joan Crawford decided she would be in attendance in the Crystal Room of the Beverly Hills Hotel, a pink creation of Mission Revival architecture, where the awards would be presented.
The Great Crawford would do what Monroe was becoming known for: She would be late—later than “the starlet.” She would seize attention away from “the upstart.”
Joan Crawford wore a dark gown, cut diagonally to expose, starkly, one bare shoulder, one bare arm. On inspiration, she wound one strand of pearls up the naked arm. As she walked into the Crystal Room, each move of her legs exposed flashes of gorgeous flesh, and proved that the body of the Queen of Hollywood had lost none of its commanding power. Let the furies stew! Popping camera lights created a giant halo about her. She was dazzling! A sensation! She had shown the three hundred or more of the most famous in Hollywood—and the photographers, and the world, and Marilyn Monroe, who would be sulking in the shadows—that she, Joan Crawford, was the star of stars, the—
Excitement poured away from her and gathered in a new wave as Marilyn Monroe walked in.
“That fucking slut!” Joan said.
Sewn into a gold lamé dress cut into a V so low it dipped to the top of her navel and so wide it exposed the edges of her magnificent nipples—men claimed to have glimpsed a flash of dark pink (the same who claimed the dress had sequins, but it was stardust)—Marilyn Monroe’s body moved, part by part, curve by curve. The dress cherished every motion and kissed and hugged her breasts, her hips. She walked in a blaze of blonde sensuality.
They gasped.
The conquering star blew kisses.
With a wry smile, Jane Russell stood and applauded, champion to champion, while Leslie Caron giggled nervously and touched her own lovely but less lush breasts—nervously—at the same moment that Tony Curtis said, “My God, my God!”—jostling Robert Wagner against Clifton Webb, just as Lauren Bacall said in her huskiest voice, “I’ll be damned!”—which drew a severe frown from heiress Lorna Rehnquist, there with Lance Renat, the sports-car racing ladies’ man, who said, “She makes me want to be a woman!”
“A vile circus!” screamed Crawford to a reporter who rushed to capture her reaction. She cupped her breasts. “Look—there’s nothing wrong with my tits, but I don’t go around throwing them in people’s faces.”
The press, from Los Angeles to Paris, reported the event with exclamation marks. In the Village Voice, Norman Mailer recorded the reaction as a “moment of existential synapse.” Crawford’s reaction appeared in the Los Angeles Times, the word “tits” merely implied.
Crawford denied the vulgar implications to Mildred Meadows, who carried the denial in her next column:
That great star and lady, Joan Crawford, lamented to me that a respected industry function was turned into a shameful display at the Photoplay Award presentations. The star was genuinely saddened when she observed that ‘Marilyn Monroe has yet to learn that actresses must be ladies.’ And so the blonde waif has made Hollywood hang its collective head in shame! Will she make amends?
Mildred waited for an answer to her personal question. Still, Monroe did not respond.
Instead, in her babbling column, Louella Parsons quoted Monroe as having said, “I’ve always admired Joan Crawford for being such a wonderful mother—for taking unwanted children and giving them a fine home. Who better than I—and Mildred Meadows—know what that means to homeless little ones?”
And Mildred Meadows!
Monroe had dared to utter her name in print! There had to be more. Her careful wording had been coached by Alberta Holland.
And instigated by Enid Morgan!
Raking through Monroe’s past to verify her strategy and locate her exact targets, Mildred was startled to discover that she had seen the movie star and Enid years before when, “on a dutiful mission of charity expected of everyone in Hollywood,” she had visited a home for unwanted children. The two girls—so
pretty—walked right up to the smoked windows of her limousine and peered in.
Out of that past interlude, Mildred Meadows extracted present significance. Then, Norma Jeane had looked pleadingly, with longing, into the car—and Enid’s amber eyes had challenged.
It was now time for war. Mildred had offered “the starlet” salvation too many times—only because of her growing beauty. First she would use stored ammunition:
Item: What blonde star—excuse me, starlet—claims to be an orphan while her mother pines for her in an institution? Don’t ask me. Ask Marilyn Monroe!
Mildred Meadows considered granting redemption. But Marilyn Monroe did not seek it.
* * *
In Mildred’s mansion, shadows were beginning to veil the windows. The old woman leaned slightly sideways on her throne, as if the past events had subdued her in the present only for paused moments.
Pulled into the narrative of tiny vengeances threatening now to gather into enormous ones, Normalyn had not interrupted the flow of Mildred Meadows’ aroused memories. But she had accumulated many questions, and longed for information about the two women involved in what seemed to be a game, then not a game at all. There had been uncomfortable times when she felt the old woman was giving her information— probably to extort more from her later. . . . And Normalyn had retained, for further exploration, blurred areas in the narrative, places Mildred had slipped over or obscured—places forced into her narrative, like the emphatic conclusion that Enid was involved in the wording of Marilyn’s newspaper statement about Joan Crawford and in the affronting inclusion of Mildred’s name. How had that involvement been inferred? The account of Mildred’s having seen the two pretty girls through smoky glass windows was introduced vaguely—signaling future importance? . . . And Normalyn’s heart had broken to imagine Enid, so proud, in an orphanage. But even then the amber eyes had defied! . . . Why had Mildred been there? Certainly not on the proclaimed mission of “charity.” Normalyn was beginning to see this clearly: Whether they hated her or loved her, everyone wanted to own Marilyn Monroe! There had been flashy interludes in Mildred Meadows’s account that had been included only to fascinate, to dazzle with the star’s magical presence. Or would even those interludes become central later?