Marilyn's Daughter

by John Rechy

  “Come in, child, please.” The woman welcomed Normalyn with warm cordiality into a house where everything was attractive, everything was in place, everything was impeccable, and everything was outmoded, as if pulled intact from the past—preserved.

  A man appeared, very tall, slender, elegant, the woman’s age, smiling a genial welcome. He was dressed in an attractive suit that looked out of date but new, like everything else here. “Yes, I believe she may be the one we’ve been waiting for, Mrs. Crouch,” Dr. Crouch approved.

  Their words jumped into further meanings. Normalyn was again in a territory where everything ordinary might turn sinister. Yet the man and his wife were beaming at her like favorite grandparents receiving a beloved child.

  They led her into their gracious living room.

  “We courteously had to decline to speak to that other young lady after a short interview,” Mrs. Crouch explained to Normalyn. The woman took short steps with precise grace; she made airy motions as if to further assure her smooth passage.

  “She just wasn’t right,” said Dr. Crouch earnestly. “Lady Star should have seen that.”

  All three stood in the middle of the wood-beamed room.

  “Dr. Crouch!” Mrs. Crouch was aghast. “You have not extended the courtesy of our home to—” She waited. “Your name, child!”

  Let them know you’re the ‘right one,’ dearheart!

  “Normalyn Morgan.”

  “Normalyn Morgan.” Dr. Crouch muttered the name.

  His wife closed her eyes briefly. “And now you’re here—”

  “From Gibson, Texas, where I lived with Enid Morgan.” Normalyn rushed the still-aching information: “She died . . . recently.”

  “Our deepest sympathy in your, bereavement,” Dr. Crouch responded.

  “Deepest.” Mrs. Crouch bowed her head for a respectful moment.

  Yet Normalyn noted a distinct apprehension in their voices, as if Enid’s death meant that what had been kept concealed might now be exposed.

  “Please forgive my bad manners.” Dr. Crouch broke the silence. “Do sit down and kindly accept our hospitality.”

  “Thank you.” Normalyn chose a plush chair.

  “You’re welcome,” bowed Dr. Crouch.

  “You’ll have a whole sofa to yourself if you sit over there.” Mrs. Crouch guided Normalyn.

  When Normalyn was seated on the sofa, the man and his wife faced her on tall upholstered chairs as if to begin an interrogation.

  Like the one Enid had recounted to Mark Poe! Normalyn felt both apprehensive and thrilled by the association.

  Mrs. Crouch rang a bell. A sulking black woman in maid’s uniform appeared with a silver Queen Anne service. Tiny cups, engraved, looked like buds of silver flowers.

  “I had Mattie prepare cocoa with a stick of cinammon, just after you called,” Mrs. Crouch announced with delight. She sniffed at the scent to make sure it was subtle.

  Glaring at the old man and woman, the black woman left the set precariously perched on a coffee table and departed, making as much noise as possible. Adjusting the setting, Mrs. Crouch served. She spread out puffs of pastry on a plate. With fastidious care, she placed Normalyn’s steaming chocolate on the table next to the sofa where she had relocated her.

  On that table was a single framed photograph of three handsome young actors and four pretty actresses, posed against a purity of white light. Marilyn Monroe’s aggressive beauty shoved away all the others in the group; but another presence insinuated back, conquering attention—another beautiful woman, dark-haired and wearing a white gossamer dress. Hers was the only figure that bore no autograph under it.

  “Child, is your chocolate . . . delicious?” Mrs. Crouch queried with the slightest suggestion of a frown; her smile sweetened in compensation.

  “Oh, yes, it is,” And it was.

  “But is it just right . . . the cream, the cinnamon?” Mrs. Crouch’s frown deepened.

  Normalyn understood. “Oh, yes, thank you.” The woman had been waiting for the ritual of fussy manners to be fulfilled.

  “You’re welcome,” Mrs. Crouch accepted. Now she could sip her own chocolate.

  Normalyn rejected a tinge of sympathy for this old man and old woman, who seemed to be waiting to be invited to dinner. Enid had called them “the genial executioners,” this man and woman who reshaped lives to suit the studios.

  Mrs. Crouch said over her silver Georgian cup, “Now then, you’re here to learn about great tragedy, great glamour, great dead movie stars. And you have chosen one of the most extravagant, child.” Mrs. Crouch seemed to approve.

  Dr. Crouch leaned just slightly toward Normalyn and confided, “For auditions, you have to tell the panel real secrets.”

  “With proof!” said Mrs. Crouch.

  Normalyn could not reconcile her sense of foreboding with the genial smiles of this man, this woman. And yet their penetrating looks were becoming . . . sinister. This might be a dangerous encounter. . . . In this home, with this smiling old man and woman?

  Mrs. Crouch said brightly, “Details are always good for initial interest.”

  “Cursum Perficio!” Dr. Crouch intoned suddenly.

  Mrs. Crouch laughed delicately in approval. “That’s what the slogan said on the coat of arms on the tiles outside the last house Marilyn lived in, the only one she ever owned. It means, ‘I am ending my journey.’”

  “Now, why don’t you say it so you’ll remember?” Dr. Crouch guided Normalyn. “Cursum Perficio. ‘I am ending—’”

  “I am beginning my journey.” Normalyn faced them.

  Mrs. Crouch gave a fluttering look to Dr. Crouch. She held her cup to her lips as if to placate a sudden nervous twitch. “Oh, don’t you just love the Dead Movie Stars, child, for wanting to restore glamour to Hollywood?”

  “I wonder whether that’s possible any more, or if it’s all gone, forever—along with courtesy, manners, respect. Their Hollywood.” Dr. Crouch indicated the photograph next to Normalyn.

  “Please don’t say it will never come back, Dr. Crouch— please.” Mrs. Crouch touched her head as if the thought might produce a headache. “Although it is true”—she acknowledged a saddened reality—“that those ‘new’ people don’t need us—those . . . independents!" With a nod, she added her own look directing Normalyn’s attention to the photograph.

  The dark-haired woman in the photograph looked like— was—Enid . . . as she appeared in the picture on the dresser in Gibson. In the attentive silence, Normalyn knew they wanted a reaction from her to the photograph. She touched the picture, removing a grain of dust. She could not think of anything to nudge the stubborn silence; so she said, “Oh, thank you, Mrs. Crouch!”

  “Why, you’re most certainly welcome, child,” Mrs. Crouch accepted with a flittering smile of satisfaction on her delicate lips.

  Silence sealed again.

  Tell them more, dearheart. They’re testing you, just like I did, remember?—when we rehearsed.

  “Who is the beautiful woman next to Marilyn Monroe?” Normalyn adjusted the advice.

  “The only one who didn’t become a star,” Dr. Crouch judged sternly, pointedly evading the name. “Finally just disappeared.”

  Enid, so proud, remembered as the only one who hadn’t become a star. . . . Normalyn felt a doubled sadness.

  “Certainly you’ve done enough research to know who she is—perhaps in relation to Marilyn?” Mrs. Crouch held her cup halfway to her lips.

  “She’s Enid Morgan, the woman I told you about earlier. So beautiful, too.” Normalyn added tribute to her identification. Now turn it back on them, dearheart. . . . “She had occasion to mention you.” That’s it!

  “What did she—?” Mrs. Crouch reached nervously for a pastry.

  “I believe you ‘worked’ on her life,” Normalyn said.

  “Heaven grant her peace,” Dr. Crouch intoned; his voice veered. “But in life she could be rebellious.”

  “God love her, but she did have an . . . unti
dy life,” Mrs. Crouch did not look up from her cocoa. “And perhaps a reckless spirit.”

  Normalyn wished they had been talking about her.

  “We did our level best to clear up her life when she first came to us. Level best,” Dr. Crouch emphasized to Normalyn, and he went on easily now to recall “the glamorous days, the days of the real Hollywood” when—

  * * *

  —a small elite corps of lawyers and advisers propped the giant apparatus of power at the studios. Among those were Benjamin and Mrs. Crouch. He was a graduate of Harvard, magna cum laude, a physician as well as a lawyer. She—then called Emily—was an honors graduate of Radcliffe. They became figures of refinement and intellect among movie moguls, for whom, with precision and courtesy, they would remake lives, rearrange any event that was necessary for the harmony of “the studios.”

  It was Dr. and Mrs. Crouch who supervised the creation of three wax figures of Jean Harlow, placed at designated times at her window for adoring fans to see—standing, sitting, looking out at them—so that they would believe her to be alive until her last film was released, a hit uncompromised by death.

  At the request of the studios, the Crouches “chatted” with a young starlet named Enid Morgan. Dr. and Mrs. Crouch decided, in the confidential report to 20th Century-Fox, that “although beautiful,” the youngwoman was “too bright, too excessively inventive, much too rebellious” to be a movie star. Additionally, she had claimed—“in a tone of serious levity”—to be constantly considering a “great revenge” on a vastly unsavory man, “whose life we will look into for any immediate complications.” The starlet herself, they reported, had terminated the interview with “ambiguous gratitude,” saying, “Thank you, dear Dr. and Mrs. Crouch,” before adding her most inflammatory words: “I will never give up my life, however you may judge it.”

  * * *

  “In kindness to the youngwoman,” Mrs. Crouch added, “we suggested that she might be employed as a stand-in.” Her fluttery smile did not disguise her tense stare on Normalyn.

  “And you might say she did stand in—for Marilyn.” Dr. Crouch’s smile seemed cut into his face now. “Did you know that, child?—that Enid Morgan stood in for Marilyn Monroe, whom she resembled—”

  “—in a strange, haunted way,” Mrs. Crouch interjected. She seemed to shiver at an association recalled suddenly.

  On the distant shoreline the two women looked strangely alike—For a hypnotic moment, Normalyn felt pulled back into the ghostly memory—and away from it by Dr. Crouch’s words:

  “—and that once she stood in for her in a situation of grave danger?” he continued his question to Normalyn. “Did you know that? Did you?”

  Say yes, dearheart!

  “Yes!”

  “And what else do you know?” The smile on Dr. Crouch’s lips froze before it shattered.

  Mrs. Crouch touched her own lips as if to pluck away the smile glued there. “Tell us, for God’s sake.”

  They were pleading with her! “I know you were involved in what happened at the D’Arcy House when Enid ran out.” She chose her words carefully.

  Dr. Crouch inhaled a sigh, something very much like relief.

  Mrs. Crouch’s sigh hovered over his. Then her face changed back to the earlier collusion of smiles. “I believe, Dr. Crouch, that Normalyn is the right one.”

  “I have arrived at the same conclusion.” Dr. Crouch restored his own quick smile. “Now we must give her all the information she will need soon.”

  Again that disquieting echo—Normalyn detected it—as if she would be expected to report to someone else what she heard here. And it was not to the Dead Movie Stars.

  Dr. Crouch addressed Normalyn gravely: “It was an audacious plan! It was devised by Alberta Holland. Eventually she had to enlist me for it to work, and I, of course, demanded to know—”

  Thirty-Six

  —the full details of how it began.

  The plan was concocted at first only to allow Marilyn Monroe hope that she might be able to have the child she wanted more than anything else in her life—and at the same time to stave off the threatened scandal such a child would enflame for the dynasty of the Kennedys. It pitted two archenemies, Alberta Holland and Mildred Meadows, against each other.

  Enid Morgan had just returned from Texas, where she had gone, she said in her cryptic, cynical way, to have “the child of a son-of-a-bitch.” Soon after, Mildred’s rampage on Marilyn Monroe occurred. Enid knew they must turn to Alberta Holland. She admired the staunch counselor, and Marilyn “loved” her.

  Sipping her fragrant tea, Alberta Holland listened to the reason for the visit of the two beautiful women. “Is the asserted involvement with the Kennedys—both of them—true?”

  “Yes,” Marilyn answered. She looked defiantly at Enid.

  Alberta tempered her voice to soothe her words. “I’m sorry to agree that Mildred is right, in that a pregnancy discovered or a child born amid inflammatory accusations will implicate the brothers, one or both, and perhaps . . . destroy them.” And with them would be crushed the inspired dream she championed, of a social Camelot, she thought but did not say.

  “Nothing must harm Robert! Or Mr. President.” Marilyn said the last with only a touch of resentment. “They mustn’t even know anything about any of this. And you both must promise me. Please promise me now!”

  Alberta promised, touched. Her cigarette lighter dormant in her hands, Enid nodded her agreement.

  Marilyn’s voice diminished. “I still love Robert, and I want this child.”

  What Alberta had heard bruised her feelings about the Kennedys. She knew it is possible for men to be great leaders yet flawed in their private lives. Her second-favorite writer, Shakespeare—she preferred Proust—had dealt with just that. . . . So she did not judge. She had adored Marilyn Monroe from their first encounter—admired her intelligence, sensitivity, daring. Yet there was a distinct vulnerability about her that might cause her to misjudge intentions, perceive—hope for—commitment where none had been offered, perhaps not even implied. She knew, too, that if the Kennedys fell—with the symbolic power of a longed-for “new frontier”—the country would reel in reaction. Among others, Richard Nixon waited greedily. The good the Kennedys symbolized must be protected.

  Alberta Holland had a reputation for being a profoundly, even blindly, earnest woman of dedication. According to her trusted friend, Teresa de Pilar, “the indomitable Alberta” had opce claimed, “Smiling is frivolous when injustice is rampant.” Still, she smiled fondly now at Marilyn. Borrowing a phrase the two women had used earlier, she promised, “You will have your child, perhaps in an interval of lavender spring which will occur just for you.”

  Then Alberta’s mind tumbled furiously as she began to shape her plan: “Mildred must be tricked into using the offered item about a miscarriage, a reconciliation with a loving ex-husband.” The brothers would survive the remains of the threatened scandal, she told them. Robbed of the enormous impact of Marilyn’s name—and of the pregnancy—it would all become just gossip, accusations all men of power endure, rumors without evidence. “Rumors capable of arousing sympathy,” she added, and hoped that that would be so. “The item in Mildred’s column has to be false, but believed.”

  “That’s very smart. Yes, that’s what we have to do!” Marilyn was desperate to accept a firm solution.

  Enid said with a wry smile. “Of course it is. But how are you going to make Mildred cooperate, Alberta?”

  “By cunning, duplicity, lies—her terms.” Through years of mutual detestation, she and Mildred had come to know each other intimately. They watched each other from a distance, read everything about each other.

  Eager to be reassured, Marilyn let her attention wander away from the web of dangers, out the window, to peaceful breaths of lavender outside. She wished none of this were happening. She imagined that there would be the sudden eager honking of a car outside, and it would be Robert. She imagined their conversation. He would begin, �
��I love you—”

  “Once the item appears”—Alberta’s mind was sweeping over all her knowledge of the detested woman—“Mildred won’t dare retract it. She’ll separate herself from even defused scandal. To do otherwise would mean admitting that she—Mildred Mead-ows!”—she shredded the name—“has been duped, deceived, fooled”—she embraced each word—“and by Alberta Holland!” Again, she hoped she was right.

  Even as Alberta’s mind continued to toss with ideas, she studied the two women closely. They at first appeared to be opposites because of the difference in their hair coloring, their manner—Enid was dark-haired, cool, somewhat aloof; Marilyn was blonde, warm, openly affectionate. In that careful scrutiny, Alberta detected a natural beauty in Enid that Marilyn had copied—no, created, Alberta withdrew any implicit judgment in her assessment—created through masterful artifice that had now achieved its own reality, its own naturalness.

  Enid must have understood the meaningful, careful attention to their appearance, because she offered this information: For years—“to confuse reporters for the hell of it and give Marilyn some privacy”—Enid had often appeared in public, not as Marilyn Monroe but as “Marilyn Monroe in disguise.” One or the other of them would tip eager reporters: “Wearing a black wig, Marilyn will be at—, on—, dressed in—” When photographers sprang at her, Enid would shelter her face, just so, while making sure it was captured by the cameras. That image became so recognizable that several times her photograph appeared identified as “Marilyn Monroe spotted in her usual disguise.” To lock the masquerade, during one daring and rare excursion together—

  “I wore a black wig and was Enid, and Enid wore a blonde wig and was me; and she was asked for autographs while I was ignored.” Marilyn joined in with the sudden delight of a schoolgirl.