And the funny thing was, she could’ve used the money. She was only getting a hundred K for starring in Something’s Got to Give, which might seem like a lot for those days, but when you figure Liz Taylor was paid a million for Cleopatra, and when you’re a movie star, you got to live like a movie star …
So, anyway, Marilyn was in her “disguise” that night, but she had the maître d’ seat us close to her place on the “Wall of Fame”—these framed caricatures of famous and maybe not-so-famous movie stars and other Hollywood big shots that went all the way back to 1929. And she made sure it was a booth with a phone jack, so the waiter could bring a telephone over should an important call come in. Also, no sooner do we sit down then some girl with a cigarette tray and a camera comes along and offers to take our picture for a buck, and Marilyn says, “Sure, honey. Why not?”
I didn’t get the logic of this, going incognito to a place where everyone was sure to recognize you anyway. All that time I spent around the woman, and I never understood the first thing about her. But then I’d probably never seen her when she wasn’t acting.
“You look at her and see a world-famous movie star,” Katya told me once. “But inside she’s feeling like a scared little girl, afraid that if you stripped away her blond hair and breasts, she’d just be a nobody. She wants to be loved for herself, unconditionally, and not as a sex object.”
Unconditional love. Yeah, it sounded good all right, but I’d discovered long ago that there were conditions attached to just about everything. Still, maybe that explained how a world-famous movie star ended up being best friends with a cameraman’s gofer.
Because when Katya Orlova loved you, she did so unconditionally.
SO THAT NIGHT at the Brown Derby, over our Cobb salads, Marilyn started talking about sex in that breathy bedroom voice of hers.
“If they gave out Oscars for faking it,” she said, “I’d have so many on my mantelpiece it would crack right in two. I’ve done some of my best acting convincing my lovers I was in the throes of ecstasy.”
“I doubt they took all that much convincing,” I said, thinking that all the guys she’d slept with probably hadn’t given a rat’s ass if she came or sang the “Hallelujah Chorus.”
She made a face at me, but her eyes were fairly dancing with delight because she liked being teased, and she liked the idea that right at this very moment I was probably imagining what a romp in the sheets with her would be like, and, yeah, I was. I’m not dead.
But then the smile turned brittle, and an awkward silence fell over the table. So Katya, ever Marilyn’s rescuer, said, “You haven’t eaten much of your salad tonight, darling. Only rearranged it on your plate. You need to eat. You’re getting too skinny.”
This pleased Marilyn so much she held out her forearm, gave her flesh a good squeeze, then laughed again. “Jack likes me skinny. He never came out and said it, but I think he thought I was too fat there for a while. He likes me to pose in front of him wearing nothing but a fur coat, and then I do this thing with my shoulders and the coat slides off …”
Katya and I exchanged a look, but neither of us said anything. To Marilyn, it was as if we weren’t there, or she was just too dense to realize how really bizarre it was for her to talk so nonchalantly about screwing the president of the United States.
“To tell you the truth, Jack makes love like a boy,” she went on, “but it’s still kind of sweet, and it never matters because he actually talks to me about politics and things. He treats me like I have a mind, that I’m not just all tits and ass.”
I blinked at that, couldn’t help it. I held a forkful of salad halfway to my mouth while my mind tried to process this remarkable piece of self-delusion. I thought of the secret files I’d read on the President’s sexual exploits. The orgies in the White House swimming pool, countless one-night stands, or rather more like thirty-minute stands, a near endless stream of women, both classy and low, and the way he talked about them. He called them “poontang.” Tits and ass.
Yet here was Miss Sex Appeal Personified thinking the man valued her for the wonders of her mind.
“James Joyce could really penetrate the human soul, don’t you think?” Marilyn was now saying, and don’t ask me how she got from fucking the President to English Lit 101. “I’ve been reading Molly Bloom’s mental meanderings—see, I can be clever with words just like you, Mike…. Now, here is Joyce, a man, writing about what a woman thinks to herself, but he got it, didn’t he? All our pain and insecurities. And I’ve been reading Shakespeare too, memorizing whole chunks, because I’ve been thinking I could produce and act in the Marilyn Monroe Shakespeare Film Festival. I’ll approach all his major plays from the female point of view.”
“Oh, darling, I like it,” Katya said, and I knew the enthusiasm in her voice wasn’t faked, bless her. She had the most generous heart—when she believed in you, she believed all the way down to her toes. “A woman’s Shakespeare. And think how it will show everyone what a really fine actress you are.”
Marilyn beamed. “I feel certain I’ll win an Academy Award for one or more of my Shakespearean woman. Don’t laugh, Mike.”
“I’m not,” I said, and if anyone deserved an Oscar, it should’ve been me.
“Oh, Kat,” Marilyn said to my wife, “you don’t know how I’ve so wanted to talk to Jack about this, to get his opinion too, but when I tried to get hold of him, I found out they’d changed his number, the special one he gave me for the Oval Office. So I called the main switchboard, only they wouldn’t put me through.”
Well, well, well, I thought. Now, this was interesting.
I remembered the Democratic fund-raising tribute in Madison Square Garden a few weeks ago, of course, with Marilyn in her fur stole and a $12,000 Jean Louis beaded gown, oozing sex and singing “Happy Birthday, Mr. President.” She couldn’t have declared more boldly and plainly to the world what was what than if she’d gone on What’s My Line and said, “I am having sex with John Fitzgerald Kennedy.”
So it was hardly a wonder if the President’s handlers had reacted to that night with a dawning horror, and better late than never in my opinion. The affair had started back in December, and everybody who was anybody in Washington knew about it. The press corps sure knew all about it, but they kept that kind of stuff off the front page, not wanting to tarnish the image of the office, or so they said. Hell, maybe they just liked Jack, wanted to see him get reelected, and, besides, more than a few of them, especially the Washington Post guys, got invited to those White House pool parties.
But then Marilyn had to go and smack everyone in the face with it. And what with brother Teddy’s senatorial primary looming in September and the administration still reeling over the Bay of Pigs fiasco, they sure didn’t need the scandal of a White House love affair of any sort to tarnish the Camelot image, let alone one with the most famous woman in the world.
“At least I’ve been able talk to Bobby about it,” Marilyn went on. “I met him that night I sang ‘Happy Birthday,’ and he’s been such a big help through everything these last few weeks. He’s a wonderful person to tell your troubles and your dreams to.”
I swallowed a snort along with a piece of bacon and nearly choked. Katya was making little soothing sounds in the back of her throat, but a worry crease was now between her eyes.
Marilyn planted her elbows on the table, leaned into us, then cast a furtive look around the restaurant as if eavesdroppers lurked behind the potted palms. “I guess you’ve probably heard the rumors about Bobby and me. It seems like suddenly all Hollywood can’t talk about anything else.”
“Now there’s a puzzle,” I said. Katya kicked me in the shin.
“Well, they aren’t true. Sure, we’ve made love, but when I hear about some of the stuff we’re supposed to have done—well, it isn’t true.”
Robert Kennedy, the President’s brother and Attorney General of the United States, had been out here in Hollywood a lot this summer to drum up financing for the filming of The Enemy Wi
thin, his bestseller about his crusade against organized crime. I knew for a fact there’d been some pretty wild parties at this Santa Monica beach house belonging to Bobby’s brother-in-law Peter Lawford. The place had lots of bedrooms, but the scuttlebutt going around was that Bobby and Marilyn’s favorite place to get it on was in the bathtub.
“I think all these awful rumors are getting to Bobby,” Marilyn said. “Because now something funny’s going on with him too. It’s like they’re all trying to shut him off from me, just like they’re doing with the President.”
I opened my mouth, and Katya kicked my shin again, so I shut my mouth.
But Marilyn seemed to have read my thoughts as if they’d appeared in a comic-strip bubble above my head.
“I’m not stupid, Mike, so quit thinking I am,” she said, and looked both wistful and tough at the same time. Quite a feat, I thought. “I think they’ve got him convinced I’ll go blabbing about us in a press conference, because he told—”
She’d been all set to come out with something really juicy before she cut herself off, I was sure of it, and I nearly swore out loud. But then she said instead, “Jack sent someone out to my house to tell me it’s over. He should have at least had the courage to tell me good-bye to my face.”
“Oh, Marilyn.” Katya reached out and touched her arm. “You know how men are. They don’t like scenes.”
“Is that how men are, Mike?”
I had a tough time looking her in the face. It was like her heart was on the verge of being broken. Really broken, and that surprised me. Surely any girl who’d been around as many blocks as she had knew the score. I mean, it’s not like she ever believed Jack would divorce Jackie and marry her, did she?
I said, “Honestly? We’d rather be boiled in oil, skewered on a spit, and then flayed alive. When it comes to women, we’re all cowards. Every one of us.”
Marilyn nodded solemnly, as if I’d revealed the answer to one of life’s great mysteries, and for the first time I, Mike O’Malley, felt sorry for her. Katya had told me about Marilyn’s childhood, born a bastard, her mother in and out of insane asylums while she was shunted off to orphanages and foster homes, unwanted and unloved, and so she’d created a sex goddess, a woman no man could ever possibly leave. And now here she was being dumped like yesterday’s garbage, and, yeah, it was stupid of her not to have seen it coming, but it was also sad.
Then she said something out of the blue that floored me.
“I can survive this, though, because for the first time in my life I feel strong inside myself. Oh, I know that what I have might not last forever—fame is fickle, as they say. But if it goes, then it goes, and I’ll survive because I know my true worth. Not only do I know what I can do, I know what I must do.”
This time Katya reached across the table and took her hand. “You’ve always been a strong person. No one could get to where you are without being strong inside. And tough.”
Marilyn gave her a smile that trembled at the edges. “And you’ve always seen the best in me, Kat. That’s why I love you. But I haven’t always seen the best in myself. Until now. So they don’t need to worry about me, those switchboard operators and those men with their dark suits and hard faces. I’ll never embarrass him.”
“I know it will be hard, but you really are doing the right thing,” Katya said, but she still looked worried. Or maybe, like me, she wasn’t sure where all this was going, but she had an inkling it wasn’t to a happy place.
“Oh, I am,” Marilyn exclaimed. “I know I am. Because Jack needs me now more than ever. This is a man who can change our country. He shared his vision with me, so I know. If he has his way, no child will go hungry, no person will sleep in the street and get his meals from garbage cans …”
There was more, and all of it sounding like the worst sort of campaign-ad dreck, so I tuned her out and amused myself by trying to see how many of the caricatures on the wall I could recognize.
And then I heard her say to Katya, “That’s why I’m going to give him your magic amulet, Kat. Your altar of bones. To do all he needs to do. At least I can help him in that way.”
Altar of bones?
It was such a non sequitur, and a really weird one, that I almost missed Katya’s reaction. And I’d only ever read about this in books, but her face actually drained of blood, like someone had come along, whipped out a knife, and slit her throat.
When she could finally speak, her voice was a strangled, harsh whisper. “Marilyn, please. It was to be our little secret. You promised.”
“I know, and I was going to keep my promise, really I was. But that was before. He’s not well, Kat. He’s sicker than most people know. The Addison’s disease is killing him, he’s in pain all the time. So I’ve got to give it to him, because there’s no end to what he will achieve if he’s given the chance.”
Katya’s hands were lying flat on the table, pressing so hard her knuckles were white. I reached out and wrapped my fingers around one of her wrists. I squeezed, hard enough to get her attention. “What is this altar of bones?”
Katya didn’t look at me, she didn’t even blink. She said, “Marilyn, listen to me. You cannot under any circumstances give the … the magic amulet to President Kennedy.”
“But why not? Look at what it’s done for me. First, it helped me over that little trouble I had last month.”
The “little trouble,” I knew, had something to do with a long weekend Marilyn had taken on the spur of the moment out of town. The day after she left, Katya got a call in the middle of the night and took off, without telling me why or where she was going, and when she got back two days later, she looked white, shaken down to her core, but she still refused to tell me what it was all about no matter how hard I pushed. I had my suspicions, though, that Marilyn’s little trouble was an abortion that had somehow gone wrong.
“Then it got rid of that sinus infection that wouldn’t go away,” Marilyn was saying. “The studio and Mr. Cukor told me I was just being lazy for missing so many shoots. With them it’s like you don’t even dare get a cold. And then they made it out like I was mentally ill because I’d flub my lines, when I was so sick I couldn’t hold a thought in my head. But my mind feels so sharp and focused now. I told you I’ve been memorizing Shakespeare? And I’ve lost the flab, you said so yourself. I’m thin and fitter than I’ve ever been in my life. I’m even sleeping most nights. Oh, Kat, you can’t imagine how good it is to sleep.”
I said again to Katya, “What’s she talking about? What did you give her?”
Katya didn’t answer, but Marilyn unbuttoned the neck of her dress and reached inside to pull out a silver chain with a tiny bottle-green glass amulet, about the size of a thumbnail, dangling at the end of it. I leaned over for a closer look and saw that the amulet was shaped like a human skull and had an itty-bitty silver stopper. Strange marks were etched into the glass, almost like rune characters.
Marilyn said, “It’s a funny thing to call it, the altar of bones. Like something out of a B horror movie. But then I got to thinking—your skeleton is your inner framework, like the steel beams on a skyscraper—and the altar of bones makes you strong from the inside out, so it’s the perfect name for what it is.”
I relaxed then and let go of Katya’s wrist. She cradled it to her chest, rubbing the red marks I’d left on her, and I felt mean for having hurt her. This altar-of-bones thing was just one of those old Russian folk remedies she was always going on about whenever I got so much as a sniffle. Some witch-doctor hoodoo her mother had brought out of Siberia with her. Eye of newt and hair of the toad, or some such nonsense, with maybe a little feel-good, peyote-like mushroom thrown in.
Trust Marilyn, I thought, to have actually swallowed some of the stuff, and then she goes and has herself a good day and, presto-chango, it’s magic and she decides to make a federal case out of it. Literally.
Still, it wasn’t something you could go passing along to the president of the United States without having all kinds of federal
agencies crawling up your ass. No wonder my poor Katya just had the fright of her life; she probably envisioned the Secret Service descending on her with handcuffs and an arrest warrant.
She seemed to have recovered, though, and I was relieved to see the color back in her face. Even the worry line was gone from between her eyes.
She slipped her arm around Marilyn’s waist and gave her a hug. “You’re such a generous person, too generous for your own good sometimes. Only you should put it away now, before someone in the restaurant here misunderstands and goes to the press, and then tomorrow there’ll be screaming headlines in all the tabloids about how you’re mainlining heroin.”
Marilyn laughed and tucked the little glass vial back between her boobs, and like a fool I figured that would be the last I’d ever see or hear about the altar of bones.
LATER, THE THREE of us stood beneath the restaurant’s red awning, waiting for the valet to bring our car around.
I looked out at Hollywood and Vine; the neon lights were buzzing in the still air, the sidewalks humming with life. I watched a Cadillac convertible with giant tail fins cruise by, its radio blaring Little Eva’s “The Loco-Motion.” The Caddy was full of girls with teased hair and tight sweaters and dreams in their eyes about being a star, and I thought of something Marilyn had once said, about Hollywood being a place where they pay you a thousand dollars for a kiss and fifty cents for your soul.
I turned to look at her then, but she and Katya had stepped away from me and were talking, their heads together, and I wondered again about their strange friendship. Something, I thought, bound them together, something beyond Marilyn’s loneliness and my wife’s exaggerated sense of loyalty, but I couldn’t for the life of me grasp what that something was. I guess there are some things in this world that simply defy explanation.
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