Not Cukor’s, rather that of one of the two cinematographers (one camera was going poolside, this other up top) yelling down, echoingly, “I’m sorry, darling—but the lines in the swimsuit are showing up!”
This was a stilted reading, obviously planned, but Marilyn quickly, and deftly, slipped off the suit. That left only the very sheer bra and panties beneath, and those soon followed, deposited at the edge of the pool as if put out to dry.
Sam’s mouth was hanging open. I started to laugh, then realized mine was yawning, too.
She was a vision, a nymph, if a nymph was as womanly as that, a pink ghost flickering beneath the turquoise glimmer, occasionally exposing more than just a limb, a delicious rump, a pert breast—even the amber pubic triangle made its presence known, if fleetingly.
Pat Newcomb, at my side, said softly, “Having fun?”
“I guess she’s showing the Fox boys she isn’t over the hill.”
The publicist grunted a little laugh. “She had to get Black Bart’s blessing, you know.”
“Who?”
She nodded toward the stout woman in the black muumuu, just beyond the big camera. “Had to have Paula’s blessing. Had to be approved ‘Method’ technique for Marilyn to swim in the nude.”
“Yeah? What’s the scene about?”
“Tempting her husband out of Cyd Charisse’s bed.”
“This is the method that would do that.”
Cukor would occasionally call “Cut,” mostly for a camera reload, and during one such break, Pat called an assistant director over and said, “Now.”
Soon a couple of photographers came in, and the publicist walked them to their respective spots and said, “You have half an hour, fellas. Don’t waste it.”
They didn’t. They had those new motor-driven Nikons that could snap half a dozen frames per second.
They caught her bobbing in the turquoise water. Got her poolside getting in and out of the nappy blue robe, even providing a few glimpses of dimpled behind. Captured incredible shots of her gripping the pool’s rim while a shapely leg slid up onto the Spanish tiles. All that, and one dazzling, knowing smile after another.…
Then when she sat on the steps and let the robe disappear and showed the fantastic sweep of her back into her narrow waist and out into the full hips, water beading, sparkling on that gorgeous flesh, audible gasps (including from Heller Father and Son) could be heard.
She just looked over her shoulder at everybody, with that old Betty Boop innocence, as if to say, “Whatever are you boys so excited about?”
And my son said, “Best birthday ever, Dad. Hell. Best dad ever.”
And father and son just stood there in the dark, bonding, ignoring each other’s erection.
CHAPTER 2
Two weeks ago, more or less, I had left Marilyn Monroe on top of the world, or anyway the part of it that included a soundstage swimming pool at Twentieth Century–Fox, whose executives were at her feet. Now, having breakfast at Nate ’n Al’s in Beverly Hills, I was reading in the LA Times about a very different Marilyn from the one Sam and I had watched doing a sexy water ballet.
According to Hedda Hopper, Marilyn had been “half mad” on the set of Something’s Got to Give, unable to remember her lines, sleepwalking through her performance, and—on the day of her nude swim—stripping off her Jean Louis bikini, so high on drugs “she didn’t even know where she was.”
Around me in the showbiz-heavy deli, Marilyn arguments pro and con raged, and when I went around picking up various other papers, including the trades, I found amazing quotes: director Cukor saying, “This is the end of the poor girl’s career,” Fox studio head Peter Levathes claiming, “Miss Monroe is not temperamental, she is mentally ill,” producer Walter Bernstein insisting, “By her willful irresponsibility, Marilyn Monroe has taken the bread right out of the mouths of men who depend on this film to feed their families.”
“This film” had officially been shut down by Fox for recasting or outright scrapping, and Marilyn fired.
I pushed aside half a plate of scrambled eggs and lox, quickly paid the check, and tooled the Jag back to my bungalow at the Beverly Hills Hotel. My digs were just the basics—living room, marble fireplace, two bedrooms, two baths, private patio. The spare bedroom had a desk that I used for work, and from there I tried to phone Marilyn at her North Doheny Drive apartment, but a dozen rings got me nowhere.
Trying Pat Newcomb at the Arthur Jacobs agency got me a little somewhere—a receptionist put me through to the publicist’s male assistant, who took my name and number and said he would pass it right on to Miss Newcomb, who was out.
I went on about my business, spending the day at the A-1 office in the Bradbury Building in downtown Los Angeles—we were hiring, and my partner, Fred Rubinski, and I interviewed half a dozen ex–LA cops. Despite what Jack Webb might have you believe, not every LA cop is intelligent, reliable, and honest, and it was a chore.
Anyway, the following Monday I was reaching for the phone to make a TWA booking back to Chicago when the damn thing rang, making me jump a little. Maybe I wasn’t as tough as I used to be.
“Sorry I didn’t get back to you sooner,” Pat Newcomb said. She sounded tired.
“I guess you’ve had your hands full.”
“I have. I’m at Marilyn’s now, as it happens.”
“The Doheny pad?”
Marilyn’s actual residence was an apartment on East Fifty-seventh in New York, but since she and Arthur Miller divorced, her Hollywood address had been at a triplex in West Hollywood, owned by Frank Sinatra. Frank’s Negro valet, George Jacobs, lived there, and usually one or two of the singer’s squeezes, or sometimes a pal needing a temporary roof. Which category Marilyn fell into, I wasn’t sure.
“No, she’s not there anymore,” Newcomb said. “She has a house in Brentwood.”
“How’s she doing? This shit in the papers, it just doesn’t let up.”
And it hadn’t.
“It’s a smear campaign by the studio.”
“You’re not asking me to believe Hedda Hopper is untrustworthy, are you? She has such a nice smile.”
“She’s a bitch,” Pat snapped, maybe not reading my sarcasm. “As for Marilyn, she’s had a rough couple days and nights, but … Well, come see for yourself.”
“Yeah?”
“Yes. She wants to see you. She likes you.”
“Don’t sound surprised. Haven’t you noticed how lovable I am?”
She wasn’t in the mood for banter, and just gave me the address and the directions.
On the way over, I wondered if I would at last encounter the Marilyn of Hollywood rumor—the notorious drug-addicted dumb-blonde diva. Would I finally see that dark, self-pitying side of her that had caused, supposedly, half a dozen or more suicide attempts? Would she be a slurry wreck, or perhaps a paranoid harridan blaming the Fox executives for all her woes?
The closest I’d come to knowing the troubled Marilyn was the occasional very-late-night phone call from her—I was one of her long-distance buddies who she might reach out to when she was having trouble sleeping. Insomnia was her real archenemy, worse than Fox or Hedda Hopper.
That phone-friend list must have been fairly long, because I’d had only five or six of these calls over the years, coming at two or three in morning, and always starting the same way: “This is Marilyn Monroe. You know, the actress?”
That was silly, of course, but usually enough time had passed since I’d heard from her to make it credible, coming from that oddly shy, modest part of this girl who must have been in some manner an egotist to have made it so far.
But I’d never got a drugged-up or drunk Marilyn on the line—just that familiar, breathy female voice. The kind no healthy heterosexual male would respond to with, “Do you have any idea what time it is?”
What you say is, “Yeah, I remember you. I think maybe I saw one of your pictures,” or maybe, “I know you. I’m a detective, remember?”
And she would laugh
and you’d talk till finally she started getting sleepy enough to sign off.
Brentwood had recovered from its disastrous fire of the previous November, once again a sleepy upper-middle-class community whose main drag was San Vicente Boulevard, its wide median home to sculpted coral trees. I wheeled the Jag onto Carmelina Avenue, a winding affair off of which were various greenery-swarmed cul-de-sacs. I was looking for Fifth Helena Drive, only Pat Newcomb warned me that it wasn’t marked—I had to count the cul-de-sacs, plus she described the houses on either corner.
Somehow I got it on the first try, though calling this short narrow strip a cul-de-sac was rather grand—I knew an alley when I saw one. At the mouth, on either side, were the homes the publicist had described for me, and at the end of the alley were two more homes, a two-story to the right, and Marilyn’s to the left.
You couldn’t see much of Marilyn’s place, though—a whitewashed seven-foot brick wall smothered in blooming bougainvillea vines blocked everything but a glimpse of red barrel-tiled roof of what would prove to be the garage.
The Jag I left half on the grass in case some other vehicle needed the space, and stepped from air-conditioning into a pleasantly warm sunny Cal afternoon, kissed with a nice coastal ocean breeze from the west.
Hollywood royalty lived here, but I was informal—black-collared gray Ban-Lon sport shirt; beltless, cuffless H.I.S. gray slacks; black suede loafers—and I’d taken to going hatless. Our young president’s fault.
I knocked at the double scalloped-topped wooden gate, and then knocked some more, and at last a middle-range female voice (definitely not Marilyn’s) responded drowsily from a distance, making three sluggish syllables out of “Yes.”
“Nathan Heller,” I said to the gate, loud but not yelling. “Miss Monroe is expecting me.”
The breeze ruffled pond fronds as footsteps minced on hard surface.
The gate wasn’t locked, although swinging it open seemed to take a lot out of the small dowdy middle-aged woman. She had short-cut wispy dark hair and unflattering dark-rimmed cat’s-eye glasses, and her shapeless floral housedress covered a stumpy asexual figure.
She gazed at me as if we were both underwater and I was a rare fish she’d come across, only she wasn’t interested in rare fish.
“You are…?”
“Nathan Heller? Miss Monroe’s expecting me?”
Was there a fucking echo in here?
“Oh. Yes. Well, all right.”
She turned her back to me and trundled across the tile courtyard toward the house, a quietly handsome L-shaped Spanish colonial with stuccoed adobe walls. But this absentminded troll belonged guarding a ramshackle middle-of-nowhere mansion, the kind where you ask to use the phone because your car broke down, and wind up a mad doctor’s next experiment.
She was reaching for the front door, but I said, “Let me get that,” ever the gentleman. Glancing down at the four tiles on the doorstep, depicting a coat of arms, I noted an inscription in blue on gray: Cursum Perficio.
“What’s that mean?” I said, more to myself than my hostess.
“Latin,” she whispered, as if this were a secret. “For ‘I have completed my journey.’ Marilyn finds comfort in that.”
She gave me a sick smile and went in. I closed the door after us, moving through the entryway into a wide living room dominated by a fireplace and glass doors onto the swimming pool. Thick white carpeting and textured white walls made a sharp contrast with bright colors courtesy of Mexican art and dark, rustic furnishings that matched the open beams.
In a white cotton short-sleeve blouse and dark capri pants, Marilyn—sitting Indian-style on the carpet near the unlighted fireplace—wore only a touch of lipstick, her platinum hair tousled, though her toes did reveal red nails. She had a fresh, freckled, youthful look, more Norma Jeane than MM.
She just smiled and waved, like a beauty queen on a float who’d spotted a homely gal friend in the crowd, and returned to her dictation.
Because that’s what she was doing, giving dictation to Pat Newcomb, who was seated on a Mexican-style wooden chair with insufficient cushions, taking down Marilyn’s crisp words on a steno pad. Some kind of list was in her lap. The publicist was looking haggard, though still attractive in her eternal sorority-girl way; she was in a blue blouse and darker blue slacks.
“‘Shutting the film down was none of my doing,’” Marilyn was saying. “‘I hope you know that. I am working to get us all back working again. Say hi to your lovely girls. Love, Marilyn.’ … How many does that make?”
Newcomb’s smile was strained. “That’s one hundred and four.”
I had taken a seat at a low-slung black-leather-covered coffee table nearby. Newcomb glanced at me, and I must have raised an eyebrow or something, because she explained: “Marilyn has dictated telegrams to every crew member on Something’s Got to Give. Each one personalized.”
Marilyn was nodding. “I always know everyone on the crew.… Hi, Nate. Thanks for coming.”
“Hi, Marilyn. Pleasure’s mine.”
She little-girl frowned at me. “You saw that ad, didn’t you? The one signed by all the crew members?”
I nodded. In Variety, an ad supposedly signed by all the propmen, carpenters, electricians, and so on had said: “Thank you, Marilyn Monroe, for the loss of our livelihoods.”
Newcomb said, “It was a fraud. We called around. Nobody on the crew knew anything about that ad. Everybody knows Marilyn is a friend to the workingman.”
Marilyn giggled. “That sounds dirty.” She had a glass of champagne going, resting where the carpet gave way and the fireplace began; no bottle was in sight, though.
The publicist shut the steno pad. “That’s it, then?”
“No! Send this to Arlington, Virginia. You know where.”
“Marilyn … honey … what—”
Comically commanding, Marilyn pointed at the publicist. “Write! I have to decline a formal invitation, don’t I? It wouldn’t be polite otherwise, would it?… ‘Dear Attorney General and Mrs. Robert Kennedy. I would have been delighted to have accepted your invitation honoring Pat and Peter Lawford.’”
Newcomb was hunkered over her pad like a slave at an oar, pencil tip scratching paper.
“‘Unfortunately, I am involved in a freedom ride protesting the loss of minority rights belonging to the few remaining…’” She looked toward the open beams for guidance. “‘… earthbound stars.’”
“Signed, respectfully…?”
“Keep writing. ‘After all, all we demanded was our right to twinkle.’” She blurted a “Ha!” and rocked on her bottom, then had a sip of champagne.
Then she remembered me. “Nate, would you like something? There’s plenty of Dom Pérignon.”
“I bet there is. No.”
“I can get you some other drink, what is it you like? Rum and Coke?”
“I switched to vodka gimlets.”
“Ooh, how sixties of you. I can have Mrs. Murray fetch you—”
“Is that your housekeeper or—”
“She’s more a companion. Social secretary.”
She’d have made a better companion or social secretary for Vincent Price than Marilyn Monroe. But whatever she was, I hadn’t even seen her go. Mrs. Murray had vanished without even a puff of smoke.
“No, thanks,” I said. “You girls finish up your work.”
Marilyn shrugged exaggeratedly, then extended both hands. “That’s all! We’re done!” She clapped once, got to her bare feet. “Come on, Pat—don’t be so glum. We’re making strides.”
Newcomb smiled, nodded wearily. “We are. I’m really happy to see you in such good spirits.”
“You have to be in good spirits to fight back. And that’s what we’re doing. And after this good news—”
I interrupted: “What good news?”
She turned her big blue eyes on me, very wide. “I guess it hasn’t hit the papers yet. Might be on the radio and TV.”
“What might be on the radio and TV?
”
“Dean. Dean Martin? My costar?”
“Yeah, guy who used to work with Jerry Lewis. What about him?”
Her smile was fetchingly smug. “Those smart-asses at Fox didn’t think to look at his contract—he has costar approval! When Kim and Shirley turned them down, they talked Lee Remick into taking my part.… Lee Remick? I mean, she’s cute, but.… Anyway, Dean quit the picture.”
Newcomb was smiling. “That’s right. He said, ‘No Marilyn, no Martin.’”
“He’s a sweetie,” Marilyn said, and her eyes got misty. “I mean, it’s touching, isn’t it? That kind of loyalty? In this town?”
She swallowed, and Newcomb went over and gave her a hug, then moved away, saying, “I better get out of here. I have a hundred and five telegrams to post.”
Marilyn’s smile was a beacon in the little room. “Yes, you do! Now scoot!”
Newcomb scooted, though she did take time to cast me a glance and a smile. I did her the same.
As the door closed, Marilyn came over to me and said, “Your turn,” and gave me a big hug. She smelled great—Chanel No. 5, as usual, but probably not directly applied; she always dumped a bottle in her bath.
“I have to say you look great,” I said.
She spread her hands in a presentational manner. “Not bad for thirty-six, huh? You think I’ve lost too much weight?”
“I like you any way I can get you. But this, this I think is your ideal fighting weight.”
“Fighting weight is right,” she said, and made two fists and held them up muscleman style. “You have no idea what these bastards are trying to do to me.”
“What can I do to help?”
She gave me another hug, then a sweet, short kiss that hovered somewhere between brother and lover. “First let me give you the dime tour. Don’t you just love this place? It’s my safe haven, it really is.”
So she took me by the hand like Mommy leading her favorite little boy, chattering on about how it was the first home she’d ever owned and how she cried when she signed the papers, pausing when we reached a point of interest.
Bye Bye, Baby Page 2