The Undocumented Mark Steyn

by Mark Steyn

  That first husband was the Young at Heart feckless-musician routine without the Hollywood gloss and Sinatra in the role: He was the trombonist in the band she was singing with. Her second spouse was a saxophonist, who offered a more stable home life, but in a rundown trailer park, not the picture-perfect picket-fence small-town idyll in which she passed her early movies. They split up, although they reunited for occasional bouts of wild sex. Her first husband blew his brains out in a car; her second she failed to recognize when she bumped into him on the street a few years back; and the third bilked her out of all her dough. (There was, briefly, a fourth, a head waiter who always gave Doris a complimentary doggie bag on her way out of the restaurant.) Surely, I suggested, that would dent your faith in all these boy-meets-girl movie plots and moon-June love songs?

  “Well, as I always say,” she chirped, “que sera, sera. Even before they ever wrote the song, that was my philosophy.” She admitted that she regretted “most of my marriages,” and you sense that it was not until very late that she enjoyed the domestic placidity that came so easily in her films. She told me she needs the dogs, but can do without a man. “A lot of women do,” she said. “I’m doing just fine, thank you. I love being able to go to the supermarket. It’s my favorite activity. But you should never go to the supermarket when you’re hungry, Mark, because, if you do, you’ll wind up filling three carts—or trolleys, as they say in Britain.”

  And so we talked about supermarkets for a while. At home in Carmel-by-the-Sea, Doris Day has finally become the girl next door.

  Her son, Terry, was mostly raised by her mother, while Doris was on the road with the Les Brown band. But they were always close, especially after she packed in the hubby business for good, and he became her closest confidant—and the man behind her later and mostly unreleased recordings. A widely admired producer for the Byrds, the Mamas and Papas, and the Beach Boys (for whom he wrote the song “Kokomo”), Terry Melcher died of melanoma ten years ago, and in 2011 Doris picked out a few of the tracks he’d recorded with her in the Eighties and Nineties and put out a CD, My Heart. At eighty-seven, she became the oldest ever singer to have a UK Top Ten album of previously unreleased material.

  Strange to hear Doris Day sing the Beach Boys song “Disney Girls,” and Billy Preston’s “You Are So Beautiful.” I wonder what else she’s keeping in the vaults. When we spoke by telephone, I told her that her version of “I Had the Craziest Dream” was one of my favorite recordings, and it made me sad that she preferred walking shitsus and pushing supermarket carts, which anyone can do. “Oh, I might do some singing again,” she said. “I sang at a Best Friends fundraiser we held at the house not long ago, and I was pretty pleased.” And then came, as for Allan Carr at the Oscars, the inevitable letdown. “But I’ve been hoarse for months now. I have hundreds of trees and they’re all live oaks, and, because of the pollen, it affects the voice.”

  “Really?” I responded, unable to suspend disbelief. “The trees have damaged your singing voice?”

  “My doctors wouldn’t dare blame it on my animals,” she said, firmly, “so I’ve decided to blame it on the poor trees.”

  And over the telephone line, from far in the distance, Wesley, or possibly Buster, barked—up a wronged tree.

  Happy ninetieth birthday, Doris. And here’s to the next album.

  THE SEVENTY-YEAR ITCH

  In 1996, The Daily Telegraph in London gave me one of my best assignments—the chance to interview a living legend as she prepared to celebrate her seventieth birthday.

  The Daily Telegraph, May 31, 1996

  SHE ARRIVES, AS ALWAYS, late but, when she does, every head turns: not because of that trademark lip-quiver in the smile or the breathless, girlish voice inquiring about her luncheon guest or the famous bosom (a little fuller) and the wiggling hips (a little fuller still), but because, for the first time in half a century, Marilyn Monroe’s bleached blonde hair is once again a mousey brown.

  “It’s about closure; it’s about letting go,” she says, declining an aperitif. “It’s all in the book.” The book is Norma Jean: The Child Inside, by Marilyn Monroe (Lorelei & Lee, £15.99) and, as Oprah Winfrey writes in a perceptive introduction, “Before Roseanne, there was Marilyn.” It’s an exhaustive account of sexual abuse, abortions, drugs, and suicide attempts that has shocked the millions of Americans for whom the name Marilyn Monroe will always mean Glory Bea Barnes, Miss Ellie’s love rival for Clayton Farlowe through eight smash seasons of Dallas.

  On the jacket, a gauche teenager stares out, combing her thick, brown curls, in an early modeling assignment. “That’s Norma Jean just before she bleached her hair and became Marilyn,” says Miss Monroe. “It’s taken me fifty years to pluck up the courage to dye my hair its natural color.”

  “You dye your hair its natural color?”

  She ruffles her locks and laughs and, unusually, the still childlike voice has a faint rasp of world weariness. “Honey, I’m about to turn seventy. I could leave it white—when we did Cocoon, Jessica Tandy said I should and, God knows, she cleaned up. But to be confident enough to dye my hair the color it was before I started dyeing it is a big part of rediscovering who I am. You have to know where you’ve come from to find where you’re going to. Besides, I’ve hated my hair ever since Elton.”

  “That would be your sixth husband?”

  “Yeah. After all those father figures, I figured I’d try a younger man. When I’d come out of the bathroom with my old brown hairbrush sticking up out of the wavy peroxide, he used to say ‘Ooh, what I’d give for a 99 from Mister Whippy.’ Funny thing with these artistic types: they always want to talk dirty.”

  She kicks off her pumps, pulls her knees up and hugs her pedal-pushers—the pink and yellow checks that Elton claimed made him homesick for Battenberg cake. She stares into my eyes, draws down her upper lip, and purrs creamily: “As Marcel Proust, 1871 to 1922, said in Du côté de chez Swann, volume one, in the Scott-Moncrieff translation, ‘Learning to love yourself is the greatest love of all.’”

  “Are you sure?” I say. “It doesn’t sound like Proust.”

  Momentarily, she panics, puts her spectacles on and fumbles through her index. Even at seventy, she packs well-thumbed copies of Proust and Whitman and Rilke, as if still craving the approval of an Elia Kazan or Arthur Miller. Only recently has she begun to find her own voice. Her next book will be a volume of New Age philosophy (Crystals Are a Girl’s Best Friend), though neither that nor Norma Jean: The Child Inside seems to find much room for the movie career Miss Monroe used to have long before she fetched up in Dallas.

  “I can’t watch those early films anymore,” she says. “That whole vulnerability thing—it makes me so angry. And anger is not where I reside.”

  “Where do you reside?” I ask.

  “Palm Springs mainly, but I was speaking”—She exhales the next word breathily, as in her famous “Happy Birthday” greeting to President Nixon—“metaphorically.”

  The movies fizzled out after The Graduate flopped in 1968. “I blame myself,” she says. “The director, Mike Nichols, wanted someone else but the studio forced me on him. It killed all our careers, but it was my fault. I still feel guilty about that boy—what was he called? Justin Hoffberg? He drops me a line every couple of years. Last I heard he was running a not-for-profit theatre in South Bend, Indiana. Could have been a big star.”

  “Oh, that’s ridiculous,” I say. “He was just a nerdy little shrimp.”

  “They wrote that song for me, you know. ‘Boop-boop-be-doop Mrs. Robinson. . . . Where have you gone, Joe DiMaggio?’ Yeah, tell me about it.”

  Her smile sags, and she falls silent for a moment, until the young waiter awkwardly hovering interrupts. “Miss Monroe, this is an honor. I loved you in Mrs. Doubtfire.”

  “That was Robin Williams, dear,” she says. “I’ll have a Caesar salad and the lobster.”

  “Which one?” He waves towards the tank.

  “All of them.”

  �
�You’re going to eat forty-seven lobsters?”

  “Silly! I’m going to release them into the ocean.”

  “Like in The Misfits,” I say, “where you try to save the wild horses from being captured and killed.”

  Since her character was written out of Dallas, when Clayton went off to find himself with Ray Krebbs, things haven’t been easy. A cover version of “I Want Your Sex” by the Pet Shop Boys failed to re-ignite her singing career; her animal shelter was closed down, and her line of perfume, Breathless by Marilyn, was taken off the market after it was revealed that eau de toilette for the latter had been tested on raccoons from the former.

  Then, in 1994, she was unceremoniously sacked four days before she was due to open in Andrew Lloyd Webber’s Sunset Boulevard. “Andrew was so, y’know, goofy about it. He kept saying he couldn’t hear the songs. But she was a silent film star, wasn’t she? So he wouldn’t have heard any songs, would he? I learnt that at the Actors Studio: sometimes the artist can see things the author’s missed, and my take on the role was that a silent screen actress just wouldn’t have been comfortable with the whole idea of singing. I met Gloria Swanson, and, believe me, she was no Ethel Merman. . . .”

  I ask the question everyone wants to put: “Have you had cosmetic surgery?”

  She laughs and wrinkles her nose. “No,” she declares, and stretches out her hands. “Eat your heart out, Queen Elizabeth!” Liver spots, but not many lines. “You can feel if you want to,” she says, adjusting the silk clinging to her breasts. “I’m the last squishy star. They all have these hard bodies now.”

  She was Playboy’s first and most famous Playmate in December 1953 and reprised her performance for the twenty-fifth anniversary and again for the fortieth. “Do you want to know the secret?”

  “Sure,” I say.

  “Always sleep in your bra. It preserves the muscle tone.”

  She’s just sold the film rights to her book and passed the tip on to the actress who’ll be playing young Marilyn, Kate Moss. (“My what?” said Kate.)

  The waiter returns with the lobsters. “Just wheel the tank round by the car,” she says. “You can put it on expenses, can’t you?”

  “Well, I’m not sure,” I begin. But I know she’s never had much money. Even in the Fifties, she never made more than $1,500 a week, and Jane Russell got paid five times as much for Gentlemen Prefer Blondes. Since then, she’s compounded her problems by some ill-advised lawsuits. She sued Madonna, arguing that her “Material Girl” video amounted to the theft of her professional identity, and lost. Her publicist had warned me there’s one area she won’t discuss, but I can’t resist bringing it up: her ongoing sexual harassment suit against President Clinton.

  “Well, it’s upsetting to me because I was one of his first supporters,” she says, “long before Barbra or Fleetwood Mac. It was a big rally and I sang ‘He’s Just a Little Boy from Little Rock,’ and you can imagine my shock when he comes up to me afterwards and goes”—the voice drops to a whisper—“‘Say hello to a girl’s best friend, baby. And I don’t mean rhinestones.’”

  I am, frankly, skeptical. “Oh, come on,” I scoff. “This is the President of the United States we’re talking about!”

  “Well, he wasn’t the first of those Hail-to-the-Chief boys to try it on with me.”

  “Really? Who else?”

  “I’d rather not say.”

  “It was Nixon, wasn’t it?”

  “I’m not saying. But it was before Nixon.”

  “My God, Eisenhower!”

  “I told you I won’t say. But it was after Eisenhower.”

  “Good grief. LBJ?”

  “Just drop it, okay?’ And the girlish voice has a sudden flash of steel.

  So I move on. “What a life!” I marvel.

  “Oh, silly!” she chides. “I’m just one of those old faces people look at in restaurants and airports because somewhere under the wrinkles they think they can see a young face they used to recognize. U wrote a song about me. ‘And it seems to me you lived your life like a candle in the wind, never knowing who to cling to when the rain set in. . . .’”

  “That’s very good,” I say. “You should get him to record it.”

  “Oh, please. I told him I don’t get the simile. I mean, a candle doesn’t cling to you in the wind, does it? It would set your shirt alight. So he went off and composed a song about Judy Garland instead.”

  I remind her of some lines young Marilyn had written to herself almost half a century earlier: “There was something special about me and I knew what it was. I was the kind of girl they found dead in a hall bedroom with an empty bottle of sleeping pills in her hand.”

  She laughs, a big, full, throaty laugh. “Maybe it would have been better that way,” she says, and points to a framed poster across the restaurant. “Like James Dean. He’ll be in that T-shirt for eternity. D’you remember The Seven Year Itch? When it played New York, they had this fifty-foot blow-up on the front of Loew’s State—me over the subway grating with the wind blowing the pleats of my skirt above the waist. I thought they’d never take it down.”

  The lips quiver playfully one last time and she begins to sing softly:

  Men grow cold

  As girls grow old

  And we all lose our charms in the end . . .

  “But to be one of the Poster People. That’s forever.”

  XIV

  LAST LAUGHS

  JOKING ASIDE

  National Review, June 6, 2011

  I READ The Joke, Milan Kundera’s first novel, when I was a schoolboy. Bit above my level, but, even as a teenager, I liked the premise. Ludvik is a young man in post-war, newly Communist Czechoslovakia. He’s a smart, witty guy, a loyal Party member with a great future ahead of him. His girlfriend, though, is a bit serious. So when she writes to him from her two-week Party training course enthusing about the early-morning calisthenics and the “healthy atmosphere,” he scribbles off a droll postcard:

  Optimism is the opium of the people! A healthy atmosphere stinks of stupidity! Long live Trotsky! Ludvik.

  A few weeks later, he’s called before a committee of the District Party Secretariat. He tries to explain he was making a joke. Immediately they remove him from his position at the Students Union; then they expel him from the Party, and the university; and shortly thereafter he’s sent to work in the mines. As a waggish adolescent, I liked the absurdity of the situation in which Ludvik finds himself. Later, I came to appreciate that Kundera had skewered the touchiness of totalitarianism, and the consequential loss of any sense of proportion. It was the book I read on the flight to Vancouver, when Maclean’s magazine and I were hauled before the British Columbia “Human Rights” Tribunal for the crime of “flagrant Islamophobia.” In the course of a week-long trial, the best part of a day was devoted to examining, with the aid of “expert witnesses,” the “tone” of my jokes.

  Like Ludvik at the District Party Secretariat, we faced a troika of judges. Unfortunately, none of them had read Milan Kundera, or, apparently, heard of him. So immediately after my trial they ensnared a minor stand-up comic, Guy Earle, who had committed the crime of putting down two drunken hecklers. Unfortunately for him, they were of the lesbian persuasion. Last month, he was convicted of putting down hecklers homophobically and fined fifteen thousand dollars. Mr. Earle did not testify at his trial, nor attend it. He lives on the other side of the country, and could afford neither flight nor accommodation. Rather touchingly, he offered to pay for his trip by performing at various comedy clubs while in town, before he eventually realized that no Vancouver impresario was going to return his calls ever again. Ludvik would have recognized that, too. Comrade Zemanek, the chairman of the plenary meeting that decides his fate, participated with him in earlier jests with the same girl, but he makes a brilliant speech explaining why Ludvik has to be punished, and everyone else agrees:

  No one spoke on my behalf, and finally everyone present (and there were about a hundred of them, including my te
achers and my closest friends), yes, every last one of them raised his hand to approve my expulsion.

  And so it went for Guy Earle, hung out to dry by his comrades at the plenary session of the Canadian Collective of Edgy Transgressive Comedians. I speak metaphorically. But, if you’d like something more literal, let’s move south of the border. Recently, Surgery News, the official journal of the American College of Surgeons, published a piece by its editor-in-chief, Lazar Greenfield, examining research into the benefits to women of. . . well, let Dr. Greenfield explain it:

  They found ingredients in semen that include mood enhancers like estrone, cortisol, prolactin, oxytocin, and serotonin; a sleep enhancer, melatonin; and, of course, sperm, which makes up only one to five per cent. Delivering these compounds into the richly vascularized vagina also turns out to have major salutary effects for the recipient.

  As this was the Valentine’s issue, Dr. Greenfield concluded on a “lighthearted” note:

  Now we know there’s a better gift for that day than chocolates.

  Oh, my. When the complaints started rolling in from lady doctors, Surgery News withdrew the entire issue. All of it. Gone. Then Dr. Greenfield apologized. Then he resigned as editor. Then he apologized some more. Then he resigned as president-elect of the American College of Surgeons. The New York Times solemnly reported that Dr. Barbara Bass, chairwoman of the department of surgery at Methodist Hospital in Houston, declared she was “glad Dr. Greenfield had resigned.” But Dr. Colleen Brophy, professor of surgery at Vanderbilt University, said “the resignation would not end the controversy.”