by Adam Braver
Marilyn listens enough to be companionable, but her attention is on the room; she watches women drop coins into the slot machines, while men dressed in dark, shiny suits, with pressed shirts and skinny ties, smelling of Pall Malls or Viceroys mixed with spicy colognes, crowd the gaming tables. It’s not that she’s immune to Pat’s worries; it’s more about vigilance. She understands how easily she can be infected by these dramas.
Pat says she’s going to insist that Frank fly her out first thing tomorrow morning, and she’ll even tell him why, no matter what Peter might think. She can’t be expected to be in the same place as a well-known gangster who has somewhat publicly declared war on her brothers for targeting him in their campaign against organized crime. It’s insulting. Not to mention a little bit threatening, the way Giancana rants about her entire family, always spitting out their surname as if it’s some kind of rot. What was Frank thinking, if he was even thinking at all?
Although she doesn’t say anything, Marilyn is surprised Frank would allow Giancana to stroll around the lodge. It’s not so much about Giancana, she’s had some good times with him, but it’s fairly common knowledge that Nevada keeps a Black Book of known gangsters, and that any casino that serves one will lose its license. But, she reminds herself, that’s not her problem. None of this is. She just can’t let herself get involved.
“Maybe you can just ignore him?” Marilyn suggests to Pat. “Keep away from him.”
“Just keeping your distance,” Pat says, “doesn’t make something go away.”
She swears she sees Joe at one of the craps tables. His hair is grayed slightly along the temples, and he looks appropriately distracted and disgusted, standing tall among the rest, still carrying an athlete’s stature. Would he have defied Frank’s dictum just for a closer watch over her? She looks again. But he’s turned his back to her.
Stepping in time with each other, she and Pat move tentatively across the floor, toward the red padded doors that lead into the show room. Pat says she wants to find Peter before Frank’s show starts, before he gets caught up in all the hubbub of being in the inner circle. She’s going to demand that he take this seriously. She wants to tell him they’re leaving in the morning. All three of them. She says that Frank will take notice when he sees Marilyn leaving; then he’ll understand the magnitude of the line he’s crossed.
Marilyn lifts a glass of champagne off the tray of another passing waitress, nearly upsetting the balance of the tray. She sips as they walk, part of the champagne spilling down her chin, then dripping onto the front of her dress. Like a child, she wipes her mouth with her forearm. Little brown-blond hairs glisten under the lights.
By the lounge entrance, in the short hallway between the show room and the restaurant, Peter Lawford stands, hands in his pockets. He appears to be waiting for someone; his darting eyes suggest someone trying to assume a tactician’s pose. He understands the principles of being observed. Locating himself in a place where he can see and be seen. It is crucial for him to stand apart from the crowd. To clearly be on the inside. Muffled music seeps out from under the door. Buddy Greco, first on the bill, sings about searching around the world, his lyrics moving over a quick walking bass line. A pair of women comes out of the Joseph Magnin, a modest storefront satellite of the elite San Francisco department store, shopping bags in hand, nearly bumping into people making their way to the show room. Peter’s fumbling for something in his pockets, and when his hands emerge, he’s pinching a book of matches. He plucks a Tareyton from his palm and dangles the cigarette off his lip while striking a match. In the past, Pat has confessed to Marilyn how much it bothers her that Peter is obsessed with keeping pace with Sinatra and the rest of the so-called Rat Pack. And because he’s never quite achieved the stature of the others (particularly Frank, Dean, and Sammy), he’s somehow stayed at their whim, aware of being only the occasional member (or as Frank calls him, the brother-in-Lawford). Because of that he jumps. Answers invitations and suggestions and directives with a desperate haste. His marrying into the Kennedys only further complicated things. And while he has been part of building the bridge that’s conflated politics with show business, his instincts always tilt him toward glamour, and for that, Pat has said, his judgments have more than once put everybody in awkward situations.
It’s strange how clearly Marilyn sees this scene. As though getting a glimpse of what it means to live on the outside.
Peter taps his ashes onto the red carpet, steps over them, avoiding one little orange ember, and kisses his wife on the lips. Marilyn, still sipping from the same glass of champagne, looks toward the show-room door. Peter stares at her, double-taking to make sure it’s her underneath the scarf.
Pat starts in about needing to go back to LA in the morning. Peter holds his cigarette between his thumb and index finger away from his side, listening, vaguely amused, as though it’s not the first time he’s heard this kind of talk. Looking at Marilyn instead of his wife, he starts to justify staying, delivering a quasi lecture on rumor and innuendo, mistaking Marilyn’s willful indifference for disappointment at the prospect of having to go back to LA. Leaving would be rude. He says even if it were true that Giancana was somewhere in the hotel (of which, he repeats, there is no proof), the insult to Frank would outweigh the insult Giancana’s presence would bring to Peter’s in-laws. They all need to realize they’re bigger than potential threats.
Marilyn tries to look away from their disagreement, thinking about how she can leave.
A woman slips out of the Celebrity Showroom, loosing a rapid-fire snare drum down the hall.
Turning from her husband in irritation, Pat mouths to Marilyn, “This is unbelievable.” She stops. Tilts her neck and squints. “Don’t you think so?”
Marilyn nods, and her scarf comes undone, the ends dangling over her ears. She pulls it off, down over her face, and then balls it up in her hand. Her other hand reflexively touches her hair, patting it into place. Her lips are tight. Sucked back against her teeth. Drawing in close to Pat, Marilyn whispers with a certain force, “Don’t look, but everyone is staring at me as if I just suddenly appeared.”
9:45 PM
People begin taking their seats. The show-room spotlight cuts in and out, its dusty stream focused on the microphone stand just to the right of center stage. Violinists hunch over, facing each other. They drag their bows across the strings, listening to one another, carefully sharpening the flats. Guitars ping between the E and the B strings, getting in tune, back and forth and back and forth. Near the piano, a sleeve of sheet music slips from a stagehand’s fingers to the floor. He bends down to pick it up, then places the loose page on a music stand, silently apologizing through a stilted smile. Meanwhile, a snare drum is being tightened, the numbing repetition of the smacking hardly noticed.
These are the cues.
Anticipation shapes the crowd.
Just to the right of the main doors, she sits in Sinatra’s booth, waiting for him to take the stage. There are some places where you instinctively feel comforted, and for her the show room is one of them, with its contemporary art hanging on opposite walls, telling the history of theater through a series of pieces in wire and fabric and paint, a cross between the primitive and the abstract. In the curved red velveteen box, not much different from the others lining the back of the lounge, she’s scooted all the way in, near the center, at the apex of the curve, with a direct sight line to the stage. Pat Lawford sits to her right, blocking the entrance, keeping watch over the room. In the box is a small table, a thin layer of wood supported by two heavy metal stands. On the tabletop, rows of champagne bottles and martini glasses and flutes and tumblers make for something of a glass wall, or maybe tools strewn around a work site. Half-smoked cigarettes still burn in the ashtrays.
Frank was just there, anchoring the left side of the box and greeting streams of well-wishers, until he realized he had to leave to get ready to go on. Peter began to follow. Pat whispered to him that he’d better keep away from Gianca
na if he’s back there. She looked so serious. Marilyn sipped her champagne, looking down but still listening, despite all her best efforts. Don’t tell him anything about anything, Pat instructed her husband. Nothing about anything.
There is another, more private booth upstairs beside the lighting crew, almost impossible to see from the floor. And then there are the backstage tables, easily accessible from the tunnels, nearly impervious to surveillance, for those who need to be impervious to surveillance. Marilyn rejected Pat’s suggestion that they sit in one of the more secreted spots, as though it might be safer. She likes being on the show-room floor, where she can feel the kick drum thumping against her chest, and the horn section breezing over her face, and then Frank’s voice melting all that away and taking her with it.
She picks up a water glass. She’s parched, and there’s hardly enough for a sip. Even the ice is gone. She looks around for a waiter. The closest one is all the way down the aisle, near the tables in front of the stage, leaning before an oddly mismatched couple, engaged in a conversation that already has gone on too long. She keeps half an eye on the waiter, watching him straighten up and smile at what should be the last comment from the woman. He keeps turning his body, shifting his stance, trying to break from the banter.
Finally free, the waiter walks up the aisle. When it looks as though he might notice her, the lights go down, and the crowd claps enthusiastically.
She tries holding her glass up. But it just disappears, right beneath the emerging spotlight.
In his tuxedo and bow tie, Frank hits the stage. He enters stage right, smiling and bowing to the wings before moving to his spot just left of center. He slips the microphone from the stand, right in time with the band launching into “Get Me to the Church on Time.” He takes small steps, skirting along with the beat, his snapping fingers motoring him like an outboard engine. She loves his carefree side, which was missing earlier in the cabin. He repositions the mic into the stand, raises his arms with palms exposed. His chest and lungs open, preparing for a long note. And when he does reach that note and then belts it loose, he seems momentarily to hold the song between his palms, guiding it to the left and then back to the middle before finally releasing it.
Pat leans over, her head is bobbing. She says, “He’s really on tonight.”
Marilyn nods. “Don’t you just love it?” she says. “You can always count on him. He gives you a bang that snaps you right out of wherever you’ve been.” She reaches across the table for one of the other water glasses, partially full. But Pat pushes it away. “No, Marilyn,” she says. “Who knows who’s been drinking from that.”
“What’s that?”
“I said, who knows who’s been drinking from that . . . Here, wet yourself with some champagne.”
Up front, a woman turns and glances at their booth, squinting through the lowly lit show room. Her discovery is cataloged in whispers and elbow nudges, causing the whole table to look. Marilyn waves at them, throwing along a little smile. There’s that secret split-second recognition, when she can see the surprise of the unexpected, and then almost feel it like the electrical jolt that can jump-start a heart.
Frank pauses for a brief aside when he forgets the words, but even that seems smoothly perfected, as though, if not part of the act, it’s an element of charm essential to his personality. And now the band is soaring, and sometimes it seems to bump him in the hips, as though it will lift him off his feet, but then his arms come down right on the beat with the horns and the snare drum, and it’s clear he would never be swept away; he is the anchor. His eyes are glassy, but his focus is intact, and at the end when he sings ding dong ding dong, there’s whimsy in his eye, and again it seems personal and private, as though for this one time only he’s willing to let you in on it, to share in and be part of his world.
He loves the swing. She can almost see him swooning between Jupiter and Mars in “Fly Me to the Moon.” It’s knowing but honest. And in that moment she’s in his otherly sway, swinging between those planets with him. Never planning to return.
Marilyn says, “When he’s on the stage, Frank can make you fall in love a hundred times over.”
“In one set.”
“One set? I’d say in one song.”
After a few numbers he stops the band. He wants to say hello officially. “Not only in song,” he says, “but to chat with you for a minute.” He thanks everybody for being there. He tells them they’re marvelous and reminds them that without an audience, “We’re dead. D-E-A-D.”
Is he looking right at her?
“Now,” he says, “where’s the bar?”
And then (again she swears he’s looking right at her) he launches into “Please Be Kind.”
The waiter has come with another bottle of champagne. He used to say, Courtesy of the chairman, but now, after he’s worked the cork from the neck with his back half turned to the stage for the millionth time tonight, he just leaves it. The bubbles sizzle in the glass, and she sways side to side, and she remembers why she accepted the invitation to Tahoe in the first place. Nights like these infuse a sense of life right into your bloodstream. They push the lawsuits and all the jazz that intends to beat up on you right off to the side, where it sits exposed for what it’s worth—a load of crap left behind by those with half the talent and half the ambition who want to prove that they are in control, and that they control the likes of you. It’s a surgical procedure, being in this room right now. The music is lifting their dead weight right out of her, like those psychic surgeons in the Philippines she’s read about in the news. She can feel herself going with it. And what more can she do but raise her glass and drink a toast to that?
Pat looks over at her. She too is smiling, but her body looks stiff. Her eyes keep glancing to each side of the stage. Her ongoing paranoia could easily break the moment. Finally she leans in to Marilyn, and whisper-shouts into her ear, “Don’t lose your vigilance.”
Marilyn reaches for her water glass, then realizes she forgot to ask for a refill. “Ha,” she says. “Me, vigilant?” And she pours a glass of champagne instead, hoping to derail the conversation.
In closing with “My Kind of Town,” Frank pauses to thank the orchestra. After the applause, he places the mic back into the stand, moves it slightly to the side, commenting on needing to be a muscleman with these things, then salutes the audience, again saying that without them he’s nothing. As the clapping fades, he points to the doors leading out to the casino. “As long as we’re here,” he says, “why don’t we all have a drink?” He glances backstage with a smirk for a split second, before looking back again at the audience. As the scrim drops, Frank exits to the right, his arms opened wide.
When the lights come up, she turns to see Pat squirming, looking to the sides of the stage in concern, and the crowd is rising and she feels like she’s in the spotlight, and she realizes that her going away has all been temporary, it was only as good as Frank’s act. And she can feel herself start to wilt, and she’s parched, and she reaches for water but the glass is still empty, and she’s afraid that Pat will say one more thing about Giancana, and she can’t take one more thing that will remotely suggest the world of Marilyn Monroe. She’s that fragile.
People stream up the aisles, and they’re almost all looking at her. She slouches a little, hiding behind the wall of bottles and barware.
Pat looks at Marilyn, and she says, “Well?”
“I think I’m just going to go back to my cabin.” Her mouth is still gummy.
“Without even a nightcap?”
“Vigilance,” Marilyn says. “Frank will understand.”
A Count Basie recording pumps through the speakers, its rhythms controlling the hurried pace of the floor; the chatter rises and falls in tandem with the horn section. She moves quickly between rows of green felt tables, en route to the tunnel. Pushing around people who step in front of her to get to the slots. Turning sideways, she squeezes through the crowd at the roulette wheel.
Passing
in front of the craps table where she swore she’d seen Joe, she slows down for a quick look, checking to see if he might still be there.
Through the yellowed smoke pall, Sam Giancana catches her eye. She’d know him anywhere: heavyset, gray suit, receding hairline. He winks; his black horn-rims magnify his eyeballs. He’s charming in a raw kind of way. Like a magnificent accident that draws all the attention. But he’s always reeked of cruelty, even when he’s thrown on the charm. It stinks from the sweat in the creases of his forehead, pooling and glistening, to the breath leaking out the permanent snarl at the corners of his lips.
He waves her over, his hand turning rapidly.
She’s unable to break his stare. Forcing a polite smile, she shrugs and keeps moving, holding the backs of occupied chairs at the blackjack tables for balance.
His voice stabs out in a burst across the table, “You can’t come over and just say hello?”
She shakes her head, mouthing the word sorry, and continues to walk.
He stands, now motioning with both hands. “You already forget you know me, or something?” he says. “For just a moment. Don’t be such a stuck-up. Now, come over and bring me a little luck.”
Her foot catches under the leg of an empty slot machine stool, halting her in place.
“Ain’t that a pip!” she hears, floating slow motion against the pace of the room. “Ain’t that a pip!”