by Adam Braver
She understands the shape of privacy.
12:07 PM
On the landing below her cabin’s deck, she spots Sinatra and Buddy Greco. They’re bordered by a giant rock wedged in the mountainside and the tall pines that cascade down to the lakeshore. Sinatra, in his swim trunks, lounges shirtless in a deck chair, reading the paper, his bony shoulders streaked by sunlight, bare legs crossed. Wearing a khaki jungle-style short-sleeved shirt with matching trousers, Greco is getting a haircut. He keeps looking around the grounds, and the barber jerks his head back in place, annoyed at the interruption of his snipping.
She waves to Frank; he’s been the one solid thing for her.
Peering over the top of his newspaper, Sinatra catches her eye. “So the queen’s come out of her chamber,” he announces. The paper drops into his lap. A page slips off, and the wind skirts it across the concrete. He shakes his head: “The definition of a civilization in ruins.” He motions her away. A brushstroke.
She stays put. Adjusts her sunglasses. On her face they feel like part of a villain’s disguise. “Frank?” she starts with a weak voice.
The wind blows the paper in a circle around the landing, until it comes back, wrapped against his ankle. He kicks the sheet away. “Can it,” he says. “Pack your bags, and go home.” He snaps his fingers, disappearing her.
And with that snap she’s invisible. She grips on to the safety rail to keep from falling down. All she can imagine doing is bounding down the stairs, heading toward the lake, building her velocity, in hopes that she might sail across Lake Tahoe and just fade away.
Postscript
One Week Later
Covering Marilyn Monroe’s death, the August 6, 1962, edition of the Los Angeles Times reported, “Coroner Theodore J. Curphey today ordered a ‘psychiatric autopsy’ for Marilyn Monroe.” The psychiatric autopsy, sometimes called the psychological autopsy, was introduced and refined by Drs. Edwin Shneidman, Norman Farberow, and Robert Litman of the Suicide Prevention Center at Los Angeles County General Hospital. Their method relied on a series of interviews with friends and colleagues of the deceased—essentially a conversational gathering of evidence to develop a postmortem psychological history. While it could point to various causes of death, its marquee objective was to determine if there had been a suicide. From a clinical research standpoint it was also hoped the practice would provide critical information for suicide prevention. Monroe’s psychological autopsy report was never made public. At one point it was leaked that one of the study’s conclusions described her as having a “suicidal state of mind prior to her death.” But that didn’t make it to the papers. It was hardly news.
As a footnote, nearly all articles about the practice of psychiatric autopsies credit Marilyn Monroe for bringing the practice to national attention.
Upon her death, Peter Levathes was quoted in the papers as saying that the studio’s lawsuit would not be “pressed against her estate.”
The August 6 New York Times article about her death painted Marilyn as being, by the end, a “virtual recluse.”
Her bedroom was described as “sparse.” Just a bed. A dressing table. An end table. And a telephone from the hallway, its cord stretched across the mussed sheets.
August 7, 1962: Westwood Village Mortuary, Los Angeles
Three days straight it took.
Nothing but quiet.
At the Westwood Village Mortuary a few family members mingled among the staff. A makeup man and a wardrobe woman waited, on call for the eventual dressing. But other than that, no Hollywood types. Joe DiMaggio had made sure of that. Muttered under his breath that they were the ones who did this to her. Muttered a lot of things under his breath, without saying much of anything to anybody. He kept his reserve, instead charging Allan Abbott of Abbott and Hast Funeral Services to oversee the details for the service and its preparations, instructing him to hire and post six Pinkerton guards to keep the showbiz people out, with additional orders to prevent postmortem photographs, as well as be sure nothing was snipped from the body as a souvenir. It was quiet in the mortuary. Quiet, except for the embalmer at work. And the squeaking soles of the six Pinkerton guards.
On the third day, something doesn’t look right. They’re getting ready to dress her, but the embalmer won’t leave the table. She looks swollen. Her neck is bulging like a bodybuilder’s, puffed out as though it could burst. The embalmer steps back. “Do you see it?” he asks Mary, one of the mortuary’s co-owners. Then he looks over at Abbott, who can only shrug. The embalmer doesn’t talk much. He prefers not to say things that don’t need to be said. At one time the embalmer wished he were deaf, until he realized it wasn’t noise on its own that bothered him, just unnecessary noise. People are surprised when he speaks. Almost honored. “I’m not imagining it, Mary, am I?”
“You’re not.”
“Then you see it too?” He squints his eyes, head cocked.
“You’re not.”
“Meaning, I don’t see it?”
“Meaning, no. You’re not imagining it, is what I mean to say. You’re not, is what I’m saying.”
He pokes at the neck with the blunt end of a scalpel, trying to measure the density. Seeing how firm her neck is. Then he touches it with his index finger, pushing in slightly, feeling through the latex that it’s all fluid; something inside has weakened, causing the embalming chemicals to leak internally. A reservoir in her neck.
The embalmer steps back and reconsiders. He pinches the bridge of his nose, then shakes his head in some disappointment. It’s only that he’d thought he was done, is all. If the embalmer were married, he’d have to call home to tell his wife he’d be late for dinner. And though he’d work carefully into the night, going through the extra steps to remedy and reconstruct, somehow the embalmer knows he’d be fighting the urge to rush. But he has the whole evening. He circles her body, trying to find the best way in for the incision.
“I don’t think we can leave her this way,” Mary says.
“No.”
“You mean she may have to stay this way?”
The embalmer picks up the scalpel and runs it across his smock. Not really sharpening it. Not quite cleaning it. He thinks that action must answer the question. To explain any more would only be noise.
He takes a pair of scissors to her hair, trimming around the back, so he can get at the least visible part of the neck. Her hair is coarse and strawlike. Not much different from a doll’s. The studio technicians gasp at the sound of the chopping scissors. It must seem like defiling to them. Abbott scurries over quickly with a broom and dustpan, trying to be useful. The hair is dumped into a barrel along with all the wadded papers, gauze, and leftover suture clippings.
Mary says it looks as though this might take some time, and she promised Mr. DiMaggio an update. Abbott thinks that is a good idea, as Mr. DiMaggio wants to be kept abreast of all the steps. He doesn’t want anybody trying to take anything over. She nods in agreement, saying she’ll be back shortly, unless the embalmer needs her help.
The embalmer doesn’t reply. He’s bent over, his back to the door, twisting the head slowly in the support, for access. He focuses as though lining up his shot, then he’s incising the scalpel into the back of her neck. He cuts a little to both sides, letting the fluid drain into a pan. Though this procedure was unexpected, it’s not far from the routine. One of a series of variables. When he’s finished he’ll suture the incision, then step back to observe the dressing, ensuring there are no more surprises. Then he’ll go home. It’s been a long three days.
“Okay,” he says to the studio people. “Ready.”
“We can? It’s okay to . . . ?”
“Ready.”
The two studio people walk up to the table. Abbott moves with them slowly. He’s just going to observe. Oversee.
The embalmer does his best to stay out of their way, standing off to the side, implying that he’ll help lift her body when needed. It shouldn’t be a big deal to put a dress on her. The emba
lmer doesn’t like fussing. He’s lived alone most of his adult life, not because he is incapable of being with someone, but more because of what he has observed: a relationship, especially marriage, seems to be ritualized fussing.
The dress is pale green. It was sewn in Italy. The dresser has mentioned that several times, maybe his way of saying she’s being buried with the class she’s earned. The dresser smoothes the material with his hand over and over, almost stroking it. And he keeps trying to spit out words, until eventually he says this can’t be so, and his chest starts to heave like he’s either going to throw up or burst into tears. He turns his head to protect the dress. The embalmer looks away because he doesn’t want any part of this. Of course the embalmer knows how significant this particular death is, but still he expects professionals to act as such, no matter how meaningful some people seem to find her. He saw The Misfits last year (although more for Gable), and it was the first time he’d seen her in a movie. She wasn’t as dopey and light as he’d imagined, based on how she’d been portrayed in the papers, and her acting wasn’t half bad; for the most part he believed her as Roslyn, and not as a starlet. He felt a little for Roslyn’s loneliness, but not like he did for Gable’s character, Gay—a solitary man in a world that will no longer allow for solitary men. And when he heard the news of her death—and nobody should mince words: suicide—he thought to himself, Well, I guess she wasn’t that light. But that was a person, and this is a body—with cotton stuffed under its eyelids, and disinfectant sprayed up the nose and in the rear, and the organs full of preservatives. The only thing that gets to the embalmer is the Yankee Clipper. The thought of meeting DiMaggio makes him a little weak. He knows he’ll want to say something, but he doesn’t know what, other than that it will probably be the wrong thing.
Mary is back in the room, watching the dresser pull down the hem for the last time, smoothing the last wrinkle. She stands back with her arms crossed. The embalmer knows that something is wrong. He’s seen this expression on her before—cheeks sucked in, eyes half narrowed somewhere between horror and exhaustion. It’s tied to her need for perfection. He looks at the body, trying to decipher what’s being seen through Mary’s eyes. The neck appears normal again. The body’s positioned in the appropriate fashion. The dress fits nicely; the lines are even and properly adjusted. But Mary is breathing louder through her nose. Her face gone flush. Finally she says, “This isn’t right.” Her voice is calm and modulated, but the embalmer can tell the force behind it. “No, not right.”
He thinks to ask her what is not right, but he’s not sure he wants to initiate a dialogue. Perhaps it will just be something that she needed to say, and that will end it. Mary is under a lot of pressure with this one. Between the media, the studio, the family, and DiMaggio, it’s all pushing in on her. Maybe she just needs to let some of it off.
“Is it something with the dress?” the dresser asks. His expression is one of embarrassment and offense. “Because if it’s the dress, I can . . .”
“It’s not the dress.”
The embalmer wishes she would just say what it is, not what it isn’t. But he holds back from telling that to Mary, not wanting to get involved with the fuss.
“She looks like a man,” Mary speaks just above a whisper. “See her chest. Flat as a boy’s.” Now she’s looking right at the embalmer. “Flat as a twelve-year-old boy.”
“It’s from the procedure,” he begins to explain. “The embalming process causes the . . . The tissues start to . . . I used some breast enhancers to—the family brought them in . . . It compensated some, but I suppose . . . Well, then, I suppose you don’t think so.” And it’s not that he can’t explain it, he just can’t grasp the words, especially under Mary’s focused stare.
“I can’t send her out like this,” Mary says. “Not in front of Mr. DiMaggio. Or her family.”
What he feels like saying is: What does it really matter? He knows that when a woman lies down her breasts flatten a little, that’s no secret, and laid out and dressed, she looks perfectly appropriate given the circumstance and the position. To puff her up, to enhance her to unnatural proportions while supine, would make her appear almost superhuman, even more unrealistic than she looked on the movie screen. They keep forgetting she’s just a body now. Maybe it’s that Mary and Abbott are driven by the need to justify everything to Mr. DiMaggio, but if the embalmer saw DiMaggio, and was the type who could speak frankly with him, he’d tell him that very thing: she’s a body now. And tell him he should feel no shame for knowing that.
“I just need a minute to think,” Mary says, pacing. “Ideas? Allan?” Then she looks to the studio people. “Anybody?” But they’re too stunned to answer. Instead they make as though they’re thinking, and their expressions, the embalmer sees, look like the smell of sweat. They’re not like Mary or Abbott. They don’t have to buy into this myth; they are part of it.
She is walking in circles. Drumming her fingers along her thighs. Then over to the body, where she turns to the dresser and tells him to help her open the dress. He looks at her, stunned in place, and she says that in case he didn’t hear her she needs help getting the dress opened, that she needs access to the body, and she doesn’t want to tear the dress of Italian origin, but she’d be willing to if necessary, because this is that important.
With the dress loosened at the top, Mary reaches under and pulls out the falsies, one at a time. “Put these somewhere safe, in case the family wants them back,” she instructs no one in particular, handing them to Abbott. Then she goes over to the supply cabinet and pulls down all the available cotton, telling the embalmer he’ll need to order more, as she’s about to use up his whole inventory.
The embalmer watches Mary reach her hands under the dress, and the sight sends a quick shock along his thigh that he feels a little embarrassed about; and he watches the bosom slowly rise with each of Mary’s handfuls of cotton, as she says more than once, “Now that looks like Marilyn Monroe.” And he thinks he might have been wrong. It does not look so freakish; in fact it makes her look strangely more lifelike, and he thinks of DiMaggio, and he thinks of DiMaggio looking at the body, and how DiMaggio must have seen her every way from Sunday, at her best and her worst, but more than likely the majority of time at her average, and how when DiMaggio looks down at her for the last time, he will see her as she was created by the studios, further enhanced by the hands of an anxious mortuary owner; and when DiMaggio looks down at her, hating the business of Hollywood, hating every thought and belief that they put into her head, believing that their success was her poison, all the while keeping his mouth shut but in his mind accusing them of murder, when he looks down at her, at this final creation, the embalmer can’t help but suspect that this version of her actually is the one Mr. DiMaggio wants to remember, and that has got to be a killer because it means he, Joe DiMaggio, is a part of it too.
Acknowledgments
Misfit is a work of fiction, primarily meant to examine a struggle for identity in a very public world, and the rewards and pitfalls of conforming to meet others’ expectations. Therefore, despite many of the principal characters having the names of actual people, their thoughts, actions, and motivations are of the author’s imagination. Misfit should not be read as a biography, or as a record of actual events. Still, there were numerous sources that helped give context to the world of the novel, and helped to frame many of the events that take place in the book:
The archives of the New York Times, Los Angeles Times, Los Angeles Mirror-News, San Francisco Chronicle, San Francisco Examiner, Life, Confidential, and Time, and other magazines of the era. Also helpful were “Naked Suicide” by Robert I. Simon, MD (Journal of the American Academy of Psychiatry and the Law) and “The Father of Scandal” by Victor Davis (British Journalism Review); The Misfits by Serge Toubiana, My Story by Marilyn Monroe and Ben Hecht, The Story of the Misfits by James Goode, After the Fall by Arthur Miller, The Misfits by Arthur Miller, Timebends: A Life by Arthur Miller, A Method to Their Madn
ess: The History of the Actors Studio by Foster Hirsch, A Player’s Place: The Story of the Actors Studio by David Garfield, and The Road to Reno by Inge Morath; many DVD documentaries were helpful for capturing the essence of the time; people I spoke with included Ginny Blasgen, Carolyn Foland, Amy Henderson, Cynthia Langhof, the staff of the Los Angeles County Records Center, the staff of the Van Nuys Airport Guide, and the staff of the San Francisco Public Library; innumerable websites that were critical for locating various pieces of minutiae; the FBI files on Monroe, Arthur Miller, and Sam Giancana—hundreds of pages that not only provided specific details but also spoke loudly to the perceptions of the era; and also necessary to mention is the staff at the Cal Neva Lodge who gave me detailed tours and answered more questions than anybody should have to, helping this “story” come to life for me.
Lastly, the following thanks are in order for the ways in which they contributed to this book actually seeing the light of day: Robert Boyers, Edward J. Delaney, Michael Gizzi, Phillip Lopate, Bill Ratner, and Steve Yarbrough; Nat Sobel and Judith Weber, and everybody in their office who read too many versions of this; the unbelievable group at Tin House who know that getting it right is the first priority (Lee Montgomery, Win McCormack, Tony Perez, Nanci McCloskey, Rob Spillman, and the indispensably indispensable Meg Storey); and finally to my friends and family, who contribute in ways they don’t even know.