by Rick Lenz
She looks away, obviously deep in thought. “You could go back and not get killed,” she says. “You understand that, don’t you?”
I laugh like the village idiot—a cliché of a madman. “And you understand you’re insane. Or some kind of witch.”
She doesn’t react, just goes on watching me.
It feels as if I’m losing any tiniest grip on sanity I might possibly still have. I know that I’m committable and believe this woman is too. I wonder if it’s too late in life to go into full-time psychoanalysis. The pills I take obviously don’t work. “Are you saying to stay out of her sister’s bed? Is that what you’re telling me to do?”
“No. Absolutely not. I can’t do that. I’m not your moral judge. I’m not telling you what to do, other than to be careful and not get yourself killed next time.”
“Next time? What are you talking about?”
“I’m suggesting that you go back and behave more cautiously this time. But it’s not my place to tell you how to live your life.”
“My life?”
“You know what I mean.”
“Actually, I fucking well don’t.” I’m staring at her with an intensity that must match hers. There is a long silence before I finally say, “Would I go back to the same time?”
“I think so.”
“If Richard Blake goes on living, does Jack Cade get …? Does he get born?”
“Yes.”
“Are you saying I’d split in two? I’d be back there with Richard Blake, but I’d also be Jack Cade as a … an infant—at the same time?”
“I don’t know.”
“Well, I’d sincerely love to hear anything you do know, and please don’t quote Dr. Hinkle or Albert Einstein.”
“How about T.S. Eliot? And the end and the beginning were always there, before the beginning and after the end. And all is always now.”
“Well, that’s all just peachy fucking perfect, but all is not always me. Are you saying I’d be in two places at one time?”
“I couldn’t possibly answer that.”
I poke at the crumbs of my pie with my fork and ask her about ramifications.
She reaches out as if to touch my face, then seems to think better of it. “There’s a theory that if it were possible to change an event in our past—even if it were, say, something as insignificant as the alteration of the lives of three average people in the San Fernando Valley—there is a theory that such a change could drastically alter the history that follows, that two different paths of reality would be created.” She looks at something over my shoulder. “I don’t believe that.”
“Going back wouldn’t set up a chain of events that would change the world you and I are living in?”
“You’re only one person. It would be insignificant.”
“The amoral side of me doesn’t really care.” I’m thinking about Marilyn, wondering if I could meet her. It’s still … possible, if I’m determined. “Why aren’t you more … surprised—that it worked?”
“I am and I’m not,” she says. “I’ve known for years it could be done.”
I snap out of my daydream about Marilyn. “I have a theory why you’re not. I think you know as well as I do that none of this is happening.”
She looks deep into my eyes.
11
I drive back to North Hollywood on surface streets, avoiding freeway traffic. On this Friday evening in October, the smog isn’t too bad in the West Valley, but the sun shining from low in the sky behind me illuminates brown, smudgy pictures of Van Nuys, Studio City, North Hollywood, Burbank, and eastward. I’m to meet Maggie Partridge at noon on Monday at 1833 Shoemaker Drive.
I roll up to my mother’s house, park behind her white Cadillac with the personalized license plate lky rita, and wander up the walkway, feeling a heightened awareness of each breath I take, of every sensation in my body. It’s as if I’m feeling the miracle of all of my muscle groups working in perfect synchronicity, of my blood coursing, exactly as my organism requires, through every part of it.
Rita opens the door, talking: “Did you hear about Paramount?” She’s dressed in jogging shorts and a tight pastel sweatshirt with a blue and gold paisley silk scarf around her neck.
“Why aren’t you ready for dinner?”
“They fired everybody, top to bottom.”
“I thought we were going to Santa Monica for dinner.”
“That last crew seemed to be doing fairly well,” she says. “But they did three sequels last year. You and I and Zippy the chimp could produce three sequels.”
“Are we going to dinner or not?”
“I’ve got to walk first.”
“Mom?”
“Come with me, and we’ll grab a bite afterwards.”
We face a wall of mirrors at the New Hollywood Health Spa, walking into ourselves on adjacent treadmills in a bank of eight.
After Rita’s personal perspective of the news in Variety, I ask her if she knows where I can find a videotape of Bus Stop.
“Eddie Brandt’s should have it. Why?”
“I’d just like to take a look at it.”
“It’s not much of a movie. They cut out the story about the alcoholic teacher and the young waitress. Don’t you remember seeing it?”
“Yeah, but I’m not sure when. It’s been a while.”
“We saw it together right after she died. They had a retrospective in Chicago. I took you to it. You were about six. We saw maybe eight Marilyn Monroe movies. You seemed to enjoy them.”
I almost lose my footing on the treadmill. “I don’t remember them.” I recover my balance and realize that for some odd reason, I’m thinking of Sophie, almost smelling her perfume. I wish I knew where she was right now.
“Well, you seemed to enjoy them. Watch your step.”
I’m staring at her image as we walk. I had no idea my relationship with Marilyn went back that far.
“You could play the cowboy’s pal, the part Arthur O’Connell played. Who’s doing it? … Darling? What is it, dinner theatre? I really don’t think you should go out of town, Jack—not in the middle of television season. I’m sure Sophie would disapprove.”
Rita has always used Sophie as a tool to leverage whatever she’s currently promoting. “I’m not talking about the play. I’m just curious about the movie.”
“It’s not much of a movie.” She flicks a wrist, a disdainful Ping-Pong backhand.
“If I did go out of town to do a play or if I was away on location for a long time, how would you do?”
“What do you mean?”
“Would you be okay by yourself?”
“I’m not by myself. I’ve got the Friends of the North Hollywood Library and the Hollywood Sign Preservation Committee and all the screenings I go to.” Then, as if she must say it to be polite, “And of course, I’d spend whatever time I could with Sophie.”
It’s not that she’s ever disliked Sophie; it’s just that she hasn’t shown much interest in her one way or the other. It’s not her fault, and it’s not Sophie’s; Sophie has always tried to be nice to her. It’s simply that Rita sometimes thinks of me more as … her own project than as an actual … son with a personal life.
“I just wondered what you’d do if I was away for a while,” I say.
“Are you planning to go somewhere? What about Sophie?”
“Oh, she’ll be okay.” I see Rita’s eyes on me in the mirror. “Actually, we’re not doing so well right now.” Her expression doesn’t change. “I was just thinking, what if I did … go away?”
She shrugs, still watching me. “Don’t worry about me. I’m a survivor.”
“Are you ever.”
“Don’t be smart.”
We’re both doing about four miles an hour on our treadmills. I’m starting to get winded and slow down to cool-off speed.
“What time of day was I born?”
“You were born at night.”
“I thought you told me it was morning.”
“No
pe. Night.” Still walking, she purses her lips and closes her eyes, remembering. “Your father and I were on our way from Jackson to Los Angeles for a vacation, and just outside of Kingman, Arizona, I felt a labor pain. We’d just had a dubious restaurant dinner of fish cakes and some noodley thing. Never order fish in this country if you’re more than fifty miles from a major body of water.” She veers back to her subject. “So I was going into labor almost a month and a half early. That’s why you’re so artistic. You were premature and, consequently, awfully sensitive.”
“Mom, children and girls and … poets are sensitive, not your son into his forties.”
She makes a foxy little smile. “See what I mean?”
“What time did you get to the hospital?”
“A little after midnight.”
“On April twelfth?”
“Of course.”
“And what time was I born?”
“It was 3:07, mountain time. I remember because it’s a good number.”
The mariner clock on the mantle in the living room at 1833 Shoemaker Drive had read three o’clock Pacific time when Richard Blake last looked at it on April 12, 1956. Jack Cade was born in Arizona seven minutes later.
“Why is 3:07 a good number?”
“Have you got a couple of hours?”
“No, Mom, I don’t think I do. Not tonight. What’s the difference between mountain time and Pacific time?”
“No difference at all—in April. Not in Arizona. Most parts of Arizona ignore Daylight Savings Time.”
When I get home, Sophie’s not there. There’s a note pinned to the bulletin board in the pantry off the kitchen:
I’ll be staying with Jean for a while, until you and I can sort out what we’re going to do. Please don’t call me. There’s nothing to talk about right now. I wish there was, but there simply isn’t anything either of us can say that will change the way I feel. I love you, but there’s no point in pursuing “us” right now.
—Sophie
“Right now.” She’s left the door open.
SATURDAY, OCTOBER 12, 1996
In the morning I call the LA Times Public Information Service, and I say I want to find out if a Richard Blake was shot to death in the West Valley on April 12, 1956. The young man I speak to tells me he’ll look it up and get back to me in the afternoon.
I go to Eddie Brandt’s video rental store and bring home a copy of Bus Stop. Don Murray has just walked into the bar near the end of the film when the guy from the Times calls back.
“Yes,” he says, “Richard Blake was shot and killed on April twelfth, by his wife, Margaret.”
There was no mention of her killing herself. I decide she must have done that later. There is also no mention of Lily. The reporter who covered the story said, “There was no apparent motive.” He left it at that. The murder was not a headline. The research guy looked through the next seven days’ papers. There was no follow-up.
I telephone Morgan’s Gifts several times, but no one answers. I call Jewels By Jaxon in Beverly Hills. I want to ask Mr. Parsons a couple of questions, but he isn’t in on Saturdays.
Even though she’s asked me not to, I try calling Sophie on her Motorola flip phone. All I hear is static. I hate technology. I ring her at her friend Jean’s. All I get is Jean’s message: “You know what to do,” she says.
“Actually, Jean, I don’t.” I hang up and try Morgan’s Gifts again.
On the off chance, I drive to Morgan’s Gifts, thinking they might be in, but not answering their phone.
They’re closed.
I knock on the door for a long time in case somebody is in the back, but I get no response. I peer in through the window gates.
From her haunt on the wall, Marilyn stares lopsidedly back at me, her Mona Lisa smile not as intriguing as usual, trapped in such a bad rendering, and nowhere near the magic it is on film. Still, I have the familiar feeling that she’s speaking to me alone.
I decide that everybody feels that way, that that was, and continues to be, the essence of Marilyn’s appeal. One of her publicists, Roy Craft, said, “Marilyn had such magnetism that if fifteen men were in a room with her, each man would be convinced he was the one she’d be waiting for after the others left.”
I watch Bus Stop again, not knowing what else I expect to see. I stop the movie several times to study Marilyn’s face, quivering in freeze-frame. Once again, I try to figure out what that something is behind her eyes and her mournful smile. I have no success, and it crosses my mind that I have spent most of my adult life looking at things, not into them. Until recently, I’ve avoided thinking about what goes on in other people’s psyches. It makes me feel uncomfortable—like a peeping Tom, like if I can see them, maybe they’ll be able to see me. Now I wish I’d paid more attention to such things.
I remembered playing opposite Susan Strasberg in a television show and talking with her about Marilyn. She told me, “All those still photos of Marilyn? That wasn’t Marilyn.”
“How did you know her so well?” I asked her. Susan was still several years away from writing Marilyn and Me: Sisters, Rivals, Friends.
“Oh, God.” She smiled and shook her head. “I knew her—as well as anyone could. She was like the adopted third child in our family.” In 1954, Lee Strasberg and his wife, Paula, took Marilyn in, and she did effectively become the third child in their family, along with Susan and her brother John. “We loved each other; we hated each other. I was insanely jealous of her. She was even jealous of me. She used to say she’d give anything to be like me, that people respected me. She never believed she was as good as she was.”
I didn’t question Susan further, but I remember her looking off into middle distance, as if that moment and her memory of Marilyn were separated by no more than a heartbeat. “She had more sides than a diamond,” she said.
Watching Bus Stop, I see several of those sides: the troubled, sad, lost, the half-formed.
Everyone is multifaceted.
Everyone does not live in a glass cage.
I watch her act. Damn, she’s good. She knew what she was doing by the time she made Bus Stop. When Joshua Logan was told she would be playing the role, he originally said, “Oh, no. She can’t act.” After filming was complete, he’d changed his mind: “I could gargle with salt and vinegar even now [for saying that] because I found her to be one of the greatest talents of all time.” Later, he said, “She is an artist beyond artistry. She is the most completely realized and authentic film actress since Garbo. She has that same unfathomable mysteriousness. She is pure cinema.”
The next day, before I return the tape, I watch it again. I look at the parts with Marilyn in them and fast-forward through the rest.
When I’ve turned the videotape off, a commercial on regular television shows a woman who claims she doesn’t believe one size fits all. A moment later she’s standing on top of a mountain, raising a bicycle over her head, telling me she wants to howl at the moon.
SUNDAY, OCTOBER 13, 1996
I reach Sophie on her flip phone. She asks me if I’ve learned anything about the ring.
“Not yet. I’m thinking of selling it. It’s a lot of money.” I hear her exhale sharply.
“I think you should keep it for a while,” she says in her patient voice. “At least until you can figure out how it came to you in the first place.”
“What if I never do?”
“At least you will have tried.”
“Anyway, I can’t keep running around with fifty thousand dollars on my hand. What if I got in a stickup?”
After a long silence, she says, “If they demand your ring, you’d better insist they shoot you.”
“Can we get together and talk?”
“I’m with the old boy from one to eight.”
“I can come over and meet you after you get off. We could have dinner.”
“We can’t afford it.”
“Why are you so mean?”
“Because you’re such a cement salesman.”
“No, I’m not. Sometimes I can be an adventurous guy. Just day before yesterday, I time-traveled to 1956 and got murdered.”
“Pardon?”
“Nothing. It’s a joke.” I don’t mention that I came within a day of meeting Marilyn Monroe.
“Jack, did you hear what I said Friday?”
“Yeah.”
“I wasn’t kidding. You’re not … you anymore. We get what we ask for.”
“Please spare me the Oprah.”
Her voice goes cold. “Did you check the computer?”
“What for?”
“I sent you an email.”
“You did?”
“From Jean’s computer.”
“Oh. No, I haven’t looked at it. What did you say?”
“Why don’t you read it.”
That feels so … I am chilled in a way that only the thought of the possibility of losing Sophie can chill me. Her voice sounds so … sad. I can’t seem to find any words. Finally, I tell her I will. I will read her message.
“I don’t think you want me very much,” she says.
“Yes, I do.”
But that doesn’t sound convincing even to me. Why am I always not saying what I want to say to her? Why didn’t I just say, “You are what I’m asking for? I want to live forever under your wing”?
But everything is too complicated. I couldn’t possibly explain anything until I’ve begun to explain it to myself—which would probably involve more years of psychiatric help than I have years of life ahead of me.
Which is a crazy thing to say. I’m no longer sure that lives are measured in years.
I sit down at the door-sized, plain wooden desk we had made at an unfinished furniture shop on Magnolia Boulevard, and turn on our computer. Almost immediately the chirpy little bastard from AOL tells me I’ve got mail.