by Rick Lenz
Once, I see a show on television about a man who had been given the curse of knowing when people are going to die. The man sees Xs on the foreheads of the soon-to-be deceased. A bride and groom turn around after the ceremony to start up the aisle together. Both their foreheads are marked with Xs. A sightseeing bus about to travel through a mountain pass is loading up. They cut to an angle on the passengers boarding the bus. They all have Xs on their brows. Then, one night, the man is alone by himself in a mansion. Outside, a storm is raging. He wakes from a nightmare, knowing he has to go out into the swirling winds and rain. He catches sight of himself in a mirror. In the center of his forehead is an X.
After a few weeks, I begin to take a little time for myself. Sometimes I drive to the ocean on my way home from work and wander the beaches in Venice, Santa Monica, and Malibu. They aren’t as crowded in 1956, and there’s more public access to them.
On a late afternoon at the end of February, I drive west on Sunset, winding from UCLA out to Pacific Coast Highway, then up to a stretch of beach near the Malibu Pier. The sun is almost set when I get there, but the oceanfront feels friendly, the air balmy and springlike. Seven or eight people wander up and down the wide expanse of beach I’ve walked out onto.
I sit down and try to enjoy what’s left of the sun as it drops from sight, rapidly withdrawing its warmth. I’ve brought a thermos of coffee from my office and a file with twenty gem plates in it—photographs of exceptional colored stones. I’m going to jot down some impressions and comparisons, but I realize it’s already too dark, so I zip up my windbreaker, put a handful of pebbles on the file of photographs to protect it from any sudden gusts of wind, and lie down in the sand.
I’m starting to drift off when a breathless voice above me says, “Hey, mister? Your pictures were blowing away.”
I sit up and take the plates from the shadowy figure of a young woman wearing jeans and a bulky Mexican-style cardigan.
“One of them got wet,” she says.
“I thought I’d weighted them down.”
I unzip my windbreaker and carefully wipe the plate dry on my sweater.
“You’ll ruin your sweater.”
“That’s okay. It’ll wash out.”
“What are they pictures of?”
“Just some colored stones—sapphires, emeralds.”
She nods, starts to walk away, then stops and turns back. “Why would you bring pictures of sapphires and emeralds down to the beach in the dark?”
“I teach geology at UCLA. I was going to make some notes, but I couldn’t even see the photographs so I gave up.”
She laughs a little breathy noise that’s hardly recognizable as a laugh.
Marilyn.
My heart is racing. I don’t know what to say. I can’t imagine what she’s doing here. But I can. She’s just arrived from New York and is in preparation to begin shooting Bus Stop. She’s come down to the late-afternoon Malibu beach to be by herself.
I act calm. “Would you like a cup of coffee? I’ve got a big thermos of it here.”
“I don’t know …”
“I don’t care who you are.”
In the growing twilight, I can tell she’s frowning. “You mean you know? Just from my voice?”
“Yes.”
“That’s scary.” She thinks it over for a moment. “You’re a geology teacher?”
“That’s right.”
“Okay. I’ll have a cup of your coffee.”
She sits down in the sand next to me, and I open the thermos. I pour a cup and hand it to her.
“Are you looking for Cherie out here on the beach?”
She flashes a surprised smile. “How would you know that?”
“Your work can’t all be fun and glamour. You must have to go through some … grief to find a character.”
“It’s the other way around. My characters help me find my … pain.” She shrugs, embarrassed she’s used that word. “I’ve never been so frightened of anything since I was a little girl. To play this part, I’ll have to act. What makes me think I can do that?”
“You’ve been at it for a while.”
“Yeah, but this is different.” She pauses. “How do you know about this—a geologist?”
“Oh, I pick up a Variety sometimes.”
She smiles and looks off toward Japan. “I’ve been back in New York since near the end of ’54. I went there because of a … friend of mine. And I thought I might study and get to be better at what I do so nobody would think I’m a joke, you know?” She makes her voice thinner in a parody of airheadedness. “You know, the dumb blonde, Marilyn? Well, I did study. I did learn.” She rakes a handful of sand up against her ankle. “But not enough.”
“I think it’s twice as hard when it’s so important to you.”
“I don’t even know sometimes if I can do it at all.”
“Yes, you can. And never mind what I think—Billy Wilder called you a genius.”
She smiles, surprised and embarrassed, then shakes her head. “You’re sweet.” She takes a sip of coffee from the plastic cup. “The thing is, my friends—sorta friends—in New York expect me to be this … artist. I’m sorry, I didn’t mean to go on like this.”
“That’s okay.”
She narrows her eyes, as if she’s trying to remember something. “And I want to please those people because they’re the first ones to take me seriously—as an intelligent person. I don’t mean as a brain or anything, but artistically. Some of them think I’m artistically intelligent.”
“I think you are.”
“Do you?” It’s a plaintive, sad question.
“Yes, I do.”
“Because even though they say that, I wonder a lot of times if they’re sincere. Then I get to a time like this when I’m starting something, and I get so unsure about everything, and I don’t believe anything people tell me. It’s like being in the dark.” She looks around her. “Like this, except all by yourself instead of with someone—like you and I here, talking.” She can make out that I’m smiling. “Well, me talking, you listening.”
“You’re interesting to listen to.”
“Not just because I’m …”
“No, not just because of that.”
She grins. “You’re better than a shrink. Cheaper, too. You should take out an ad in the paper: ‘Geologist, objective and everything, available to listen to frightened movie stars.’ You’d make a fortune.”
“When do you start shooting?”
“Next week.”
I can’t think of anything else to say that won’t sound like I’m trying to come on to her. “I wish you all the luck. I think you deserve it. Can I walk you up to your car?”
“Sure.”
It’s gotten chilly, and she bundles her thick cardigan around her. We walk up the beach in silence, both of us shivering.
When we get to the highway, she points at a black Thunderbird. “That’s me.”
I reach out to shake hands with her. “It was very nice to meet you.”
She takes my hand and squeezes it. “Same here.”
I turn to walk to the Oldsmobile, wishing I could prolong this but not knowing how, when she says, “UCLA is only a couple of miles from Twentieth, you know.”
I turn back.
“Would you come by and see me sometime?” She laughs self-consciously. “I wasn’t trying to sound like Mae West. I mean to visit me? On the set?” She says the next very quickly. “We could talk a little, like now.” She nods toward the darkened beach.
“Sure.” There is no way I could possibly refuse her. What can one do? “I’ll come by.”
“I’ll leave a pass at the gate for you.” She smiles. “What’s your name?”
“Richard Blake.”
“Richard Blake.” She smiles again, shyly, and gets in her car. “Bye, Richard. Don’t forget.”
25
MARCH AND APRIL, 1956
Most of the filming of Bus Stop is done on soundstages eight and fourteen at
Twentieth Century Fox, which is only a ten-minute drive from UCLA. When they’re not on location in Idaho or Phoenix, I visit her on a regular basis.
One day, she says to me in controlled, even tones, “I think I’m going insane, just like my mother and her mother.” She’s just had a fight with one of the other actors.
I tell her about Margaret and Lily—I can’t think of a reason not to—and describe Lily’s state of mind. Marilyn wants to know what they do out in the San Fernando Valley all day and I say, “Not much. They don’t do much.”
“That’s so sad.”
“Yes.”
“I love being alone, but …” She laughs, then shrugs it off. “I need to be alone … but you’ve got to be able to go out into the world when you want to.”
“I lead a double life,” I say. “My life at home and my life away from it. Actually, that’s not quite accurate. I live a quadruple life—minimum.”
The day’s shooting is over. I stay in her trailer. Feeling a little like the love-struck young man in Of Human Bondage, I say I want to tell her something I hope will make her feel less unhappy and ask if she’ll listen.
She doesn’t say a word, just sits down next to me.
I tell her about Jack and Richard, everything I know how to tell her, everything that’s happened, leaving nothing out. She listens to me as if this were no more than an old friend telling her his most recent family gossip. It feels like one crazy person telling another one the deranged details of his disease, and the other one doesn’t even raise an eyebrow.
Another day, I talk to her about perceptual filters. It’s not the first time I’ve mentioned the subject. Since we started having our talks, I’m no longer the character in Of Human Bondage, but have now morphed into Bottom the Weaver in A Midsummer Night’s Dream, after he’s been turned into an ass and believes that Titania, the beautiful magical fairy queen, is enthralled with him. I’m not saying I mind the feeling. I pour my heart out to her and she … listens.
Nothing I say seems to surprise her until the time I mention Lawrence in Bus Stop. “He was a gemologist on a field trip in Utah.”
Her reaction comes out like an extended violin note, diminuendo, “But there is a Lawrence character.” She stares at me, saucer-eyed. “… Or there was. We’re probably not going to shoot it because we’re short on time. But there is a Lawrence. Only he’s not a gemologist, he works for the Department of Interior.”
“It got changed.”
“But the thing is, the only people who know about it right now are Josh, George Axelrod—the screenwriter—and me. Nobody else knows. Nobody. I’ll probably tell Arthur, but he doesn’t know yet.” She looks around her dressing room, eyes flashing, her mind apparently racing. “Jesus.”
My Bottom the Weaver mind has wandered. “Have you ever heard anybody use the word … damaged? About a person?”
“What do you mean?” She’s still trying to make sense out of what I’ve said about Lawrence.
“They don’t use that word about people, not in 1956, do they?”
She frowns. “Why would you ask me that? I don’t know. Not that I ever heard of.”
I’m remembering my last conversation with Margaret, a lifetime ago, and am not listening to Marilyn. “They say ‘damaged’ about buildings and houses after tornados … and floods, that sort of thing—but not about people.”
“Do you think I’m a damaged … person?”
No, I hear her—the injured kindergartner, Norma Jean. “I think you’ve been … hurt.”
I hear words she will say only months later: “When my emotions kick me on the inside and the world kicks me on the outside, where do I go from there?”
Another day, she says, “I want to—you know, in my life—keep the diamonds and throw away …”
“The kimberlite?” Richard suggests.
“What’s kimberlite?”
“Oh, it’s just what they call the rock that diamonds are found in—the stuff they throw away; it’s mica, magnesium … junk.”
“Right,” says Marilyn. “I want to get rid of all the junk.” She takes a deep breath and studies the look on my face. “You know what’s going to happen to me, don’t you? Or you think you do.”
I want to shout at her to run home and throw away all of her pills, forever, but I don’t. “She was always a little in love with death,” the armchair psychoanalysts said. What if I rouse that impulse in her now? Abused kids are always snarling variations of “Go to hell” when pressed, and do exactly what you’ve told them not to. It makes no difference how good or well-intentioned the advice is.
She says, “You won’t tell me what’s going to happen, will you—whatever you think you know? Because no matter what it is, I don’t want to hear it.”
“I understand.”
“Besides, it’s not written in stone, is it?” She forces a smile. “I mean, even if it’s good news—my future—if I try, I might be able to make it … even better.”
“Of course.” I smile broadly, reassuringly, suggesting the sky is the limit, that her future may be glorious.
“Thanks for that.” She smiles wistfully and looks away. “But the only future I ever heard of is to get old. If I was someone else, maybe I wouldn’t mind so much.” She lifts both shoulders, defenseless. “But sex symbols don’t get old.”
I talk Margaret into enrolling Lily in an occupational therapy course at Cal State Northridge, only a few miles east in the Valley. Lily chooses Beginning Sculpture, which meets on Thursday nights. She has a gift for it, which isn’t that surprising. One of her pieces stands on a pedestal in the front yard. Margaret objects, but I insist. The sculpture is made of welded iron (with the aid of a professional iron caster). The figure is disturbing, sexual—a young woman, lost, testifying to the frustrated yearnings of her creator.
Margaret cuts down on her drinking. She doesn’t become cheerful, but she’s no longer an abiding portrait of gloom. She signs up for a class too, one that meets at the same time as Lily’s. It’s a survey course in general psychology.
This causes Richard, who is emptying the dishwasher when he hears it, to laugh so hard he drops an entire stack of dinner plates.
Early in the shoot, Marilyn is checked into Saint Vincent’s Hospital with bronchitis. She’s there for four days, recovers well, and is relatively healthy for the rest of the Bus Stop filming.
I pop awake at four a.m. one morning. In a dream, I’ve heard myself say, “What am I doing here?” I think it’s Jack alone doing that dreaming, saying those words. I don’t think it has anything to do with being back in time, a forty-year-old man at a moment when, according to the calendar, he should be a baby.
In another dream, I have a son. He looks very much like Jack Cade, but he’s a little boy. I’ve taken him to an amusement park called Raging Waters. I’m standing with him on a stairway leading to the top of “the longest, steepest water slide in the world.” Far below, a woman—it could be Sophie, I’m not sure—is looking up at us.
The little boy flicks his tongue along the new braces on his upper teeth. I’m trying to remember if I’ve sent in my unemployment form. Now my little boy’s look reminds me of the question that woke me up, and as I think about it, I realize it’s a question that’s awakened me many nights: “What am I doing here?” My son looks nervous. When I ask him, he tells me he’s fine, but I know in his gut he feels he might die on this godforsaken contrivance in the middle of this boondocks desert at the east end of Los Angeles County.
At the top of the water slide now, a big young man—a ripple-muscled people pusher—says to him, “There ya go,” and positions him where he’ll start his forty-five-degree (that feels like eighty-nine-degree) descent to a tiny pool far, far below. My little boy looks up at me and his eyes say, “Please, Daddy, what are we doing here?” And he doesn’t mean at the top of a water slide.
The guy reaches down and pushes my child off into eternity, then he looks down at me. I say, “What are we doing here? Don’t you ever as
k yourself that when you’re not pushing people?”
He frowns at me, puzzled, and says, “Aren’t you an actor? Didn’t I see you in a commercial once?”
Then he grins and shrugs, not caring what other me might be coming along for the ride, and pushes me into eternity, too. When I wake up, happy to be anywhere at all, I don’t even attempt to make sense out of the dream. There’s no point in trying. I don’t understand any of it. Never did.
To anyone who’s never heard of her (somebody who lives on Mars, for example), the conversations between Marilyn and me might seem to be no more than two career neurotics assuring each other that if they could only make a tiny adjustment here and do a little bit of tweaking there, they would both be completely at peace.
Maybe that’s true for me; it’s possible. I have at least a prayer of ending up peaceful—out of sync with myself, perhaps, but for the most part peaceful. Marilyn always seemed to be doomed. It didn’t have to be that way. It was as if, out of our primitive needs, we put a curse on her. We turned her into an icon, then a vessel of our hopes and dreams, and finally a human sacrifice. When she did self-destruct (not even knowing we had—oh, Lord—“enabled” her), we gazed at her with the half-dead look of people attending a public execution, mocking the face of misery we helped her create.
She wanted to live; she said so. She begged us for help. We said, “We worship you.” Then we made fun of her and threw her off the cliff like an Incan sacrifice. The pulp press—a mirror to us, whether we believe it or not—egged her on. Later, we cried for her and called her a goddess.
She never understood any of it, not the adoration and certainly not the resentment that amounted to hatred. She wanted more than anything to learn how to survive—to be made well. Her housekeeper said, shortly after her death, “It’s my feeling she looked forward to her tomorrows.” Marilyn said, “Beneath the makeup and behind the smile, I’m just a girl who wishes for the world.” She was being clever, which she was, but the truth behind her frantic sadness—and anyone who came close to being her friend knew it—was that what she wanted more than anything was what most people want: to live in peace and happiness in the world she was born into.