by Ron Renauld
“What are you talking about?” she asked, annoyed.
“Did you know that when this was the Hollywood Studio Club that Gale Storm and Sharon Tate and Marilyn Monroe all lived in room 334?”
“Give me a break,” the girl said, walking off.
“Bet you didn’t know that!” Eric razzed. “Hell with you, anyway. You couldn’t hold a candle to Norma Jean. She was the best! You’ll be lucky to make a commercial!”
Eric took Lexington back to Vine and turned right. He was getting hungry, so he stopped at a take-out stand near Selma Avenue, next to the Huntington Hartford theatre. He had made a horseshoe trek around the heart of Hollywood.
Selma was the area’s unofficial pickup strip for gays, given to more subtleties than the action in front of the Golden Cup just up another block.
The man behind the counter was Eric’s age, wearing a white T-shirt dotted with miniature Judy Garlands. Watching Eric park, wearing his leather jacket and sunglasses, the counterman ran a quick hand across the part in his short-cropped hair.
“What’ll you have, Leather?” he asked Eric, smiling.
“Something fast,” Eric said. “You got a special or something?”
The cashier grinned.
“Special’s a hot dog in a fresh bun . . . with plenty on it.”
“Sounds great,” Eric said, looking around, watching the flow of traffic coming to and from Hollywood Boulevard, just a block north.
The counterman looked at Eric expectantly.
“Interested, then, are you?”
“Oh, yeah,” Eric said. “Sorry. Two specials and a large Coke.”
“Two specials,” the other man laughed. “You mean, like one now and one . . . well, I’m on break in five minutes.”
“Well, don’t you have two made already?” Eric asked. “If you don’t, one’s okay.”
The smile left the other’s face. “So you just want two hot dogs and a large Coke, is that it?”
“Right.”
“Right,” the counterman repeated coldly. He turned his back on Eric to get the hot dogs. He spit in the buns.
“Two seventy-six,” he said, sliding the order across the counter at Eric, who sat cross-legged on a stool, staring out at Vine Street.
While he paid, Eric asked, “Did you ever see Marilyn Monroe coming out of the Brown Derby?” He gestured with his head toward the famous restaurant across the street.
The counterman laughed bitterly, rolling his eyes. “She’s been dead for years, man, what the hell do you think?”
Eric smiled, taking his change as he stood up. He shook his head and said, “You’re wrong.”
“What are you talking about?” the cashier demanded, tired of the games.
Breathing hard, Eric leered at the man. “You’re wrong!” he shouted with anguish, sweeping his arm across the countertop and sending his order flying. “She’s as alive as you and I!”
“I said she’s dead!” the attendant shouted as Eric stormed off to his bike. “She’s dead, you jerk!”
Starting up his Vespa, Eric whined off into the northbound traffic to Hollywood Boulevard. He found another parking space and placed a quarter in the meter, his temper subsiding.
On foot, he began the long walk back to Mann’s Chinese Theatre, staying on the south side of the street. Kenneth Anger would love the Boulevard today, he thought. It was Hollywood Babylon on parade. The sixties had pretty much tarnished the glossy sheen of the area, and after the clones of Haight-Ashbury had been evicted, they had left in their wake sidewalks teeming with drifters, panhandlers, flesh-peddlers of all persuasions, and other assorted riffraff. Many preferred to handle this stretch from the safety of the tourist buses that crawled along the street like streamlined snails while bored guides yammered through hand-held microphones about the scenic surroundings and the exact location of celebrities’ stars along the walkway.
It wouldn’t be safe for you today, Marilyn, Eric thought. I’d have to be here to protect you. I could do it, too. Better than the others. Joe’s selling coffee makers now, Marilyn.
Cagney’s star was near the corner of Wilcox, in front of an optometrist’s shop and a pinball arcade. A middle-aged man was trying to divert pedestrians around the star while his wife pointed a Super 8mm camera at it and started shooting off foot after foot of the motionless picture before her.
Grinning, Eric came up behind the woman, adopting his Cagney sneer and accent.
“Come on, Verna,” he said. “Help Ma with the groceries!”
The woman looked up, surprised. Her husband laughed good-naturedly.
“That’s pretty good, young man. That’s from White Heat, isn’t it?”
“You bet!” Eric said, pulling the T-shirt from his coat pocket and unrolling it for them to see.
“Cody Jarrett,” the woman read. “That’s very cute.”
“That’s my name, sister,” Eric snarled for show.
The woman laughed this time, looking from the star to her camera to Eric.
“Say,” she suggested, “Would you mind . . . ?”
“Anything for a swell dame like you,” Eric mugged.
A small crowd gathered around as Eric stood before Cagney’s star, holding his Cody Jarrett-T-shirt over his chest. The older woman slowly panned the camera up from a fix on the star to Eric’s aping face.
“This is Cody Jarrett, see,” Eric said, “I gotta get back to my ma, see. She’s holdin’ up in the hills with Marilyn and the gang. Big Ed’s going to try to play his hand and I gotta stop him, got it?”
A slight patter of applause went up from the crowd after the woman lowered her camera.
“Thank you very much, young man.”
“Say, though,” the husband inquired, “Wasn’t Jarrett’s wife named Verna, though, like you said before?”
“Cody’s married to Marilyn,” Eric told them emphatically.
The woman played along.
“I don’t see why not. After all, I think she could have played the part as well as Virgina Mayo.”
The woman’s remark stunned Eric like an apocalyptic revelation. His mind chased through his filed knowledge of Monroe trivia.
“Of course she could have!” he insisted excitedly, “and she was available, too, that whole year! God, it would have been perfect! She would have been a star three years earlier. Everything would have been different. Who can I—”
Eric noticed that the couple had hastened away and that others were watching him strangely.
“Whaddya lookin’ at?” he yelled at them, stuffing the T-shirt back into his coat pocket and walking past the Fox Theatre.
Several blocks down he stopped in front of Frederick’s of Hollywood, the puce palace of erotic underwear, fronted by the stars of Jack Palance, Margaret O’Brien, Fleetwood Mac, and Will Rogers. Stiff-limbed mannequins with pouting lips and Quaalude stares looked down from their display perches at Eric, telling him the girl of his dreams could only be better in crotchless panties or a slinky negligée.
“I’ll buy you only the best,” Eric promised Marilyn as he snapped off several pictures of wigged forms in satin nightgowns.
Larry Edmunds’ was only a block away, situated between the Pussycat Theatre and the Supply Sergeant surplus shop.
Eric went inside the bookshop and back to the rear counter. The clerk on duty was an older man, dressed and groomed with rumpled indifference as he worked over the rows of filing cabinets. He saw Eric and said, “Let me guess . . .”
Eric nodded.
The clerk went to the back room and came back with the Marilyn Monroe file.
“Listen,” Eric told him, accepting the file and starting to sort through the pictures inside. “In her whole career, there was only one year Marilyn Monroe wasn’t in a picture. Nineteen forty-nine, the same year as White Heat. Why didn’t she do it with Cagney, huh?”
The clerk looked dully at Eric. “Eric, how many times have I told you I don’t play trivia. I work here. We try to run a business. You want
an answer, look it up in a book. That’s why we have them.”
Unperturbed, Eric sifted through the file and pulled out one-sheets for Ladies of the Chorus and Love Happy. Marilyn had bit parts in both films and wasn’t even listed on the posters. Eric set the two sheets on the counter and then pulled them apart, pointing to the space between.
“That’s when White Heat was made!” Eric said triumphantly. “Oh, Christ, if she only could have made it! It would have been the best film of all time!”
“Eric, could you keep it down?” the clerk admonished. “This isn’t a ball park.”
“Why didn’t she? Why?”
“Frankly, Eric, I don’t give a damn!” The clerk made no effort to sound like Clark Gable.
Castigated, Eric fell silent and the clerk ignored him to help some other customers. Eric went through the file slowly, savoring each picture as if for the first time. Nine covers from Life magazines; the calendar pinup she had posed for in the nude during 1949 (because she was desperate for money, Eric thought, the same year she should have been in White Heat); the famous shot from Seven Year Itch of her standing over the cool air duct, her skirt billowing up and outward, exposing her legs. All the pictures projected her as the embodiment of an ideal sexual archetype, the model by which millions would come to measure themselves and others.
“You’ll always be mine,” Eric whispered, tracing her outline in the publicity still from The Prince and the Showgirl, letting his finger linger on her lips. The longing he felt for her was intense, overpowering. He knew so much about her. More than anyone. He was sure of it. And yet he’d never met her, never had her. It didn’t seem right.
“Look, Eric,” the clerk finally said, “you’ve been here for over an hour. Are you going to buy anything or not? You’ve got most of these anyway.”
Sighing, Eric handed the file back, keeping the nude calendar pose and the still from The Prince and the Showgirl.
“I’ll just take these two,” he said.
“Pay up front,” the clerk said. Eric turned away, but the clerk stopped him. “Eric, watch your money.”
Eric had left his roll of thousands on the counter. He picked it up and put it back in his pocket.
“How come you try to set up credit when you carry around a wad like that?” the clerk asked, annoyed.
“Because she didn’t die until a few weeks ago,” Eric said.
“Oh, your aunt. That’s right. Sorry, Eric.”
“Yeah, sure.”
Leaving the bookshop, he stopped a moment in front of the Pussycat Theatre, where the doublebill of Deep Throat and The Devil in Miss Jones was going into still another year of consecutive play. He stared at the color stills of Linda Lovelace and Georgia Spelvin, suggesting some of the prurient rituals they subjected themselves to on the screen inside.
“Not you, Marilyn,” Eric said to himself, “you didn’t . . . you wouldn’t have . . .”
But as he walked away, continuing west toward Highland and the point where he had started his odyssey, Eric pulled Marilyn’s calendar pose out of the bag and stared at it. He regretted it immediately, closing his eyes and putting the picture away.
It was too late.
In his mind, he saw Marilyn’s face in the pictures in front of the Pussycat Theatre, her body adopting the pornographic poses . . . and others. Lurid, writhing acts of passion.
“No!” he pleaded out loud, “Please stop . . . no . . . please, no . . .” He was beginning to sweat. Everyone on the sidewalk was staring at him. He closed his mouth, bit his tongue. The pain was starting.
He walked on, his gait irregular, stumbling. The thoughts still came. It was just like with Aunt Stella. The more he tried to suppress the images, the more vivid they became. Her pale flesh, so soft to the touch . . . the smell of sweat and lilac . . . her in his arms . . . doing it alone, eyes on him . . . light, deep, knowing . . .
“Stop it, Marilyn,” he wept, “Stop . . . no . . . Ma . . . Marilyn . . . please, no . . . Aunt Stella, stop it . . . make her stop . . . bitch . . . to me! . . . Do it to me! . . .”
He clamped his hand against his mouth, falling back against the face of the building next to him and sagging down to the sidewalk. The pain was unbearable. He shook his head fiercely, closing his eyes. Tears leaked through as he cried, sitting like a broken doll on the concrete.
Minutes passed. Tourists walked by, muttering to one another. Someone kicked him in the shins, but he didn’t react. The pain was passing.
One voice came through the others, firm but gentle.
“Are you okay, son?”
Someone was shaking his shoulders. Eric stopped twitching and found himself staring up at a man in a uniform. He was old, kind-looking.
Eric panicked. Police, he thought.
“I work down at the Roosevelt,” the man said, extending a hand. “Come on, you can wait in the lobby until you feel better, okay?”
Eric nodded feebly and let himself be helped up to his feet. His head still throbbed, but the pain was dull. He felt weak. With his first step, Eric realized something was wrong. There was a dampness between his legs, warm and claggy. His pants were dark, so the wetness didn’t show. Eric was sure he could smell it, though. Rich, pungent. They crossed Highland together and continued down the next block to the Roosevelt Hotel.
Inside, Eric asked for directions to the men’s room. The old man, whose uniform was that of a porter, showed Eric the way and left him alone.
Eric went into one of the stalls and pulled his pants and shorts off. He flushed the toilet and then dipped the front of his pants into the clean water before putting them back on. He discarded the underwear in the waste bin for hand towels. He stepped back and observed himself in the mirror. The wet spot was barely visible. Still, Eric took off his jacket and replaced his shirt with the Cody Jarrett T-shirt, which came down lower, covering half the stain. Putting his coat back on, he left the men’s room.
The old man was standing by the registration desk.
“Feeling better, are you now?”
Eric nodded.
“The heat,” he explained. “Too much to take on an empty stomach.”
“Righto,” the porter said. “If the heat won’t get you, the smog will, I say. Feel free to wait here a moment.”
“Thanks,” Eric said.
There was a tiled fountain in the middle of the lobby, squirting thin geysers of water over white statuary. The walls were lined with large black-and-white portraits of movie greats. Eric could feel them looking at him, smiling knowingly at his accident. He was ashamed, humiliated before all those he held close.
Marilyn was over the doorway, poised between Presley and Gable. It was the Phillipe Halsman portrait that had earned her her first Life cover. Standing, her back against the wall, shoulders bared, dress clinging suggestively, her head tilted back so that she looked downward, smiling.
Feeling another outburst coming on, Eric fought back his tears and left the hotel. Back on Hollywood Boulevard, he stared across the street at the Chinese theatre. It looked more impressive from this distance, like a temple, radiant in the sun, lording magnificently over the throng of worshippers. Struck by the sight, Eric felt like a blasphemer. He looked away and walked down the sidewalk to the intersection of Highland and Hollywood. Richard Widmark’s star was there. Eric stared down at it, waiting for the light. He could hear Tommy Udo laughing, at him.
Eric crossed Highland, swallowing hard. He stopped in front of Pots and Pans, a family restaurant across the street from the Hollywood Wax Museum. He leaned against the storefront, weeping silently as he fondled the marking pen in his coat pocket. He waited there until the sidewalk was clear, then pulled out the pen and threw himself down before Marilyn’s star.
Before two startled bystanders could rush over and restrain him, Eric had written in the space around the gilt-edged star, “I’m sorry . . . Cody Jarrett.”
Sam was already on duty for the night when Eric came back to work. The day shift had gone home alm
ost an hour ago.
Sam shook his head sadly as he unlocked the gate and let Eric in.
“I’m afraid you’re in hot water,” Sam said, following Eric over to the corner of the lot where he parked the Vespa. “Mr. Berger’s in there all by himself and he’s worked up a mean temper.”
“So why isn’t he home resting?” Eric said. “Dumb shit has an operation to get ready for. Why do I have to deal with him tonight anyway?”
“He wants to make sure he’s caught up,” Sam said, “I gotta get back to my post, Eric. If he sees me talking with you I could get into a whole lot of trouble.”
“Don’t worry about it,” Eric said. “I can handle Mr. Berger.”
“Okay, Eric,” Sam said uncertainly. “Good luck.”
Sam slowly shuffled back to his post while Eric trudged up the ramp to the loading dock. He went over to the fire escape and jumped, grabbing the lower rung and lifting himself up. As he was bending his legs around the frame supporting the ladder, Mr. Berger charged out of the back door, taking ravenous bites from an egg salad sandwich. Eric hung upside down like a bat as Mr. Berger came up to him.
“What the hell is the matter with you, Binford! I could have you arrested for stealing company property.”
“I needed wheels,” Eric explained matter-of-factly. “I had something to do.”
“Oh, I see. That’s an answer. Why didn’t you buy a car with the insurance money your aunt—”
“That’s none of your business!” Eric cried, swinging back to his feet and stepping away from beneath the fire escape. He made a move to grab Berger by the lapels of his coat, but his boss slapped him away.
“You keep your goddamn hands off me!” Berger roared indignantly, spitting egg salad. “You know, I’ve been hearing all kinds of things about you lately, Binford.”
Eric walked away to the edge of the loading dock, as if it were a stage. He looked out at a non-existent crowd, smiling facetiously as he lit a cigarette.
“You mean about my wedding?” he asked lyrically.
“Now that is one I haven’t heard!” Berger admitted. “I can’t imagine the creature that would want to marry you. Tell me, who is this unlucky girl?”