The Dark Prince in my bed. Oh, he was a close friend, he told me to call him Carlo. But were we lovers? I don’t think so. Were we?
Immediately he began to snore. She drew bedclothes up over him and cuddled quietly beside him. The remainder of this nightmare night passed in swift jumps and cuts. She was exhausted from the hope and strain of her New York life; her life that was to redeem her. Five-hour workshops several days a week at the Ensemble, and hours of intense private tutoring with Max Pearlman or with one of his aggressive young associates; her love for the Playwright and her anxiety that he should escape her, and then she must die; such failure as a woman would condemn her to death for hadn’t Grandma Della spoken in scorn of her own daughter Gladys, who’d lacked the ability to keep a husband, even a sugar daddy to support her? Della wheezing and laughing What good is it being a fallen woman and a slut if at the age of thirty you’re empty-handed? And Norma Jeane would be thirty in a few months.
She settled her head cautiously on the Dark Prince’s shoulder. He didn’t shove her away. He slept fitfully but deeply, as men do. Ground his teeth, jerked and kicked and sweated, until by dawn he’d dampened the bedclothes and smelled as if he hadn’t bathed at all, a smell that made Norma Jeane smile thinking of Bucky Glazer, his swampy armpits and dirt-webbed feet. This time, with her new husband, she would make none of the mistakes she’d made in the past. She would make the Playwright proud of her as an actress and she would make him love her all the more as his wife. They would have babies together. Almost, she could imagine herself pregnant already. In the peacefulness of that night, toward dawn, Baby again came near, and forgave me.
Otto Öse had cruelly predicted for her a junkie’s death in Hollywood but that was not to be her fate.
. . .
Midmorning, she woke and dressed as quietly as possible while the Dark Prince continued to sleep, and went out to a grocer’s on Fifth Avenue to buy fresh eggs, cereal, fruit, and Java coffee beans, and when she returned the Dark Prince was waking, wincing as light struck his bloodshot eyes but otherwise in reasonably good condition, surprising her with his humor, his wit; he told her the stink of his body repelled him and he needed to shower, and lurching into the bathroom another time he laughed at her concern, and she stood at the door listening in dread of another catastrophe but heard nothing more jarring than the thud! of the bar of soap which clumsily the Dark Prince dropped several times. Afterward, toweling his hair dry, the Dark Prince poked through her closet and bureau drawers looking for men’s clothes, a change of underwear and socks at least. But found nothing. And in the kitchen accepting from her only a glass of ice water, which he drank cautiously as a man walking a tightrope with no net beneath. Norma Jeane was disappointed he wanted nothing to eat. He wasn’t giving her a chance! Bucky Glazer and the Ex-Athlete had both been excellent breakfast eaters. She herself was drinking only black coffee to liven her nerves. How handsome the Dark Prince was, even with his bloodshot eyes and wincing headache and what he called “intestinal flu.” In his soiled clothes of the previous day, unshaven, and his damp hair carelessly combed. He was calling her Angel and thanking her. She stroked his hand, smiling sadly as he spoke with unconvincing eagerness, like a character in an Odets play, of their one day doing a play together under Pearlman’s auspices, or possibly a movie together if they could get the right script (for he, too, despising Hollywood, yet needed Hollywood money); she was thinking how ironic, neither would recall with any degree of clarity what had happened the previous night except to know that some measure of tenderness had passed between them. Maybe she’d saved his life, or he’d saved hers? And so they were bound together, if only as sister and brother, for life.
After I died, Brando would give no interviews about me. He alone of the Hollywood jackals.
It was as the Dark Prince prepared to leave her that he recalled the message he’d been instructed to bring.
“Angel, listen: I ran into Cass Chaplin recently?”
Norma Jeane smiled faintly. She said nothing. She was trembling and hoped her friend wouldn’t notice.
“I hadn’t seen him or Eddy G for maybe a year. You hear things about them, y’know? Then I ran into Cass at somebody’s house and he told me, next time I saw you, he had a message for you.”
Still Norma Jeane said nothing. She might have reasonably said, If Cass has a message for me, why doesn’t he deliver it himself?
“He said to me, ‘Tell Norma, The Gemini miss their Norma, and the baby.’”
The Dark Prince saw the look on her face and said, “Maybe I shouldn’t have relayed that message? That fucker.”
Norma Jeane said goodbye and walked hurriedly into another room.
She heard her companion of the previous night call after her, hesitantly. “Hey, Angel?” But he didn’t follow her. He knew, as she knew, that the scene was over; their night together was done.
Brando and I never did a film together. He was too powerful an actor for Monroe. She’d have been broken by him, like a cheap doll.
Yet the scene with the Dark Prince wasn’t entirely over.
Late that afternoon she would return from an acting workshop to discover what seemed to her, in the first startled, stunned moment of stepping into her living room, a sepulchre of flowers. There were several floral displays, of predominantly white flowers: lilies, roses, carnations, gardenias.
So beautiful! But so many.
The gardenia smell was nearly overwhelming. Her eyes stung with tears. She felt a swirl of nausea.
Wanting to think the flowers were from the Playwright, her lover begging her to forgive him. But she knew they were not.
They were from the Dark Prince of course. Her lover who could not love her.
He’d carefully printed in red ink on a heart-shaped card the message
ANGEL
I HOPE IF ONLY ONE OF US MAKES IT
ITS YOU
YOUR FRIEND CARLO
“DANCING IN THE DARK”
A middle-aged tattered coat upon a stick. God, he’d come to despise himself!
Yet: clenching his gloved fists staring across the expanse of fresh-fallen powdery snow. There, as in a musical comedy in which sound, color, movement are highlighted, was the Blond Actress ice-skating with a young actor from the New York Ensemble. In fact, it was the actor who’d played his Isaac. His Isaac, ice-skating with his Magda. Almost, it was more than a playwright could bear.
If the two kissed? As he watched?
The rumor was of her and Marlon Brando too. Of that, he could not allow himself to think.
She’d had so many men. So many men had had her.
It had been relayed to the Playwright by mutual friends that the Blond Actress would soon be leaving New York for Los Angeles; strengthened by months of intensive work at the Ensemble, she would be resuming her career as a film actress. But not on the old terms. The Studio had not only forgiven Marilyn Monroe but had capitulated to a number of her demands. It was to be Hollywood history. Marilyn Monroe, so long despised in the industry, had beaten The Studio! Now she would have project approval, script approval, director approval. Her salary was raised to $100,000 per movie. Why? Because there was no blonde they’d been able to invent to take her place. Who’d made so many millions of dollars for them, so cheaply.
He wasn’t jealous of the Blond Actress, he wished her well. That deep sadness in her eyes. As in the eyes of his Magda of thirty years ago that he, blinded by adolescent infatuation, hadn’t understood.
On the ice rink in Central Park amid dozens of colorfully attired skaters of all ages the Blond Actress in dark glasses, a white angora cap pulled down snug around her ears to hide every strand of hair and a matching muffler around her neck, was skating! She who claimed never to have skated on ice before, only just roller-skated as a girl in southern California.
Where she came from, the Blond Actress said with a wink, there was no ice. Ever.
You could see her tentativeness on skates. As other, more experienced skaters breez
ed past. Her ankles were weak; she was always about to lose her balance. Pumping her arms, laughing and teetering and about to fall except her companion deftly caught her, an arm around her waist. Once or twice, despite his gallantry, she sat down hard on the ice but only laughed and with his help scrambled up again. She dusted off her bottom and continued. Skaters glided around her, past her; if anyone glanced at her, it was only to see a pretty creamy-skinned girl in very dark glasses, wearing a minimum of makeup. Or no makeup at all. She wore her heather-colored cable-knit sweater and dark slacks of some warm plush material the Playwright hadn’t seen before, and white leather ankle-high rental skates. If new to ice-skating, the girl was obviously a natural athlete, possibly a dancer. That suppleness in her body. That energy! One moment she was clowning to disguise her awkwardness, the next moment she’d become graceful, skating hand in hand with her companion. The young man was a skilled skater, with long elastic legs and a sure sense of balance; he wore wire-rimmed glasses that gave him, like the Playwright at his age, a boyish-scholarly-Jewish look, darkly attractive. Except for earmuffs, his head was bare.
It was mid-March, and still very cold in New York City. A northeast wind out of the blinding-blue sky.
Heartsick, lovesick, the Playwright watched. He’d been unable to stay away. Unable to remain in his study, at his desk. Sick with yearning. (Yet had he the right to involve the Blond Actress in his life? He was again being investigated by the House Un-American Activities Committee; it was not an investigation so much as a persecution, a harassment; he had to hire a lawyer, and he had to pay legal fees that were tantamount to fines; the new chairman of the committee had taken a special dislike to the Playwright since he’d seen a play of his allegedly “critical of American society and capitalism.” It was known that the Playwright’s F.B.I. files were “incriminating.” The Playwright was one of a “cadre of New York-born left-leaning intellectuals.”)
The Blond Actress skated, and the Playwright watched. To his credit (he was thinking) he made no effort to hide. He was not a man to hide. And what purpose in hiding? Seventy-second Street was close by the Park and he often walked here; frequently, needing to clear his head, he tramped through the snow on days when most of Central Park was deserted. Watching the skaters made him smile. He’d loved to skate as a boy. And he’d been surprisingly good. As a young father living in the city he’d taught his children to skate on this very rink, years ago. Suddenly it didn’t seem so long ago.
The Blond Actress on the glittering ice, laughing and shining in the sun.
The Blond Actress who loved him in a way that no woman had ever loved him. Whom he loved as he’d loved no other woman.
Monroe! A nympho.
Who says? I heard she does it for money. She’s desperate.
She’s frigid, hates men. She’s a lezzie. But yes, she does it for money when she can get her price.
The Playwright stared smiling at his Magda on the ice, and his Isaac gripping her hand. His heart pounded with a kind of pride.
He wondered that the other skaters and the numerous spectators didn’t recognize her. Stare and point and applaud.
He had the impulse to lift his hands and applaud.
Had she noticed him yet? Had Isaac noticed him? The Playwright stood in full view, a familiar figure to them both. The Playwright who had created them. His Magda, his Isaac. She was a girl of the people; he was a boy of European Jewry eager to become “of the people,” eager to become American, eager to erase all dreams of Back There.
Maybe in fact the Playwright was a Holocaust survivor. Maybe all living Jews were. It was not a fact of which the Playwright wished to think there in the bright blazing sunshine of a late-winter afternoon in Central Park.
There he stood tall as a totem figure at the edge of the flagstone terrace past which skaters glided in long looping circles around and around the rink. A music box of animated figures! The Playwright whom strangers frequently recognized in Manhattan. In his dark trench coat, dark wool Astrakhan hat. Thick-lensed glasses. As the Blond Actress and her companion skated past, hand in hand, talking and laughing, the Playwright refused to turn aside or even to lower his eyes. On this terrace in warm weather there was a popular outdoor café to which the Playwright frequently came, midafternoons, for a break from his work. In winter the wrought-iron tables and chairs remained. He would have dragged a chair to the edge of the terrace and sat but he was too restless. That music! “The Skater’s Waltz.”
He would marry her after all, if she would have him. He could not let her go.
He would divorce his wife. Already in his heart they were divorced. Never would he touch her again, never kiss her again. The thought of that woman’s aging raddled flesh repelled him. Her angry eyes, her hurt mouth. His manhood had died with her but would be resurrected now.
He would rend his life in two for the Blond Actress.
I would rewrite the story of both our lives. Not tragic but American epic!
I believed I had the strength.
There he was, renting skates! Nothing to it. Shoving his feet into the shoes, lacing them tightly up. And on the ice, his ankles weak at first, stiffness in his knees at first, but quickly his old skills returned; he felt a boy’s thrill of simple physical exertion. He was skating boldly counterclockwise against the gliding skaters. He looked like a man who knew what he was doing, not a muddled older man flailing his arms to keep his balance. The amplified music was now “Dancing in the Dark.” A song written by a Jew yet how American-assimilated it seemed, like all the great tunes of Tin Pan Alley. A song of romance and mystery if you listened closely to the lyrics.
Skating toward the Blond Actress he smiled happily. He had no doubt! This was a scene of a kind the Playwright himself could not have written for it lacked irony, subtlety. She’d drawn him out of his snug airless study on 72nd Street. She’d drawn him to her; he had no choice. Smiling like a man wakened by sunshine, who’d fallen asleep in the dark.
“Oh, gosh! Oh, look.”
The Blond Actress saw him now and was skating toward him, radiant with happiness. Not since he’d been a young father and his children had greeted him with such expressions of rapture, as if they’d never seen anyone so wonderful, nor so unexpected, had he felt this privileged and this happy. The Blond Actress would have collided with him except he caught her and held her up. They swayed together on the glittering ice. They were drunken lovers together. Gripping each other’s hands, laughing in delight. The young actor who’d played Isaac hung back discreetly, rueful but smiling, too, for he knew himself privileged to see this meeting as he would be privileged to portray it to others, to tell and retell the historic occasion of the Playwright and the Blond Actress so publicly in love on the ice-skating rink in Central Park that day in March.
“Oh! I love you.”
“Darling, I love you.”
Reckless and daring in her skates the Blond Actress stood on tiptoe to kiss the Playwright full on the mouth.
And that night in the sublet flat on East 11th Street, the Blond Actress, naked, after lovemaking trembling with emotion, and her cheeks shining with tears, took both the Playwright’s hands in hers, caressed his fingers and lifted them to her lips, and covered them with kisses. “Your beautiful hands,” she whispered. “Your beautiful, beautiful hands.”
He was deeply moved. He was stricken to the heart.
They would be married in June, soon after his divorce from his wife, and after the Blond Actress’s thirtieth birthday.
THE MYSTERY. THE OBSCENITY.
The intersection between private pathology and the insatiable appetite of a capitalist-consumer culture. How can we understand this mystery? This obscenity.
So the grieving Playwright would one day write.
But not for a decade.
CHERIE 1956
I love Cherie! Cherie is so brave.
Cherie never drinks out of fear. Never swallows pills. For if Cherie begins, she knows how it will end. Where it will end.
The place Cherie came from she’s terrified she will return. I shut my eyes and saw a sandy bank, a shallow muddy creek and a single tall spindly tree with exposed, ropy roots like veins. The family was living in a battered trailer in a mound of rusted cans and vines. Cherie with her younger brothers and sisters. Cherie was the “little mother.” Singing to them, playing games with them. She’d had to drop out of school aged fifteen to help at home. Maybe she’d had a boyfriend, an older guy in his twenties. He broke her heart but not her pride. Not her spirit. Cherie sews toys for her brothers and sisters and mends the family’s clothes. Her chanteuse costumes will break your heart, so much clumsy darning. Even the black-net stockings are darned! Cherie wasn’t platinum blond, her hair was dishwater blond. She had a healthy color then, spending so much time outdoors, now she’s sickly pale. Pale as the moon. Maybe anemic? This cowboy Bo takes one look at her and knows she’s his Angel. His Angel! Might’ve always been anemic, and her younger brothers and sisters too. Vitamin deficiency. One of her brothers was retarded. One of her sisters was born with a cleft palate and there wasn’t money to correct it. As a girl Cherie listened to the radio a lot. Sang with the radio. Country-and-western songs mostly. Sometimes she’d cry, her own singing broke her heart. I saw her lifting a baby with a soaked diaper to carry into the trailer to change. Her mother watched TV a lot when the set worked. Her mother was a heavy, sallow-skinned woman in her forties, a drinker with a puckered collapsed face like raw dough. Cherie’s father was gone. Nobody knew where. Cherie was hitchhiking to Memphis. There was a radio station she listened to, she hoped to meet one of the disc jockeys. She had a two-hundred-mile journey. Thought she’d save bus money and got a ride with a long-distance trucker. You’re a pretty girl, he told her. About the prettiest girl ever climbed into this cab. Cherie pretended to be deaf and dumb, retarded. Gripping her Bible.
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