Norma Jeane stared at him, unable to speak.
Darling. Hadn’t she killed this man’s love for her, by now?
Fleece had been excited about coming to Reno as a special guest of Marilyn Monroe. But she’d turned in her plane ticket & came instead by Greyhound bus. In the Zephyr, she would run up a room service bill of over three hundred dollars in three days, much of it for liquor. She would badly damage the room with spillage & cigarette burns; she would fall asleep in the tub while running bathwater & the water would overflow onto the floor and through the floor into the room below. (These hotel damages, Norma Jeane would pay.) She would pawn the gold Bulova wristwatch Norma Jeane impulsively gave her, removed from her wrist (a gift from Z inscribed To My Sugar Kane). She would pawn several items from her hotel room including a brass lamp in the shape of a rearing horse smuggled from the hotel in a shower curtain. She would lose literally every penny of the one-hundred-dollar “stake” provided by Norma Jeane in the casinos. She would not visit the set of The Misfits once. She would kiss Norma Jeane fully & fiercely on the mouth in the very presence of the playwright husband, who was himself mildly drunk or pretending to be so. She would abruptly leave the married couple in the midst of dinner in a Reno restaurant & would subsequently be arrested early the following morning in a casino bar for causing a disturbance & slashing a blackjack dealer & a security guard with a knife & she would be jailed on several charges including assault with a deadly weapon until Marilyn Monroe of all people (the tabloid National Enquirer would publish the lurid scoop featuring a large photo of the dazed-looking Marilyn in dark glasses & smeared lipstick mouth trying to shield her eyes from the camera flash) came to post her one-thousand-dollar bail bond. Shortly afterward she would disappear from Reno, probably by Greyhound, leaving only a scribbled note for Norma Jeane pushed beneath her hotel door.
DEAR MOUSE
LIVE FOREVER IN MARILYN FOR US!
YOUR FLEECE LOVES YOU
The estranged husband. Heard a scratching at the door. In the night. They were in separate rooms in the suite, he on a sofa and she in the bedroom insomniac and drinking Dom Perignon and reading and inscribing in her battered journal in a shaky hand Between us and heaven and hell there is only life, the frailest thing in the world until her eyes would not focus and later then trying to get out of bed—and such a high bed!—her legs so weak she had to crawl like a baby to the door but it was the wrong door, not the bathroom door; he would find her naked (always she slept naked) whimpering and clawing at the door and discover to his alarm and disgust she’d soiled herself and the carpet. Not for the first time.
Maybe all there is is just the next thing
This time Marilyn came out alone, with us, visiting the bars and casinos, and in the Horseshoe Casino there was H at the craps table and called us over. H was a compulsive gambler and like all such his anxiety wasn’t losing but being out of the game and having to leave the casino and return to his hotel room alone. H drunk and in a maudlin mood now The Misfits had only another week or so of shooting on location and he was telling himself it might be a masterpiece or maybe it was an utter flop. H took up Monroe’s hand and kissed it. Those two! They fought so much on the set neither could truly recall, meeting like this, who’d gotten the shitty end of the stick that day, who owed who an apology, or maybe they were even for once. H was up a few hundred at the craps table and staked Monroe to fifty bucks, and Monroe said in this baby voice she never gambled ’cause she’d only just lose, knowing the house odds were against her, and H cut her off like a director will, not realizing he’s being rude, saying, “Honey, just throw the fucking dice,” and Monroe laughed this nervous little squeaky laugh like a single throw of the dice was her life at stake, and she threw and won; it had to be explained how she’d won (craps is a complicated game); she smiled at the people clapping for her but told H she wanted to quit while she was ahead, for sure she’d lose if she tried again, and H looked at her surprised, saying, “Honey, that isn’t Marilyn. Not the Marilyn I know. That’s fucking poor sportsmanship, we’re only just getting started.” Monroe looked scared. (There were plenty of people gawking and some even snapping pictures but it wasn’t these people she was scared of. Strangers gawking at her, whispering to themselves That’s Marilyn Monroe! made her feel safe and protected.) She said, “What? You play till you lose? I don’t like that.” H said, “That’s right, honey. You play till you have nothing left to lose.”
That was what they did, those two, that night at the Horseshoe Casino our last week in Reno, Nevada.
The estranged husband. He would say, he would allow himself in the carelessness of grief to be quoted, “I gave her The Misfits and she left me anyway, I love her and don’t understand.”
The fairy tale. Some movies you make and forget even as you’re making them and won’t bother to see even the previews, and some movies you feel such anguish for, you’ll never forget and see numberless times and come to love and in retrospect convince yourself you’d loved the hour-by-hour experience of making the movie as in retrospect you might wish to convince yourself you’d loved the hour-by-hour experience of your own mysterious life, at its conclusion. So we loved the fairy tale of The Misfits. We loved Monroe and Gable loving each other. The Fair Princess and the Dark Prince they were, strolling in the desert dusk, whispering and laughing together. Monroe had her arm linked tight through Gable’s. She was a brash little girl leaning into the crook of his arm. Now he’d aged into his sixtieth year Gable was revealed to be solid as rock. He had a broad big alert face lined and creased like a weatherworn rock. That thin mustache. That quizzical half smile.
Did you think Gable wasn’t real? Gable can’t die like any of you, of a heart attack in a few weeks?
Now that Monroe had aged into her thirty-fifth year you saw she would never be The Girl again and her hair appeared prematurely white, wispy-white in the lengthening shadows and her eyes!—those yet-beautiful eyes always watering and shifting out of focus (never detected by the camera; the camera was forever Monroe’s lover) as if even as you spoke with her you were not-there for her, as in a dream sudden images appear imposed upon others and fade and are gone without memory, and yet most of the time Monroe would reply coherently and often she was witty, cheerful, “doing” Marilyn to make you smile. In this scene the Fair Princess in shirt and slacks and boots and the Dark Prince in cowboy attire and a hat amid the sharp fragrance of sagebrush. It was a stark clear night. The movie music so subdued almost you can’t hear it. In the distance you could see the glow of Reno like a strange undersea phosphorescence.
She was saying, “Funny how we end up!” and he was saying, “Honey, don’t talk like that. You’re far from ending up.” She said, “I mean here in the Nevada desert. Mr. Gable—” “Haven’t I told you to call me ‘Clark,’ Marilyn. How many times?” “C-clark! When my mother was a little girl, she used to pretend you were my father,” she said eagerly, and realizing her error amended, “I mean when I was a little girl, my mother used to pretend you were my father.” Gable snorted with laughter that may have been genuine. He said, “That long ago!” She protested, tugging at his arm, “Oh, hey. It wasn’t that long ago I was a little girl, Clark.” Good-naturedly he said, “Hell, I’m an old man, Marilyn. You know that.” “Oh Mr. G-gable you’ll never be old. The rest of us come and go. I’m just a blonde. There’s so many blondes. But you, Mr. Gable, will be forever.” She was pleading with him, and Clark Gable was gentleman enough to grant her the possibility. “Honey, if you say so.” His several heart attacks had left him with a shaken sense of his own mortality and yet he had not protested like the others the delays in filming and the ceaseless stress caused by Monroe’s unpredictable behavior. She’s not a well girl. She’d be well, if she could. He would not much complain of filming in searing-hot desert temperatures and as Gay Langland he would choose to perform many of his character’s strenuous action shots and in an accident find himself dragged by a rope behind a truck traveling at thirty-five miles an h
our. Oh, Gable knew he was mortal! Yet he had a new young wife. His wife was pregnant. Wouldn’t that mean he would live for many years, to see his child grow up?
In old Hollywood, it would.
The fairy tale. The Blond Actress would herself come to believe in this fairy tale a man had written for her as a love offering. She would come to believe not just that luminous Roslyn could save the small herd of wild mustangs but that wild mustangs might be saved. These horses, only six remaining of how many hundreds and one of them a foal. A foal galloping anxiously beside its mother. Lassoed and roped by the desperate men, yet they might be saved from death. From the butcher’s knife and being ground into dog food. Here is no romance of the West or even of manly ideals and courage but a melancholy “realism” to thrust into an American audience’s faces! Roslyn alone would save the mustangs with her slow-gathering female fury. Roslyn alone would run into the desert in an action blocked out with care by the Blond Actress and her director that would allow her to express, at the top of her lungs, her fury at manly cruelty. (“But I don’t want close-ups. Not of me screaming.”) She would scream at the men Liars! Killers! Why don’t you kill yourselves! She would scream in the emptiness of the Nevada desert until her throat was raw. Until the interior of her sore-pocked mouth throbbed with pain. Until more capillaries burst in her straining eyes. Until her heart pounded close to bursting. I hate you! Why don’t you die! She may have been screaming at those men of her life whose faces she retained or she may have been screaming at those men lacking faces, constituting the vast world beyond the perimeters of the crimson velvet backdrop and the blinding-bright photographer’s lights. She may have been screaming at H who had eluded her charm. She may have been screaming into a mirror. She’d told Doc Fell she would not need any medication that morning (after even the stupor of the phenobarbital night) and aroused now to pity, horror, rage by the spectacle of the trapped horses she had not needed any drug. She believed she would never again need any drugs. What power! What joy! She would return to Hollywood alone, and she would buy a house, her first house, and she would live alone, and she would do only work she wanted to do; she would be the great actress she had a chance of becoming; she would no longer be trapped by men; she would no longer be cheated of her truest self. The Blond Actress was expressing anger, rage. At last. Except (all observers would claim) it wasn’t the simulated expression of anger and rage but genuine passion ripping through the woman’s body like an electric current.
“Liars! Killers! I hate you.”
Weeks behind schedule. Hundreds of thousands of dollars over budget. The most expensive black-and-white feature film ever made.
“We owe it all to our Marilyn. Infinite thanks.”
This time there would be no lavish premiere for a Monroe movie.
No royal motorcade making its way along Hollywood Boulevard past thousands of screaming fans. No gala celebration at Grauman’s. No sparkling Dom Perignon foaming and overflowing down the Blond Actress’s bare arm. By the time the film was released Clark Gable would have been dead for several months. Monroe would have been divorced for nearly as long. The Misfits would be a box-office failure. It was a film disliked by The Studio that had produced it, though it would receive intelligent, respectful reviews and the performances of Gable, Monroe, and Clift would be praised. It would be damned as special, “artistic.” It had a stubborn integrity. The characters resembled broken-down actors. Famous faces yet not themselves. You looked at Gay Langland and thought Wasn’t he once Clark Gable? You looked at the blond Roslyn and thought Wasn’t she once Marilyn Monroe? You looked at the battered rodeo performer Perce Howland and thought My God! He used to be Montgomery Clift. These are people you knew when you were a kid. Gay Langland was a bachelor uncle of yours; Roslyn Tabor was a friend of your mother’s, a small-town divorcée. Small-town wistfulness and lost glamour. Maybe your father was in love with Roslyn Tabor! You’ll never know. The rodeo performer was a drifter, sad-eyed, skinny, with a ruined face. You’d see him in the early evening outside the bus station smoking and casting ghost-eyes in your direction. Hey: do you know me? These were ordinary Americans of the fifties yet mysterious to you because you knew them long ago when the world was mysterious and even your own face, contemplated in a mirror, in for instance the cigarette vending machine of that bus station or in the water-specked mirror above a lavatory sink, was a mystery never to be solved.
Living in the house at 12305 Fifth Helena Drive, Brentwood, Norma Jeane would one day realize, “All that Roslyn was, was my life.”
CLUB ZUMA
Hey? Who?
Astonished to see her Magic Friend up there onstage & the dance performed in front of mirrors. Flashing/gyrating lights. “I Wanna Be Loved by You.” MARILYN MONROE in the white crepe sundress with the halter top, swirling pleated skirt, & white panties exposed as an updraft of air lifts the skirt. The audience screams. Shapely legs spread. Arching her spine squealing with delight & the crowd whistles, cheers, thumps fists & feet amid a haze of blue smoke & deafening music. Oh why’d they bring me here, I don’t want to be here. Shining platinum-blond hair on the dancer’s bobbing head. MARILYN MONROE look-alike except the white clown face is longer & the jaw more prominent, & a bigger nose. But the red-luscious mouth & blue-shadowed eyes sparkling like rhinestones. And big breasts in the halter top. The dancer begins to strut, stomp, wriggle in her spike high heels, to shake big boobs & ass. Mari-lyn! Mari-lyn! the crowd loves her. Oh please I wish you wouldn’t. We’re more than just meat to be laughed at. We are!
This night smelling of jasmine & Jockey Club cologne & there’s Norma Jeane cringing in dark glasses, white silk turban hiding her hair & white silk pasha trousers & a man’s striped jacket belonging to Carlo. Oh why’d he do this. Why’d he bring me here I thought he loved me? The dancer is skillful, contorting her mammalian body in the accelerating beat of copulation. Pelvis like an air hammer. Moist pink tip of tongue between her lips. Panting, moaning. Caressing her big bouncy breasts. The audience loves this! Can’t get enough! Oh why? Make them laugh at us? The dancer is coked to the gills you can see her white eyeballs & sweat gleaming on her chest streaking the white clown makeup like exposed nerves. Can’t stop that rhythm! The crowd is insatiable. Like fucking. Rhythm builds, can’t stop. The dancer in the mirrors stripping off her elbow-length white gloves, tossing them into the frenzied crowd. I wanna be loved be loved by you by you by nobody else but you. Removing stockings & tossing. Removing the halter top—Ohhhh!—the crowd in Club Zuma goes crazy. Club Zuma on the Strip hazy-blue with smoke. Carlo’s Moroccan cigarettes. Carlo laughing with the rest. The dancer struts amid swirling smoke & deafening music holding her enormous bouncy breasts like foam rubber, neon-pink nipples the size of grapes & next the pleated skirt is torn off & tossed & she’s shimmying her plump ass & turns her back to the screaming audience stoops & spreads cheeks—Ohhhhh! the audience groans, yells—the dancer now nude gleaming in powdery-caked oily-white sweat on her pimply back & turning at last in triumph to reveal the long slender penis taped to the shaved pubis with flesh-colored adhesive & this adhesive she/he unfurls with a scream wanna be loved be loved be loved be loved & now the crowd in Club Zuma has truly gone crazy, screaming at the dancer & frantic bobbing penis semi-erect
MARI-LYN! MARI-LYN! MARI-LYN!
DIVORCE (RETAKE)
Once a part is prepared and elaborated in all its details . . . the actor will always play it correctly even if uninspired.
—Michael Chekhov, To the Actor
1
“I’m sorry. Oh forgive me! I c-can’t say anything more.”
In this newsreel known as the Divorce Press Conference the Blond Actress, tastefully dressed in black, is white-skinned as a geisha. Like Cherie in Bus Stop she appears so much paler than her companions, she might be a mannequin or a clown. Her lips have been outlined in a purplish-red pencil to make them appear larger and fuller than they are. Her eyes, seemingly reddened from weeping, have been carefully made up in pale blue e
ye shadow and dark brown mascara to match her eyebrows. Her hair as always is platinum blond, with a high glossy sheen. This is MARILYN MONROE and yet a hurt, confused woman. Her manner is both agitated and eager-to-please. As if in the midst of uttering crucial words to be recorded by dozens of journalists she’s forgetting her lines. She’s forgetting who she is: MARILYN MONROE. She’s wearing an elegant black linen suit with a pale diaphanous scarf knotted at her throat, dark-tinted stockings, and black high-heeled shoes. No jewelry. No rings: her shaky hands are conspicuously bare of rings. (Yes: she threw her wedding ring into the Truckee River in Reno, Nevada, like the divorcée Roslyn Tabor. A revered old Reno custom!) It’s startling to see MARILYN MONROE appearing fragile and not busty; the assembled media people have been informed that she’s recently lost “between ten and twelve pounds.” She is “suffering mental anguish” since her Mexican divorce from her playwright husband of four years and since the “tragic death” of her friend and co-star Clark Gable.
Like a widow. You want to impress these cynics as a widow suffering irrevocable loss, not a divorcée relieved to be free of a dead marriage.
Though she manages to stammer more or less coherent answers to questions about Clark Gable—how close a friend was he, what of accusations made by the actor’s widow that MARILYN MONROE was directly responsible for Gable’s heart attack, so delaying and complicating the production of The Misfits, causing such stress et cetera—she will not discuss her former husband. Either of her former husbands. The Playwright and the Ex-Athlete. Except to say in a whispery voice, so quiet her words must be repeated by her divorce attorney who stands beside her, the Blond Actress leaning on his arm, she “infinitely respects” them.
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