Still, Whitey was blinking tears from his eyes. The sight of him was upsetting.
“Whitey, what’s wrong? Please tell me.”
“Miss Monroe. Look at the ceiling, please.”
Stubborn Whitey stooped over his work, frowning. Applying dark brown liner to her eyelids, with a treacherously sharp pencil; brushing the curled eyelashes with mascara. His breath smelled fruity and warm as a baby’s. When finally he finished this painstaking work he straightened and looked away from the mirror. “Miss Monroe, I’m sorry for my weakness. It’s just my cat Marigold died last night.”
“Oh, Whitey. I’m so sorry. Marigold?”
“She was seventeen years old, Miss Monroe. Old for a cat, I know, but she never seemed old! Until almost the hour she died, in my arms. A beautiful silky long-haired calico, a stray who came to my back door all those years ago, motherless and abandoned and starving. Marigold slept on my chest most nights and was my companion always when I was home. She had such a sweet loving disposition, Miss Monroe. Such a hearty purr! I don’t see how I can live without her.”
This lengthy speech by Whitey, who rarely spoke more than a few words and those quietly, astonished Norma Jeane. In her MARILYN makeup and platinum hair she felt stricken with shame. She would have clutched at Whitey’s hands except, hiding his teary face, he’d drawn away. He stammered, “She just so s-suddenly died, you see. And now she’s gone. I can’t believe it. And almost a year to the day after my mother.”
Norma Jeane stared at Whitey’s averted face in the mirror. She was too stunned to react. Mother? Whitey’s mother? She hadn’t known that Whitey’s mother had died; hadn’t known that Whitey had a mother. Norma Jeane was one who prided herself on knowing and caring about assistants. She remembered their birthdays, she gave them gifts, and listened to their stories. Their stories which were of little significance in the public world were far more meaningful to her than her own stories, which were of exaggerated significance in that world. How to respond to Whitey’s grief? Obviously, Marigold’s death was foremost in his thoughts; it was Marigold he’d slept with, and Marigold he wept over; yet Norma Jeane had to speak of his mother, didn’t she? How strange that Whitey had never mentioned his mother’s death at the time of that death. Not a word. Not a hint! He’d never mentioned his mother to Norma Jeane at all. To commiserate with both his losses now would be to trivialize the mother’s death.
Yet it was Marigold’s death that was making Whitey cry.
At last Norma Jeane said, ambiguously, “Oh, Whitey. I’m so sorry.” It would have to do for both.
Whitey said, “Miss Monroe, I promise it won’t happen again.”
He wiped his face and returned to work. Whitey would summon forth a dazzling and young-looking MARILYN MONROE to arrive on the set of the doomed Something’s Got to Give several hours late, but to arrive! As he completed his skillful powdering and primping, Norma Jeane thought uneasily But this was a story already. A Russian story. A carriage driver begins to cry, his son has died and no one will listen? Oh why can’t I remember! It frightened her that, since her angry lover had shut his door in her face, she was forgetting so much.
Another Whitey story. One day Whitey was giving his mistress a facial in her dressing room at The Studio. A mud pack smelling of nasty muck and ditch water but she liked the smell, it was a smell that suited Norma Jeane. She found the drying-tightening sensation of the mud pack peaceful too, hypnotic and consoling. She was lying on a chaise lounge covered in towels, her eyes protected by damp pads. That day she’d been brought to The Studio groggy and sedated. She’d been delivered to her crew of assistants like an invalid, MARILYN MONROE in fact newly released from Cedars of Lebanon (bladder infection, pneumonia, exhaustion, anemia?) and that day at The Studio she was scheduled for publicity stills exclusively, no speaking, no acting, no reason for anxiety, and so she’d lain back as Whitey applied the mud pack and quickly drifted into sleep like one deprived of her troubling senses the girl who sees too much and a crow comes to peck out her eyes, a little girl who hears too much and a big fish walking on his tail comes to gobble up her ears and after a while she’d wakened and sat up excited and confused and removed the pads from her eyes and saw herself—her mud face, her naked and appalled eyes—in the mirror and screamed and Whitey came running, his hand on his heart, asking what was wrong Miss Monroe, and Miss Monroe said, laughing, “Oh gosh, I thought I was dead, Whitey. Just for a second.” So they laughed together, who knows why. Amid the clutter of gifts in this dressing room of MARILYN MONROE that had once been the dressing room of MARLENE DIETRICH there was an opened bottle of cherry-chocolate liqueur and from this each had several swallows and laughed again, tears in their eyes, for a female in a mud pack is a comical sight, mouth and eyes untouched by mud but defined by mud, and Norma Jeane said in her shivery MARILYN voice that meant she was serious, no joking, no flirting or banter, and don’t repeat this please, “Whitey? Promise me? After I’m”—hesitating to say dead, even gone, out of delicacy for Whitey—“will you make Marilyn up? One final time?”
Whitey said, “Miss Monroe, I will.”
“HAPPY BIRTHDAY MR. PRESIDENT”
She’d been dreaming she was pregnant with the President’s baby but there was something wrong with the President’s baby, they would charge her with manslaughter, the drugs she’d been taking so the fetus was misshapen in the womb, no larger than a seahorse floating in that liquid darkness, and in any case the President though a staunch Catholic in horror of abortion as of contraception wished strongly to prevent a national scandal and so the misshapen fetus would have to be surgically removed from her, Hey: I know this is a crazy dream she’d wake every half hour shivering and perspiring and her heart knocking in terror one of them (Dick Tracy, Jiggs, Bugs Bunny, the Sharpshooter) had entered her house in stealth to chloroform her (as they’d chloroformed her in the C Hotel and delivered her comatose in the crinkly black hooded raincoat to her return flight to L.A.) so she dialed Carlo’s number in desperation, though knowing that Carlo wouldn’t answer, but dialing Carlo’s number was in itself a consolation, like prayer, her pride wouldn’t allow her to consider how many other women, and men, were dialing Carlo’s number in the exigency of night terror too banal to be named, but later that day when she was entirely awake and conscious and aware of her surroundings, This is real life! not the stage the telephone rang and when she lifted the receiver saying in The Girl’s breathy welcoming voice, “Hi there? H’lo? Who’s it?” (her number was unlisted, only parties dear to her or crucial to her career had this number) hearing the clicking-crackling of the line that meant the phone was being tapped, the monitoring equipment in a van around the corner or parked unobtrusively in a neighbor’s driveway, but she hadn’t any proof of course, didn’t want to exaggerate, certain of the drugs exacerbated nerves, suspicions, diarrhea, light-headedness and vomiting and paranoid thoughts and emotions. But what is imagined might already have happened.
And later that day, as dusk softened the contours of things, a watercolor-apocalyptic sky overhead, she was lying on a plastic lounge chair by the pool (in which she would never once swim) and glanced up to see him, not the President but the President’s brother-in-law who resembled the President, the men as alike as blood brothers, and he smiled at her, saying, “Marilyn. We meet again.” This genial unctuous ex-actor who (she’d come to learn, to her embarrassment) was known fondly in certain quarters and contemptuously in others as the President’s Pimp. He is the devil. But I don’t believe in the devil do I? She was in a vulnerable mood. She’d been reading Chekhov’s The Three Sisters imagining she might play Masha; she’d been approached by a well-regarded theatrical director in New York to perform in a six-week limited-run production and her optimistic heart urged her Why not? I can whistle, like Masha! for she’d matured into Masha, she was maturing into tragedy, though her pessimist-realist heart knew You will only fail again, don’t risk it. The MARILYN MONROE successes that constituted her career had the taste of failure in
her mouth, a taste of wetted ashes, but here suddenly was an emissary from the President “gobbling her up with his eyes,” MARILYN MONROE in a black bikini reading Chekhov: Major Plays what could be funnier, if only he had a camera, Jesus! He could imagine the President his drinking/fucking buddy cracking up over that one.
Asked MARILYN for a drink and she went to fetch it for him (barefoot and her ass jiggling in the skinny black thong and her boobs the most amazing he’d ever seen on any Homo sapiens female), and when she returned he sprang upon her the surprise: MARILYN MONROE was being invited to sing “Happy Birthday” to the President at a gala birthday salute to be held in Madison Square Garden later that month, it was to be one of the great fundraisers in history and for a damned worthy cause, the Democratic Party, the party of the people, fifteen thousand paying guests and more than a million dollars hauled in for next November’s elections and only the very special very top-talented American entertainers were being invited to participate, only special friends of the President including MARILYN MONROE. She stared. No makeup, a scrubbed plain-pretty look, and her hair in pigtails, looking so much younger than almost thirty-six, wistful and plaintive and saying shyly, “Oh but I thought he didn’t l-like me anymore? The President?” The President’s brother-in-law seemed astounded. “Doesn’t like you? Are you serious, Marilyn? You?” When she didn’t reply, biting at a ragged thumbnail, he protested, “Honey, you must know we’re all crazy for you. For Marilyn.” Doubtfully, as if thinking this might be a trick, she said, “You—you are?” “Absolutely. Even the First Lady, the Ice Queen as she’s fondly called. Loves your movies.” “She does? Oh. Gosh.” He laughed, finishing his drink, a scotch and soda prepared as ineptly as a child might prepare it, and in the wrong kind of glass and the rim chipped. “‘See no evil, hear no evil.’ My strategy, too.”
She couldn’t fly to New York in the midst of making a movie, she said. She was close to being fired from this project, she said. Oh, she was sorry, she knew this was an honor, a once-in-a-lifetime honor, but she couldn’t risk being fired and frankly she couldn’t afford it. She wasn’t Elizabeth Taylor making one million dollars for her movies; she was lucky to make one hundred thousand and saw so little of that after expenses and agents’ fees and God knew who else was sucking her dry, oh she was ashamed almost, she hadn’t much money. Maybe he could explain to the President? This house she loved was costing her, she couldn’t really afford it. Plane tickets, hotel expenses, a new dress, oh gosh she’d have to wear a special dress for the occasion, wouldn’t she, that would cost thousands of dollars, and if she went to New York in violation of her contract with The Studio they wouldn’t pay for the dress of course, as they wouldn’t defray her expenses, she’d be on her own entirely; no she couldn’t afford it, an honor of a lifetime but no: she couldn’t afford it.
Anyway I know he hates me. He doesn’t respect me. Why should I be exploited by that gang!
The President’s Pimp took her hand and kissed it.
“Marilyn. Until we meet again.”
It would cost five thousand dollars.
She didn’t have five thousand dollars but (she’d been promised!) the organizers of the Birthday Salute to the President would defray her expenses including the dress so there she was being fitted, excited nervous giddy as any American high school girl trying on her prom dress. And what a prom dress! A very very thin “nude” fabric like gossamer magically covered with hundreds—thousands?—of rhinestones so MARILYN MONROE would shine—glare—glitter—seem virtually to explode in the deliriously swirling spotlights of Madison Square Garden. She would be nude beneath the dress, of course. Absolutely nothing beneath. MARILYN MONROE guaranteed. Assiduously she’d shaved her body hairs, preparing herself smooth as a doll. Oh, that old bald floppy-footed doll of her childhood! Except nothing about MARILYN MONROE is floppy, not yet. So the jammed-in cheering crowd would stare at her, at the President’s gorgeous wind-up sex doll, an inflatable platinum-blond doll she appeared, they would stare and imagine what they couldn’t in fact see, and in imagining it they would see it, a shadowy cunt! a shadowy cut! a shadowy nothingness between the female’s luscious creamy-pale thighs! as if this shadow were the very eucharist, fraught with mystery. As it happened, the emcee for the Birthday Salute was none other than the President’s handsome brother-in-law or, as he was known more intimately, the President’s Pimp, mellow and beaming in his tuxedo, rousing the clamorous crowd to a fever pitch of cheering roaring applauding whistling stomping enthusiasm for MARILYN MONROE the President’s whore.
So drunk, Marilyn had to be aimed from backstage and practically caught by her underarms by the broadly grinning emcee and walked to the microphone. So tightly stitched into that ridiculous dress and in her spike-heeled shoes she could barely walk, in mincing baby steps. So terrified, despite being drunk and coked to the gills, she could barely focus her eyes. What a spectacle. What a vision. The audience of fifteen thousand affluent Democrats roared their approval. Unless their good-natured derision. Mari-lyn! Marilyn! This incredible female was the grand finale of the birthday salute and well worth waiting for. Even the President, who’d dozed off during some of the salutes, including heartfelt gospels sung a cappella by a mixed Negro chorus from Alabama, was roused to attention. In the presidential box above the stage there lounged the handsome youthful President in black tie, feet up on the rail, an enormous cigar (Cuban, the very best) between his teeth. And what milk-white chunky teeth. He was staring downward at MARILYN MONROE this spectacle in mammalian body and glittery “nude” dress. Had Marilyn time to wonder if the President would fly to Los Angeles to help celebrate her birthday on June first, an intimate celebration possibly, no, not likely she had time to wonder, for she found herself standing at the microphone dazed and vacuously smiling licking red-lipstick lips as if trying desperately to remember where she was, what this was, glassy-eyed, swaying in spike-heeled shoes, beginning at last after an embarrassingly long pause to sing in the weak, breathy, throaty-sexy MARILYN voice
Somehow these gasped syllables emerged despite the terrible dryness of her mouth and the roaring in her ears and the blinding swirling spotlights as she stood holding the microphone, now clutching desperately to keep from falling, and giving her no assistance was the emcee in his tux standing behind her clapping vigorously and wolf-grinning at her backside in the shimmering dress; there were some who would claim that MARILYN turned lovesick eyes toward the President lounging like a spoiled young prince in the box above her, her sexy-intimate nursery-rhyme song was clearly for him alone, except the President was in a party mood, not a sentimental mood, the President was flanked by raucous male buddies including his rival brothers and the First Lady was notably absent, the First Lady disdained rabble-rousing occasions like this vulgar fund-raiser in Madison Square Garden, much preferring genteel company to this crowd of party hacks and politicos, these crude characters! As the President gazed down at MARILYN MONROE cooing seductively to him, one of his buddies nudged him in the ribs Hope she fucks better than she sings Prez and the witty Prez muttered around his cigar No but, fucking her, you don’t have to listen to her sing, which cracked up everybody in the box. In fact, MARILYN MONROE managed to get through not one but two precarious choruses of “Happy Birthday” attentively observed by the vast crowd as a tightrope walker on a high wire stricken suddenly with vertigo might be observed by a hushed audience waiting for her to fall, yet she sang without hitting a single false note (it seemed) or stammering or losing her way and brought the audience to their feet to join in a joyous finale wishing the President “Happy Birthday.” Marilyn was fabulous that night a fantastic performer nobody like Marilyn the guts required to stand in front of fifteen thousand people knowing you’ve got no talent looking like a drowned woman though beautiful in that dead-white way of hers, a corpse floating just below the surface of water so sweet that night we fell in love with her all over again Marilyn in this weird dazzle-gown she’d been stitched into like a sausage and it surprised us, she almo
st could sing in this wistful ghost voice. And suddenly it was over. She was squinting out at them, these strangers who adored her. Clapping and screaming for her. And the President and his companions vigorously clapping too. Laughing and clapping. Oh, they liked her! They respected her. She hadn’t journeyed in ill health and terror for nothing. This is the happiest day of my life she was trying to explain now I can die happy, I am so happy oh thank you! trying to explain to the crowd but the laughing emcee in his tux was urging her away, Thank you thank you Miss Monroe, an assistant emerged from backstage to escort Miss Monroe away, poor dazed woman leaning on a stranger’s arm You could see she was sick, drained, she’d given everything she had it was pitiful to observe she was leaning on a man’s arm, might have sunken to the floor to sleep except he said gently Miss Monroe? you don’t want to lie down here and there she was breathing hard hanging on to the doorframe, then leaning heavily against the bathroom counter, she was alone, she was fighting waves of nausea, in her bathroom at 12305 Fifth Helena Drive staring at her haggard face in the mirror, she’d never left home? she’d never flown to New York City, to sing “Happy Birthday” to the President? yes but it was days later, she’d been fired by The Studio and was being sued for one million dollars (according to Variety) but she’d had her moment in history, there was the fabulous “nude” rhinestone dress hanging in her closet, such a beautiful dress requires a fabric hanger not a wire hanger but she hadn’t one, or if she had one somewhere she had no idea where, oh God she was appalled seeing that many of the rhinestones had fallen off, and the dress had cost so much, and they would never “defray” her expenses. Oh, she knew!
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