Stars in His Eyes

by Martí Gironell

  The president’s previously relaxed expression turned tense as walked back into the house. Jean followed him inside with his eyes. There, in a dimly lit room, half a dozen people were chatting and passing out drinks. Cigar smoke darkened the space where a figure had just arrived, one who seemed to shine with her own inner light. Jean watched Kennedy make a beeline to Marilyn Monroe, who took the president’s arm.

  The most powerful man in the world and the most sensual and longed-after woman treated each other with hypnotic familiarity. That weekend had been planned so the two lovers could be together.

  Leon watched them with his trademark indifference. But there was also an envy that he would never acknowledge. How long had it been since he’d felt so close to Donna? Since they’d spoken to each other in soft voices, since they’d touched in a way that made their skin tingle? Since they’d been together because they wanted to, and not because they had to? They barely ever spoke now, not gently, anyway. They fought, and each time they pulled further away.

  The same had been happening of late with JFK and Marilyn. Jean had sensed the distance growing between the president and the actress. It was like a curse with her—the same thing had happened with Sinatra. Her doomed affairs seemed to pile up like cast-off clothes in the bottom of a closet. Sinatra had dumped her. Arthur Miller had remarried and was waiting on a child, and Joe DiMaggio lived outside the limelight, struggling with his longing to return to the love of his life and the pathological jealousy he felt when other men made eyes at Marilyn.

  Jean had seen her enchantments firsthand. Whenever she dropped in at La Scala, in the company of some hangers-on, not visibly drunk but too out of sorts to be coherent, Jean would drop his usual feigned aloofness and approach that lost but lovely woman with care.

  One Saturday night soon afterward, someone called the restaurant asking for him.

  “Jean?”

  He was surprised to hear a woman’s low, hesitant voice on the other end.

  “Marilyn?” he guessed.

  “Yes, Jean, it’s me,” the actress confirmed in a broken voice. “I’m calling to tell you I won’t be in for dinner tonight. I’m a little tired. Could you send some dinner over for me, please?”

  “Of course, you can count on it. Fettuccine and rosé?”

  La Scala’s customers made good use of its delivery services. Marilyn had grown used to calling in for a warm meal whenever she didn’t feel strong enough to leave home.

  “That’s right.”

  “You’ll have it in half an hour, OK?”

  Marilyn sent him a kiss through the receiver and hung up.

  Fettuccine Leon was La Scala’s spin on a dish that had made it to Hollywood several decades before and had quickly become a classic. The now-ubiquitous Alfredo sauce, widely thought to be an Italian classic, was actually just an American adaptation of the pasta in bianco that millions of Italians ate at home. But since Douglas Fairbanks and Mary Pickford had brought back the recipe from Alfredo’s restaurant in Rome after their honeymoon, local chefs had started adding an array of cheeses, butter, cream, bread crumbs, grilled chicken, cubed tomatoes—anything to give the dish their own personal touch. Marilyn liked it extra creamy, with lots of Parmesan and chopped beef, and it became another of the restaurant’s fixtures.

  First had come the mostaccioli Natalie, the rigatoni à la Debbie Reynolds, the grenadine of beef à la Paul Newman, and chicken à la Dean Martin. Then, when Marilyn took a liking to it, Jean Leon had renamed his fettuccine Leon in honor of the actress: fettuccine à la Marilyn.

  Leon took the order to Marilyn’s home himself. It wasn’t his first time there. The actress lived in Brentwood at 12305 Fifth Helena Drive, close to Bel Air and not far from La Scala. It was a house on a narrow street, with iron bars over the windows and an interior she herself had decorated with knickknacks she’d brought back from Mexico—a country she loved, where her mother was from. As was her assistant, who lived in Marilyn’s home with her and Pat Newcomb, Marilyn’s secretary.

  Jean remembered the first time he’d made a delivery to the actress. Yes, please, the usual. Fettuccine and rosé.

  He’d rung the bell nervously, and Marilyn had taken her time opening the door. She’d answered with her eyes lowered and a glass of bourbon in her hand, wrapped in a pale-pink silk robe. Leon went into the dining room to set down her delivery, and she followed him in. She whispered, coquettish like a cat’s meow, but there was something wounded in her voice, too.

  “I met him a few years back at a party, at the home of this producer, Charlie Feldman,” she began, as though they had been conversing for hours. Leon was confused but had a guess about who the actress might be referring to in her disordered monologue. “I was with Joe . . . He was so irresistibly handsome that I couldn’t help but write my number down on a scrap of paper and leave it in his jacket pocket. He was a promising young senator at the time.” She sighed and went on, then jumped ahead in the story. “We saw each other in the Malibu Cottage, at Pat and Peter’s Palm Springs house, at the Beverly Hilton . . . at . . . so many places, Jean, places where Jack and I made love in secret, for years . . . years, Jean . . . and now . . .” She stopped to delicately dry her tears. “Now it’s over, no calls, no meetings . . . Peter told me. Like that . . . without explanations, without anything. The same way he came into my life, all at once, he’s up and written me off.”

  Jean didn’t need to ask—he knew “Peter” meant Peter Lawford, the president’s go-between.

  “But I’ve still got his brother . . .”

  “Bob?”

  “Yeah, we’ve seen each other a few times lately,” she admitted.

  Marilyn got up to fill her glass.

  “It all started at the birthday party. When Jack turned forty-five, at Madison Square Garden in New York.” Marilyn recalled the day she had immortalized singing the most sensual “Happy Birthday” that had ever been heard. “Did you see me?”

  “Why don’t you put that drink down and have a bit of pasta?”

  She paid him no mind, grabbing the bottle of bourbon and dumping out another healthy portion. She added more ice cubes and continued as though he hadn’t said a word.

  “I was the president’s birthday present. I sang live in front of fifteen thousand people. Everyone in America was watching, even Jackie. With that dress, like a jeweled glove squeezing my body . . .” Marilyn ran her hands over her hips. Watching her, Leon could see why men found it hard to control themselves around her.

  “You were a sight to see.”

  “Something happened that night that I could never have predicted.”

  “What?”

  “When I got up from the stand after performing, I ran into his brother.”

  “Bob?”

  “Yes, Bob, and I cornered him against a wall, and I would have showered him with kisses if Ethel hadn’t been with him.”

  “You jumped on Bob Kennedy in front of his wife?”

  “Yes, Jean, I was drunk, but I knew I’d have a better shot with the president’s brother than with the president himself. Or maybe both at the same time . . . who knows.” Under the sway of the alcohol, Marilyn Monroe was dreaming out loud in her dining room, and he was a witness to it. A partial and worried witness.

  “Marilyn, listen to me and eat something,” he said, offering her a plate of his fettuccine.

  The actress pushed aside a lock of blond hair that had fallen in her eyes, went over, and gave him a kiss on the cheek.

  “Your Donna is a very lucky woman.”

  “My Donna,” he repeated softly, with some remorse.

  “Thanks, Jean.”

  “Good night, Marilyn.”

  Two months later, nearly the same scene took place. Jean never knew what state she would be in, whether her mood would be glum or ecstatic.

  “Jean! Hey! Come in,” the actress greeted him, this time in a white satin robe.

  “Hi, Marilyn, how are you?” Jean asked.

  “Good, good . . . ,”
she said, a bit apathetic.

  “Should I leave this in the kitchen?” Leon asked, not wanting to linger too long.

  “Yes, please. I’ll go get the money,” Marilyn said, disappearing down a hall.

  Leon walked through the dining room toward the kitchen. That was when he saw him.

  “Hello, Jean.”

  “Hello, Bobby.”

  The brother of the president, the attorney general of the United States, Robert Kennedy, was pouring himself a whiskey. He looked relaxed; he had taken off his jacket and rolled up his shirtsleeves.

  Jean knew that they had already seen each other the night before at La Scala. Robert had been sharing a table with Marilyn, Pat Newcomb, and Peter Lawford. Rumors of a relationship between Marilyn and JFK’s brother had been floating around for some time, but Leon had ignored them and had kept his mouth shut.

  “You want one?” Kennedy offered Jean the bottle of Jack Daniel’s in his left hand, which showed his wedding ring.

  “No can do, Bobby. I’m just here to drop off Marilyn’s dinner. I’ve got to hurry back to the restaurant. We’re full up tonight,” he said, excusing himself. “I’m just doing this one delivery, because, well, you can’t say no to Marilyn.”

  They exchanged a glance. The actress arrived and paid Jean, who left with an ambivalent feeling, a discomfort he couldn’t shake.

  He walked back to his car, breathing in the hot, dry air that came in from the Pacific coast and filled the night with the aroma of eucalyptus. It was harder and harder to recognize the Marilyn he had met years ago, the pre-Kennedy Marilyn. That joyful, curious, and unpredictable woman who had waltzed right into the kitchen to learn to make fresh pasta the way Emilio did it. The Marilyn who had captivated Jean Leon, who had chatted him up one night long ago, after accepting his invitation to a glass of wine at the famous chef’s table.

  “Jean Leon.” As he started the engine, he remembered the way Marilyn had pronounced his name that night, around closing time, with a provocative French intonation.

  “Like the painter,” he said, as he always did whenever someone tried to pin down where he was from.

  “Gérôme!” she said exultantly. “Je l’aime.”

  Jean was surprised she had heard of him.

  “Have you seen the women he paints?” she asked. “When I look at them, I see my reflection in them, I swear it . . . Something about the sight of them is just wonderful.”

  She giggled, but then put her hand in front of her lips, while in his mind Jean reconstructed those scenes of slave markets, Turkish baths, and seraglios, like something from the Arabian Nights. It was true, Gérôme’s women had a voluptuousness in their bodies identical to Marilyn’s.

  “You’re right,” he said. “Gérôme’s women are very . . . stimulating.”

  He had loved that spontaneous Marilyn. She had real personality, even if very few people ever got to see it.

  “You know I almost became a princess?” she told him one night when she was finishing dinner alone at table fourteen.

  “On-screen or in real life?” Leon asked her.

  After waving over a waiter and motioning for him to bring a glass so Jean could share the last bit of her champagne, she continued: “A real princess, with a prince, servants, and everything! Luckily it didn’t work out.”

  Leon was intrigued by her story. And the actress loved telling it.

  “It’s a secret, but I can tell you because I know you’ll never share it with anyone else.”

  “You can count on that.”

  “I could have been princess of Monaco.”

  “Really?”

  “Yes, really, aren’t you listening?” she said between giggles. “Aristotle Onassis was pushing for it. He had stock in the casino in Monte Carlo, and half of the principality was his. He wanted to bring back the splendor of the French Riviera, and he came up with this scheme with Gardner Cowles, the editor of Look, for Prince Rainier to marry a big Hollywood starlet . . .”

  “No!” Jean responded, his mouth falling open as he leaned forward, desperate to know the rest.

  “Yes, yes!” the actress replied. “Cowles proposed my name to Onassis. And so they offered it to me. I didn’t know the first thing about Prince Rainier.”

  “So what happened?”

  “Cowles and Onassis skipped over a very important detail . . .”

  “What?”

  “Rainier was already in love with a Hollywood starlet.”

  “Grace.”

  Those conversations, so sincere, so unexpected, never happened anymore. The cheer in Marilyn’s face was gone—now it was ever more pallid and tortured.

  On the drive back, Jean mulled over the scene he had just witnessed with Marilyn and RFK, and it kept eating at him even after he was back in the dining room overseeing the dinner rush. He gave everything his usual once-over, making sure there were no smudges on the wineglasses or silver, no dust on the bottles behind the bar. The headwaiter came over and informed him in a trembling voice that there was an especially high-priority guest there that Saturday.

  “At table thirteen, sir.”

  “Sam Giancana?”

  They had met a few years back through Frank Sinatra, and when Jean opened La Scala, Sam Giancana and other prominent Italian Americans started frequenting the place. At first, Leon didn’t find anything unusual: “Momo” Giancana had been in La Scala many times, though he was more a fan of Puccini, the restaurant Frank Sinatra had since opened two streets away.

  But then, when Jean thought more about it, it seemed like too much of a coincidence: only a few minutes earlier, he had greeted Bobby Kennedy, one of Giancana’s sworn enemies. Sam wasn’t pleased with the two Kennedy brothers. He’d put up a fortune to help get them into the White House. And now, from the attorney general’s office, Bobby was starting a crusade against organized crime.

  “Sam! Welcome! Good to see you!”

  Leon greeted Giancana and his menacing companions. One of them, the slimmer, more serious of the two, stared him down, while the other made a grimace it was hard for Leon to ignore.

  “Jean, my friend,” the mafioso said with a smile, opening his arms in a sign of satisfaction, “it’s not easy to find a place like yours, Jean, with good Italian cooking. You got one hell of a chef here.”

  Not a single trace of the spaghetti they had served the gangster remained on his plate. Just a few splotches of red and the crumbs from the bread he’d used to sop up the leftover tomato sauce until the plate was nearly spotless.

  “Thanks, Sam, I’ll tell Emilio—he’ll be happy to hear that.”

  Later he learned the men with Giancana were two of his most feared enforcers: “Needles” Gianola and “Mugsy” Tortorella.

  The next day was a Sunday, and Jean worked all day until very late. He closed up and went home, exhausted but satisfied. Everyone back at home was asleep.

  The restaurant was closed on Mondays. That was their one day off a week, but even then, Jean liked to wake up early and drive over there to relax. He preferred to avoid the hustle and bustle of mornings at home while the kids were getting ready for school. He picked up the newspaper that the paperboy had left by the door, made a coffee in the kitchen, and glanced at the headline:

  MARILYN MONROE FOUND DEAD

  Impossible! He brought his hands to his head, pushing his hair back anxiously. Marilyn. He had just been with her. He had served her . . . yes. Her last supper.

  It can’t be, he repeated over and over. It can’t be true.

  He felt that same old jabbing pain in the pit of his stomach. His brother. Jimmy Dean. And now Marilyn Monroe. She’d never be back there at table fourteen, she’d never greet him at her house in her robe, she’d never enjoy his fettuccine again, she’d never tell those incredible stories or share her intense, bewildered thoughts.

  He felt something crack inside him. For the first time in ages, he missed his wife.

  CHAPTER 11

  Donna barely ever set foot in La Scala nowa
days. But one day, La Scala came to her.

  “Special home delivery. I’ve got lunch for you.”

  “Emilio?” Donna opened the door for him, surprised.

  In a chance conversation with Jean, Emilio Nuñez had learned that Donna hadn’t left the house for two weeks. She was laid up sick with a fever. Jean had told him everything was under control, that the children were at his sister-in-law’s house, and he was shocked when the cook hushed him with a cutting remark. Emilio had headed over to the house within the hour.

  “You look like hell . . . ,” Emilio told her as soon as he saw her, his forehead creased with concern.

  “Don’t come too close, I’m worried I’m contagious.”

  “God forbid Jean should get stuck without his head chef.”

  They both laughed. Emilio went straight to the kitchen to unwrap the food. He told Donna to take it easy and sit down, that he would take care of everything.

  “It’s been a long time since you’ve eaten at La Scala, it’s not like the old days. You’re lucky: I’ve made you caldo gallego. It’s my mother’s recipe, it’ll do you right.”

  He hadn’t even begun to heat it up when they heard the sound of the keys opening the front door. It was Jean. He acted like nothing was out of the ordinary, but to Donna and Emilio he was an open book. They were the only two people who always knew what he was thinking.

  “We’re backed up bad in the kitchen, Emilio.”

  “I’m busy here.”

  Jean stared at him with a clenched jaw, not blinking. “I can take care of this.”

  And, against all predictions, Jean kept his word. He served his wife dinner, then waited for her to fall asleep so he could go to his sister-in-law’s house to collect the children. He called out sick the rest of that week and took care of his family. Donna couldn’t remember a single time he had stayed at home when La Scala was up and running.

  “I know I’m losing an important part of their lives, Donna, but I want to leave something behind for them, and right now is when I need to really take care of it if I want it to turn into something big.”