The Blonde

by Anna Godbersen

  “Oh, yes.” Pat hooked the elbow of her slender, freckled arm over the backrest of her chair, twisting to face the newcomer more fully. “I remember seeing you across the room. I would have loved to talk to you, but that was quite a week for my family, as you can imagine. I was barely home myself—Mother and Father had a place in Beverly Hills, and of course we had rooms downtown, too. The party went on at the beach pretty much all week, and I confess I had to go elsewhere just to get some rest. Quite a few people drank too much to get home and had to stay the night, and the next night, too. But that’s why we keep that house, you know. Peter and I, we love company.”

  “It’s a beautiful house,” Marilyn whispered, as though a house were a wonder not quite to be believed.

  “Thanks, darling. You should see the one my family keeps in Palm Beach. Have you ever been to Palm Beach?”

  Marilyn shook her head.

  “You must come sometime.” If Marilyn had believed this, then she might have taken it as a sign that her troubles would soon be over, but the way Pat shrugged and glanced away, removing a cigarette from an ivory case and fixing it into a silver cigarette holder, made her think that this was just the sort of empty invitation she issued to let people know that she liked them. It made sense that she alone amongst her siblings had married into Hollywood. Her regal posture, the way she inhabited her surroundings, her unconcealed indifference to the nervous husband beside her—now being called onto stage—suggested a proclivity for contentment.

  A smattering of applause traveled across the nightclub, and then the lights dimmed, and everyone hushed while the cone of the spotlight illuminated Peter’s charming, rueful face. “Ladies and gentleman, welcome to the Copacabana. I am here to introduce a man who needs no introduction. And yet I will say a few words …”

  Marilyn focused her attention stageward, as she assumed Pat would until her husband stepped down. But Pat, uninterested in the mild palaver Peter was warming up the crowd with, inclined her head toward Marilyn and said, “I’m so awfully glad you sat with us. You know these boys can be such a bore when they get together; it’s nice to have another girl along for the ride.”

  Marilyn beamed and snuggled against her fur. “Well, it’s nice for me, too.”

  “Are you and Frank the new item?”

  “Oh, I don’t know about that, we’re more just like—”

  “I don’t care what goes on behind closed doors, darling, I really don’t. I’m sure Frankie is a terrible pain. But stick around, would you? We’d have such fun.”

  “Thanks.” Finally Marilyn was beginning to relax, and when the waiter came by she didn’t bother explaining what was in her glass, and whispered, “Just a little champagne, if you have it, please.”

  The room had meanwhile applauded as Frank swaggered to center stage, and he and Peter began laughing, shifting on their feet, lightly snapping their fingers, ribbing each other in a way that she supposed was meant to be good-natured. After a while Peter retreated to a stool in the shadow, and Frank advanced toward the microphone with his boxer’s intensity. For a moment he gazed steadily into the far back reaches of the club, and then he cleared his throat and said, “This first number is for a good friend of mine who just so happens to be gracing us with her presence tonight, Miss Marilyn Monroe …”

  A drumroll sounded as he gestured toward the empty table in the front row, and the spotlight drifted in the direction he’d indicated. His upper lip tensed when the spotlight showed only an empty seat. Marilyn, swallowing her dismay, put two fingers in her mouth and whistled. “Frankie!” she stage-whispered. “Over here!”

  The spotlight found her, and she stood and lifted her white whip of an arm so the audience could see her figure, which inspired much clapping and cat-calling. Once she sat down, and the attention of the room was focused once again on Frank, he chuckled as though her unpredictability hadn’t bothered him. “That dame’s never where she says she’ll be, but who can blame a guy for following her around. Am I right?”

  The room noisily agreed, and then the string section started up, and Frank leaned into his microphone, stretching out the syllables of the half-sung, half-shouted opening line of “Luck Be a Lady.”

  The music washed over Marilyn, who was glad that neither Sinatra nor anybody else was looking at her any longer, and she sat back and happily accepted the champagne that the waiter brought. There was another old-fashioned for Pat, too, and this time it was the Kennedy sister who offered her glass to cheers. Then she draped an arm over Marilyn’s shoulders, and Marilyn realized she was shaking with silent laughter. “That was to die for,” she whispered, between giggles. “Did you see the look on Frankie’s face?”

  “He’s gonna be mad later,” Marilyn whispered back.

  “Who cares? Stick with me, darling, he won’t show his temper when I’m around. He’s too proud of being the president’s friend to be a bastard in front of anybody who’s got Jack’s private line.”

  Up on stage, the rhythm had picked up, and Frank’s singing had grown full and flowing. He blew on a fistful of imaginary dice, and tossed them into the audience—it was one of those theatrical moves from the big band days. But she couldn’t really laugh at him, only reflect that he was lucky to have that voice.

  He was singing about luck as though luck were a woman, and Pat was still giggling, although Marilyn wasn’t sure if it was because Frank’s feathers had been ruffled, or because she was pondering what the lyric about some other guy’s dice really meant, and Marilyn was glad to be out in the world, and beginning to think she might have some luck left, too.

  “When are you coming back to the Coast?” Pat had eased away slightly, but her arm rested protectively on the back of Marilyn’s chair. “Say it’ll be soon. I think you and I are going to be fast friends.”

  TWENTY-EIGHT

  Santa Monica, May 1961

  “WHAT are you doing out here all by yourself?”

  “Oh, I …” Marilyn glanced up from her lounge chair and watched Pat descend from the brightness of the house to the unlit place on the patio where she had been listening to the Pacific crash up against the rim of the continent. There were several truthful answers to this question, none of which she found advantageous to share. She was tired, was the simplest—in the months during which her friendship with Pat had blossomed, she had been happy to fulfill the unspoken expectation that she brighten up the dinner parties the Lawfords hosted, doing a sweet little drunken dance, or spilling some movie gossip, or murmuring a naughty bon mot so that their guests would have an anecdote to take home about what Marilyn Monroe was really like. Of course she had filled the same function before, but always with a larger goal in mind, and she had been performing in this capacity for a few months now without even a glimpse of the thing she was really after: Jack.

  And, too, she had been pondering the news out of Cuba. What the president called an episode, and Havana called an invasion of a mercenary army, at a place vividly named the Bay of Pigs. Perhaps Castro had received advance warning of the operation by some other avenue, but Marilyn couldn’t help but feel sick over what she’d told Alexei during those bleak days in Payne Whitney, and wonder if she weren’t to blame for the fighters who had been shot up on the beach, or executed in the ensuing terror, suddenly and without trial. It made her almost nonchalant about what he might yet do to her. But mostly she had been staring at the spot in the far corner of the swimming pool where Jack the senator had given it to her, at dawn, almost a year ago now. She shouldn’t miss him, but she did. “I just wanted to say hello to the ocean, I guess,” she said eventually.

  Pat paused with her hand on the back of the lounge chair and gazed out, as though just remembering about the ocean, and that it was so close to her house. “It’s a pretty night, isn’t it? The way the moon paves the water silver.”

  “Yeah …” Marilyn murmured vaguely, her gaze shifting to the moon, which was where Jack wanted them to go. For a moment she was with those men, one Russian and one American,
who had looked down on Earth from space within weeks of one another, wondering if they’d been lonesome up there.

  But it was not in Pat’s nature to stand around in reflection, and before Marilyn could drift too far into her own mind, she said: “Come on, Blondie, I have a surprise for you.”

  Dutifully Marilyn stood, slipping her feet into high-heeled mules. For a few moments her vision was splotchy from staring at the moon and at the ghostly underwater illumination of the swimming pool. Then it came back: the palm trees, the lavender sand beyond the glass walls spreading out to the shore, the manicured lemon trees of the Lawfords’ garden. And amongst those shadows, behind the broad tree trunks, she saw men wearing suits creeping toward the house. Her breath shortened, and she was afraid she was hallucinating, as she had frequently since her days of confinement.

  But Pat tilted her head back, shaking her hair out with her fine, rippling laugh. “Don’t be scared, darling, they’re here to protect him.”

  “What?” She hadn’t known she’d seemed scared, and was more concerned with concealing that than parsing the word him.

  The hostess didn’t bother responding, and laced her arm through Marilyn’s and drew her toward the party. “You’ve never met a president before, have you?” she went on teasingly.

  Too late, Marilyn realized what the surprise was and regretted the clothes she’d chosen for the evening. If Pat had told her, she’d have put on a dress, not the yellow slacks and white blouse she’d worn for what she’d imagined would be another casual, intimate gathering of the Lawfords’ close friends and allies. She was about to say that in fact she had met Pat’s older brother, but of course that had not been the question. “No,” she said. “I’ve never met a president before.”

  “Be nice to him. They really gave him hell in Europe, and he was lucky to get a few days out here to relax while Jackie and the children are in Middleburg, doing whatever horsy stuff she does out there.” Pat was talking low and conspiratorial, her nose at Marilyn’s ear. “Lord knows there’s no rest when that woman’s around. He had to marry her, you know. Without her he’d never have been really class, and I guess he got served exactly what he ordered up. She’s so stiff it’s absurd, runs the water whenever she’s in the bathroom for fear somebody’ll hear her doing what everybody else does, you know.”

  Marilyn was only half listening to this commentary. Her mind was occupied with her appearance, and she was hoping that she would manage to slip away to fix her lipstick before Jack saw her. They had come up the steps, through the heavy Spanish door, into the large open room where the Lawfords’ guests had been served digestifs, and she saw that she was too late. Jack was entering from the opposite side, handsome in his navy blue suit, tie loosened. His eyes met hers automatically. The whole time his gaze was on her she couldn’t breathe, and though she told herself to smile, she had no idea whether or not she managed to. He did seem fatigued—the skin under his eyes was purplish, and his expression communicated the variety of displeasure that comes from lack of rest. There was a blink of recognition, after which his gaze shifted. A moment later he saw someone he knew, and gave them his dazzling, toothy smile, and Marilyn, now feeling much farther than a room away, experienced that weightlessness of having never existed at all.

  “Poor Jack, he must have had a long flight,” Pat went on in the same manner, not noticing how thoroughly her friend had been cut. The mood of the party had been languorous before, but it perked up now. The twenty or so dinner guests were standing, talking over each other while they watched the most important person in the world make his way across the carpet. “Come. They’ll be sucking his blood in a minute if we don’t save him.”

  “Oh, but everybody wants to say hello …” Marilyn began to protest, hoping that if she had some time to recover, she’d be better prepared to meet him.

  “Of course they do. That’s exactly why we have to save him.” Pat’s arm remained interlaced with hers until they reached her brother and she let go. “Here you are at last!” she cried, embracing him. “Have you met our Marilyn?”

  “Marilyn Monroe.” He pronounced the name, not as he once had—like he could not quite believe he was beholding her with his own eyes—but as though she were a person he had grown bored of, and was annoyed to find hanging around.

  “This is Prez.” Pat had not taken her eyes off her brother, so she would not have noticed how Marilyn’s face fell.

  “Hey there, Prez,” Marilyn murmured, trying hard to conjure the shy flirtatiousness that used to work on him.

  “Ah yes. Nice to meet you. I believe we’re both acquainted with Mr. Frank Sinatra,” Jack said flatly before turning his attention back to his sister. “I’d clear a small village for a drink about now. Tell me where, I’ll fix it myself.”

  “What’ll you have? I’ll get it for you, darling,” Pat replied, her eyes focused, brilliant with adoration, on her brother.

  “Just point me in the right direction,” he said, squeezing his sister’s waist. “It’ll be the only five minutes I get alone all month.”

  “I’m so glad you’re here,” Pat said with a sigh, before pointing out the bar and moving on to greet her younger brother, Robert, who had arrived in the president’s wake. Marilyn smiled bravely for whomever was watching, and then found an inconspicuous couch. The way Jack had said Frank Sinatra bruised her; it had seemed to suggest she was that man’s problem now. Not that this wasn’t somewhat true. Luckily, Frank was away doing a show in Honolulu that weekend, but he had helped her in many ways over the last few months, setting her up with an apartment on Doheny, finding her a new analyst—his, in fact, a Dr. Ralph Greenson, who saw her in his own lovely house with a view of the sea, and had no compunction about prescribing her enough pills to get to sleep. Which was a lot, considering her dreams these days. Frank was protective, and made sure she wasn’t too alone in Los Angeles, offerings she wished she didn’t need. He would have liked bedroom favors in return, she knew, but he had plenty of other girls and did not seem to mind letting their attachment be mainly for publicity. Of course, that explanation never satisfied anybody, and anyway, Jack’s indifference to her seemed entirely more complete than that.

  She did not sit in quiet contemplation long. The conversation swept around her and picked her up; Jack was the star of whatever room he was in, but her aura was strong, too, so she did not have the chance to wallow in the awkwardness she felt. After a while the president went for a swim—which incited some animated, admiring chatter—and when he came back he was wrapped in a towel, and he sat down next to a film producer’s wife who wore a turban and smoked a Kent. Out of the corner of her eye, Marilyn monitored him, and when he rose—saying he wanted to fix himself a drink, and repeating the line about it being the only five minutes he’d get alone all month—she, too, made an excuse.

  “Hey there, Prez.” She had come up behind him at the unmanned tiki-style bar, her lips already quivering. She made herself think about that high-pitched groan—fuck me, Jack, fuck me—so that her fingers trembled as she took the shaker from him and began to fix his daiquiri, and she wouldn’t have been able to meet his eye even if she wanted to. It was an impression of hopeful weakness that only a very cruel person could have shut out entirely. Of course, she had told herself not to hope, but there hope was, anyway. They were out of earshot, but even so she let her voice burn down to a whisper before going on, “You forgot about me, huh?”

  “Forgot about you.” He exhaled dismissively and put his elbows against the bar, showing her his profile.

  She thought he was going to say something more, but when he didn’t she went on in the same manner, as though every syllable required the marshalling of her whole spirit. The tremble in her fingers was too strong now—she set the shaker down, drinks unmixed. “I mean, I understand. I do! There must be all sorts of important things you gotta see to now. Maybe I never thought you’d stay interested in me very long. But I miss you. I’d like to say I didn’t care anymore, but there doesn’t seem muc
h sense in lying, you know?”

  “Some girl.” Jack shook his head, keeping his gaze on the window, at the illuminated jungle plants outside, vivid against the black night. “You get me choked up on the most important day of my life, so that the only thing I wanted on this green earth was to listen to you say a few words to me over long distance. I made all those speeches, kept myself upright through those uncertain hours, and then what do I discover? The thing I’d been counting on was a lie.”

  Marilyn had never been a shy girl at a high school dance—she had already been married off, to a merchant marine, by the time she was old enough for that—but for a moment she thought she knew what it was to be a wall-flower who finds herself unexpectedly in the arms of the most popular jock in school. The trembling routine was forgotten, and—slowly, cautiously—she put her fingers against his wrist. The words coming out of her mouth were not very intelligible, but they were sincere. “But I—why?—Bobby …” She closed her eyes, swallowed. “Bobby said you wouldn’t see me anymore.”

  “He said—?” Jack turned toward her suddenly, and there was his torso above the towel, the bare chest and still-damp hair, and the gravitational pull made her seasick.

  “When I called that day, he—”

  “What are you two on about?” Pat called out as she approached, and Marilyn swerved in her direction, hoping that her face wasn’t quite so spread open with longing as it had been a moment before. “Our Marilyn’s an actress, you know; we don’t let her do this sort of plebeian thing.” Wearing a broad smile, she picked up the shaker Marilyn had set down. “Can’t cook an egg, but of course she was built for better things.”

  “We were talking about Lincoln.” Marilyn’s blood had become cooler; she had a clear vision of her play. “Pat, sugar, do you have a pen? I want to be sure I write down the name of this wonderful book about Lincoln that Jack has just got to read before I forget.”