by John Rechy
ALSO BY JOHN RECHY
Fiction
City of Night
Numbers
This Day’s Death
The Vampires
The Fourth Angel
Rushes
Bodies and Souls
Non-Fiction
The Sexual Outlaw: A Documentary
Plays
Momma As She Became—But Not As
She Was (One-Act)
Rushes
Tigers Wild
* * *
MARILYN’S
* * *
DAUGHTER
* * *
A Novel
BY
* * *
JOHN RECHY
GROVE PRESS
New York
Copyright © 1988 by John Rechy
All rights reserved. No part of this book may be reproduced in any form or by any electronic or mechanical means, including information storage and retrieval systems, without permission in writing from the publisher, except by a reviewer, who may quote brief passages in a review. Scanning, uploading, and electronic distribution of this book or the facilitation of such without the permission of the publisher is prohibited. Please purchase only authorized electronic editions, and do not participate in or encourage electronic piracy of copyrighted materials. Your support of the author’s rights is appreciated. Any member of educational institutions wishing to photocopy part or all of the work for classroom use, or anthology, should send inquiries to Grove Atlantic, 154 West 14th Street, New York, NY 10011 or [email protected].
Permission acknowledgements:
“Don’t be Cruel” by Elvis Presley & Otis Blackwell copyright © 1956 by Shalimar Music Corp. Copyright renewed and assigned to Elvis Presley Music. All rights administered by Unichappell Music, Inc. International copyright secured. All rights reserved. Used by permission.
“Heartbreak Hotel” by Mae Boren Axton, Tommy Durden, Elvis Presley copyright © 1956 by Tree Publishing Co., Inc. Copyright renewed. All rights reserved. International copyright secured. Used by permission of the publisher.
“That Old Black Magic” by Johnny Mercer and Harold Arlen. Copyright © 1942 by Famous Music Corporation. Copyright renewed 1969 by Famous Music Corporation.
eISBN 978-0-8021-9312-4
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For the memory of my mother
For Marilyn Monroe
And for Michael Earl Snyder
“Marilyn Monroe—a monument to the perfection of artifice.”
—David Lange,
The Kennedys: Last of the Heroes
Part One
Texas
August 4, 1962
Dear Enid—
Whatever happens now, please take care of my daughter if she is alive.
Love!
Marilyn
N.J.R.I.R.
Spring! 1980
Normalyn, dear Normalyn!
Marilyn Monroe is your real mother and she loved you and wanted you with all her heart!
My love, too!
Enid
One
Normalyn crumpled the single sheet with the two handwritten entries and threw it down.
It fell on the soft carpet of Enid’s bedroom, among scattered petals from the flower Mayor Wendell Hughes had given her earlier, plucked out of the one wreath on her mother’s—on Enid’s—grave. That single wreath, from the Mayor, asserted Enid’s, and Normalyn’s, isolated life in the secluded City of Gibson, a clutch of greenery within enclosing Texas deserts.
The newspaper that morning had noted the death of “onetime Hollywood starlet Enid Morgan.” Normalyn had refused tears then, just as she had at the funeral—and did now in Enid’s bedroom. Enid had wanted to take herself away from her, had swallowed with alcohol the pills that killed her—and so Normalyn would not cry. But her tears had stopped before that because crying had rendered her vulnerable to the woman who had loved her fiercely and then turned angry in the last years of her life.
Calmly, Normalyn tried to explain Enid’s letter. Even out of death Enid was attempting to control her, as she had for the eighteen years of her life—but now with new intimations of dangers and mysteries, renewed assertions of love. That would keep her turbulently alive in Normalyn’s memories. The proud woman had described herself as “cunning.” “I always have a purpose. Remember that, Normalyn,” she would emphasize.
Normalyn picked up the letter, smoothed it. The paper looked old—no, was just made to look old. She added to her explanation of Enid’s strange motives. In one of her last pursuing moods of feared insanity—“the darkness, the blackness,” she named it—Enid had written both parts of that letter, and so at the end extended her obsession to the point of sharing her own daughter with the woman with whom she claimed to have shared everything, the woman who haunted Enid’s memories—Marilyn Monroe, evoked in a constant litany of reminiscences, at first only with love, then love brushed by anger.
Normalyn had stopped wondering whether Enid’s intimate memories of the movie star were real or invented. Enid had traced them to childhood years: “Norma Jeane—that was her name before she became Marilyn Monroe—Norma Jeane and I ran away from the orphanage once.” Enid had allowed a girl’s laughter at a cherished adventure, before anger thrust out what eventually would become punctuation to her memories: “Marilyn Monroe was created over Norma Jeane!”
Normalyn studied Enid’s room for new clues about the woman who had turned into a stranger. Now that the powerful presence was gone, she saw the dead room for the first time.
It was a starlet’s bedroom!
The white furniture was gold-gilded, the bedspread silk brocade. Pale voile drapes sighed restlessly in a vagrant breeze. On a night table was a white figurine of a huddled angel with a chipped wing. Next to it was a small bouquet of faintly lavender, aging artificial flowers. There was a delicacy about everything here!
It was on the table with the flowers that Normalyn had found the letter, and a brown envelope she had not yet opened. Both had been propped against a glittery twin picture frame, each side of which contained a photograph Normalyn had not seen until today. One was of a dark-haired young woman with a vibrant natural beauty. The other was of an equally beautiful blonde woman, extravagantly made up, extravagantly created. Yes, the first was of Enid, so young and almost, almost smiling. And the other was of Marilyn Monroe. There was an odd resemblance between the seeming opposites.
Why did you stop loving me? Normalyn accused the dark-haired woman, the young Enid. Did you? She had never let herself believe that entirely, because Enid’s maddest rages had always erupted into affirmations of love.
Looking away from the photographs, Normalyn allowed herself a glimpse of her own reflection in the gold-framed mirror over Enid’s dresser. The woman’s cherished gold-leafed makeup box, with sketchy outlines of pink rosebuds, remained there from her movie days: makeup always kept fresh, no longer used.
Normalyn removed her glasses. Enid had insisted she needed them, and they hid her from the world—from Gibson. She pushed her hair back—she had learned to comb it forward to conceal herself further. In the mirror misted gold, her skin was fair, her hair light brown, her eyes . . . not amber, like Enid’s. They were gray, just gray. Today they looked blue. Normalyn touched her breasts. A fullness. No, ugly! She yanked her hand away. An enraged memory stirred, of a violent time by the dusty Rio Grande—three pairs of cowboy-booted feet, three shadows, three men standing over her.
Normalyn turned away from the lash of that despised time. . . . Had she seen in the m
irror just now a hidden prettiness released by Enid’s death? No. Enid had insisted, with quiet kindness the first times, then harsh assertion, that Normalyn was ordinary, plain—“and be glad!”—as if lack of beauty were kinder in the world.
Outside, the rising wind was ending an interlude of spring in the City of Gibson, spring swept away by dust and tumbleweeds. Enid hated those “goddamned Texas winds.” “You think they’re over with, and then they’re back, burrowing under your skin to find where your damn soul went.”
Grasped by that memory, Normalyn still refused to cry. You killed yourself, Mother! She had repeated that to herself many times since the recent morning when the sun had briefly warmed clinging wintry days and Enid did not come downstairs. Her door was locked. Normalyn had telephoned Mayor Hughes, who was there immediately, as always carrying one of his many elegant canes, to disguise a limp. He pried open the door. Choking tears, he summoned Dr. Phillips and Rosa. The Mayor instructed the maid, “Leave everything exactly where Enid left it; just tidy up.” He remained in the room. “An accidental overdose of medication,” he dictated to Dr. Phillips, who wrote the words dutifully in his report of death. No longer holding back his tears, Mayor Hughes said in wonder to Normalyn, “Just like her movie-star friend, that Monroe woman.” Normalyn had not entered the room until today.
She read the letter again. The words Enid’s signature claimed were desperately kind . . . no, they were attempting to seem so . . . no, they were mysteriously cruel. Normalyn studied the boldly inked letters: N.J.R.I.R . . . N.J.—Norma Jeane? She reread the saddened words—“if she is alive”—in the first note. What could have created doubt?
Placing the letter next to the frayed artificial lavender flowers, Normalyn tore open the brown envelope. She pulled out a birth certificate, newspaper clippings, a news-photograph. On a fading sheet of ruled paper were penciled notes scrawled in a childish hand: “After the anger Norma Jeane and I laughed and played a game. Our secret! Neither one of us is a sad orphan now! An important day! The jacaranda trees are so beautiful, we call the petals when they fall to the ground ‘lavender snow.’ Next time I will be the movie star.” After those words was another entry, in ink. The writing had matured: “She is the movie star!” There was one last entry: “Someday I will leave behind all the pain.”
The birth certificate was Normalyn’s:
Name of Child: Normalyn Morgan. Date of birth: June 1, 1962. Place of Birth: Private residence; Galveston, Texas. Maiden Name of Mother: Enid Morgan. Name of Father: Unknown. CERTIFIED: Wendell Hughes, Mayor, Gibson, Texas; August 11, 1962.
The printed and typed document had been revised with black ink to allow dual entries. A line had been drawn over the date of birth and another date written over it: “August 2, 1962.” The place of birth had been ruled out with another line. Over it was written: “Los Angeles, California.” Name of Father” remained “Unknown.” Over the entry designating “Maiden Name of Mother: Enid Morgan,” there was only the beginning of a drawn line—it did not even touch the typed name, as if the pen had been lifted suddenly, not able to continue. But above that name had been inked: “Marilyn Monroe.”
Her eyes sweeping over words, Normalyn read the headlines of newsclippings: “MARILYN MONROE DEAD—August 5, 1962.” “INQUEST POSSIBILITY LOOMS.” “HUNT MARILYN’S MYSTERY FRIEND.”
The news photograph revealed a woman wearing a scarf and dark sunglasses, trying to hide further from pursuing cameras by holding one hand shielding her face. The caption read: “One of the last photographs of Marilyn Monroe, in disguise, taken after reporters were tipped that she was in seclusion in—”
Normalyn stared at the longest clipping, and she realized only vaguely that her life was being pushed away by an unburied past. She saw urgent inked checkmarks emphasizing certain names, other names slashed with X’s, some underlined, others ruled out, one signaled by a question mark, all on the aged newspaper clipping bearing the headline:
“MARILYN’S DEATH STUNS WORLD.”
Two
Los Angeles Tribune August 8, 1962
MARILYN’S DEATH STUNS WORLD
LOS ANGLES—The death of Marilyn Monroe on Sunday, August 5, sent shock waves across the world. The movie star died of an apparent overdose of sleeping pills in her home in the Los Angeles suburb of Brentwood. She was 36.
According to a highly reliable source who spoke on condition he not be identified, in her last year Monroe was “despondent over personal and professional problems.” She was believed to have been in financial difficulty and had just been fired from her latest film. She had reportedly terminated “a very serious involvement with a very, very prominent man,” according to the source, who said she had been in “semi-seclusion” even from close friends during her last months. “She became a very saddened, abandoned human being, just as she was in her childhood,” he said.
While the official cause of death is still to be determined by the County Coroner’s Office, reports indicate that the movie star took her own life late Saturday night or early Sunday morning after ingesting a lethal dose of Nembutal and Chloral Hydrate pills, obtained by prescription. The body was discovered by her psychiatrist, Dr. Ralph Greenson, summoned to her home by housekeeper Mary Allen, who became alarmed when the light to the star’s locked bedroom remained on late into night. Dr. Greenson broke in through a window and found the star dead. She was holding the receiver of her white private telephone. No clarification as to whom she was calling has been made.
Reaction from the famous and the unknown was swift and dramatic. Baseball star Joe DiMaggio, the actress’s second husband, was not available to the press. Insiders report that the athlete was “stunned and cried uncontrollably.” Playwright Arthur Miller, divorced from the star, was also unavailable for comment. Through a family spokesman, he was quoted as saying, “It had to happen. It was inevitable.”
Her first husband, James Dougherty, a police deputy, could muster only, “I’m sorry.” His present wife informed reporters that on hearing the news by telephone, Dougherty told her to “say a prayer for Norma Jeane.” Norma Jeane Baker was the actress’s name before she changed it to Marilyn Monroe. In 1950 Dougherty was assigned by the Los Angeles Police Department to hold off barricaded fans waiting for the entrance of his ex-wife, Monroe, into Grauman’s Egyptian Theater during the premiere of her film The Asphalt Jungle.
Between sobs, acting coach Paula Strasberg said Marilyn had “a quality second to no actress in the world.” Her daughter, actress Susan Strasberg, compared the star to a “butterfly,” because “butterflies are very beautiful, give great pleasure, and have very short lifespans.” Her remarks were in apparent reaction to earlier ones by cameraman Len Brakowitz, who called Monroe “an iron butterfly—frail but hard as nails. I still loved her, though,” he added.
Gossip columnist Mildred Meadows acknowledged that she had “never been particularly fond of the blonde waif, but I came to admire her, for her spirit.” Meadows called Monroe “the symbol of beauty in her time.” It was Meadows who revealed the existence of Monroe’s mother in a mental institution while the star and studio releases claimed the mother was dead. Meadows added, “With her suicide she may yet be able to pull down Hollywood and the other capital.” She refused clarification. Industry figures infer her reference was to the expensive film Monroe had not yet completed for 20th Century-Fox. Its costly termination could affect studio executives and financial interests.
In Paris, Milton Greene, until recently a partner in Marilyn Monroe Productions, said his wife, Amy, “had a premonition that Marilyn was in serious trouble.” Also in Paris, director Billy Wilder telephoned news services to “clarify” a remark attributed to him in an early story. “I said whatever I said, probably not all that kind,” he admitted. “Then in the cab on the way to the hotel I saw the headlines. They never told me she was dead, those cruel S.O.B’s.” Monroe and Wilder were frequently at odds during filming of the star’s hit comedy Some Like It Hot. Wilder has been quoted as saying, “
The question is whether Marilyn is a person at all.”
Praising her acting, director John Huston said he had feared while working with her that “it would be only a few short years before she died or went into an institution.” The star’s mother, Gladys Mortensen, has been in several psychiatric institutions as “mentally unstable.”
Reporters attempting to reach Mrs. Mortensen where she is confined at Rock Haven Sanitarium were not allowed past the gates by sanitarium officials. When a reporter spotted the star’s mother strolling on the lawn, he shouted the news of her famous daughter’s death. According to witnesses, Mrs. Mortensen paused for only a moment and then walked on without comment.
Director Joshua Logan, who directed Miss Monroe in the hit Bus Stop, in which many claim the star became an actress, called Monroe “one of the most unappreciated people in the world.” He emphasized that he meant both in her public and private lives.
Darryl Zanuck, president of 20th Century-Fox, who acknowledged “serious difficulties” with the actress, claimed “nobody discovered her, she earned her own way to stardom, and nothing could stop her.” Sir Laurence Olivier, her costar in an unsuccessful endeavor, The Prince and the Show Girl, attributed her demise to the fact that “she was exploited beyond anyone’s means.”
Kay Gable, whose famous husband, Clark Gable, died of a heart attack soon after completing The Misfits with Monroe, said she “went to Mass and prayed for her.” Monroe was known for keeping crews waiting on the set. Hally Towne, long-time makeup man at 20th Century-Fox, recalls that she would often be ready for filming and then smear the makeup off her face and demand he start again. “She stared at her reflection as if she could no longer see what she looked like,” he remembered.
