Marilyn's Daughter

by John Rechy

  Normalyn looked like that, Jim thought, pretty and sad at the same time, especially as she had listened to Miss Bertha tell her about the movie star; she sat there so silently.

  “Now we’re ready to pretend!” Miss Bertha said, again spiritedly. “We’ll imagine that Marilyn turned to me for advice, yes, on a hazy afternoon. Now you offer something, Normalyn.” She waited, waited longer. When Normalyn did not speak, Miss Bertha sat back, hands crossed, lips closed firmly.

  Enid’s voice reminded Normalyn: “I was there at every crisis!”

  “She was with a beautiful dark-haired woman, a natural beauty.” Normalyn offered only that, to see how much the woman would pretend—and out of her own loyalty to Enid.

  “Yes! I remember,” Miss Bertha greeted eagerly. “How did you know, dearheart? Now we’ll just say I met Marilyn at a charity—there were many of those—and let’s say it was a benefit for unwanted children—there are many, many of those and she cared for them, she was one.”

  And so was Enid, Normalyn had to resist saying aloud; she was determined to provide nothing more to Miss Bertha’s charade.

  “Would you like to give a name to Marilyn’s friend, dearheart?” Miss Bertha prodded. “We were going to pretend together,” she reminded.

  “You tell me.” Normalyn did not disguise the testiness in her voice. She was ready to end this, annoyed she had invited it, pulled in only because she was tired, hungry, didn’t want to have to decide anything yet.

  “Why”—Miss Bertha held her hands as if she were preparing to reveal the answer to a difficult riddle—“at the charity with Marilyn was . . . Joan Crawford!” She seemed to delight in the elaborate introduction.

  Normalyn was not sure why she breathed in relief—she had felt momentary alarm. But the old woman had merely doubled her imagined importance. Released from the attention she had been lulled into momentarily—Miss Bertha’s curious reality—Normalyn could no longer avoid real decisions she would have to make: What would she do tonight? It was already tonight! Would her luggage have gone into Los Angeles? Would she have to stay in Long Beach overnight? Where! What would she do tomorrow? The next day! And—

  Click!

  Miss Bertha held a cigarette lighter. But there was no cigarillo in her mouth. Click! She snapped it again.

  Enid’s signal! This woman was Alberta Holland! Normalyn was sure at that moment. She was testing her, asserting she, Normalyn, was whom she had known she was when she first came in with Jim.

  Click! Click! “When I first met Marilyn, she was with Crawford,” Miss Bertha said slowly. “But when she came to me for crucial advice, she was with another woman, and they came because there was grave danger.” Click!

  She had intimated the turbulence Enid had evoked only at the last of her life! “The woman’s name was Enid Morgan!” Normalyn responded to the eerie summons. Immediately, she felt trapped, angered.

  “Oh, lord, can you believe I’ve been trying to light a damn cigarillo without putting it in my mouth? Thank heaven this old lighter doesn’t work or I would’ve—” The flame flicked. She lit the cigarillo, took only three puffs. “Now, dearheart,” Miss Bertha said, “let’s do pretend, together, like we started to.”

  Normalyn refused to agree.

  “Yeah!” Jim agreed for her. One of Miss Bertha’s good stories would allow him just enough time for his own, about the buses.

  “Well, then, Normalyn.” Miss Bertha nestled into her chair. “I’ll start, and then maybe you’ll want to join along the way. Yes, I’ll start, with a time long past . . . so well remembered . . . when I first saw her—”

  Three

  —in her own aura, a key light she was born with, Marilyn Monroe stood glowing in a white dress on a greenish lawn under an insignificant sun. Next to her was Joan Crawford; at the time she was assuming to be the younger star’s experienced mentor.

  Miss Bertha waited for a moment in the distance, so that she might later repaint in her mind the first time she had seen the blonde movie star in person. Then she walked up to her and introduced herself, only nodding at Crawford, whom she disliked but respected as an actress. Marilyn said politely, “And I’m Marilyn Monroe, Miss Bertha.”

  “Everyone knows who you are,” Miss Bertha said.

  “But you’re really famous,” Marilyn Monroe told her.

  A part of the great star would remain awed child, Miss Bertha knew.

  “Famous!” sneered Joan Crawford. “Infamous! A left winger. Maybe a communist.” She did not bother to whisper.

  “But they’re for the people, aren’t they?” Marilyn asked sincerely.

  Miss Bertha could have hugged her. But she had already noticed Marilyn’s guarded frailty, a certain caution as if she thought she could be hurt by everyone, anyone. For a second before she had time to prepare the extravagant smile, she winced when people approached her.

  Joan stalked away, to talk to Hedda Hopper, who was showing off a hat with a little live bird in a cage. “Like Marie Antoinette,” she kept saying. It was one of those affairs that everyone in Hollywood attends. On a veranda, Jane Russell waved at Miss Bertha and Marilyn, and blew them a kiss. With extreme formality Marlon Brando was introducing everyone to Movita, his new wife. John Derek at her side, Louella Parsons sat like a toad on a peacock chair. Everyone ignored Eve Harrington and her companion, Phoebe.

  Miss Bertha and Marilyn chatted amicably.

  “Did you really tell the Un-American Committee to go fuck?” Marilyn asked that suddenly with delicious glee. She had used her breathy tone, making the harsh word sound like lovemaking.

  “Yes.” Miss Bertha was flattered the young star knew so much about her.

  Marilyn leaned over to her. “Maybe you shouldn’t have wished them anything that good!”

  Miss Bertha was impressed by her wit—and her keen intelligence. She told the young actress that.

  “But don’t tell anybody, not yet.” Marilyn cautioned, indicating a knowledgability of the odd world of Hollywood a beautiful woman had to move in. “Then I’ll spring it on them and catch them off guard.” Suddenly, Marilyn Monroe tilted her head, parted her lips, leaned slightly on one hip, inhaled, then made the softest murmuring of sensual laughter—and became the center of attention, as if she had turned a light on inside herself. Everyone, everyone looked at her in awe. Miss Bertha was not sure whether everyone gasped or whether it was only she, hearing herself.

  Miss Bertha gave Marilyn her card—and left the charity event. She was not even aware that Lauren Bacall had just kissed her on the cheek. She did not want anything to impinge on her memory of the beautiful woman. She hoped that Marilyn would turn to her for advice soon because there were rumors that “ruinous revelations” from the star’s past were about to be made by none other than the deadly columnist Mildred Meadows—despised by Miss Bertha.

  In the thirties, the forties, and into the sixties, counseling was an established profession in Hollywood. Stars who didn’t rush off to their astrologers, fortune tellers, or spiritual guides turned to Miss Bertha, respected by the intelligent in Hollywood. She never pretended to be other than a counselor, in the tradition of Socrates.

  When she began in the business, a young woman herself, she warned Harlow about her mother. Harlow did not listen. Claiming God would heal her daughter from uremic poison, the mother allowed her to die. Norma Desmond’s attorney turned to Miss Bertha to suggest how best to sway the jury in favor of a verdict of justifiable homicide. Miss Bertha told him, “Be respectful of her, treat her like a human being.” When Mildred Meadows—who was already emerging as archfiend for Miss Bertha—led the howls against “the adulterous Ingrid Bergman,” Miss Bertha, whom the star went to consult one midnight, told her to face them down, expose their hypocrisies: “Never flee!” But Ingrid was tired. She left the country in disgust.

  In the fifties, there developed a terrible time in Hollywood. Political witch-hunts destroyed dedicated people, overnight. A reactionary madness swept the country, and with
it came a tidal wave of false “morality.” Terror, suspicion, secret investigations, smashed lives, forced exile. Scandal magazines assassinated the stars monthly. Miss Bertha cried into morning with Liz Scott, slaughtered by false innuendoes. She accompanied Robert Mitchum when he turned himself in to jail.

  Those turbulent times were peaking when the venomous Mildred Meadows began releasing a series of attacks on Marilyn Monroe. In her vile column she gasped that a few years earlier “the blonde waif’ had posed for “pornographic pictures.” Soon after, she announced, “with a mother’s broken heart,” that Marilyn’s own mother, claimed to be dead, was alive in a state institution—“ignored, unloved, alone, shunned, a pauper while the ‘blonde’ starlet decorates herself in costly glitter.”

  Boldly, Miss Bertha turned for assistance to a trusted friend, “a trusted human being”—a Spanish woman of aristocracy who as a girl fought with the gypsies against the dictatorship of Franco. It was believed by some that she was the model for Maria in Hemingway’s For Whom the Bell Tolls. If so, Miss Bertha claimed, the bullish author had taken giant liberties. The fact that Miss, Bertha had sheltered this woman in exile became a factor against her when she was summoned before the House Committee on Un-American Activities. Following Miss Bertha’s instructions—that there must be no bruiting of conspiracy—the Spanish woman pretended to run into Marilyn at a restaurant where the star ate in disguise. She gave her a note from Miss Bertha: “I have learned that the studios have decided to abandon you. Save yourself, admit everything, don’t flee like Ingrid. Fight them!”

  Marilyn met secretly with Miss Bertha. To survive the scandals, Marilyn would have to answer the accusations. Miss Bertha asked her all the expected harsh questions and they devised answers. She emphasized this: “Seem to flatter Mildred Meadows while slaughtering her.”

  Marilyn did. She admitted posing in the nude—for fifty dollars, because she was desperate for money. “How can anyone think of the body as pornographic?” she asked gathered reporters. “Do you?” She added, “I’m sure Mrs. Meadows doesn’t think so either, since she is well known as a collector of classical statuary. . . .” She thanked Meadows graciously for giving her “the best news possible,” that her mother was still alive. As a child, she explained, she had been placed in many homes by her beloved mother, separated from her for anxious years, to the point that she’d become confused as to who of all the women who became her guardians was her real mother. Now that Mildred Meadows had been so helpful, she would care for her mother—and she had already transferred her to an expensive private home, which she hoped Mrs. Meadows would visit “on one of her many excursions of charity.” Amid sympathy and congratulations, Marilyn triumphed over the assaults. The studios re-embraced her. Mildred Meadows was hospitalized “for a brief rest.”

  Years later, Miss Bertha was having afternoon tea when the bell rang in her Brentwood home.

  Marilyn Monroe stood at the door. Wearing a gray dress, dark glasses, a concealing scarf, she still ruled the spring afternoon. There was another woman with her. Yes, she was beautiful, too, in a natural way. She wore a dramatic hat that slashed a diagonal across her face; only her long reddened lips were stark. Miss Bertha let the two in quickly.

  Marilyn sat nervously in the high-backed chair Miss Bertha offered her. The other woman stood by the window, looking out as if to scrutinize the street for intrusive presences.

  From her earlier modeling days Marilyn had acquired a look that made her appear to be simultaneously a lost girl and a seductive woman. She had a sexual pout that was also a sad smile. Today she looked only like the lost child.

  Miss Bertha offered the two women a cup of her spiced tea. Marilyn said yes, the other woman requested iced tea—odd, because it was a cool day. Marilyn sniffed the delicate scent of the tea. “This is lovely,” she said.

  Miss Bertha was amazed that she could say something so ordinary and make it sound as if she were caressing the words.

  Then Marilyn went on to talk about fame: “How strange! People write things about me that never happened! . . . Yesterday, someone came right up to me and said, ‘Who the hell do you think you are? Marilyn Monroe?’ . . . And somebody who asked me to autograph a photograph of myself told me that’s all I am now, a photograph! . . . Is the real me gone?” She looked sincerely bewildered.

  Click! The woman with her snapped the lighter as if in answer, a reminder. It was a gold lighter—no, silver, Miss Bertha noticed, momentarily confused only because it had caught a lost ray of sunlight and turned gold for that second. Oh, yes, this woman was very beautiful, too.

  Miss Bertha knew Marilyn had been avoiding the reason for their visit, but she offered her observation on what the star had just told her about the strangeness of her fame: “That’s because you’re a legend, and legends are a hundred truths and a thousand fantasies.”

  “You’re supposed to be dead before you’re a legend,” Marilyn said honestly.

  “But some people are so astonishing they become legends before their very own eyes. That means you’ll live forever,” she tried to cheer the star.

  “No!” Marilyn laughed—but she shuddered. “That’s too long.” She allowed only a breath of laughter. “And yet there’s so much I’ll never do.”

  “Like what, dearheart?”

  “Oh, things, you know—like living in the White House,” Marilyn said.

  At the time, Miss Bertha thought that was just the extended daydream of an unwanted child. Yet she had said it softly, sadly.

  Marilyn was looking toward the window. She said jubilantly, like an excited girl, “So many jacaranda trees on this street. When their petals fall, it’s like—” With a smile, she waited for the other woman to finish.

  “—like lavender snow,” Enid smiled back.

  The two beautiful women laughed, like schoolgirls involved in a private game, theirs only. It was an astonishing moment. A delicate shared memory had been able to pull them out of the darkening mood. The two were opposites—dark, blonde—but alike in an eerie way, in moments seeming to imitate each other.

  Click! Enid flicked her lighter, flameless, ending the carefree interlude.

  “Please help me, Miss Bertha, I’m pregnant,” Marilyn pleaded suddenly.

  “Do you want the child?” Miss Bertha had heard about several abortions.

  “More than anything in my life. Finally. Yes!” Marilyn said.

  “Then you must have your child.” Miss Bertha did not hesitate.

  Marilyn conveyed her terrible fears about childbirth. She had had miscarriages—yes, abortions—but she was willing now to do anything, stay in bed the whole length of that time, anything, anything! There was another powerful fear, though, of what she called “the darkness, the blackness”—the insanity that ran in her family. . . . Marilyn held out her hands, palms out, as if to show she already held the legacy.

  At the same moment, Enid looked down into her own hands.

  Miss Bertha counseled with conviction: “Have your child, dearheart. You want it too much to lose it. And the madness is too tired; it’s gone through too many people, too many lives—it’s exhausted. You’ll be a wonderful mother because you’ve had too much pain to pass it on.” She held Marilyn’s hand, knowing she would not wince at the touch now. “Dearheart, leave your past behind; live in the present and for the future. Remember: You are now Marilyn Monroe, not an unwanted child anymore, not Norma Jeane—”

  Click! Enid’s lighter snapped, followed by a fusillade of angered clicks. At last the flame flicked. It cast a mesmerizing key light on Enid. After held moments, she spoke for the first time: “Please tell her,” she urged Marilyn, with quiet kindness.

  Rushing words, stuttering the way she did all her life during turmoil, Marilyn Monroe told Miss Bertha that there were more dangers than those of miscarriage, the possible legacy of madness. There were threats that included blackmail and—

  As she heard the movie star’s frantic words, Miss Bertha knew instantly that the birth of
this child would involve horrifying clashes of great power. For the child to be born, there must be intrigue, deception, terrible dangers because of the man involved, the father.

  Four

  “None of that ever happened!” Normalyn stood up. Coldness pierced a rush of angered heat.

  “But of course it didn’t. We were imagining,” Miss Bertha reminded her. She reached for a dead cigarillo and tried to force new life into it; she set it aside on the ashtray beside her. “We knew that from the start, dearheart.”

  Forcing instant composure at the woman’s words, Normalyn sat back down and brought an empty cup of tea to her lips.

  “Miss Bertha, you’re not going to stop the story there, are you?” Jim asked anxiously.

  “Yes—and I intended to all along,” Miss Bertha asserted. Then she said to Normalyn, “Sometimes you have to rehearse with lies to prepare for truth.”

  “Uh, Miss Bertha.” Jim tried to be tactful. “You said that aloud, and I ain’t sure it makes sense.”

  “I know I said it aloud,” Miss Bertha said.

  Jim was right, what the woman had just said didn’t make strict sense—almost, for a moment, then not. A message for her to interpret? What was entirely clear was that the old woman had tricked her into participation. Throughout, she had continued her testing, not speaking, crossing her arms, implying she would stop unless— And Normalyn had responded —naming Enid, locating her there, insisting on her beauty throughout, asserting she had asked for iced tea even on a cool day, that the lighter was silver, not gold. And in return what had she learned? Information contained in books, references to Mildred Meadows, ensnared within Enid’s markings in the clipping left to her. . . . Was that all? Normalyn was not sure whether she hoped the answer to be yes or no.