Marilyn's Daughter

by John Rechy

  Lie on the cot, the star told herself, and this “waking dream” will end the way the other one did when you were about to jump out of the window, remember? She saw a woman’s powdered face staring at her through the door-window. A nurse! Another face peered in. A man—a doctor! He invited another face. Then there was another. She heard buzzing voices at the door:

  “It is Marilyn Monroe!”

  Panic battled sedatives. She was sure that maddened fans had captured her. In the morning new faces pressed against the glass.

  She stood up.

  “Is it really Marilyn Monroe?” someone asked.

  “It can’t be,” Marilyn Monroe thought she heard her own voice answer, “because Marilyn Monroe couldn’t be captured like this.” So it must be—?

  She tore off the hospital gown; the most famous body in the world stood naked before hospital attendants. She screamed at them: “If you want to look at me, look at me! I’m Marilyn Monroe!”

  She was still screaming when the door opened and someone covered her with a sheet; she was still screaming when they transferred her to a security ward on a grayer floor; she was still screaming when another door bolted from outside. She smashed the single chair against the concrete wall. “Goddamn you! God-fucking-damn you!” she kept screaming.

  She bribed an orderly to make a telephone call for her: “I’ll give you my autograph!” She signed a paper.

  “What the hell!” He gave it back to her.

  She could not decipher her own name. She signed the paper again, concentrating on each letter: “M-a-r-i-l-y-n M-o-n-r-o-e.” She added, “Love!” She was not sure whether the orderly would keep his word.

  News of her commitment reached her second husband, the athlete, who was then in Florida. He flew to New York, rushed to the hospital, and on the fourth day of her captivity he got her out. As she was being smuggled through a freezing basement passageway, she held her comforting fur coat close to her body. She saw ahead, through a window, the indifferent East River, freezing over in jagged shapes. She was pale, still disturbed. New lines scratched at her face. Her ex-husband went ahead to make sure that outside there were no—

  Newsmen, photographers—dozens of them sprang at her, dancing madly about her, shouting questions—“Why—?”—firing accusations—“Did you—?”—shooting at her with cameras. She retreated back, back, farther back. Her ex-husband struggled to reach her. The reporters and photographers advanced—crouching, kneeling. She was cornered. “I’m Marilyn Monroe!” she whispered. Behind her, her hands touched cold walls, ice on ice.

  It was after the actress told her what had occurred—a crisis she had not lived through with her—that Enid telephoned Mark about employment: “Simply to be with her, help her—someone strong like you.” Mark told Enid of his exile, the bruising scandals. She knew all about that, she told him. She admired him and his “beautiful novel, very much”; she knew they could trust him, she told him. She also knew that his play had been postponed: “I’m sure that it was beautiful, too.”

  He assumed she knew the reason for its postponement. A principal backer had only belatedly learned about his “questionable background.”

  The day Mark arrived at Marilyn’s Brentwood home, the door was open. She was dancing alone, barefoot. “It’s so good to be a movie star again!” She hugged him. “Are you still gay, dammit?” she teased. “Yes,” he assured her and hugged her back. “Just as well,” she said, “because that way the neighbors won’t start rumors besmirching my new virginity.” In an interview that had only recently appeared she had claimed she was “always a virgin between marriages.”

  She was not happy. Her latest film was not a success, and in it she had given perhaps her best performance. She hated her new movie, Something’s Got to Give, and learned that its director, George Cukor, gossiped behind her back. She had difficulty getting to the studio on time, then getting there at all. There was talk of an impending suspension. She stayed home more and more. She made many calls, received few. Enid had disappeared again, but she called often, long distance. Those were among the rare times that Marilyn still laughed during that darkening period.

  When Marilyn was especially restless, Mark called Robert in Palm Springs to inform him he might be late, might stay over. She and Mark would talk until her pills “clicked on.” She would sit on the higher of two steps that led to the back of the house, the rooms and a bathroom she now grandly called her “quarters.” She would sit there, Mark thought, as if to remain as close as possible to the “peaceful pills” in her bedroom. So difficult to think of this lonely woman as “Marilyn Monroe!” . . . Those times, she and Mark exchanged stories, shared their detestation of Mildred Meadows. Marilyn’s accounts of her life were often contradictory, but always unaltered were the memories of many unhappy foster homes, of being unwanted, of a “crazy grandmother who tried to strangle me when I was a child,” and of a “crazier mother,” who would appear now and then, she told him, “with a huge chunk of kindness only to take it with her when she left me again.” She talked about her dread of “the darkness,” the madness in her background, and her fear of “passing it on” if she ever had a child, which she wanted “more than anything in the world.”

  One such late night Marilyn sat on the stairs in a robe and pressed her knees together as if she were cold. She told him about the “waking dream” that had preceded her commitment, and about the real nightmare of being in the psychiatric clinic.

  As she related the eerie experience, she seemed drawn into it again. She gathered her robe, and she was shivering. She looked lost, frightened. Mark held her hand, soothing.

  Suddenly she stood up. She threw off the robe. It fell to her bare feet, and she was naked. “I’m Marilyn Monroe”—she repeated the words she had told him she’d screamed at the clinic.

  Mark said what he thought she needed to hear: “Yes, you’re the most famous and beautiful movie star alive, perhaps of all time.”

  “Then you have to want me. Every man wants me.” There was no exultation in the voice, just devouring need.

  She was not reacting out of desire for him, Mark knew. At that moment she craved the whole world’s love to attempt to fill the deep pit carved by years of abandonment.

  “Aren’t you a fucking man?” she yelled at him.

  Mark did not soothe her sudden sobbing this time.

  * * *

  “She had turned into someone else,” Mark said in the alcove in Palm Springs.

  The sunlight was still bright, but Normalyn sensed thickening shadows, a new darkness. Again, she had heard events Enid claimed as part of her life being attributed to the movie star’s.

  “What she said to Mark was cruel, but I know she didn’t mean it,” Robert said, loyal to both. “It’s just that by then she was living on the edge, like we have, Mark. Just like we have.”

  “Yes,” Mark agreed. “I even think that—”

  * * *

  —Marilyn forgot what happened.

  Soon after, she was renewed. Mark thought she was at work again, perhaps in a role she longed for, Grushenka in The Brothers Karamazov. He knew that Somerset Maugham had written her, to tell her he thought she would be “wonderful” as Sadie Thompson in a television version of his play Rain, and that Jean-Paul Sartre had just recently called her “one of the greatest actresses alive” and expressed his desire that she appear in his screen version of The Life of Freud. But her new excitement had another origin.

  Her private line would ring and she would purr soft words into it. She began to suggest Mark “take a day off; you deserve it for putting up with me.” She became coyly secretive: “Even if I told you—and I’m not going to—you wouldn’t believe who I’m seeing!” she teased.

  He found her in the kitchen, which she had converted into a jungle of vegetables, a clutter of utensils. She gasped that she had to cook dinner “for a very close, very important man.” Now she was in a panic because she wasn’t a good cook. “I know!” She looked like a pretty child w
ho has conceived of an enormously clever plot to confuse demanding adults. “I’ll send out for food, but I’ll put it all in the oven and that will make delicious smells in the house, just like in a restaurant.” She chose two bottles of champagne to chill. She looked mischievously angelic. She asked him please to wait for the ordered food—“and then you’ll rush off because he’s very private.” She went to get ready “early.”

  “Do I look like me?” She stood in the kitchen.

  At first he was shocked. Her hair was just brushed through; she was wearing hardly any makeup. She looked her age, looked like a pretty woman—but not the beautiful movie star she was. He understood her question and was moved. “Yes,” he answered, “you look exactly like you, and you’re lovely.” He meant it.

  “That’s how I want him to see me.” She kissed Mark gratefully on the mouth. She confided the reason for the elaborate evening: “Everyone will know soon, because he’s going to ask me to marry him.”

  Mark left, glad to return to Palm Springs early to discuss deferred plans about the school with Robert. In the flurry of arrangements for the subterfuge dinner, he had forgotten some pages of his new novel. He drove back. As he approached the house, he saw a lean, angular man with tousled brownish hair; he was hurrying into Marilyn’s house from a nondescript car parked several houses away.

  * * *

  Mark returned the next morning to find Marilyn sitting alone in the kitchen, her head on the table as if she had fallen asleep off and on in that position. Plates of dried, abandoned food remained on a table. Two champagne bottles were empty. He helped her to the bedroom.

  The door did not open the rest of that day.

  Her moods blackened. She stayed in bed into late morning; she woke up sick. There was no reference to her new lover. One night she appeared, spectral and weary, fully dressed, and insisted Mark drive her to the market. It closed at ten, he reminded. She insisted.

  The store was closed. She got out of the car. She hurried to a telephone booth. He remembered she had told him that she had been hearing “weird interference” on her own lines at home. Lighted within the transparent cubicle now, she looked like a radiant captive. She dialed once, again, again, another time. He saw her lips moving. She dialed yet another time. Again her lips moved.

  When she returned to the car, looking pale even in the dim light, she said to him in surprise, “He changed his private telephone number. I had to leave a message for him at the switchboard.” She looked startled. “I told the night operator at the Justice Department and at the White House to tell Robert Kennedy that Marilyn Monroe had called.”

  Nineteen

  When Mark moved into the account of Marilyn’s clandestine calls that eerie night, Normalyn severed the visual contact with which she had encouraged his narrative.

  “I believe Normalyn has heard enough,” Mark said quickly.

  “Normalyn is very brave, Mr. Poe. Whatever she has to hear—” Troja assured.

  What a powerful ally she had in Troja, Normalyn knew— and trusted her, no matter what would be spoken here. One second later she felt a nasty jab of suspicion about Troja’s motives. She conquered those doubts the very next second.

  A loud flip of a page! Michael Farrell continued to assert his presence nearby, although shadows were tinting the book he was straining to study while glancing at Normalyn.

  “And then, please?” Now Normalyn asked Mark to continue into the territory she had tried to isolate from scrutiny.

  “And then,” Mark said, “Marilyn began to drink heavily; she was abusive, then silent—”

  Like Enid. Normalyn linked the two women more tightly.

  “Tormented,” Robert again defended. “People forget that the end of her life was very sad. She was terribly isolated, and she thought she was through. All people remember now is the legendary woman, forgetting that the real one suffered a lot. All that love came later. Sad, isn’t it? She didn’t know that after her death she would be idolized. So sad.”

  “She was tormented, yes,” Mark agreed, “so troubled that—”

  * * *

  —she slept only when sedatives claimed her, at whatever time of day that occurred. She waited for one call that refused to come. She learned the studio was about to fire her, and still she would not turn up. She merely wandered about the house as if she were preparing to become a ghost.

  In the mornings, she would trace with a finger the deepening scratchy lines about her eyes, touching them only delicately, as if she expected them to heal.

  She stayed in her “quarters,” within controlled, familiar boundaries. At times she would lie by the pool, which, for her, was the most powerful symbol that she was a movie star. Today, she reclined on a lawn chair under a shading umbrella. She wore a large hat, doubly hiding her fair skin from the sunlight. Suddenly she threw off the hat, pushed the umbrella away—it spun in a whorl of colors. Removing her sunglasses, she stared at the indifferent sun.

  Demanding that it see her.

  Mark went to her. “For a while everyone seemed to love me,” she said, “and then—” She opened her empty hands.

  Coming to work the next day, Mark saw her standing before the entrance of the house she had bought with so much pride as “finally something of my own.” She was staring at the Latin motto inscribed over the door by previous owners. “I found out what that means,” she told Mark. “It says, ‘I am nearing the end of my journey.’”

  Mark was elated that afternoon to see that Enid was back. She was adjusting her slanted hat in the hall mirror.

  “Enid!” he welcomed.

  She turned, lifted the veil. It was Marilyn! “You thought I was Enid,” she said.

  Mark tried to dismiss her strange pleasure in having confused him.

  Then soon after, laughter, happy laughter emerged from Marilyn’s “quarters.” Mark recognized Enid’s voice. He welcomed the joyous laughter, incongruous in the previously moody house. It was the laughter of schoolgirls sharing intrigue with each other. Only Enid could accomplish that instant transformation in Marilyn.

  “Hello, Mark.” A time later, as unobtrusively as she had entered the house, Enid entered his office. He had deliberately stayed late in order to see her. She greeted him with a curious shyness, quick intense glances withdrawn, reasserted, a smile about to form, deciding whether it would. His memory of her had not done justice to her charm, her beauty. She looked gorgeous in the sliced shadows of the room.

  He said aloud, “You really do exist,” because when he had first seen her, the only time before now, she had disappeared so entirely yet haunted his memories.

  She only smiled the wryly saddened smile he remembered, not unlike Marilyn’s during this period of reclusion. “I read your novel again,” she told me. “It takes so much courage to be who you are, always.”

  “Or foolish doggedness.” He tried to laugh.

  “No,” she said. “It’s courage.”

  He thanked her, touched. He cleared a chair for her. She seemed tired. Pensive. “She’s been unhappier than I’ve ever known her to be,” she indicated familiarity with Marilyn’s earlier panic.“But she’ll be fine now,” she said with conviction.

  “Because you’re here.” Mark wanted to express his appreciation.

  “Oh, no,” she denied, “not because of that.” She confided, “Before you came, she had a very delicate operation so that she’ll be able again to have children.”

  Mark Poe had heard, like all of Hollywood, of the miscarriages, the reported abortions.

  “She was very depressed because she believed the operation hadn’t been successful,” Enid clarified. Then she smiled, a full smile that made her face radiant. “But it was and she’s pregnant again, and she’ll do everything to have this child.”

  Enid’s pleasure in the discovery astonished Mark because he thought he knew, with reasonable certainty, that Marilyn’s only contact during the recent period of retreat had been “the very important man.” But he was married, a father, a f
igure of national importance many thought would be President. With a stab of apprehension and sadness, Mark remembered that one day in a rare playful mood Marilyn had pretended with him to be heading a receiving line, although it was she who was doing the curtsying, as she had done with such quiet dignity when she was introduced to the Queen of England. That day she would whisper with elegant restraint, “Mr. Ambassador— . . . Senator— . . .” As far as Mark knew, there had been no word from the Attorney General since Marilyn’s late-night call to the White House, the Justice Department. Enid was much too sophisticated not to realize the potential for danger in the startling news she had conveyed with such tender happiness.

  “Oh, don’t look so concerned, Mark,” Enid teased. “Of course there’ll be a remarriage.”

  A remarriage! Then either he was wrong or Marilyn had told Enid she was pregnant by one of her ex-husbands, reconciled. Mark worried even more when Enid said:

  “Still, there’s something else troubling her. She says there’s nothing, just the natural apprehensions. But she’s determined this time. It may be her last chance. She wants this child more than anything else in the world.” As if dismissing the slightest brush of a doubt, she told Mark, “She tells me everything, you know.”

  “Yes.” But Mark wondered then.

  “She’s resting now,” she told Mark. “She’ll be fine, I know it! . . . I know it!” she seemed to swear.

  To entice her into staying, Mark asked what he might offer her.

  She astonished him as always. “And why not champagne?” she actually flirted! She made her voice husky. “It’s never too early for champagne!” Then, shyly—a shyness incongruous in a woman of her beauty—she asked in a quiet voice for “iced tea.”

  But Mark opened a bottle of champagne.

  She had thrilling wide lips, a line of scarlet. Her eyelashes were thick, dark, long. Mark was surprised to discover she was wearing no mascara. Her eyes tilted just slightly, as if once they had delighted in mischief. He felt guilty for thinking that this is what Marilyn Monroe might have looked like had she been born a natural beauty like Enid. At that moment it seemed to Mark that Marilyn had drawn on her own face an artificial version of Enid’s. Enid’s body was as beautiful as Marilyn’s, her breasts as lush, but she wore more loosely flowing clothes. In a shock of sensuality, the sudden curve of a leg as she settled into the chair, the quick movement of an arm, asserted the fabulous outline. Early in his life, Mark had felt attracted to women, “admired” men—the demarcation between admiration and desire blurred. That night, he felt a stirring of desire for this fascinating woman.