Marilyn's Daughter

by John Rechy

  Otto drew wooden shutters across the ground-level windows of the basement so that light would not seep in nor out.

  Lady Star managed a twisted smile. She looked down at her orchid, held it, studied it, put it back firmly in her hair. “Proceed,” she said to the contender.

  The evening had veered into the unexpected. Normalyn felt trapped in multiple realities, dreams, fantasies, interpretations, reflections on reflections—all banishing her life?

  Almost imperceptibly, from the ranks of supporting players, four figures emerged to stand and wait in the shadows to make their entrances: Two youngmen; a youngwoman wearing a gray wig so that she could appear older; and another youngwoman, holding a cigarette lighter in her hand, revealed when, for a moment, it transformed vagrant light into a tiny sparkle of silver.

  The Contender for Marilyn Monroe began:

  “And now! In narrative and scenes! The Epic Tragedy of the Last Days in the Life of Marilyn Monroe! And! The Creation of a Legend!”

  Thirty

  Norma Jeane Mortenson was born at 9:30 A M., June 1, 1926, at Los Angeles General Hospital. She was baptized Norma Jeane Baker, on December 6, 1926, by the flashy evangelist Aimée Semple McPherson. At the time of Norma Jeane’s birth, her mother, Gladys Pearl Mortenson, had long been divorced from her first husband, Jack Baker, a gas station attendant, and separated from Edward Mortenson, a roaming baker, who one day had jumped on his motorcycle and fled, denying he had ever fathered a child. Gladys later introduced Norma Jeane to her “real father” by showing her a photograph of a somewhat rakish man, a salesman. “He was—Those were the only words Gladys ever provided about the man she had probably loved. To Norma Jeane, he looked “just like Clark Gable.” He, too, years later when she telephoned him, denied she was his daughter.

  Norma Jeane’s early years were spent near Los Angeles in the City of Hawthorne, then a scattering of flat stucco houses among vacant lots and wildflowers. It was not far from the ocean, which Norma Jeane called “the deep wet.”

  Because Gladys worked—as a studio film-cutter in Hollywood—she paid a trusted “foster family” five dollars a week to care for her daughter in Hawthorne. Still in her twenties, a pretty woman whose red hair fascinated Norma Jeane, Gladys had begun to feel an anguished restlessness because life had not even begun giving her what was her due: some stability, some happiness, much love—longings her daughter would inherit. Gladys had two commendable goals: to buy a pretty house for herself and her daughter, and to marry a man who really loved her and would be a father to her child. Norma Jeane saw “the pretty lady with beautiful red hair” only on weekends. There was one exception, which Norma Jeane cherished forever, a time when she was sick and Gladys stayed with her “every single moment for three entire weeks until she was sure I was well.” Thereafter Norma Jeane adored the red-haired lady who came to visit.

  Gladys took the child to the beach for cherished picnics. Sheltering her fair skin from the sun, Gladys would nevertheless play on the sand with her daughter. Then, the mother would lie on the child’s lap, looking up longingly into the sky while Norma Jeane stroked the wondrous red hair. Often, they went to the movies, which thrilled Norma Jeane, especially when they trekked into Hollywood to the Egyptian Theater: Norma Jeane would stand for minutes to admire its elaborate sunburst ceiling.

  In 1933, Gladys achieved one of her goals: She bought a two-story house in Hollywood. It had a Georgian portico, and it was one of the handsomest homes along Highland Avenue. She bought a piano for Norma Jeane. To assure making her payments on the house, Gladys rented a portion of it to an English couple, who often looked after Norma Jeane when Gladys was out trying to accomplish her second goal.

  On a drizzly day in January 1934, during an interlude of relentless lashing rain, Norma Jeane’s life was altered forever. That was when she began to suspect that she had a terrible legacy, a legacy of madness—“the blackness, the darkness,” she came to call it. There had been hints of it before that day, periods when Gladys would be so depressed she could utter not a single word, act as if she did not even see her daughter. Then she might become hysterically happy, once insisting on teaching Norma Jeane “how to sing like Ginger Rogers and Fred Astaire.”

  Years earlier there had been a violent indication of fears to come. Norma Jeane’s grandmother, Della, who the child claimed had attempted to smother her at age one, a time of hallucinations and vague memories, had been carried away screaming to Norwalk State Hospital, her hands bloodied from aimless pounding on the wall. Della threw back her head—the sky was so strangely calm. Then she screamed.

  Gladys watched that, holding Norma Jeane’s hand so tightly—to keep the child from breaking away—that the young girl’s fingers ached for days. Later, Norma Jeane would remember thinking then that Gladys was “passing something on” to her.

  On that rainy day in January, Norma Jeane remembered her grandmother’s screams. Gladys had just announced to the English couple that she felt “too ill, much too ill” to go to work at the studio. That was a rare occurrence. She could not define her illness. The rain, she said, was depressing her. She would hum a tune, then stop abruptly and look out the window, seeing desolate sheets of water wash the glass panes. When Norma Jeane left for school, bundled under an enormous orange raincoat, Gladys was reapplying her makeup, at first gaily, then angrily, over and over and over before a mirror—erasing it, starting again.

  She began moving impatiently from room to room, opening doors, staring in. “What are you looking for, Gladys?” the English woman asked her. “A place to hide!” she answered. She huddled, trembling, under the staircase, the darkest place she could locate. Frightened, the couple called for an ambulance. When attendants arrived, Gladys battled them with raging ferocity. They strapped her to a stretcher. She shut her eyes tightly to banish the whole darkening world.

  Norma Jeane arrived home to see her mother being taken away to Norwalk State Hospital, where Della had died of a heart attack after a violent seizure.

  After that, Gladys was in and out of institutions, at times admitting herself. She alternately loved and ignored Norma Jeane—and refused to give her up to adoption. So, at age nine, Norma Jeane came to feel that she had become “someone else”—an “orphan”—because while Gladys moved in and out of the “blackness,” the child drifted through orphanages and foster homes, treated not unkindly in some at times, in others abused. In one foster home she was raped. In all of those places, she felt “temporary”: “Every day was a new eternity that could end suddenly and begin another one; I thought I was the only person in the world who felt this awful; so I didn’t tell anyone because they wouldn’t understand what I was talking about and they’d get mad at me.”

  Times of “stability” lessened, the times when Gladys was out of an institution and brought “lots of love, and took it away when she left soon after,” leaving once for twelve years.

  Along the way Norma Jeane learned to entertain by singing “Jesus Loves Me.” “But I didn’t believe it,” she confided later. “I never believed Jesus loved me; I just liked the tune and it pleased everybody.”

  At age eleven she went to live with a friend of her mother’s. In school, she was outstanding in English. At sixteen, she married—the first of three marriages, three divorces. The following year she rehearsed the first of many suicide attempts.

  An ordinary, blandly pretty girl with pleasant open features, Norma Jeane changed her name to Marilyn Monroe. Marilyn Monroe bleached Norma Jeane’s hair blonde, then platinum blonde. She narrowed her nose, strengthened the chin through surgery, erasing the outlines of Norma Jeane’s features. She turned the girl’s nervous stutter into a sighed whisper by substituting a sexy breath where the stutter would be. She converted Norma Jeane’s self-conscious walk into a sequence of sensual movements, punctuated by a careful pause, which allowed them finally to flow into a masterpiece of motion. The girl’s lips had parted to cry, to attempt to protest, to smile anxiously; now they parted, just part
ed, crimson, the cry, the protest, the anxious smile shaping a wordless invitation on her beautiful lips.

  Marilyn Monroe became a movie star.

  One characteristic remained, the girl’s look of bewilderment at constant loss and rejection, a startled violated innocence, which, melding with the practiced look of knowledgeability of the experienced woman she became, gave her the appearance of a wounded sexual angel.

  * * *

  Normalyn sat quietly, trying to think of nothing, nothing at all. But she could not push this away: Enid had at first given her the same birthday as Norma Jeane’s—June 1.

  With darting eyes, Lady Star pinned the Contender for Marilyn Monroe. The crooked smile on Lady Star’s face remained in askew admiration. She had to consider what was occurring among the other Dead Movie Stars and among the audience—fascinated, bruised petitioners chafing in exile but still longing to return another time. A careless move might shift loyalties.

  The Contender for Marilyn Monroe signaled with the tilt of one raised hand. Two youngmen moved into the clearing of light. One faced her. The other remained waiting a distance away.

  The contender announced, “The last tragic days of my life began in 1960 when—”

  * * *

  —John, Robert, and their father, Joseph P. Kennedy, arrived in Los Angeles to attend the Democratic Convention that would nominate the next President of the United States. The brothers stayed in separate suites at the Beverly Hills Hotel, layer upon layer of shiny windows. The old man borrowed a mansion from Marion Davies.

  Soon after, John F. Kennedy stood movingly before jubilant crowds at the Los Angeles Coliseum and asked the country to fulfill its rich potential on “a new frontier . . . of unknown opportunities and perils.” His call for “pioneers” into the new age stirred the hearts and minds of a thrilled generation. Instantly John F. Kennedy became a symbol of the noblest instincts in the country.

  That night, at a party given by Peter Lawford in his Mediterranean villa to celebrate John’s nomination, Senator John Kennedy drank a daiquiri, a superb one, concocted just for him—with the exact breath of lime, not lemon—by the head bartender rented from Romanoff’s Restaurant for the occasion. The Senator was trying to separate himself for a few quiet moments to nurse his voice. Had he sounded convincing earlier in his acceptance speech? He meant what he said. He wanted the country to rebel against the injustices he saw entrenching poverty, exploitation, bigotry. He thought he had seen the grim face of such injustice—for a split second it flashed as judgment in the opulent villa—on a recent tour of coal-mine country. He had seen grim men with blackened dust-wrecked faces; and one of their women, all angular bones and coarsened flesh, exhorted him, “Remember us!” And he would, he swore, he would. He remembered her now, knowing that the nation had too long cultivated the ancient roots of injustice, ignoring the tender grapes of justice. “The big foxes that spoil the grapes—” That phrase had recurred in his mind. He had wanted to use it in his acceptance speech, but the metaphor did not fit into the imagery of a “new frontier.” He wondered now whether that had been the reason he had hesitated or whether— . . . His father was greeting guests—John saw him, so sure—roaming the villa as if he owned it.

  John Kennedy was aware of the irony, the paradox, of his father’s wealth, his own, and his championing of the dispossessed. Oh, he enjoyed his wealth, what it could buy, like others who have known it all their lives; but unlike his father, John did not desire more, still more and more. All his life he had seen such men, dominated by greed. He was sure of this: He wanted to give some back! He never admitted this, but he felt that he and his brothers must do “social penance” for the excesses of their father’s anxious capitalism.

  In this palazzo once owned by Louis B. Mayer, John had been gravitating closer to an oval glass window in the large room. He didn’t realize that until he was staring outside. The frontier of night, land’s end, he thought. If he had been born poor, he felt sure he would have been a “radical,” one who would have pointed out that his class of “rowdy new aristocrats” represented decay on the “new frontier.” The “big foxes” encouraged the “little foxes.” He hated the arrogant tyrants of the steel industry. Had he managed to convey his true longings for the country? America had a potential for greatness not evoked since Franklin Delano Roosevelt. John longed to follow in his steps and not his father’s.

  “—most eager to discuss the state of the country with you, Senator Kennedy,” said Ken Lavet, a key Figure in California politics. He was introducing a woman who looked, John thought, like a beautiful silver moth!

  With the slightest curtsy—she had learned it when she was introduced to the Queen of England—Marilyn Monroe said, “I’m very pleased to meet you, Mr. President.”

  “I’m not President yet,” John smiled.

  “But you will be,” she promised him.

  During a period when he was recovering from an operation for his troublesome back problems, John had attempted to banish the heavy hospital atmosphere by decorating his room with a Howdy Doody doll, a fish tank—he watched intently as sturdy fish zigzagged to avoid tangles of seaweeds—and a life-size poster of Marilyn Monroe in shorts. He’d pinned the picture upside down.

  Thinking of that silliness for a moment, he extended his smile. He had a charming, ambiguous smile, as if always holding two thoughts simultaneously—one serious, another amused. Perhaps a premonition of his imminent doom forced on him a certain premature detachment from day-to-day events.

  Marilyn Monroe was telling him earnestly how thrilled she was by the possibilities of a new frontier for human rights when Joseph Kennedy clamped one hand on the movie star’s shoulder and another on his son’s.

  “So! You’ve met. Of course!” The old man approved. He touched his glasses, to adjust his sight for greatest clarity on the lavish movie star.

  His father! Marilyn Monroe thought. She still marveled how easily fathers existed for others.

  Looking at the gorgeous woman, the old man had a fantasy that he and John and— “Marilyn Monroe, I assume!”

  “And you are . . .” She dredged her mind for the most admiring words she could say to this powerful old man. “The father!”

  Joseph’s glasses fogged. He sighed wistfully, “You are a beautiful woman, Miss Monroe.” Winking approbation at his son, he moved away, slightly saddened.

  Now, some would claim that there was a crucial flaw in the truly socially concerned, truly committed Kennedy brothers, and that, along with wealth, their father had passed on to them that flaw—an urgent need to be sexually satisfied, over and over, by many beautiful women in quick succession. Among Joseph’s conquests were the bedazzling Gloria Swanson and, in a brief interlude, Verna La Maye. Himself a “movie fan,” John had courted Gene Tierney, Sonja Heine, Rhonda Fleming, and Angie Dickinson.

  John drank another daiquiri. Marilyn sipped champagne. A buried beam of light in the glass fascinated her. “Like a hidden diamond,” she said to John Kennedy. But when he looked, the reflection was gone.

  John delighted in the curved body of “the beautiful silver moth,” and Marilyn was charmed by his ambiguous smile.

  Hours later, the Senator’s bodyguards, a breed sworn to protect, to give up their lives—and be quiet—saw a dazzling woman being escorted into the Senator’s suite by Ken Lavet. The woman wore a blue silk cape with a cowl shading her face, but her lips stood out like a split ruby. As she passed the stony men, Marilyn imagined she was Amber St. Clare, a favorite heroine, keeping an assignation with the King.

  Then Marilyn Monroe and John Kennedy were alone in the hotel room.

  * * *

  In the basement of the Thrice-Blessed Church, the two youngmen with the contender spread on the clearing before the platform and the folded chairs an elegant quilted pad, with tiny fleurs-de-lis.

  The sturdier of the two youngmen said to the contender:

  * * *

  “Miss Monroe.”

  “Mr. President.”
>
  This time the Senator did not correct her.

  She spun about. “What a beautiful, beautiful room!” she gasped. Immediately she heard a disturbing echo of her giddy excitement. Where had it come from? She was not really impressed by this room. She had seen rooms much grander than this, even movie sets. Why had she reacted—felt!—like a dazzled child?

  “I’m delighted you accepted my invitation to visit,” said John Kennedy.

  “I’m delighted you extended it,” Marilyn Monroe said.

  His hand about her waist was strong and sure.

  He is going to make love to me! Marilyn Monroe announced, to herself. Before lovemaking, and during it, she liked to verbalize to herself—and sometimes aloud to the added arousal of her partners—what was occurring, what would occur, what was being touched on her, what she was touching. That multiplied all sensations. Now she continued to herself, I am in the arms of the man who will be the President of the country! He is touching her breasts— My breasts, she adjusted. She has— I have my arms around him. . . .

  She had a feeling that someone else had entered the room. Oh, not a spy. Not anyone actually. Just a presence, like an “unreal ghost.”

  Somewhat clumsily John attempted to remove her dress.

  It split in a long jagged line. Sequins dropped to the carpet.

  “I was sewn into this dress!” She laughed the matter away.

  “Will I have to sew it back on before you leave?” He bit slightly at her flesh through the tear in the dress. More sequins sprinkled her feet.

  “No,” she told him, “when I leave, I’ll just wrap myself in my silk cape—nothing under.” Letting her tongue touch the lobe every few syllables, she whispered in his ear that sometimes she went out wearing nothing under her fur coat.

  That aroused him more.

  Tearing at the seams of the dress, she let it fall to her feet. She stood on stardust. Then she picked up tiny dots of glitter and pasted them with her saliva on her naked body. She raised a lazy arm over her head, she shook her hair loose so that it cascaded in waves only on one side—she assumed the famous nude calender pose.