Marilyn's Daughter

by John Rechy

  Everyone’s attention except Kim’s turned to Marilyn when she asked the Attorney General in a modulated voice, “Do you foresee a time in the history of civil rights when litigation shall not be needed to enforce what is, after all, nothing but civility?”

  “Why—” Robert Kennedy was impressed. Her question indicated a refined sophistication. Then he noticed that she was reading from concealed notes on her lap. He smiled.

  Realizing that he had seen her consult her notes—which she had phrased earlier—Marilyn was glad that Kim went on to describe “unbelievable crests of water that creep up to land’s end in Carmel.”

  When dinner was over, the twenty-five or so guests milled about the grand oceanfront room, where Marilyn had met John after his nomination. The glass wall provided a spectacular view of the ocean. A strong breeze stirred the night. Robert Kennedy gravitated toward Marilyn, who was secretly waiting. She smiled at the lean Kennedy, thinking that although he, too, was smiling, he looked sad.

  “You look sad even when you smile, Miss Monroe,” Robert told her. That is what Rose Kennedy, the dowager mother, often observed in public about his eyes: “They look sad even when he smiles his best Irish.”

  “But do I look smart?” Marilyn asked the Attorney General. When she saw the frown that that created on his craggy yet youthful face, a frown of confusion perhaps, she instinctively revised her question: “But do I look sexy?”

  “Yes!” He answered that question too quickly. He added seriously, “Miss Monroe, you are the most sexual woman in the world.”

  At that moment Marilyn thought he looked like an English Romantic poet who would die young, leaving only a few poems, the promise of many greater ones. Saddened by that thought, and because champagne was bubbling in her mind, she leaned her head just slightly on his shoulder. He touched it. It was as if they were alone in the room.

  Robert’s whole body responded to that contact. He loved sports because he marveled at the many individual movements that create one action—a chain of motion. Often he would concentrate on the components of that chain to the point that his movements would slow. When the family played touch football, John could tell when his brother was becoming “entranced with motion.” If they were on opposite teams, John would take strategic advantage of it to score a touchdown. . . . Just now, Robert followed the sensation that spread from the first brush of Marilyn’s head on his shoulder. He pulled away. “Everybody’s looking!” he said.

  “Why shouldn’t they?” she laughed. “I’m Marilyn Monroe and you’re Robert Kennedy.”

  His frown deepened. “You’re talking too loudly. Stop trying to attract attention!”

  Kim Novak was comparing the Santa Monica coastline with that of Carmel, “its soaring abutments like powerful wings, its—”

  Peter Lawford told her to hush. Something amazing was occurring between John Kennedy’s brother and Marilyn Monroe. He had counted on something, but this!

  Marilyn confronted Robert’s rude tone. “You know you desire me.”

  He turned from her and walked out of the room.

  “Bast—” She only started the word.

  In the suddenly placid night, Robert Kennedy was disturbed. He had felt a doubled desire—desire for this beautiful woman and desire for his brother’s mistress.

  * * *

  Before the panel of Dead Movie Stars—as Lady Star draped one emphatically casual arm about her chair, to proclaim only mild interest while the rest of the founders sat enthralled—the lanky youngman moved back into the shadows, waiting to reappear.

  Normalyn sat quite still as she saw the dark youngwoman in the shadows preparing to make her powerful entrance. The contender’s next supporting player had just adjusted the veil on a dramatically slanted hat. She held a cigarette lighter in her palm. . . . Normalyn pulled her attention away. It jerked into the memory of Troja and Kirk. She separated them now in her mind, the way death had: Troja. And Kirk.

  The youngman who had played the President lay on the soft padding sprinkled with fleurs-de-lis. Beside him, on a shimmery sheet, the contender stretched her body and rested her blonde head—

  * * *

  —on his arm. John Kennedy was slightly uncomfortable. Next to him Marilyn was dozing. In the morning he had to face Lyndon Johnson, a man he was coming to despise and admire equally. Among close intimates, John would imitate Johnson: “When Ahm Pray-see-dey-yent of the U-ni-ted States, Ah will call muhself Gentl’man Bird.”. . . Now he edged his arm away. Marilyn woke, startled she had been allowed to stay this long. She saw John smiling his private smile, as if no one else in the world would be amused by what he was perceiving.

  The door opened. A man walked in.

  John’s smile tilted. “Miss Monroe, I believe you’ve met my brother—”

  * * *

  “Robert Kennedy!” Billy Jack exclaimed. “He came in?”

  The lanky youngman stood over the contender and the other youngman lying on the glistening sheet. As if profoundly startled, the Contender for—

  * * *

  —Marilyn Monroe looked at the President. Propped on pillows, he was still smiling, at Robert, at her, at himself.

  “Miss Monroe,” Robert Kennedy, too, addressed her formally. After silent seconds, he walked out.

  “What—?” Marilyn only began her question because at that moment she did not know what it was.

  She left without another word to John. She walked out. Street noises seemed to belong to another world. She knew she had entered the darkest time of her life. She stopped on a busy corner, to force herself to hear the city’s sounds. They seemed to come from another world, as if hers had been separated. Of course, she knew what would happen now.

  Thirty-Two

  “What did happen!” Betty Grable demanded.

  “Yeah, what, man?” James Dean was no longer slouching.

  “Tell us immediately!” Hedy Lamarr ordered.

  “Come on!” coaxed Errol Flynn.

  “Now!” Rita Hayworth added her full authority.

  Veronica Lake and Billy Jack glanced at each other, then at a thoughtful Tyrone Power. Billy Jack leaned away from Lady Star, and Veronica Lake shifted her chair an inch or so apart from her. Lady Star gauged those reactions of tilting allegiance and the audience’s eagerness, and she was pensive, pensive.

  The Contender for Marilyn Monroe put a finger to her lips: Wait! . . . She directed her words first to Lady Star, then the panel, finally the audience: “Some say that in sharing their women, the Kennedy men came closer to each other. Once, after dinner at the White House, John Kennedy asked the Great Dietrich if she had had sex with his father and only then asserted his own desire for her.”

  “Wow!” Errol Flynn paid tribute to all three.

  Lady Star seized this opportunity: “I believe the contender may be straying into antidotes—”

  “That’s for poison.” Veronica Lake was bolder than usual.

  “—into idle gossip”—with a lazy flutter, Lady Star’s fingers mimed idleness—“and away from the purpose of her audition.” At the last, she put warning into her voice, and her eyes thrust daggers at Veronica Lake.

  As ripples of laughter approved Lady Star’s delivery, the youngwoman lost a tiny fraction of her superb command; she scratched an eyelid.

  Lady Star noted that. “Continue with the auditions!” she sprang at the contender. Now she knifed Normalyn with narrowed eyes.

  Demanding that she counter with information of her own! That conclusion recurred more powerfully each time for Normalyn—and wavered less quickly. It was increasingly clear that this contender was now a strong possibility as a Dead Movie Star—and that was not Lady Star’s intention.

  The contender drew a sensual hand over her curvy hip. With authority she continued: “I saw the president less and less, and I saw his brother more and more. The first time I was with him, we lay—”

  * * *

  —naked. Marilyn Monroe and Robert Kennedy lay naked on the enormous bed
with sheets that were the slightest shade of blue in a room bathed in golden light. For moments, lazily, their bodies had only slightly arched toward each other, just lain there, increasing their awareness of each other. Occasionally, when tall palmtrees parted outside in a soundless breeze, a slender moon peered into the room and brushed the edges of the room with silver.

  In that light, Marilyn Monroe’s body, one foot tucked under the bluish sheet, appeared goldly translucent. She held one arm behind her head, and that position extended one breast, which, even so, retained its astonishing, proud roundness. From her breasts, her flesh insinuated itself into the softest S, which disappeared into a puff of tawniness before extending into the full sweep of her legs. Under her raised arm, her hair was rumpled. A loosed wave dipped over one eye, a shade of blue unchanged by the burnished light.

  Robert Kennedy leaned over her, only from the waist because he wanted to extend the gradual contact of his body with hers. Marilyn Monroe is naked—gloriously startlingly naked! Robert thought. No, he amended, she is wearing one earring, only one.

  It glittered on her ear. Looking at his long, lightly furry runner’s legs, Marilyn slid her hands along the bare wiry torso of this coltish man she had once seen in a film clip as he ran, all angles, to catch a football John had pitched at him on a lawn of impeccable greenness. She thought, I am with him, she is with him. Her scarlet lips parted, waiting for his.

  He kissed her, thought he felt her lips bubble as he had imagined they would! He leaned back, to look at the lips he had just kissed so easily and could kiss again. They were crimson, moist, parted, Marilyn Monroe’s!

  There was a light film, a beginning nestling of moisture, on his chest. Marilyn touched it with a finger, to create drops that sprinkled liquid sequins on her breasts. Laughing—her laughter bubbled!—she reached up and tousled his sandy hair. He shook her hands away, biting playfully at her fingers, nails as glossy as her lips. Exultant, she tossed her head to one side, blowing at her hair, wisps of blondness. She thought, Soon he will enter me—will enter her!

  The most sexual woman in the world! The fantasy of every man, of hundreds, of thousands, of millions of men—men dreaming about her at this very moment, and she is with me now, Robert thought. His hands touched her perfect breasts— they were perfect! His fingers paused on the tips of her nipples, to feel them react. He was remembering a photograph he had seen of her in a book. She had been naked from the waist up, holding two roses—enormous cloth roses—against her breasts. She had been half-smiling, half-pouting, teasing, forbidding. He pretended he was plucking the petals of those remembered roses with his teeth.

  She winced slightly at the light bites, then quickly restored her smile, transforming herself into a girl, a kittenish young girl. She meowed. She extended the sound to a low growl. Then she softened it into a sensual purring. She is with him!

  Only in rehearsal, he arched his body. She raised her hips. In the very second when he would have had to surrender to the voluptuous invitation, he thought, Not yet! He slid on her stomach and held her, flesh on flesh. Both laughed.

  He remembered a blowup of her in shorts, a blowup once pinned in his brother’s hospital room. He touched her waist, where those shorts had hugged her. He remembered—evoked— the photograph of her with her dress swirling lovingly over white panties. He touched her thighs where the delicate cloth would have touched. He remembered—evoked—the silvery sheath that had sliced a stark V between her breasts at his brother’s birthday celebration. He traced that V now, at the exact moment looping his fingers away from the nipples, as if they were not yet exposed. Not yet. . . . He remembered—evoked—a photograph of her lying on saffron sheets, her hair the same color, the curve of one naked hip revealing the hint of a darker shade of gold—woman-girl, reclining on one elbow— . . . He adjusted her elbow like that now. The image still did not shape, and so he closed his eyes—and thought of her covered with sequins on flesh moistened by desire.

  She knew why he had closed his eyes. She held his face until he opened them again, on her. She tried to assume the exact expression the cameras celebrated in glowing, Technicolored photographs—dark-lidded eyes narrowed, glossy scarlet lips about to part, parting, parted. She reminded herself, I am with him, she is with him, she is—

  Beautiful, he thought—and closed his eyes again, to see not just her, this woman lying with him, but to see Marilyn Monroe—myth, legend, his brother’s mistress, the greatest movie star in the world, the most beautiful woman; closed his eyes in order to see all the reflections of her, the tantalizing kept youngwoman in that movie—he forgot the name—the woman wrapped in a towel and looking both innocent and delighted to have been surprised at her shower door, the woman slipping into almost invisible stockings, the woman peeling one long glove as if that were just a first promise of many, many, many more, the woman holding only a sheer scarf before her so that her breasts created a tantalizing smear in that movie in which—that photograph in which—the woman in— the woman—woman—

  Urgently he tried to locate an image of her, lying, standing, dressed, undressed—his eyes remained closed—and he grasped the image of the woman posing for the calendar called “Golden Dreams”! Yes, her! Behind closed eyes, he saw the outline of her flesh against soft red velvet—the curved hips, the languorous arm, the crimson lips, one leg barely concealing—no, barely revealing— . . . Golden dreams, golden dreams, golden dreams! He stretched his body its full length, feeling the gathering release as she flung her body—desperately!—against his with a cry that muffled the name she almost spoke aloud: Kennedy!

  He thrust once more, and he thought, This is—

  * * *

  “—a lie! An obvious lie!” Lady Star broke the heated revery of the supporting player who, as Robert Kennedy, had suddenly interrupted the Contender for Marilyn Monroe in the basement of the Thrice-Blessed Church of the Redeemer. He had gone on to deliver in a rush his heated fantasy of what had occurred between the movie star and the senator. Adjusting immediately to the unexpected, and to stave off a jarring effect on her own thoughtful presentation, the Contender for Marilyn Monroe had managed to interject into the outrageous account some tender and some solemn touches—and a Technicolored backdrop.

  “How dare you!” Lady Star’s anger at the insurgent supporting player grew. “You can’t know what went on in that bedroom. You have no right! How dare you!”

  “I just imagined it that way.” The supporting player admitted the obvious.

  Momentarily enthralled, rendered momentarily moony, the rest of the panel now became staunchly indignant at the supporting player as Lady Star’s wrath mounted. Only Billy Jack protested: “Aw, lettim finish.” His hand had been cuddling his warming groin.

  During the sudden interruption, Normalyn had sat quietly, had stopped listening, awed anew by the living power of the movie star.

  Like a stern judge, Lady Star directed the gathered: “You will disregard as totally unreliable everything you have just heard from this—this—supporting player. Legends have tragedy. And glamour!” she pronounced. “They do not—do not—”

  “What?” challenged Billy Jack.

  “Legends don’t fuck!” Lady Star made herself clear. “Now go on!” she commanded the contender.

  Grasping dramatic authority, the contender silenced giggles instantly when she announced, “With Robert—”

  * * *

  —it became more than just an affair. He was tender with her, spoke softly. They laughed, he discussed Castro, Cuba, the bastard-Teamsters, the threat of the right wing, giant industries; his favorite season of the year—fall, “nature’s rebellion against winter,” he said; hers, of course, was early spring.

  She saw him as often as possible. He came to her home. Once, in disguise—he wore a beard, she wore her beautiful black wig—they went—she dared him, he challenged her back—to Pirate’s Cove, a nude beach near Zuma. There, unrecognized, the movie star and the Attorney General walked naked, hand in hand, along the
sand of the sheltered recess formed by looming white cliffs.

  She was in love.

  She was sure he was in love with her. As a youngwoman, she had survived the ugliness in her life by forcing hope. If she could hope, she could live. . . . She came to believe that powerful hoping could nudge even fate. She was sure that Robert, unlike “stodgy old John,” would take her as his guest to the White House, for a formal dinner. The press would record their excitement and pleasure. And soon after that—! She hoped even more powerfully.

  To resolve everything, she invited him to a “special dinner”—she would cook! With a small laugh at the extravagant prospect—he never seemed totally committed to the flippancy of laughter—Robert accepted.

  On the day appointed, cooking seemed impossible. She wasn’t a good cook and she was nervous. Her spirits soared: She would send out for food, put it in the oven to warm in advance so that the house would be wafted by fabulous scents. She would let him assume she had cooked, might even smudge her face with something tasty. At a certain point, she would sniff at the air and, running into the kitchen, she would say, “I think dinner is ready. Ummmm—just smell!”

  That way, too, she could spend more time to make herself irresistible. Naked, the way she always made herself up when she was alone, she reached for her best cosmetics. She stopped. She looked closely into the mirror. What she saw fascinated her. Someone else had been aging under the face she was about to make up. She continued to stare. Her eyes looked larger, alert—not sexily dreamy—as if, wide open, they wanted now to see everything, face everything! She touched, in fascination, a maturing angularity on her face. She would let him see her as her. She made herself up only lightly and wore a pretty but not extravagant dress.

  To test this new, exciting appearance, she stood quietly before her male secretary—actually her companion, with her since not long before, when she had experienced a near breakdown that led to her self-commitment at Payne Whitney Psychiatric Clinic.