Marilyn's Daughter

by John Rechy

  In the mocking glare, Enid and Norma Jeane had to walk—slowly, slowly, but it still waited—right up to the long dark limousine.

  A white face stared out of the smoky window at the two.

  After extended seconds, the car drove away.

  Silently, Enid and Norma Jeane had to “unpack” their clothes before the gleeful girls.

  Sandra did not learn about those details until later, because when she saw the gray limousine, she ran and hid from it.

  * * *

  “Why did the limousine come here?” Normalyn asked Sandra. It had to have been Mildred’s, when she had come on the unlikely “dutiful mission of charity expected of everyone in Hollywood”—as she had carefully described it to Normalyn.

  “It was just an ugly mistake,” Sandra declared firmly. “Norma Jeane never came back to visit us. She just said those terrible things about all the homes she’d been in. They weren’t true of this one,” she said loyally. “Miss Kline and Mrs. Travers always tried to care. It hurt Miss Kline when those awful tourists started coming to see ‘one of those places where Marilyn Monroe was mistreated.’ Even so, Miss Kline kept saying, ‘Marilyn Monroe will come visit, wait and see.’ The way she touched her fingers when she said that, I think she wished she’d come back with the blue glass necklace. . . . Only Enid came back, always when she was in the city. Each time she was more beautiful, with that hat and her silver lighter she clicked like she was commanding.” Sandra tried to imitate the proud stance, gave up.

  “Each time she came back—”

  * * *

  —Enid would spend a few moments by herself on the bench near the statue in the playground. Then she would face the placid angel. She squared her shoulders as if with renewed courage.

  A certain time, she needed courage. She confided hurriedly to Miss Kline and Mrs. Travers—and of course Sandra—that she was going away “to have a child.” She said that with defiance.

  Sandra could not help assuming the child was Stan’s—he was mean enough that she would have to go away to have it. They had all learned not to ask Enid questions. She would say all she intended, no more.

  Miss Kline always managed to ask about Marilyn Monroe. “Oh, and by the way how is—”?

  Enid told her joyfully that Marilyn seemed happy. “She’s sure she’ll fall in love again and marry, and she says this time it will be forever.”

  As Sandra walked her out, Enid told her, “Oh, we still play the game—when it becomes necessary to remember.”

  * * *

  That was when Enid returned to Texas to have Stan’s child, Normalyn connected. In sudden wonder, she realized that years ago, Enid had been here! Normalyn ran her hand along the bench, tenderly.

  Sandra continued sadly. “When Enid came back again, the last time, we were all so sad because we learned that—”

  * * *

  —Marilyn Monroe was dead.

  Enid had to speak to someone close before she fled—forever—“this city of pain and lost angels.” Her hand kept touching her lips, to stifle sobs. Even behind the specked veil of her hat, her beautiful eyes looked steeped in sadness. At first Sandra thought that was the only reason she had asked the blinds to be drawn as they sat in Miss Kline’s office. But soon Sandra began to suspect another reason as Enid stood recurrently, looking out, staring, as if someone might have followed her—or as if she were waiting for someone in secret. She rushed her words, which kept snagging on a gasp she attempted to control’ with a sigh: “I’m leaving right away, I wanted to leave from here.” She looked out the window differently this time, at—

  —the angel! Sandra was sure. Even in these terrible moments she would gain strength from it.

  Enid spoke urgently now. “It was dangerous to return, but I had to go to her house when I learned she was dead.” She seemed to see it all again, just as she had at—

  * * *

  —dawn!

  The house was surrounded by reporters, doctors, photographers, policemen! Standing outside, Enid saw a stretcher being carried out of the star’s home. The body of Marilyn Monroe was covered with a pale-blue blanket.

  Enid felt torn in two. She screamed: “Marilyn!” Then she whispered: “Norma Jeane— . . .”

  * * *

  “Is it possible that so much life has stopped, just stopped, so soon?” In Miss Kline’s office, Enid asked that aloud.

  “She was so beautiful, so famous, so rich, so loved,” Mrs. Travers said.

  “So hurt,” Sandra remembered.

  “She wasn’t rich. She had to borrow, she thought her career was over—the studio had fired her. She was sure she was losing her beauty, but she wasn’t—she was more beautiful than ever.” Enid roamed over reasons. “She’d lost her confidence—because the man she finally loved walked out on her when she was sure he’d marry her, that he would want their child as much as she did—”

  “Marilyn was pregnant—?” Mrs. Travers began in surprise.

  “Yes!” Enid covered her lips as if they had said more than she had intended.

  “All that loss, all at the same time, and it was too much for her to bear, for anyone to bear.” Miss Kline thought she understood. “And so she killed herself,” she managed to whisper the terrible words.

  As if something foreign had entered her body, making her rigid, her veins straining visibly, Enid stood suddenly. One hand pressed her throat as if to smother a scream of pain she would be screaming silently the rest of her life. “She didn’t kill herself!” she gasped.

  Forty-Five

  Mrs. Travers pulled back from the startling words. Sandra thought urgently, Rest in rest, rest in rest—

  “Then who—!” Miss Kline began in horror.

  Agitated, Enid opened her purse. She looked at her silver lighter in surprise, as if it, too, had died. Then she held a letter and stared at it, as if to identify it. Slowly, gently, she returned it to her purse.

  With such sudden tenderness! Sandra was sure it was a last letter from Marilyn Monroe.

  Her back to the others, her gaze steady on the impassive angel outside, Enid seemed to speak to herself now, as if to find answers to her own questions, shape grief into words that—spoken aloud—might be understood. “The last time I saw her alive—when I went to her house to explain the final details of the plan that might make it possible for her child to be born in secret”—she pronounced private words the others did not understand, did not dare question—“Marilyn was concerned for me. It touched me when she asked me—”

  * * *

  “You’ll do all this for me, put yourself in danger?”

  “You’ll be in danger, too,” Enid reminded carefully.

  “I know. But you don’t have to be.”

  Enid said quietly, “We became a part of each other, remember?”

  “In our game, yes,” Marilyn knew. They had not played it since the day Mildred’s raid had erupted into harsh recriminations between them.

  “The game came true for you,” Enid said. “You wanted to be only the movie star.” She said that only to soothe.

  “Because a movie star is loved by everyone.” Marilyn’s voice assumed a note of wistfulness that slipped into irony as she recited the key line from the game they’d first played under the shadow of the angel’s hurt wing. Then she said with anger, “No one is ever ‘only a movie star.’ A movie star doesn’t exist except as fantasy—it’s just a creation for others, it’s never real.” She felt a wistful regret, the unreality of dreams.

  “But you wanted to become your own fantasy. And you have,” Enid reminded. “The whole world knows you, Marilyn Monroe.”

  They were sitting like subdued school girls on Marilyn’s movie-star bed in her newly acquired Spanish-style home. Enid was aware of the sensitivity of these moments, the movie star’s sadness that the man she had come to love must not even know she was having his child—and that sadness bruised the joy of anticipation of the new life. The two women knew, also, that they would not be able to see each oth
er for long, even to talk, during the rest of the pregnancy and for a time afterwards. That added a special sad closeness to these moments.

  “You could have been a star, too,” Marilyn said. She had never understood why Enid had pulled away.

  Enid shook her head. The dream for her had become tarnished when she knew her life would be redone.

  “Was it because you loved Stan?” Marilyn would have given up her unreal life to become Mrs. Robert Kennedy.

  Enid said harshly, “Whether I ever loved Stan or not, I don’t even remember—that’s how much I despise the bastard now.”

  Marilyn knew Enid had just recently returned—from somewhere—and that the reason concerned Stanley Smith. But Enid kept her own crises secret, like the rest of her life. “Where do you disappear to, Enid—when you go away?”

  “To the shoreline, any shoreline.” Enid smiled at the question unanswered for so many years, accepted in these delicate moments. “I love the dark ocean. I go to places where I can walk alone along the edge of the water. I click my cigarette lighter for attention—”

  “But there’s no one to hear it, just the dark.” But Marilyn understood. She, too, loved the ocean at night, because it rendered darkness real, unlike the menacing “blackness” that was only perceived.

  “That’s why I carry it, as a signal to the darkness that I do exist.” Enid laughed, to temper the serious words.

  Marilyn welcomed laughing now. “You’ve always been so damn mysterious. It’s as if I know you only when you’re present. When you’re gone, you’re just . . . questions. Do you still write in that journal you kept for questions?” On the day they had named the jacaranda dust “lavender snow,” Enid had shown her the few scattered pages she kept.

  “I called it Why? I’m still wondering that.”

  Enid realized the glamorous movie star known throughout the world was this saddened, confused isolated woman she loved. And yet—Enid detected this gladly—there was about her now a new saving radiance that came from her determination to have this child.

  “And you also wonder what became of Norma Jeane?” Marilyn responded to the tight stare. “You said once you’d never abandon her and you’d make sure I didn’t either because if I tried, I would—” Marilyn stopped. She had not meant to remember that, nor to accuse.

  “I always wonder about Norma Jeane,” Enid said softly.

  “But all of that was only a game we kept on playing,” Marilyn said urgently. “We always laughed at the last.”

  “You really believe it was just a game?” Enid asked aloud.

  Marilyn said, “Sometimes I’m not sure.” She went to the mirror over her dresser. She freshened her lipstick, adding Vaseline to make her lips glow redder, as if makeup might keep her from being pulled back too forcefully into the memory of dark days. “Enid,” she said, and looked away, “when you came for me in New York after I committed myself to the psychiatric clinic, I didn’t tell you everything. Now I have to tell you what I left out, about all that happened after that night of—”

  * * *

  —the waking dream.

  When she found herself at the edge of the open window of her high-story apartment, about to jump into the “warm blackness,” she pulled back, startled.

  The next day she discussed the “dream” with her psychiatrist, Dr. Irene Slasky, who believed compassion was most effective when hidden. Marilyn remembered only then: “I went to the window because I heard footsteps outside; then I heard someone calling me.”

  “You know you were much too high to hear footsteps, even a voice.” Dr. Slasky was firm.

  “Dammit, she was looking up at me, daring or coaxing me to jump—or telling me not to—I’m not sure now!” Marilyn had not realized any of that until this moment. “God damn it, doctor, I saw her!”

  “Did you recognize her?”

  “Y-y-yes.”

  Although Dr. Slasky concluded that Marilyn had experienced a “severe hallucinatory state” brought on by grogginess from pills, she encouraged her to commit herself to Payne Whitney Psychiatric Clinic—“just for a rest, observation.”

  The day Marilyn went there, the East River was icing. She stepped out of the cab and walked in her white fur coat toward the clinic. She saw in a window dulled by frost the outline of a woman. She recognized the reflection.

  Inside the clinic, she was stripped of her clothes and her snowy coat. She tried to mold the drab hospital gown to her curves. Shocked to find herself locked into a bare room, she demanded, then pleaded to be let out. But no one responded, although throughout the long, terrifying night doctors, nurses, attendants made scratchy noises at her window, staring in, recognizing her.

  She threw off her clothes before the spying eyes. “If you want to look at me, look at me! I’m Marilyn Monroe!” she shouted.

  They rushed her screaming into a security ward, where she broke a chair against the barren walls, trying to smash this unbudging nightmare. Marilyn Monroe couldn’t be in here, helpless, she told herself.

  In exchange for her autograph, an orderly agreed to call her ex-husband in Florida. When he looked at the paper she’d signed, he shoved it back angrily. The name she had written wasn’t hers!

  Finally released by her ex-husband, she was smuggled through a freezing basement passage. Ahead, the East River froze in jagged shapes.

  Dozens of newsmen and photographers sprang at her, advancing, crouching, kneeling, cornering her. Her hands touched cold walls, ice on ice. As she lashed out with her hands, she knew no one had heard Norma Jeane whisper:

  “I am M-M-Marilyn M-M-Monroe.”

  * * *

  Of course Enid had know all along what Marilyn had left out—barely suggested—when she’d first recounted those experiences: the assertive presence of Norma Jeane.

  “So you see, Enid, Norma Jeane isn’t gone,” Marilyn tried to laugh now in her bedroom.

  Enid was silent, thoughtful.

  Marilyn Monroe said in surprise, “And sometimes I wake up starded, almost knowing I am Marilyn Monroe. I almost realize it’s me on all those magazine covers, in newspapers, on the screen.” She paused; her voice lowered. “Years ago, when Photoplay magazine gave me that award—”

  Now there occurred an odd change in Marilyn’s voice, Enid noticed. She had introduced the memory with a retrospective sadness, but as she spoke it further, her voice thrilled with pleasure as she remembered Joan Crawford’s deliberately late arrival:

  “Excitement poured away from her—”

  * * *

  —and gathered in a new wave at the entrance to the Crystal Room of the Beverly Hills Hotel.

  Marilyn Monroe had just walked in!

  In a gold lamé dress that dipped to her navel and opened at her breasts to expose half-crescents of dark pink flesh, Marilyn Monroe’s body reshaped itself into even more curves as she floated in on a blaze of sensuality. She was lifted up on a wave of adulation, crests of gasps, applause, sighs. The “empty pit” the child had detected when she was only Norma Jeane was gone! It had been filled by the sweep of adoration spilling over, and she thought she felt alive for the first time. She was sure that at this moment Marilyn Monroe was being fully born!

  But at that exact same moment—

  * * *

  “—I wanted to run, escape!” Marilyn confessed as she sat in her bedroom with Enid. She ran her finger along her lips, removing the Vaseline she had just applied, as if now that would pull her from the pursuing time. “When a photographer asked me to part my lips in a ‘sexy pout,’ I froze with terror because I was sure that if I did, I would hear a scream—my own!”

  No—Norma Jeane’s, Enid knew. But she did not say that during these delicate moments. “You just remember it differently now, that’s all,” Enid said, to calm the star’s agitation.

  Marilyn frowned. The spoken memory had just linked with another: “When I invited Robert to dinner, when I was sure he would ask me to marry him, I tried to look like me, more than a movie star. He stared at
me as if he didn’t recognize me.” She could still see the look of bafflement, dying desire. “There were times when I was sure Robert saw me, loved me—” She placed her hands with delicate care on her stomach, on the child forming inside her. “And yet, sometimes, when they were desiring me—I was aware of this more with John than with Robert—I felt they would be . . . embarrassed . . . to be with Marilyn Monroe other than when we were having sex—” she voiced her confusions. She said with anger, although she wasn’t sure it was directed at Enid, “You said John and Robert treated me like an orphan.”

  “A weak orphan. And that’s not what Norma Jeane is.” At this crucial time, Marilyn had to understand that it was the orphan who had struggled to survive, that their strength came from that survival.

  “Dammit, is that all there’s been between us, Enid, just that damn game? Is that all that ties us?”

  And having seen each other completely vulnerable! And having become a part of each other! And having learned from each other how to survive. . . . Enid tried not to show her hurt. She remained silent.

  “If so, then it’s turned into a damn battle,” Marilyn judged Enid’s silence. And yet— She thought of the years Enid had come to her in crises, to remind her of their strength, defiance; and in a few hours she would go into seclusion and Enid would replace her in public, putting herself in danger to allow her to have her child, to cover the secret pregnancy. Gently, she took Enid’s hand in hers, to soften her words.

  Enid held it back. “If it was a battle, then it was fought only with love.”

  “Yes,” Marilyn knew. Then she added quietly, “For Norma Jeane.”

  * * *

  “It was Norma Jeane who killed Marilyn Monroe!” Enid gasped, the day she returned to the home, to the statue of the angel, to talk to Miss Kline, Mrs. Travers, Sandra, when Marilyn Monroe was dead. Enid’s eyes were glazed with tears as she looked at the three women, as if pleading not to be judged harshly.

  “Don’t you see how clear it is? Norma Jeane wouldn’t allow herself to be mistreated like a weak orphan, and Marilyn kept trying to abandon her. Even if I had been able to go to her myself when it all shattered at the very last,” she spoke to herself, “eventually it would have happened. Because Norma Jeane was strong. I saw to it!” Her voice was a whisper. “But Marilyn Monroe was not.”