She shivered. “Oh, and I’ve had my fill of the press today, already.”
Marilyn Monroe was in town on a press swing to promote the imminent release of Gentlemen Prefer Blondes; when I’d arrived at her suite, she had just wrapped up an interview with Irv Kupcinet, of the Sun Times.
“If they see me at your side,” I said, “they may be more inclined to behave themselves.”
“That’s sort of what Ben said. He said people know you in Chicago. That you have quite a reputation.”
“Reputations can deceiving.”
“Oh yes,” she said with a lift of her eyes and a flutter of lashes. “Nathan, can I get you something to drink?”
“A Coke would be nice.”
She flashed just a hint of the famous smile, said, “I’ll have one, too,” rose and walked to a little bar in one corner, and in those painted-on Capri pants, she provided a rear view even more memorable than Niagara.
Soon she was behind the bar, pouring Coca-Cola over ice, saying, “How did you meet Ben? I met him on monkey business.”
“Met him how?”
She walked over to where I was sitting, a tumbler in either hand, a study in sexy symmetry as her breasts did a gentle braless dance under the sweater. “On the movie—Monkey Business. Ben wrote it. That was a good role for me. Nice and funny, and light. How did you meet him?”
I took my Coke from her. “You better let Ben tell it.”
I figured that was wise, because I had no idea where or when I’d first met Ben Hecht, though according to Ben we’d known each other since I was a kid. I had no memory of encountering Hecht back in those waning days of the so-called Chicago literary Renaissance of the late teens and early twenties, though when he approached me to do a Hollywood job for him, a few years ago, he insisted we were old friends…and since he’d been the client, who was I to argue?
Hecht, after all, was a storyteller, and reinventing his own life, revising his own memories into better tales, was in his nature.
She sat up, now, and forward, hands folded in her lap around the glass of Coke, an attentive schoolgirl. “Ben says your father had a radical bookshop.”
“That’s right,” I said. “We were on the West Side, and most of the literary and political shenanigans were centered in Tower Town…”
“Tower Town?”
“That’s the area that used to be Chicago’s Greenwich Village; still is, sort of, but it’s dying out. On the Near North Side. But most of the freethinkers and radicals and artsy types found their way into Heller’s Books, from Clarence Darrow to Carl Sandburg.”
Her eyes went wide as Betty Boop’s. “You know Carl Sandburg?”
“Sure. He used to play his guitar and sing his god-awful folks songs in this little performance area we had.”
Her sigh could only be described as wistful. “I love his poetry.”
“Yeah, he’s become a big deal, hasn’t he? Nice guy.”
Hope danced in the wide eyes. “Will he be there tonight?”
Imagine a homely wart like Charlie getting a dish like this warmed up over him.
“I kind of doubt it. He doesn’t get back to Chicago all that much.”
Her disappointment was obvious, but she perked herself up, saying, “Ben’s arranged this party as a benefit for Maxwell Bodenheim, you know.”
“Are you serious?”
Misinterpreting my displeasure as something positive, she nodded and said, “Oh, yes. Ben said Mr. Bodenheim and his wife flew in from New York last night. Do you know him?”
“Yeah. Yeah, I know Max. I’m surprised you’ve even heard of him, Marilyn.”
“I read a lot of poetry,” she said. “His Selected Poems is a delightful collection.”
Who was I to rain on her parade? How could she know that Bodenheim, who I vividly remembered from childhood, had been a womanizing, sarcastic, self-important, drunken leach? The only writer my softhearted father had ever banished from his store, when he caught Bodenheim shoplifting copies of his own books.
“I haven’t thought of that guy in probably thirty years,” I said. “I didn’t even know he was still alive.”
Her brow furrowed with sympathy. “Ben says Mr. Bodenheim has fallen on hard times. It’s difficult to make a living as a poet.”
I sipped my Coke. “He used to write novels, too. He had some bestsellers in the twenties.”
Sexy potboilers, with titles like Replenishing Jessica, Georgie May, and Naked on Roller Skates, that had seemed pretty racy in their day; Jessica had even been busted as pornography. Of course, in the modern era of Erskine Caldwell and Mickey Spillane, the naughty doings of Bodenheim’s promiscuous jazz-age heroines would probably seem pretty mild.
Still, if Bodenheim was broke, it was only after squandering the fortune or two a bestselling writer would naturally accrue.
“I just think it’s wonderful of Ben to help his old friend out like this,” she said, her smile radiant, as madonnalike as she imaged Hecht’s intentions to be saintly.
Bodenheim was indeed an “old friend” of Hecht’s, but my understanding was that they’d had a major falling out, long ago; in fact, while I don’t remember ever meeting Hecht in the old days, I do remember my father talking about how violently these two one-time literary collaborators had fallen out. Hecht had even written a novel, Count Bruga, lampooning his pretentious former crony, to which Bodenheim replied with his own novel, Duke Herring, about a self-centered sellout clearly patterned on Hecht.
The gathering tonight at Riccardo’s was a Renaissance reunion, organized by Hecht, who was one of that movement’s stellar graduates, albeit not in the literary way of such figures as Sandburg, Vachel Lindsay, Sherwood Anderson, Edgar Lee Masters, and Margaret Anderson. Hecht—whose archly literary novels and would-be avant-garde pornography of the twenties had made him a king among local bohemians—had literally gone Hollywood.
After the success of his play The Front Page, a collaboration with Charlie MacArthur, another former Chicago newspaper-man, Hecht began a wildly successful screenwriting career—Scarface, Gunga Din, Spellbound, and Notorious, to name a few of his credits—that would be impressive by anybody’s standards. Except, perhaps, those of the literary types among whom he’d once dwelled.
Like Bodenheim.
Of course, I didn’t figure—other than Bodenheim—there would be many people at the party that Hecht would owe any apology to. The crowd that Ben and Bodenheim had hung out with, sharing the pages of literary magazines, and the stages of little theaters and the wild and wooly Dill Pickle Club, was pretty well thinned out by now. The most exotic demise was probably that of Harriet Monroe (presumably no relation to Marilyn); the editor of the prestigious magazine Poetry, Harriet had died in 1936, on some sort of mountain-climbing expedition in Peru (Sherwood Anderson also died in South America, but less exotically, succumbing to peritonitis on a goodwill tour). Vachel Lindsay had died a suicide, Edgar Lee Masters died broke in a convalescent home. This poetry was a rough racket.
The beautiful, enigmatic (i.e., lesbian) editor of the Little Review, Margaret Anderson, wasn’t dead, but she might as well have been: she lived in Paris. I figured the party attendees would mostly be Renaissance refugees who had drifted back into the newspaper business, from whence most of the players had come in the first place, seasoned veterans of Schlogl’s, the legendary Loop tavern where Daily News reporters gathered, even those without literary pretensions.
Of course, Riccardo’s was a newspaper hangout in general, and the entertainment scribes Marilyn had already encountered this trip—Kup, Herb Lyon, Anna Nangle, among others—might be there, as well. I knew all of them and could keep them at bay in a friendly way.
I sipped my Coke. “I gather you and Ben are embarking on some sort of project together.”
“Well, we’re seriously discussing—”
And a knock at the door interrupted her. I offered to answer it for her, and did, and as if he’d arrived specifically to answer my question, there was B
en.
“Madhouse down there,” he said, gesturing with a thumb, as if pointing to Hell, but in reality only meaning the floor where the meetings and seminars of the ABA were being held.
Ben Hecht, a vigorous sixty years of age, brushed by me and went over to greet Marilyn, who rose from the couch to give him a Hollywood hug. His frame was square, large-boned, just under six foot, his attire rather casual for a business occasion, a brown sport jacket over a green sport shirt; a Russian Jew, he looked more Russian than Jewish—a pleasant, even handsome-looking man with an oval head, salt-and-pepper curly hair, a high forehead that was obviously in the process of getting higher, trimmed mustache, deep-blue slightly sunken eyes, and strong jaw worthy of a leading man.
She sat back down, and he nestled next to her, and took her hands in his as if about to propose marriage.
“I talked to the Doubleday people,” Ben said, “and they’re very excited.”
Her eyes Betty-Booped again. “Really?”
“They did somersaults over the idea.”
Now she winced. “I still think I’m a little young to be writing my life story…”
“You’re the hottest thing in show business, kid. Strike while the iron is hot. You liked the sample chapters I wrote, didn’t you?”
“I loved them.” She turned to me, and I was relieved to see that one of them realized I was still there. “We spent an afternoon at the Beverly Hills Hotel, Ben and I, with me talking into a tape recorder, and then a few days later we met again. Ben had turned my ramblings into something marvelous. I laughed…I cried…”
“Well,” he said, withdrawing a cigar from a silver case from inside his sport jacket, “you’ll laugh and cry with joy when you hear the deal Doubleday’s offering. Plus, I talked to some people from the Ladies’ Home Journal, and they’re going to make an offer to serialize.”
For a guy famous for writing ping-pong back-and-forth dialogue, Ben nonetheless spoke in paragraphs, though the words did flow at a machine-gun clip.
“Oh, Ben…this is so wonderful…”
He bit off the end of his cigar. “Kid, they’re going to pay you bushel baskets of money, and the end result is, publicity for you. Only in America.”
“Ben, how can I ever repay you?”
It was a question millions of American men would have died to hear Marilyn Monroe ask.
Ben, patting his jacket pockets as if he were frisking himself, replied with, “You got a light?”
She nodded and pranced over to the bar and got some hotel matches and came bouncing back and fired up his Cuban. It had a strong, pleasant aroma, but the mixture of it and Marilyn’s Chanel Number Five was making me a little queasy.
I asked, “What time’s the party?”
“They got a buffet over there for us,” Ben said, “at seven. I’m kind of the host, so I’ll head over a little early. Marilyn, what time would you like to make your appearance?”
“Maybe around eight,” she offered. Then she looked at me. “Could you meet me in the lobby, Nathan, and escort me over?”
“Be delighted.”
She stood. “Then you boys better scoot. I have to get ready.”
“You are ready,” Ben said, but he was rising at her command just the same. He gestured with his cigar in hand. “These are writers and poets, kid. Come as you are.”
“I’ll wear something nice and casual,” she promised. “But I’d like to relax with a nice long hot bubble bath…”
That was a pretty image to leave on, so we did. In the hall, as we waited for the elevator, I said, “Bodenheim?”
“Yeah,” Hecht said, as if throwing a benefit for his arch literary enemy was a natural thing to do. “We flew him and his wife in. I got them over at the Bismarck, if he hasn’t burned it down by now.”
“What’s he need a benefit for?”
Hecht snorted, spoke around his cigar. “Are you kidding? He’s been living in Greenwich Village for the last, I don’t know, twenty years. Poor bastard’s turned into a bum. Complete alky. You know how he makes his living, such as it is? Hawking his poems on street corners, pinnin’ ’em on a fence, sellin’ ’em for quarters and dimes.”
“Jesus. Even I wouldn’t wish that on him. I mean, he was famous…respected….”
“There was a time,” Hecht said, and the sunken eyes grew distant, “when he was near the peak of poetry in this nation. Ezra Pound wrote him goddamn fan letters. William Carlos Williams, Conrad Aiken, Marianne Moore, all expressed their public admiration. Now? Now the son of bitch is sleeping on park benches and, when he’s lucky, in flophouses.”
“What’s this about a wife?”
Hecht got a funny smile going; he flicked ashes from the cigar in the wall ashtray by the elevator buttons. “Her name’s Ruth. He looks like shit, but she’s kind of foxy, in a low-rent kind of way.” Hecht shook his head, laughed. “Son of a bitch always did have a way with the ladies. You know the stories, don’t you, about the suicides?”
I did. There was a period in the twenties, shortly after Bodenheim traded Chicago for New York, that the national papers were filled with the stories of young women driven to suicide by the fickle attentions of the author of Replenishing Jessica.
“I know you fancy yourself a ladies’ man, Nate,” Hecht said with a sly grin. “But committing suicide over your favors never has become a national fad, now, has it?”
“Not yet,” I granted, and the elevator finally arrived. We stepped on. Hecht pushed the button for his floor and I hit lobby. We had the elevator to ourselves, so our conversation remained frank.
“What’s all this about you writing Marilyn’s autobiography? Since when are you reduced to that kind of thing, or are you trying to get a piece of that sweet girl’s personality?”
Hecht had his own reputation as a ladies’ man, or at least, womanizer.
He shrugged. “Straight ghost job. Good payday. I don’t always sign my work, kid. Hell, if I put my name on every script I doctored, I’d be the most famous asshole in Hollywood.”
“Well, doesn’t scriptwriting pay better than books?”
“Hell yes.” His voice remained jaunty but his expression turned grave. “But, frankly, kid—I got my ass in a wringer with this big fat mouth of mine. I’m blacklisted in England, you know, and if a producer uses me on a script, he can’t put my name on the British prints, and if the Brits find out my name was on the American version, they might pass on the thing, anyway.” His sigh was massive. “If you ever hear me gettin’ messed up in politics again, slap my face, okay?”
“What are friends for?”
Hecht, whose apolitical nature was probably the reason why my father’s radical bookshop was an unlikely place for us to have met, had gotten uncharacteristically political, right after the war. Specifically, he got vocal about Israel, outspoken in his opinion that England was the enemy of that emerging state, publicly praising Irgun terrorists for blowing up British trains and robbing British banks and killing British “tommies.”
“Maybe it’s for the best,” he said, as the bell rang and the door drew open at his floor. “It’s putting me back in the world of books, where I belong. Hey, I talked to Simon and Schuster this afternoon, and they’re makin’ an offer on my autobiography…. See you at Riccardo’s, kid!”
And with that final machine-gun burst of verbiage, he was gone.
2
Just to be safe, I returned to the Palmer House at seven thirty, walking over from my suite of offices at the Monadnock Building, going in on the State Street side, through the business arcade and up the escalator to the vast high-ceilinged lobby, a cathedral-like affair with arched balconies, Roman travertine walls, and an elaborately painted Italian classical ceiling depicting gods and goddesses, which was only fitting considering who I was escorting tonight.
And since Hollywood divinity occupies a time and space continuum all its own, I had plenty of opportunity, seated comfortably in one of the velvet-upholstered chairs, to study each and every shapely
nude, and near-nude, cloud-perched goddess.
As my delight at this assignment gradually wore to irritation (shortly after nine), I began toying with calling up to Miss Monroe’s suite to see if I’d misunderstood when I was to pick her up, or if she’d run into a problem, and just as irritation was bleeding into indignation (nine thirty), she stepped out of an elevator, a vision of twentieth-century womanhood that put to shame the classical dames floating above me.
She wore a simple black linen dress, spaghetti straps and a fairly low, straight-across-the-bosom neckline—no sign of a bra, or any pantyline, either; her heels were black strappy sandals, her legs bare. No jewelry, a small black purse in hand. Doffing my coconut-palm narrow-brim hat, I rose to approach her as she click-clacked toward me across the marble floor and by the time I’d slipped my arm in hers, and gazed into that radiant face with its blazingly red-lipsticked baby-doll pout, my annoyance disappeared, and delight had bloomed again.
She issued no apology for her tardiness, but what she said instead was much better: “Don’t you look handsome.”
And for the first time I witnessed, in person, the practiced, patented open-mouthed smile, as she stroked the sleeve of my green Dacron sport jacket, then straightened and smoothed the lighter-green linen tie that matched my sport shirt, under which my heart went pitty pat.
“I thought bodyguards tried to blend into the woodwork,” she said, eyeing my canary-yellow lightweight slacks.
“This bodyguard wants to be noticed,” I said, as we walked through a lobby whose patrons were wide-eyed with wonder at the presence among them of this goddess. “Not that anyone will…”
In back of the cab, on our way to Riccardo’s, I ventured a question: “Do you mind if I ask something a little personal?”
“Ask and see.”
“Is what I read about in the papers true, about you and Joe DiMaggio?”
She shrugged. “We’ve been dating, kind of off and on.”
“Is it ‘on’ right now?”
“Off.”
“Ah,” I said. “I’m sorry.”
Triple Play: A Nathan Heller Casebook Page 10
