homosexuals, not necessarily mutually exclusive groups. Kids his age didn’t need having their sexuality undermined. In fact, my mission today was just the opposite.
Of course, in trying to impress my kid-whose “other” father was a producer (did I mention the fat prick used to be successful?)-I should have picked a lot other than Fox’s. The grand old studio was scrambling to stay afloat. Clouds of dust crowded the blue out of the sky over bulldozers making way for apartment buildings and office towers. The out-of-control Liz Taylor picture Cleopatra, currently filming in Rome, had required the selling off of such fabled backlot locations as Tyrone Power’s Zorro hacienda, Betty Grable’s Down Argentine Way ranch, and Lana Turner’s Peyton Place town square.
Marilyn’s new picture, which Hedda Hopper and Louella Parsons called “troubled,” was in fact the only going project on the lot.
“Jeez,” Sam said, elbow out the rolled-down window. “It’s a lousy ghost town.”
The streets of this soundstage city had once been hopping with cowboys and Indians, pirates and dancing girls. Even the trees and lawns were brown and dying-palms and ferns, too. Had they cut off the water? Or had the water company cut off Fox?
As per Pat Newcomb’s instructions, I drove directly to Marilyn’s recently constructed bungalow, which had the look of a small prefab suburban house. I left Sam in the Jag and went up to the door, where a security guard was on watch; I showed my special pass, and he knocked for me.
I was greeted by Pat Newcomb-slim in a yellow blouse and tan slacks, thirty or so, her light brown hair cut chin-length. We knew each other only slightly. She was attractive, but not too attractive-that wouldn’t do for the woman assigned by the Arthur Jacobs PR agency to be Marilyn’s right hand.
The interior was mostly one big bustling room, as buzzing as the lot was otherwise dead. A battalion of technicians was at work on creating the fabled Marilyn Monroe “look.” Each seemed to operate off caffeine, as one hand would bear a coffee cup, the other whatever tool of the trade was required: comb, brush, makeup jar.
Wearing only a flesh-colored bikini, the object of their artistry reclined on a slant board like the bride of Frankenstein waiting to be awakened. She was more slender than I’d ever seen her, but her prominent rib cage made her handful breasts jut nicely, and her narrow waist and flaring hips suggested a voluptuousness that wasn’t really earned.
I shouldered my way in. “Afraid I’m gonna have to take you in for public nudity.”
Marilyn beamed at me but didn’t turn her head-her makeup man of many years, Whitey Snyder, a pleasant sharp-featured guy, was using a watercolor brush to highlight her cheekbones.
“Are you going to make me laugh, Nate?” she asked, with only a hint of her trademark halting screen delivery. “Because if you are, I am going to have to throw you out on your you-know-what.”
An almost naked broad using a euphemism like “you-know-what” was pretty funny.
“I wouldn’t want to ruin your face,” I said.
“Takes more and more work to make it a face,” she said, rueful but good-humored. Her mouth was on, but not as full as before, if just as lushly red. Her whole look had been adjusted to make the switch from the fifties to the sixties, more fashion model than pinup.
At a counter facing the slant board, a heavyset woman in a pale blue smock was mixing body makeup. Then she began applying the goop with a rubber-gloved hand.
“I’m going to be in that chlorinated water a long time,” Marilyn said by way of explanation, batting her mascaraed lashes at me. “This is the mixture Esther Williams used to use. Where’s your son?”
“Out in the car.”
“Leave him there. We’ll let him see the magic. But not how the trick is done… Ooh, this is nasty stuff. Again, you know, it’s because of the water…”
A skinny effeminate man also in a pale blue smock had begun spraying hairspray that turned her platinum locks, already put to the test by God knew how many and what chemicals, into something brittle and stiff.
“Everybody! This is my friend Nate Heller-you know that private eye on TV? Peter Gunn? He’s based on Nate…”
Everybody gave me a fraction-of-a-second glance, and a few even pretended to be impressed. They’d have been more impressed if Peter Gunn hadn’t been canceled recently.
Having tossed me my cookie, she said, “You run along, Nate.”
I ran along.
(By the way, Peter Gunn was not based on me, though I was a paid consultant the first season.)
When I climbed into the Jag, Sam gave me a wide-eyed welcome. It was like looking into the mirror and seeing my fourteen-year-old self look back at me. Horny fourteen-year-old self.
“Was she in there?”
“Yup.”
“Jeez, Pop. What was she wearing!”
“Quit talking like an old Charlie Chan picture.”
“ All Charlie Chan pictures are old. What was she wearing?”
“Not much.”
He leaned against the leather seat and smiled to himself. He was gazing straight ahead-into that calendar he kept hidden under his gym socks. So I started up the Jag and headed through the lot to Soundstage 14.
Funny to think that Marilyn Monroe was the last hope of this dying beast. She’d been at odds with Twentieth Century-Fox almost from the start. Back in the middle 1940s, she’d struggled to get picked out of cattle calls, just another pretty blonde looking for extra work or bit parts. Then she’d tried to get noticed in small roles. Finally she worked her way up to being the worst-paid star on this or any other lot. Something’s Got to Give signaled her exit from Fox bondage-that one last picture she owed them.
From what I’d read, it wasn’t much of a picture, and of course getting stuck with lousy scripts had been why Marilyn had walked from Fox back in the fifties and gone east to form her own company. She’d wound up in the prestigious Actors Studio, a fairly unlikely berth for a bombshell.
Not that Marilyn was your average bombshell. She’d married Joe DiMaggio and Arthur Miller, hadn’t she? She even turned her bubbleheaded shtick into something more with her Bus Stop and Some Like It Hot performances. Who but Marilyn could have found nuances in dumb-blonde roles?
She was special, and I liked her, on-screen and off. She had a reputation for driving directors and costars and studio execs crazy, but I knew that came from a kind of cockeyed perfectionism born out of insecurity. The hard- drinking, drug-abusing Marilyn of rumor was a stranger to me. I’d always found her sweet and sexy and funny, if needy, and if she had a bad side, I’d been privileged not to see it.
Anyway, this Something’s Got to Give should have been an easy payday for her. She had a copasetic costar in Dean Martin-she hung around with the Rat Pack boys, having been Sinatra’s sweetheart off and on-and the director was on her very short approved list with the likes of Billy Wilder and Alfred Hitchcock.
Trifle though it might be, the picture was a remake of a comedy classic, My Favorite Wife, where remarried hubby Cary Grant is confronted by his suddenly-not-dead first wife, Irene Dunne, who’s been on a desert island with hunk Randolph Scott. Similar shenanigans should ensue second time around, with the current loosening of the Production Code meaning the sex stuff could be sexier stuff.
So the gig should have been painless for Marilyn, but the papers said she’d been out sick for half the production days. On the phone last night, I’d asked Pat Newcomb about it.
“So what’s up? Is Marilyn really sick?”
“She has been, yes. Sinusitis, flu, running a high temperature. The studio’s own physician has found her unfit for work.”
“So the columns saying she’s being a prima donna, that’s crap?”
A pause. “Mr. Heller, Marilyn is a star and has certain… eccentricities, and expectations. But no, she’s really sick.”
“Not so sick that she didn’t show up to sing ‘Happy Birthday’ to the president at Madison Square Garden the other night.”
It had been a big, gaudy televised event. Marilyn had done her dumb-blonde bit, not this new sixties model, and Jack Kennedy had damn near drooled over the attention. No wonder Jackie Kennedy had stayed away.
“That had been agreed to months ago,” the publicist said, defensively. “The studio tried to renege at the last moment, but how does a star like Marilyn turn down a command performance for the president?”
