“So she tries to get smart,” the old man says.
Monroe gets Life magazine on her side, reeling them in to do a big feature on her. She talks Dean Martin into quitting Something's Got to Give when the studio replaces her with Lee Remick. And she calls a little meeting. At her place in Brentwood, a very little meeting with just the tip of every movie-studio iceberg. Every studio that owns a movie she's been in.
“Smart girl like her,” the man says, “and you'd think she'd keep a gun on hand. Something to defend herself with.”
With all the studio top brass sitting around her Mexican table, Monroe drinks champagne and tells them she plans to kill herself. Unless they give her back the last movie, and sign her to a new million-dollar contract, she'll overdose. Simple as that.
“Studio people,” he says, “they don't scare that easy.”
Those sharks, they got the best of her already in the can. Monroe's just getting older, and the public is bored with her looks. Killing herself would gold-plate every movie of hers they had in their vaults. They told her: Go ahead, lady.
“The guy who sells me the jar, here,” the old man says, “he heard that direct from a big shot at the meeting.”
Monroe getting high on champagne. The studio dragons in their chairs. She had their blessing. It must've broke her heart.
“Then,” the old man says, “she gets smart with them.”
She's changing her will, she says. True, she's got terrible profit-sharing deals, but she pulls a little from any re-release of her old stuff. Those films in the vaults, someday they'll sell to television. And they'll keep selling, especially if she's done suicide. She knows that. So do they.
Dead, she'll be sexy forever. People will love that studio-owned image of her forever. Those old films are money in the bank, unless . . .
The old man says, “Here's where her last will and testament comes in.”
She'll set up a foundation: The Marilyn Monroe Foundation. And all income from her estate will feed into it. And that foundation will distribute every penny to the causes she'll name. The Ku Klux Klan. The American Nazi Party. The North American Man/Boy Love Association.
“Maybe some of those didn't exist back then,” the old man says, “but you get the general idea.”
When the American public knows that a few cents of every ticket to one of her shows, maybe even a nickel, goes to Nazis . . . No box office. No television sponsors. Those films will be worth—nothing. No naked picture of her will be worth anything. Marilyn Monroe will become America's Lady Hitler.
“She'd made her image, she told the studio heads. And she could damn well break it,” the old man said.
The jar sitting on the counter between them, Claire looked up from watching it and said, “How much?”
The old man looked at his wristwatch. He said he'd never sell it except he's getting old. He'd like to retire and not sit here all day getting robbed blind.
“How much?” Claire said, her purse on the counter, open, and her gloved hands digging out her wallet.
And the man said, “Twenty thousand dollars . . .”
It's five-thirty, and the store closes at six.
“Chloral hydrate,” the old man told her. Knockout drops, is how the guy killed her. That August night he found her half asleep on pills, he just tipped a bottle down her throat. Of course, a Mickey Finn shows up in the liver during autopsy, but everybody said she'd got the stuff in Mexico. Even her doctor who'd wrote the script for her pills, he said Mexico. Even he said suicide.
Twenty thousand dollars.
And Claire said, “Let me think.” Still watching the white murk inside the jar, she pushed back from the counter, saying, “I need to . . .”
The old man snapped his fingers for her purse and coat and umbrella. If she was going to wander the store, he'd hang on to them.
Without even taking the playing cards, Claire handed her things over the counter.
Claire Upton, she could look at a polished trophy and see a young man still reflected there, smiling and beaded with sweat, holding a tennis racquet or a golf club. She can watch him getting fat, married, with kids. After that, the trophy shows nothing but the inside of a brown cardboard box. Then the trophy comes out, held by another young man. This one, the son of the first.
But that jar, it felt like a bomb waiting to go off. A murder weapon trying to confess. Just putting your finger on it, you'd feel a jolt. An electric shock. Some kind of warning.
While she wandered through the shop, he was watching her in the video monitors.
In the dark lenses of old sunglasses for sale, she watches a man wrestle a woman to the ground and kick her feet apart.
In the gold-tone tube of an old lipstick, she can see a face crushed inside a nylon stocking, two hands around the neck of someone in bed, then the same hands scooping the spare change, the wallet, and keys off the dresser beside the lipstick. The witness.
Claire Upton and the old-man cashier, they're alone in the shadowy store with pillows of yellowed lace. Needlepoint dishtowels. Counted cross-stitch pot holders. Silver-plate brush sets tarnished dark brown. Mounted deer heads holding wide racks of antlers.
In the steel blade of a straight razor, the handle, chromium, scrolled and heavy—reflected there, Claire can see her future.
There, among the shaving mugs and horsehair brushes. Tall stained-glass church windows. Beaded evening bags.
Alone in
