“You know Peter is planning entertainment for this big fund-raiser for Jack’s birthday in May, don’t you?”
“Yeah.”
“It’s going to be at Madison Square Garden. They say they’re going to charge a thousand dollars a ticket, and he wants you to sing ‘Happy Birthday’ to the president for the finale. Well, you have my permission.”
She smiled, straightened, and gave him the silly little salute she used to give the boys in Korea after the USO shows. “Yes, sir,” she said, and hurried across the lawn.
“Hey, baby, you want a shot?”
Jack was lying facedown on the bed in the bungalow, and the fidgety man who wore glasses was already putting his equipment back into the worn brown leather bag. He paused, regarded Marilyn, and removed a glass syringe worthy of Mengele from his bag in the manner of a sommelier proffering an elegant vintage.
“Oh, no thanks. I like the other kind. If you give me that stuff, I’ll never get a good night’s rest again.”
The doctor shrugged—suit yourself, he seemed to mean—and zipped the bag with an efficient, Teutonic tug.
“Thanks, doc.” Jack was up, his hair standing high and brushy and wild, his pupils big and black. The doctor nodded and left, but Marilyn did not see him go, because Jack had her in a waltz hold and was moving her around the room with sudden, fluid energy. His nostril grazed her nostril; his mouth was open an inch from her open mouth. She was pretty sure he hadn’t slept at all the night before, but he showed no sign of fatigue. Every gesture was boundless.
“You don’t need that stuff,” she murmured.
“Bobby put you up to that?”
She gave him a knowing smile, thought what a dupe she was. All her life she’d just wanted to find a man who could give her a little shelter, and here she was in the arms of the most powerful man in the world, tall and handsome, rich and educated, and her strongest impulse was to love him and love him until he never felt bad again.
“Don’t you want to get off the compound?”
“Sure,” she murmured. He didn’t seem less like himself, now that he was flying; he seemed to pulse with all his matter, and she saw the blood coursing through him, how it throbbed beneath the skin.
“Think you can get me past those Secret Service men?”
She grabbed his hand, twirled away from him under the arch of his arm, twirled back so that her shoulder blades pressed his chest. They swayed like that. “I do enjoy a challenge.”
“Come on. Let’s go.”
In fact, that part was easily done. She made a spectacle of herself when she returned to the house—fixed a Bloody Mary, asked the hostess in a stage whisper if she had any reds lying around, and announced she was going into town for a while. A small pile of joints were displayed in a cut-glass bowl on the bar, and she put one behind her ear before draping a Navajo throw blanket, which had adorned a sofa, over her shoulders. She walked through the front door as if she wasn’t precisely sure which town she was in, then veered toward the garage. By then she’d lost the robe, but added only rolled dungarees to her outfit of white bikini, and she imagined she must be quite a sight. She got into the cherry-colored Mustang convertible that Jack had lain down in the backseat of, found the key waiting in the ignition, tossed the blanket over so he could cover himself, and sped off the property with her morning cocktail held aloft and a brilliant smile for the guard at the gate. When she stopped at the first streetlight, Jack climbed over the seat.
“That was well done.”
“You see? I’m smarter than I look,” she said, shifting as they sped along the flat, wide desert road. “Take that, would you?” With her chin she indicated the Bloody Mary she was clutching between her knees. “It’s freezing.”
“They’ll soon realize I’m gone,” he observed genially as he took the cocktail and sipped. “Come after us.”
“Well, we’re free a little while anyway, right?”
“Sure.” He winked and reached over to undo the top button of her jeans.
Her voice was lower when she spoke next. “You really don’t need that stuff, you know?”
“Believe me, I wouldn’t take it if I didn’t need it. I’m broken in about a hundred different ways. But I get that shot, there’s nothing I can’t do.”
The morning had been cool, but at midday the atmosphere was dense with heated particles. The temperature, and Jack’s hand under her bikini, caused her eyelids to droop a few seconds, for her to relent on the gas pedal. When she opened her eyes again she saw the chase car in the rearview. “Shit,” she said, batting his hand away.
They were out of town, everything flat and barren for miles, the same simple landscape rolling out forever with nothing but a few bare-bones structures to interrupt the strange midget trees and sand-colored stones. She was getting close to ninety when she realized she wouldn’t lose them. Then she saw it—a dirt road that snaked out from the highway, through a sculpture garden of rusted cars and tractors, old doors, and other detritus held together with disintegrating rope and homemade nails. A Model T glinted, its wheels half sunk in earth. At the center was a shack of sun-bleached wood with a roof rigged from corrugated plastic and a hand-painted sign that declared it The Sacred Church of the Yucca and the Halleluyah. Below that was a message exhorting weary travelers to heal their souls. The wheels shrieked when she took a hard right, and the dust was still waist high when they reached the shack.
A man emerged serenely from behind the sheet that served as a door. He was tall, with bulbous shoulders and nose, and he wore blue jeans but no shirt or shoes. His gunmetal hair fell down his bare chest, tangled up in the heaps of turquoise beads hanging from his neck.
“Hello, strangers.” He raised his hand in greeting, and if he recognized them, he didn’t show it.
“You heal people?” Marilyn called.
“Occasionally,” he replied, sounding amused, as though he’d told the beginning of a joke and was already enjoying the punch line in the privacy of his own mind.
“You some kind of Indian shaman or something?” Jack asked as he climbed out of the car. His hands were in the pockets of his plaid shorts, and he wandered off to examine a totem pole constructed of several dusty television sets.
“Mother was Norwegian, father of German descent. I came out from Oklahoma during the Depression. Used to do a pretty good business, too.” He held up his big hands to examine them and wiped whatever sweat or dirt he’d found against the thighs of his pants, and she saw that he was missing his left middle and ring fingers. When he smiled, his two front teeth flashed silver. “Guess people aren’t quite so desperate for guidance as they used to be.”
“My friend needs some healing.” Marilyn slammed the door behind her and advanced toward the shack. “You’re a holy man, right? Anything we told you would be in confidence, wouldn’t it?”
This seemed to amuse him. “I’m holy as anybody” was all he answered.
The Secret Service car was at the turnoff, and the one behind it was speeding toward them along the highway.
“Come in,” the man with the turquoise urged them.
They followed him under the sheet, into a room cast a rose color by its temporary roof. It had all the parts of a church: simple wooden benches for pews, a raised platform of pine boards, a music stand for a pulpit, a clawfoot bathtub full of holy water.
“This is some place you’ve got,” Jack said as they walked up the aisle to the front of the church.
“Thanks. Built it with my own eight fingers. Now tell me. What needs healing?”
She wasn’t sure if Jack would say what really ailed him or not. His hands were in his pockets, his sunglasses covering his eyes, and he had the appearance, especially in the surroundings, of a person whose privilege has set him above the abject needs of ordinary folks. “Bad back, mostly,” he said after a pause.
“First, you must purify yourselves. Wash your hands and mouths.” The man with the turquoise indicated the bathtub, and when Marilyn hesitated, he e
xplained: “Don’t worry, it’s rainwater. I have a basin on the roof, and it comes down through that pipe. It’s all perfectly clean and fresh.”
A ghost of mirth passed over Jack’s face, but he went along as Marilyn brought the rainwater up with the copper dipper and poured it over their hands—the runoff made dark rivulets on the dirt floor—and then used more to rinse their mouths. They were completing the ritual when one of the agents pushed aside the sheet and started up the aisle.
“Mr. President—”
“This is a house of worship,” interrupted the man in turquoise. “You can’t charge in here like that.”
“Agent Schiller, will you wait outside, please?”
“Sir, I don’t think …”
“I am being healed,” Jack announced and, with a wicked smile, turned his back on the agent charged with his protection. “It will take only a minute or two.”
The agent retreated reluctantly to the doorway, where he remained, the sheet pulled to the side so that the agents who had followed him could observe the doings within.
“Please, both of you, kneel down.”
Marilyn took Jack’s hand, and knelt in the dust before the raised platform, where the man in turquoise had arranged himself cross-legged. After a few seconds Jack followed her lead.
“So. How long has your back been giving you trouble?”
“I suppose I was born this way. Crooked. Then things I did as a young man—roughhousing, in the navy—they didn’t help it any.”
The man in turquoise did not hesitate. “No doctor will ever be able to heal that back.”
Marilyn glanced at Jack, afraid that he would be angry, denounce the man for his obvious fraudulence, or be irritable with her for half believing in his racket. But the answer seemed to please him. “Finally, a man who speaks the truth. That certainly seems to be the trend, though nobody ever wants to tell me straight.”
“But can you heal him?” Marilyn asked.
“You two are a sight to behold. I must say, it is a pleasure just to look on you. So I’m going to tell you the secret.” He extended those big hands, pressing his palms against their foreheads, and let his voice wax grand and lyrical. “All sickness is homesickness.”
“What?” Jack said.
“Do you feel at home when you’re with this pretty lady?”
He coughed and laughed. “Yes.”
“Well! You’re healed. Go on your way, now. I can see your friend Agent Schiller has an itchy trigger finger, and I don’t cotton to firearms in my church.”
Marilyn stood first, helping Jack to his feet. The manic energy had left him, and he stared for a moment at the preacher, as though he might be able to tell by looking whether or not he was a sham. But the preacher didn’t meet the president’s gaze. Instead he reached for Marilyn’s hand, bowed his head, and brushed his lips over her knuckles. “It’s a real honor, honey. You take care of yourself, hear?” And Marilyn, bewildered by his tenderness, could only nod yes, take Jack’s arm, and lead him up the aisle toward Schiller and his three fellow agents, who had been waiting anxiously for the president to quit indulging in foolish displays so they could bring him home safe.
THIRTY-FOUR
New York, May 1962
WHOEVER was on stage must have come with good material, because every ninety seconds or so a fit of hilarity seized the audience, setting off foot stomping and uncontrollable quaking in the rickety old seats, which reverberated all through the building, even in the walls of Marilyn’s dressing room, causing her reflection in the mirror to blur. She hadn’t been put together like this for years. The premieres for The Misfits and Let’s Make Love had both been sad affairs, a whiff of failure about them, and though her loyalists in the press had described her dress and hair on those occasions with the customary hysterical adoration, she had seen to her appearance with an indifferent, partial attention, and known the effect to be short of magical.
Tonight her hair was freshly dyed—one shade closer to white—and styled in the high, side-swept bouffant she was wearing for Something’s Got to Give, the Cukor picture, the set of which she had abandoned to be at Madison Square Garden. Her dress had been created especially for the occasion. It was her dress, not just literally, but because she had asked Jean Louis, The Misfits costume designer, to come up with something only she could wear. In this he had not disappointed. No other actress would have dared. Even referring to it as a dress was off—he’d created a costume exactly suited to the performance of femininity that she had honed one movie at a time. Beyond that it barely existed—skin and beads, a woman-shaped nude stocking encrusted with rhinestones, the total mass of which was so insignificant that she’d brought it east in an envelope clutch. The first rush of nerves had come earlier that day, when she climbed on stage in loafers and slacks—to rehearse a song that she, and everybody else, had sung a thousand times—and she felt like a miniature creature at the center of a dark cavern, and realized how many years had passed since she’d performed live.
The nerves had not abated. She assessed the face she had built, its slender form and voluptuous features, the false eyelashes and line of kohl capping the sedate smolder of the gaze, the parting of the painted lips. Did the face even belong to her anymore? It impressed her, the way she might be impressed with a picture someone else had drawn.
A fist sounded on the door, which opened before she could answer. “Marilyn?” Nan Pettycomb peered in, her smile rigid, her eyes eager, her bob stiff. “How we doing, baby?”
“Oh, I think I …” Marilyn twisted in her chair, her posture soft and her voice fragile. Then she saw the man behind Nan. “What’s he doing here?”
“Who?”
“Doug.” When she had requested Nan as her escort on this trip, she had hoped to get rid of the young man watching her for the Russians. “What is Doug doing here?”
“Well, you know it’s going to be a lot of press, and Fox is worried that you’ll miss more days on set, so Alan and I thought it would be a good idea to have an extra set of hands. Just in case. Just to be sure everything goes smoothly.”
“I’m here to assist you. In any way I can.” Doug hovered, pushed his head beyond the barrier of the door. That earnest expression! It was hard to believe he was Alexei’s eyes and ears, that he was part of an operation that would use a psych ward as an interrogation room. But he was; and this only made the earnest gaze that much more insidious. “Is there anything I can get you, Miss Monroe?”
“Yeah, a shot of something.” She narrowed her eyes at him. “Whiskey, vodka, I don’t care. Not champagne. You got that?”
His head bobbed resolutely, and then she heard the heels of his dress shoes as he went in search of her drink. Nan approached, keeping Marilyn in her sights, moving cautiously, conscientiously inward. “You ready for this?” she asked, as one asks a child if he is ready for the first day of school.
Marilyn turned back to her own reflection, which was as it had been before, and also at the same time astonishing. “Ready for what?” she asked. When she was having the dress made, when she was arguing with the studio about allowing her to travel, she had been thinking only of Jack, celebrating him, being close to him. What it would mean to perform for an audience this big occurred to her later, not just movie fans but also the evening news, the whole world, serious people, and people who disliked her—as well as those whose interest in her doings was of more catastrophic consequence—and these elements had crept slowly into her consciousness throughout the day.
“Here you are, Miss Monroe.” Doug was back, his sturdy, tuxedoed body all the way in the room, and there was nothing she could do to prevent it. He had a highball nearly full with brown liquor, so she decided to drop her outward opposition to his presence.
“Thanks, doll,” she replied, looking at the glass, not him, as she took it from his hand. The whiskey sent a comet down her throat, burned off the seasickness, granted a reprieve to the many extraneous transmissions of her consciousness.
Nan??
?s smile was blinding, forceful. “Mr. Lawford is about to introduce you, honey.” Then she snapped her French manicured fingers in the direction of the mink that Marilyn had borrowed from the studio, and which was hanging by the door. Doug lifted the fur for Marilyn to step into, and when the weight of the coat fell against her shoulders she knew that if she was able to hide, it was only going to be for a little while. They were moving through the dim corridors of the Garden, the odor of stale sweat from fighters long forgotten, toward the noise. Nan up ahead, her arm extending backward with a reassuring grip on Marilyn’s hand, and Doug behind, as though to protect her, but in fact to monitor her every gesture, search out the signs of her disloyalty. They were, briefly, a single organism—Nan the shepherd of everything she had ever worked for, Doug representing her most secret dealings, and in the middle the mortal body that had carried her so many miles, to this place.
On stage, Peter was massaging the crowd, getting them ready for the finale. “This lovely lady is not only pulchritudinous,” he was saying, “but punctual. Mr. President, Marilyn Monroe!” It was not her cue; it was the penultimate beat in the long lead-up to the joke of her entrance, which was a joke on her famous tardiness. All night, her name had been accompanied by an empty spotlight. The laughter surged and simmered, and Peter went on, as though at the beginning of a bout of windbaggery. “But I’ll give her an introduction, anyway. Mr. President, because in the history of show business, perhaps there has been no one female who has meant so much, who has done more …”
The spotlight reached for her at the top of the stairs, and Nan and Doug pushed her up into its illuminated cone. The dress encased her so completely that her legs almost couldn’t part, and when she reached the stage, with the help of their hands, she had to scamper to the podium on her tiptoes. Peter kept his back to her, so the audience had the pleasure of spotting her themselves. A little applause set it off, then the whole room roared. Peter turned just as she was reaching the podium, and extended his arm. “Mr. President,” Peter intoned into the microphone, “the late Marilyn Monroe.”