The Blonde (39 page)

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.”

Then he stepped aside and reached for her coat; she moved toward him, so that the podium would not obstruct the audience’s view, and allowed him to disrobe her. They saw her dress, which concealed so little and attracted so much light, and she heard the sound of thousands of mouths sucking in smoky air. Someone laughed, and a cheer went up. Her hands shielded her brow, and she located Jack, whose smile and bow tie were askew. Nakedness had been her intention, as always. Over the years she had shaved layer after layer from her persona, until here she was, on this stage, where everything
she felt, the current giddiness, the old sorrow, the places on her body where his hands had been, were on display without even a shadow for protection. The audience knew it—they were hooting; and the stage lights knew it—they illuminated every rise and fall of her figure, the vibrations of breath. There would be no hiding, so she drifted back, tapped the microphone, and opened her mouth.

Darkness enveloped her. Music surged from the orchestra. Now the spotlight was on the towering birthday cake, which was being carried into the crowd. She could hear whispering, and she knew what happened next, that the president would be coming to the stage, and that his people didn’t want him photographed with her. She felt nauseous over what she’d done. She wanted to move quickly, to accommodate their desire that she not say a personal happy birthday to the president—if she shook his hand up there, she would be able to conceal even less than she just had—but she couldn’t remember in which direction she was supposed to exit. A hiss cut at her eardrum, a voice called
“Get her off !”
and before she could move arms were underneath her, scooping her up and carrying her away.

They descended a staircase into the recesses of the arena, and she was obliged to hang from the man’s neck so as to not be jostled. They were coming into a harshly lit corridor, where long catering tables covered with red paper were laden with coffee urns and pastries. As the man put her down she began to coo her thanks, but the dress was too tight, it left her off-balance, and she had to fall against him for support. That was when she recognized Alexei, in a cheap tuxedo that created a glancing impression of any other stagehand.

“What are you doing here?” she managed.

Someone passed them briskly, paying no attention.

Jack was at the microphone, his voice amplified throughout the arena. “I can now retire from politics,” he was saying over the crowd’s laughter,
“now that I’ve had ‘Happy Birthday’ sung to me in such a sweet, wholesome manner …”

“We don’t have long.” Alexei’s gaze flicked about—the coming and going had not stopped, and he assisted her to the red table, where he made a show of pouring her a coffee. From his breast pocket he removed a flask, tilted it toward her cup. But he left the cap on, and afterward handed it to her. “Keep that, and whatever you do, don’t drink it.”

“But why—?” The flask was made of antique silver, and cold to the touch.

“Summer is coming. Slow months in Washington—you’ll be able to see a lot of Hal. Your affair will never be so regular as it is now. What you’ll need to do is get a few drops of that in his drink once a week. Ten or so. Twenty, if you are only able to manage it every other week.”

“I can’t,” she gasped.

“I thought you saw him clearly now.”

“So? I couldn’t kill a fly, much less—”

“My dear, it won’t kill him. No, no. Not unless you gave him the whole bottle at once. In little doses, it is designed to make the teeth rot, blacken, fall out.”

“But why go to all the trouble then?”

“Things have gone too far. It doesn’t matter how many mistakes he makes, how inconsistent he is. Despite everything he is a hero figure not just to Americans but to the whole world. Because of you, we know he is an invalid, unfaithful, materialistic. We have spread these stories widely. It makes no difference! His image is too strong. He is beloved, the whole world over. We are losing our best minds—they’re willing to die crossing that wall. You Americans worship perfect teeth, and you childishly associate dental decay with moral decay. They must be made to
see
his dereliction.”

“But he tells me what he’s thinking, isn’t that more important? What if I fail?” she went on wildly. “You’d lose all that.”

“Already he is giving you bad information, false information, lying to you,” Alexei hissed. “What you told me in Florida, none of it was true—”

“But maybe time will prove it is?” she interrupted. She felt desperate, she wasn’t even sure what she was saying. She didn’t remember what she’d said in Florida, only that she hadn’t wanted to repeat anything Jack had told her.

“We can’t wait that long.”

She shimmied goofily, indicating the tightness of her dress, a garment with no place for a hidden compartment. “But I’ve got no place to put it,” she tried to joke. But the joke was lame, and when she heard it out loud she knew she’d reached the end. She had just told the whole country she was in love with Jack, so Alexei must know, too, and she couldn’t pretend anymore she was seeing the president on his behalf.

He pursed his lips and paused, as though trying to decide what to do with her. She heard a shuffle, a mechanical click, and revolved to see Doug, high on the balcony above them. “Miss Monroe! There you are,” he called.

She glared at him as he jogged down the stairs. Of course—that was why Alexei had been so brazen, talking to her in public like this. He’d had a lookout the whole time, the man now descending to provide the one item missing from this latest plot. Once again Doug held the mink so she could slip under its silken wing, dropping the flask into the hidden interior pocket. Alexei was gone like a ghost, and she turned all her dread and fury on his underling. “Where’s Nan?” she demanded. “I’ve had enough. I want to go to the party now, be around people for once.”

The journey to the party, and the party itself, were as swirling and grotesque as a nightmare. Her spangled form floated through the elegant apartment detached from consciousness, wielding a champagne glass, laughing at jokes, blushing at compliments. Bobby was there, hovering around her, as though he might thus contain the memory of her carnal rendition of “Happy Birthday,” her unsubtle declaration that she’d made it with the president. Or maybe Bobby wanted only to be where she was. She could not seem to drink
enough champagne to keep Alexei’s face from appearing in the windows, amongst the millionaires eating blue cheese in endive and leering at her. Occasionally a peculiar sensation would bring her back into her body, and she would see Jack across the room with a new quality in his gaze, something like possession.

Life had not been easy on her—it had pinned her to the mattress with a pillow, depriving her of oxygen, often enough—but she had never been so trapped as this. That she had already committed crimes for which she could be executed seemed the least of her predicament. They wanted her to poison Jack; the poison itself was in the pocket of the fur she now wore. She had few moves, all of them unspeakable, and still the worst outcome she could imagine was the one in which she was alive and couldn’t have Jack—couldn’t see him, feel his appreciative eyes on her, listen to him talking about the world. That, as Alexei had said, their affair would never be so regular as now.

“Hey, honey,” she said to the host, a movie producer who had the block-like head of a pugilist. “Where’s the ladies’?”