Forty-Nine
David Lange pulled the blinds open, expelling the lingering shadow of Mildred Meadows. Behind his desk, he faced Normalyn.
Her strength had survived. With new fascination Normalyn studied the photographs surrounding the silver-bordered anarchy on his wall. She inhaled. “What did she do to you, David, to bring about all the revenge?”
“Monroe?” He pronounced the name as if it itself were a question.
Normalyn felt again the great power of Marilyn Monroe, a power the movie star herself had not fully recognized.
David Lange rose and stood by the window, as if locating an exact point in the distance. He spoke very quietly—words might shatter fragile memories:
“The night I met Robert Kennedy, I saw her in person for the first time, that night—”
* * *
—in Santa Monica, at the villa of Peter Lawford, the actor who had married the sister of the President of the United States.
David Lange was introduced to the President’s younger brother, a lean, intense man. David was already becoming convinced that Robert would become the great leader the country waited for, greater than his brother. As Attorney General, he had already initiated the most dedicated assault on organized crime and political corruption in the country’s history.
“David Lange?” Robert Kennedy repeated when they were introduced. “You worked to elect my brother. I know he thanked you, but let me thank you again.” He shook David’s hand, holding it for a moment to extend his appreciation. “And,” he smiled, “you’re the writer who deserves the Pulitzer Prize!”
David was younger than the Attorney General. His prestige as an honored journalist allowed him to travel among the great. He knew that politicians are primed about the activities of guests so that they seem to be responding personally to everyone. But there was an unabashed earnestness about Robert Kennedy as he went on to discuss one of the main points in David Lange’s recent book—that the Bill of Rights mandates a social responsibility of the government.
As they spoke, David was more inspired by the man’s enthusiasm—yes, enthusiasm!—for justice. That enthusiasm created an energy in the very air. Robert Kennedy spoke as if he truly believed justice was possible in our time. Occasionally, though, he would smile a bemused smile; this would occur at odd moments. David became certain that smile was an acknowledgement of the realistic idealist’s sense of irony that justice should have to be fought for, not demanded. Yes, Robert Kennedy would lead the country beyond the new frontier his brother was staking—into a visionary era. Even now, there were certain—
Marilyn Monroe walked in.
Everyone turned. Her presence had issued a silent command. She let slide from her bare shoulders an emerald cape, which a butler was not able to catch before it fell in folds at her feet. She wore a cream-tinted dress, so sheer it seemed smeared on her body. Sequins of gold ice splashed it. Her lips were a shade of red that defined red. Long, darkened eyelashes enclosed the blue of her eyes, the eyes of an innocent but sensual child. Against a backdrop of candles being lit that very moment in preparation for dinner, her outline seemed to have been drawn by an adoring artist in one masterful flow of curves. She was the most beautiful woman in the world, David Lange knew.
Lawford had arranged for Robert Kennedy to be flanked at dinner by Marilyn Monroe and Kim Novak, herself a thrilling woman, “discovered” after Harry Cohn, having allowed Marilyn’s contract to lapse, demanded that Columbia Studios’ talent department create “another Monroe.” Despite that, Kim Novak had a more subtle beauty of her own.
David Lange sat two seats away from Marilyn Monroe.
While Kim Novak talked passionately about her new ranch in Carmel, “its hypnotizing horizon, mesmerizing mists at dusk,” Marilyn asked the Attorney General sophisticated questions about civil rights. David had not anticipated such a refined intellect. Surprised by the range of her knowledgeability, Robert Kennedy answered seriously. At the same time, he was clearly charmed. David wondered when Robert would discover what he himself just had, that Marilyn Monroe was reading from hidden notes. Robert Kennedy only smiled when he saw that. Marilyn Monroe was unfazed by the discovery. “I wrote them myself,” she convinced everyone. “I like to organize my thoughts.” She faced the Attorney General of the United States. “Don’t you, Mr. Kennedy, when you go into court?”
“Of course, Miss Monroe,” he agreed soberly.
After dinner, guests mingled, about twenty-five or so. Robert and Marilyn drifted apart from the others.
At the time there were rumors that Marilyn drank too much—and she had clearly enjoyed the splendid champagne served tonight; that she was frequently “out of control”; that pills she took for sleeping deepened darkening moods; that she was at times abusive, then regretful. Her late-night calls to the few people she considered friends were frantic, demanding. David Lange knew—Mildred Meadows had shown him a copy—that a scurrilous letter in the hands of J. Edgar Hoover accused the Kennedy brothers of “sexual immorality” with many women. David disbelieved all that, completely. He had denounced it to Mildred as “lies that are spoken about all great men.”
That night, Marilyn Monroe was like a flirtatious girl, David saw, and, yes, that only added a certain youthful insouciance to her startling presence. She was clearly intrigued by the bright, coltish Attorney General. Why not? And why should he be expected to resist the charm of so beautiful a woman? After all, it was all public, all uncomplicated, all natural.
David’s eyes remained on them as they stood at one end of the dazzling room, by an enormous free-form sculpture of cut crystal—its reflections speckled Marilyn Monroe’s dress with split gems of light. Robert’s carefree laughter matched Monroe’s. Then her head brushed his shoulder, as if she might rest it there. Yanked out of a spell, Robert pulled back. His laughter stopped.
At the same time all conversation around them halted. The girlish laughter was isolated in the silenced room. David heard fragments of words: Robert’s—“are watching!’’; Monroe’s—“know you desire—” Robert Kennedy stared in horror at the guests looking at them. He said something to the movie star. Her laughter was throttled. She turned her head as if his words had struck her. Robert walked out of the room. The beautiful woman stood abandoned within her glitter and beauty, entrapped by stares.
“Bast—!” She did not finish the enraged word, hurled at the man stalking away from her. She took a step toward him, to follow. The dress frosted over with beads parted, revealing a bare strip of her legs. A bodyguard blocked her path. She looked like a scolded child. She backed away from the forbidding man. Then she ran out of the house, through a side exit.
To separate himself from the breathless conjecture that would certainly follow among the guests—he did not want even to wonder what had occurred—David went out onto the balcony. Illumined by dark light, the night was silver. A layer of clouds concealed the moon. The ocean was calm but the sound of distant waves was growing. David looked down, away. He saw Marilyn Monroe running toward the beach!
He felt a moment of terror. He had heard that she had attempted suicide several times. He jumped the short distance from the balcony, not taking the time to go down the stairs. He hurried, following her along the beach, stumbling on the sand.
He stopped.
Ahead, Marilyn Monroe was looking at the ocean. She stood very still and stared into darkness. She seemed like an apparition, a silver presence created by the night’s reflections. In that dim light she shone as if rejecting the darkness about her. The moon—he had been wrong, there was a moon that night—floated in and out of clouds as if fascinated by her.
David Lange watched, watched her.
She removed her shoes. She tore at the slit at the bottom of her dress so she could walk without difficulty on the moist sand. He saw a spray of glittering dust sprinkle the sand.
David Lange gazed at the silver outline against tossing clouds of night, restless dark water.
Marilyn Monroe turned!
She was laughing! Joyfully! She beckoned: “Come on!” she called in that eager voice that could convey the greatest excitement, the greatest need.
David Lange hesitated. She had clearly mistaken him for the angered man who had walked away from her, although he himself was shorter, somewhat heavier. She kept motioning him closer as he approached—slowly, to make sure, cautiously, that she was calling to him.
“Come on, hurry, come on!” she said. She laughed happily. “We’ll take a walk along the beach.”
He looked at her. So close. So close to him. When they had been introduced earlier, she had nodded politely, said a few words. Now—
“Take off your shoes, like me!" she said in delight.
Embarrassed, he did, not knowing what to do with them, holding them.
She linked her arm through his. She shivered. He began to take off his coat, to give it to her.
“No,” she said, “don’t do that, because then I won’t have an excuse to do this.” She leaned against him, nestling her head on his shoulders.
His hand rose and almost touched her. He had not yet said a word. They walked through tatters of ocean mist, through pockets of dark light. Crests of water rolled almost to their feet.
Again, he began to remove his coat, to offer it to her.
Again, she refused.
He could feel her body—shivering coldly, trembling warmly—as it pressed against his.
For erratic moments the water became turbulent. Now a wave rose, tumbled, frothing white at its crest. They felt a spray of water. Marilyn welcomed it, her hands up, out, exultant. The wet dress turned translucent.
Marilyn trembled, again, pressed closer to David Lange. “Save me!” she whispered.
* * *
David Lange transferred his gaze from the past and into this office, to Normalyn. He had brought the memory intact into this room. “She ran back to the house,” he said. “I followed her, and there—”
* * *
—where the Mediterranean villa rose in tiers of lights, Marilyn Monroe waited, barefoot, her dress torn, her luminous flesh almost revealed in wet patches.
“You promise?” she said.
“What?” he asked, wanting to hear it again, to hear her voice, to hear words spoken to him by her.
“Have you forgotten what I asked you? Will you promise to save me?”
“I haven’t forgotten,” David Lange said.
“Will you come tomorrow to my house?” she asked him.
Only later would he know the magic moments were real. He memorized and quickly wrote—and then looked at it and looked at it and looked at it—the address she gave him, the time agreed.
* * *
“Eight o’clock.” In his office, David Lange remembered the hour that had continued to make his memory real that night after she returned to the villa and he left. “And I was there, at her house. She came to the door, eagerly. When she saw me—”
* * *
—Marilyn Monroe said, “Who the hell are you? What do you want?” She was about to close the door.
“Last night,” David formed words. He touched the paper on which he had written the time, the address—assuring reality. “Last night, on the beach, we walked together and you said—You told me—” He withheld the cherished words. The beautiful tender face of the previous night was smiling in a different way now. The lips curved slightly. In disbelief. Or in contempt?
“I’ve never seen you in my life,” she said to David Lange.
* * *
David Lange turned to face Normalyn. “I accepted an assignment I had turned down, in Europe. When I returned months later, I drove again to her house. Another car had just parked nearby. I recognized Robert Kennedy as he walked into her house. That night I wrote the unsigned letter to Mildred. Shortly after, she read me the essential ‘new explosive document’ in her possession, linking Monroe. I agreed that at the proper time I would donate all the authenticity I possessed to her revelations of immorality.”
Out of those moments on the beach, the destruction had begun, Normalyn understood.
“And then I pulled away from it all, knowing what I had done, knowing there was nothing I could do to stop it, longing to, yet able now only to watch it in horror.”
The most culpable, the least culpable. That was the significance of the dual jacaranda bouquets. And that was why it was he who was the “collector of truths.” Because his conscience, unlike that of the others, was still alive, still chafing, still questioning. That was the deep sadness she had detected from the very first in his eyes, and in his voice, in its bruised firmness. She did not have to ask him that. She was as certain as if he had confessed it. And yet— . . . He would have sought absolution through deceit! He had attempted to convert her into the “most likely candidate,” whatever other motives were involved—into one who would extract from his accuser the needed truth—and who would release him, like the others, from that person’s constant judgment and reminders, even if not, finally, from his own continuing self-judgment. Again and still, that fluctuating duality in him!
“Is the person you call your accuser Teresa de Pilar?” Normalyn asked.
“I’m not at liberty to disclose that identification,” David answered quickly. “Mildred assumed it to be; Mildred still believes she has a reliable network of private information.”
“You promised me that at the right time you would tell me everything about your own involvement. All that I’m ‘required’ to know.” Normalyn used his words.
“I have.” David gazed out the window, where he had sought his distant, bitter memory, still alive. “About myself, my own involvement. Anything further will come from the person in question.”
Yes, it would be Teresa de Pilar, Normalyn was sure. He did not want yet to surrender access beyond himself.
“If there’s more, Normalyn, ask it!”
Seeking her judgment? But she chose to ask the question that had long baffled her, the others: “What stopped the scandal?” There had been none, no revelations, none. Even Mildred had been warned that nothing could thwart the machinery set into deadly motion, the machinery Dr. Crouch had heard “ticking” ineluctably. Yet, she remembered, the movie star had told him on the telephone, “I know a way.”
David looked at Normalyn. He frowned. “Why, Marilyn Monroe, of course.”
“But how?” She thought she understood—
“By the ultimate step in her own creation of Marilyn Monroe—her suicide,” David said slowly. “Whatever else occurred that night, she must have evaluated all that had happened, not only in those last days but in her life, even what would occur in her future—”
* * *
—pursued by debts . . . sustained by pills . . . age attacking her beauty . . . her career in limbo . . . the crushed love affair . . . the tumult of the secret days . . . and now the impending exposure of those she loved. . . .
And so she locked her bedroom door.
She swallowed deadly pills. She made one more telephone call. She lay in bed. Her body began its drift toward sleep. It reached the very edge of death!
It poised there, deciding.
And in that synapse between living and dying, she chose: She reached for one more pill. Her movements were airy, weightless, she made graceful motions with her hand. She swallowed the pill. Then she curved her body on its side, one hand resting on her breasts, assuming the same pose as that in the darkly shining photograph she loved, beckoning . . . seductively . . . to darkness itself. She welcomed it now, the darkness she had fought throughout her life—welcomed it at last. It wasn’t cold anymore, no longer frightening. It soothed and warmed!
She knew exactly what would happen now:
She would float, was floating on this new, soft blackness into sleep, deep sleep, deeper sleep, deepest . . . and she would flow, was flowing now into death—
And out!
—into the undying glow of . . . Legend!
* * *
Exultant! In gleaming dress. Parted scarlet lips inviting, Marilyn Monroe stood forever alive!
That is how Normalyn saw her in the photograph her eyes sought on David Lange’s wall, the photograph in which, it seemed now, Marilyn Monroe was born.
David spoke in fascination: “With her death, she completed the creation of Marilyn Monroe. She allowed the legend to live. The day her suicide was known, the whole world paid attention. Love and sympathy rushed to embrace the legend, the way they had stopped embracing the woman. In life she had become vulnerable, easily used for the purposes of deadly scandal. By killing herself, leaving her motives forever in ambiguity, she stopped the scandal—and added the grandeur of enduring mystery to her legend. The legend of Marilyn Monroe vanquished the powers poised to destroy the Kennedys through her. Now those forces didn’t dare release the carefully crafted scandal. Risk connection to her death? Be blamed as murderers, exploiters of tragedy? Lose their protective invisibility in the glare of culpability?” David meted out the words as if they must be spoken with care, so enormous was their meaning: “They had counted on everything except the power of a legend.”
But only when she finally believed her daughter was dead did she commit suicide, Normalyn had to believe. Or perhaps she thought the destruction would have sucked in all those she loved, including her daughter—if still alive.
David Lange said, “The legend survives, always loved.”
The way Norma Jeane never was. Normalyn wanted to believe that at the last the abandoned “orphan” had known that she would attain what eluded her in life.
Almost inaudibly David echoed Mildred’s last damning words to him: “Did all that destructive power, geared to crush with scandal and thwarted by her death, did it flail more surely, twice, to murder the Kennedy brothers?”
In a sudden move, David overturned the glass left on his desk by Mildred. The liquor spilled in enraged shapes. Startled, he looked at his open hands as if to make sure he had released all the unwanted passion he had confessed to.
The most culpable, the least culpable. . . . Normalyn had just heard in his words his enduring horror.
David rushed peremptory words: “I’ve told you all this because our accuser will want to know it. You have all the information necessary up to now.”
He was trying to erase the moments of crushing emotion. Normalyn saw again the man she had first seen. No. He had lost his power to control her. She might finally come to pity him.
Quickly David touched the telephone. “I can proceed immediately to arrange for you to see the person who can unlock the mystery of your birth. Are you ready to take that final step, Normalyn?”
She nodded.
David said quickly, “Our accuser claims that a letter written by Monroe to Enid was given to Enid when she attempted to return once more to Monroe’s house after she learned of her suicide. Do you have that letter?”
“Yes.”