Misfit (21 page)

Marilyn notices this from the corner of her eye and turns her attention elsewhere quickly. It scares her that much. Makes her feel a little queasy. But it isn't
about the physical disability or the disfigured form. It's the reminder that even at his most benevolent there still are clear limits to God's compassion.

Despite the cool and damp Friday evening, 51,000 people fill the stadium, greatly anticipating the Yankees' first visit of the season. Mickey Mantle's injury has lessened the enthusiasm somewhat. However, he will be suited up and sitting in the dugout—a worthy consolation. At least that's how Joe put it on the car ride over.
A worthy consolation
. Since they've arrived, Joe has been working the field, making his way from player to player. More than ten years past retirement, and it still lights him up. But it isn't the notice he gets from the fans for being on the diamond that compels him to attend events held in baseball stadiums. It's the familiarity and sense of belonging that come from feeling the way the infield grass gives under his feet. She once asked him what he meant by that, but he couldn't explain it in a better way.

The stadium lights shine down, leaving a slight halo of moisture above Chavez Ravine. Being away from the
Something's Got to Give
set allows Marilyn to move through that glow with a relaxed grace. Her suit, accented by a silver star-shaped brooch pinned just over her left breast, no longer feels like something from wardrobe, but instead like an outfit designed to showcase the best of her. The fur-lined hat sits in perfect complement to her platinum hair, fashionable and unexpectedly practical, keeping her warm on this moist and unusually chilly evening. She even passed
Wally Cox, with whom she had just spent the whole day on set, and gave him a warm, surprised smile, as if she hadn't seen him in ages.

Meanwhile, the wheelchair woman keeps looking. She's trying to say something to Marilyn. Working hard to catch her eye. Make her mouth work while she has the chance. Marilyn, alone for the moment, smiles and takes a step back, looking for a distraction. As if on cue, Joe walks by in conversation with a Yankees player. She reaches out and grabs Joe's sleeve, stops him, and turns him around until he blocks off the wheelchair. “Well, here she is,” Joe says, turning around in place. “She's right here.”

“Yes,” she says, shifting slightly to the side. “Yes. Here I am.”

She's introduced to Johnny Sain. He joined the Yankees during Joe's final year, at the end of the 1951 season, when they beat the Giants in six to take the World Series. “He put in a heck of an effort on that final run,” Joe explains.

“Barely,” Sain says, speaking in a slow Southern drawl. “Couldn't close out the ninth in game six. Three straight hits, and I almost lost it.”

“But he got us there, and then some, in the following years. And now he's our pitching coach. Made everybody forget he'd ever been a Brave, much less a National Leaguer.”

“Well, I don't know about that.” Sain looks over his shoulder to the dugout, and then down to the
bullpen, where the pitchers are stretching. “But it's a pleasure to meet you, Miss Monroe. A real honor.” She leans in to hear him over the stadium noise. “A real pleasure,” he repeats, louder. “To meet you.”

From the corner of her eye she catches the attendant backing up the wheelchair, as if it might be changing position for a better view of her. “Yes,” she says, straining her voice. “Likewise.”

“Johnny says to expect a good one from Terry tonight. That his arm is all gold. He's going to take it to Belinsky and those Angels.”

She sidesteps to the right, trying to keep the wheelchair out of her sight line. “I'll certainly be rooting for him,” she says. “Rooting Belinsky on.”

“No,” Joe says. “
Terry
. Bo Belinsky's on the Angels.” He winks at Sain with a crooked grin. “We root for Ralph Terry.”

“Ralph Terry it is, then. I'll be rooting
him
on.”

“Miss Monroe, I will tell him you said that. Knowing that ought to give him a little extra gas.”

“Yes,” she says. “You tell him.”

Sain heads down to the bullpen, with Joe falling behind him. The woman again sits in plain view. And for once Marilyn wishes Joe would stick around, tell her more about baseball or why the Angels played at Dodger Stadium or other things that don't really matter.

 

She's placed beside Albie Pearson, waiting to be announced. The boys' choir forms a break wall behind
them, and the wheelchair is positioned in front of them, just ahead of Pearson. The woman cranes her neck, still trying to catch Marilyn's eye. Sooner or later, Marilyn knows, she'll have to say something to her.

When she's announced, Marilyn looks up into the seats behind home plate. Each level blurs into the next. The crowd cheers, and for just a moment she has to remember this event isn't about her. But after all the threats from the studio, and their insinuations about the demise of her career, it's hard to let the moment go. She extends her arms and claps toward the woman. The crowd rises to its feet. She walks up to the microphone, briskly passing the wheelchair as though she could catch something, and makes her appeal for the charity fund.

The boys' choir breaks into “Happy Birthday”; the imperfection of their nervous voices, high and sweet and lightly off-key, is too real for her. Like a million-watt bulb exposing every hidden frailty and weakening her. When they finish, she hugs two boys in the front row, almost collapsing into them.

Someone takes her hand. She turns around and sees it's the woman in the wheelchair. Summoning what strength she has, the woman reels Marilyn in. The woman's mouth forms slowly, lips finding shapes. Her raspy voice is barely audible above the stadium cheers. Carefully enunciating, she says, “I've only wanted to say
happy birthday.”

On the way home, Marilyn sits with her back to Joe, staring out the window and pinching the bridge of her nose. The cool, damp Chavez Ravine wind got to her. It rattled her sinuses. They didn't stay for the game, which leaves Joe a little quiet on the ride. She told him he should stay, but he escorted her out with the resentment of duty. And it never seemed to occur to him that she actually wanted him to stay. Sometimes she doesn't know what's harder to bear: inviting Joe into her life, or turning him away.

Traffic slows on the Pasadena Freeway, near downtown. The city lights stab at her, bringing on a wave of nausea. Closing her eyes, she squeezes harder on her sinuses. She asks the driver to turn up the radio. She doesn't want to hear her thoughts. They only swell her head. Joe reaches over to rub her neck. His hand is too big. Awkward, without tenderness. She scoots closer to the door, shrugging him away with her shoulders. She doesn't want to be touched.

 

She wakes the next morning barely able to breathe. The thermometer reads 100. Her face feels like a pressure cooker, the swelling brought on by a relapse of sinusitis. There's no way she can get to the studio. It hurts to move. She stares at the phone. Unwilling even to dial it. When she worked at the Radioplane Company all those years back, she was always afraid to call in sick, fearful of losing her income. There were days when she was so under the weather she
hardly was able to see or to think, and yet she still had to stand at the assembly line constructing drones. Measuring the balsa. Cutting. Gluing and assembling. Never again, she would say to herself all the way through her shift. Then she'd say it again driving out of the old Metropolitan Airport, through the farmlands of Van Nuys. Never again.

Drawing in a breath, she phones Henry Weinstein. (The idea of explaining to Cukor makes her feel even sicker.) When he hears her voice, Weinstein's reply sounds wary with anticipation. She starts off with an apology, and then tells him about the charity event, and then the sinusitis that she just can't shake. The bottom line, she says, is that she can't make today's shoot. The fever has thrown her a real knockout punch. It's bad. So bad that when she hangs up she's going to have her maid call Dr. Greenson.

Weinstein is silent.

“Henry,” she asks, “did you hear me?”

“No,” he says.

“You can't hear me?”

“No. Please.”

“I'm so sorry, Henry. I don't want to stop, you know that . . . But this is for real. I don't want this. For real.”

“No. No. No.”

They both understand this will only lead to trouble for her and the picture. What more can she do but apologize again?

But he isn't even listening. “No. No. No,” he repeats.

“I'm going to go now, Henry. I'm just going to rest up good, and get ready to shoot again soon. For a day or so. Whatever the doctor says. But please don't worry, Henry. I'll be back as soon as I can. It's just the rest I need. You see? I can barely move. Barely talk. You can hear it, I'm sure. So, I'm going to go now. Go get that rest.”

She hangs up and takes one of the headache pills, and then leans back against a mound of pillows, holding a compress soaked in warm water and apple cider vinegar across her nose. It lies over her cheekbones, loosening the mucus.

The brass at Twentieth Century-Fox gathers in a hastily arranged meeting. The windows closed. Shades drawn. The overhead lights are on, but the room is dim. Almost washed out. Calling in from New York, Twentieth's vice president, Peter Levathes, starts off: “We've let the inmates run the asylum.” There's tentative laughter, no one quite sure what to make of that statement. But Levathes isn't laughing. Couldn't begin to tell you why anybody would find that statement funny. And for the moment he leaves it at that. Lets the idea sink in.

No one responds. They know where this heading.

Levathes speaks again, saying that, simply put, Marilyn has to be fired.
Something's Got to Give
was supposed to make up for the
Cleopatra
debacle, not add to its deficit. He's not running a charity. The film was supposed to be easy. A remake. Just update an old script and throw some stars into it. But the son of a bitch has been hijacked. How many revisions has the script gone through? How many writers? How this has gotten out of hand is obvious. Levathes says he's holding a memo. The stationery wrinkles in his fingers. “Marilyn Monroe,” he recites into the telephone, “has only managed to be on set for twelve out of thirty-seven shooting days.” The whole production is in a constant state of regeneration, having to readjust itself on the fly nearly every morning. And someone in the room says, “What is it with actors these days?” Levathes agrees, saying that part of it is the agents trying to muscle the contracts away from the studios. They inflate the stars into thinking they're more than they are. Pumping them up for negotiations, trying to jimmy the salaries up higher above the expense line. And Marilyn is queen of the swelled heads. The role model. At thirty-six years old in this business, she's lucky to get any leading roles, yet she acts as though she runs the motherfucking studio, shifting schedules based on her moods, and her real and imagined illnesses. It's threatening the whole system. Barely any room for a studio head anymore. She has to go. Not just for the movie, but for the sake and health of the industry.

Henry Weinstein offers a last defense. He asks, “What about what she's done for the studio? Isn't she owed some leeway or extra circumstance? There is a history here. A real history.”

Levathes sighs into the phone. “The money from the world of the past,” he says, “has little value in the world of the future.”

Weinstein walks to the window. He pushes the curtain open with the back of his hand. Backlit, he looks like a shadow puppet. And in that moment it becomes even clearer that in Hollywood there is no past. There are trace amounts of nostalgia, just enough to keep the foundation strong. But it's a business focused on the future.

A business that closes its eyes and hopes for a future.

 

The next day,
Los Angeles Times
gossip columnist Hedda Hopper leaks the news of Marilyn's dismissal in her column, “Hedda Hopper's Hollywood.” She quotes a source who's identified only as “one of the most knowledgeable men in the industry.” He's told Hopper, “I believe it is the end of her career . . . She has no control of herself.” It's believed the knowledgeable man was George Cukor.

 

At twenty-seven, nearly ten years younger than Marilyn, Lee Remick is at her prime. Under contract with Twentieth, she is assigned to take over Marilyn's part
in
Something's Got to Give
. And although the studio publicists have been trying to push her as America's answer to Brigitte Bardot, “a chick with money and breeding who's loaded with sex appeal” (something she's battled against, hiring her own publicist to push her as a serious actress who, like Marilyn, attended the Actors Studio), what makes her most suitable for this particular movie at this particular time are the qualities she described in an interview with the
New York Herald Tribune
. “My problem,” she said, “is I've always been too happy. I have a lovely baby, a wonderful husband, my friends all like me, and I don't have any neuroses. I'm not an oddball. Every part I play is different because I don't bring the trademark neurosis to it . . . Why is it most actresses must be bizarre, vulgar, or temperamental to make good copy?” If Remick can really clean up in the wake of Monroe's hurricane path, Levathes is willing to call off the publicity department on the Brigitte Bardot pitch. He'll let her say she's a serious actress all she wants.

 

On June 8, Remick is fit and dressed in Marilyn's wardrobe, then photographed alongside George Cukor, both with reflexive smiles; a reluctant debutante and her patron. But behind the scenes she doesn't trust the motives. She suspects it's all an attempt by Twentieth Century-Fox to humiliate Marilyn Monroe. Remick asked her agent to find out if she really has to go through this, all for a measly $80,000. Additionally,
time is tight—she's already obligated to a July shooting schedule for
The Running Man
. But there's no discussion. She's informed that she owes Twentieth another movie, and contrary to what her predecessor in the role might have thought, Peter Levathes is still in charge. They expect her to be gracious. Get out there and put on a good face for the sake of the picture. And to follow through with whatever the unit publicist asks for.