Like most jokers, he was also pathetically happy to have anyone just treat him like a human being. I'll admit I used him shamelessly, but you could find out half of what was going down on any lot for the price of just fifteen minutes with Flattop.
"Ooh, Marilyn is pissed off, man," Flattop said as he fiddled with some editing equipment. I tried to ignore the fact that he used his prehensile toes for half the job. "Zanuck stuck her on this pic for the last spot on her contract, and I don't know what deal Welles made to get him to do it. She'd walk if she could."
"What's the problem?"
"Didn't you know, man? This is a wild cards pic and that old witch Hopper's declared War. She's been flying around the set trying to twist Marilyn's arm. I Wouldn't be surprised if she hired a stunt plane and had it write 'Surrender Marilyn!' over the studio."
It sounded like standard tactics for Hopper. First she gave you a friendly warning, then she blasted you in her column. Welles's "conspiracy of silence" might end quite soon.
It was getting late in the day, and there was a lot more information I wanted to pump Flattop for. I asked if he'd like to go out for beer after he finished up.
"But you don't drink, Nick," he pointed out. Like I said, Flattop was perceptive.
I shrugged.
"There's a party out in Malibu tonight. They actually invited me." He smiled and there was the strangest mixture of pain and happiness in his weird eyes. "This is the first one I've been asked to since ..."
I clapped him on the shoulder. "Don't sweat it, Pete." That was his name, actually. Peter Le Fleur. Sometimes I was jealous of him. His wild card was out for everyone to see, so he didn't have to lie to anyone about who or what he was, including himself.
Then again, I didn't get the joker treatment.
He folded his elongated fingers over my hand and I made sure I didn't flinch. It wasn't as if there was anything I could catch from him. "Thanks, Nick. If you want to tag along ..."
I thought of Marilyn. "Wouldn't miss it."
The party was at Peter Lawford's beach house in Malibu. It was pretty exclusive: cast and crew favorites, along with Rudo and Strasberg and some others. Poitier was absent, but that was to be expected. And Davidson had talked his way in, so I wasn't the only stand-in.
Lawford was there, of course, three sheets to the wind, riding on the fame of his wife's brothers, one of whom was actually present. Robert Kennedy, the Attorney General, was in the pool, flirting with Marilyn, as was James Dean.
It was a moment to make an entrance, and I took it. I did a three-sixty off the board and the water cleft perfectly. I'd had an athletics scholarship to USC and Olympic hopes, but I had to give them up when they started testing for wild cards, not that being an electric eel shaved any time off me in the fifty meter.
Once I came up, there was some gratifying applause and I managed to insinuate myself into the conversation with Marilyn. It was light politics, Dean going on about getting Tachyon back into the country, but the pauses let me discover what I'd heard rumored: Marilyn and Bobby were having an affair.
It wasn't any part of my ace. A detective just gets a sixth sense for that sort of thing. It's a matter of ordinary animal magnetism and body language. Bobby Kennedy wanted Marilyn and acted like he'd had her before.
Marilyn's reactions were more subtle, with a note of anguish underlying the laughter, but I could tell that she wanted Bobby in more of a primal way, more like a little girl wants her father than a woman wants a man.
Dean was attentive, but didn't desire Marilyn in any manner beyond the general. He had a long scar down one leg, visible even through the ripples of the pool. I'd never seen it before, but I knew it was a legacy of the car crash that had killed Liz Taylor and nearly claimed him, back at the end of Giant.
He didn't drive quite so fast anymore.
Marilyn hadn't given Dean a second glance, but she looked straight at me.
There was chemistry there, and it wasn't the sort you got with the wild card. I made a total fool of myself, but then that was the general idea. Once or twice I felt Welles giving me a look, but dammit, I was more than just being paid to stick around Marilyn. I wanted to be with her.
The party went all night and I ran into a number of other hangers-on, the youngest of whom was Tom Quincey, a freshman from USC who looked younger and kept babbling on about Aldous Huxley and his book, Destiny and the Doors of Perception. It seemed Huxley had been at the party, but had left early, though Tom was more than happy to tell me all about him and showed off some white tablets he'd left behind. "They're LSD!" he said. "From the Swiss pharmacy. See - They're stamped with the Sandoz mark!"
I'd never seen LSD tablets, but Rudo came over and explained that they were perfectly legal, non-prescription. "Similar to mescaline," he said. "They expand perceptions."
To demonstrate their harmlessness, Rudo and Tommy both popped a couple. I chose not to indulge, not wanting to see What they did with my Wild card, but Marilyn and the Lawfords tried some, and so did another Tom, Douglas I think, a musician friend of Quincey's. Flattop amused everybody by taking the half-empty Coke bottle from his arm and filling it up the rest of the way with the Lawford's rum and a couple of Tommy's tablets before plugging it back in.
Flattop, of course, got the first effects and started staring at the pool lights, with the Toms joining in soon after. Rudo didn't say or do much out of the ordinary, so I concluded that it was just like fraternity brothers getting drunk for the first time and Flattop and Tommy and Tom were playing it up. There was something about Tom Quincey that set me on edge, though I couldn't quite say what.
Marilyn, however, thought him amusing. She said he'd followed her here from New York and had refused to go away ever since. I knew they had a relationship too.
Welles and Trumbo were at loggerheads over the direction of the script - pretty much whether it would be "Orson Welles's Blythe" or "Dalton Trumbo's Blythe" - and Trumbo went into a paranoid jag about capitalist interests wanting to subvert the proletarian heart of his story. Welles told him to get stuffed and that the heart of the story was the romance between a New York blue-stocking and an alien prince, and it would be hard enough getting it to play in Peoria without holding out for Moscow too.
Everyone at the party seemed generally enthused for the project with the exception of Paula Strasberg, and even she loosened up after Josh went on about the evils of the HUAC and how brave it was for Bobby and the President to end the Blacklist by going to see Spartacus.
Paula got drunk then and started to demand McCarthy's head on a stick, but people had to remind her that he was already dead and his head would be a bit mouldy.
After the requisite head-butting, Welles and Trumbo tried to figure out who to get for Golden Boy and Harstein. Pat Lawford then mentioned that jack Braun lived down the street.
I should have remembered that. After the eight-by-tens I'd taken, that's all he had left.
Marilyn, very drunk by this point, and stoned on an interesting mixture of Paula Strasberg's tranquilizers and Tommy's LSD, suggested that everyone invite him to the party. Who better to play Golden Boy than Golden Boy? He'd already done it in one movie.
This notion was entertained in varying levels of seriousness, but Trumbo thought it could be useful to at least get Braun's input in on the script, he being the only one of the Four Aces both easily accessible and living.
Marilyn and Tommy, bearing bottles of champagne and wearing nothing more than bathing suits, elected to be the ones to go be neighborly and invite him over. I, being the only sober person left, volunteered to shepherd them down the street.
I can't forget Jack Braun's expression. He had a bottle of cheap scotch in one hand and the door in the other and I knew he must think he was hallucinating. I mean, if you open your door at ten o'clock in the evening, you don't expect to see Marilyn Monroe in a bathing suit, accompanied by a teenager and the detective who'd taken pictures of you en flagrante delecti.