If there was anyone who saw, they never interrupted.
When it was over, we were both giggling with nervous laughter, Marilyn's intoxicated, mine drunk on fear and sobriety. And love.
She'd wanted me for me. And she knew I kept secrets and didn't care.
I think I could have loved her just for that.
I was in love, for the first time, really, and so, I think … at least I'd like to think … was Marilyn.
I was like a giddy teenager. It was like nothing I'd ever had, even before the wild card.
But you're probably wanting to know what happened with bombs and all that. The next day Flattop and I went through the larger snippets, but had trouble placing them. The breakthrough came from Marilyn.
Marilyn had been friends with Jane Russell ever since Gentlemen Prefer Blondes, and she identified the first clip I'd found. "Oh sure, Nickie," she said. "That's from The Outlaw Jane did for Howard Hughes. But don't show Jane. The film was an absolute bomb."
I gave Marilyn a kiss and she forgot about it, but I didn't. The rest of the snippets came from The Outlaw and other bad adventure flicks, all from RKO, owned and operated by one Howard Hughes. Hughes' paranoia about disease was legendary, so it was likely he'd been behind the bomb attempt, not that there was anything you could prove.
The Hearst papers carried an article about a Japanese mine from World War II drifting into the Santa Monica pier. How it managed to hit six feet above the water line was never explained.
The pier was closed for "structural damage" and the Menagerie was shut down, though in a much less bloody fashion than was no doubt planned. A check of public records showed the long arms of Howard Hughes and Willie Hearst pulling the strings. Hopper's column raved about the planned renovation, during which no doubt the Menagerie would lose its liquor license.
In an unrelated piece, the bodies of three men were found Washed up on the beach. The corpses were identified the next day as belonging to three of RKO's special effects men. The obituary listed the cause of death as a "boating accident." Their names correlated with Wally's suspects for several sabotaged pics.
I had evidence, but nothing I could present to anyone, Welles included. And it was just more conspiracy work for the files — nothing about any particular plot against Blythe.
But Marilyn was the key to the whole house of cards. If she fell, the whole thing would collapse. I stayed close by her during the day, and at her house at night. There really wasn't anything else I could do.
She had a small place in Brentwood, with an inscription above the portico that read Cursum Perficio, "My journey ends here." Sometimes we dallied in the house, and sometimes in the pool in the back yard, memories of our first time together.
I felt like I had come home at last.
During the day, I escorted Marilyn around the set and played stand-in what little time I had to. And at night, back at her place, Marilyn told me her nightmares.
Sometimes she woke up from them screaming like a little girl and begged me to hold her until they went away.
Her nightmares … How can I describe them? In one she was Mary Shelley, talking to her husband about the baby she'd lost. Then he'd console her, and say that she was the mother of far more, since hadn't she created Frankenstein and given her nightmares to a thousand people?
And then there was the one where she was Cleopatra, and it was like the last scene of the movie, except the asp talked, and it said, "You are the Goddess. You are the Queen. And I am all men and I will have you. And I will kill you."
And then, trapped in the motions of the story, she dropped the asp down the front of her dress. But instead of biting her, it crawled inside her.
And she knew her body was not her own.
Then she was Guenevere from Camelot, singing "The Simple Joys Of Maidenhood" just like Julie Andrews on Broadway. And as she did, the bodies of her admirers piled up around her feet, one after the other.
There were a dozen others, sometimes as many as three a night. Sometimes I did nothing but hold her, and sometimes we did nothing but make love until the nightmares went away. And sometimes, during all that, I wondered if it were the LSD that had caused the nightmares, or perhaps something else.
And every afternoon, she had a session with Dr. Rudo. I didn't like to think of what they did together, or the trysts she had every week or so with either of the Kennedy brothers, but whenever I raised the subject, she just laughed. "Nickie, you're so old-fashioned," she'd say. "We're all sexual creatures. If I make love to another man, it doesn't mean I don't love you. And anyway, it's part of the treatment."
Dauerschlaf, that's what Rudo called it: The Long Sleep. Marilyn had first come to him for her insomnia, and then for her other problems. Sometimes she said she felt like a thousand women packed into one. Blythe was almost autobiographical.
Schizophrenia ran in her family. It had claimed both her mother and grandmother. She didn't want it to claim her.
Whatever the problem, I didn't believe that sex was a necessary part of any therapy. What did Dr. Rudo do with boys? But somehow, bastard that he was, Rudo's cure seemed to be working. Marilyn got better for all the bad dreams. She drank less, and slept more without tranquilizers.
And her acting became hearthreakingly beautiful. I wasn't the only one to cry when I saw her do Blythe's final scene. And her last coherent words:
"Tisianne, hold me. I can't bear them any longer."
Seeing her in the straightjacket as she descended into Blythe Van Renssaeler's madness, I was reminded of Wally Fisk. While Marilyn and I had made love, he'd swallowed his tongue and died in the hospital.
"A brilliant performance, no?" Pan Rudo stood next to me and lit another cigarette. The smoke curled lazily from his fingers. "You find it very beautiful, but very disturbing as well. Some personal meaning, perhaps?"
He shook forward a cigarette from his case, but I got out one of my own and used my own lighter. "Do you always state the obvious, Dr. Rudo?"
He tapped his unlit smokes back into line and snapped the case shut, slipping it into an inside pocket. "Frequently." He took a lazy pull from his cigarette as the scene broke down and Welles called it a wrap. "There are so many lies and self-deceits abounding, it's often useful to remind oneself of the facts. 'To thine own self be true,' as Shakespeare put it. Wouldn't you agree?"
I blew some of my own smoke his direction. "I've always been more of a 'Pay no attention to the man behind the curtain' man myself."
He laughed. "I never cease to be amazed by you, Mr. Williams. I always keep thinking I've found your heart, but all I get is another matrushka doll. What's inside the last would you say? Pins and sawdust? Clockwork springs? Or is there really a lion's heart of flesh and blood?"
I looked into his eyes, cold blue mirrors of my own. "Being that I don't wear it on my sleeve, Dr. Rudo, I don't think you'll ever have a chance to find out."
He leaned back on one heel, regarding me. "Perhaps, Mr. Williams. Perhaps."
He broke off the look abruptly. The witch had arrived, hat and all.
Hedda was wearing a salmon pink linen skirt and jacket, with a matching hat: salmon felt decorated with silver applique waves and, I kid you not, an honest-to-God, life-size gold-lame fish lunging after the fly that dangled from the miniature rod stuck through the crown.
"Pan, darling!" Hedda oooed. "And dearest Nicholas! What luck to find you both here!"
Rudo paused and looked to me. "You know Hedda, Mr. Williams?"