Max Allan Collins
Kisses of Death
1
You can almost see it on the cover of Photoplay or Modern Screen, can’t you, circa 1954? “I Was Marilyn Monroe’s Bodyguard!” with a subhead reading, “A Private Eye’s Hollywood Dream Assignment!”... but in the end, “A New York Nightmare of Depravity” was more like it, worthy of Confidential or Whisper.
Not that Miss Monroe was involved in any of that depravity — no such luck — though we did have a promising first meeting, and it was in neither Hollywood nor New York, but in my native Chicago, at the Palmer House, where the A-1 Detective Agency was providing security for the American Booksellers Association’s annual convention.
I didn’t do any of the security work at the booksellers shindig myself — that was for my staff, and a few add-on ops I rounded up. After all, I was Nathan Heller, president of the A-1, and such lowly babysitting was simply beneath my executive position.
Unless, of course, the baby I was sitting was Miss Marilyn Monroe, curled up opposite me on a couch, sweetly sitting in her suite’s sitting room, afternoon sunlight coming in behind her, making a hazy halo of her carefully coifed platinum pageboy.
“I hope this isn’t a problem for you,” she said, shyly, with only a hint of the mannered, sexy exaggeration I’d noted on the screen. “Such short notice, I mean.”
Normally I didn’t cancel a Friday night date with a Chez Paree chorus girl to take on a bodyguard job, but I only said, “I had nothing planned. My pleasure, Miss Monroe.”
“Marilyn,” she corrected gently. “Is it Nate, or Nathan?”
Her manner was surprisingly deferential, and disarmingly reserved. Like other movie stars I’d encountered over the years, from George Raft to Mae West, she was smaller than I expected, though her figure lived up to expectations, partly because her black short-sleeved cotton sweater and her dark gray Capri pants were strategically snug.
“Nate’s fine,” I said. “Or Nathan.”
I would gladly have answered to Clem or Philbert, if she were so inclined. I was forty-seven years of age, and she was, what? Twenty-five? Twenty-six? And I felt like a schoolboy, tongue thick, hands awkward, penis twitching, rearing its head threateningly as I crossed my legs.
Her barefoot casualness (her toenails, like her fingernails, were painted a platinum that matched her hair) was offset by the flawlessness of her surprisingly understated makeup, her complexion luminously, palely perfect, a glorious collaboration between God and Max Factor. The startling red of her lipsticked lips was ideal for her world-famous smile — sex-saturated, open-mouthed, accompanied by a tilt-back of the head and bedroom-lidded eyes — only I never saw that smile once, that afternoon.
Instead, only rare tentative fleeting smiles touched those bruised baby lips, and for all her sex appeal, the in-person Marilyn Monroe’s undeniable charisma invoked in me unexpected stirrings, which is to say, Not Entirely Sexual. I wanted to protect this girl. And she did seem a girl to me, for all her womanly charms.
“I read about you in Life,” she said, dark blue eyes twinkling.
She’d read about me in Life. Was she kidding?
Actually, she probably wasn’t. Last year the magazine had done a spread on me, and my career, touching on the Lindbergh kidnapping, the Sir Harry Oakes murder, and several other of my more headline-worthy cases of years past, but focusing more on the current success of my Hollywood branch of the A-1, which was developing into the movie stars’ private detective agency of choice.
On the other hand, I’d read about her not only in Life, but Look, and the Saturday Evening Post, and Esquire, not to mention the Police Gazette, Coronet, and Modern Man. She was also the reason why I hadn’t, in June of 1953, gotten around to taking down a certain 1952 calendar as yet. My most vivid memory of Miss Monroe, prior to meeting her face to face, was a rear view of her walking slowly away from the camera in a movie called Niagara (which I walked away from after her character got prematurely bumped off).
“When Ben told me about the party tonight, at Riccardo’s,” she said, “I simply had to be there. I’m afraid I invited myself...”
As if there’d be an objection.
“...and Ben suggested we ask you to accompany us. He thinks it’s a necessary precaution.”
“I agree with him,” I said. “That joint’ll be crawling with reporters.”
She shivered. “Oh, and I’ve had my fill of the press today, already.”
Marilyn Monroe was in town on a press swing to promote the imminent release of Gentlemen Prefer Blondes; when I’d arrived at her suite, she had just wrapped up an interview with Irv Kupcinet, of the Sun Times.
“If they see me at your side,” I said, “they may be more inclined to behave themselves.”
“That’s sort of what Ben said. He said people know you in Chicago. That you have quite a reputation.”
“Reputations can deceiving.”
“Oh yes,” she said with a lift of her eyes and a flutter of lashes. “Nathan, can I get you something to drink?”
“A Coke would be nice.”
She flashed just a hint of the famous smile, said, “I’ll have one, too,” rose and walked to a little bar in one corner, and in those painted-on Capri pants, she provided a rear view even more memorable than Niagara.
Soon she was behind the bar, pouring Coca-Cola over ice, saying, “How did you meet Ben? I met him on monkey business.”
“Met him how?”
She walked over to where I was sitting, a tumbler in either hand, a study in sexy symmetry as her breasts did a gentle braless dance under the sweater. “On the movie — Monkey Business. Ben wrote it. That was a good role for me. Nice and funny, and light. How did you meet him?”
I took my Coke from her. “You better let Ben tell it.”
I figured that was wise, because I had no idea where or when I’d first met Ben Hecht, though according to Ben we’d known each other since I was a kid. I had no memory of encountering Hecht back in those waning days of the so-called Chicago literary Renaissance of the late teens and early twenties, though when he approached me to do a Hollywood job for him, a few years ago, he insisted we were old friends... and since he’d been the client, who was I to argue?
Hecht, after all, was a storyteller, and reinventing his own life, revising his own memories into better tales, was in his nature.
She sat up, now, and forward, hands folded in her lap around the glass of Coke, an attentive schoolgirl. “Ben says your father had a radical bookshop.”
“That’s right,” I said. “We were on the West Side, and most of the literary and political shenanigans were centered in Tower Town...”
“Tower Town?”
“That’s the area that used to be Chicago’s Greenwich Village; still is, sort of, but it’s dying out. On the Near North Side. But most of the freethinkers and radicals and artsy types found their way into Heller’s Books, from Clarence Darrow to Carl Sandburg.”
Her eyes went wide as Betty Boop’s. “You know Carl Sandburg?”
“Sure. He used to play his guitar and sing his god-awful folks songs in this little performance area we had.”
Her sigh could only be described as wistful. “I love his poetry.”
“Yeah, he’s become a big deal, hasn’t he? Nice guy.”
Hope danced in the wide eyes. “Will he be there tonight?”