Imagine a homely wart like Charlie getting a dish like this warmed up over him.
“I kind of doubt it. He doesn’t get back to Chicago all that much.”
Her disappointment was obvious, but she perked herself up, saying, “Ben’s arranged this party as a benefit for Maxwell Bodenheim, you know.”
“Are you serious?”
Misinterpreting my displeasure as something positive, she nodded and said, “Oh, yes. Ben said Mr. Bodenheim and his wife flew in from New York last night. Do you know him?”
“Yeah. Yeah, I know Max. I’m surprised you’ve even heard of him, Marilyn.”
“I read a lot of poetry,” she said. “His Selected Poems is a delightful collection.”
Who was I to rain on her parade? How could she know that Bodenheim, who I vividly remembered from childhood, had been a womanizing, sarcastic, self-important, drunken leach? The only writer my softhearted father had ever banished from his store, when he caught Bodenheim shoplifting copies of his own books.
“I haven’t thought of that guy in probably thirty years,” I said. “I didn’t even know he was still alive.”
Her brow furrowed with sympathy. “Ben says Mr. Bodenheim has fallen on hard times. It’s difficult to make a living as a poet.”
I sipped my Coke. “He used to write novels, too. He had some bestsellers in the twenties.”
Sexy potboilers, with titles like Replenishing Jessica, Georgie May, and Naked on Roller Skates, that had seemed pretty racy in their day; Jessica had even been busted as pornography. Of course, in the modern era of Erskine Caldwell and Mickey Spillane, the naughty doings of Bodenheim’s promiscuous jazz-age heroines would probably seem pretty mild.
Still, if Bodenheim was broke, it was only after squandering the fortune or two a bestselling writer would naturally accrue.
“I just think it’s wonderful of Ben to help his old friend out like this,” she said, her smile radiant, as madonnalike as she imaged Hecht’s intentions to be saintly.
Bodenheim was indeed an “old friend” of Hecht’s, but my understanding was that they’d had a major falling out, long ago; in fact, while I don’t remember ever meeting Hecht in the old days, I do remember my father talking about how violently these two one-time literary collaborators had fallen out. Hecht had even written a novel, Count Bruga, lampooning his pretentious former crony, to which Bodenheim replied with his own novel, Duke Herring, about a self-centered sellout clearly patterned on Hecht.
The gathering tonight at Riccardo’s was a Renaissance reunion, organized by Hecht, who was one of that movement’s stellar graduates, albeit not in the literary way of such figures as Sandburg, Vachel Lindsay, Sherwood Anderson, Edgar Lee Masters, and Margaret Anderson. Hecht — whose archly literary novels and would-be avant-garde pornography of the twenties had made him a king among local bohemians — had literally gone Hollywood.
After the success of his play The Front Page, a collaboration with Charlie MacArthur, another former Chicago newspaper-man, Hecht began a wildly successful screenwriting career — Scarface, Gunga Din, Spellbound, and Notorious, to name a few of his credits — that would be impressive by anybody’s standards. Except, perhaps, those of the literary types among whom he’d once dwelled.
Like Bodenheim.
Of course, I didn’t figure — other than Bodenheim — there would be many people at the party that Hecht would owe any apology to. The crowd that Ben and Bodenheim had hung out with, sharing the pages of literary magazines, and the stages of little theaters and the wild and wooly Dill Pickle Club, was pretty well thinned out by now. The most exotic demise was probably that of Harriet Monroe (presumably no relation to Marilyn); the editor of the prestigious magazine Poetry, Harriet had died in 1936, on some sort of mountain-climbing expedition in Peru (Sherwood Anderson also died in South America, but less exotically, succumbing to peritonitis on a goodwill tour). Vachel Lindsay had died a suicide, Edgar Lee Masters died broke in a convalescent home. This poetry was a rough racket.
The beautiful, enigmatic (i.e., lesbian) editor of the Little Review, Margaret Anderson, wasn’t dead, but she might as well have been: she lived in Paris. I figured the party attendees would mostly be Renaissance refugees who had drifted back into the newspaper business, from whence most of the players had come in the first place, seasoned veterans of Schlogl’s, the legendary Loop tavern where Daily News reporters gathered, even those without literary pretensions.
Of course, Riccardo’s was a newspaper hangout in general, and the entertainment scribes Marilyn had already encountered this trip — Kup, Herb Lyon, Anna Nangle, among others — might be there, as well. I knew all of them and could keep them at bay in a friendly way.
I sipped my Coke. “I gather you and Ben are embarking on some sort of project together.”
“Well, we’re seriously discussing—”
And a knock at the door interrupted her. I offered to answer it for her, and did, and as if he’d arrived specifically to answer my question, there was Ben.
“Madhouse down there,” he said, gesturing with a thumb, as if pointing to Hell, but in reality only meaning the floor where the meetings and seminars of the ABA were being held.
Ben Hecht, a vigorous sixty years of age, brushed by me and went over to greet Marilyn, who rose from the couch to give him a Hollywood hug. His frame was square, large-boned, just under six foot, his attire rather casual for a business occasion, a brown sport jacket over a green sport shirt; a Russian Jew, he looked more Russian than Jewish — a pleasant, even handsome-looking man with an oval head, salt-and-pepper curly hair, a high forehead that was obviously in the process of getting higher, trimmed mustache, deep-blue slightly sunken eyes, and strong jaw worthy of a leading man.
She sat back down, and he nestled next to her, and took her hands in his as if about to propose marriage.
“I talked to the Doubleday people,” Ben said, “and they’re very excited.”
Her eyes Betty-Booped again. “Really?”
“They did somersaults over the idea.”
Now she winced. “I still think I’m a little young to be writing my life story...”
“You’re the hottest thing in show business, kid. Strike while the iron is hot. You liked the sample chapters I wrote, didn’t you?”
“I loved them.” She turned to me, and I was relieved to see that one of them realized I was still there. “We spent an afternoon at the Beverly Hills Hotel, Ben and I, with me talking into a tape recorder, and then a few days later we met again. Ben had turned my ramblings into something marvelous. I laughed... I cried...”
“Well,” he said, withdrawing a cigar from a silver case from inside his sport jacket, “you’ll laugh and cry with joy when you hear the deal Doubleday’s offering. Plus, I talked to some people from the Ladies’ Home Journal, and they’re going to make an offer to serialize.”
For a guy famous for writing ping-pong back-and-forth dialogue, Ben nonetheless spoke in paragraphs, though the words did flow at a machine-gun clip.
“Oh, Ben... this is so wonderful...”
He bit off the end of his cigar. “Kid, they’re going to pay you bushel baskets of money, and the end result is, publicity for you. Only in America.”
“Ben, how can I ever repay you?”
It was a question millions of American men would have died to hear Marilyn Monroe ask.
Ben, patting his jacket pockets as if he were frisking himself, replied with, “You got a light?”
She nodded and pranced over to the bar and got some hotel matches and came bouncing back and fired up his Cuban. It had a strong, pleasant aroma, but the mixture of it and Marilyn’s Chanel Number Five was making me a little queasy.