I asked, “What time’s the party?”
“They got a buffet over there for us,” Ben said, “at seven. I’m kind of the host, so I’ll head over a little early. Marilyn, what time would you like to make your appearance?”
“Maybe around eight,” she offered. Then she looked at me. “Could you meet me in the lobby, Nathan, and escort me over?”
“Be delighted.”
She stood. “Then you boys better scoot. I have to get ready.”
“You are ready,” Ben said, but he was rising at her command just the same. He gestured with his cigar in hand. “These are writers and poets, kid. Come as you are.”
“I’ll wear something nice and casual,” she promised. “But I’d like to relax with a nice long hot bubble bath...”
That was a pretty image to leave on, so we did. In the hall, as we waited for the elevator, I said, “Bodenheim?”
“Yeah,” Hecht said, as if throwing a benefit for his arch literary enemy was a natural thing to do. “We flew him and his wife in. I got them over at the Bismarck, if he hasn’t burned it down by now.”
“What’s he need a benefit for?”
Hecht snorted, spoke around his cigar. “Are you kidding? He’s been living in Greenwich Village for the last, I don’t know, twenty years. Poor bastard’s turned into a bum. Complete alky. You know how he makes his living, such as it is? Hawking his poems on street corners, pinnin’ ’em on a fence, sellin’ ’em for quarters and dimes.”
“Jesus. Even I wouldn’t wish that on him. I mean, he was famous... respected...”
“There was a time,” Hecht said, and the sunken eyes grew distant, “when he was near the peak of poetry in this nation. Ezra Pound wrote him goddamn fan letters. William Carlos Williams, Conrad Aiken, Marianne Moore, all expressed their public admiration. Now? Now the son of bitch is sleeping on park benches and, when he’s lucky, in flophouses.”
“What’s this about a wife?”
Hecht got a funny smile going; he flicked ashes from the cigar in the wall ashtray by the elevator buttons. “Her name’s Ruth. He looks like shit, but she’s kind of foxy, in a low-rent kind of way.” Hecht shook his head, laughed. “Son of a bitch always did have a way with the ladies. You know the stories, don’t you, about the suicides?”
I did. There was a period in the twenties, shortly after Bodenheim traded Chicago for New York, that the national papers were filled with the stories of young women driven to suicide by the fickle attentions of the author of Replenishing Jessica.
“I know you fancy yourself a ladies’ man, Nate,” Hecht said with a sly grin. “But committing suicide over your favors never has become a national fad, now, has it?”
“Not yet,” I granted, and the elevator finally arrived. We stepped on. Hecht pushed the button for his floor and I hit lobby. We had the elevator to ourselves, so our conversation remained frank.
“What’s all this about you writing Marilyn’s autobiography? Since when are you reduced to that kind of thing, or are you trying to get a piece of that sweet girl’s personality?”
Hecht had his own reputation as a ladies’ man, or at least, womanizer.
He shrugged. “Straight ghost job. Good payday. I don’t always sign my work, kid. Hell, if I put my name on every script I doctored, I’d be the most famous asshole in Hollywood.”
“Well, doesn’t scriptwriting pay better than books?”
“Hell yes.” His voice remained jaunty but his expression turned grave. “But, frankly, kid — I got my ass in a wringer with this big fat mouth of mine. I’m blacklisted in England, you know, and if a producer uses me on a script, he can’t put my name on the British prints, and if the Brits find out my name was on the American version, they might pass on the thing, anyway.” His sigh was massive. “If you ever hear me gettin’ messed up in politics again, slap my face, okay?”
“What are friends for?”
Hecht, whose apolitical nature was probably the reason why my father’s radical bookshop was an unlikely place for us to have met, had gotten uncharacteristically political, right after the war. Specifically, he got vocal about Israel, outspoken in his opinion that England was the enemy of that emerging state, publicly praising Irgun terrorists for blowing up British trains and robbing British banks and killing British “tommies.”
“Maybe it’s for the best,” he said, as the bell rang and the door drew open at his floor. “It’s putting me back in the world of books, where I belong. Hey, I talked to Simon and Schuster this afternoon, and they’re makin’ an offer on my autobiography... See you at Riccardo’s, kid!”
And with that final machine-gun burst of verbiage, he was gone.
2
Just to be safe, I returned to the Palmer House at seven thirty, walking over from my suite of offices at the Monadnock Building, going in on the State Street side, through the business arcade and up the escalator to the vast high-ceilinged lobby, a cathedral-like affair with arched balconies, Roman travertine walls, and an elaborately painted Italian classical ceiling depicting gods and goddesses, which was only fitting considering who I was escorting tonight.
And since Hollywood divinity occupies a time and space continuum all its own, I had plenty of opportunity, seated comfortably in one of the velvet-upholstered chairs, to study each and every shapely nude, and near-nude, cloud-perched goddess.
As my delight at this assignment gradually wore to irritation (shortly after nine), I began toying with calling up to Miss Monroe’s suite to see if I’d misunderstood when I was to pick her up, or if she’d run into a problem, and just as irritation was bleeding into indignation (nine thirty), she stepped out of an elevator, a vision of twentieth-century womanhood that put to shame the classical dames floating above me.
She wore a simple black linen dress, spaghetti straps and a fairly low, straight-across-the-bosom neckline — no sign of a bra, or any pantyline, either; her heels were black strappy sandals, her legs bare. No jewelry, a small black purse in hand. Doffing my coconut-palm narrow-brim hat, I rose to approach her as she click-clacked toward me across the marble floor and by the time I’d slipped my arm in hers, and gazed into that radiant face with its blazingly red-lipsticked baby-doll pout, my annoyance disappeared, and delight had bloomed again.
She issued no apology for her tardiness, but what she said instead was much better: “Don’t you look handsome.”
And for the first time I witnessed, in person, the practiced, patented open-mouthed smile, as she stroked the sleeve of my green Dacron sport jacket, then straightened and smoothed the lighter-green linen tie that matched my sport shirt, under which my heart went pitty pat.
“I thought bodyguards tried to blend into the woodwork,” she said, eyeing my canary-yellow lightweight slacks.
“This bodyguard wants to be noticed,” I said, as we walked through a lobby whose patrons were wide-eyed with wonder at the presence among them of this goddess. “Not that anyone will...”
In back of the cab, on our way to Riccardo’s, I ventured a question: “Do you mind if I ask something a little personal?”
“Ask and see.”
“Is what I read about in the papers true, about you and Joe DiMaggio?”
She shrugged. “We’ve been dating, kind of off and on.”
“Is it ‘on’ right now?”
“Off.”
“Ah,” I said. “I’m sorry.”
“Are you really, Nathan?”
“No.”