Fade to Black (19 page)

“She really did have little hands,” Eric whispered to himself, snapping a picture of Marilyn’s square and then placing his own outstretched fingers over hers. “But beautiful legs,” he said, fondling the circular indentations of her high heels.

While he waited for the ejected print to develop, he looked up the side of the central archway, following the outline of the red wooden pillar, the facial masks of the capitals, the inverted pyramids leading up to the bladed offshoots at each of the four corners of the famous roof. Cast-iron dog-sized dragons posed like stick figures on the offshoots. The tip of the corner blade directly over Eric’s head seemed to stab outward at the noonday sun, blocking its rays so that Eric stood in an asparagus-shaped shadow.

He walked diagonally across the courtyard, gently elbowing his way through the sightseers to the window display advertising the Hollywood Wax Museum, a few blocks east of the theatre. Marilyn Monroe was the figure on display, and Eric clicked off another picture of her, although he thought the resemblance was terrible. The model was dressed in a polyester gown that was supposed to suggest silk or satin, and the cheap beaded trim on the dress was falling apart with age as the adhesive gave out. A feather boa was draped around her shoulders, and she sat in a chair, looking out past the crowd toward the street, as if ready to run at the first opportunity.

Next to the window display was a booth where one could have his picture taken by a computer printer and transferred onto a T-shirt with his name underneath. Eric bought one, moulding his features into his best Cagney imitation for the picture and having them print out “Cody Jarrett” beneath the ironed-on portrait.

Getting back on his Vespa, Eric turned south on Highland, weaving happily through the traffic until he came to Santa Monica Boulevard, where he turned left, passing Cahuenga and then Vine. He slowed down and turned left again, this time on Lodi Place, a shaded sidestreet leading into a surprisingly quiet residential district. Near the corner of Lexington he parked the Vespa by the curb and walked over to a peach-colored building, old beneath a fresh coat of paint. A sign on the side of the building identified it as the current chapter of the local YMCA.

Eric was snapping a Polaroid of the doorway when a young blonde came out of the building, made up and dressed as if on her way to a screen test. She was mouthing lines silently to herself as she walked.

“Hey!” Eric called out, startling her. She tried to ignore him as she started down the steps, but he tagged along. “What room are you in?”

“What are you talking about?” she asked, annoyed.

“Did you know that when this was the Hollywood Studio Club that Gale Storm and Sharon Tate and Marilyn Monroe all lived in room 334?”

“Give me a break,” the girl said, walking off.

“Bet you didn’t know that!” Eric razzed. “Hell with you, anyway. You couldn’t hold a candle to Norma Jean. She was the best! You’ll be lucky to make a commercial!”

Eric took Lexington back to Vine and turned right. He was getting hungry, so he stopped at a take-out stand near Selma Avenue, next to the Huntington Hartford theatre. He had made a horseshoe trek around the heart of Hollywood.

Selma was the area’s unofficial pickup strip for gays, given to more subtleties than the action in front of the Golden Cup just up another block.

The man behind the counter was Eric’s age, wearing a white T-shirt dotted with miniature Judy Garlands. Watching Eric park, wearing his leather jacket and sunglasses, the counterman ran a quick hand across the part in his short-cropped hair.

“What’ll you have, Leather?” he asked Eric, smiling.

“Something fast,” Eric said. “You got a special or something?”

The cashier grinned.

“Special’s a hot dog in a fresh bun . . . with plenty on it.”

“Sounds great,” Eric said, looking around, watching the flow of traffic coming to and from Hollywood Boulevard, just a block north.

The counterman looked at Eric expectantly.

“Interested, then, are you?”

“Oh, yeah,” Eric said. “Sorry. Two specials and a large Coke.”

“Two specials,” the other man laughed. “You mean, like one now and one . . . well, I’m on break in five minutes.”

“Well, don’t you have two made already?” Eric asked. “If you don’t, one’s okay.”

The smile left the other’s face. “So you just want two hot dogs and a large Coke, is that it?”

“Right.”

“Right,” the counterman repeated coldly. He turned his back on Eric to get the hot dogs. He spit in the buns.

“Two seventy-six,” he said, sliding the order across the counter at Eric, who sat cross-legged on a stool, staring out at Vine Street.

While he paid, Eric asked, “Did you ever see Marilyn Monroe coming out of the Brown Derby?” He gestured with his head toward the famous restaurant across the street.

The counterman laughed bitterly, rolling his eyes. “She’s been dead for years, man, what the hell do you think?”

Eric smiled, taking his change as he stood up. He shook his head and said, “You’re wrong.”

“What are you talking about?” the cashier demanded, tired of the games.

Breathing hard, Eric leered at the man. “You’re wrong!” he shouted with anguish, sweeping his arm across the countertop and sending his order flying. “She’s as alive as you and I!”

“I said she’s dead!” the attendant shouted as Eric stormed off to his bike. “She’s dead, you jerk!”

Starting up his Vespa, Eric whined off into the northbound traffic to Hollywood Boulevard. He found another parking space and placed a quarter in the meter, his temper subsiding.

On foot, he began the long walk back to Mann’s Chinese Theatre, staying on the south side of the street. Kenneth Anger would love the Boulevard today, he thought. It was Hollywood Babylon on parade. The sixties had pretty much tarnished the glossy sheen of the area, and after the clones of Haight-Ashbury had been evicted, they had left in their wake sidewalks teeming with drifters, panhandlers, flesh-peddlers of all persuasions, and other assorted riffraff. Many preferred to handle this stretch from the safety of the tourist buses that crawled along the street like streamlined snails while bored guides yammered through hand-held microphones about the scenic surroundings and the exact location of celebrities’ stars along the walkway.

It wouldn’t be safe for you today, Marilyn, Eric thought. I’d have to be here to protect you. I could do it, too. Better than the others. Joe’s selling coffee makers now, Marilyn.

Cagney’s star was near the corner of Wilcox, in front of an optometrist’s shop and a pinball arcade. A middle-aged man was trying to divert pedestrians around the star while his wife pointed a Super 8mm camera at it and started shooting off foot after foot of the motionless picture before her.

Grinning, Eric came up behind the woman, adopting his Cagney sneer and accent.

“Come on, Verna,” he said. “Help Ma with the groceries!”

The woman looked up, surprised. Her husband laughed good-naturedly.

“That’s pretty good, young man. That’s from
White Heat,
isn’t it?”

“You bet!” Eric said, pulling the T-shirt from his coat pocket and unrolling it for them to see.

“Cody Jarrett,” the woman read. “That’s very cute.”

“That’s my name, sister,” Eric snarled for show.

The woman laughed this time, looking from the star to her camera to Eric.

“Say,” she suggested, “Would you mind . . . ?”

“Anything for a swell dame like you,” Eric mugged.

A small crowd gathered around as Eric stood before Cagney’s star, holding his Cody Jarrett-T-shirt over his chest. The older woman slowly panned the camera up from a fix on the star to Eric’s aping face.

“This is Cody Jarrett, see,” Eric said, “I gotta get back to my ma, see. She’s holdin’ up in the hills with Marilyn and the gang. Big Ed’s going to try to play his hand and I gotta stop him, got it?”

A slight patter of applause went up from the crowd after the woman lowered her camera.

“Thank you very much, young man.”

“Say, though,” the husband inquired, “Wasn’t Jarrett’s wife named Verna, though, like you said before?”

“Cody’s married to Marilyn,” Eric told them emphatically.

The woman played along.

“I don’t see why not. After all, I think she could have played the part as well as Virgina Mayo.”

The woman’s remark stunned Eric like an apocalyptic revelation. His mind chased through his filed knowledge of Monroe trivia.

“Of course she could have!” he insisted excitedly, “and she was available, too, that whole year! God, it would have been perfect! She would have been a star three years earlier. Everything would have been different. Who can I—”

Eric noticed that the couple had hastened away and that others were watching him strangely.

“Whaddya lookin’ at?” he yelled at them, stuffing the T-shirt back into his coat pocket and walking past the Fox Theatre.

Several blocks down he stopped in front of Frederick’s of Hollywood, the puce palace of erotic underwear, fronted by the stars of Jack Palance, Margaret O’Brien, Fleetwood Mac, and Will Rogers. Stiff-limbed mannequins with pouting lips and Quaalude stares looked down from their display perches at Eric, telling him the girl of his dreams could only be better in crotchless panties or a slinky negligée.

“I’ll buy you only the best,” Eric promised Marilyn as he snapped off several pictures of wigged forms in satin nightgowns.

Larry Edmunds’ was only a block away, situated between the Pussycat Theatre and the Supply Sergeant surplus shop.

Eric went inside the bookshop and back to the rear counter. The clerk on duty was an older man, dressed and groomed with rumpled indifference as he worked over the rows of filing cabinets. He saw Eric and said, “Let me guess . . .”

Eric nodded.

The clerk went to the back room and came back with the Marilyn Monroe file.

“Listen,” Eric told him, accepting the file and starting to sort through the pictures inside. “In her whole career, there was only one year Marilyn Monroe wasn’t in a picture. Nineteen forty-nine, the same year as
White Heat.
Why didn’t she do it with Cagney, huh?”

The clerk looked dully at Eric. “Eric, how many times have I told you I don’t play trivia. I work here. We try to run a business. You want an answer, look it up in a book. That’s why we have them.”

Unperturbed, Eric sifted through the file and pulled out one-sheets for
Ladies of the Chorus
and
Love Happy.
Marilyn had bit parts in both films and wasn’t even listed on the posters. Eric set the two sheets on the counter and then pulled them apart, pointing to the space between.

“That’s when
White Heat
was made!” Eric said triumphantly. “Oh, Christ, if she only could have made it! It would have been the best film of all time!”

“Eric, could you keep it down?” the clerk admonished. “This isn’t a ball park.”

“Why didn’t she? Why?”

“Frankly, Eric, I don’t give a damn!” The clerk made no effort to sound like Clark Gable.

Castigated, Eric fell silent and the clerk ignored him to help some other customers. Eric went through the file slowly, savoring each picture as if for the first time. Nine covers from
Life
magazines; the calendar pinup she had posed for in the nude during 1949 (because she was desperate for money, Eric thought, the same year she should have been in
White Heat);
the famous shot from
Seven Year Itch
of her standing over the cool air duct, her skirt billowing up and outward, exposing her legs. All the pictures projected her as the embodiment of an ideal sexual archetype, the model by which millions would come to measure themselves and others.

“You’ll always be mine,” Eric whispered, tracing her outline in the publicity still from
The Prince and the Showgirl,
letting his finger linger on her lips. The longing he felt for her was intense, overpowering. He knew so much about her. More than anyone. He was sure of it. And yet he’d never met her, never had her. It didn’t seem right.

“Look, Eric,” the clerk finally said, “you’ve been here for over an hour. Are you going to buy anything or not? You’ve got most of these anyway.”

Sighing, Eric handed the file back, keeping the nude calendar pose and the still from
The Prince and the Showgirl.

“I’ll just take these two,” he said.

“Pay up front,” the clerk said. Eric turned away, but the clerk stopped him. “Eric, watch your money.”

Eric had left his roll of thousands on the counter. He picked it up and put it back in his pocket.

“How come you try to set up credit when you carry around a wad like that?” the clerk asked, annoyed.

“Because she didn’t die until a few weeks ago,” Eric said.

“Oh, your aunt. That’s right. Sorry, Eric.”

“Yeah, sure.”

Leaving the bookshop, he stopped a moment in front of the Pussycat Theatre, where the doublebill of
Deep Throat
and
The Devil in Miss Jones
was going into still another year of consecutive play. He stared at the color stills of Linda Lovelace and Georgia Spelvin, suggesting some of the prurient rituals they subjected themselves to on the screen inside.

“Not you, Marilyn,” Eric said to himself, “you didn’t . . . you wouldn’t have . . .”

But as he walked away, continuing west toward Highland and the point where he had started his odyssey, Eric pulled Marilyn’s calendar pose out of the bag and stared at it. He regretted it immediately, closing his eyes and putting the picture away.

It was too late.

In his mind, he saw Marilyn’s face in the pictures in front of the Pussycat Theatre, her body adopting the pornographic poses . . . and others. Lurid, writhing acts of passion.

“No!” he pleaded out loud, “Please stop . . . no . . . please, no . . .” He was beginning to sweat. Everyone on the sidewalk was staring at him. He closed his mouth, bit his tongue. The pain was starting.

He walked on, his gait irregular, stumbling. The thoughts still came. It was just like with Aunt Stella. The more he tried to suppress the images, the more vivid they became. Her pale flesh, so soft to the touch . . . the smell of sweat and lilac . . . her in his arms . . . doing it alone, eyes on him . . . light, deep, knowing . . .