The Blonde (27 page)
She nodded mechanically.
“No, I did not think so. Despite what you have sometimes implied to your friends in the press, I do not believe you have that in you. Now, mourn your friend, and remember that he was not your real father. Get some rest. Soon you will be going back to work. You understand what is at stake now, yes? And you—we have only glimpsed what you are capable of. If you put your mind to it, you can do anything, my dear. You can certainly win Jack Kennedy back.”
Los Angeles, November 1960
AS yet Walls had resisted all his mother’s exhortations to “smoke grass” with her and her coterie of bored, gorgeously put-together women friends. He had in fact never done any kind of drug. But he thought that maybe he knew what it felt like already, as he drove to work, merging from one surreally broad freeway to another, everything very fast and somehow also very slow. He was high on an idea that had first occurred to him in a bar in New York last May but had since coalesced and hardened and was now as simple and complete and gleaming as the truth. Marilyn Monroe, whose likeness his prep school roommate had pinned to the wall upside down, so that her bare legs were spread toward the ceiling, and whom he had thus for many years associated with the Clorox-like odor of that young man’s side of the room, was an agent. She was an agent of the Soviet intelligence apparatus, and she was an intimate of the next president of the United States, and as far as Walls could ascertain, he was the only G-man who knew.
To think of himself as a G-man, even in the privacy of his own mind, had always seemed ridiculous and slightly embarrassing to Walls. It was an appellation of movieland. But, pulling into the Bureau parking lot on a cloudless November day that was just cool enough for him to comfortably wear the slim-fitting black wool suit and narrow black tie that his mother had given him for his birthday, he thought that it did have a certain hammy appropriateness. He strode across the asphalt, for once pleased by the sentry of palm trees, the convertibles in shades of yellow and sky blue, the Technicolor California-ness of it all. He had smiles for everyone. As he passed his own
desk and proceeded, with two fresh cups of coffee in hand, toward Toll’s office, he even winked at his boss’s secretary, Susanna—whose legs were a frequent conversational topic, and whose eyes he had always found especially pretty—and decided that later he might ask her for a date. Then he would be remembered, at the Los Angeles field office, for two coups.
“Special Agent Walls.” Toll’s displeasure at this intrusion appeared to decrease when he saw the coffee in his subordinate’s outstretched hand. “Thank you. Although I must say Susie Q over there looks a whole lot better bringing my coffee.”
Walls glanced over his shoulder, showing his grin to the back of Susanna’s shellacked, mahogany bob. “I’ll bet.”
“Glad to see you, anyhow. I imagine you must be a little bored with nothing but Marilyn to do—I have a new job for you.”
“What?” Walls’s grip on the paper cup loosened, and he was lucky to catch it before he made a mess on the wide metal desk, which was also a burial ground of paperwork. The venetian blinds behind Toll cast bars of sunlight across this immense bureaucratic topography.
“You’ll be working for Special Agent Harvey. There’s some organizing down on the docks in Long Beach that smells wrong. Here.” He held out a folder for Walls, his eyes already shifting to whatever came next. “Your homework.”
“But sir, I—”
“Yes?”
“What about Marilyn?”
“Walls, don’t you read the paper?”
“Yes.” This was the moment he had been waiting for, and he didn’t hesitate in removing the folded
New York Times
from the crux of his armpit and placing it in front of Toll. “Do you see this?”
“See what?”
Walls leaned his hip against the desk, so that he could view the paper from
the same angle as his superior. A story about Marilyn’s divorce from Arthur Miller, with a shot of her looking lovely and distressed, ran beside a big picture of Kennedy, en route to Palm Beach, making a stop in Washington to drop his wife and daughter at their Georgetown home. The picture was of Kennedy deboarding his plane, his daughter in his arms and his wife ahead of him wearing a cloth coat that revealed her advanced pregnancy. The presence of these two items on one page of newspaper had seemed, to Walls earlier that morning, all the proof he would ever need.
Toll appeared less impressed, but Walls persisted. “I’ll bet she’s going to Florida, too, only there’s no way for me to know that because I don’t have a tap on her New York phone—”
Toll was shaking his head slightly, as though trying to knock water out of his ear. “Listen, kid, the thing I was hoping you had noticed in the news is that Kennedy made some announcements this week regarding his administration. He’s keeping Hoover. So we don’t want to ruffle any feathers just now. The Director doesn’t need to apologize to the president if his girlfriend finds a wire in her chandelier, got that? We’re friends for the time being—who knows what will change, and you’ve done good work, and I’d appreciate a detailed report with everything you have on Miss Monroe and John Kennedy. But let’s just let this one rest awhile, you understand?”
“But sir, it’s so much more than an affair—” He was furious with himself, almost disbelieving, that he hadn’t managed to get the story out yet.
“Oh, yeah?” Toll had switched to heavy irony, never a good sign. “What are they—deeply,
madly
in love?”
“Toll, she’s a spy.”
“A
what
?”
“She’s a Soviet spy. Did you know her first agent in town, Johnny Hyde, was Russian? He discovered her, got her nose and chin fixed, made her first big deals, and then he died.
Mysteriously
.”
“And he was KGB?”
“I don’t have anything conclusive on that yet, but the Gent has mentioned him a few times, and the Gent is working for them. Of that I’m certain.”
“The Gent?”
“Don’t know his real name yet, but he’s the one running her. I saw him in New York, at a distance, and closer in Tahoe, just for a minute. He was telling her how important she was to the people.”
“The people?”
“Yeah, you know, the people of Russia. The workers. The proletariats.”
“Maybe he just meant people who go to the movies?”
“No, no, I’m sure of it. If you had heard his tone, you’d be, too. And there’s more. The analyst she sees in New York, Marlene Kurtz, studied in Berlin before the war with a group of Freudian-Marxists, and to this day she’s on a list of analysts approved by the Communist Party. Marilyn met her through her husband’s analyst—
also
a Communist. And you should have heard this thing she said to Anna once: ‘A wise girl kisses but doesn’t love, listens but doesn’t believe, and leaves before she is left.’ Don’t you understand? She’s leading a double life. That’s what the Gent told her, or maybe even Hyde. How she has to behave in order to do what she does with Kennedy …”
“Who is Anna?”
“Oh, this girl I went on a few dates with. She works as Miss Monroe’s makeup artist sometimes. Anna is her real name, but Marilyn calls her—get this—
Anechka
.”
“You dated her makeup girl?”
Walls—who during his morning drive had rehearsed a line of argument that was by turns exquisitely witty and daringly cogent—found his conviction badly eroded. He did manage an affirmative head bob.
“Agent Walls, this is the FBI,” Toll said, hitting every syllable with weary exasperation. “It is standard procedure, when you are working on an assignment, to check in every two hours, and if you are at a lady friend’s house, to leave her name and number with your supervisor. I saw no mention of any
‘Anechka’ while I was reviewing your file for Agent Harvey this morning. I am further alarmed—if what you are saying is to be believed—by your failure to file timely paperwork on the object of your surveillance, as much of what you are alleging does not appear in your weekly reports. But I am mostly alarmed by the fact that you might actually believe that Marilyn Monroe is capable of infiltrating the highest office in this country on behalf of a foreign enemy, when everybody in this town knows she is a bimbo who can’t memorize a simple page of dialogue.” Toll sighed and drained what was left of his coffee, before handing the cup over to Walls. “Throw this out for me. And don’t share any of that with anybody else, kid. I’ll just chalk it up to you losing sleep listening in on breathy nonsense, but others won’t be as kind, you understand?”
Words had abandoned him. He wasn’t even sure he could recite his theory now if asked—all he had was a seething desire to put his fist through plaster. “Yes,” he did finally manage.
“You got that folder? The Long Beach one. And remember that this is Special Agent Harvey’s job; you’re just the office boy on this one.” Walls saw the folder in his hands, nodded, and focused on the floor as he retreated, quickly as possible. His chest burned with shame, and he couldn’t tolerate the possibility that if he lingered he might actually go red in the face. He had almost succeeded in leaving the scene of his humiliation when a sweet, feminine voice stalled him.
“Hey, Doug?”
He turned, nearly dropping the file. The two coffee cups, one full and one empty, were awkward in his hands.
Susanna was smiling at him with glossed, darkly pink lips.
“Yeah?”
“I just wanted to say you look good in that suit.”
New York, February 1961
SNOW was falling, a white coverlet over Manhattan, turning back time so that cars stalled and disappeared and the skyline might have been a ridgetop through the blur. The city appeared for once a simple, old-fashioned place, but for Marilyn the weather only made her think of skiing, sledding, snowball fights, and scenes of happy childhood that belonged in the life stories of other people, and she took no pleasure in it. She sat with her feet on the windowsill in the room that had once been Arthur’s study and watched it coming down, hoped it would go on and form big, impassable banks, so that finally the reporters who loitered outside her building would be forced to go home. They had abandoned her briefly over Christmas, but when she returned from her trip to Mexico (the purpose of which had been to obtain a hasty divorce), they had smelled blood and flocked back. In fact, there was blood everywhere. That same week, Arthur had attended Jack’s inauguration with his photographer friend, and she’d had to marvel at this almost unconscious ability to go on spitting in her wounds.
“Telephone for you.”
Marilyn glanced over her shoulder at Lena, eyebrow raised. She no longer hoped Jack might call, and she and Arthur had lawyers to communicate whatever needed communicating. Alexei she had not heard from since the day he’d come to tell her he’d killed Clark Gable. She wore black as she had every day since Clark’s death, black slacks and a black turtleneck, and thought of his widow, who by then had made it obvious that she was not interested in Marilyn’s condolences. “Who is it?”
“It’s Alan Jacobs’s office. They say it’s important. Mr. Jacobs himself wants to talk to you.”
Marilyn slowly put one foot and then the other on the ground. She had hired Alan Jacobs as her press agent because she trusted that he had her best interests at heart, but she was currently so indifferent to her own interests that talking to him struck her as a waste of both their time. “Okay,” she said finally, and followed Lena into the living room. The furniture was new, hers alone, and looking at it made her sad.
“I have Miss Monroe,” Lena told the girl.
“Hey, Al,” Marilyn said as she took the receiver and moved to the window to see if the snow had thinned the crowd below.
“How are you, sweetheart?”
Marilyn rolled her eyes. “Grand, Al. I’m just grand.”
“Those boys still hounding you?”
“They can’t do much hounding if I don’t leave the apartment.”
“Sweetheart, that’s no way to live. You’re a young woman, at the height of her powers. Don’t let old Willy Loman get you down. He’s a bore! You were too much for him, that’s all. We both know you’re only getting started. Romantically, professionally …”
“I need a job.”
“Yes, dear. But in the meantime why don’t we give those boys a happy story, so that they’ll leave you alone awhile?”
“What did you have in mind?”
“Sinatra’s called you, hasn’t he?”
“Once or twice.” In fact, it had been more than that, but she had felt a little sick just hearing Lena say the name of Jack’s drinking buddy.
“He’s interested, Marilyn. He knows it would be a boon for him to be married, and he thinks you’re the only one big enough for him.”
“Oh, wonderful. That’s swell. Really romantic.”
“Marilyn—I’m not saying you have to marry him. Just go on some dates.
Get photographed looking lovely. Have some fun. You know what they say about his—
you know
.”
“About his cock? Yeah, Al, I’ve heard what they saw about his cock.”
“It is supposedly very large.”
She was silent awhile contemplating what, in the vast spectrum of her displeasure, she should articulate. “But he himself is an odious little man.”
“Yes,” Alan allowed. “But he’s very romantic with the ladies, especially leading ladies. And there’s none like you. So why not let him show you a good time? No strings attached. Just some nice stories in the columns, some pictures in the magazines, both of you looking sexy and smiling and happy. And if you don’t like him, you let him go.”
