Max Allan Collins - Bye Bye, Baby (The Memoirs of Nathan Heller)

For my favorite Marilyn look-alike

the one I married

Everybody is always tugging at you. Theyd all like sort of a chunk of you. They kind of like to take pieces out of you.

Marilyn Monroe

Marilyn never liked good-byes.

Lee Strasberg, from his funeral eulogy

CONTENTS

ONE

Somethings Got to Give!

May 23July 29, 1962

CHAPTER

The naked actress was laughing, splashing, her flesh incandescent against the shimmer of blue, now on her back, then bottoms up, her happy sounds echoing, as if she were the only woman in the worldand wasnt she?

She was, after all, Marilyn Monroe, and this was Foxs Soundstage 14, where she was shooting the film Somethings Got to Give, under the supervision of legendary Hollywood director George Cukor.

Nude scenes were common overseasBardot had become famous flashing her fanny in And God Created Woman but a major star like Monroe shedding for the CinemaScope camera? Just not done, even if she did have those notorious calendar shots in her past.

This was the closed set of all closed sets. A small army of security guards had been summoned by producer Henry Weinstein to cover the five entrances to the soundstage, after word of the nude scene wildfired across the lot. This was the toughest ticket in town, unless you had an in.

I had an in. Last night Id heard from Marilyns personal publicist, Pat Newcomb (calling at the stars request), that tomorrow would be the day of days on the Somethings Got to Give set.

Marilyn says you wanted to visit, Pat said, in her pleasantly professional way, sometime during filming. And this is it.

Mind my asking whats special about tomorrow?

She has a swimming scene and, knowing Marilyn, might just slip out of her suit.

I reminded Miss Newcomb that I needed two passes, and was assured theyd be waiting at the studio gate.

So how did I rate? Big-shot agent? Top Hollywood columnist? Producer sizing up MM for his next picture, maybe?

No. I was just a private detective, or anyway I used to be. Since my agency grew to three locations (LA, Manhattan, and the original Chicago office), Id become mostly a figurehead, bouncing between them, handling publicity and sucking up to big-money clients. I couldnt remember when I last knocked on a strange door or parked outside some motel with a camera, much less carried a gun.

But Nathan Heller, president of the A-1 Detective Agency, me, had indeed done a number of private eye jobs for Miss Monroe, starting with bodyguard duty in Chicago on her Gentlemen Prefer Blondes junket, and more recently tracking down a guy named C. Stanley Gifford, who she thought was her father, in the sense that he was the likeliest candidate for having knocked up Mom, who currently resided in the latest of many nuthouses.

Old C. Stanley missed the boat, or maybe his gravy train, when my client used the info I gathered to call her potential pop and say, This is Norma JeaneIm Gladys Bakers daughter. Apparently thinking this was a touch, the idiotunaware that Norma Jeane Baker had transformed herself, through no little effort, into Marilyn Monroehung up. On her second try, she got C. Stanleys wife, who told the caller to contact her husbands lawyer if she had a complaint.

Anyway, we were friendly, Marilyn and I, and for a while had been very friendly. In the interim I had transformed myself, through no little effort, into the private eye to the stars. This was a nice trick since I lived in Chicago, though the A-1s ongoing security job with the Beverly Hills Hotel meant I had a bungalow whenever and for however long I might need one.

I also had an ex-wife out here, a former actress now married to a once successful producer, neither of whom I gave a shit about. I gave much more than a shit about my teenage son, Sam, who was actually Nathan Samuel Heller, Jr., only we had called him Sam when he was little, to avoid having two Nates around. Before long, my wife was happy not to have any Nate around.

So Sam it was, now a happy fourteen-year-old. Why happy? Wouldnt you be, if you were a fourteen-year-old male whose father had got him onto the set of Marilyn Monroes nude swimming scene?

When you are divorced and your wife has custody of your only child, and the other dad is a film producer (once successful or otherwise), you have to work to stay on your kids good side. Sam was not impressed with celebrities, generally, having seen plenty, but this was different. I was fairly certain his first sexual experience had been with the signed-to-him nude Monroe calendar Id given him on his thirteenth birthday (his mother still didnt know about that).

This was his fifteenth-birthday present, even though this was May and the real date wasnt till September. Some gifts you grab when they present themselves.

Id kept the nature of what wed be witnessing to myself, just promising Sam a treat, and he put up with that. We cut each other plenty of slack, since we often had half a continent between us, and anyway, in my mid-fifties, I was pretty old for a teens dad.

Sam looked a lot like me, identical except for his mothers brown hair and not my reddish variety, and was already within two inches of my six feet. He was slender and so was IId lost my paunch in an effort to regain my youth.

So I looked goddamn good in my lightweight gray glen plaid Clipper Craft suit with lighter gray shirt (Van Heusen tab collar) and thin black silk tie. Sam was in a tan striped Catalina pullover and brown beltless Jaymar slacks. We were a sporty pair.

Keep in mind that I was already in solid with the kid for getting him out of school for the day. This was a Wednesday, and he had something like a week and a half left before summer vacation. So I was cool, for a dad.

He did complain that I didnt have a convertible, which in California was a criminal offense. My wheels, technically part of the A-1s fleet, were merely a white 1960 Jaguar 3.8, leather seats, walnut interior, disk brakes, automatic transmission.

Convertibles blow my business papers around, I said at the wheel, tooling around the Fox lot. And muss my hair.

Get it cut, he said, rubbing his hand over the bristle of his crew cut.

I dont like the smell of butch wax.

Come on, Dad. Grow up.

I didnt share with Sam my opinion of crew cuts, which was that they were for servicemen, bodybuilders, and homosexuals, not necessarily mutually exclusive groups. Kids his age didnt need having their sexuality undermined. In fact, my mission today was just the opposite.

Of course, in trying to impress my kidwhose other father was a producer (did I mention the fat prick used to be successful?)I should have picked a lot other than Foxs. The grand old studio was scrambling to stay afloat. Clouds of dust crowded the blue out of the sky over bulldozers making way for apartment buildings and office towers. The out-of-control Liz Taylor picture Cleopatra, currently filming in Rome, had required the selling off of such fabled backlot locations as Tyrone Powers Zorro hacienda, Betty Grables Down Argentine Way ranch, and Lana Turners Peyton Place town square.

Marilyns new picture, which Hedda Hopper and Louella Parsons called troubled, was in fact the only going project on the lot.

Jeez, Sam said, elbow out the rolled-down window. Its a lousy ghost town.

The streets of this soundstage city had once been hopping with cowboys and Indians, pirates and dancing girls. Even the trees and lawns were brown and dyingpalms and ferns, too. Had they cut off the water? Or had the water company cut off Fox?

As per Pat Newcombs instructions, I drove directly to Marilyns recently constructed bungalow, which had the look of a small prefab suburban house. I left Sam in the Jag and went up to the door, where a security guard was on watch; I showed my special pass, and he knocked for me.