The 11 Year Itch

With my new book “Marilyn Monroe: My Little Secret” nearing publication, I had the itch to start blogging about the book’s status and my long journey of how it came to transpire. Some of you who are fans of my Facebook page, Marilyn Monroe: My Little Secret, are already privy to the information how, for a little over a decade now, I’ve been working on a true story about the woman who started Marilyn Monroe’s first fan club at 20^th Century Fox. For those of you just learning about the book, I invite you to become a fan on Facebook and follow my blog.

Now, there’s only so much an author can reveal about his/her book before it hits the shelf – or in many cases today, Kindle – but it’s the stories behind “the story” itself that can be just as intriguing. For instance, I never in my wildest dreams would’ve imagined that one day I would meet (let alone write about) a person who shared a direct correlation to unarguably one of the most famous movie stars of all time. Granted, as a kid growing up in Upstate New York, I was fascinated with all things Hollywood. Where or how the fascination came about is beyond me. All I knew was that one day I would be involved in the movie world, be it writing, directing, and for a fleeting moment, even starring in one. At the age of 17, I had accomplished all three… by filming my own home movies. On weekends, I would summon together my cousins and neighborhood friends and tell them we were going to shoot a movie. No script. No budget. Hell, we didn’t even have sound, being that I used my parent’s old 16mm movie camera. What we did have, however, was fun. Since it was the late ‘70’s, we didn’t have access to laptops, iPads, iPhones or a Wii-- We were our own entertainment. And I was the Cecil B. DeMille at the helm.

One of my epic productions was a recreation of Alfred Hitchcock’s 1963 classic, The Birds. My biggest dilemma was how to tackle the climatic final scene when Tippi Hedren’s character is attacked by an endless array of birds. Using my artistic genius – at least I thought it to be genius back then – I created an endless array of birds out of tube socks with cardboard beaks. I filled the beaks with ketchup so when my cousin (who portrayed Tippi) was repeatedly pecked, it would leave an illusion of blood streaked across her skin. Damn! If only youtube was around back then, I’m positive that movie would’ve gone viral!

Fast forward to the mid-eighties. After receiving a B.A. degree in English and Journalism at a SUNY college in Upstate New York, I moved to Manhattan. Hell’s Kitchen, to be exact, where high crime, crack heads, muggers and prostitutes were everywhere. And while it made for good writing material, I knew deep in my heart that Hollywood was calling me. I had hit the 11-year mark, which seems to be a running theme in my life, when I had the itch to leave the left coast for L.A. Ah yes, the bluffers paradise. Or as Woody Allen once said, “A place where they shoot too many movies and not enough actors who star in them.”

Speaking of actors, there’s an old expression in Hollywood how, ‘you’re only as good as your last picture,’ meaning that an actor’s popularity depends on how successful his or her last movie did at the box office. Well, the same holds true for a writer. You see, when I moved to L.A. the only movies I had under my belt were the ones I shot as a teenager. What I did have was what most people in New York would consider a solid writing resume, which consisted of several plays I had written that were actually produced, including my off-Broadway comedy, Tell Veronica! But this was L.A. The movie capitol of the world, and unless my last name was Neederlander, my plays and their favorable reviews meant basically squat to ‘the suits’ in the business. On the flipside, I did interview with a couple popular TV shows at the time who found my resume to be impressive, yet I was too over-qualified to be hired as a writer’s assistant on the shows.

But I never felt overwhelmed or defeated. Aside from the fact that this is where I wanted to be for as far back as I can remember, I was a firm believer that the universe hands you a gift when you are least likely to be looking for it. And that’s when I met the woman who started Marilyn Monroe’s fan club. Her name was Jane, who led me down what I refer to as ‘The Marilyn Rabbit Hole.’ At one time Jane had over 4,000 pictures of Marilyn; some candid, others publicity photos from back in the day when she was a 12-year-old girl running Marilyn’s fan club. Then, little by little, I began to unwrap the gift the universe gave me, and it finally dawned on me that this wasn’t the place I wanted to be, it was where I was destined to be in order to tell the story of “Marilyn Monroe: My Little Secret.”