Editing Marilyn - Part II

Here is another excerpt that was edited from the book, which deals with my first physical meeting with Jane.

I had visualized Jane as a woman in her early 60s who was artfully nipped and tucked, glazed with perfect but slightly too troweled-on make-up, strutting in stilettos, and unable to let go of her platinum bombshell image that had served her so well 40 years earlier. I realize now I had been thinking of Marilyn’s best friend, Jeanne Carmen, the stylishly aging B movie actress who had ridden Marilyn’s coattails for so many years after her death. But my idealization could not have been more inaccurate. I was romantically anticipating a time traveler from Hollywood’s Golden Age, a vintage beauty ready to tell me the secrets of the stars.

            I was half right.

            “You must be Tony.” As I turned I fear my excited smile may have transformed into a slack jaw a little faster and bigger than was polite. I closed my mouth and forced a grin as I sized up Jane.

            She was no Jeanne Carmen.

            Propping the door with her foot, Jane was, as the snarksters might say, “short for her weight.” She used the door as a crutch and I could see by her body language, and stress in the corner of her eyes, she was in pain. Barely the thickness of a Daily Variety over five feet, my eyes immediately scanned down her attire, from the fresh (egg, I believe) stained pocket t-shirt, to the worn, baggy jeans, to the unlaced tennis shoes. On top of the shock of snow white short hair was a ball cap adorned in a Rainbow Flag and ACT UP pins. That little voice seemed to belie the woman I was seeing, someone with attitude, openly gay and a kind of salty old broad.

            I liked her instantly.

            “Jane?”

            “The one and only,” she said, as her eyes twinkled with a sweet innocence and her smile warmed the space around her. “Janice told me all about you.”

            I nervously used one of my favorite stock quips, “I was young, I needed the money.”

            “You’re even more handsome than she said,” finishing with a little giggle that I would come to know well.

            The ice sort of broken, I forced myself to abandon the fantasy and embrace the reality. Literally. I stepped forward, in more of a practiced move than an organic one, and made a clumsy attempt to hug her. Up close, I saw her eyes were a bright blue behind the wire rims and her tanned face was lined. As I put my arms around her, her squat little body felt like my grandmother’s. Despite an appearance that suggested she could handle herself, holding her I sensed her energy was delicate, even fragile. Between her face, her eyes, and her aura, I felt a life force that was not strong.

            I released her, stepped back, and to my horror, her already shaky balance sent her toppling backward, like a broken wind-up toy. A delicate hand caught the edge of the mailboxes – apparently, I would discover, in a move she was used to – and made the save before she crashed into the potted weeds.

            “Whoa,” she said, “my equilibrium’s a little off.”

            I rushed forward to help but she was already upright. “You okay?”

            She giggled. “Oh, yeah. Just the medicine. Sometimes it makes me dizzy. I guess the fact it keeps me alive is a small price for a little wooziness, huh?”

            I made sure she was stable before letting go. We were close, and for a brief moment, she studied my face. “Yup, definitely a looker,” with that little giggle again.

            “C’mon,” she said, hobbling away.

            We passed an open door with a screen on the unit marked “manager.”

            “Hey Mike,” she yelled. From somewhere inside, like a priest behind a confessional, came a garbled response. We stepped in the service elevator and she pulled back the metal accordion door and punched “3.” The elevator shuddered upward. At the second floor it inexplicably stopped and opened. There was no one around.

            Jane smiled. “Ghosts.”

            “Ghosts?” I repeated, feeling the word needed repeating.

            “Yup,” she said, as the car jerked, then continued up, sending Jane off balance again. She flopped gently against the wall. “Even my mother sees them. The ghosts.”

            “Your mother lives here, too?”

            “No,” she smiled slyly, leaving a theatrical pause. “She’s dead.”

            At her floor we stepped out onto more of a catwalk than a walkway. I watched her clutch the hand railing and waddle with great effort toward her apartment. I stood ready to wrest her back from the brink should she lose her balance again. I briefly imagined the headline in the Hollywood Reporter: “Former Monroe Pal Exits In Apartment Plunge,” cringing that they would probably refer to me as a telemarketer.

            But, no need to fret because we arrived at her door, with Jane still intact and fumbling for the key pinned to her shirt. I looked back over my shoulder. The walkway was outside and from that elevation, along with the fact that her building was on a slight rise just below Sunset, her view was pretty spectacular – slightly higher and far better than the view from my rooftop.

            “How long have you lived here?” I asked as we entered.

            “Nearly thirty years,” she said. “Rent’s only six hundred. Can you believe it?”

            Before I could register my shock that a top floor apartment just off Sunset would be priced like it was 1975, she added, “But it’s going up. Maybe as high as six-fifty.”

            I smiled to myself.

            “Girls! We’ve got company.”

            Girls? Janice had not mentioned that Jane had kids or roommates.             

            A smoky gray tabby darted past, and a large calico eyed me from an end table. The question of the girls had been answered. As we walked inside, the rush of punishing heat made the boiler room seem like Baskin-Robbins. The drawn shades didn’t help, as a matter of fact it made the place seem like a sweat lodge for geriatrics. A crappy little fan whirred a wholly inadequate breeze across the room. In the shafts of sunlight on either side of the shades I could see gossamer tufts of cat hair floating like little cirrus clouds on the breeze. I made a mental note to try not to inhale one.

            From an arm of the sofa, Lola, a white Persian shorn in a ridiculous lion cut, eyed me with penetrating blue eyes. It stared a hypnotizing hole through me, forcing my eyes away only to have them come to rest on Marilyn’s equally brilliant blue eyes, these gazing back at me from the Bert Stern litho hanging over the sofa. Jane’s oldest girl, Sally, lay across the back of the sofa, purring like a small motorboat in the distance.

            The sofa was draped in a wrinkled sheet and arrayed with all shapes and sizes of pillows, leading me to believe this was both Jane’s sofa and bed. At short arm’s length was a classic 50s TV tray that looked more like the pick-up window at a Walgreens pharmacy, covered as it was in pill bottles, vials and pill organizers. These were all in aid of Jane’s heart condition and phlebitis. This alarming pharmaceutical hodgepodge confirmed that Jane’s unsteady gait was no act and, despite having known her for all of five minutes, I was already concerned. I also sensed from this short encounter that we would become more than just two people trying to do a little business on Ebay.

            “Go ahead, sit,” she said. ‘That’s my mom’s chair.” I eyed the salmon chair and matching ottoman next to the sofa. Both pieces were reupholstered in cat hair, but I did as invited and began to lower myself onto the ottoman.

            “Watch my mom’s feet!” she blurted and I jumped slightly, causing Jane to giggle then laugh out loud. “Gotcha!”

            I sat, making sure I avoided mom’s feet.

            “Isn’t she beautiful?” asked Jane, as my eyes went back to the Stern litho, then realized she actually meant the faux mini-lion, Lola.

            “Yes, she’s beautiful.”

            Lola picked up on the attention and brushed against my arm.

            “She doesn’t take to too many people. She seems to like you. Go ahead and pet the lovely Lola,” she suggested.

            Before my hand could caress her head, Lola did a Ninja and put four perfect little slices across the back of my hand then leaped away. I looked down as the quadruplet lacerations filling with blood. Jane snickered. “Naughty girl.” She nodded to a box of Kleenex behind the chair. “Sorry. You can put that on it.” I grabbed a tissue and compressed the wound.

            Jane struggled to get seated and took a moment to get comfortable. She fumbled with several bottles of pills and found the one she wanted.

            I noticed several framed pictures of Ellen Degeneres and one of Gwyneth Paltrow. “I take it you’re a big Ellen fan?”

            “I love Ellen. She makes me laugh.”

            As Jane laboriously twisted caps off medicine bottles and popped various pills, we made small talk.

            “When did your mother die?”

            “Oh, it was about a year ago. I miss her. She lived in Arizona when she passed.”

            I pointed at the Stern litho of Marilyn. “Is that one you want to sell?”

            “Oh no,” then she smiled softly. “Marilyn watches over me at night when I sleep.”

            This confirmed the sofa/bed theory.

            As my eyes got accustomed to the shadows in the room I began to see Marilyn related memorabilia all over the place.

            “So Janice says you knew Marilyn really well. Is that true?”

            Jane nodded her head slowly, smiling wistfully. It was at that moment I realized that these were real memories and not just Hollywood hot air. “I knew her very well. We were the best of friends. And I mean the best.”