hollywood's dead
PG13. 9299 words.
Spans late 1940s to late 1960s.
Classic Hollywood RPF featuring Marlon Brando, Paul Newman, Audrey Hepburn, James Dean, Marilyn Monroe, and Montgomery Clift, among a host of others – seriously I name-dropped everyone.
Summary: You used to be a real thing of beauty.
Note: For![]()
portions_forfox and ![]()
xx_pinkstar, very belated. You don't even know, I had a crazy color-coded timeline for this. I really tried to keep it as semi-realistic as possible, so everyone interacts with someone they could have possibly interacted with, i.e.: were in the same time at the same place. But I feel like I left so much ground uncovered still! I could write old hollywood rpf forever and ever I think, there is so much to saaaaay.
I.
The first name Marlon hears in New York City is Montgomery Clift.
It trips over the excited tongues of pretty girls and straight-backed boys, sets the eyes of other actors alight, tip-taps down the streets five paces ahead of Marlon. He'd like to go one goddamn day without hearing the name Montgomery Clift. You're next, they all say. When we suck him dry, you're next.
Marlon is resolved to be unimpressed, and that holds until the first time he sees Monty on film. Goddamn, Marlon thinks, furious, studying that handsome face up on the screen, big and gray and sharp-featured, goddamn. Monty's a switchblade, slim and determined, jabbing you in the ribs and sticking there. Marlon remembers the movie for a long time after he sees it. It burns in him when he's up on stage, in class, on the street. Montgomery Clift, everywhere Marlon goes.
He sees Monty at a party once and ignores him, or at least fakes it. Really he's watching, and he knows Monty knows, because Monty is watching him too. They circle each other like jungle cats. One of the old socialite ladies with the manicured roving hands says those boys sure don't like each other.
No, Marlon ought to tell her. No, it's not that. It's that they're the same, him and Monty, except Monty is a knife wound and Marlon is a closed-fist punch.
Once Marlon's on his bike revving down Madison Avenue and there's Monty, an apparition, faceless amongst the throng because he chooses to be. Marlon pulls over, brakes, calls out, "Hey, Clift!"
Monty turns, a scowl already twisting his beautiful face.
"People tell me I remind them of you," Marlon says.
Monty arches a dark eyebrow. "Oh yeah?"
Marlon gives him a look up and down, a slow steady kind of look. "I don't think so," he says, and races off. It's difficult to determine over the motorbike's roar, but he thinks he hears Monty laughing.
A couple of years later he's on Madison again, on foot with his hands in his pockets, saying goodbye to New York City once again for Hollywood. Goodbye, old stomping grounds. Goodbye, dirt and grime. Goodbye, buildings boxing him in and ever-present press of people. Marlon'll miss ya.
He side-steps a crack in the sidewalk and damn near careens into an old broad in a fur, flashing her an apology grin that makes her wrinkled cheeks flush. When he turns away his eyes meet those of a petite little thing, a girl with brown hair to her shoulders – a little bird, more like, ready to take right off. She's got big eyes like a doll's, lids sliding shut and open again in a languorous blink.
When he turns his grin on her, she merely peers at him with her big doll eyes, impassive. They pass each other by but just before they both turn away, her mouth curves upwards playfully. It's like the breath is knocked right out of him. He's seen a lot of girls, been with a lot of girls, touched them and watched them and tormented them the good way and the bad. But that girl sucks his breath right out of his lungs and before he can toss out a smart-aleck comment, she's long gone.
Later in life he will learn her name and sit beside her at a dinner and he will not be able to say a single word.
Monty finds him again after Streetcar one night. Apparently Monty had come before, sat in the audience and lingered in the wings afterwards, waiting. But that had been the night Marlon broke his nose in the customary pre-show brawl with Teddy the stagehand and he'd been rushed to the hospital immediately after the performance since he'd refused to miss it.
Monty comes again, though, and leans on Marlon's vanity with his arms crossed, ankles crossed. "You used to be a real thing of beauty," Monty says. "Look at that sorry face now."
Marlon smiles widely and feels the ache of it all through his head. Bruises cover his face, black and red and pained, and his noise is swollen, the straight line of it definitively ruined. He doesn't mind it much. "Got character," he says. "You could use some."
Monty uncoils, rises with that easy grace he's got, and moves up close into Marlon's space. They're just about the same height. He sets his fingers lightly on Marlon's cheeks, thumbs pressing directly into the sore spots on either side of his nose. It hurts like a motherfucker. Monty's eyes are lighter than Marlon expected, almost green, and he's got that determined look he gets when he's acting. Marlon wets his lips and waits and revels in the dull pain of Monty poking his bruises – and then, surprising him, Monty says, "Show me the stage."
The theater has emptied, and they wave goodbye to the last few stragglers heading home. Monty climbs the set stairs, investigates the false upstairs apartment, and then climbs down the back of the structure, emerging once again through Stanley and Stella's bedroom window. Marlon watches him with hands in his pockets and his entire body tensed, ready to strike.
"Wait, wait," Monty says, pausing where he'd been fiddling with the paper lantern, "Hold up," and he goes back up the staircase, leans on the railings looking down at Marlon. "You gotta do it. You gotta call for me."
Marlon rolls his eyes, smiling. "You get your ass down here, Clift."
Monty gives him an unimpressed look. "You know what you gotta do, Brando."
He's not a man made easily uncomfortable, and he's not shy either, so Marlon tilts his head back and shouts it to the rafters. He gives it the full stage effort, the same effort that has him hoarse-voiced at the end of every night. His throat feels raw; his bruises ache. Monty, he shouts, over and over, Montgomery, until Monty has descended. On the final step, amused but attempting to remain serious, he reaches out and grips Marlon by the shoulders to haul him closer.
Goddamn, Marlon thinks, looking at him so close, closer than a camera's kiss. Goddamn, but Monty is beautiful. Dark ominous brows, deep-set eyes, high cheekbones, wrinkles already marking the ghosts of his expressions. "I think you got enough character," Marlon decides, and then lets Monty kiss him.
The kiss burns right through all of Marlon's sore muscles, his sore face. There's gotta be some word for it, but Marlon was never a very good student and so he doesn't remember. But there must be a word for when two forces run headlong into each other, like trains crashing nose-to-nose on the wrong tracks. That's what kissing Monty is, running headlong into something going just as fast. The kiss is hard, unyielding, unforgiving. Monty grips his shoulders with white-knuckled hands. Marlon is waiting to touch him, waiting until Monty is on edge for it, until he gets that whining look in his eyes like a hungry dog.
Eventually Monty puts his arms tight around Marlon's neck, kiss as painful as the bruises, and that's when Marlon finally moves. Very, very carefully, without touching Monty's actual body at all, he tugs Monty's shirt untucked. Then he slips his hands underneath, lays his palms directly on the bony bend of waist and hip. Marlon feels a little shiver go through the other man and he grins.
Jerking a hand towards the rows of empty seats, Marlon says, "You want me to take you in front of an audience?"
A little of the humor fades from Monty's eyes and vulnerability takes its place. "Yeah," he says, "Yeah."
So that's where Marlon fucks him, on the still-mused stage sheets of the Kowalski marital bed. Monty's a real hellcat, he thinks, one of the best he's ever had. Monty's the best at everything Marlon turns his hand to, and that's why he wants him, 'cause they're mirrors, because they're the same.
II.
It's raining, so Paul hoists the collar of his jacket up around his face and ducks into an alcove in a building's edifice. He lights a cigarette first and pulls his script from inside his coat second, eyes scanning the lines with resignation.
Jackie is back at the little house in St. George with Scottie and Stephanie, and by now she's probably learned not to expect him. Paul knows that he ought to be with her, but he needs something, he's got to have something, something better than standing around in the background of someone's TV screen. There's the wife and the kids, the third on the way, and Paul still kicking around trying to make a name for himself.
A shove to his shoulder shakes him from his maudlin thoughts. It's followed by Jimmy's whole body squeezing into the negligible amount of space remaining in Paul's alcove. Jimmy takes the cigarette and takes the script and Paul laughs a little, letting him.
"I'm going out for this too," Jim says, pushing his glasses up his nose. They're splattered with raindrops.
"Fight you for it," Paul suggests dryly.
James gives him one of those quick uneasy grins before fisting a hand in Paul's jacket and dragging him out into the rain.
"You're gonna ruin my suit," Paul laughs, "And I've only got the one –"
"Eh, you don't need a suit," Jimmy says, looking back over his shoulder at Paul. His look lingers just a beat too long, and is just a bit too serious; like Jimmy. Paul has gotten used to the attention from him.
He's James Dean, for auditions, and Jimmy for any other time. The uniform's the same no matter the occasion: glasses and pea coats and black sweaters with holes, though he'll lose the glasses when he's trying to impress someone. This is how they met: they kept showing up at the same auditions for the same blonde-haired, blue-eyed parts. But Jim's got the kind of loping ease in his body and his movements that Paul sorely lacks, and a natural way of drawing the eye. He doesn't seem aware of it; or maybe he's very aware of it, maybe he spent hours in his Los Angeles bedroom trying to emulate that Brando sprawl.
When James gets drunk he dials Brando or Clift, breathily awaiting the sound of their voice on the other end. He gets so morose when they hang up that he drinks harder, no longer friendly drinking but something deeper, and he ends up trying to press messy kisses to Paul's mouth. Paul extricates himself carefully each time, a companionable hand on Jimmy's neck, and takes it as his cue to leave. He goes down to the ferry, tiredly trudges home and accepts the sticky hands of his children and Jackie's clear exhaustion and thinks there has to be more to it than this.
Three days a week Paul sells encyclopedias on Staten Island after his round of auditions. Twice he passes out on Jimmy's couch instead and only comes home after everyone is asleep. During breakfast he pretends to munch baby food and baby fingers, delights in his children's giggles. He tries to ignore the speculative way Jackie watches him over her morning coffee and cigarette.
Sometimes Paul goes to see plays with Jim and the rest of the gang. Paul's heart twinges guiltily every time he thinks of Jackie alone at home with the kids, but she's been different since they were born, less interested in the things she used to care about most. Still, he can't help but think she'd like the one they see tonight, about a little French girl being trained up to be a courtesan. The girl in question, Gigi – Audrey, Jimmy tells him, waving around the playbill – has a sweet, lilting voice and an accent Paul can't place but doesn't think is French.
If it weren't rude, Paul would want to lean over on the seat in front of him like he used to do in the movies when he was a kid. That's what she does: she makes him want to lean in real close, lean in until he's fallen in, submerged like into a deep pool. He wonders if that's something that can be taught, because Paul studied acting and he doesn't remember any lessons on it.
One of Jim's friends knows one of her friends and she is persuaded out with the rest of them. Audrey has hair to her shoulders, a waist that couldn't span more than a hand's width, and the extremely straight spine of a dancer.
"Where you from?" Paul asks, leaning in to be heard over his raucous friends. He glances at them, grins at her, says, "These clowns…" and shakes his head.
She smiles a little, prettily, and it occurs to him that when she smiles her whole face seems to tilt up the same way – eyes, lips, all curving to smile. "They're all right," she says, and, "Europe," vague. She probably thinks he's some American knucklehead who doesn't know the difference.
Paul has his fingers hooked around the neck of a beer bottle, trying to keep his eyes averted so he won't end up looking at her like she's a specimen. He can't get over how this polite little girl with her shy, animated expressions is so very watchable. She'd surprised him by ordering a scotch and water, and surprised him again when she mentions dancing as a chorus girl in London. He tells her she was probably a good deal too graceful for it. She pauses and smiles and is embarrassed and says no, no, but it wasn't for her anyway.
"I'm a real terrible dancer," he tells her. "I played football, so all I know how to do is crash into people."
It's not exactly the truth but he doesn't know what else to say to her, and it makes her laugh, a pretty sound. "Why, I'll teach you, come here."
She's nearly his height, especially with her very straight stance and the regal lift of her chin. Her hand in his is surprisingly strong. "Now," she says softly, glancing down at their feet and then up into his eyes, her own so wide, so warm. There's a twinkle in them, playful. "If you're not very good and your partner is, and the situation isn't very formal, it is acceptable to allow her to show off a bit. As a diversion."
Paul laughs. "As a diversion, alright."
"Like so." And she twists in his arms, twirls, her skirt fanning out and ends of her hair catching the light. Paul stills her with a hand on her waist, feeling how very light she is, like a little bird. Her hands press against his chest and she laughs brightly, without restraint.
"Watch yourself, he's married!" someone calls with a cackle, probably Jimmy.
"Oh, it's all right," Audrey says, but she's looking up at Paul. "We're all friends, aren't we?"
It's a good anecdote – Audrey Hepburn taught me to dance– but for some reason he never tells it.
He thinks of it later when he's understudying in the play, when he's finally got something, and the director is snapping, "You gotta loosen up, Newman, you can't just stand there!"
Running through the play with the understudies is the highlight of Paul's whole week, but he seems to frustrate more than please, and it makes him wonder how he landed this part at all. The dancing scene is important, seductive, a turning point, and Paul is as stiff as a statue, letting Miss Woodward show off when it's meant to be him doing so.
She is the other reason he looks forward to the understudy run-throughs, though he's probably the reason she dreads them. She's got her blonde hair all tucked up and her mouth is an exasperated line, arms crossed and dark brows rising as her eyes roll heavenward. There is something cold and sharp and commanding in the way she holds herself, something that shuts off easy as a switch when she wants, and she rarely wants that around Paul. Joanne Woodward is something, that's for sure, and she thinks he's something dull.
"You gonna stand there all night, Nebraska, or are we going to do it again?" Joanne says. She turns away from him to walk briskly back to her original spot.
Paul is annoyed to be chided in front of everyone like that. "I'm from Ohio," he mutters, stalking back to his mark.
"All the same north of the Mason-Dixon," she says. She smiles, sharp. "And you just look so corn-fed."
"Some Southern belle," Paul says. "I heard you all had manners."
"We do when we want to," Joanne replies, and there's a little ripple of amusement.
"From the top," the director says, and there they go again.
Paul's not sure if it's the anger or just the desire to show Joanne up, but the scene is different this time. It's something he's only tasted before, something that had brushed his grasping fingertips but always evaded him. It's electric. He feels like he's on fire and when he touches her he knows she feels it too, he can see it in her eyes. He pulls Joanne close and feels her fall into it, against him, and for half a second he forgets what he's supposed to be doing. He's in it, for once in his life, isn't just standing at the precipice.
"Not so bad, Ohio," she tells him after, and he fancies she's a little breathy.
"Thanks, Georgia peach," he replies. The look she gives him is pure exasperation. It makes him grin.
Six months into the play, when Roman Holiday is in theaters and Joanne has been letting too much softness creep into her constant irritation with him, Paul demands, "Why don't you like me?"
Though what he means is: why do you pretend you don't like me?
"'Cause I have to," Joanne says. Her furious eyes are a clear, cool green. "Because otherwise I might kiss you, and where would that get me?"
"Kissed," Paul says. It would be a joke if he were joking.
Against all odds, Joanne smiles. "You're a rascal, Newman," she says. "And a girl's got to be wary of rascals."
III.
Audrey endeavors to be thoughtful and Audrey endeavors to be polite, but even she has limits, and that limit is currently the very ancient man talking her ear off. She sips her champagne and nods and mm's along, trying to look attentive but instead running through ballet positions in her head.
She's so very focused on not looking bored that she nearly misses it when another man slurs, "Tough luck."
Audrey blinks. Automatically, she says, "Excuse me, sir," and turns from the very old man to the much younger one now at her side.
Marlon Brando looks sleepy-drunk, clutching a glass of amber-toned liquor in one large hand, suit rumpled and loose at the collar. Her heart speeds up slightly in her chest. Her eyes widen. "Excuse me?" she says.
"Tough luck," he repeats, takes a swallow. "On the – on the ¬–"
"The award?" she suggests, smiling faintly. "It's quite alright, I've already got one." She finds it easier to be pleasant on familiar ground such as this; she's been saying the same thing to everyone all night. "I ought to be congratulating you! Really, it was a wonderful performance. You must be very proud."
He shrugs, mutters, "Doesn't matter." It isn't spoken like he's trying to be humble or unassuming – rather that it truly doesn't make a lick of difference. He'd seemed so charming and personable on stage, a marked change from the man who sat beside her at a dinner last month. He'd been surly and silent, ignoring every attempt she made to converse until eventually she'd given up altogether. Drunk and low-voiced, now, he is much closer to that reality than the man on the stage. His eyes bore into her, searching.
"I think I saw you once," he says.
"Yes, a few weeks –" Audrey begins, but he stops her.
"No, years," he says. She's startled that he remembers.
"On the street," she says.
"Yes," he murmurs, nods. He looks down, free hand rubbing the back of his neck. It's a gesture almost self-conscious, and his expression is almost shy.
She remembers seeing him with embarrassing clarity. She remembers his painfully handsome face, the wild rakish grin tossed over his shoulder. She had only been in New York for a few weeks at most and she hadn't recognized him, though in retrospect she isn't sure how. Her pulse had picked up then as it does now. She does not look for Mel in the crowd, though perhaps she ought to.
"I thought you were –" he starts suddenly, breaking off. He catches her eye again. "Lovely."
She blushes a little, involuntarily, and is glad it can be easily blamed on the heat of the room.
"You are lovely," he says, with that almost shy look again, and comprehension zings through her abruptly. Why, he's nervous, she realizes. Just like that the brute is chased away and she sees again the young man on stage, the young man grinning at her over his shoulder.
She is called away before the appropriate response can find its way to her lips. She looks back just once to see Marlon still watching her, the glass in his hand held cradled against his chest.
Audrey rings him after a fight with Mel. That's partly the reason she does it, but partly she's just been thinking of him ever since, like the echo of a particularly sweet dream. "I've gotten your number from someone," she says, adds resolutely, "I'd like a drink, would you?"
There is a beat of scratchy silence and then a near unintelligible, "Yeah, yeah, alright."
Audrey leaves in what she'd been wearing that day – nothing special, just slim black pants and a flannel shirt tied at the waist over a high-necked top. Her shoes are flat. Her purse is wicker. She looks utterly benign, utterly boring.
He is slouching in his doorway, waiting for her. "Was it really a drink you came for?" he asks. "Or the other?"
Audrey remembers his nervousness, the way sullenness had turned shy. "I don't see why I can't have both," she says, and uncharacteristically steps past him into the apartment.
His place is expectedly messy, smaller than she thought it would be. There are a lot of boxes, perhaps he's moving. He watches her from the doorway, still, a picture box of blue sky and tan buildings behind him. His hands are in his pockets. His gaze is intense.
"You got a husband," he says.
Audrey pauses in where she had been looking at a book resting atop one of the boxes, lifting her eyes to meet his stare unblinkingly. "Yes," she says. "Yes, Marlon, I have a husband."
She wants to ask, Do you see a lot of women who have husbands? But her politeness prevents it.
He shifts, mood shifting with body into sudden affability, an easy smile gracing his face. "How 'bout that drink?" he says, and shuts the door, shuts out picturesque and false Los Angeles. All at once it no longer feels like a film about an affair, but an affair, the two of them in a dim room in the late afternoon, two people who don't know each other at all.
Something in him is reminiscent of Bill – but no, best not to think about that.
"Scotch, if you have it," she murmurs. "Scotch and water."
She watches him while trying to appear as though she isn't, catching his shape at the edge of her field of vision. Though he's not too tall there is something large about him, looming, with big hands and muscular arms, nothing like Audrey usually likes, nothing like anyone she's ever been with.
Mercurial. That's what it is, that's what's so like Bill. A changeable nature that made her seek out steady Mel, whose disappointments crept beneath his mild surface instead of exploding out of him.
When he gives her the drink, he stands much too close. "Here ya go, Miss Hepburn," he murmurs. He tips his own drink back, ice clinking.
She tries not to gulp hers, instead taking slow tiny sips, and with each one he seems somehow closer, and closer still. Eventually he is close enough that all she sees is the wide breadth of his shoulders and the way his t-shirt stretches over his body. He takes the cup from her hands. The hair on his forearms is fine, almost golden. He is a collection of geometric configurations. He is planes and lines and points connecting harshly, he is the contrasting softness of mouth and eyes. The bump in his nose is visible so close. He looks Roman. He looks like Marc Antony, underdressed in a too-small Los Angeles apartment.
"I am not made of glass," she tells him, sensing his hesitancy even as she swallows her own.
"You're like one of those…" He touches her, Marlon's big hands running up her sides. "One of them little ballerinas inside the music box."
She smiles. "That's lovely," she says.
He undoes the tie of her overshirt. "I must say I was surprised to hear from you." He is gentle peeling the shirt down her arms, gentle pulling the other one up over her head. She is briefly self-conscious.
"I must say I was surprised to call," she says quietly. He touches her skin now, a hand stretching out over her spine, another on her neck tilting her face up. She meets his dark eyes and feels a slight hitching of her breath.
Looking into her eyes with the same odd attentiveness, he says, "You mustn't be shy. There's nothing you could do that would make me think you were anything other than wonderful."
She's certain it's just some kind of seduction, but the words do their job. She takes a relaxing breath. "Even if I said you were a lousy actor?"
He throws back his head and laughs.
Marlon will pick her up and put her on the bed as easily as a leaf caught on the wind. He will kiss her for the first time in his messy unmade bed and she will run her fingers over the geometry of his musculature, as breathlessly in the thrall of his rough beauty as any girl would be. He will make love to her. He will be gentle, like she is the ballerina from a music box. She will mind, but only a little. She will feel consumed by him for the time that it lasts and she will go back to her life afterwards as though she dreamt the entire afternoon.
She walks for a while after, even though no one walks anywhere in Los Angeles. It is like no city she's ever known, sprawling and endless and fake as the sets built upon it, a movie city, a movie of a city, unreal. People notice her and make a fuss here like they don't in New York or anywhere else. But right now she needs to breathe.
Silhouetted against the sunlight there is an hourglass, a halo of messy blonde curls, ankles bound by delicate shoes. The woman wears a coral dress with matching lipstick, white gloves white purse white shoes. Audrey has the briefest, most illusory flash of and there's what I'll never be but it fades almost immediately. She won't give in to that sort of thing anymore.
The woman drops her purse, items spilling along concrete. Audrey bends to help her pick it all up, their different shapes casting different shadows.
"What a lovely color," Audrey says, wiping grit off a lipstick with her fingers and replacing the cap. "You're lucky it wasn't crushed."
"Yes, thank you," Marilyn says softly. "You're very kind, thank you."
"No trouble," Audrey says, smiling reassuringly.
When she returns home, she sinks into a very hot bath and remains until it is very cold and her fingers are very pruney. Far from satisfied, she feels feverish. Even in the cool water she is hot, her mind distracted, caught up in an afternoon's dreaming.
She is sure of one thing: they will not stay in Los Angeles much longer.
IV.
Jimmy has a God, and it is the light of a film projector.
Jimmy's church is a large empty room with rows upon rows of velvet-covered seats, all facing a pulpit upon which images dance back and forth. Sometimes the images are flat, gray or Technicolor; sometimes they are solid as Jimmy, touchable and real on a vast stage.
Jimmy has saints, too. Jimmy's saints are men who spit forth wicked beauty, women with demons in their eyes. He pays them tribute with the breadth of his devotion, which is deep and wide as the sea. He gives them his anxious heart on the line, his anxious heart waiting to hear that Brando drawl, see that Clift melancholia.
"Gotta relax, babe," says Sal. "Nobody's gonna fuck you if you act damn crazy."
Sal makes Jimmy laugh, his vulgar sense of humor hidden behind that baby faced exterior. Jimmy likes that Sal is hungry in the same way he is, and he likes that Sal gives blowjobs like some people give hello kisses. Jim's best nights in L.A. are spent with Sal and Natalie, driving up to spots high enough to take in the whole city. They sit out on blankets, Jim's head in Natalie's lap. She touches his hair gently and says, "I worry about you, Jimmy, honey, I really do."
But he worries about Natalie, because she is beautiful in a way that will only be ripped apart.
Other nights are spent just driving around with sweet Eartha, her hand on his on the gearshift. She wears a floral scarf tied over her hair so they can keep the top down. Her voice is low, musical when she says, "You gotta slow down. I don't like this car one bit, Jamie, it'll kill you."
Jim just laughs.
His days are tangled up making deals, evenings dedicated to driving, nights – oh, Jimmy's nights. Some nights he doesn't sleep at all, playing bongos in his apartment until dawn. Some nights he drinks in clubs until everything is fuzzy and soft. Some nights he crawls into the beds of a million men, and few of them are men he loves. Isn't that how it goes?
Eartha's always telling him he goes too fast with everything but that's the only speed Jim knows.
Once, lonely for New York and the life he led there, he begs Paulie for a block of time. Paul is a man adrift. Paul is between wives but he's in love with Joanne, everyone knows he's in love with Joanne, especially Jackie.
So it's a weary fella who drops down into Jimmy's passenger seat, tired as he is handsome. Sometimes Jim used to kiss Paul just to see how he'd react; sometimes Paul would let him. They go to the movies and sit in the back row, slide down low in their seats with their feet up like real assholes, munching popcorn. Mischief lights Paul's face. Marilyn Monroe is on screen, eyes half-lidded and glossy red lips parting in a dazzling smile. Jim wants to cross himself out of respect for this sainted siren dripping in diamonds.
"Not for me," Paul decides.
"No, you like your girls a good deal colder, huh, Paulie?" Jim says, and cuts off whatever Paul's annoyed response will be with, "Let's go down to the water."
His desire is to make Paul unwind a little. The strip out of their clothes and submerge themselves in the chill salt sea. Jim emerges sing-songing, "A kiss on the hand may be quite con-tin-en-tal –"
"Shut the fuck up," Paul says, laughing. The moon reflects in his blue eyes, his white teeth, the shine of water on his tan skin. An ocean god, that Paul, and only Jimmy here to marvel at him. What a wonder.
Sternly, Paul adds, "Eyes in your head, Dean."
Jim spends most of his time fucking men, almost all of his time, and worshipping women – Dizzy back in New York and the way she'd dance; Eartha's soul-sweet husky voice and eyebrow arching with wisdom; Natalie's one thousand freckles and that funny shy wit; Pier who never backed down. Marilyn, who James has never met except in his triple feature movie palaces, though once he called Brando and heard her in the background – very soft, saying, "Now who was that?"
That's facetious. He worships men too. Case in point:
Paul sits on the sand, which sticks to his wet skin in great coarse swathes. He looks like a statue slowly crumbling. He's not naked but he might as well be, fabric of his skivvies clinging white and revealing. Waves lap at Jim's ankles as he steps out of the water. Looking at Paul he feels the same kind of rushing that he feels when he's driving very, very fast.
Paul tilts his head back, meeting Jim's gaze. "You lookin' so hard 'cause you can't see a damn thing without your glasses?"
"Looking 'cause there's something to see," says Jim.
Amusement curls up a corner of Paul's mouth. "Sit your ass down, Dean."
Paul reaches over to their pile of clothes for a pack of cigarettes as Jim sits, legs tucked beneath him. A pearly drop of water slips over the curve of Paul's thigh and Jimmy is tempted to trace its path with his finger. "You gonna marry her, Paulie?"
"Joanne?" Paul lights up, exhales pale smoke. "I'd like to."
A simple, gentlemanly declaration that speaks nothing of the family he will leave behind. There used to be a wedding ring on Paul's finger but now there is only a strip of pale skin.
"But you don't want to talk about Joanne," Paul says.
Jim looks up. "No," he says evenly. There are a few things he could say. He could say, Let's call up Eartha and get drunk. Or maybe, Let's drive around until the sun rises and then sleep all day. But in lieu of all that, he goes with, "I want to have you right here on the beach, with the sand all gritty and getting everywhere, and I want it to be miserably beautiful."
Paul's eyes widen fractionally and he says in his measured voice, "Jamie…" which is a name he never uses.
"I'd say the car, but there's no room," Jim says. "Unless you wanna get on the hood."
"Jamie," Paul says again, this time with a laugh, turning his face away. Jim fancies Paul is mildly scandalized, cheeks pink in the dark.
Jim's fingertips find beads of seawater on Paul's leg and crush them with a touch. "What do you say, Newman?"
Paul wets his lips and looks back at Jim. His lips part before the words find their way out. "Just this once, you hear?"
Jimmy smiles, because he's heard that one before.
He lays his exploring hand flat on Paul's thigh, feeling the tense muscle of it. There is no oxygen in their lungs, just cigarette smoke and apprehension. He moves his hand up Paul's stomach and his chest, loops his fingers in the gold chain at Paul's throat. "I'll be gentle," Jim says, mouth quirking up.
Paul's sober expression cracks and he laughs. "Fuck you," he says, then leans forward to wrap his hand around the back of Jim's neck, bringing him in for the kiss.
Weeks later Jimmy is driving to Salinas, he's laughing at something Rolf said, he's cutting Rolf off to gesture at an oncoming car and say, "Look at this asshole – Guy's gotta stop, he'll see us, hold on –"
Upon impact, James has a vision. He sees a cacophony of sainted figures, the twitch of hips in pink satin and red lips shaping Byron poetry, a t-shirt ripped below a grinning mouth, all the painted shades of pain and humor, the bluest eyes Jim's ever seen and the darkest.
And then that's it.
Goddamn Eartha. She's always right.
V.
Marilyn stays in bed for a week straight when James Dean dies, even though she never met him.
There is no reason for her to be sad – which Arthur tells her – except in the distant way everyone is sad, because a life was lost and potential now squandered. She did not know James Dean. He was just a figure on her periphery. She didn't have the chance to form an opinion on his character. She might have hated him. But now – well, now she'll never know, will she?
She heard his voice on the telephone once. She'd been at Marlon's, joking with him about something or other when the phone rang. Marilyn was closer so she picked it up, but before she could speak a male voice said, "Hey, can I ask you something?" She handed it over mutely, figuring it was some boy of Marlon's.
Marlon raised an eyebrow, taking the receiver. "Hello? Oh. I'm busy right now, kid. Yeah, I'm in the middle of something. I don't know. I don't know, kid, don't you have a pal you can call up or something?" Exasperation began to mount in his voice. "I don't know. Alright. Alright. Goodbye."
As he was leaning forward to hang up, she asked, "Now who was that?" The receiver connected to the base with a click. She teased, "You're awful mean to them, Carlo, they just wanna love you."
"Oh is that so?" Lips easing into a grin, he pounced on her, his fingers finding her ticklish sides, and she shrieked with laughter. Her drink got everywhere. She found out later the boy on the phone was James Dean.
She calls Marlon now, sniffling slightly. "I really don't know what it is," she whispers. "I keep thinking of his body getting pulled out of that car, all mangled."
"You can't dwell on it, honey," he says kindly. Marlon is never unkind to her. "You're still alive; you're fine."
In her head she can see so clearly the dusty California road, the silver of the much-publicized car, the vibrant red of the blood.
Marilyn doesn't feel fine.
She gets this way sometimes. Her insomnia is chronic but it has upticks and nosedives and lately she is in one of the worst lulls, staring unblinking at her ceiling in the dark for what feels like days. She ought to take the medication, but sometimes it works and sometimes it doesn't, and she has the feeling she's too far gone for it to put her to sleep now.
Her hair is stiff with spray and greasy at the roots. She gets her first laugh in ages out of her reflection, big pale mountain ranges of hair atop her sleepless face.
Arthur lets himself in with the key she gave him. He finds her in bed and sits at the edge, looking tired as she feels with his heart breaking in his eyes. Most people say he's not much to look at, but Marilyn thinks he's really something.
"You been to class this week?" he asks. She shakes her head. He seems disappointed. "I thought it was important to you." Lee will be disappointed too. Marilyn herself is disappointed.
"It is," she says. It's more important to her than anything, only sometimes it's terribly difficult to go through all the motions of making herself presentable, to do it over and over every single day. Lee will have to understand.
She wants Arthur to be proud of her but at the same time there is a part of Marilyn that is a little defiant, a little angry; Arthur understands pain, but only when he's writing it. He understands the abstract beauty of fear only in poetry and penned lines. He doesn't understand the depth, the horrible bottomless depth, of Marilyn's fear.
He doesn't understand that attending every single class is an act of bravery, crossing a seemingly uncrossable bridge. He doesn't understand getting so upset over the death of a stranger. He doesn't understand the fear of failing because everyone has always thought he was brilliant.
They think Marilyn is Marilyn, a dip in a tight sweater. Any praise she's known melts beside that.
But when Arthur clasps her hands in his she forgets being angry for a moment. "What did Lee tell you?" he says, more patiently.
Lee told her to dig deep.
Lee told her that being sensitive is the best and worst thing she could be in this business, and the direction it took was up to her.
She shuts her eyes. Her most delicate, intangible feelings are still hers and they are worthy, they are real. She breathes in.
She feels Arthur's lips against her temple. "I've got to go down to Washington," he reminds her, and she feels immediately ashamed of her wallowing, her cruel thoughts.
"Yes," she says, "Yes, yes, right, here –" She snatches up a pair of earrings on the bedside table, little diamonds, and puts them in his hand. She smiles. "A good luck token. It'll be like I'm there with you."
Arthur smiles back and Marilyn's heart flutters in her chest. Whenever anyone asks her why Arthur, she smiles and shrugs it off, says he's brilliant or something, but at the end of the day it's the way he looks at her. It's like he's looking at her, not the other one.
In a few days she is able to go to class. She makes Marlon escort her because she could use his particular charm right now; he could always make her laugh. She wants to ask him about James Dean, ask if Marlon went to bed with him, mostly as a joke. But jokes get caught in her throat and she only ends up clinging to his arm all down 10th Avenue.
She met Marlon at a party. She'd been getting a little too nervous, overwhelmed by all the questions leveled at her by strangers, so she'd sat down at the piano to get away from it a little. She only knew Chopsticks, really, but it made her look busy and classy and unapproachable, which is better than trying to hide on the balcony or something, where everyone just thinks you're crazy. Hiding in plain sight. Marilyn learned that one quick.
So Marilyn had been sitting at the piano, trying to quietly plunk away, and all of a sudden there had been a sharp blow to the side of her head. Then there was Marlon, setting his drink down on the glossy piano without a coaster, his hand tenderly covering hers, which was clasped to the throbbing spot just above her ear. It had been his elbow that struck her, unaware that there was anyone behind him.
"I'm sorry," he was saying, brows drawn together in worry. "I'm awful sorry, it was an accident –"
Marilyn peered up at him, lips pursing, brow furrowing, and pronounced good-naturedly, "There are no accidents."
They'd been fast friends from then on. Marlon even taught her to play a little something on the piano that night, something he said he learned from his mama.
He lets her hold his arm all the way to the doors of the studio and then he lets her go, moving inside and away from her without a word. He knows that Marilyn will have to cross the threshold by herself. She has to face it all herself.
That morning she had looked at herself in the mirror. Her hair was rumpled, freshly washed, curling. Her face was so young without powder. It startled her briefly, but happily, and it seemed to hit her all at once that it was still her face. She could still see herself there.
That morning she looked in the mirror and told herself, "I will be as sensitive as I am without being ashamed of it."
She told herself several times, like a mantra, and then she could breathe.
VI.
Liz is a mess on the day of the funeral but the kind of perfectly controlled mess only Liz can be. Her short dark hair is arranged away from her made-up face, her hands in a graceful pile in her lap. One end of her cigarette is stamped with a red kiss. It's only Monty who could tell that there is a tremor to that elegant hand, a nervous waver in that lilting voice.
Neither she nor Monty attended the funeral. Liz sent flowers, and then Monty came over so they could sit together in her Los Angeles home, the one she shares with Michael, about a million miles from that mournful little Indiana town.
It's ironic, Monty thinks. Spend your whole life trying to get out of one hick town and then they put you in the ground there for eternity.
"We made a bet, you know," Liz says, flicking ash into a cut-glass ashtray with a jerky, rapid movement. "It was so silly. Rocky and I. We saw that gorgeous boy and we said: dinner on whoever gets him first. He won, of course." She shoots Monty a small smile but it doesn't light up her face like the real ones do.
Monty fiddles with his silver lighter. The air feels heavy with sighing but there's an acute emptiness in him that remains untouched. "I won," he says.
Liz gives him that high-class affronted look she's so good at, but then she laughs loud and abrupt. "You snake," she exclaims. "But I shouldn't be surprised."
Marlon had certain lines he wouldn't cross – not a lot of 'em, but they were there – and he saw James like a little boy looking up to idols, which Monty supposes he was. So they'd joke about it but Marlon would never touch him. Monty had no such qualms – not while he was in the moment, at least.
"If I'd known him then, you know…" Liz murmurs. "If I'd known Jimmy, I wouldn't have. I wouldn't have bet for him."
Later Monty will hear that they arranged James with his face turned so the damaged half was hidden. Showing the camera his good side one last time.
"From what I hear he wasn't exactly a stranger to it."
"Monty," Liz tsks. She gives him a look that is very nearly reproachful, so he holds out his hand for hers, drawing her into his lap by those cool fingertips. She's not really cross with him. "He was a sweet boy. Which I suppose you know firsthand, hm?"
Monty does smile then, even though he's not feeling so funny. "You're a saint, Bessie Mae. I bet you made that kid feel like gold."
Monty had been wrung-out tired and drunk when he finally let that boy into his apartment. James was wiry and skittish as a stray cat, shoulders hunched up. He took his glasses off immediately, tucking them into the pocket of his leather jacket. It had amused Monty greatly, the leather.
"You can take the jacket off, Brando," he said, pointed sarcasm, as he rubbed at his face. His eyes had that raw dry feeling that came with too many late nights and late drinks; he should've been sleeping instead of inviting disciples back for a quick fuck, but his judgment was impaired and he wanted what he wanted.
It wasn't like Monty would've slept much anyway.
James slunk out of the coat, dropping it on the floor in an on-purpose way, and tucked his hands into his pockets.
"You talk?" Monty asked. "Or you just breathe into the telephone?"
"I talk," James said. He studied the room they were in, all of Monty's fine pristine things, finding himself reflected back in the surfaces of many mirrors. Monty wondered how much he could even see without the glasses. "You get lonesome?"
Monty had been surprised by the question, so surprised that any kind of clever reply fled his tongue, leaving him with silence. Finally, honestly, he said, "Yeah. Doesn't everyone?"
He held out a drink. James took it, their fingers brushing.
James was like every Nebraska boy that Monty had never been, this fair-haired all-American tumbleweed of a boy, awkward yet strangely accessible all the same. But he was like Monty too, in a way, and that was powerfully unsettling.
James wasn't Marlon, brash and commanding. James had that little needy twinge in him that Monty recognized, needing to be what you are not and being constrained by what you are.
Monty didn't like the recognition. He only liked looking at himself in mirrors.
Usually Monty studied people, filing away their mannerisms and expressions for some future time when an impersonation or performance was required. It was an automatic habit. But he kept his back to James for the most part, did not make eye contact; perhaps he wanted to make James uncomfortable. He was a little tempted to poke and prod, play the movie star to James' dedicated fan, but he didn't get a chance.
He felt a hand on the back of his neck, gentle. It curved around his nape with a kind of intent, pushed up into his hair in a luxurious caress and then slid back down, slowly, one long wide stroke between Monty's shoulder blades. Knuckles glided over the small of his back. Fingers tucked between the waistband of Monty's trousers and his shirt, tugging him back firmly against a solid, warm chest.
"I'm done," James said, and held the empty glass up in front of Monty's face.
Monty almost laughed, turning so they were face to face, very close. "I'm not."
They kissed, James' hands running over as much of Monty as they could find, his lips trailing reverently down Monty's throat. In one of the mirrors Monty saw them reflected, James all golden against his shadow, and it was then that he laughed, then that he finally felt inebriation suffusing his body.
"Get me outta this funhouse," he said, but he was the one to grip a handful of James' shirt and haul him to the dim bedroom.
They barely had anything to say to one another, but in the good way, the way Monty could condense three pages of dialogue down to a single look. James was like a boy in church, head bowed and worshipful, and Monty didn't mind it much, found he liked the worship of intimacy in a way he did not like worship of crowds.
Afterwards he half expected an audience's cheering, like that one time he'd been with Marlon on the stage after hours and, naked, Marlon had gotten up from the bed to applaud him.
They barely had anything to say to one another but at one point James had paused, poised above Monty and slick with sweat. With a little needy shiver, he murmured, "A moment's important when it makes your mind go numb with beauty."
Monty, eyes closed, had gasped, "You're one damn strange kid."
Later on Monty will recall the shattered hood of James' silver car when he looks upon his own wreck, the twisted skeleton of metal that hardly resembles a car anymore, the interior splashed dark with Monty's own blood. He will think of the day of James' funeral when he sits in his hospital bed and sees Liz beside him, head bowed and cheeks tear-stained. Her crying left faint trails in her foundation.
Monty had been sober for the accident, he swore it up and down, but the road was lonely and had so many dark twists. It was as though he blinked and the world disappeared; before he knew it there was only the dental sound of grinding metal, sharp starbursts of pain. He had felt like he was in a film of his own life. What a remarkable shot they'll get, he thought.
Liz had been there then too, grit and glass sticking to her pale lovely arms, his blood on her party dress. She had spent the night drunk and fighting with Michael so her eyes were hard and bright with forced sobriety, unshed tears. Monty had been choking. She dipped her small cool hand into his throat and extracted five teeth, one after another. She looked like Snow White and the witch in one, hand drenched red with poison.
Pain becomes the only lover Monty could ever keep, and pills the only bride he'd ever have. He takes all his mirrors down.
Years later he lays with his head in Marilyn's lap. It's late and neither of them can ever sleep, so they pool their medication and curl up in the bed Monty had shipped to Reno from his Manhattan home.
"You're the only one I know in worse shape than me," she told him, sad little smile on her face. With a finger, she traced his features, each one slightly rearranged compared to how it had been before.
"Least you still got your good looks," Monty tells her.
"Oh, honey," she says, and her voice at its softest is the closest to Marilyn Monroe he's heard her sound, "Oh, honey, you're beautiful. Did your Mama tell you how pretty you were every day? No one ever told me, not 'til I was older and they meant something else instead." She strokes his cheek, looking at him with a little worried mark between her brows. "You're beautiful, you know, sweetheart?"
Thing was, his ma had told him he was beautiful; everyone had told Monty he was beautiful; Monty had become exceptionally conceited and vain about his beauty. But the face that stared back at him now from polished silver was not his own, more like the caricatures he used to draw of his family as a little kid – a slash of dark brow, misshapen oval face, a loop of nose, spiking hair. It wasn't him at all. It's not his face, just a replacement made by doctors on an operating table.
Marilyn touches his mouth and he nips her finger, making her laugh. "I can tell you don't believe me," she says. "But I mean it."
She says everything with such simple complete sincerity that Monty does almost believe her. Sometimes when he's looking in her eyes he feels like he's looking at his own.
"What d'you say once Miller's out of the picture, you and me get hitched?" Monty says, reaching up to touch that sad, lovely mouth of hers.
"I don't know if I'm in the market for a fourth," she tells him. Her smile lilts under his fingertips. "But you're just my type, you know. Something tells me I'm not yours."
Monty gives a little roll-of-the-eyes-shrug, something that would've been real charming when he was young. "What's on the menu for tonight, Ms. Monroe?"
She looks over at the bottles on his bedside table, then reaches for them, selects two red, three blue, two white. "Appetizers, dinner, and dessert," she says.
Watching Misfits on television late one night, Montgomery reflects on her ocean eyes, her fragile limbs, her bleached-white hair like cotton candy. When she died she'd been wrapped up naked in her bed sheets with the telephone beside her. Making plans, he supposes. She'd told him two weeks before how much she missed New York. Monty said she had a bed with him anytime, and she made some crack about flying hers in from Los Angeles.
His home has no mirrors, except the tiny one above the bathroom sink, and his last reflection is fuzzy and boxed in on the television set. Looking at himself he feels the same blunted surprise he usually feels and he thinks –
You used to be a real thing of beauty. Look at that sorry face now.
PG13. 9299 words.
Spans late 1940s to late 1960s.
Classic Hollywood RPF featuring Marlon Brando, Paul Newman, Audrey Hepburn, James Dean, Marilyn Monroe, and Montgomery Clift, among a host of others – seriously I name-dropped everyone.
Summary: You used to be a real thing of beauty.
Note: For
portions_forfox and xx_pinkstar, very belated. You don't even know, I had a crazy color-coded timeline for this. I really tried to keep it as semi-realistic as possible, so everyone interacts with someone they could have possibly interacted with, i.e.: were in the same time at the same place. But I feel like I left so much ground uncovered still! I could write old hollywood rpf forever and ever I think, there is so much to saaaaay.I.
The first name Marlon hears in New York City is Montgomery Clift.
It trips over the excited tongues of pretty girls and straight-backed boys, sets the eyes of other actors alight, tip-taps down the streets five paces ahead of Marlon. He'd like to go one goddamn day without hearing the name Montgomery Clift. You're next, they all say. When we suck him dry, you're next.
Marlon is resolved to be unimpressed, and that holds until the first time he sees Monty on film. Goddamn, Marlon thinks, furious, studying that handsome face up on the screen, big and gray and sharp-featured, goddamn. Monty's a switchblade, slim and determined, jabbing you in the ribs and sticking there. Marlon remembers the movie for a long time after he sees it. It burns in him when he's up on stage, in class, on the street. Montgomery Clift, everywhere Marlon goes.
He sees Monty at a party once and ignores him, or at least fakes it. Really he's watching, and he knows Monty knows, because Monty is watching him too. They circle each other like jungle cats. One of the old socialite ladies with the manicured roving hands says those boys sure don't like each other.
No, Marlon ought to tell her. No, it's not that. It's that they're the same, him and Monty, except Monty is a knife wound and Marlon is a closed-fist punch.
Once Marlon's on his bike revving down Madison Avenue and there's Monty, an apparition, faceless amongst the throng because he chooses to be. Marlon pulls over, brakes, calls out, "Hey, Clift!"
Monty turns, a scowl already twisting his beautiful face.
"People tell me I remind them of you," Marlon says.
Monty arches a dark eyebrow. "Oh yeah?"
Marlon gives him a look up and down, a slow steady kind of look. "I don't think so," he says, and races off. It's difficult to determine over the motorbike's roar, but he thinks he hears Monty laughing.
A couple of years later he's on Madison again, on foot with his hands in his pockets, saying goodbye to New York City once again for Hollywood. Goodbye, old stomping grounds. Goodbye, dirt and grime. Goodbye, buildings boxing him in and ever-present press of people. Marlon'll miss ya.
He side-steps a crack in the sidewalk and damn near careens into an old broad in a fur, flashing her an apology grin that makes her wrinkled cheeks flush. When he turns away his eyes meet those of a petite little thing, a girl with brown hair to her shoulders – a little bird, more like, ready to take right off. She's got big eyes like a doll's, lids sliding shut and open again in a languorous blink.
When he turns his grin on her, she merely peers at him with her big doll eyes, impassive. They pass each other by but just before they both turn away, her mouth curves upwards playfully. It's like the breath is knocked right out of him. He's seen a lot of girls, been with a lot of girls, touched them and watched them and tormented them the good way and the bad. But that girl sucks his breath right out of his lungs and before he can toss out a smart-aleck comment, she's long gone.
Later in life he will learn her name and sit beside her at a dinner and he will not be able to say a single word.
Monty finds him again after Streetcar one night. Apparently Monty had come before, sat in the audience and lingered in the wings afterwards, waiting. But that had been the night Marlon broke his nose in the customary pre-show brawl with Teddy the stagehand and he'd been rushed to the hospital immediately after the performance since he'd refused to miss it.
Monty comes again, though, and leans on Marlon's vanity with his arms crossed, ankles crossed. "You used to be a real thing of beauty," Monty says. "Look at that sorry face now."
Marlon smiles widely and feels the ache of it all through his head. Bruises cover his face, black and red and pained, and his noise is swollen, the straight line of it definitively ruined. He doesn't mind it much. "Got character," he says. "You could use some."
Monty uncoils, rises with that easy grace he's got, and moves up close into Marlon's space. They're just about the same height. He sets his fingers lightly on Marlon's cheeks, thumbs pressing directly into the sore spots on either side of his nose. It hurts like a motherfucker. Monty's eyes are lighter than Marlon expected, almost green, and he's got that determined look he gets when he's acting. Marlon wets his lips and waits and revels in the dull pain of Monty poking his bruises – and then, surprising him, Monty says, "Show me the stage."
The theater has emptied, and they wave goodbye to the last few stragglers heading home. Monty climbs the set stairs, investigates the false upstairs apartment, and then climbs down the back of the structure, emerging once again through Stanley and Stella's bedroom window. Marlon watches him with hands in his pockets and his entire body tensed, ready to strike.
"Wait, wait," Monty says, pausing where he'd been fiddling with the paper lantern, "Hold up," and he goes back up the staircase, leans on the railings looking down at Marlon. "You gotta do it. You gotta call for me."
Marlon rolls his eyes, smiling. "You get your ass down here, Clift."
Monty gives him an unimpressed look. "You know what you gotta do, Brando."
He's not a man made easily uncomfortable, and he's not shy either, so Marlon tilts his head back and shouts it to the rafters. He gives it the full stage effort, the same effort that has him hoarse-voiced at the end of every night. His throat feels raw; his bruises ache. Monty, he shouts, over and over, Montgomery, until Monty has descended. On the final step, amused but attempting to remain serious, he reaches out and grips Marlon by the shoulders to haul him closer.
Goddamn, Marlon thinks, looking at him so close, closer than a camera's kiss. Goddamn, but Monty is beautiful. Dark ominous brows, deep-set eyes, high cheekbones, wrinkles already marking the ghosts of his expressions. "I think you got enough character," Marlon decides, and then lets Monty kiss him.
The kiss burns right through all of Marlon's sore muscles, his sore face. There's gotta be some word for it, but Marlon was never a very good student and so he doesn't remember. But there must be a word for when two forces run headlong into each other, like trains crashing nose-to-nose on the wrong tracks. That's what kissing Monty is, running headlong into something going just as fast. The kiss is hard, unyielding, unforgiving. Monty grips his shoulders with white-knuckled hands. Marlon is waiting to touch him, waiting until Monty is on edge for it, until he gets that whining look in his eyes like a hungry dog.
Eventually Monty puts his arms tight around Marlon's neck, kiss as painful as the bruises, and that's when Marlon finally moves. Very, very carefully, without touching Monty's actual body at all, he tugs Monty's shirt untucked. Then he slips his hands underneath, lays his palms directly on the bony bend of waist and hip. Marlon feels a little shiver go through the other man and he grins.
Jerking a hand towards the rows of empty seats, Marlon says, "You want me to take you in front of an audience?"
A little of the humor fades from Monty's eyes and vulnerability takes its place. "Yeah," he says, "Yeah."
So that's where Marlon fucks him, on the still-mused stage sheets of the Kowalski marital bed. Monty's a real hellcat, he thinks, one of the best he's ever had. Monty's the best at everything Marlon turns his hand to, and that's why he wants him, 'cause they're mirrors, because they're the same.
II.
It's raining, so Paul hoists the collar of his jacket up around his face and ducks into an alcove in a building's edifice. He lights a cigarette first and pulls his script from inside his coat second, eyes scanning the lines with resignation.
Jackie is back at the little house in St. George with Scottie and Stephanie, and by now she's probably learned not to expect him. Paul knows that he ought to be with her, but he needs something, he's got to have something, something better than standing around in the background of someone's TV screen. There's the wife and the kids, the third on the way, and Paul still kicking around trying to make a name for himself.
A shove to his shoulder shakes him from his maudlin thoughts. It's followed by Jimmy's whole body squeezing into the negligible amount of space remaining in Paul's alcove. Jimmy takes the cigarette and takes the script and Paul laughs a little, letting him.
"I'm going out for this too," Jim says, pushing his glasses up his nose. They're splattered with raindrops.
"Fight you for it," Paul suggests dryly.
James gives him one of those quick uneasy grins before fisting a hand in Paul's jacket and dragging him out into the rain.
"You're gonna ruin my suit," Paul laughs, "And I've only got the one –"
"Eh, you don't need a suit," Jimmy says, looking back over his shoulder at Paul. His look lingers just a beat too long, and is just a bit too serious; like Jimmy. Paul has gotten used to the attention from him.
He's James Dean, for auditions, and Jimmy for any other time. The uniform's the same no matter the occasion: glasses and pea coats and black sweaters with holes, though he'll lose the glasses when he's trying to impress someone. This is how they met: they kept showing up at the same auditions for the same blonde-haired, blue-eyed parts. But Jim's got the kind of loping ease in his body and his movements that Paul sorely lacks, and a natural way of drawing the eye. He doesn't seem aware of it; or maybe he's very aware of it, maybe he spent hours in his Los Angeles bedroom trying to emulate that Brando sprawl.
When James gets drunk he dials Brando or Clift, breathily awaiting the sound of their voice on the other end. He gets so morose when they hang up that he drinks harder, no longer friendly drinking but something deeper, and he ends up trying to press messy kisses to Paul's mouth. Paul extricates himself carefully each time, a companionable hand on Jimmy's neck, and takes it as his cue to leave. He goes down to the ferry, tiredly trudges home and accepts the sticky hands of his children and Jackie's clear exhaustion and thinks there has to be more to it than this.
Three days a week Paul sells encyclopedias on Staten Island after his round of auditions. Twice he passes out on Jimmy's couch instead and only comes home after everyone is asleep. During breakfast he pretends to munch baby food and baby fingers, delights in his children's giggles. He tries to ignore the speculative way Jackie watches him over her morning coffee and cigarette.
Sometimes Paul goes to see plays with Jim and the rest of the gang. Paul's heart twinges guiltily every time he thinks of Jackie alone at home with the kids, but she's been different since they were born, less interested in the things she used to care about most. Still, he can't help but think she'd like the one they see tonight, about a little French girl being trained up to be a courtesan. The girl in question, Gigi – Audrey, Jimmy tells him, waving around the playbill – has a sweet, lilting voice and an accent Paul can't place but doesn't think is French.
If it weren't rude, Paul would want to lean over on the seat in front of him like he used to do in the movies when he was a kid. That's what she does: she makes him want to lean in real close, lean in until he's fallen in, submerged like into a deep pool. He wonders if that's something that can be taught, because Paul studied acting and he doesn't remember any lessons on it.
One of Jim's friends knows one of her friends and she is persuaded out with the rest of them. Audrey has hair to her shoulders, a waist that couldn't span more than a hand's width, and the extremely straight spine of a dancer.
"Where you from?" Paul asks, leaning in to be heard over his raucous friends. He glances at them, grins at her, says, "These clowns…" and shakes his head.
She smiles a little, prettily, and it occurs to him that when she smiles her whole face seems to tilt up the same way – eyes, lips, all curving to smile. "They're all right," she says, and, "Europe," vague. She probably thinks he's some American knucklehead who doesn't know the difference.
Paul has his fingers hooked around the neck of a beer bottle, trying to keep his eyes averted so he won't end up looking at her like she's a specimen. He can't get over how this polite little girl with her shy, animated expressions is so very watchable. She'd surprised him by ordering a scotch and water, and surprised him again when she mentions dancing as a chorus girl in London. He tells her she was probably a good deal too graceful for it. She pauses and smiles and is embarrassed and says no, no, but it wasn't for her anyway.
"I'm a real terrible dancer," he tells her. "I played football, so all I know how to do is crash into people."
It's not exactly the truth but he doesn't know what else to say to her, and it makes her laugh, a pretty sound. "Why, I'll teach you, come here."
She's nearly his height, especially with her very straight stance and the regal lift of her chin. Her hand in his is surprisingly strong. "Now," she says softly, glancing down at their feet and then up into his eyes, her own so wide, so warm. There's a twinkle in them, playful. "If you're not very good and your partner is, and the situation isn't very formal, it is acceptable to allow her to show off a bit. As a diversion."
Paul laughs. "As a diversion, alright."
"Like so." And she twists in his arms, twirls, her skirt fanning out and ends of her hair catching the light. Paul stills her with a hand on her waist, feeling how very light she is, like a little bird. Her hands press against his chest and she laughs brightly, without restraint.
"Watch yourself, he's married!" someone calls with a cackle, probably Jimmy.
"Oh, it's all right," Audrey says, but she's looking up at Paul. "We're all friends, aren't we?"
It's a good anecdote – Audrey Hepburn taught me to dance– but for some reason he never tells it.
He thinks of it later when he's understudying in the play, when he's finally got something, and the director is snapping, "You gotta loosen up, Newman, you can't just stand there!"
Running through the play with the understudies is the highlight of Paul's whole week, but he seems to frustrate more than please, and it makes him wonder how he landed this part at all. The dancing scene is important, seductive, a turning point, and Paul is as stiff as a statue, letting Miss Woodward show off when it's meant to be him doing so.
She is the other reason he looks forward to the understudy run-throughs, though he's probably the reason she dreads them. She's got her blonde hair all tucked up and her mouth is an exasperated line, arms crossed and dark brows rising as her eyes roll heavenward. There is something cold and sharp and commanding in the way she holds herself, something that shuts off easy as a switch when she wants, and she rarely wants that around Paul. Joanne Woodward is something, that's for sure, and she thinks he's something dull.
"You gonna stand there all night, Nebraska, or are we going to do it again?" Joanne says. She turns away from him to walk briskly back to her original spot.
Paul is annoyed to be chided in front of everyone like that. "I'm from Ohio," he mutters, stalking back to his mark.
"All the same north of the Mason-Dixon," she says. She smiles, sharp. "And you just look so corn-fed."
"Some Southern belle," Paul says. "I heard you all had manners."
"We do when we want to," Joanne replies, and there's a little ripple of amusement.
"From the top," the director says, and there they go again.
Paul's not sure if it's the anger or just the desire to show Joanne up, but the scene is different this time. It's something he's only tasted before, something that had brushed his grasping fingertips but always evaded him. It's electric. He feels like he's on fire and when he touches her he knows she feels it too, he can see it in her eyes. He pulls Joanne close and feels her fall into it, against him, and for half a second he forgets what he's supposed to be doing. He's in it, for once in his life, isn't just standing at the precipice.
"Not so bad, Ohio," she tells him after, and he fancies she's a little breathy.
"Thanks, Georgia peach," he replies. The look she gives him is pure exasperation. It makes him grin.
Six months into the play, when Roman Holiday is in theaters and Joanne has been letting too much softness creep into her constant irritation with him, Paul demands, "Why don't you like me?"
Though what he means is: why do you pretend you don't like me?
"'Cause I have to," Joanne says. Her furious eyes are a clear, cool green. "Because otherwise I might kiss you, and where would that get me?"
"Kissed," Paul says. It would be a joke if he were joking.
Against all odds, Joanne smiles. "You're a rascal, Newman," she says. "And a girl's got to be wary of rascals."
III.
Audrey endeavors to be thoughtful and Audrey endeavors to be polite, but even she has limits, and that limit is currently the very ancient man talking her ear off. She sips her champagne and nods and mm's along, trying to look attentive but instead running through ballet positions in her head.
She's so very focused on not looking bored that she nearly misses it when another man slurs, "Tough luck."
Audrey blinks. Automatically, she says, "Excuse me, sir," and turns from the very old man to the much younger one now at her side.
Marlon Brando looks sleepy-drunk, clutching a glass of amber-toned liquor in one large hand, suit rumpled and loose at the collar. Her heart speeds up slightly in her chest. Her eyes widen. "Excuse me?" she says.
"Tough luck," he repeats, takes a swallow. "On the – on the ¬–"
"The award?" she suggests, smiling faintly. "It's quite alright, I've already got one." She finds it easier to be pleasant on familiar ground such as this; she's been saying the same thing to everyone all night. "I ought to be congratulating you! Really, it was a wonderful performance. You must be very proud."
He shrugs, mutters, "Doesn't matter." It isn't spoken like he's trying to be humble or unassuming – rather that it truly doesn't make a lick of difference. He'd seemed so charming and personable on stage, a marked change from the man who sat beside her at a dinner last month. He'd been surly and silent, ignoring every attempt she made to converse until eventually she'd given up altogether. Drunk and low-voiced, now, he is much closer to that reality than the man on the stage. His eyes bore into her, searching.
"I think I saw you once," he says.
"Yes, a few weeks –" Audrey begins, but he stops her.
"No, years," he says. She's startled that he remembers.
"On the street," she says.
"Yes," he murmurs, nods. He looks down, free hand rubbing the back of his neck. It's a gesture almost self-conscious, and his expression is almost shy.
She remembers seeing him with embarrassing clarity. She remembers his painfully handsome face, the wild rakish grin tossed over his shoulder. She had only been in New York for a few weeks at most and she hadn't recognized him, though in retrospect she isn't sure how. Her pulse had picked up then as it does now. She does not look for Mel in the crowd, though perhaps she ought to.
"I thought you were –" he starts suddenly, breaking off. He catches her eye again. "Lovely."
She blushes a little, involuntarily, and is glad it can be easily blamed on the heat of the room.
"You are lovely," he says, with that almost shy look again, and comprehension zings through her abruptly. Why, he's nervous, she realizes. Just like that the brute is chased away and she sees again the young man on stage, the young man grinning at her over his shoulder.
She is called away before the appropriate response can find its way to her lips. She looks back just once to see Marlon still watching her, the glass in his hand held cradled against his chest.
Audrey rings him after a fight with Mel. That's partly the reason she does it, but partly she's just been thinking of him ever since, like the echo of a particularly sweet dream. "I've gotten your number from someone," she says, adds resolutely, "I'd like a drink, would you?"
There is a beat of scratchy silence and then a near unintelligible, "Yeah, yeah, alright."
Audrey leaves in what she'd been wearing that day – nothing special, just slim black pants and a flannel shirt tied at the waist over a high-necked top. Her shoes are flat. Her purse is wicker. She looks utterly benign, utterly boring.
He is slouching in his doorway, waiting for her. "Was it really a drink you came for?" he asks. "Or the other?"
Audrey remembers his nervousness, the way sullenness had turned shy. "I don't see why I can't have both," she says, and uncharacteristically steps past him into the apartment.
His place is expectedly messy, smaller than she thought it would be. There are a lot of boxes, perhaps he's moving. He watches her from the doorway, still, a picture box of blue sky and tan buildings behind him. His hands are in his pockets. His gaze is intense.
"You got a husband," he says.
Audrey pauses in where she had been looking at a book resting atop one of the boxes, lifting her eyes to meet his stare unblinkingly. "Yes," she says. "Yes, Marlon, I have a husband."
She wants to ask, Do you see a lot of women who have husbands? But her politeness prevents it.
He shifts, mood shifting with body into sudden affability, an easy smile gracing his face. "How 'bout that drink?" he says, and shuts the door, shuts out picturesque and false Los Angeles. All at once it no longer feels like a film about an affair, but an affair, the two of them in a dim room in the late afternoon, two people who don't know each other at all.
Something in him is reminiscent of Bill – but no, best not to think about that.
"Scotch, if you have it," she murmurs. "Scotch and water."
She watches him while trying to appear as though she isn't, catching his shape at the edge of her field of vision. Though he's not too tall there is something large about him, looming, with big hands and muscular arms, nothing like Audrey usually likes, nothing like anyone she's ever been with.
Mercurial. That's what it is, that's what's so like Bill. A changeable nature that made her seek out steady Mel, whose disappointments crept beneath his mild surface instead of exploding out of him.
When he gives her the drink, he stands much too close. "Here ya go, Miss Hepburn," he murmurs. He tips his own drink back, ice clinking.
She tries not to gulp hers, instead taking slow tiny sips, and with each one he seems somehow closer, and closer still. Eventually he is close enough that all she sees is the wide breadth of his shoulders and the way his t-shirt stretches over his body. He takes the cup from her hands. The hair on his forearms is fine, almost golden. He is a collection of geometric configurations. He is planes and lines and points connecting harshly, he is the contrasting softness of mouth and eyes. The bump in his nose is visible so close. He looks Roman. He looks like Marc Antony, underdressed in a too-small Los Angeles apartment.
"I am not made of glass," she tells him, sensing his hesitancy even as she swallows her own.
"You're like one of those…" He touches her, Marlon's big hands running up her sides. "One of them little ballerinas inside the music box."
She smiles. "That's lovely," she says.
He undoes the tie of her overshirt. "I must say I was surprised to hear from you." He is gentle peeling the shirt down her arms, gentle pulling the other one up over her head. She is briefly self-conscious.
"I must say I was surprised to call," she says quietly. He touches her skin now, a hand stretching out over her spine, another on her neck tilting her face up. She meets his dark eyes and feels a slight hitching of her breath.
Looking into her eyes with the same odd attentiveness, he says, "You mustn't be shy. There's nothing you could do that would make me think you were anything other than wonderful."
She's certain it's just some kind of seduction, but the words do their job. She takes a relaxing breath. "Even if I said you were a lousy actor?"
He throws back his head and laughs.
Marlon will pick her up and put her on the bed as easily as a leaf caught on the wind. He will kiss her for the first time in his messy unmade bed and she will run her fingers over the geometry of his musculature, as breathlessly in the thrall of his rough beauty as any girl would be. He will make love to her. He will be gentle, like she is the ballerina from a music box. She will mind, but only a little. She will feel consumed by him for the time that it lasts and she will go back to her life afterwards as though she dreamt the entire afternoon.
She walks for a while after, even though no one walks anywhere in Los Angeles. It is like no city she's ever known, sprawling and endless and fake as the sets built upon it, a movie city, a movie of a city, unreal. People notice her and make a fuss here like they don't in New York or anywhere else. But right now she needs to breathe.
Silhouetted against the sunlight there is an hourglass, a halo of messy blonde curls, ankles bound by delicate shoes. The woman wears a coral dress with matching lipstick, white gloves white purse white shoes. Audrey has the briefest, most illusory flash of and there's what I'll never be but it fades almost immediately. She won't give in to that sort of thing anymore.
The woman drops her purse, items spilling along concrete. Audrey bends to help her pick it all up, their different shapes casting different shadows.
"What a lovely color," Audrey says, wiping grit off a lipstick with her fingers and replacing the cap. "You're lucky it wasn't crushed."
"Yes, thank you," Marilyn says softly. "You're very kind, thank you."
"No trouble," Audrey says, smiling reassuringly.
When she returns home, she sinks into a very hot bath and remains until it is very cold and her fingers are very pruney. Far from satisfied, she feels feverish. Even in the cool water she is hot, her mind distracted, caught up in an afternoon's dreaming.
She is sure of one thing: they will not stay in Los Angeles much longer.
IV.
Jimmy has a God, and it is the light of a film projector.
Jimmy's church is a large empty room with rows upon rows of velvet-covered seats, all facing a pulpit upon which images dance back and forth. Sometimes the images are flat, gray or Technicolor; sometimes they are solid as Jimmy, touchable and real on a vast stage.
Jimmy has saints, too. Jimmy's saints are men who spit forth wicked beauty, women with demons in their eyes. He pays them tribute with the breadth of his devotion, which is deep and wide as the sea. He gives them his anxious heart on the line, his anxious heart waiting to hear that Brando drawl, see that Clift melancholia.
"Gotta relax, babe," says Sal. "Nobody's gonna fuck you if you act damn crazy."
Sal makes Jimmy laugh, his vulgar sense of humor hidden behind that baby faced exterior. Jimmy likes that Sal is hungry in the same way he is, and he likes that Sal gives blowjobs like some people give hello kisses. Jim's best nights in L.A. are spent with Sal and Natalie, driving up to spots high enough to take in the whole city. They sit out on blankets, Jim's head in Natalie's lap. She touches his hair gently and says, "I worry about you, Jimmy, honey, I really do."
But he worries about Natalie, because she is beautiful in a way that will only be ripped apart.
Other nights are spent just driving around with sweet Eartha, her hand on his on the gearshift. She wears a floral scarf tied over her hair so they can keep the top down. Her voice is low, musical when she says, "You gotta slow down. I don't like this car one bit, Jamie, it'll kill you."
Jim just laughs.
His days are tangled up making deals, evenings dedicated to driving, nights – oh, Jimmy's nights. Some nights he doesn't sleep at all, playing bongos in his apartment until dawn. Some nights he drinks in clubs until everything is fuzzy and soft. Some nights he crawls into the beds of a million men, and few of them are men he loves. Isn't that how it goes?
Eartha's always telling him he goes too fast with everything but that's the only speed Jim knows.
Once, lonely for New York and the life he led there, he begs Paulie for a block of time. Paul is a man adrift. Paul is between wives but he's in love with Joanne, everyone knows he's in love with Joanne, especially Jackie.
So it's a weary fella who drops down into Jimmy's passenger seat, tired as he is handsome. Sometimes Jim used to kiss Paul just to see how he'd react; sometimes Paul would let him. They go to the movies and sit in the back row, slide down low in their seats with their feet up like real assholes, munching popcorn. Mischief lights Paul's face. Marilyn Monroe is on screen, eyes half-lidded and glossy red lips parting in a dazzling smile. Jim wants to cross himself out of respect for this sainted siren dripping in diamonds.
"Not for me," Paul decides.
"No, you like your girls a good deal colder, huh, Paulie?" Jim says, and cuts off whatever Paul's annoyed response will be with, "Let's go down to the water."
His desire is to make Paul unwind a little. The strip out of their clothes and submerge themselves in the chill salt sea. Jim emerges sing-songing, "A kiss on the hand may be quite con-tin-en-tal –"
"Shut the fuck up," Paul says, laughing. The moon reflects in his blue eyes, his white teeth, the shine of water on his tan skin. An ocean god, that Paul, and only Jimmy here to marvel at him. What a wonder.
Sternly, Paul adds, "Eyes in your head, Dean."
Jim spends most of his time fucking men, almost all of his time, and worshipping women – Dizzy back in New York and the way she'd dance; Eartha's soul-sweet husky voice and eyebrow arching with wisdom; Natalie's one thousand freckles and that funny shy wit; Pier who never backed down. Marilyn, who James has never met except in his triple feature movie palaces, though once he called Brando and heard her in the background – very soft, saying, "Now who was that?"
That's facetious. He worships men too. Case in point:
Paul sits on the sand, which sticks to his wet skin in great coarse swathes. He looks like a statue slowly crumbling. He's not naked but he might as well be, fabric of his skivvies clinging white and revealing. Waves lap at Jim's ankles as he steps out of the water. Looking at Paul he feels the same kind of rushing that he feels when he's driving very, very fast.
Paul tilts his head back, meeting Jim's gaze. "You lookin' so hard 'cause you can't see a damn thing without your glasses?"
"Looking 'cause there's something to see," says Jim.
Amusement curls up a corner of Paul's mouth. "Sit your ass down, Dean."
Paul reaches over to their pile of clothes for a pack of cigarettes as Jim sits, legs tucked beneath him. A pearly drop of water slips over the curve of Paul's thigh and Jimmy is tempted to trace its path with his finger. "You gonna marry her, Paulie?"
"Joanne?" Paul lights up, exhales pale smoke. "I'd like to."
A simple, gentlemanly declaration that speaks nothing of the family he will leave behind. There used to be a wedding ring on Paul's finger but now there is only a strip of pale skin.
"But you don't want to talk about Joanne," Paul says.
Jim looks up. "No," he says evenly. There are a few things he could say. He could say, Let's call up Eartha and get drunk. Or maybe, Let's drive around until the sun rises and then sleep all day. But in lieu of all that, he goes with, "I want to have you right here on the beach, with the sand all gritty and getting everywhere, and I want it to be miserably beautiful."
Paul's eyes widen fractionally and he says in his measured voice, "Jamie…" which is a name he never uses.
"I'd say the car, but there's no room," Jim says. "Unless you wanna get on the hood."
"Jamie," Paul says again, this time with a laugh, turning his face away. Jim fancies Paul is mildly scandalized, cheeks pink in the dark.
Jim's fingertips find beads of seawater on Paul's leg and crush them with a touch. "What do you say, Newman?"
Paul wets his lips and looks back at Jim. His lips part before the words find their way out. "Just this once, you hear?"
Jimmy smiles, because he's heard that one before.
He lays his exploring hand flat on Paul's thigh, feeling the tense muscle of it. There is no oxygen in their lungs, just cigarette smoke and apprehension. He moves his hand up Paul's stomach and his chest, loops his fingers in the gold chain at Paul's throat. "I'll be gentle," Jim says, mouth quirking up.
Paul's sober expression cracks and he laughs. "Fuck you," he says, then leans forward to wrap his hand around the back of Jim's neck, bringing him in for the kiss.
Weeks later Jimmy is driving to Salinas, he's laughing at something Rolf said, he's cutting Rolf off to gesture at an oncoming car and say, "Look at this asshole – Guy's gotta stop, he'll see us, hold on –"
Upon impact, James has a vision. He sees a cacophony of sainted figures, the twitch of hips in pink satin and red lips shaping Byron poetry, a t-shirt ripped below a grinning mouth, all the painted shades of pain and humor, the bluest eyes Jim's ever seen and the darkest.
And then that's it.
Goddamn Eartha. She's always right.
V.
Marilyn stays in bed for a week straight when James Dean dies, even though she never met him.
There is no reason for her to be sad – which Arthur tells her – except in the distant way everyone is sad, because a life was lost and potential now squandered. She did not know James Dean. He was just a figure on her periphery. She didn't have the chance to form an opinion on his character. She might have hated him. But now – well, now she'll never know, will she?
She heard his voice on the telephone once. She'd been at Marlon's, joking with him about something or other when the phone rang. Marilyn was closer so she picked it up, but before she could speak a male voice said, "Hey, can I ask you something?" She handed it over mutely, figuring it was some boy of Marlon's.
Marlon raised an eyebrow, taking the receiver. "Hello? Oh. I'm busy right now, kid. Yeah, I'm in the middle of something. I don't know. I don't know, kid, don't you have a pal you can call up or something?" Exasperation began to mount in his voice. "I don't know. Alright. Alright. Goodbye."
As he was leaning forward to hang up, she asked, "Now who was that?" The receiver connected to the base with a click. She teased, "You're awful mean to them, Carlo, they just wanna love you."
"Oh is that so?" Lips easing into a grin, he pounced on her, his fingers finding her ticklish sides, and she shrieked with laughter. Her drink got everywhere. She found out later the boy on the phone was James Dean.
She calls Marlon now, sniffling slightly. "I really don't know what it is," she whispers. "I keep thinking of his body getting pulled out of that car, all mangled."
"You can't dwell on it, honey," he says kindly. Marlon is never unkind to her. "You're still alive; you're fine."
In her head she can see so clearly the dusty California road, the silver of the much-publicized car, the vibrant red of the blood.
Marilyn doesn't feel fine.
She gets this way sometimes. Her insomnia is chronic but it has upticks and nosedives and lately she is in one of the worst lulls, staring unblinking at her ceiling in the dark for what feels like days. She ought to take the medication, but sometimes it works and sometimes it doesn't, and she has the feeling she's too far gone for it to put her to sleep now.
Her hair is stiff with spray and greasy at the roots. She gets her first laugh in ages out of her reflection, big pale mountain ranges of hair atop her sleepless face.
Arthur lets himself in with the key she gave him. He finds her in bed and sits at the edge, looking tired as she feels with his heart breaking in his eyes. Most people say he's not much to look at, but Marilyn thinks he's really something.
"You been to class this week?" he asks. She shakes her head. He seems disappointed. "I thought it was important to you." Lee will be disappointed too. Marilyn herself is disappointed.
"It is," she says. It's more important to her than anything, only sometimes it's terribly difficult to go through all the motions of making herself presentable, to do it over and over every single day. Lee will have to understand.
She wants Arthur to be proud of her but at the same time there is a part of Marilyn that is a little defiant, a little angry; Arthur understands pain, but only when he's writing it. He understands the abstract beauty of fear only in poetry and penned lines. He doesn't understand the depth, the horrible bottomless depth, of Marilyn's fear.
He doesn't understand that attending every single class is an act of bravery, crossing a seemingly uncrossable bridge. He doesn't understand getting so upset over the death of a stranger. He doesn't understand the fear of failing because everyone has always thought he was brilliant.
They think Marilyn is Marilyn, a dip in a tight sweater. Any praise she's known melts beside that.
But when Arthur clasps her hands in his she forgets being angry for a moment. "What did Lee tell you?" he says, more patiently.
Lee told her to dig deep.
Lee told her that being sensitive is the best and worst thing she could be in this business, and the direction it took was up to her.
She shuts her eyes. Her most delicate, intangible feelings are still hers and they are worthy, they are real. She breathes in.
She feels Arthur's lips against her temple. "I've got to go down to Washington," he reminds her, and she feels immediately ashamed of her wallowing, her cruel thoughts.
"Yes," she says, "Yes, yes, right, here –" She snatches up a pair of earrings on the bedside table, little diamonds, and puts them in his hand. She smiles. "A good luck token. It'll be like I'm there with you."
Arthur smiles back and Marilyn's heart flutters in her chest. Whenever anyone asks her why Arthur, she smiles and shrugs it off, says he's brilliant or something, but at the end of the day it's the way he looks at her. It's like he's looking at her, not the other one.
In a few days she is able to go to class. She makes Marlon escort her because she could use his particular charm right now; he could always make her laugh. She wants to ask him about James Dean, ask if Marlon went to bed with him, mostly as a joke. But jokes get caught in her throat and she only ends up clinging to his arm all down 10th Avenue.
She met Marlon at a party. She'd been getting a little too nervous, overwhelmed by all the questions leveled at her by strangers, so she'd sat down at the piano to get away from it a little. She only knew Chopsticks, really, but it made her look busy and classy and unapproachable, which is better than trying to hide on the balcony or something, where everyone just thinks you're crazy. Hiding in plain sight. Marilyn learned that one quick.
So Marilyn had been sitting at the piano, trying to quietly plunk away, and all of a sudden there had been a sharp blow to the side of her head. Then there was Marlon, setting his drink down on the glossy piano without a coaster, his hand tenderly covering hers, which was clasped to the throbbing spot just above her ear. It had been his elbow that struck her, unaware that there was anyone behind him.
"I'm sorry," he was saying, brows drawn together in worry. "I'm awful sorry, it was an accident –"
Marilyn peered up at him, lips pursing, brow furrowing, and pronounced good-naturedly, "There are no accidents."
They'd been fast friends from then on. Marlon even taught her to play a little something on the piano that night, something he said he learned from his mama.
He lets her hold his arm all the way to the doors of the studio and then he lets her go, moving inside and away from her without a word. He knows that Marilyn will have to cross the threshold by herself. She has to face it all herself.
That morning she had looked at herself in the mirror. Her hair was rumpled, freshly washed, curling. Her face was so young without powder. It startled her briefly, but happily, and it seemed to hit her all at once that it was still her face. She could still see herself there.
That morning she looked in the mirror and told herself, "I will be as sensitive as I am without being ashamed of it."
She told herself several times, like a mantra, and then she could breathe.
VI.
Liz is a mess on the day of the funeral but the kind of perfectly controlled mess only Liz can be. Her short dark hair is arranged away from her made-up face, her hands in a graceful pile in her lap. One end of her cigarette is stamped with a red kiss. It's only Monty who could tell that there is a tremor to that elegant hand, a nervous waver in that lilting voice.
Neither she nor Monty attended the funeral. Liz sent flowers, and then Monty came over so they could sit together in her Los Angeles home, the one she shares with Michael, about a million miles from that mournful little Indiana town.
It's ironic, Monty thinks. Spend your whole life trying to get out of one hick town and then they put you in the ground there for eternity.
"We made a bet, you know," Liz says, flicking ash into a cut-glass ashtray with a jerky, rapid movement. "It was so silly. Rocky and I. We saw that gorgeous boy and we said: dinner on whoever gets him first. He won, of course." She shoots Monty a small smile but it doesn't light up her face like the real ones do.
Monty fiddles with his silver lighter. The air feels heavy with sighing but there's an acute emptiness in him that remains untouched. "I won," he says.
Liz gives him that high-class affronted look she's so good at, but then she laughs loud and abrupt. "You snake," she exclaims. "But I shouldn't be surprised."
Marlon had certain lines he wouldn't cross – not a lot of 'em, but they were there – and he saw James like a little boy looking up to idols, which Monty supposes he was. So they'd joke about it but Marlon would never touch him. Monty had no such qualms – not while he was in the moment, at least.
"If I'd known him then, you know…" Liz murmurs. "If I'd known Jimmy, I wouldn't have. I wouldn't have bet for him."
Later Monty will hear that they arranged James with his face turned so the damaged half was hidden. Showing the camera his good side one last time.
"From what I hear he wasn't exactly a stranger to it."
"Monty," Liz tsks. She gives him a look that is very nearly reproachful, so he holds out his hand for hers, drawing her into his lap by those cool fingertips. She's not really cross with him. "He was a sweet boy. Which I suppose you know firsthand, hm?"
Monty does smile then, even though he's not feeling so funny. "You're a saint, Bessie Mae. I bet you made that kid feel like gold."
Monty had been wrung-out tired and drunk when he finally let that boy into his apartment. James was wiry and skittish as a stray cat, shoulders hunched up. He took his glasses off immediately, tucking them into the pocket of his leather jacket. It had amused Monty greatly, the leather.
"You can take the jacket off, Brando," he said, pointed sarcasm, as he rubbed at his face. His eyes had that raw dry feeling that came with too many late nights and late drinks; he should've been sleeping instead of inviting disciples back for a quick fuck, but his judgment was impaired and he wanted what he wanted.
It wasn't like Monty would've slept much anyway.
James slunk out of the coat, dropping it on the floor in an on-purpose way, and tucked his hands into his pockets.
"You talk?" Monty asked. "Or you just breathe into the telephone?"
"I talk," James said. He studied the room they were in, all of Monty's fine pristine things, finding himself reflected back in the surfaces of many mirrors. Monty wondered how much he could even see without the glasses. "You get lonesome?"
Monty had been surprised by the question, so surprised that any kind of clever reply fled his tongue, leaving him with silence. Finally, honestly, he said, "Yeah. Doesn't everyone?"
He held out a drink. James took it, their fingers brushing.
James was like every Nebraska boy that Monty had never been, this fair-haired all-American tumbleweed of a boy, awkward yet strangely accessible all the same. But he was like Monty too, in a way, and that was powerfully unsettling.
James wasn't Marlon, brash and commanding. James had that little needy twinge in him that Monty recognized, needing to be what you are not and being constrained by what you are.
Monty didn't like the recognition. He only liked looking at himself in mirrors.
Usually Monty studied people, filing away their mannerisms and expressions for some future time when an impersonation or performance was required. It was an automatic habit. But he kept his back to James for the most part, did not make eye contact; perhaps he wanted to make James uncomfortable. He was a little tempted to poke and prod, play the movie star to James' dedicated fan, but he didn't get a chance.
He felt a hand on the back of his neck, gentle. It curved around his nape with a kind of intent, pushed up into his hair in a luxurious caress and then slid back down, slowly, one long wide stroke between Monty's shoulder blades. Knuckles glided over the small of his back. Fingers tucked between the waistband of Monty's trousers and his shirt, tugging him back firmly against a solid, warm chest.
"I'm done," James said, and held the empty glass up in front of Monty's face.
Monty almost laughed, turning so they were face to face, very close. "I'm not."
They kissed, James' hands running over as much of Monty as they could find, his lips trailing reverently down Monty's throat. In one of the mirrors Monty saw them reflected, James all golden against his shadow, and it was then that he laughed, then that he finally felt inebriation suffusing his body.
"Get me outta this funhouse," he said, but he was the one to grip a handful of James' shirt and haul him to the dim bedroom.
They barely had anything to say to one another, but in the good way, the way Monty could condense three pages of dialogue down to a single look. James was like a boy in church, head bowed and worshipful, and Monty didn't mind it much, found he liked the worship of intimacy in a way he did not like worship of crowds.
Afterwards he half expected an audience's cheering, like that one time he'd been with Marlon on the stage after hours and, naked, Marlon had gotten up from the bed to applaud him.
They barely had anything to say to one another but at one point James had paused, poised above Monty and slick with sweat. With a little needy shiver, he murmured, "A moment's important when it makes your mind go numb with beauty."
Monty, eyes closed, had gasped, "You're one damn strange kid."
Later on Monty will recall the shattered hood of James' silver car when he looks upon his own wreck, the twisted skeleton of metal that hardly resembles a car anymore, the interior splashed dark with Monty's own blood. He will think of the day of James' funeral when he sits in his hospital bed and sees Liz beside him, head bowed and cheeks tear-stained. Her crying left faint trails in her foundation.
Monty had been sober for the accident, he swore it up and down, but the road was lonely and had so many dark twists. It was as though he blinked and the world disappeared; before he knew it there was only the dental sound of grinding metal, sharp starbursts of pain. He had felt like he was in a film of his own life. What a remarkable shot they'll get, he thought.
Liz had been there then too, grit and glass sticking to her pale lovely arms, his blood on her party dress. She had spent the night drunk and fighting with Michael so her eyes were hard and bright with forced sobriety, unshed tears. Monty had been choking. She dipped her small cool hand into his throat and extracted five teeth, one after another. She looked like Snow White and the witch in one, hand drenched red with poison.
Pain becomes the only lover Monty could ever keep, and pills the only bride he'd ever have. He takes all his mirrors down.
Years later he lays with his head in Marilyn's lap. It's late and neither of them can ever sleep, so they pool their medication and curl up in the bed Monty had shipped to Reno from his Manhattan home.
"You're the only one I know in worse shape than me," she told him, sad little smile on her face. With a finger, she traced his features, each one slightly rearranged compared to how it had been before.
"Least you still got your good looks," Monty tells her.
"Oh, honey," she says, and her voice at its softest is the closest to Marilyn Monroe he's heard her sound, "Oh, honey, you're beautiful. Did your Mama tell you how pretty you were every day? No one ever told me, not 'til I was older and they meant something else instead." She strokes his cheek, looking at him with a little worried mark between her brows. "You're beautiful, you know, sweetheart?"
Thing was, his ma had told him he was beautiful; everyone had told Monty he was beautiful; Monty had become exceptionally conceited and vain about his beauty. But the face that stared back at him now from polished silver was not his own, more like the caricatures he used to draw of his family as a little kid – a slash of dark brow, misshapen oval face, a loop of nose, spiking hair. It wasn't him at all. It's not his face, just a replacement made by doctors on an operating table.
Marilyn touches his mouth and he nips her finger, making her laugh. "I can tell you don't believe me," she says. "But I mean it."
She says everything with such simple complete sincerity that Monty does almost believe her. Sometimes when he's looking in her eyes he feels like he's looking at his own.
"What d'you say once Miller's out of the picture, you and me get hitched?" Monty says, reaching up to touch that sad, lovely mouth of hers.
"I don't know if I'm in the market for a fourth," she tells him. Her smile lilts under his fingertips. "But you're just my type, you know. Something tells me I'm not yours."
Monty gives a little roll-of-the-eyes-shrug, something that would've been real charming when he was young. "What's on the menu for tonight, Ms. Monroe?"
She looks over at the bottles on his bedside table, then reaches for them, selects two red, three blue, two white. "Appetizers, dinner, and dessert," she says.
Watching Misfits on television late one night, Montgomery reflects on her ocean eyes, her fragile limbs, her bleached-white hair like cotton candy. When she died she'd been wrapped up naked in her bed sheets with the telephone beside her. Making plans, he supposes. She'd told him two weeks before how much she missed New York. Monty said she had a bed with him anytime, and she made some crack about flying hers in from Los Angeles.
His home has no mirrors, except the tiny one above the bathroom sink, and his last reflection is fuzzy and boxed in on the television set. Looking at himself he feels the same blunted surprise he usually feels and he thinks –
You used to be a real thing of beauty. Look at that sorry face now.