The Undocumented Mark Steyn (45 page)

She kicks off her pumps, pulls her knees up and hugs her pedal-pushers—the pink and yellow checks that Elton claimed made him homesick for Battenberg cake. She stares into my eyes, draws down her upper lip, and purrs creamily: “As Marcel Proust, 1871 to 1922, said in Du
côté de chez Swann
, volume one, in the Scott-Moncrieff translation, ‘Learning to love yourself is the greatest love of all.’”

“Are you sure?” I say. “It doesn’t sound like Proust.”

Momentarily, she panics, puts her spectacles on and fumbles through her index. Even at seventy, she packs well-thumbed copies of Proust and Whitman and Rilke, as if still craving the approval of an Elia Kazan or Arthur Miller. Only recently has she begun to find her own voice. Her next book will be a volume of New Age philosophy (
Crystals Are a Girl’s Best Friend
), though neither that nor
Norma Jean: The Child Inside
seems to find much room for the movie career Miss Monroe used to have long before she fetched up in
Dallas
.

“I can’t watch those early films anymore,” she says. “That whole vulnerability thing—it makes me so angry. And anger is not where I reside.”

“Where do you reside?” I ask.

“Palm Springs mainly, but I was speaking”—She exhales the next word breathily, as in her famous “Happy Birthday” greeting to President Nixon—“
metaphorically
.”

The movies fizzled out after
The Graduate
flopped in 1968. “I blame myself,” she says. “The director, Mike Nichols, wanted someone else but the studio forced me on him. It killed all our careers, but it was my fault. I still feel guilty about that boy—what was he called? Justin Hoffberg? He drops me a line every couple of years. Last I heard he was running a not-for-profit theatre in South Bend, Indiana. Could have been a big star.”

“Oh, that’s ridiculous,” I say. “He was just a nerdy little shrimp.”

“They wrote that song for me, you know. ‘Boop-boop-be-doop Mrs. Robinson. . . . Where have you gone, Joe DiMaggio?’ Yeah, tell me about it.”

Her smile sags, and she falls silent for a moment, until the young waiter awkwardly hovering interrupts. “Miss Monroe, this is an honor. I loved you in
Mrs. Doubtfire
.”

“That was Robin Williams, dear,” she says. “I’ll have a Caesar salad and the lobster.”

“Which one?” He waves towards the tank.

“All of them.”

“You’re going to eat forty-seven lobsters?”

“Silly! I’m going to release them into the ocean.”

“Like in
The Misfits
,” I say, “where you try to save the wild horses from being captured and killed.”

Since her character was written out of
Dallas
, when Clayton went off to find himself with Ray Krebbs, things haven’t been easy. A cover version of “I Want Your Sex” by the Pet Shop Boys failed to re-ignite her singing career; her animal shelter was closed down, and her line of perfume,
Breathless by Marilyn
, was taken off the market after it was revealed that
eau de toilette
for the latter had been tested on raccoons from the former.

Then, in 1994, she was unceremoniously sacked four days before she was due to open in Andrew Lloyd Webber’s
Sunset Boulevard
. “Andrew was so, y’know, goofy about it. He kept saying he couldn’t hear the songs. But she was a silent film star, wasn’t she? So he wouldn’t have heard any songs, would he? I learnt that at the Actors Studio: sometimes the artist can see things the author’s missed, and my take on the role was that a silent screen actress just
wouldn’t have been comfortable with the whole idea of singing. I met Gloria Swanson, and, believe me, she was no Ethel Merman. . . .”

I ask the question everyone wants to put: “Have you had cosmetic surgery?”

She laughs and wrinkles her nose. “No,” she declares, and stretches out her hands. “Eat your heart out, Queen Elizabeth!” Liver spots, but not many lines. “You can feel if you want to,” she says, adjusting the silk clinging to her breasts. “I’m the last squishy star. They all have these hard bodies now.”

She was
Playboy
’s first and most famous Playmate in December 1953 and reprised her performance for the twenty-fifth anniversary and again for the fortieth. “Do you want to know the secret?”

“Sure,” I say.

“Always sleep in your bra. It preserves the muscle tone.”

She’s just sold the film rights to her book and passed the tip on to the actress who’ll be playing young Marilyn, Kate Moss. (“My what?” said Kate.)

The waiter returns with the lobsters. “Just wheel the tank round by the car,” she says. “You can put it on expenses, can’t you?”

“Well, I’m not sure,” I begin. But I know she’s never had much money. Even in the Fifties, she never made more than $1,500 a week, and Jane Russell got paid five times as much for
Gentlemen Prefer Blondes
. Since then, she’s compounded her problems by some ill-advised lawsuits. She sued Madonna, arguing that her “Material Girl” video amounted to the theft of her professional identity, and lost. Her publicist had warned me there’s one area she won’t discuss, but I can’t resist bringing it up: her ongoing sexual harassment suit against President Clinton.

“Well, it’s upsetting to me because I was one of his first supporters,” she says, “long before Barbra or Fleetwood Mac. It was a big rally and I sang ‘He’s Just a Little Boy from Little Rock,’ and you can imagine my shock when he comes up to me afterwards and goes”—the voice drops to a whisper—“‘Say hello to a girl’s best friend, baby. And I don’t mean rhinestones.’”

I am, frankly, skeptical. “Oh, come on,” I scoff. “This is the President of the United States we’re talking about!”

“Well, he wasn’t the first of those Hail-to-the-Chief boys to try it on with me.”

“Really? Who else?”

“I’d rather not say.”

“It was Nixon, wasn’t it?”

“I’m not saying. But it was before Nixon.”

“My God, Eisenhower!”

“I told you I won’t say. But it was after Eisenhower.”

“Good grief. LBJ?”

“Just drop it, okay?’ And the girlish voice has a sudden flash of steel.

So I move on. “What a life!” I marvel.

“Oh, silly!” she chides. “I’m just one of those old faces people look at in restaurants and airports because somewhere under the wrinkles they think they can see a young face they used to recognize. U wrote a song about me. ‘And it seems to me you lived your life like a candle in the wind, never knowing who to cling to when the rain set in. . . .’”

“That’s very good,” I say. “You should get him to record it.”

“Oh, please. I told him I don’t get the simile. I mean, a candle doesn’t cling to you in the wind, does it? It would set your shirt alight. So he went off and composed a song about Judy Garland instead.”

I remind her of some lines young Marilyn had written to herself almost half a century earlier: “There was something special about me and I knew what it was. I was the kind of girl they found dead in a hall bedroom with an empty bottle of sleeping pills in her hand.”

She laughs, a big, full, throaty laugh. “Maybe it would have been better that way,” she says, and points to a framed poster across the restaurant. “Like James Dean. He’ll be in that T-shirt for eternity. D’you remember
The Seven Year Itch
? When it played New York, they had this fifty-foot blow-up on the front of Loew’s State—me over the subway grating with the wind blowing the pleats of my skirt above the waist. I thought they’d never take it down.”

The lips quiver playfully one last time and she begins to sing softly:

         
Men grow cold

         
As girls grow old

         
And we all lose our charms in the end . . .

“But to be one of the Poster People. That’s forever.”

XIV

LAST LAUGHS

JOKING ASIDE

National Review
, June 6, 2011

I READ
The Joke
, Milan Kundera’s first novel, when I was a schoolboy. Bit above my level, but, even as a teenager, I liked the premise. Ludvik is a young man in post-war, newly Communist Czechoslovakia. He’s a smart, witty guy, a loyal Party member with a great future ahead of him. His girlfriend, though, is a bit serious. So when she writes to him from her two-week Party training course enthusing about the early-morning calisthenics and the “healthy atmosphere,” he scribbles off a droll postcard:

         
Optimism is the opium of the people! A healthy atmosphere stinks of stupidity! Long live Trotsky! Ludvik.

A few weeks later, he’s called before a committee of the District Party Secretariat. He tries to explain he was making a joke. Immediately they remove him from his position at the Students Union; then they expel him from the Party, and the university; and shortly thereafter he’s sent to work in the mines. As a waggish adolescent, I liked the absurdity of the situation in which Ludvik finds himself. Later, I came to appreciate that Kundera had skewered the touchiness of totalitarianism, and the consequential loss of any sense of proportion. It was the book I read on the flight to Vancouver, when
Maclean’s
magazine and I were hauled before the British Columbia “Human Rights” Tribunal for the crime of “flagrant Islamophobia.” In the course of a week-long trial, the best part of a day was devoted to examining, with the aid of “expert witnesses,” the “tone” of my jokes.

Like Ludvik at the District Party Secretariat, we faced a troika of judges. Unfortunately, none of them had read Milan Kundera, or, apparently, heard of him. So immediately after my trial they ensnared a minor stand-up comic,
Guy Earle, who had committed the crime of putting down two drunken hecklers. Unfortunately for him, they were of the lesbian persuasion. Last month, he was convicted of putting down hecklers homophobically and fined fifteen thousand dollars. Mr. Earle did not testify at his trial, nor attend it. He lives on the other side of the country, and could afford neither flight nor accommodation. Rather touchingly, he offered to pay for his trip by performing at various comedy clubs while in town, before he eventually realized that no Vancouver impresario was going to return his calls ever again. Ludvik would have recognized that, too. Comrade Zemanek, the chairman of the plenary meeting that decides his fate, participated with him in earlier jests with the same girl, but he makes a brilliant speech explaining why Ludvik has to be punished, and everyone else agrees:

         
No one spoke on my behalf, and finally everyone present (and there were about a hundred of them, including my teachers and my closest friends), yes, every last one of them raised his hand to approve my expulsion.

And so it went for Guy Earle, hung out to dry by his comrades at the plenary session of the Canadian Collective of Edgy Transgressive Comedians. I speak metaphorically. But, if you’d like something more literal, let’s move south of the border. Recently,
Surgery News
, the official journal of the American College of Surgeons, published a piece by its editor-in-chief, Lazar Greenfield, examining research into the benefits to women of. . . well, let Dr. Greenfield explain it:

         
They found ingredients in semen that include mood enhancers like estrone, cortisol, prolactin, oxytocin, and serotonin; a sleep enhancer, melatonin; and, of course, sperm, which makes up only one to five per cent. Delivering these compounds into the richly vascularized vagina also turns out to have major salutary effects for the recipient.

As this was the Valentine’s issue, Dr. Greenfield concluded on a “lighthearted” note:

         
Now we know there’s a better gift for that day than chocolates.

Oh, my. When the complaints started rolling in from lady doctors,
Surgery News
withdrew the entire issue. All of it. Gone. Then Dr. Greenfield apologized. Then he resigned as editor. Then he apologized some more. Then he resigned as president-elect of the American College of Surgeons.
The New York Times
solemnly reported that Dr. Barbara Bass, chairwoman of the department of surgery at Methodist Hospital in Houston, declared she was “glad Dr. Greenfield had resigned.” But Dr. Colleen Brophy, professor of surgery at Vanderbilt University, said “the resignation would not end the controversy.”

Dr. Greenfield is one of the most eminent men—whoops, persons—in his profession, and, when it comes to vascularized vaginas, he would appear to have the facts on his side. But, like Ludvik, he made an ideologically unsound joke, and so his career must be ended. An apology won’t cut it, so the thought police were obliged to act: To modify the old line, the operation was a complete success, and the surgeon died.

Years later, Ludvik reflects on the friends and colleagues who voted to destroy him. I wonder if, in the ruins of his reputation, Dr. Greenfield will come to feel as Kundera’s protagonist does:

         
Since then, whenever I make new acquaintances, men or women with the potential of becoming friends or lovers, I project them back into that time, that hall, and ask myself whether they would have raised their hands; no one has ever passed the test.

Who would have thought all the old absurdist gags of Eastern Europe circa 1948 would transplant themselves to the heart of the west so effortlessly? Indeed, a latter-day Kundera would surely reject as far too obvious a scenario in which lesbians and feminists lean on eunuch males to destroy a man for
disrespecting the vascularized vagina by suggesting that semen might have restorative properties. “Give it to me straight, doc. I can take it”? Not anymore. Kundera’s Joke is now on us.