Music For Chameleons

  TC: You drive a hard bargain.

  MARILYN: I’m listening. So let’s hear your best experience. Along those lines.

  TC: The best? The most memorable? Suppose you answer the question first.

  MARILYN: And I drive hard bargains! Ha! (Swallowing champagne) Joe’s not bad. He can hit home runs. If that’s all it takes, we’d still be married. I still love him, though. He’s genuine.

  TC: Husbands don’t count. Not in this game.

  MARILYN (nibbling nail; really thinking): Well, I met a man, he’s related to Gary Cooper somehow. A stockbroker, and nothing much to look at—sixty-five, and he wears those very thick glasses. Thick as jellyfish. I can’t say what it was, but—

  TC: You can stop right there. I’ve heard all about him from other girls. That old swordsman really scoots around. His name is Paul Shields. He’s Rocky Cooper’s stepfather. He’s supposed to be sensational.

  MARILYN: He is. Okay, smart-ass. Your turn.

  TC: Forget it. I don’t have to tell you damn nothing. Because I know who your masked marvel is: Arthur Miller. (She lowered her black glasses: Oh boy, if looks could kill, wow!) I guessed as soon as you said he was a writer.

  MARILYN (stammering): But how? I mean, nobody … I mean, hardly anybody—

  TC: At least three, maybe four years ago Irving Drutman—

  MARILYN: Irving who?

  TC: Drutman. He’s a writer on the Herald Tribune. He told me you were fooling around with Arthur Miller. Had a hang-up on him. I was too much of a gentleman to mention it before.

  MARILYN: Gentleman! You bastard. (Stammering again, but dark glasses in place) You don’t understand. That was long ago. That ended. But this is new. It’s all different now, and—

  TC: Just don’t forget to invite me to the wedding.

  MARILYN: If you talk about this, I’ll murder you. I’ll have you bumped off. I know a couple of men who’d gladly do me the favor.

  TC: I don’t question that for an instant.

  (At last the waiter returned with the second bottle.)

  MARILYN: Tell him to take it back. I don’t want any. I want to get the hell out of here.

  TC: Sorry if I’ve upset you.

  MARILYN: I’m not upset.

  (But she was. While I paid the check, she left for the powder room, and I wished I had a book to read: her visits to powder rooms sometimes lasted as long as an elephant’s pregnancy. Idly, as time ticked by, I wondered if she was popping uppers or downers. Downers, no doubt. There was a newspaper on the bar, and I picked it up; it was written in Chinese. After twenty minutes had passed, I decided to investigate. Maybe she’d popped a lethal dose, or even cut her wrists. I found the ladies’ room, and knocked on the door. She said: “Come in.” Inside, she was confronting a dimly lit mirror. I said: “What are you doing?” She said: “Looking at Her.” In fact, she was coloring her lips with ruby lipstick. Also, she had removed the somber head scarf and combed out her glossy fine-as-cotton-candy hair.)

  MARILYN: I hope you have enough money left.

  TC: That depends. Not enough to buy pearls, if that’s your idea of making amends.

  MARILYN (giggling, returned to good spirits. I decided I wouldn’t mention Arthur Miller again): No. Only enough for a long taxi ride.

  TC: Where are we going—Hollywood?

  MARILYN: Hell, no. A place I like. You’ll find out when we get there.

  (I didn’t have to wait that long, for as soon as we had flagged a taxi, I heard her instruct the cabby to drive to the South Street Pier, and I thought: Isn’t that where one takes the ferry to Staten Island? And my next conjecture was: She’s swallowed pills on top of that champagne and now she’s off her rocker.)

  TC: I hope we’re not going on any boat rides. I didn’t pack my Dramamine.

  MARILYN (happy, giggling): Just the pier.

  TC: May I ask why?

  MARILYN: I like it there. It smells foreign, and I can feed the seagulls.

  TC: With what? You haven’t anything to feed them.

  MARILYN: Yes, I do. My purse is full of fortune cookies. I swiped them from that restaurant.

  TC (kidding her): Uh-huh. While you were in the john I cracked one open. The slip inside was a dirty joke.

  MARILYN: Gosh. Dirty fortune cookies?

  TC: I’m sure the gulls won’t mind.

  (Our route carried us through the Bowery. Tiny pawnshops and blood-donor stations and dormitories with fifty-cent cots and tiny grim hotels with dollar beds and bars for whites, bars for blacks, everywhere bums, bums, young, far from young, ancient, bums squatting curbside, squatting amid shattered glass and pukey debris, bums slanting in doorways and huddled like penguins at street corners. Once, when we paused for a red light, a purple-nosed scarecrow weaved toward us and began swabbing the taxi’s windshield with a wet rag clutched in a shaking hand. Our protesting driver shouted Italian obscenities.)

  MARILYN: What is it? What’s happening?

  TC: He wants a tip for cleaning the window.

  MARILYN (shielding her face with her purse): How horrible! I can’t stand it. Give him something. Hurry. Please!

  (But the taxi had already zoomed ahead, damn near knocking down the old lush. Marilyn was crying.)

  I’m sick.

  TC: You want to go home?

  MARILYN: Everything’s ruined.

  TC: I’ll take you home.

  MARILYN: Give me a minute. I’ll be okay.

  (Thus we traveled on to South Street, and indeed the sight of a ferry moored there, with the Brooklyn skyline across the water and careening, cavorting seagulls white against a marine horizon streaked with thin fleecy clouds fragile as lace—this tableau soon soothed her soul.

  As we got out of the taxi we saw a man with a chow on a leash, a prospective passenger, walking toward the ferry, and as we passed them, my companion stopped to pat the dog’s head.)

  THE MAN (firm, but not unfriendly): You shouldn’t touch strange dogs. Especially chows. They might bite you.

  MARILYN: Dogs never bite me. Just humans. What’s his name?

  THE MAN: Fu Manchu.

  MARILYN (giggling): Oh, just like the movie. That’s cute.

  THE MAN: What’s yours?

  MARILYN: My name? Marilyn.

  THE MAN: That’s what I thought. My wife will never believe me. Can I have your autograph?

  (He produced a business card and a pen; using her purse to write on, she wrote: God Bless You—Marilyn Monroe)

  MARILYN: Thank you.

  THE MAN: Thank you. Wait’ll I show this back at the office. (We continued to the edge of the pier, and listened to the water sloshing against it.)

  MARILYN: I used to ask for autographs. Sometimes I still do. Last year Clark Gable was sitting next to me in Chasen’s, and I asked him to sign my napkin.

  (Leaning against a mooring stanchion, she presented a profile: Galatea surveying unconquered distances. Breezes fluffed her hair, and her head turned toward me with an ethereal ease, as though a breeze had swiveled it.)

  TC: So when do we feed the birds? I’m hungry, too. It’s late, and we never had lunch.

  MARILYN: Remember, I said if anybody ever asked you what I was like, what Marilyn Monroe was really like—well, how would you answer them? (Her tone was teaseful, mocking, yet earnest, too: she wanted an honest reply) I bet you’d tell them I was a slob. A banana split.

  TC: Of course. But I’d also say …

  (The light was leaving. She seemed to fade with it, blend with the sky and clouds, recede beyond them. I wanted to lift my voice louder than the seagulls’ cries and call her back: Marilyn! Marilyn, why did everything have to turn out the way it did? Why does life have to be so fucking rotten?)

  TC: I’d say …

  MARILYN: I can’t hear you.

  TC: I’d say you are a beautiful child.

  VII

  Nocturnal Turnings, or

  How Siamese Twins Have Sex

  TC: Shucks! Wide awake! Lawsamercy, we ain’t been
dozed off a minute. How long we been dozed off, honey?

  TC: It’s two now. We tried to go to sleep around midnight, but we were too tense. So you said why don’t we jack off, and I said yes, that ought to relax us, it usually does, so we jacked off and went right to sleep. Sometimes I wonder: Whatever would we do without Mother Fist and her Five Daughters? They’ve certainly been a friendly bunch to us through the years. Real pals.

  TC: A lousy two hours. Lawd knows when we’ll shut our eyes agin. An’ cain’t do nothin’ ’bout it. Cain’t haf a lil old sip of sompin ’cause dats a naw-naw. Nor none of dem snoozy pills, dat bein’ also a naw-naw.

  TC: Come on. Knock off the Amos ’n’ Andy stuff. I’m not in the mood tonight.

  TC: You’re never in the mood. You didn’t even want to jack off.

  TC: Be fair. Have I ever denied you that? When you want to jack off, I always lie back and let you.

  TC: Y’all ain’t got de choice, dat’s why.

  TC: I much prefer solitary satisfaction to some of the duds you’ve forced me to endure.

  TC: ’Twas up to you, we’d never have sex with anybody except each other.

  TC: Yes, and think of all the misery that would have saved us.

  TC: But then, we would never have been in love with people other than each other.

  TC: Ha ha ha ha ha. Ho ho ho ho ho. “Is it an earthquake, or only a shock? Is it the real turtle soup, or merely the mock? Is it the Lido I see, or Asbury Park?” Or is it at long last shit?

  TC: You never could sing. Not even in the bathtub.

  TC: You really are bitchy tonight. Maybe we could pass some time by working on your Bitch List.

  TC: I wouldn’t call it a Bitch List. It’s more sort of what you might say is a Strong Dislike List.

  TC: Well, who are we strongly disliking tonight? Alive. It’s not interesting if they’re not alive.

  TC: Billy Graham

  Princess Margaret

  Billy Graham

  Princess Anne

  The Reverend Ike

  Ralph Nader

  Supreme Court Justice Byron “Whizzer” White

  Princess Z

  Werner Erhard

  The Princess Royal

  Billy Graham

  Madame Gandhi

  Masters and Johnson

  Princess Z

  Billy Graham

  CBSABCNBCNET

  Sammy Davis, Jr.

  Jerry Brown, Esq.

  Billy Graham

  Princess Z

  J. Edgar Hoover

  Werner Erhard

  TC: One minute! J. Edgar Hoover is dead.

  TC: No, he’s not. They cloned old Johnny, and he’s everywhere. They cloned Clyde Tolson, too, just so they could go on goin’ steady. Cardinal Spellman, cloned version, occasionally joins them for a partouze.

  TC: Why harp on Billy Graham?

  TC: Billy Graham, Werner Erhard, Masters and Johnson, Princess Z—they’re all full of horse manure. But the Reverend Billy is just so full of it.

  TC: The fullest of anybody thus far?

  TC: No, Princess Z is more fully packed.

  TC: How So?

  TC: Well, after all, she is a horse. It’s only natural that a horse can hold more horse manure than a human, however great his capacity. Don’t you remember Princess Z, that filly that ran in the fifth at Belmont? We bet on her and lost a bundle, practically our last dollar. And you said: “It’s just like Uncle Bud used to say—‘Never put your money on a horse named Princess.’ ”

  TC: Uncle Bud was smart. Not like our old cousin Sook, but smart. Anyway, who do we Strongly Like? Tonight, at least.

  TC: Nobody. They’re all dead. Some recently, some for centuries. Lots of them are in Père-Lachaise. Rimbaud isn’t there; but it’s amazing who is. Gertrude and Alice. Proust. Sarah Bernhardt. Oscar Wilde. I wonder where Agatha Christie is buried—

  TC: Sorry to interrupt, but surely there is someone alive we Strongly Like?

  TC: Very difficult. A real toughie. Okay. Mrs. Richard Nixon. The Empress of Iran. Mr. William “Billy” Carter. Three victims, three saints. If Billy Graham was Billy Carter, then Billy Graham would be Billy Graham.

  TC: That reminds me of a woman I sat next to at dinner the other night. She said: “Los Angeles is the perfect place to live—if you’re Mexican.”

  TC: Heard any other good jokes lately?

  TC: That wasn’t a joke. That was an accurate social observation. The Mexicans in Los Angeles have their own culture, and a genuine one; the rest have zero. A city of suntanned Uriah Heeps.

  However, I was told something that made me chuckle. Something D. D. Ryan said to Greta Garbo.

  TC: Oh, yes. They live in the same building.

  TC: And have for more than twenty years. Too bad they’re not good friends, they’d like each other. They both have humor and conviction, but only en passant pleasantries have been exchanged, nothing more. A few weeks ago D. D. stepped into the elevator and found herself alone with Garbo. D. D. was costumed in her usual striking manner, and Garbo, as though she’d never truly noticed her before, said: “Why, Mrs. Ryan, you’re beautiful.” And D. D., amused but really touched, said: “Look who’s talkin’.”

  TC: That’s all?

  TC: C’est tout.

  TC: It seems sort of pointless to me.

  TC: Look, forget it. It’s not important. Let’s turn on the lights and get out the pens and paper. Start that magazine article. No use lying here gabbing with an oaf like you. May as well try to make a nickel.

  TC: You mean that Self-Interview article where you’re supposed to interview yourself? Ask your own questions and answer them?

  TC: Uh-huh. But why don’t you just lie there quiet while I do this? I need a rest from your evil frivolity.

  TC: Okay, scumbag.

  TC: Well, here goes.

  Q: What frightens you?

  A: Real toads in imaginary gardens.

  Q: No, but in real life—

  A: I’m talking about real life.

  Q: Let me put it another way. What, of your own experiences, have been the most frightening?

  A: Betrayals. Abandonments.

  But you want something more specific? Well, my very earliest childhood memory was on the scary side. I was probably three years old, perhaps a little younger, and I was on a visit to the St. Louis Zoo, accompanied by a large black woman my mother had hired to take me there. Suddenly there was pandemonium. Children, women, grown-up men were shouting and hurrying in every direction. Two lions had escaped from their cages! Two bloodthirsty beasts were on the prowl in the park. My nurse panicked. She simply turned and ran, leaving me alone on the path. That’s all I remember about it.

  When I was nine years old I was bitten by a cottonmouth water moccasin. Together with some cousins, I’d gone exploring in a lonesome forest about six miles from the rural Alabama town where we lived. There was a narrow, shallow crystal river that ran through this forest. There was a huge fallen log that lay across it from bank to bank like a bridge. My cousins, balancing themselves, ran across the log, but I decided to wade the little river. Just as I was about to reach the farther bank, I saw an enormous cottonmouth moccasin swimming, slithering on the water’s shadowy surface. My own mouth went dry as cotton; I was paralyzed, numb, as though my whole body had been needled with Novocaine. The snake kept sliding, winding toward me. When it was within inches of me, I spun around, and slipped on a bed of slippery creek pebbles. The cottonmouth bit me on the knee.

  Turmoil. My cousins took turns carrying me piggyback until we reached a farmhouse. While the farmer hitched up his mule-drawn wagon, his only vehicle, his wife caught a number of chickens, ripped them apart alive, and applied the hot bleeding birds to my knee. “It draws out the poison,” she said, and indeed the flesh of the chickens turned green. All the way into town, my cousins kept killing chickens and applying them to the wound. Once we were home, my family telephoned a hospital in Montgomery, a hundred miles away, and five hours lat
er a doctor arrived with a snake serum. I was one sick boy, and the only good thing about it was I missed two months of school.

  Once, on my way to Japan, I stayed overnight in Hawaii with Doris Duke in the extraordinary, somewhat Persian palace she had built on a cliff at Diamond Head. It was scarcely daylight when I woke up and decided to go exploring. The room in which I slept had French doors leading into a garden overlooking the ocean. I’d been strolling in the garden perhaps half a minute when a terrifying herd of Dobermans appeared, seemingly out of nowhere; they surrounded and kept me captive within the snarling circle they made. No one had warned me that each night after Miss Duke and her guests had retired, this crowd of homicidal canines was let loose to deter, and possibly punish, unwelcome intruders.

  The dogs did not attempt to touch me; they just stood there, coldly staring at me and quivering in controlled rage. I was afraid to breathe; I felt if I moved my foot one scintilla, the beasts would spring forward to rip me apart. My hands were trembling; my legs, too. My hair was as wet as if I’d just stepped out of the ocean. There is nothing more exhausting than standing perfectly still, yet I managed to do it for over an hour. Rescue arrived in the form of a gardener, who, when he saw what was happening, merely whistled and clapped his hands, and all the demon dogs rushed to greet him with friendly wagging tails.

  Those are instances of specific terror. Still, our real fears are the sounds of footsteps walking in the corridors of our minds, and the anxieties, the phantom floatings, they create.

  Q: What are some of the things you can do?

  A: I can ice-skate. I can ski. I can read upside down. I can ride a skateboard. I can hit a tossed can with a .38 revolver. I have driven a Maserati (at dawn, on a flat, lonely Texas road) at 170 mph. I can make a soufflé Furstenberg (quite a stunt: it’s a cheese-and-spinach concoction that involves sinking six poached eggs into the batter before cooking; the trick is to have the egg yolks remain soft and runny when the soufflé is served). I can tap-dance. I can type sixty words a minute.