Kisses of Death

2

Just to be safe, I returned to the Palmer House at seven thirty, walking over from my suite of offices at the Monadnock Building, going in on the State Street side, through the business arcade and up the escalator to the vast high-ceilinged lobby, a cathedral-like affair with arched balconies, Roman travertine walls, and an elaborately painted Italian classical ceiling depicting gods and goddesses, which was only fitting considering who I was escorting tonight.

And since Hollywood divinity occupies a time and space continuum all its own, I had plenty of opportunity, seated comfortably in one of the velvet-upholstered chairs, to study each and every shapely nude, and near-nude, cloud-perched goddess.

As my delight at this assignment gradually wore to irritation (shortly after nine), I began toying with calling up to Miss Monroe’s suite to see if I’d misunderstood when I was to pick her up, or if she’d run into a problem, and just as irritation was bleeding into indignation (nine thirty), she stepped out of an elevator, a vision of twentieth-century womanhood that put to shame the classical dames floating above me.

She wore a simple black linen dress, spaghetti straps and a fairly low, straight-across-the-bosom neckline — no sign of a bra, or any pantyline, either; her heels were black strappy sandals, her legs bare. No jewelry, a small black purse in hand. Doffing my coconut-palm narrow-brim hat, I rose to approach her as she click-clacked toward me across the marble floor and by the time I’d slipped my arm in hers, and gazed into that radiant face with its blazingly red-lipsticked baby-doll pout, my annoyance disappeared, and delight had bloomed again.

She issued no apology for her tardiness, but what she said instead was much better: “Don’t you look handsome.”

And for the first time I witnessed, in person, the practiced, patented open-mouthed smile, as she stroked the sleeve of my green Dacron sport jacket, then straightened and smoothed the lighter-green linen tie that matched my sport shirt, under which my heart went pitty pat.

“I thought bodyguards tried to blend into the woodwork,” she said, eyeing my canary-yellow lightweight slacks.

“This bodyguard wants to be noticed,” I said, as we walked through a lobby whose patrons were wide-eyed with wonder at the presence among them of this goddess. “Not that anyone will...”

In back of the cab, on our way to Riccardo’s, I ventured a question: “Do you mind if I ask something a little personal?”

“Ask and see.”

“Is what I read about in the papers true, about you and Joe DiMaggio?”

She shrugged. “We’ve been dating, kind of off and on.”

“Is it ‘on’ right now?”

“Off.”

“Ah,” I said. “I’m sorry.”

“Are you really, Nathan?”

“No.”

She smiled at that. Then, looking out the window at the Loop gliding by, she said rather absently, “I’d never heard of him.”

“Never heard of Joltin’ Joe?”

She looked back and me and a tiny laugh bubbled in her throat. “It was a blind date. My girlfriend said he was a famous ballplayer who liked blondes. I didn’t even know what kind of ballplayer she meant, football or baseball or what. Didn’t want to look any dumber than I already did, but he was a real sweetheart on the date, and you should’ve seen people slapping him on the back, asking him for autographs. They were completely ignoring me.”

“And you liked that?”

“I respected it... Are you married, Nathan?”

“Not right now.”

Riccardo’s was a converted warehouse at 437 North Rush; it began in ’34 as a hole-in-the-wall gathering place for artists, writers, and theatrical types, but had been revamped and expanded a decade ago to accommodate the wider clientele its arty atmosphere and exotic reputation attracted.

The evening was pleasantly warm, with just the right hint of lake breeze, and the tables that spilled out from under the awning onto the sidewalk were packed with patrons enjoying dinner and drinks and a magnificent view of the parking lot. Heads swiveled and eyes widened as I guided Marilyn through the tables and into the restaurant, which somehow managed an intimate ambience despite expansive, open seating and bright lighting designed to show off the framed paintings that were everywhere.

“Looks more like an art gallery than a restaurant,” Marilyn said breathlessly, her gaze skimming above the heads of diners who were admiring the work of art walking among them.

“It’s both,” I said, moving her gently through the crowd. “This main dining room is an exhibit hall for young midwestern artists.”

“What a lovely notion! So the paintings are constantly changing?”

I nodded. “One-man shows lasting a month.”

This month’s genius seemed adept at filling canvases with dull gray backgrounds on which danced amoebalike blobs of garish purple, red, and green.

“Ah,” I said, “here’s Ric...”

In a black suit and tie, tall, slender, a youthful fifty with his gray crew cut and black eyebrows and mustache, looking like a Mephistophelean maitre d’, Ric Riccardo approached, eyes twinkling, hand outstretched.

“The Chicago Sherlock,” he said, as we shook hands. “And no introduction is required of this lovely lady...”

He gently took her fingertips in his and kissed the back of her hand and she smiled and raised her eyebrows, appreciation murmuring behind her kiss of a pursed smile.

“Marilyn, this is Ric Riccardo.”

She frowned. “You don’t look much like Desi Arnaz.”

Ric looked mildly wounded. I wasn’t sure whether she was kidding or not, but somehow with her it didn’t matter.

“This is the original,” I said, “and he’s Italian, not Cuban.”

Her bare shoulders lifted and sat themselves down, doing a fine job of it, too, I must say. “I just love the idea of your restaurant, Mr. Riccardo! You’re a true patron of the arts.”

Ric made a dismissive gesture. “I’m afraid I only did it to have a place to hang my own canvases.”

“You’re an artist, too?”

“I’ve never been able to decide whether I paint badly,” Ric sighed, “or whether people just can’t understand what I paint. But at least, here, I sell a canvas now and then.”

“Don’t let him kid you,” I told her, “his artwork’s even better than his veal scaloppine.”

Ric’s eyes narrowed. “Which brings us to a difficult subject — my friends, you’ve missed the buffet, and I’m afraid the party has moved from my private dining room into the bar.”

He led us down into the lower level, where I spotted Ben chatting with a pair of Trib talents, obsessive Sherlock Holmes buff Vincent Starrett and literary section editor Fanny Butcher. Here and there were the likes of bookseller Stuart Brent, Herald American columnist Bob Casey, various other well-known local scribes, John Gunther, Bill Leonard, Bob Cromie, among the bigger names. Mostly, as I had predicted, the crowd consisted of second-stringers and tail-end members from the Renaissance movement, who had gone back to the newspaper world that spawned them.

“Oooo,” Marilyn said, “look at that odd-shaped bar!”

“It’s a big artist’s palette,” I said.

“Oh, it is!” And her laughter chimed.

“Our murals back behind there,” Ric said proudly, as he led us to a corner table for two, plucking the “reserved” sign off, “are the work of our city’s most well-known artists — the Albrights, Aaron Bohrod, Vincent D’Agostino...”

“And Desi Arnaz, here,” I said.

And our host smiled, bowed, and — with us deposited at our cozy table — moved on. Like Ben Hecht, Ric was a pragmatic Renaissance survivor, an artist turned businessman. And like Ben, Ric liked to think he was still a bohemian at heart.

For all its premeditated hipness, however, Ric’s restaurant bore the square stigmata of Italian restaurants immemorial: instead of the cool tinklings of jazz piano, the air resounded with the strains of “O Sole Mio,” accompanied by violin, mandolin, and concertina, courtesy of strolling singers and musicians in ruffled sleeves and satin trousers.

Wandering in from the dining room and sidewalk café, where they provided a welcome backdrop for couples romantically dining, came a trio of these singers with a violinist in tow, warbling “Come Back to Sorrento.” This was a misguided sortie into enemy territory, as Ben and other self-styled intellectual and literary lights attending the reunion glanced at them irritably over cocktail glass rims and cigarettes-in-hand.

A slender ponytail brunette, her olive complexion a stark contrast next to her short-sleeved cream-color dress, planted herself in front of the musicians, hands pressed around a tall glass, swaying to their serenade. At first glance she seemed attractive, even strikingly so, and I pegged her for her midtwenties.

“She’s having fun,” Marilyn said, not at all judgmentally.

As the musicians moved through the bar, and closer to us, and the brunette danced sensuously along, I got a closer look at her. The dress was a frayed secondhand-store frock, and she had to be in her thirties. Her big brown eyes were cloudy and dark-circled, her wide mouth slack.

This girl wasn’t tipsy: she was a lush.

About this time, the musicians noticed Marilyn — or at least noticed a beautiful blonde — and made their way to our table. I was digging for a half dollar to tip them, and make them go away, when the slender bombed brunette inserted herself between us and the strolling musicians and hip-swayed to their music in a manner that would suit Minksy’s better than Riccardo’s.

Marilyn’s glance at me was more sad than disapproving.

The brunette clutched the arm of the nearest singer — a handsome if chubby kid in his twenties, the tenor — and her other hand began moving up and down the thigh of his satin pants.

“Gentlemen!” a male voice cried, above the syrupy strains. “Please cease.”

And an absurd figure who might have walked in off a burlesque stage appeared at the fringe of this little tableau, positioning himself alongside the violinist, a foul-smelling corncob pipe in one hand, a double-shot glass of straight whiskey in the other. The four musicians trailed off into stunned silence, and their eyes traveled from the drunken dame to the latest character in this farce, stooped, obviously inebriated, a frail sack of bones swimming in a dark, shabby, slept-in suit set off ever so nattily by a dark frayed food-stained tie and shoes that had long since exploded in wear.

His face was misshapen from years of drink, the blobby careless first draft of an indifferent sculptor, skull beneath the flesh asserting itself as his features threatened to fall off, his complexion a mottled albino, eyes dark rheumy haunted pools, nose a lumpy sweet potato, mouth a thin crumpled line. His hair, unkempt and shaggy as it was, his ears half-covered, sideburns bordering on mutton chop, was the garish reddish brown of a Mercurochrome dye job; it might have been a wig, had this pitiful creature been able to afford one.

“Could it be,” he said, revealing a jack-o’-lantern smile, his near-toothlessness giving him a Karloff lisp, “that angelic choristers of heaven have invaded this bistro, wings tipped with music vibrating like a flock of wild swans skimming the surface of some enchanted sea?”

“Shut up, Max,” the brunette said; she had a husky voice that under the right circumstances might have been sexy.

“Who is that?” Marilyn whispered.

“The guest of honor,” I said.

And this was indeed Maxwell Bodenheim, an astonishing husk of the tall, slim, golden-haired ladies’ man I remembered from my father’s bookshop; back then, only his eyebrows had been a devilish red-brown.

He leaned against the shoulder of the violinist. “And are these the heartwarming, bell-like tones of a Heifetz? Or does the angel Gabriel lurk in your barrel-like form?”

“Max!” she said. “Can’t a girl dance?”

He raised the whiskey glass sloshingly, a parody of a toast, underlined by the threat of flinging it in the nearest face (not much of one, because Bodenheim was unlikely to waste such precious fluid in so foolhardy a manner).

“Or,” he proclaimed, “are you heathens tempting an innocent child into the ways of the nymph, stirring the wildness in her nature and fomenting the bestial longings in her blood?”

The brunette threw her hands up. “Jesus Christ, Max!”

The musicians were looking at each other like the Three Stooges wondering how to explain their latest botched wallpapering job to their boss. Wide eyes peered out of the drifting cigarette smoke around us as the Renaissance reunion got a good look at the man of the hour, who was dramatically draining the whiskey glass, handing the empty vessel to the nearest bewildered musician.

Then, moving with unexpected quickness, and force, Bodenheim grabbed the woman by the arm and she squealed with pain as he intoned, “Or is this ‘innocent’ the heathen? If we are to believe Schopenhauer, women are incapable of romantic love, yet infinitely capable of unfathomable treachery...”

“Excuse me,” I told the horrified but spellbound Marilyn, and got up and put my hand on Bodenheim’s shoulder.

“It is rather unfortunate,” he was saying, still clutching his wife’s arm, his face inches from hers with its wide eyes and lips drawn back in snarl, “that the legs of a girl cannot be nailed to the floor... It’s hard to keep them in one place, except when they are locked up in closets.”

I said, “Been a long time, Max.”

The rheumy blue eyes tried to focus, and he suddenly noticed the hand on his shoulder, looking down at it as if it were an oversize, unpleasant moth that had landed there. “I don’t know you, young man. Kindly remove your meat hook from my shoulder.”

I did, then extended my hand. “Nate Heller. Mahlon’s son.”

A wrinkled smile formed under the lumpy nose and the eyes tightened in remembrance. “Heller’s Books. Ah yes. The West Side. Wonderful days. Days of youth and passion.” Ric, just behind us, was rounding up his musicians and herding them out of the bar and back up into the dining room.

In the meantime, Bodenheim had unhanded the brunette and was gesturing to her rather grandly with his corncob pipe in hand. “Heller’s Books, allow me to introduce Mrs. Maxwell Bodenheim.”

The pretty, lanky lush smiled at me, looked me up and down with open appreciation, and said, “I’ll have to get Max to bring me to Chicago more often.”

“You’ll have to forgive Ruth,” Bodenheim said, his smile tightening. “She has the morals of an alley cat, but she can’t help it. She, too, comes from a newspaper background...”

“You mean like me, Max?” Ben asked, stepping into our rarefied social circle. He had a cigar in the fingers of the hand that held his glass of Scotch. He had the uneasy smile of a host who suddenly realized he had invited a disaster area for a guest.

Bodenheim beamed at the sight of his old friend and adversary; his smile had more holes than teeth. “I was referring...” He gestured and sneered and stage-whispered: “...to these lesser lights. Literary section editors. Book reviewers. Columnists...”

Ben smirked. “Try not to alienate them too bad, Bodie, till I pass the hat for ya.”

Ruth floated off and I returned to the small table where a stilted Marilyn was talking to Herb Lyon of the Trib. He was trying to wrangle an impromptu follow-up interview for his Tower Ticker column; I gently let Herb know this was a social occasion and he drifted off. Soon Marilyn was sipping a glass of champagne; I had a Coke — I was working, after all — while Bodenheim (who had somehow acquired another drink) had Hecht up against a wall, the former getting worked up and Hecht’s patient smile wearing thinner and thinner.

I only got bits and pieces of it, mostly Bodenheim, saying, “I have always liked your work, my cynical friend, I can honestly say I’ve never slammed it... Count Bruga, of course, excepted... Ben, you had great ability in fields of prose, where money alone lies. I am an indifferent prose writer and a very good poet. That explains the difference in our purses!”

“Such a sad, brilliant man,” Marilyn said, working on her second glass of champagne.

“Sad, anyway.”

“You don’t think he’s brilliant?”

“He’s got an impressive line of bullshit,” I said, “for a deadbeat.”

“How can you say that? His language is beautiful!”

“But what he says is ugly.”

“I don’t care. I want to meet him.”

I didn’t argue with her. Mine was not to reason why. Mine was but to do and sigh.

As I approached Bodenheim, he continued filibustering his old friendly foe: “If we don’t raise at least twenty dollars tonight, Ben, I shan’t be able to get my typewriter out of hock when I return to that shallow, mean, and uncouth frenzy known as New York.”

“Then as you wend your way around this room, Bodie,” Ben said, smiling the world’s tightest smile, “I suggest you find some topic of discussion beside the ‘stench of Capitalism.’ Your old friends, the ones still alive anyway, aren’t radicals anymore. They’re democrats.”

“I do need my typewriter,” Bodenheim said, as if Ben had said nothing, “even though I have not sold one of my short stories or poems yet this year.” He took a healthy swig from his latest glass of whiskey. “But hope is a warmly smiling, stubbornly tottering child — and without a typing machine I would feel like a writer with spinal meningitis.”

I whispered to Ben: “Marilyn wants to meet the Great Man.”

Ben rolled his eyes, and said, “All right, but let’s both chaperone him, then.”

Bodenheim was saying, “You might consider it a persecution complex, but I’m convinced these rejections stem from the days when I threw many a caustic jab at the intellectual dwarfs who pass as literary editors and critics...”

Taking his toothpick arm, I said, “Max, that lovely blonde would like to meet you. She’s quite famous. That’s Marilyn Monroe.”

“Heller Books, it would be my immense pleasure!” he said, something flickering in the cloudy eyes, the ghost of a once-great womanizer, perhaps.

I ushered him over to the table, where Marilyn rose, smiling, almost blushing, saying, “Mr. Bodenheim, I’ve worn my copy of your Selected Poems simply to tatters.”

He took her hand and, much as Ric had, kissed it; I hope she washed it, later. With antiseptic soap.

“My dear,” Bodenheim said, bowing, “your taste is as impeccable as your skin is luminous. May I sit?”

She gestured eagerly. “Please.”

Ben and I commandeered a couple extra chairs and the four of us crowded around the postage-stamp table as the Tattered King of Greenwich Village conferred with Hollywood’s reigning Sex Queen.

“Miss Monroe, I have admired your contributions to the cinema,” he said.

“I would think an artist of your stature wouldn’t find much of value in what I do,” she said, obviously as flattered as she was surprised.

Ben said, “I never knew you to go to a picture show, Bodie.”

“I have slept in some of the finest grindhouses on Forty-Second Street,” he said rather grandly. He was looking around, probably for his wife. She was nowhere in sight. He returned his gaze to the incandescent beauty who hung on his every word.

“I adore your contribution to the arts, my dear,” he said, the sarcasm so faint I wasn’t sure it was there. “You remind me of the Bali woman who walks naked down to her navel, and proudly displays her beautifully formed breasts; making love is as a natural to her as breathing, or singing. Sex is really the song of the spirit as well as the flesh, and my dear, you are a prima donna, a diva, of your art.”

This slice of condescension-laced sexual innuendo made Ben wince, but Marilyn seemed not to mind, even to take it as a compliment.

“But what I do is so... ephemeral,” Marilyn said. “Your poetry will live forever.”

He leaned forward. “Do you know what poetry is, my dear?”

“I think I do... I don’t know if I could put it into words...”

Now he sat back again. “It’s the deep, unformed longing to escape from daily details... to enter delicately imaginative plateaus, unconnected with human beliefs, or fundamental human feelings...”

“Oh, but Mr. Bodenheim...”

He puffed the corncob. “Call me Max, child — or Bodie, as my friends do.”

Ben rolled his eyes, as if to say, What friends?

Marilyn’s expression was heartbreakingly sincere. “But, Max... your poems are filled with human feeling...”

He nodded, exhaling foul smoke; I had a hunch if you took the smoke away, he wouldn’t smell much better.

“I am cursed with a malady of the soul,” the poet said. “I am constantly tempted to desert the sleek jest of this physical existence.”

Her eyes tightened. Her question was a whisper: “Suicide?”

“My life has been a dirty, cruel, involved, crucified mess — with the exception of my glittering words. And sometimes I even hate them, my pretty, glittering words. But where would I be without that golden braid of language that lifts me up out of my life?”

“Would you... would you ever do it? Take your own life?”

“I think not, child. We demonstrate the truth or falsity of our lives by the manner of our deaths.”

“What do you mean?”

“Those who die in a tavern brawl like Christopher Marlowe or in a fit of desperation like Hart Crane leaping off a ship in mid-ocean reveal in their violent deaths the inadequate inner workings of their secret beings... Are you familiar with this one?

I shall walk down the road.

I shall turn and feel upon my feet

The kisses of Death, like scented rain.”

“For Death is a black slave with little silver birds,” Marilyn said, “perched in a sleeping wreath upon his head.”

“You do me great honor,” Bodenheim said, touching a hand to his chest, lowering his head, then chugging some whiskey.

“So many of your poems are about death... and love.”

“I am a man, and man is human, all too human, placed by the theologians a little below the angels. Life is the struggle between the pull of the divine and the downward drag of the beast.”

She was leaning forward, rapt in the wise man’s words. “Is suicide divine, or beastly?”

“Neither. Both. Perhaps I’ll answer your question in my next poem.” Then he shrugged and began working on relighting his corncob. “But as long as Ruth lives, I’ll not take my life.”

“Ruth? Your wife?”

“My sweet better half, with whom I share park benches, flophouse suites, and what remains of my tattered existence. We have an exquisite arrangement — she cheats on me, and I beat on her. An inventive girl. Burned down her parents’ house, you know. There are those who say that she is mad, but who among us does not have eccentricities?”

“Is she a poet, too?”

He had the corncob going again. “She’s a writer.”

Marilyn swallowed, summoned bravery and said, “I write poetry.”

His smile was benevolent. “You do, my child?”

“Would you like to hear one?” She smiled. “I think I’ve had enough champagne to get the nerve...

Life — I am of both your directions

Somehow remaining

Hanging downward the most

Strong as a cobweb in the wind...”

“You wrote that?”

“Yes.”

Bodenheim shook his head. “Sentimental slush.” He stood suddenly. “Stick to the silver screen, sweetie.”

And he rose and stumbled off into the crowd.

Marilyn had turned a ghostly white, her mouth slack, her face without expression, her eyes wide and vacant and yet filled with pain.

Ben touched her arm and said, “Marilyn, I’m sorry... he’s a drunken no-good bastard. Hell, he thinks Ezra Pound stinks...”

“Nathan... could you please take me back to the hotel?”

“Sure.”

But Marilyn was already up and moving out, and I was working to keep up with her. She didn’t begin crying until we were in back of the cab, and I held her in my arms and comforted her, telling her how much I liked her poem.

At the door of her suite, I said, “He’s a Skid Row bum, you’re a goddess. They’ll be watchin’ your movies when this guy’s poems turn to dust.”

She smiled, just a little, and touched my face with the gentlest hand imaginable.

Then she kissed me.

Sweetly. Sadly.

“Do you want me to come in?” I asked.

“Next time, Nathan,” she said.

And sealed herself within.