Kisses of Death

8

Harold Weinberg (Joe Greenberg was an alias) had a history of mental illness, having been first institutionalized at age ten; in 1945, at seventeen, he’d been medically discharged from the Army, and had since racked up a long record of vagrancy and breaking-and-entering arrests. He confessed to the police several times, delivering several variants of what he told me, as well as a version that had Bodenheim killing Ruth and prompting Weinberg to retaliate with the .22, as well as my favorite, one in which a person hiding under the bed did it. Weinberg sang “The Star-Spangled Banner” at his arraignment, bragged about ridding the world of two Communists, assured spectators he was “not crazy,” and was promptly committed to Bellevue, where Maxwell Bodenheim and his wife Ruth were also registered, albeit in the morgue.

I claimed the bodies, at Ben Hecht’s behest, who shared funeral expenses with Bodenheim’s first wife, Minna, subject of Max’s first book of poetry. Three hundred attended the poet’s funeral, including such leading literary lights as Alfred Kreymborg and Louis Untermeyer, among a dozen other nationally known figures in the arts, who mingled with lowly Village poets, painters, and thespians. Kreymborg gave a eulogy that included the prediction, “We need not worry about Maxwell Bodenheim’s future — he will be read.”

And Bodenheim’s murder did receive enormous national coverage — probably no Bowery bum in history ever got such a send-off — and by dying violently in a sexually charged situation, the one-time bestselling author of Replenishing Jessica gained a second fifteen minutes of fame (to invoke a later oddball Village luminary).

But Kreymborg’s prediction has otherwise proved less than prescient. Every one of Bodie’s books was out of print at his death, and the same is true as I write this, forty-some years later. As far as I’m aware, the last time a Bodenheim book was in print was 1961, when a low-end paperback publisher put some sexy babes on the cover of the Greenwich Village memoirs he was writing at the time of his death.

The body of the former Ruth Fagan was claimed by her family in Detroit.

As I had intended, and done my best to arrange, my participation in the official investigation into the murder of Maxwell Bodenheim and his wife Ruth was minimal; I gave a statement about the argument I’d seen at the Waxworks on the evening of Saturday, February 7. I was not required to testify, and while I’m sure at some point Weinberg must have told the cops about the guy with the automatic who took a confession from him in Allen Spiegel’s rooming-house room, it was likely written off as just another of the numerous ravings of a madman who was eventually committed to Matteawan State Hospital for the Criminally Insane; he was released in 1977, and was behind bars again within a year on an attempted murder charge.

Until his death in 1964, Ben Hecht continued to write (and doctor) movie scripts, if with far less distinction than the glory days of the ’30s and ’40s. His real comeback was as a writer of nostalgic, wry memoirs, including A Child of the Century in 1954, in which he waxed fondly of Max; he tended to write of Chicago, not Hollywood or New York, and glorified the Chicago Renaissance (and himself) whenever possible, never letting the truth stand in the way of a good yarn.

He also completed the Marilyn Monroe “autobiography,” which was entitled My Story, but the project hit an unexpected snag.

“Looks like I won’t be paying you to make goo-goo eyes at Marilyn Monroe at this year’s ABA,” Ben said to me on the phone, in April of ’54.

“Hell you say. Why not? Isn’t she making an appearance?”

“Yeah, but not at the ABA. In court. That bimbo’s suing me!”

Ben’s British agent had peddled the serialization rights to the book overseas, without Marilyn’s permission. Her new husband, Mr. DiMaggio, convinced her she was being swindled and, besides, he didn’t like the idea of the book, anyway. Ben’s agent had violated the agreement with Marilyn, who hadn’t signed a final book contract; the book was pulled, the lawsuit dropped. My Story wasn’t published until 1974, when Marilyn’s former business partner, Milton Greene, sold it to Stein and Day, without mentioning Hecht’s role.

I did, however, encounter Marilyn again, and in fact had heard from her prior to Ben’s news about the busted book project. About a week after Bodenheim’s death, when I was back in Chicago, I received a phone call, at home, at three in the morning.

“I’m sorry to call so late,” the breathy voice said.

“That’s okay...” I said, sitting up in bed, blinking myself awake, pretty sure I recognized the voice, but thinking I was possibly still dreaming.

“This is Marilyn Monroe. You know — the actress?”

“I think I remember you. Very little gets past me. I’m a trained detective.”

She laughed a little, but when the voice returned, it was sad. “I couldn’t sleep. I was thinking about what I read in the papers.”

“What did you read?”

“About that poor man. Mr. Bodenheim.”

“He was cruel to you.”

“I know. But life was cruel to him.”

We talked for a good hour, about life and death and poetry and her new husband and how happy she was. It was a sweet, sad phone call. Delicate, gentle, poetic in a way that I don’t think Maxwell Bodenheim ever was, frankly.

The best thing you can say about Max is that, unlike a lot of writers who hit the skids and the bottle, he never stopped writing. He never stopped filling paper with his poetry.

On the other hand, I think about the sign I found in that ten-by-ten hellhole where he died, the cardboard on which he’d scrawled the words: I AM BLIND.

Probably the truest poem he ever wrote.