Snuff

30. Mr. 137

The head of casting for Metro-Goldwyn-Mayer rejected Roy Fitzgerald three times. The actor stumbled when asked to walk around her office, stumbled so often she worried he'd break her glass coffee table. Fitzgerald, a former navy sailor turned Teamster, who now worked delivering frozen carrots, showed too much gum line when he smiled. Worst of all, he giggled. Fitzgerald spoke with the squeal of a teenage girl, and every time he tripped and stumbled over his own feet he'd giggle.

Nobody would cast the big sissy until his agent, Henry Willson, taught him to press his lips to his teeth as he smiled. Willson exposed Fitzgerald to an actor suffering from strep throat. Once Fitzgerald was infected and his throat fully inflamed, the agent ordered him to scream and shout until his vocal cords were scarred. After that, the actor's voice was lower, a deep, gravelly growl. A man's voice. And his name was changed to Rock Hudson.

I love that Cassie Wright knew that bit of Hollywood history. The fact that we both knew so much of the same trivia—about Tallulah drinking crushed eggshells and Lucy stretching her face back—that made me fall in love with her. Most marriages are based on a lot less.

Cassie knew about Marilyn Monroe cutting one high heel shorter than the other so her ass would truly roll as she walked. Cassie knew that Marilyn's lifetime of pneumonia and bronchitis was most likely caused by her habit of burying herself in a bathtub of crushed ice before any appearance in film or public. Lying naked, drugged to escape the pain, buried in ice for hours, gave Monroe the solid stand-up tits and ass she wanted for the day's work.

Wouldn't you know it?

Cassie knew Marilyn's secret name, the person Monroe dreamed of being. Not the baby-talking, hip-swinging blonde. Monroe dreamed of being respected, an intellectual like Arthur Miller, a respected, Stanislavsky-trained actor. A dignified human being. That's who Monroe would become as she traveled without makeup, without designer clothes borrowed from a movie studio, with her famous hair tied under a scarf, hiding behind horn-rimmed reading glasses. It was that plain, intelligent, educated actress who called herself Zelda Zonk. When she booked airplane tickets or registered in hotels. Zelda Zonk. Who read books. Who collected art. That was who Marilyn Monroe, the blonde sex goddess, dreamed of being.