The Enchanters (Marilyn), Affairs to Remember

Bug mounts meant potential tapped phone lines. The Marilyn Monroe crib featured three extensions. Living room, spare bedroom, Marilyn’s boudoir. I made the rounds and ran receiver checks. I pulled the handsets off the phones and unscrewed the perforated tops and bottoms. I checked for stashed mini-mikes and got zilch. But—I saw left-behind circuit spacers. That meant the three phones had been tapped. The spacers were frayed and corroded. My spacers and mikes had been inset in the handgrips. Monroe bought the house in February and moved in March 10. My surveillance job began April 11. I photographed the three spacer sets and replaced the receiver caps. I dropped the damp prints in my kit. I returned to Monroe’s bedroom and worked up fibers and prints. Hardwood flooring. Two throw rugs by the foot of the bed. One wood-veneer dresser. The flooring would not trap dry-constituent fibers. The rugs would. The dresser had good touch-and-grab planes that might sustain latent prints. Hoffa brushed crumbs off his lap. “Jack the K is ramming this nutty nympho, Marilyn Monroe, I have this on good authority, but I can’t reveal my source. I want you to build a derogatory profile on Monroe, Jack, Bobby, and any other extraneous cooze those whipdicks are slipping it to, not to mention whatever bedroom dirt you can get me on Miss Marilyn Monroe herself.” Tilt. Royal flush. Money tree. Three-cherry jackpot.

“You want full-time bugs and taps. Listening posts, monitor shifts, tape copies and transcriptions, summary reports, physical surveillance on Monroe and the other principals, and you want all this shit to rock around the clock, and you are keenly aware that it’s going to cost you a great deal of money.” Hoffa went harumph. “You’re a camel jockey, and you’re out to bilk James Riddle Hoffa with no compunction.” I leaned close. Hoffa flinched. I ticked points, wham-bam.  Hoffa snapped his waistband and buffed his gold watch. “I want it ugly, Freddy. I want lots of sordid behavior, with an emphasis on sex.” My first thought: Where’s Marilyn’s address book? Where does she list her friends, colleagues, flunkies, ex-husbands, and lovers for real? My second thought: Where’s her received correspondence and fan mail? Where’s her hotsville missives from John F. and Robert F. Kennedy?

My first guess: Stashed on the premises. My second guess: She keeps her address book and all hotsville notes on her person. My third guess: She’s mercurial defined. She dumps boring correspondence and fan mail. She keeps the good stuff in a bank vault. Marilyn justifies her "Got to Give" misconduct. Marilyn calls her work-shirking ailments “manifestations of existential malaise.” Marilyn Monroe’s got a secret life within her overarching life of dissolution. It affirms her resolve to plow a thoughtful and steady course as internal chaos subsumes her. I’m stitching evidential and theoretical links. They encompass her cash stash, her disguises, her surreptitious phone calls and her Valley jaunt. Lawford’s calls out and calls in ran innocuous. He called agents and studio geeks. They called him. The Lawford house was bedlam. Kids ran through and grabbed phone extensions. Lawford was on the outs with the Rat Pack. He was on the outs with June Allyson, who begged Dick Powell forgiveness. Of all people, Dino wanted a piece of Allyson too. But Lawford warned Dino about Powell and Nixon. -The Enchanters (2023) by James Ellroy 

Dick Powell and Ellen Drew, guests at the opening of Preston Sturges´ restaurant The Players, stray into the pantry for a mid-evening snack, 1940. The Great McGinty had won Sturges the Academy Award for best screenplay. His other new project was a rambling former private home at 8225 Sunset Boulevard. It was underneath the Chateau Marmont. Sturges personally oversaw the renovation of his building into a two-level restaurant and supper club. He helped design the interior, hired the chefs, worked on the menus and the menu's design. The menu was strictly American, remembered writer Philip K. Scheuer in the L.A. Times. In 1959 Preston Sturges died penniless in a comped room at the Algonquin Hotel in New York City. He was 60 years old. During renovations work crews discovered the revolving stage, the dance floor and the infamous secret tunnel connecting to the Chateau Marmont. 

The film critic Ephraim Katz wrote that Sturges films "...parodied with pungent wit various aspects of American life from politics and advertising to sex and hero worship. They were marked by their verbal wit, opportune comic timing, and eccentric, outrageously funny camo characterizations." In 1942, in his review of The Palm Beach Story, critic Manny Farber wrote: "He is essentially a satirist without any stable point of view from which to aim his satire. He is contemptuous of everybody except the little woman who, at some point in every picture, labels the hero a poor sap. Another phase of his attack is shrouding in slapstick the fact that the godfather pays off not for perseverance or honesty or ability but merely from capriciousness." According to Allan Royle, Christmas in July was one of the most acidic portrays of the double sword within a capitalist system, and his research seems to indicate the stars Dick Powell and Ellen Drew might have had a fling behind the scenes, since Drew was in a process of divorce of her first husband Fred Wallace, which became official on October, 8, 1940, coinciding with the widenation release of Christmas in July on October, 18.  -Affairs to Remember (2016) by Allan Royle