Max Collins - Bye bye,baby

Now his eyes met mine. “I don’t follow you, Mr. Heller.”

“Somebody, CIA or FBI or, yeah, even Secret Service, grabbed me and tried to sell you to me as Marilyn’s killer. Thinking I would do something rash, like break into your house and put a bullet in your brain.”

“You can’t be serious.”

“I do kid around. But not this time. They thought they could play me. Manipulate me into taking you out. Play me a phony tape and watch me dance. Chances are, I would have wound up either dead or arrested for your murder. Maybe Hamilton is sitting out there in an unmarked car, waiting for a gunshot. Anyway, in somebody’s eyes, you would make a good corpse and I would make a better patsy.”

He thought about that. “What can I do?”

“I would write everything down or record it, essentially a full confession, and let everyone know… start with Hamilton… that should you have a fatal accident, that information will go public. Public in the way they thought Marilyn was going to.”

Now his smile bore no disgust. “That is good advice, Mr. Heller. You may not be as ‘crazy’ as you seem.”

“First, hearing that from a psychiatrist is kind of a relief. Second, I got out of the Marines on a Section Eight, so don’t be too sure.” I stood, tucked the nine-mil in my waistband, zipped the jacket over it. “You mind if I go out the front door?”

“Please.”

“Sorry for the intrusion, Doc.”

I was halfway out the den when he said, “There is no way in my lifetime, Mr. Heller, that I can ever make up for this-for aiding the very people who likely took that sweet child’s life…”

“You’re right. Probably isn’t.”

“I don’t really know if I will ever get over it, completely. And I’ll always wonder if there was some way I might have saved her.”

I shrugged. “You might try therapy.”

And left him there.

At Flo’s Roxbury manse, I learned just how hard and fast my little Brenda Starr could work. For all the pampering cocktail parties and press junkets, she proved as hard-boiled a newswoman as Rosalind Russell pretended to be in His Girl Friday.

In a home office as messy as she was well-groomed, Flo Kilgore sat in a T-shirt and rolled-up jeans and no shoes, fingers flying at her Smith-Corona, machine-gunning keys, answering each ding with a forceful carriage return. The converted bedroom was filled with filing cabinets, research books, folders of clippings, and haphazardly stacked steno pads, though she never seemed to have any trouble finding in a flash whatever she needed.

I was chiefly a bystander, or sitter, plopped in a comfy chair between a filing cabinet and a worktable, finishing the last couple hundred pages of The Carpetbaggers. My God, did anybody really have this much sex?

Anyway, my presence was needed for the questions and clarifications she would on occasion toss over her shoulder, her fingers frozen over the keys, poised to attack once I had provided whatever tidbit she required.

We started (if I may generously include myself as part of the process) around 10:00 A.M., after her cook fed us corned-beef hash and buttermilk pancakes, and she had a draft of the story by 1:00 P.M.

She handed it to me, saying, “Remember, we don’t have to solve the mystery. Just raise legitimate questions, and throw light on the dark areas.”

That she had.

Tough but fair, with plenty of confidential sources but a good number going on the record (myself included), the in-depth article made no bones about personal relationships between Marilyn Monroe and both John and Robert Kennedy, and established clearly that RFK had been at MM’s house the afternoon before she died.

The scientific impossibility of an accidental drug overdose by Marilyn, and the probability of a “hot shot” injection having killed her (despite the deputy coroner’s search for injection marks), was stunningly well argued. The presence of the studio, police, and likely government cleanup crews manipulating the scene and even staging the suicide break-in, all during the early morning hours before the death was officially called in, was firmly established.

“What do you think?” she asked, bright-eyed, her smile tentatively proud.

“Ship it,” I said.

But what she did was call it in, and somebody in New York took down the copy word-for-word (“… period, paragraph…”), all twenty-five hundred of them.

We took a late lunch at Nate ’n Al’s, both casual, though she’d traded her T-shirt and Levi’s for a white blouse and gray skirt. I still had on the lime-green polo and darker green Jaymar slacks I’d worn over to her place this morning. We laughed in the face of death by sharing a huge pastrami and Swiss cheese sandwich.

“You really like it?” she said eagerly.

“I love pastrami.”

She giggled. “No. You know…”

“I think,” I said grandly, Russian dressing dribbling down my mouth, “you will be the first Hollywood columnist ever to win the Pulitzer.”

She beamed, her blue eyes bright; her dark brown hair bounced at her shoulders, none of that bouffant noise. “You’re not teasing?”

“No. It’s a well-substantiated piece. What now?”

“Now I wait to hear from my editor.”

“Will he get back to you on a Saturday?”

“For this story, you bet.”

But she didn’t hear till deep into Sunday. I was back at my bungalow, and Sam had come over to use the hotel pool. I was in my swim trunks and a Catalina pullover, about to follow him out, when the phone rang.

She was in tears. And angry.

“Cocksuckers,” she said.

Flo didn’t swear lightly, so I knew at once her story had been nixed.

“What did your editor say?”

“He said I did a ‘damn good job of research.’ But even though the Herald Tribune is a Republican paper, this is an election year, and the story would seem a ‘gratuitous slap’ at the president and his brother. They’re killing it.”

“Christ, how the hell do you write off exposing a movie star’s murder as a gratuitous fucking slap?”

“I think this is more than just editorial policy. I… Nate, I know it’s more.”

“What do you mean?”

“I have contacts in the administration.” She wasn’t crying now, at least not sobbing, though she snuffled some. “They say the Trib sent the story over by telex and asked them to confirm or deny the reporting about Bobby and Jack. They refused to do either, which was bad enough, but you can bet some pressure was put on, behind the scenes.”

“Always is. Can you take it elsewhere?”

Her sigh seemed endless. Then: “If a paper as right-leaning as the Trib won’t print the thing, who will? I might find a magazine to use it, but I would likely lose my job. And I like my job. Anyway… I used to like my job…”

“I’ll come right over.”

“No. No, not today. I want to be alone today. We were up very late last night, remember…”

I did. We’d been giving those carpetbaggers a run for the money.

“… and I just have to zonk out. Get some sleep. I’m gonna pop some pills in the glorious Hollywood tradition, and just go away for a while… Bye, Nate.”

“Bye, baby.”

That was a fitting way for Flo to write -30- on this story, wasn’t it? Pop some sleeping pills? Zonk out like Zelda, aka Marilyn Monroe, the former Norma Jeane?

My son overheard this, my end anyway, and he gave me a worried, earnest look, the kind you can summon when you haven’t been in the world as long as the grown-ups.

“Jesus, Dad! What the hell happened? You sound really upset.”

I just shook a finger at him. “I’m fine. Don’t you go using bad fucking language, just because you hear me doing it.”