Marilyn was being interviewed by a transvestite.
In the video they sat across a small cocktail table from one another in So-Ho. The interviewer was long and gorgeous, perfectly prepared, the kind of woman that would turn a man’s head, the kind of woman that a man might indeed take home, only to find out the ultimate unalterable truth.
Marilyn was dressed in her signature attire – ridiculous flipped blonde wig, six-inch long eyelashes, makeup that seemed to have been painted on with a two-inch sash brush, a number of rings the size of baseballs. Her ample 80 year-old body was stuffed into a tight sequined gown, bulging and erupting like an over-yeasted mass of dough.
I am exaggerating, but not by much.
These were two generations of performers. The younger was oozing city sophistication and style. The elder was simply oozing, regaling the younger with tales of the outrageous, the indecent, the off color, and the barely repeatable moments in her career as a nightclub performer.
Marilyn gave me this video, along with a wonderful signed promotion photo of her dressed in all her glory. I was seeing her for a bothersome diabetic ulcer, visiting her in her fourth floor apartment that had not been cleaned since the Mets won the World Series. I gave up attempting to wash my hands at the kitchen sink after one visit. Racks of ridiculous gowns hung in an overstuffed closet. Her room was accessed by parting a heavy purple velvet curtain. That very gesture was a dramatic moment, like entering a chamber to visit the Queen. Boxes were stacked everywhere, like three- dimensional bar graphs surrounding a large rumpled bed.
In it reclined Marilyn, a bizarre Cleopatra, who without her costume and wig looked more like a large retired Jewish tailor you might see on the boardwalk in Rockaway. She never missed an opportunity to tell a story that was meant to shock and embarrass. The challenge, when in the presence of this ribald member of royalty, was to appear totally unfazed, as if her world were yours, as if she were talking of the quality of bagels.
This was indeed, a difficult task.
For example:
Case #1
“Oh girl,” she said as I washed her feet, “You should have seen the faces in the audience. It was absolutely marvelous. I remember it like it was yesterday. I had taken my panties and melted a bar of chocolate on them, then I pulled them out and…”
Case #2
“Girl, why don’t you get into bed with me. You know I give the best head in the City.”
Case #3
I parted the velvet curtain, announcing my presence. My supervisor, Kathleen Kelly, followed me. Kathy was a very attractive middle-aged Catholic woman whose mother probably had a first communion picture of Kathy on the wall of her apartment in Greenpoint. This would be the picture where Kathy, dressed in frilly white, had her hands folded piously at her breast. I had called Marilyn to let her know that my supervisor was accompanying me for a routine evaluation visit. Although this was a polite and necessary thing to do, I sensed potential danger.
I held the velvet curtain open for Kathy as I turned away from Marilyn, and at once I saw them both in my peripheral vision.
Marilyn, reclining amidst her hundreds of pillows and mountains of down, lifted an enormous, but otherwise very realistic dildo. The ridiculous plastic penis pointed skyward in an instant three-foot erection. Simultaneously I watched as Kathy’s eyes and mouth rounded like three huge O’s, taking over her face like three donuts on a flat plate.
“Welcome darling,” Marilyn said, her voice dripping with Hollywood drama, “Has D told you all about me?”
The rubber dildo bounced in the air between us, like a fishing pole with a nibble. Marilyn measured the reactions. I tried to stay as impassive as possible, but I shook my head in a gesture of wonder.
“Marilyn,” I simply said.
Kathleen Kelly, herself a wily veteran of this world behind the doors, also tried to remain implacable. But I knew that Marilyn had seen what I had seen in Kathy’s eyes. Marilyn had succeeded once again, if but for an instant, to peek into someone’s naked soul and see the unvarnished astonishment, disgust, embarrassment that lies within us all.
I admired her for that.
I changed the dressing and Marilyn put down the dildo.
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