HOWL AND THE PUSSY-KAT.7

JASON MEETS MARILYN MONROE AT HIS AGENT'S FUNERAL

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Chapter Thre: PRE-PRODUCTION (Part Five)

DOLORES DELANO ATTEMPTS SUICIDE, ENTERS CONVENT bawled the Hollywood Reporter in the second week of October. Mysterious drowning of lesbian lover merited another headline in lower-case. Oscar-winner ‘Hot Rod’ Fire to direct ‘VOYAGER’ remake got squeezed off the front page.

Like the more effective one by Lupe Velez whose Mexican Lady movies she had remade, Dolores’s suicide attempt had an element of farce. She jumped blind drunk into her swimming pool, which turned out to have only two feet of water in it. A crack from a recent earth tremor had worked its way through to the lining and lifted some tiles; the pool had been draining for days. It is possible to drown in two feet of water, but not on your back in a polyester jump-suit filled with enough air to keep your head clear of the surface.

With no injury more serious than a turned ankle Dolores dozed at the bottom of the pool for an hour or so until the cold partially sobered her up. She cursed Hollywood; various men, including her five husbands and Isaac Hunt; various women, including Myra Mae, Cora, even her own mother; she cursed God. Finally she limped up the steps and got out of her wet clothes.

From habit she turned on the TV in her bedroom, pressing the channel buttons randomly. On came the Reverend Barton Duchat’s Louisiana-based Amazing Grace Station. Bart was fulminating against pornography - not just the hard- and soft-core varieties but also the pornography of mainstream Hollywood and TV, whose products uniformly cheapened family values and the virtues of the Founding Fathers. It’s a familiar theme, but – the thermal inversion may have been affecting transmission, or perhaps the drink hadn’t entirely worn off – Dolores saw the Rev. Bart on-screen haloed with light.

Dolores saw light. Dolores saw The Light.

The next day, high now on divine grace, she called her lawyer, then her ancient mother in Veracruz, then her travel agent. She did not call Myra Mae. By mid-afternoon she was on her way to Mexico. The sister of one of her brothers-in-law was a nun in a Poor Clare Franciscan convent. Dressed in demure black, Dolores went to see the Mother Superior the following day.

Before she entered the convent as a novitiate Bride of Christ (husband number six) Dolores gave a last interview to a local TV reporter. She spoke of her suicide attempt and her redemption by the Rev. Barton Duchat’s haloed image on TV. She announced that she was donating her jewellery to the convent to fund some much-needed restoration of the chapel and the refectory. The rest of her fortune, including the proceeds from the sale of her mansion in Beverly Hills, would go to the Amazing Grace Ministry.

It was DeeDee Delfein in the LA Times who found a parallel with an earlier Dolores: Dolores Hart who quit movies in the 1960s to become a nun, albeit under less colourful circumstances. DeeDee failed to mention that in one of her movies Dolores Hart had played the founder of the Poor Clare order, Saint Francis’s childhood sweetheart. And no commentator picked up on the irony of Saint Clare being also the patron saint of television. (Assisi did not discover television 700 years before John Logie Baird: Clare was proclaimed the medium’s patron in 1958 because she’d once seen mass at a distance, though surely not as great a distance as between Baton Rouge and Beverly Hills.)

* * *

Here endeth the career of Dolores Delano, whose husbands included Cary Grant and whose lovers included Richard Burton (in that intermission between his marriages to Liz Taylor) and, on the distaff side, Cora Quinn and – best, perhaps, to let discretion prevail.

Whether the career of – her name post-induction - Sister Maria of the Agony in the Garden ends in canonisation (five bonus stars to Bart if it does!), it’s too early to say, since that career is still ongoing.

* * *

Little is known about the death of Cora Quinn. She left no note, no desperate message on somebody’s answering machine. Her body was found half a mile from the rented beach-house in the Palisades, so it was inferred that this is where she went into the sea. The autopsy showed only a moderate level of alcohol in her bloodstream and no sign of barbiturates or ‘recreational’ drugs. Whether she got out of her depth deliberately or accidentally is unknowable.

Jason was back in time for her funeral, truly saddened to have lost his mentor and his only platonic woman friend. He sat in the front row next to Lorne and Lorne’s gay partner.

Myra Mae, a de-glamorised Cruella De Vil in billowing black, sat beside a woman in a white trouser-suit and a black headscarf. Darla Dawson, another of Cora’s discoveries, was absent, but a few minor stars of soap and schlock attended, plus a number of those who were still working as extras, still waiting for that Big Break that sometimes never comes.

Not until Myra Mae introduced them after the service did Jason realise her neighbour was Marilyn Monroe. The fluffed-up thin white hair beneath the scarf, the puffy unmade-up face and the dumpy body hardly evoked the image of a sex goddess or even a trophy wife. But if the glamour she could still radiate on screen in her seventies was missing, something yet remained of her inner luminosity. Jason had never felt with anyone during his TV work that he was in the presence of a Living Legend. Now he did.

Marilyn held one of his hands in both of hers (which were liver-spotted). Speaking in that familiar breathy voice, she wistfully shared some reminiscences of Cora. Jason hadn’t known they were friends.

‘She was a good pal to me when I badly needed one,’ she said.

Jason felt almost tongue-tied. ‘To me too,’ he said.

Even hard-ass Myra Mae had a tear in her eye. Or maybe it was a mote.

* * *

The movie industry was having a bad summer, a bad year. Not one blockbuster hit. The most successful film of the summer was one of the twenty or so teenage comedies, not an Isaac Hunt-produced, Ben Burns-scripted rip-off but the smutty sequel to a smutty hit of a few years back. Hunt Studios and Gorgon Pictures weren’t the only producers of mega-flops, nor was Isaac’s the only studio to have several in a row.

In the wake of Isaac’s one modest hit with Windbag and Al Kazman’s marginally bigger success with Poor Nellie, one last surprise came with a Made-in-Britain tag: Big Girl’s Blouse, a low-to-medium-brow comedy set in Liverpool’s beat- and Beatle-land. Produced by Elisabeth Murdoch for Fox and released at the end of summer, this did as well as Windbag and Poor Nellie combined. There was talk of Nominations for Julie Walters and Bob Hoskins.

So – a better year for ‘Brit-flicks’ than for homegrown produce. But no one had fared worse than Isaac, whose every fruit seemed blighted.

* * *

‘This is a lot raunchier than your last script for Dolores,’ Isaac said.

‘Well, I thought – you know – with Katharine onboard –’ Ben tailed off with a sidelong glance at Al Kazman. The two of them, plus Rodney Fire and Aaron Spuhn, were grouped across the gleaming maple from Isaac.

‘Davis and Henreid didn’t actually – get it on together on-screen,’ Isaac protested. He knew he was wasting his time. It was his project, his studio riding on the outcome, but it wasn’t his money. It wasn’t his movie any more.

‘But you knew they were lovers off-screen,’ Rodney put in. ‘Davis gives Charlotte a kind of a glow, way beyond what the couture costumes and make-up do for her.’

Isaac felt a warmth towards Rodney that was almost love.

‘You just know Jerry has been fucking her brains out,’ Rodney went on. Isaac’s ardour cooled.

‘It’s a very nice script,’ Al Kazman said. ‘Of course –’ he spread his hands – ‘I don’t have as much experience of these kind of movies as you – gentlemen.’ He smiled at Isaac who smiled thinly back.

‘You must like the stuff with the wine glass?’ Ben said to Isaac. ‘Jerry pours just the one glass and they both drink out of it …’

‘Why not do that thing with the cigarettes from the original?’ queried Rodney. ‘It’s an incredibly potent image.’ Isaac re-warmed towards him. ‘I mean – he’s obviously asking her for a blowjob and she’s saying, “Ram it down my throat, baby”.’ Isaac’s temperature sank below freezing.

‘I nixed the cigarettes,’ Ben explained. ‘You know: smoking – wrong message.’

‘You think? Oh well, I guess Katharine can run her tongue round the edge of the glass like’s she’s already licking the head of his cock.’

Everybody looked at the surface of the desk. There was an uncomfortable silence. Isaac would have liked, now, to see Rodney’s head explode into pulp.

'I hope we are still making a relationship movie here,’ he said feebly. ‘A love story. Not a – fuckfest.’ He avoided looking at Kazman, the fuckfest king. He looked at Aaron who rarely said anything at these meetings.

Aaron smiled supportively. He always did. Aaron, a few years younger than Isaac, had been with him since 1959 apart from six months in 1997 when he’d gone to work on Cybill Shepherd’s TV show. Always a yes-man at Hunt’s, Aaron had made the mistake of contradicting Ms Shepherd, who publicly and very loudly fired him. Back at Hunt’s he was often referred to as Aaron ‘Cybill’ Spuhn. (Reader, do you think you see a gag coming here? Be patient.)

‘I’m sure we’re all committed to this as a romantic picture, Isaac,’ Rodney said. ‘With a nod – a strong nod – towards cinema’s glory days of the 1940s and just a few concessions to the expectations of a modern audience.’

I was right: a fuckfest, thought Isaac. But it was plain that Rodney was in the ascendant.

‘Well -’ Rodney rose to further heights - ‘Ben and I can fine-tune the script here and there while I’m storyboarding the key scenes. But I think I can safely say, people, that we are, as of this minute –’ he paused for a moment that was almost theatrical, certainly pure cinema – ‘ready - to - rock - and - roll!’

‘Yeah,’ said Ben, feigning enthusiasm, although he, as of this minute, shared a little of Isaac’s concern that ‘their’ movie was going to be vulgarised.

‘And our movie will be a big hit,’ Kazman joined in. ‘Insh’Allah.’

There was another long silence.

‘Sorry?’ said Rodney. Kazman smiled at him.

‘It means “if God wishes” in Arabic. We say it all the time - for luck.’

‘You’re - an Ay-rab?’ Isaac’s you’re-jerking-my-chain expression belonged on film: something of the calibre of High Ho.

‘You did not know this?’ Kazman looked genuinely perplexed.

‘Well,’ said Rodney. ‘Two Jews, one Muslim. I guess that makes me the fucking Virgin Mary!’

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NO TRAILER --- THAT'S ALL FOLKS!!!

Well, no, obviously that's NOT all, but it's all I'm going to post here for now. This (you may have guessed) is a long novel. The rest of it encompasses the making of AGAIN, VOYAGER and what happens to Jason, Kate, Ben and Isaac. You'll be surprised, reader - well, I certainly hope so! - but you'll have to wait for the published version.

I am trying to decide whether to 'self-publish' HOWL AND THE PUSSY-KAT - or something else. Unless I can find a commercial publisher for it. It's still going the rounds.