classic hollywood rpf: you'd look good in black and white
you’d look good in black and white. classic hollywood rpf set in a modern era. 5900 words. PG13. The thing about Hollywood is half the people believe their whole lives are movies, and the other half believe movies are their whole lives.
Marilyn Monroe/Marlon Brando, Audrey Hepburn/Gregory Peck, Elizabeth Taylor/Richard Burton, name dropping of almost everyone else.
Because really - LOOK AT HOW CUTE. Thanks to abvj for betaing and putting up with the madness of this fic. You are the greatest, and hugs forever.
These are all lies.
The first time Marilyn met Marlon, they were at a party. It was summer, the kind of hip and trendy party that Dean would throw on a rooftop. Marlon was single then.
“Marlon, this is Marilyn.”
A mutual friend introduced them.
(Remember: in the grand scheme of the world, they will not change anything. The world kept spinning on its axis and Marilyn’s knees didn’t go weak. )
“Nice to meet you,” she says with her hand outstretched. She was impossibly young then, barely 19 and he’s not much older.
Neither of them is famous yet. That’s important.
“Nice to meet you too, Marilyn,” Marlon says with a dazzling smile. Her hand slipped into his effortlessly.
ESPN is playing in the background, a group of men circled around them with sweating beers in their hands. Stuart Scott talks about the impact the new draft pick, Joe DiMaggio, will have on the Yankees. Marilyn doesn’t notice.
Marlon will always remember Marilyn wore a white sundress that clung to everything and the way the sun silhouetted her hair and the score of the Yankees game from the night before. Most of all he will remember the way Marilyn presses all of herself against him and says, “Hope to see you later,” at the end of the night.
(Marilyn was a romantic then, just as she is now. She didn’t give him her number because for some reason she thought he would find her.)
“You will,” he said and then she was gone.
Four years later he runs into her on a red carpet. She’s wearing white again.
“Hi,” he says first.
“Hello Marlon,” she lilts, “it’s great to see you again.”
Marlon isn’t single anymore.
Elizabeth marries Eddie on a hot, clear day in Las Vegas. She’s fifteen minutes late and her dress is short.
Almost no one is there and Elizabeth is surprised by how much she loves that. Eddie holds her hands too tight before kissing her softly.
She thinks of Debbie for a moment, of dinner parties and too much wine and whispering in each other’s ears like teenage girls. Eddie says, “I love you,” and Elizabeth smiles.
His foot cracks the wineglass, and that is that.
Two helicopters take blurry pictures of the ceremony that end up in US Weekly; Debbie tweets about how much of a bitch Elizabeth is, which mostly breaks Elizabeth’s heart more than any man ever could.
They are at Marilyn’s house, a monstrous 8,000 square foot palace with HD TV’s in almost every room. “I don’t like the sound of silence,” Marilyn says when Audrey asks why that is necessary. “It makes me feel lonely.” She is in between marriages and looks the better for it.
“You know what?”
Audrey is stretched out like a cat in the sun. In the background, Marilyn’s new sound system pumped Lady Gaga through the speakers. Audrey hates Lady Gaga. Which means, of course, Marilyn loves her.
“I think, that maybe, Arthur is sticking it to the golf pro over at Los Angeles Country Club.”
“Oh for the love of God, Marilyn.”
Audrey’s sunglasses fall back onto her face and she wonders how long this will last. Another marriage over followed by another two months of Marilyn trashing the guy. Arthur is most definitely not gay, and Marilyn knows this.
“You know, I love you, really, but I’m not putting up with this again.”
Marilyn has a stunning way of being incredibly neurotic when she thinks no one is watching. Audrey has seen it more often than anyone, probably. It’s hard to find best friends in Hollywood, so they hold on to what they can get.
When Joe calls an hour later, Marilyn’s voice gets soft and quiet. Something about Joe undoes Marilyn in all the best and worst ways.
(“That’s called an orgasm, sweetie,” Marilyn had cooed condescendingly when Audrey told her this once. It was during the time of Marilyn and Joe and God, had they loved each other.
Two hours after Marilyn’s smartass remark, she and Joe had a fight over Marilyn’s Maxim cover. Marilyn drove over sobbing and Audrey was too good of a friend to say I told you so. Orgasms are the highest high, Audrey muses, but she’s not sure it’s worth it when the lows are so low.)
What you don’t understand, [or maybe you’ve guessed by now] is that they are the most dysfunctional people you will ever meet. Audrey loves Gregory, mostly, sometimes, and of course there’s ex-husband one and two respectively to consider. James sulks and mostly loves boys, a fact that is relatively well hidden thanks to strategic dates with Natalie and a killer publicist. There’s Marlon, of course, but everyone loves him and he mostly loves sex. Richard and Elizabeth fight and break up marriages and have done everything to be with each other. There is Natalie who tries so hard to not love James, but fails most of the time.
Marilyn loves everyone with at least a little piece of her heart, and she might be the worst off because of it. They never seem to love her back in the right ways.
Perhaps James put it best when he says, “We’re all real fucked up.”
The first day on the set of their new movie is a shitshow. Marilyn’s running half an hour late because of the fucking paparazzo parked outside of her house. She had flicked a cigarette into the lens of one of the cameras and smiled enchantingly.
Marlon is not pleased. It didn’t help that he is all, you know, method and shit at the moment. The more of an angry bastard his character is, the more of an angry bastard Marlon is.
“Would it kill you to show up on time? For Christ’s sake, Marilyn, it’s the first fucking day.”
He throws something across the room, probably his script, but Marilyn daintily steps over it and continues walking towards hair and makeup.
“You really should calm the fuck down, darling,” she croons in his face.
He rolls his eyes at her before storming away. She tilts her head to get a better look at his retreating backside. God bless whatever created Marlon, she thinks briefly.
Later they made love as two different people. Marlon is warm and steady above her and he presses his hands flat on her skin, like he wants to feel every piece of her, like he can’t get enough of her and maybe she believes him a little. He kisses a warm trail of kisses down her neck and goddamn if she doesn’t wonder where he learned how to do that. Sometimes she doesn’t know if she’s kissing Marlon or his character.
“I love you,” she says to him. [Don’t get confused - they’re still in character.]
He rolls over and there is a whole sea of white sheets and silence between them.
Marilyn cries on cue.
Before the shitshow first day, there was a script reading. An executive read a story about a doomed wife and an abusive husband and saw gold statuettes on piles of dollar bills.
“I want stars!” he demanded.
They called Marlon first, which Marilyn’s ego would never quite recover from.
The audition was the best kind of disaster.
It was a love scene that was really a fight scene and Marilyn’s hands shook when Marlon screamed at her. She started crying before she knew it and grasped his shirt weakly. For just a second, Marlon let her hands rest there. (Transcendence, he’d say later and she would chock it up to the usual method bullshit. He was going to be in a movie about spirituality next.) She fell to her knees and threw a nearby plate at him.
After, they were lying on the ground, a jumbled, shaking mess with her head buried in his chest and he wipes away her tears.
“You two are gold,” the director raved.
Marilyn wondered what it would be like to kiss him. She found out soon enough.
Audrey’s in Barcelona, on the final leg of the European press tour and completely exhausted. She’s wearing five-inch Louboutin platforms and a painfully tight Givenchy sheath.
Gregory’s on her right, her shoulder pressed against him as the flashbulbs go off and she can smell his cologne on her own skin.
“You clean up nice, Hepburn,” he says out of one side of his mouth and Audrey tries to ignore the goosebumps that run up and down her neck when his breath hits her skin.
“We’re paid to clean up nice, Greg.”
The photo op ends and their handlers usher them down the carpet.
“You can never take a compliment, can you Rey?” She hates that nickname.
Her nails are painted a bright red and all of a sudden she notices that they match his tie. Audrey remembers the Golden Globes last year, when she had too much champagne during Bob Hope’s monologue. She hadn’t really known Greg back then, just a few polite hellos on the award show circuit and a lingering glace on his part.
At the after party, he kissed her first.
“You’re married,” she had accused indignantly. But her hand was twisted in his lapel and their corner was dark and he smelled good.
“You’re beautiful,” he said, smug and smirking. Audrey removed her hands and stood up carefully. She left him sitting there.
Four months later, they were cast in a movie together and Audrey tried her best to avoid touching him.
It’s not all bad moments, of course. Marlon is gentler than most in bed, fingers tripping up the expanse of her ribcage, ghosting across her breasts, settling low on her hips. She’s never quite felt as adored as when she’s with Marlon, when his open mouth is on her neck and he’s putting her needs first.
He tries making breakfast one morning. Marilyn wakes up to a plate of watery eggs with blackened toast. Marlon’s sitting at the edge of the bed, hand rubbing at the back of his neck as he tries to explain the meal.
“Sorry. I’m not used to the settings on your toaster, I guess.”
Moments like these, the quiet, intimate ones, are why Marilyn loves falling in love.
“Thank you very much,” she says before taking a bite of the toast. The toast is covered in strawberry jelly and butter, her favorite, and she loves him all the more for it.
Marlon smiles with one side of his mouth and kisses the top of her head.
Il Diablo, James names his motorcycle. It’s a horribly beautiful thing, all black leather and black shiny paint and enough power to get him away from the city as soon as he possibly wants.
“That’s dangerous,” Elizabeth says, unimpressed.
It was 75 and sunny and James still insists on wearing leather. She is wearing indecently short shorts and eating an ice cream cone. She looks exactly like the sex symbol she is.
“Completely irrational,” she continues and he laughs at her.
“Coming from the woman with a 33 carat diamond in her safe.”
Elizabeth quirks her eyebrow and snaps her gum at the same time. She is so much larger than life that sometimes he feels like every time he’s with her, he should learn a life lesson.
He tweets a picture of Elizabeth straddling the wide leather seat, a fierce theatrical scowl on her face and cleavage pouring out of her crisp white shirt.
my girls, the caption said.
“Aren’t you supposed to be dating Natalie?” Elizabeth mused and James sighed. “You are the worst closeted gay in Hollywood,” she teases.
Richard re-tweets the picture moments later, commenting, Watch yourself, Jim.
The whole exchange makes the nine o’clock news.
“This is ridiculous,” Elizabeth complains from bed.
Richard doesn’t look up from his iPad when he says, “That’s Hollywood, dear.”
The thing about Hollywood is half the people believe their whole lives are movies, and the other half believe movies are their whole lives.
Marilyn prefers the former.
Life is so much more exciting that way.
Award shows must be a special sort of hell, Marlon thinks. There’s Marilyn in that goddamn white dress on his right and his wife on his left, and at the table next to him, Frank laughs.
This is the afterparty, which doesn’t necessarily mean it is any more fun than the ceremony, and he went through half an hour of interviews before this. There were flashbulbs fucking everywhere and three missed calls from his mother.
His wife was talking to Natalie. Marilyn’s dress was so white in the dark room it practically glowed; Marlon avoided eye contact and cringed when she leaned in towards him. His wife was wearing purple and she looked beautiful.
“You wanna go dance?” he propositions her charmingly.
Marilyn scowls into her champagne but his wife smiles and takes his hand. Marlon loosens his tie and drops a hand onto the small of her back. He dips her once, and reminds himself not to look at Marilyn.
Later, she kisses him in a dark corner and says I love you like it means something in this business.
Marilyn, he sighs, thumb rubbing the bare skin on her arm and standing still. She smiles then, presses her forehead against her shoulder and laughs this terribly sad laugh before walking away.
In his stronger moments, he thinks he had wanted to say I love you, too.
Both Marlon and Marilyn are the types to fall into affairs quickly. Marilyn’s always been a romantic, probably always will be, and Marlon’s biggest vice is a beautiful lady.
The paparazzi snap a blurry looking picture of Marilyn sneaking out of Marlon’s apartment in downtown LA. Her sunglasses cover half of her face. Her hair isn’t brushed and she’s wearing one of his old t-shirts.
Whoever the scumbag photographer is, he sells it to People for 100,000 dollars. On the front cover, the picture of her is blown up for even the blindest old lady to see. There are two pictures of Marlon and her from various events stuck in the corners of the cover. . “Will She Ever Find Love?” the cover asks. “Why Marilyn keeps looking in all the wrong places!”
Marlon calls her the minute it hits the newsstand. “The Missus isn’t too happy about this.”
“Yeah, well, you can tell her I’m not so thrilled either. That title, God it’s awful.”
Marilyn’s spread out on the bed, a new reality TV show about losing weight playing softly in the background, and the stupid magazine is open in front of her to the cover story. The pictures the editor chose are really awful, she thinks. Of course they’re the ones where she stares at Marlon while he looks the other way. “I look like I’m obsessed with you.”
“Well if you ask me, it’s not all lies.”
“Oh, shut up,” she says as she briskly turns the page. “But the part about how we’re having an affair is true, I guess.”
“Were,” he corrects and he can picture her shrug through the silence. “And anyways I was referring to the why you keep looking in all the wrong places part of it.”
“You know, Marlon, you can be really terrible when you want to be.”
There’s a beat of silence, and just when Marilyn can hear a slight intake of breath on his end, just when she thinks he’ll apologize - he lets it out in a sigh and hangs up the phone.
One New Text from Jack Nicholson, his phone says.
You’ve been fucking Marilyn? You lucky bastard! Marlon can only sigh. Jack’s too young to understand these kinds of things.
His wife is crying in the kitchen. Marlon ducks out through the laundry room and goes to In n Out for lunch.
“There is nothing better than an animal style double double,” he says on the phone with Frank.
“Not even Marilyn?” Frank asks, teasing. Frank seems to forget all the times he’s slipped out while Ava is sleeping to meet up with some groupie who complimented his eyes. Frank’s the easiest out of all of them, really. Selective memory, he pleads on more than one occasion.
Marlon slams the phone on the table and shatters the whole front screen.
The thing is - Marilyn is something else. She’s curves and smiles and great sex and laughing and crying and feelings that are complicated. His mother told him once, “There are women you marry, and women you fuck,” and Marlon has always listened to his mother.
In retrospect, that was really terrible advice.
“Stupid fucking iPhone,” he mutters but no one is listening.
Audrey calls Elizabeth after she reads the story. If anyone knows how to handle labels like ‘homewrecker’ and ‘whore’, it’s Elizabeth.
“Liz, you need to talk to her.”
“You know I hate it when you call me Liz,” Elizabeth grumbled into the phone. She was stuck in traffic, on her way to audition for a new movie with Sidney Poitier. She was also running fifteen minutes late.
Audrey flipped the magazine shut and promptly threw it in her trashcan. Her fingernails rapped against her marble countertop as she continued talking. “Fine. Elizabeth, you need to talk to her. She hasn’t left the house all day.”
“Has anyone talked to Marlon? Or the wife?”
“Marlon’s not answering his phone.”
There’s silence over the line for a second. They all knew this would end badly. Marlon was self-destructive and horribly selfish while Marilyn was too tragically romantic to ignore a doomed relationship.
“I’ll call her when I’m done, okay?”
Audrey sighed in relief and murmured a quick goodbye into the speaker.
Marilyn doesn’t leave her house for two whole days. She paints her toenails red, then black, then red again. She screens calls from Joe and Arthur, watches five DVR’d episodes of the Bachelor, calls Audrey twice and bawls. She eats a carton of Pinkberry. She feels bad about eating the carton of Pinkberry, so she tries the new Pilates workout. She quits the new Pilates workout.
Mostly, she wishes Marlon would call.
“Sweetie,” Audrey chirps into her receiver. “What exactly were you thinking?”
“I wasn’t,” Marilyn says matter of factly, and she doesn’t apologize for it.
Audrey buys a house in L.A. because she has to.
Because her agent, an Ari Gold type, short, Jewish, vaguely attractive in an I’m an asshole way, said, “Aud, you’re one of the biggest fucking movie stars on the planet but even you can not make Warner Bros. move to the Big goddamn Apple.”
“Language, Jacob,” she had tsked teasingly before calling a realtor. “And I won’t be living in this city full-time.”
“Buy a house in Malibu and take long walks on the beach. Maybe you’ll change your mind.”
“Not a chance in hell, buddy.”
The house she buys is small and pretty, a vintage little thing in Santa Monica that could just as easily be in Connecticut. Her kitchen is pale yellow and her bedroom is green. The interior decorator said her home lacked a connecting theme. Audrey had sat down on the couch and retorted, “I want it to have character, instead.”
“We should have a party,” Natalie says. “Themed, maybe?”
Audrey says, “Abso-fucking-lutely not,” and keeps cutting strawberries.
They don’t throw a party. For such a tiny person, Audrey can be quite demanding when she wants to.
The first day on the set of Cleopatra, Richard called her a gem. Elizabeth blushed, barely, and said, “I love the sound of that.”
The green screen behind them and her braid extensions were pulled so tight her eyes were watering. She still managed to smile wonderfully. The PA counted down, and as Cleopatra she was in love with him.
He kissed her, strong and warm, looking too damn good in gold, and when the director yelled cut Elizabeth still felt in love with him.
The feeling never wore off.
I feel like I’ve been in love with you since I met you, Richard will tell her a couple of weeks later, probably in bed and naked. Her nails will rake across his back gently and her ring will catch whatever light is left in the room.
I know the feeling, darling, she said and they made love for the rest of the night.
Audrey’s doorbell rings at two in the morning on a too-warm night in March. She wraps a robe tightly around her nightie before shuffling down the hall towards the front door.
When she opens it, Greg is standing there, in an unbuttoned wrinkled white shirt and tuxedo pants. “Drey!” he slurs as he lunges towards her. “Drey I’m s’happy you’re awake.”
And then he’s hugging her, or more accurately trying to hug her, and Audrey can smell him all over her clothes. She read somewhere that smell is one of the most powerful triggers for memory - her thoughts flicker to the Golden Globes but she represses it and tries to wrangle him inside.
“Y’know, Dre, you’re so beautiful.”
“Greg, what are you doing here? Where are your friends?” she inquires once she gets him on the couch.
“You’re my friend Rey. You’re my favorite,” he emphasizes. He’s trying to take his shoes off, tip of his tongue peeking out from his lips in concentration, and Audrey finally helps him by untying his shoes.
“Thanks”, he says before tucking his toes underneath a pillow and pulling her favorite cashmere blanket tightly around him.
It breaks her heart a little bit, the sight of him sprawled on her couch and reaching out for her. It’s pathetic on both of their parts, really.
She goes to the kitchen and pours him a glass of water. There’s a loud thud from the opposite room. She can hear a slurred, loud apology from the sink.
“Drink this,” Audrey mutters as she shoves the glass of water into his hands, “and then sleep it off, jackass.”
He murmurs his thanks and gulps down the water, Adam’s apple bobbing.
“If you puke on my blanket, I’ll kill you!” She yells from down the hall.
Greg doesn’t hear her, he’s already passed out face down into her throw pillow.
“You’re so irrational about men,” Audrey tells Marilyn over martinis at a restaurant opening. Audrey left for a while after the Greg incident. Marilyn’s visiting her in New York for the weekend.
“When has love ever been rational?” she swoons.
“Oh, so you’re in love now? With who?” Audrey asks patronizingly. Marlon has been out of the picture for a while, filming a movie in Tahiti or something and Arthur had remarried. Joe was dating a girl, but Audrey wasn’t worried about him. If any man was capable of loving Marilyn the way she needed to be, it was Joe. She motions for the waiter and orders the house special.
Marilyn is all big eyes and innocent expression when she answers, “Aren’t I always?”
“The paparazzi are everywhere,” James lamented over dinner with Natalie. She daintily chewed her scallops and raised her eyebrows.
“That’s kind of the point, James.” This is their fourth date in two weeks. Their nickname is Jatalie and she hates the way it sounds whenever James says it.
He sulked into his chicken parmesan. His art exhibit at some NYU gallery opened to mediocre reviews and he was in a shitty mood. Natalie knew this not only by his expression but also because of all the plaid he was wearing. James said plaid was a depressing fabric.
“Don’t be such a drama queen,” she snapped and he playfully flipped her off.
“Why don’t we put on a show for them, then?”
He kissed her across the table long and soft. Outside, flashes go off. The woman at the table next to her blatantly ogles.
“Brilliant!” He exclaimed and kissed her again. Natalie leaned it to deepen the kiss right as he pulled away. Her fingers inched away from his on the table and she took a long gulp of her wine. The point is, James is pretty stupid a lot of the time.
Audrey gets nominated for an Oscar. Greg does not.
“Congrats, Rey,” he says into the phone.
Across the country, Audrey summons up the strength to say, “Stop calling me, Greg,” and hang up the phone. It is the first and only time she cries over him. Marilyn coos poor baby over the phone and tells her, “The best way to get over someone is to get under somebody else.” Elizabeth suggests Phish Food. Natalie comes over with two bottles of wine and they watch old movies.
Greg calls once more and leaves a message that Audrey won’t listen to.
(The message said: I’m sorry and I miss you and please don’t do this. It’s generic and surprisingly unoriginal for such a great actor.)
Audrey doesn’t care - she’s halfway through her bottle of wine and laughing with Natalie about how absurd it is fake-dating James. They smoke weed on her tiny balcony and order late-night pizza. She eats three slices of Hawaiian and remarks how much the pineapple looks like little lifesavers. It sends them both into another fit of giggles. They joke about how terrible Times Square is and the cutest players on the Knicks. Los Angeles gets trashed talk and New York gets glorified.
When she tells Nat that she’s not interested in Greg anymore, it feels like the truth.
“I kissed Elvis last night.”
They’re in the bathroom during the premiere of Frank’s newest movie. Elizabeth is borrowing Marilyn’s red lipstick and Marilyn’s powdering her nose. Audrey is in New York.
(This isn’t important, but good to know anyways:
In New York, Audrey is with James. “Perez thinks we’re having an affair behind Nat’s back,” James says over day-old Chinese and red-wine out of plastic cups. He liked to pretend he’s bohemian. Audrey laughs into her chicken lo-mein and takes another sip. “I’m sure your boyfriend loved that one.”)
But back to LA:
Elizabeth sighs and leans against the bathroom counter. Her ring sparkles bright under the fluorescent lights and it makes Marilyn’s stomach turn.
(“I’m in love,” Elizabeth told her during Cleopatra and Marilyn made herself a mimosa with her cell phone pressed in between her shoulder and ear.
“Yes I know, that’s why I got you a wedding present two years ago.”
Then there was silence across the world and Marilyn knew what Liz was going to say before she said it.
“Are you sleeping with Richard?”
Liz barely spoke into the phone, just exhaled a giddy yes and Marilyn finished her drink.
“People’s going to have a heart attack over this, you know.”
“I really don’t give a shit”, Liz grumbled and Marilyn thought about the divorce papers on her own dresser.
“Enjoy Egypt, I have to go to a meeting,” and both of them knew she was lying.)
“Why did you kiss him?”
Marilyn smacks her lips before saying, “Because I wanted to.”
“You know,” Liz drawls in that cutting way of hers, “you aren’t fooling anyone with that bullshit.”
There is silence until Marilyn plucks her lipstick out of Liz’s hands. Liz is the kind of friend who is hard to be friends with sometimes, even if she has good intentions. This is the perfect example. Marilyn can think of a hundred other times just like it, if she wants to.
“Go to hell.”
Outside the audience cries when Frank dies.
“I’m sure I’ll meet you there.”
Marilyn would be offended if she wasn’t so sure it was true. Richard is waiting for Elizabeth outside of the bathroom; Marilyn kisses him on the cheek once and leaves by herself.
Liz miscarries before she even realizes she is pregnant.
One night she’s sipping on a martini in a skintight red dress, Richard smiling from across the room and then he’s swinging her around on the dance floor. Later, at home, Richard kisses his way down her neck as he unclasps her necklace. His hands are soft and his lips are softer and she feels like she is slipping out of her own skin.
In the morning she wakes up to a red stain on her sheets, and her stomach cramping as she yells out. Richard drives like a madman to the hospital and for a moment Elizabeth thinks she is dying.
“I’m so sorry,” the doctor tells her, “but you miscarried.”
The cheap hospital gown rubs against her skin and for a moment she loses her breath.
“Oh my god,” Richard sighs out, low and heavy. His hands reach for hers and he sinks into a chair.
“Oh my god,” he repeats again. Liz stays quiet, one hand in Richard’s and the other settled on an empty stomach.
Richard starts crying first.
“I love you,” Elizabeth says when she can finally find her voice again. He looks at her with sad, teary eyes and she feels this overwhelming crushing sadness - a baby would’ve been good for them, a baby with her eyes and Richard’s jawline and a baby they could parent, could love, could protect.
When she finally starts to cry, Richard wraps his arms around her tighter.
The press finds out somehow - when she’s pushed out in a wheelchair the next morning, there’s a wall of flashbulbs. Richard has a fit but Elizabeth bows her head into her hands and feels too exhausted for anything else.
For his birthday, Marlon’s wife invites everyone over for a barbeque and cocktails. Is Marilyn coming? Everyone asks. Of course she is, Audrey scoffs at them. Don’t be so immature.
Sprinkles Cupcakes caters the desserts and Marilyn shows up in time to sing Happy Birthday with the rest of the crowd.
“Everyone, come around to the front of the house,” Mrs. Brando enthuses and everyone trudges along, happily buzzed and munching on cupcakes. In the driveway, a brand new Audi R8 sits gleaming and waiting.
DESIRE, the license plate says.
Marlon stares disbelievingly while everyone else tries not to laugh
“You’ve got to be fucking kidding me,” Marilyn finally blurts. Her laugh is high-pitched and almost hysterical. “I have to go,” she says and takes a bit of Dean’s vanilla cupcake.
“I have to go,” she says again, licking the frosting off her mouth. Sidney offers to walk her out, which she gladly accepts.
“Jesus Christ,” Grace exclaims. Her Wayfarers are bright pink and match her Tory Burch sundress. “Marilyn’s kind of a mess, isn’t she?”
Grace has been gone for a while, being a princess and all that. It’s easy to lose touch halfway around the world when there’s a country to rule.
“Marilyn’s always kind of a mess,” Dean says with a shrug as he rolls up the sleeves of his seersucker blazer. There’s a general murmur of agreement from everyone else.
Audrey slams down her wine glass. “You should be ashamed of yourselves,” she scolds.
Everyone stares at the ground and Audrey reaches for her glass again, one hand rubbing her temple. Grace sits next to Audrey and says, “I’m sorry,” in a voice that sounds like she means it, a voice trained not to offend and Audrey has to resist rolling her eyes.
Frank tosses Ava into the pool as a distraction and someone else calls for another round of cold ones.
“This is so fucked up,” Audrey says to no one in particular and then leaves.
“This isn’t going to work,” the wife says.
“I figured you were going to say that,” Marlon responds.
Audrey’s outside by herself, sneaking a cigarette because no one in LA smokes (cigarettes) anymore and she just wants to get cancer in peace.
“You shouldn’t be smoking that,” Greg murmurs behind her and Audrey jumps a little.
“You scared me.”
He laughs. It simultaneously annoys her and gives her what Marilyn calls “the tinglies”.
“Sorry, I’m not sorry.”
Typical, she thinks as he grins at her. Gregory is someone she’s almost always half in love with, thanks to movies and press tours and his hand on the small of her back. The media calls it sexual tension. She calls it a pain in the ass. It makes things like this difficult most of the time. It’d be PR heaven if you guys dated, her publicist enthused. I’m sure his wife would love that, Audrey responded, cold as ice.
“You’re too old to pull that off. You sound like you’re trying too hard.”
“And you’ve just described most of Hollywood, oh wise one.”
Her mouth closes around the cigarette; if he watches, she doesn’t say anything. She takes one last drag and grinds it under her heel. He watches her and leans against the balcony. Audrey has the sudden urge to scuff his stupid, shiny shoes.
“Those things’ll kill you, you know.” One vague gesture towards the cigarette and he’s still smiling like the damn Cheshire cat.
She waves her own hand around, dismissing the idea, and reaches for another.
“Hollywood will kill me first.”
(It’s fine to say things like that now. There are still two years before Dean and his prized Porsche get crashed into by a drunk teenager and several years before Marilyn overdoses on a spectacular cocktail of Xanax, sleeping pills, and horse tranquilizers. They’re still long before the hangovers start to hurt a little more and there are brighter, younger actors and Natalie goes overboard causing Audrey to develop a not entirely irrational fear of yachts. Death becomes something that follows them all around after that, and they don’t speak of it so carelessly.
They find out they aren’t immortal in the cruelest ways.)
Greg leans over and plucks the cigarette from between her fingers before tossing it clean over the balcony.
This feels like a timeless kind of moment - just the balcony and a cigarette and a man she mostly loves. There’s a whole city beneath their feet but the darkness bleaches the color out of everything. She misses New York.
“You look good in black and white,” Greg confesses. Audrey wonders what kind of half-assed compliment that was. If she was Marilyn, which she definitely is not and has no desire to be, she would say something sexy and press herself tightly against him. She would ensnare him with her feminine wiles and take charge of her sexuality. It’s the 21st fucking century, she can hear Marilyn say, we can sleep with whoever we want.
“Yeah, well, it’s really too bad about Technicolor, isn’t it?”
The gold of his wedding band presses cold against her arm and she leans away. He leans on her, heavy, and she rests her hands on his chest to push him away. Everyone in Hollywood thinks they love like Romeo and Juliet.
His phone buzzes, twice and too loudly. “You should probably answer that,” she chirps before ducking back inside.
Audrey’s always been old fashioned.
Marlon is the one who says it.
“You know what,” he starts and everyone stops drinking and smoking and flirting to look at him, “this is pretty fuckin’ great.”
It was Marilyn who snaked her fingers around Marlon’s drink and finished it off with an impossibly sexual flick of her wrist.
“Of course it is,” she says, throaty and full.
Everyone laughs.
That part about them not changing the world? That was a lie. But you probably already knew that.
Marilyn Monroe/Marlon Brando, Audrey Hepburn/Gregory Peck, Elizabeth Taylor/Richard Burton, name dropping of almost everyone else.
Because really - LOOK AT HOW CUTE. Thanks to abvj for betaing and putting up with the madness of this fic. You are the greatest, and hugs forever.
These are all lies.
The first time Marilyn met Marlon, they were at a party. It was summer, the kind of hip and trendy party that Dean would throw on a rooftop. Marlon was single then.
“Marlon, this is Marilyn.”
A mutual friend introduced them.
(Remember: in the grand scheme of the world, they will not change anything. The world kept spinning on its axis and Marilyn’s knees didn’t go weak. )
“Nice to meet you,” she says with her hand outstretched. She was impossibly young then, barely 19 and he’s not much older.
Neither of them is famous yet. That’s important.
“Nice to meet you too, Marilyn,” Marlon says with a dazzling smile. Her hand slipped into his effortlessly.
ESPN is playing in the background, a group of men circled around them with sweating beers in their hands. Stuart Scott talks about the impact the new draft pick, Joe DiMaggio, will have on the Yankees. Marilyn doesn’t notice.
Marlon will always remember Marilyn wore a white sundress that clung to everything and the way the sun silhouetted her hair and the score of the Yankees game from the night before. Most of all he will remember the way Marilyn presses all of herself against him and says, “Hope to see you later,” at the end of the night.
(Marilyn was a romantic then, just as she is now. She didn’t give him her number because for some reason she thought he would find her.)
“You will,” he said and then she was gone.
Four years later he runs into her on a red carpet. She’s wearing white again.
“Hi,” he says first.
“Hello Marlon,” she lilts, “it’s great to see you again.”
Marlon isn’t single anymore.
Elizabeth marries Eddie on a hot, clear day in Las Vegas. She’s fifteen minutes late and her dress is short.
Almost no one is there and Elizabeth is surprised by how much she loves that. Eddie holds her hands too tight before kissing her softly.
She thinks of Debbie for a moment, of dinner parties and too much wine and whispering in each other’s ears like teenage girls. Eddie says, “I love you,” and Elizabeth smiles.
His foot cracks the wineglass, and that is that.
Two helicopters take blurry pictures of the ceremony that end up in US Weekly; Debbie tweets about how much of a bitch Elizabeth is, which mostly breaks Elizabeth’s heart more than any man ever could.
They are at Marilyn’s house, a monstrous 8,000 square foot palace with HD TV’s in almost every room. “I don’t like the sound of silence,” Marilyn says when Audrey asks why that is necessary. “It makes me feel lonely.” She is in between marriages and looks the better for it.
“You know what?”
Audrey is stretched out like a cat in the sun. In the background, Marilyn’s new sound system pumped Lady Gaga through the speakers. Audrey hates Lady Gaga. Which means, of course, Marilyn loves her.
“I think, that maybe, Arthur is sticking it to the golf pro over at Los Angeles Country Club.”
“Oh for the love of God, Marilyn.”
Audrey’s sunglasses fall back onto her face and she wonders how long this will last. Another marriage over followed by another two months of Marilyn trashing the guy. Arthur is most definitely not gay, and Marilyn knows this.
“You know, I love you, really, but I’m not putting up with this again.”
Marilyn has a stunning way of being incredibly neurotic when she thinks no one is watching. Audrey has seen it more often than anyone, probably. It’s hard to find best friends in Hollywood, so they hold on to what they can get.
When Joe calls an hour later, Marilyn’s voice gets soft and quiet. Something about Joe undoes Marilyn in all the best and worst ways.
(“That’s called an orgasm, sweetie,” Marilyn had cooed condescendingly when Audrey told her this once. It was during the time of Marilyn and Joe and God, had they loved each other.
Two hours after Marilyn’s smartass remark, she and Joe had a fight over Marilyn’s Maxim cover. Marilyn drove over sobbing and Audrey was too good of a friend to say I told you so. Orgasms are the highest high, Audrey muses, but she’s not sure it’s worth it when the lows are so low.)
What you don’t understand, [or maybe you’ve guessed by now] is that they are the most dysfunctional people you will ever meet. Audrey loves Gregory, mostly, sometimes, and of course there’s ex-husband one and two respectively to consider. James sulks and mostly loves boys, a fact that is relatively well hidden thanks to strategic dates with Natalie and a killer publicist. There’s Marlon, of course, but everyone loves him and he mostly loves sex. Richard and Elizabeth fight and break up marriages and have done everything to be with each other. There is Natalie who tries so hard to not love James, but fails most of the time.
Marilyn loves everyone with at least a little piece of her heart, and she might be the worst off because of it. They never seem to love her back in the right ways.
Perhaps James put it best when he says, “We’re all real fucked up.”
The first day on the set of their new movie is a shitshow. Marilyn’s running half an hour late because of the fucking paparazzo parked outside of her house. She had flicked a cigarette into the lens of one of the cameras and smiled enchantingly.
Marlon is not pleased. It didn’t help that he is all, you know, method and shit at the moment. The more of an angry bastard his character is, the more of an angry bastard Marlon is.
“Would it kill you to show up on time? For Christ’s sake, Marilyn, it’s the first fucking day.”
He throws something across the room, probably his script, but Marilyn daintily steps over it and continues walking towards hair and makeup.
“You really should calm the fuck down, darling,” she croons in his face.
He rolls his eyes at her before storming away. She tilts her head to get a better look at his retreating backside. God bless whatever created Marlon, she thinks briefly.
Later they made love as two different people. Marlon is warm and steady above her and he presses his hands flat on her skin, like he wants to feel every piece of her, like he can’t get enough of her and maybe she believes him a little. He kisses a warm trail of kisses down her neck and goddamn if she doesn’t wonder where he learned how to do that. Sometimes she doesn’t know if she’s kissing Marlon or his character.
“I love you,” she says to him. [Don’t get confused - they’re still in character.]
He rolls over and there is a whole sea of white sheets and silence between them.
Marilyn cries on cue.
Before the shitshow first day, there was a script reading. An executive read a story about a doomed wife and an abusive husband and saw gold statuettes on piles of dollar bills.
“I want stars!” he demanded.
They called Marlon first, which Marilyn’s ego would never quite recover from.
The audition was the best kind of disaster.
It was a love scene that was really a fight scene and Marilyn’s hands shook when Marlon screamed at her. She started crying before she knew it and grasped his shirt weakly. For just a second, Marlon let her hands rest there. (Transcendence, he’d say later and she would chock it up to the usual method bullshit. He was going to be in a movie about spirituality next.) She fell to her knees and threw a nearby plate at him.
After, they were lying on the ground, a jumbled, shaking mess with her head buried in his chest and he wipes away her tears.
“You two are gold,” the director raved.
Marilyn wondered what it would be like to kiss him. She found out soon enough.
Audrey’s in Barcelona, on the final leg of the European press tour and completely exhausted. She’s wearing five-inch Louboutin platforms and a painfully tight Givenchy sheath.
Gregory’s on her right, her shoulder pressed against him as the flashbulbs go off and she can smell his cologne on her own skin.
“You clean up nice, Hepburn,” he says out of one side of his mouth and Audrey tries to ignore the goosebumps that run up and down her neck when his breath hits her skin.
“We’re paid to clean up nice, Greg.”
The photo op ends and their handlers usher them down the carpet.
“You can never take a compliment, can you Rey?” She hates that nickname.
Her nails are painted a bright red and all of a sudden she notices that they match his tie. Audrey remembers the Golden Globes last year, when she had too much champagne during Bob Hope’s monologue. She hadn’t really known Greg back then, just a few polite hellos on the award show circuit and a lingering glace on his part.
At the after party, he kissed her first.
“You’re married,” she had accused indignantly. But her hand was twisted in his lapel and their corner was dark and he smelled good.
“You’re beautiful,” he said, smug and smirking. Audrey removed her hands and stood up carefully. She left him sitting there.
Four months later, they were cast in a movie together and Audrey tried her best to avoid touching him.
It’s not all bad moments, of course. Marlon is gentler than most in bed, fingers tripping up the expanse of her ribcage, ghosting across her breasts, settling low on her hips. She’s never quite felt as adored as when she’s with Marlon, when his open mouth is on her neck and he’s putting her needs first.
He tries making breakfast one morning. Marilyn wakes up to a plate of watery eggs with blackened toast. Marlon’s sitting at the edge of the bed, hand rubbing at the back of his neck as he tries to explain the meal.
“Sorry. I’m not used to the settings on your toaster, I guess.”
Moments like these, the quiet, intimate ones, are why Marilyn loves falling in love.
“Thank you very much,” she says before taking a bite of the toast. The toast is covered in strawberry jelly and butter, her favorite, and she loves him all the more for it.
Marlon smiles with one side of his mouth and kisses the top of her head.
Il Diablo, James names his motorcycle. It’s a horribly beautiful thing, all black leather and black shiny paint and enough power to get him away from the city as soon as he possibly wants.
“That’s dangerous,” Elizabeth says, unimpressed.
It was 75 and sunny and James still insists on wearing leather. She is wearing indecently short shorts and eating an ice cream cone. She looks exactly like the sex symbol she is.
“Completely irrational,” she continues and he laughs at her.
“Coming from the woman with a 33 carat diamond in her safe.”
Elizabeth quirks her eyebrow and snaps her gum at the same time. She is so much larger than life that sometimes he feels like every time he’s with her, he should learn a life lesson.
He tweets a picture of Elizabeth straddling the wide leather seat, a fierce theatrical scowl on her face and cleavage pouring out of her crisp white shirt.
my girls, the caption said.
“Aren’t you supposed to be dating Natalie?” Elizabeth mused and James sighed. “You are the worst closeted gay in Hollywood,” she teases.
Richard re-tweets the picture moments later, commenting, Watch yourself, Jim.
The whole exchange makes the nine o’clock news.
“This is ridiculous,” Elizabeth complains from bed.
Richard doesn’t look up from his iPad when he says, “That’s Hollywood, dear.”
The thing about Hollywood is half the people believe their whole lives are movies, and the other half believe movies are their whole lives.
Marilyn prefers the former.
Life is so much more exciting that way.
Award shows must be a special sort of hell, Marlon thinks. There’s Marilyn in that goddamn white dress on his right and his wife on his left, and at the table next to him, Frank laughs.
This is the afterparty, which doesn’t necessarily mean it is any more fun than the ceremony, and he went through half an hour of interviews before this. There were flashbulbs fucking everywhere and three missed calls from his mother.
His wife was talking to Natalie. Marilyn’s dress was so white in the dark room it practically glowed; Marlon avoided eye contact and cringed when she leaned in towards him. His wife was wearing purple and she looked beautiful.
“You wanna go dance?” he propositions her charmingly.
Marilyn scowls into her champagne but his wife smiles and takes his hand. Marlon loosens his tie and drops a hand onto the small of her back. He dips her once, and reminds himself not to look at Marilyn.
Later, she kisses him in a dark corner and says I love you like it means something in this business.
Marilyn, he sighs, thumb rubbing the bare skin on her arm and standing still. She smiles then, presses her forehead against her shoulder and laughs this terribly sad laugh before walking away.
In his stronger moments, he thinks he had wanted to say I love you, too.
Both Marlon and Marilyn are the types to fall into affairs quickly. Marilyn’s always been a romantic, probably always will be, and Marlon’s biggest vice is a beautiful lady.
The paparazzi snap a blurry looking picture of Marilyn sneaking out of Marlon’s apartment in downtown LA. Her sunglasses cover half of her face. Her hair isn’t brushed and she’s wearing one of his old t-shirts.
Whoever the scumbag photographer is, he sells it to People for 100,000 dollars. On the front cover, the picture of her is blown up for even the blindest old lady to see. There are two pictures of Marlon and her from various events stuck in the corners of the cover. . “Will She Ever Find Love?” the cover asks. “Why Marilyn keeps looking in all the wrong places!”
Marlon calls her the minute it hits the newsstand. “The Missus isn’t too happy about this.”
“Yeah, well, you can tell her I’m not so thrilled either. That title, God it’s awful.”
Marilyn’s spread out on the bed, a new reality TV show about losing weight playing softly in the background, and the stupid magazine is open in front of her to the cover story. The pictures the editor chose are really awful, she thinks. Of course they’re the ones where she stares at Marlon while he looks the other way. “I look like I’m obsessed with you.”
“Well if you ask me, it’s not all lies.”
“Oh, shut up,” she says as she briskly turns the page. “But the part about how we’re having an affair is true, I guess.”
“Were,” he corrects and he can picture her shrug through the silence. “And anyways I was referring to the why you keep looking in all the wrong places part of it.”
“You know, Marlon, you can be really terrible when you want to be.”
There’s a beat of silence, and just when Marilyn can hear a slight intake of breath on his end, just when she thinks he’ll apologize - he lets it out in a sigh and hangs up the phone.
One New Text from Jack Nicholson, his phone says.
You’ve been fucking Marilyn? You lucky bastard! Marlon can only sigh. Jack’s too young to understand these kinds of things.
His wife is crying in the kitchen. Marlon ducks out through the laundry room and goes to In n Out for lunch.
“There is nothing better than an animal style double double,” he says on the phone with Frank.
“Not even Marilyn?” Frank asks, teasing. Frank seems to forget all the times he’s slipped out while Ava is sleeping to meet up with some groupie who complimented his eyes. Frank’s the easiest out of all of them, really. Selective memory, he pleads on more than one occasion.
Marlon slams the phone on the table and shatters the whole front screen.
The thing is - Marilyn is something else. She’s curves and smiles and great sex and laughing and crying and feelings that are complicated. His mother told him once, “There are women you marry, and women you fuck,” and Marlon has always listened to his mother.
In retrospect, that was really terrible advice.
“Stupid fucking iPhone,” he mutters but no one is listening.
Audrey calls Elizabeth after she reads the story. If anyone knows how to handle labels like ‘homewrecker’ and ‘whore’, it’s Elizabeth.
“Liz, you need to talk to her.”
“You know I hate it when you call me Liz,” Elizabeth grumbled into the phone. She was stuck in traffic, on her way to audition for a new movie with Sidney Poitier. She was also running fifteen minutes late.
Audrey flipped the magazine shut and promptly threw it in her trashcan. Her fingernails rapped against her marble countertop as she continued talking. “Fine. Elizabeth, you need to talk to her. She hasn’t left the house all day.”
“Has anyone talked to Marlon? Or the wife?”
“Marlon’s not answering his phone.”
There’s silence over the line for a second. They all knew this would end badly. Marlon was self-destructive and horribly selfish while Marilyn was too tragically romantic to ignore a doomed relationship.
“I’ll call her when I’m done, okay?”
Audrey sighed in relief and murmured a quick goodbye into the speaker.
Marilyn doesn’t leave her house for two whole days. She paints her toenails red, then black, then red again. She screens calls from Joe and Arthur, watches five DVR’d episodes of the Bachelor, calls Audrey twice and bawls. She eats a carton of Pinkberry. She feels bad about eating the carton of Pinkberry, so she tries the new Pilates workout. She quits the new Pilates workout.
Mostly, she wishes Marlon would call.
“Sweetie,” Audrey chirps into her receiver. “What exactly were you thinking?”
“I wasn’t,” Marilyn says matter of factly, and she doesn’t apologize for it.
Audrey buys a house in L.A. because she has to.
Because her agent, an Ari Gold type, short, Jewish, vaguely attractive in an I’m an asshole way, said, “Aud, you’re one of the biggest fucking movie stars on the planet but even you can not make Warner Bros. move to the Big goddamn Apple.”
“Language, Jacob,” she had tsked teasingly before calling a realtor. “And I won’t be living in this city full-time.”
“Buy a house in Malibu and take long walks on the beach. Maybe you’ll change your mind.”
“Not a chance in hell, buddy.”
The house she buys is small and pretty, a vintage little thing in Santa Monica that could just as easily be in Connecticut. Her kitchen is pale yellow and her bedroom is green. The interior decorator said her home lacked a connecting theme. Audrey had sat down on the couch and retorted, “I want it to have character, instead.”
“We should have a party,” Natalie says. “Themed, maybe?”
Audrey says, “Abso-fucking-lutely not,” and keeps cutting strawberries.
They don’t throw a party. For such a tiny person, Audrey can be quite demanding when she wants to.
The first day on the set of Cleopatra, Richard called her a gem. Elizabeth blushed, barely, and said, “I love the sound of that.”
The green screen behind them and her braid extensions were pulled so tight her eyes were watering. She still managed to smile wonderfully. The PA counted down, and as Cleopatra she was in love with him.
He kissed her, strong and warm, looking too damn good in gold, and when the director yelled cut Elizabeth still felt in love with him.
The feeling never wore off.
I feel like I’ve been in love with you since I met you, Richard will tell her a couple of weeks later, probably in bed and naked. Her nails will rake across his back gently and her ring will catch whatever light is left in the room.
I know the feeling, darling, she said and they made love for the rest of the night.
Audrey’s doorbell rings at two in the morning on a too-warm night in March. She wraps a robe tightly around her nightie before shuffling down the hall towards the front door.
When she opens it, Greg is standing there, in an unbuttoned wrinkled white shirt and tuxedo pants. “Drey!” he slurs as he lunges towards her. “Drey I’m s’happy you’re awake.”
And then he’s hugging her, or more accurately trying to hug her, and Audrey can smell him all over her clothes. She read somewhere that smell is one of the most powerful triggers for memory - her thoughts flicker to the Golden Globes but she represses it and tries to wrangle him inside.
“Y’know, Dre, you’re so beautiful.”
“Greg, what are you doing here? Where are your friends?” she inquires once she gets him on the couch.
“You’re my friend Rey. You’re my favorite,” he emphasizes. He’s trying to take his shoes off, tip of his tongue peeking out from his lips in concentration, and Audrey finally helps him by untying his shoes.
“Thanks”, he says before tucking his toes underneath a pillow and pulling her favorite cashmere blanket tightly around him.
It breaks her heart a little bit, the sight of him sprawled on her couch and reaching out for her. It’s pathetic on both of their parts, really.
She goes to the kitchen and pours him a glass of water. There’s a loud thud from the opposite room. She can hear a slurred, loud apology from the sink.
“Drink this,” Audrey mutters as she shoves the glass of water into his hands, “and then sleep it off, jackass.”
He murmurs his thanks and gulps down the water, Adam’s apple bobbing.
“If you puke on my blanket, I’ll kill you!” She yells from down the hall.
Greg doesn’t hear her, he’s already passed out face down into her throw pillow.
“You’re so irrational about men,” Audrey tells Marilyn over martinis at a restaurant opening. Audrey left for a while after the Greg incident. Marilyn’s visiting her in New York for the weekend.
“When has love ever been rational?” she swoons.
“Oh, so you’re in love now? With who?” Audrey asks patronizingly. Marlon has been out of the picture for a while, filming a movie in Tahiti or something and Arthur had remarried. Joe was dating a girl, but Audrey wasn’t worried about him. If any man was capable of loving Marilyn the way she needed to be, it was Joe. She motions for the waiter and orders the house special.
Marilyn is all big eyes and innocent expression when she answers, “Aren’t I always?”
“The paparazzi are everywhere,” James lamented over dinner with Natalie. She daintily chewed her scallops and raised her eyebrows.
“That’s kind of the point, James.” This is their fourth date in two weeks. Their nickname is Jatalie and she hates the way it sounds whenever James says it.
He sulked into his chicken parmesan. His art exhibit at some NYU gallery opened to mediocre reviews and he was in a shitty mood. Natalie knew this not only by his expression but also because of all the plaid he was wearing. James said plaid was a depressing fabric.
“Don’t be such a drama queen,” she snapped and he playfully flipped her off.
“Why don’t we put on a show for them, then?”
He kissed her across the table long and soft. Outside, flashes go off. The woman at the table next to her blatantly ogles.
“Brilliant!” He exclaimed and kissed her again. Natalie leaned it to deepen the kiss right as he pulled away. Her fingers inched away from his on the table and she took a long gulp of her wine. The point is, James is pretty stupid a lot of the time.
Audrey gets nominated for an Oscar. Greg does not.
“Congrats, Rey,” he says into the phone.
Across the country, Audrey summons up the strength to say, “Stop calling me, Greg,” and hang up the phone. It is the first and only time she cries over him. Marilyn coos poor baby over the phone and tells her, “The best way to get over someone is to get under somebody else.” Elizabeth suggests Phish Food. Natalie comes over with two bottles of wine and they watch old movies.
Greg calls once more and leaves a message that Audrey won’t listen to.
(The message said: I’m sorry and I miss you and please don’t do this. It’s generic and surprisingly unoriginal for such a great actor.)
Audrey doesn’t care - she’s halfway through her bottle of wine and laughing with Natalie about how absurd it is fake-dating James. They smoke weed on her tiny balcony and order late-night pizza. She eats three slices of Hawaiian and remarks how much the pineapple looks like little lifesavers. It sends them both into another fit of giggles. They joke about how terrible Times Square is and the cutest players on the Knicks. Los Angeles gets trashed talk and New York gets glorified.
When she tells Nat that she’s not interested in Greg anymore, it feels like the truth.
“I kissed Elvis last night.”
They’re in the bathroom during the premiere of Frank’s newest movie. Elizabeth is borrowing Marilyn’s red lipstick and Marilyn’s powdering her nose. Audrey is in New York.
(This isn’t important, but good to know anyways:
In New York, Audrey is with James. “Perez thinks we’re having an affair behind Nat’s back,” James says over day-old Chinese and red-wine out of plastic cups. He liked to pretend he’s bohemian. Audrey laughs into her chicken lo-mein and takes another sip. “I’m sure your boyfriend loved that one.”)
But back to LA:
Elizabeth sighs and leans against the bathroom counter. Her ring sparkles bright under the fluorescent lights and it makes Marilyn’s stomach turn.
(“I’m in love,” Elizabeth told her during Cleopatra and Marilyn made herself a mimosa with her cell phone pressed in between her shoulder and ear.
“Yes I know, that’s why I got you a wedding present two years ago.”
Then there was silence across the world and Marilyn knew what Liz was going to say before she said it.
“Are you sleeping with Richard?”
Liz barely spoke into the phone, just exhaled a giddy yes and Marilyn finished her drink.
“People’s going to have a heart attack over this, you know.”
“I really don’t give a shit”, Liz grumbled and Marilyn thought about the divorce papers on her own dresser.
“Enjoy Egypt, I have to go to a meeting,” and both of them knew she was lying.)
“Why did you kiss him?”
Marilyn smacks her lips before saying, “Because I wanted to.”
“You know,” Liz drawls in that cutting way of hers, “you aren’t fooling anyone with that bullshit.”
There is silence until Marilyn plucks her lipstick out of Liz’s hands. Liz is the kind of friend who is hard to be friends with sometimes, even if she has good intentions. This is the perfect example. Marilyn can think of a hundred other times just like it, if she wants to.
“Go to hell.”
Outside the audience cries when Frank dies.
“I’m sure I’ll meet you there.”
Marilyn would be offended if she wasn’t so sure it was true. Richard is waiting for Elizabeth outside of the bathroom; Marilyn kisses him on the cheek once and leaves by herself.
Liz miscarries before she even realizes she is pregnant.
One night she’s sipping on a martini in a skintight red dress, Richard smiling from across the room and then he’s swinging her around on the dance floor. Later, at home, Richard kisses his way down her neck as he unclasps her necklace. His hands are soft and his lips are softer and she feels like she is slipping out of her own skin.
In the morning she wakes up to a red stain on her sheets, and her stomach cramping as she yells out. Richard drives like a madman to the hospital and for a moment Elizabeth thinks she is dying.
“I’m so sorry,” the doctor tells her, “but you miscarried.”
The cheap hospital gown rubs against her skin and for a moment she loses her breath.
“Oh my god,” Richard sighs out, low and heavy. His hands reach for hers and he sinks into a chair.
“Oh my god,” he repeats again. Liz stays quiet, one hand in Richard’s and the other settled on an empty stomach.
Richard starts crying first.
“I love you,” Elizabeth says when she can finally find her voice again. He looks at her with sad, teary eyes and she feels this overwhelming crushing sadness - a baby would’ve been good for them, a baby with her eyes and Richard’s jawline and a baby they could parent, could love, could protect.
When she finally starts to cry, Richard wraps his arms around her tighter.
The press finds out somehow - when she’s pushed out in a wheelchair the next morning, there’s a wall of flashbulbs. Richard has a fit but Elizabeth bows her head into her hands and feels too exhausted for anything else.
For his birthday, Marlon’s wife invites everyone over for a barbeque and cocktails. Is Marilyn coming? Everyone asks. Of course she is, Audrey scoffs at them. Don’t be so immature.
Sprinkles Cupcakes caters the desserts and Marilyn shows up in time to sing Happy Birthday with the rest of the crowd.
“Everyone, come around to the front of the house,” Mrs. Brando enthuses and everyone trudges along, happily buzzed and munching on cupcakes. In the driveway, a brand new Audi R8 sits gleaming and waiting.
DESIRE, the license plate says.
Marlon stares disbelievingly while everyone else tries not to laugh
“You’ve got to be fucking kidding me,” Marilyn finally blurts. Her laugh is high-pitched and almost hysterical. “I have to go,” she says and takes a bit of Dean’s vanilla cupcake.
“I have to go,” she says again, licking the frosting off her mouth. Sidney offers to walk her out, which she gladly accepts.
“Jesus Christ,” Grace exclaims. Her Wayfarers are bright pink and match her Tory Burch sundress. “Marilyn’s kind of a mess, isn’t she?”
Grace has been gone for a while, being a princess and all that. It’s easy to lose touch halfway around the world when there’s a country to rule.
“Marilyn’s always kind of a mess,” Dean says with a shrug as he rolls up the sleeves of his seersucker blazer. There’s a general murmur of agreement from everyone else.
Audrey slams down her wine glass. “You should be ashamed of yourselves,” she scolds.
Everyone stares at the ground and Audrey reaches for her glass again, one hand rubbing her temple. Grace sits next to Audrey and says, “I’m sorry,” in a voice that sounds like she means it, a voice trained not to offend and Audrey has to resist rolling her eyes.
Frank tosses Ava into the pool as a distraction and someone else calls for another round of cold ones.
“This is so fucked up,” Audrey says to no one in particular and then leaves.
“This isn’t going to work,” the wife says.
“I figured you were going to say that,” Marlon responds.
Audrey’s outside by herself, sneaking a cigarette because no one in LA smokes (cigarettes) anymore and she just wants to get cancer in peace.
“You shouldn’t be smoking that,” Greg murmurs behind her and Audrey jumps a little.
“You scared me.”
He laughs. It simultaneously annoys her and gives her what Marilyn calls “the tinglies”.
“Sorry, I’m not sorry.”
Typical, she thinks as he grins at her. Gregory is someone she’s almost always half in love with, thanks to movies and press tours and his hand on the small of her back. The media calls it sexual tension. She calls it a pain in the ass. It makes things like this difficult most of the time. It’d be PR heaven if you guys dated, her publicist enthused. I’m sure his wife would love that, Audrey responded, cold as ice.
“You’re too old to pull that off. You sound like you’re trying too hard.”
“And you’ve just described most of Hollywood, oh wise one.”
Her mouth closes around the cigarette; if he watches, she doesn’t say anything. She takes one last drag and grinds it under her heel. He watches her and leans against the balcony. Audrey has the sudden urge to scuff his stupid, shiny shoes.
“Those things’ll kill you, you know.” One vague gesture towards the cigarette and he’s still smiling like the damn Cheshire cat.
She waves her own hand around, dismissing the idea, and reaches for another.
“Hollywood will kill me first.”
(It’s fine to say things like that now. There are still two years before Dean and his prized Porsche get crashed into by a drunk teenager and several years before Marilyn overdoses on a spectacular cocktail of Xanax, sleeping pills, and horse tranquilizers. They’re still long before the hangovers start to hurt a little more and there are brighter, younger actors and Natalie goes overboard causing Audrey to develop a not entirely irrational fear of yachts. Death becomes something that follows them all around after that, and they don’t speak of it so carelessly.
They find out they aren’t immortal in the cruelest ways.)
Greg leans over and plucks the cigarette from between her fingers before tossing it clean over the balcony.
This feels like a timeless kind of moment - just the balcony and a cigarette and a man she mostly loves. There’s a whole city beneath their feet but the darkness bleaches the color out of everything. She misses New York.
“You look good in black and white,” Greg confesses. Audrey wonders what kind of half-assed compliment that was. If she was Marilyn, which she definitely is not and has no desire to be, she would say something sexy and press herself tightly against him. She would ensnare him with her feminine wiles and take charge of her sexuality. It’s the 21st fucking century, she can hear Marilyn say, we can sleep with whoever we want.
“Yeah, well, it’s really too bad about Technicolor, isn’t it?”
The gold of his wedding band presses cold against her arm and she leans away. He leans on her, heavy, and she rests her hands on his chest to push him away. Everyone in Hollywood thinks they love like Romeo and Juliet.
His phone buzzes, twice and too loudly. “You should probably answer that,” she chirps before ducking back inside.
Audrey’s always been old fashioned.
Marlon is the one who says it.
“You know what,” he starts and everyone stops drinking and smoking and flirting to look at him, “this is pretty fuckin’ great.”
It was Marilyn who snaked her fingers around Marlon’s drink and finished it off with an impossibly sexual flick of her wrist.
“Of course it is,” she says, throaty and full.
Everyone laughs.
That part about them not changing the world? That was a lie. But you probably already knew that.