What, She Worry?

BOOKS

What, She Worry?

by Ed Ward

“So of course, they came out — in the Hollywood Reporter, no less... oh, it was great, the column started out: ‘Yoo-hoo! Frank Sinatra!’ and I thought ‘I have to plow through this? But what the thing said was that I had had an affair with Marvin Gaye before he met Berry Gordy’s sister...” Elaine Jesmer, author of a scandalous novel about the record and nightclub businesses Number One With A Bullet, gives a look that says “How silly, how hopeless these people are.”

Affair or no, Number One With A Bullet is one of the hottest pieces of non-literature making the rounds these days. Basically, it deals with Daniel Stone, one of Houston-based Finest Records’ stable of stars, and his attempts to escape from the creative straightjacket the company is imposing upon him. Finest too, is having trouble staying out of the hands of an increasingly more insistent criminal syndicate, and president Bob Vale (whose sister, Vinetta, is married to Daniel Stone) also has to keep hushed up the fact that his predilection for kinky sex has resulted in the death of Cindy Dover, one of Finest’s rising young stars. The book is trashy and tawdry, and no matter how far any resemblance to real events might have been fictionalized, it was still enough for Motown to try and stop publication.

“I figured those people would freak,” Ms. Jesmer says, “They aren’t cool. If they were cool, they’d have said ‘Great! Let’s make a movie out of it.’ The nature of the trouble with Motown is that I think that Berry Gordy (Motown’s president) thinks this in some way threatens him.”

Well, is there a real-life prototype for Daniel Stone? I had one idea immediately — Otis Redding. “Otis? Why no, I never thought of him. I never met him. Actually, there are two guys who sort of gave me the idea to do the character, but as I’ve been going around promoting the book people have been coming up to me and saying ‘Daniel Stone is really so-and-so, right?’ and I have to admit that although I’d never thought of it, that person fits.” So the book is fiction, y’all, although, as she says, there is certainly enough truth in it to make it spicy.

Ms. Jesmer says she wrote Number One after a mental crackup which followed hard on the heels of several years as press agent for some of Hollywood’s more prominent and “happening” clubs

— the Trip, Ciro’s, and the Whiskey A Go-Go. Certainly Kate Henley, the cocaine-sniffing press agent who falls in love with Daniel Stone is headed in that direction.

Reviews of Number One have all been similar — “I hated it but I also had to finish it.” Many of them agreed that it was headed toward the Silver Screen, but there have been troubles there, too. “A1 Ruddy, who was involved with The Godfather, bought the movie rights and made a deal with Paramount. He wrote a script and waited to hear what was happening. At the same time, Motown made a three-picture deal with Paramount with their own money, and the way I hear it, Berry Gordy said, in essence, that if you want our money, don’t make the picture. So they’re not going to make the movie — that’s already been decided. A good thing, too

— I read a few pages of the script and they’ve changed it all around, trying to make it a black Godfather, and it didn’t work. It was too white. And then I heard that Paramount made an underthe-table v deal with Berry Gordy giving him the right to control what happens to the property. That was when I called the Justice Department, who had already contacted me in connection with that payola investigation. I told them if they could figure what was happening with my property, they had a case.”

In the meanwhile, though, Elaine Jesmer’s working on a second novel, and touring the country promoting her first. “It’s odd,” I remarked to her, “When I first heard about your book — blackowned, Houston-based record company, I thought you’d been writing about Duke/Peacock, which is a black-owned, Houston-based record company.” She stared at me. “You’re kidding. There really is such a thing? No, really — you’re kidding.” It seems that Houston was one of the upcoming stops on her promotion itinerary, so if that second novel never comes out...

MY STORY Marilyn Monroe (Stein and Day) JAYNE MANSFIELD May Mann (Pocket Books)

Post-Grable Hollywood was a lollipaboobsla. The camera gaze had swung from gams to rib-cage in a mammary phenomenon that had starlets starving for a “washboard tummy” and hourglass silhouette. When the flesh cleared, Marilyn was the three-syllable High Priestess -c5f Ash Blondes arisen from the chorus. With sheer brute force of hype and chutzpah, Jayne Mansfield became her lady-in-waiting. .

Both were early rapes, both childbrides, both shackled with Cro-Magnon chauvinist hubbies who’d rather sit and swill beer with the “little woman” where she belonged (in the kitchen scramblin’ his eggs or in bed putting on the dog), both with the same dues to pay in California — from producers pushing them into couches to bigwigs ditching them from the payroll for assets “unsaleable.”

Whereas Marilyn was hampered with a clubfooted psyche she couldn’t shake, Jayne was a velvet steamroller. Triumphing over puritanic momma, hubby Paul, the theater snobs of New York, the thorny Press, and eventually Hollywood, which she brought to its knees, she erected a Pink Palace as a paean to American ingenuity and hard work. She had what Marilyn could never have — a sense of Self, an ironclad ego that wouldn’t buckle to studio bosses or various piranhas. She had children when most glamor girls aborted; she married often and whom she wished; she did her own publicity, for better or worse, until she almost OD’d the credibility capacity. Only late in her career, when she was co-opted and almost enslaved by her pygmy lawyer who brutalized her and her children, did she falter.

What Jayne’s story lacks in tragic flaws and inherent drama is made up for in spades. Occult weirdism prevails — from Jayne herself appearing to May Mann in a seance telling her to finish the book to satanist Anton LaVey cursing her and her lawyer to death in a car crash. Take it with an ounce of balony, but after the threat Jayne and lawyer Sam Brody turned thousands of dollars worth of exquisite cars into twisted junk metal until the curse’s fulfillment came with Jayne’s head sliced from her body by a limousine window,

As for My Story, it’s hard not to be cynical about a book bound and tied in litigation as fraud. It’s hard to believe that it could lie molding since 1954, unwanted until this frenzied state of Monroe-mania. Whole paragraphs have been printed elsewhere, even in such common sources as the Pyramid series of critiques. And there is a prevailing sense of doom, embodied in the quote “I was the kind of girl they found dead in a hall bedroom with an empty bottle of sleeping pills in her hand.” Farsighted.

As much as it’s against my better sense, I want to believe that MM actually typed out this manuscript. Whereas the quotes in the Mansfield book are stilted and too precise to be actual conversation, this book zings with naturalness and those flashes of Marilyn-personality that pierce through even her most stereotyped screen roles.

As much as she claims that women never liked her, and vice versa, she wrote “a woman’s book" — inside girl chat about “wolves,” street harrassment, pickups, and sexism sans hifalutin’ feminism. As last year’s MS. profile cited, she died ten years too early or the woman’s movement started ten years too late because Marilyn could’ve used a “sister.”

Clever word plays, a sardonic eyewinked sense of humor, and a comic’s sense of understatement and timing riddle the book. It acts as a shattering counterpoint to the passages of depression, schizophrenia, and foreboding. Marilyn Moviestar could never transcend Norman Jean, transient orphan shuttled from foster home to foster home throughout the Southwest. The Norma Jean forced to bathe in eight peoples’worth of dirty bath water, without a father but with an insane mother, rips through passages of this book, into the Marilyn who wrote “Nowhere” for her address in the Kennedy guest book scant weeks before her death.

It’s a book for fans, as it’s short on “information.” Short vignettes of people who made. Marilyn’s life happy or miserable, it ends with a poignant dot-dot-dot. A nebulous cadence with her marrying DiMaggio, off to New York to fight for meatier film roles, entertaining the soldiers in Korea — her future looks bright, but...

Had this book been published when it should have been, it might have forestalled the slide by presenting the right slaht with which to deal with Marilyn. The wit, intelligence, sensitivity, and crying need for love slash through the pages. The Star System, which was eating her alive, might have gagged had it realized, as Groucho Marx did, that she was “Mae West, Theda Bara, and Bo Peep all rolled into one.”

Kathy Miller