In a forthcoming anthology, Dark City Lights: New York Stories, author and artist Jonathan Santlofer has contributed a short story, ‘The Garmento and the Movie Star’, imagining a twelve year-old boy’s bittersweet encounter with Marilyn.
One summer, the boy was working as an errand boy for his father, who owned a company on Seventh Avenue – at the heart of New York’s garment district – where top designers made and sold their cocktail dresses. In Santlofer’s story, Marilyn visits the shop one day:
“Her expression changed often but in slow motion: happy to sad to mad to determined or lost. A couple of times she turned to me and asked my opinion about a dress and I always said she looked beautiful.
‘Really?’ she’d say, as if no one had ever said that to her before and I’d bob my head up and down like a puppy and say ‘Really‘, and she’d throw me a smile like a bunch of wild flowers tossed into the air.
A couple of times she called my father over and cupped his ear and whispered like a child would, and when I think about it now that’s exactly how she seemed: childlike.
At one point she sagged onto the couch beside me in a half-unzipped dress and sipped champagne and asked me more questions – if I liked school, if I had siblings, if I liked to read (I could not come up with a single title, not even one of my Hardy Boys books or Classic Comics), so I turned it around and asked her, ‘What’s your favorite movie you ever made?’ and she thought for a while before saying ‘Bus Stop, because…Cherie was a…real girl, you know, sad but…trying to be happy’, her pale face inches from mine, and I said, ‘Oh you were great in that’, though I hadn’t seen it and again she said ‘Really?‘ as if my opinion mattered, and I said, ‘Yes!’ and she smiled and asked me if I got along with my sister and I said ‘sort of’, and I asked her if she had any kids and she blinked and pulled back as if slapped and her eyes welled up with tears and in a quivering whisper said ‘I…have not been…lucky,’ and my father cut in and said ‘Kids? Who needs kids? Brats, all of ’em!’ and swatted me a little too hard on the thigh and forced a laugh, then quickly fetched a new dress. Marilyn dashed behind the screen looking as though she might shatter to pieces but emerged in less than a minute in a white satin dress with a tight bodice and the same less trim along the bottom, all smiles and absolutely radiant, the movie star, Marilyn Monroe.”
In a blog entry posted on July 2014, Santlofer mentioned seeing Marilyn on the big screen. Maybe that experience inspired his story?
“Film Forum is having a ‘Femmes Noir’ festival, all the great films. The other night Joyce Carol Oates her husband Charlie Gross, Megan Abbott and NY Times humorist, Joyce Wadler and I, all went to see Niagara. I had never seen it on the big screen, always thought it was a sloppy B movie only worth seeing for the luscious 25-year-old Marilyn, but it’s better than that. Joseph Cotten plays the tortured husband well and Jean Peters is really pretty and the color is fantastically lurid. It’s true one misses Marilyn when she’s not on the screen but she’s kind of acting in her own film anyway. The first scene of Marilyn/Rose in bed and obviously nude, is a showstopper, and that face, dewy and open despite the heavy makeup, was made for the screen.”