Chapter 7
Innocents Abroad
Whichever, Norma did become a star, at once. The porkpie dream was right about her and had not misrepresented himself. No Jimmy in any sense, and a respectable producer in every sense, he engineered opportunities one after another for Norma to be seen by anyone he thought could help her. Before she hardly knew what was happening, no one thought she was just a dumb blonde. She was the dumb blonde.
Never dumb, she played a dumb blonde in movie after movie, and many of the men of America fell in love with her while their wives and girlfriends raged. She was the only major movie-star to pose nude for Playboy, and the women raged the more about how dumb they wished she were as their husbands bought the magazine, and did who-knows-what with it. It wasn’t on the coffee table.
She never got over Jimmy, but neither did she ever see him again, on Earth. She thought about sending his mother money, but she knew his mother’s world-war widow’s pension kept her as happy as money could make her, and it would have cut Jimmy’s heart out, if she hadn’t already done that, herself.
She married again, and again. But it wasn’t the same as had come from that serendipitous look on the levee. The first of the agains was to a sports-legend, a baseball-player who was a role-model to little boys the earth over. The second of those famous agains was to a literary legend, a playwright who was a role-model to adult artists the earth over. The first was because she wished to have fun, and the second was because she wished to be important.
She did indeed have fun with the first and stayed as good a friend to him as she had been with Jimmy. The second was doomed from her days in New Orleans, her days wondering why people would have so little to do with her, besides trying to belittle her. After that, nothing on Earth could make her feel important.
She married a great playwright so she could learn drama, as though she didn’t know drama to the core of her beautiful soul. She studied acting with a great acting teacher, as though she couldn’t feel how to act from her lovely heart. So, after playing a dumb blonde, she played a smart dilettante. For vision of importance, she boffed the pres. She thought that that might be her coming out.
It was a lot easier than killing him. She was a movie-star, and Fits Jr. gathered movie-stars around him, as though they were knights of the roundtable his cabinet might well have been, were he able to understand the concept of a round table. He had to be at the head of the table, or dancing on it like a jester in his own court. But Norma had no psychic view, or notion what might follow.
To her, he was the president of the United States, and she was a daughter of a Bourbon Street whore. To her, every woman in the United States admired this gallant swaggering statesmen, and no one had ever admired her for anything but pretending to be a dumb blonde. Beatrice and I admired her, but we’d last spoken with her in New Orleans, and now she seemed fine.
She seemed fine, a movie star and hanging out with the president of the United States. We knew nothing of how she felt about Jimmy or his mother, and the situation seemed to us a dream come true for her. It seemed to us better than anything offered to her in New Orleans. We knew she’d not been happy then. Now we thought she was. And we’re still sorry. We’re still sorry.
But enough of my apologies, none of which excuse. All of us, I and Slavey and Oliver and Theresa, and anyone else on the whole wide earth who’d ever seen people self-destruct should have seen what was happening. Instead of seeing her films and laughing at her, we should have seen her self and wept with her, for her as for ourselves.
What happened is she said she’d boffed the pres, and she said it publicly. The Fits Jr. court of adultery thought it might pass as a dumb blonde’s drunk remark, if she said it once. But the Fits Jr. court that tried and convicted her of being too honest for their comfort knew she wasn’t a dumb blonde and hadn’t said it out of drunkenness.
So they engineered an alternative for everyone involved. Fits Jr.’s family legacy was bootlegging and union-corruption. Just as Fits Jr. tried to suck up to Negroes for their vote, his father had sucked up to unions for their members’ money, after ending prohibition ended his earlier means, of making money for himself. And Fits Jr. had a sense of humor, although he strained it like everything else through the drugs he was taking for his back. In reply to his telling Norma about PT-109, she told him she’d been married to a sailor. And then she felt ashamed of saying that.
“But his name was Jimmy,” she said. “Not Johnny.”
So Fits Jr. had his court find a California union goon to pay Norma a visit and shut her up, and he asked them to find one named Jimmy, for special emphasis. He wasn’t to kill her but only to threaten her, and the court found a guy named Jimmy Huffa. Fits Jr. thought that was great, a guy named Huffa to snuff this dame for saying she’d boffed the pres, presumably in the buff, as in Playboy. For all Fits Jr.’s talk about Arthur and Camelot, he’d never read Le Mort d’Arthur. So he thought this little plot of his poetic justice. We were to show him poetic justice.
But shamefully late for Norma Jean.
Huffa was then a junior goon for a mixed-up operation headquartered at a nightclub in Los Angeles called El Dorado. One of Fits Jr.’s court-goons met with the union-goon there and discussed the possibilities. The court-goon made the request, and Huffa said what he thought, got what he could.
“You’ll have to make her an offer she can’t refuse,” said the court-goon. “We have it that she’s a proud woman, and she’s not as dumb as she looks. What we’re suggesting is that you offer her a choice between us offing her or her offing herself. You know, you can talk about like the choice between guns and pills.”
“You talk like I don’t know who we’re talking about,” said Huffa. “I think I’ve got the savoir faire to do this job, but there’d better be a whole lot in it for me. Anybody finds out I did it, and every horny jerk in the country’s going to be out to off me. I’d be out to off me, if I wasn’t happily married. So make me your offer. How much for this?”
“There isn’t any offer,” said the court-goon. “The only thing I’m authorized to say is that you’ll be alright. Things are shifting in Detroit and Chicago and Washington, and someone who can deliver a message like this will be very welcome in any of those venues. You’ll have to get away from Hollywood anyway, to make big in your business. Oh, and be sure and tell her your name is Jimmy. You don’t need to know why.”
Huffa scratched his chin. He shook up the sediment from the melted rocks in his scotch. He looked at the instruments standing idle on the bandstand empty of players. He carefully refrained from scratching either of his palms. He nearly stuck a stubby finger into an itching ear. He slurped a little of his tepid scotch. He returned the glass to the table. He leaned back in his chair. He stuck out his lower lip. He sniffed and nodded. He said okay. He did it.
But Norma Jean did not go gentle into that good night. She hid herself away for a few days in a motel near Big Sur, tried to find herself in the surf beneath the rocks. She couldn’t find herself there, and so she visited her mother. She hadn’t seen her lately.
She had had her moved from the nuthouse in New Orleans to a sanitarium in Pasadena. She loved her diagnosed paranoid-schizophrenic manic-depressive mother and liked to call her the little old lady in Pasadena, as she thought of her as a rose parade. Later some blond boys made a hit song with that title, and I think Norma might have enjoyed it, for herself and her mother. But she never heard it, just saw the roses.
She took a taxi from Big Sur back down to Pasadena, something she could afford as a star. Slavey, for all his eternal life, regretted that his role on Earth never permitted him to visit his mother in Kalamazoo before she died. Norma was at least lucky in that, in knowing she had done the best she could for her mother, always and forever.
But now, in the threat against her life, she sought her mother’s life as well. She didn’t know whether she’d ever see her mother again, and so she went to see her now. She sought two things, in her trek now from the taxi, through the pastel hallways to the courtyard with its many roses. She sought from her mother advice and consolation. And her crazy mom delivered both.
Her mom sat in a wicker rocker in a corner of the courtyard beneath a huge rosebush, talking to herself. Seeing her daughter strolling across the lawn, she shut up and paid attention with wide bright eyes, her irises fluctuating with the sunlight on her daughter as her daughter walked beneath the eucalyptus trees and lilac bushes someone had decided to place in the courtyard for the shade and the scent. Norma often had wondered how this not-very-big courtyard in this insane-asylum had exactly what it needed, to look like what she thought might be heaven.
“Hi, Mama,” said Norma, kissing her mother on her furthest cheek and settling into the rocker on her nearer side. “I’m sorry I haven’t been here lately.”
“I know,” said her mother. “Where was I for you?”
“In my heart,” said Norma. “Always.”
That was enough for Norma, reminding herself and her mother of the truth. Details are seldom told or sought in matters of the heart and eternity, and Norma knew that in that moment. So she and her mother shared the box of candy Norma had brought, and craziness the two of them rattled about this and that and here and there, until the sun looked to be about to turn the afternoon into evening.
Norma kissed her mother again and bade her farewell and took another taxi, this one to a motel in Hollywood. As she looked at the cheap drapes and a picture of a sailing ship Jimmy might have thought artsy, she thought of him and his mother and her mother and the deep unsounded sea and sparkling sand and her child hand in brilliant motes of dust in sunlight through a window, and she took some pills and went to sleep and never awoke again, at least not there in Hollywood.
So, that was my main personal reason for wishing Fits Jr. killed. But, for the world in general, the reason was how he responded to the Central Intelligence Agency, and specifically to an operative named Rich Abyss. Like me, Rich was a Yale economist, partly because he took his name seriously. He saw life as a deep unsounded sea of wealth. So he delved deep in that rich abyss.
His first opportunity to raise a huge lode of that wealth to the surface was in Germany in implementing the Marshall Plan. There, he met Charles de Gaulle, whose leadership of the French Resistance and its subterfuge assistance of the success of Earth’s powers less crazy than Hitler at Normandy inspired Eisenhower to evolve the United States Office of Strategic Services into the Central Intelligence Agency.
The Office of Strategic Services was a World War II development of the Pentagon to deliver strategic intelligence to the military for military purposes. Eisenhower, in his coordination with de Gaulle, saw a need and a possibility to gather intelligence more broadly and use it for civil purposes. He thought that might be a way to keep peace proactively, rather than repeatedly having to restore it reactively through war.
Rich and Charles talked about that, as they struggled to restore prosperity to war-torn Europe, while watching new wars developing all around the world, from Canaan to Vietnam. So Charles recommended Rich to Ike, for the fledgling agency he was developing through the leadership of his secretary of state John Dulles and John’s brother Allen. Ike passed Rich along through John to Allen, who appointed Rich director of the Office of Scientific Intelligence, in Allen’s newly formed Central Intelligence Agency.
Rich’s most widely known project there was the development of the U-2 spy planes. Rich thought the abyss of possibilities not only deep but high, and later he also developed projects to identify UFO’s. So he developed the U-2 as an eye to the sky as well as to the earth. But the eye to Earth nearly got all humanity killed, thanks to Fits Jr. By that, Fits Jr. proved that we were right.
U-2 surveillance caught on film Soviet development of missile bases in Cuba. Fits Jr., instead of quietly calling the Kremlin and entering into negotiations, had his staff call the Washington Post and the American Broadcasting Company and anyone else who could spread the word and the pictures, and he entered into a public word-shooting contest that nearly turned into a nuke-shooting contest that could have blown the earth to kingdom come. His famous speaking-ability nearly turned literally into bombast.
Why? Ike was still alive and well, and Rich was still at Allen’s CIA. But Fits Jr., instead of asking people who knew how international exigencies worked, told his yes-men what he thought, and they agreed. And what he thought was that he’d show the world what a brave young man he was and how he wasn’t going to let those commies threaten America. The truth was that the potential threat was not nearly kinetic until Fits Jr. threatened the Soviets. After that hectoring, the questionable missiles in Cuba were hardly relevant. Relevance turned to intercontinental nuclear missiles on both sides.
But I shouldn’t have said he was hectoring. Hector at Troy was facing an actual threat. The Greeks had surrounded his hometown and were parading like Fits Jr. all around. So Hector nodded his plume to his wife and son and braved the battlefield with the bravest face he could put on from fear for his friends and his family. Maybe Fits Jr. would have fit better in earlier millennia, but in millennia earlier than Arthur’s if so, if he’d fit well anywhere. Fits Jr. was more like those Greeks than that Trojan, and the Greeks later learned. Fits Jr. crusaded publicly for his private hubris. Greeks learned to call that the tragic flaw. But in that life of his, Fits never learned.
Yet the people of the United States bought his bombast, as they cheered watching cowboys killing Indians on television, after other Indians had killed the Indian Gandhi, for being too peaceable. Of course Kruschev, not as crazy as Fits Jr., backed down and pulled out, knowing his missile presence in Cuba was by no means worth the impending doom. So headlines bombasted that Fits Jr.’s bombast had made the other fellow blink. All on Earth should have been blinking tears from their eyes through all of that. And the other fellow became still less a fellow, making all worse.
But, still then, my companions and I didn’t decide to take out the fellow who had directed that regression of the fellowship that Rich and Allen and John Foster and Ike and Charles had tried to salvage from the abysmal morass of Truman’s and Churchill’s mistakes. The final decision did not occur until after the failure at La Baya de los Cochinos, the Bay of Pigs. There, again, Fits Jr. refused the advice of Ike and Rich to follow Charles’ example. And this time people died for nothing, nothing except Fits Jr.’s hubris. That debacle proved a pattern we couldn’t suborn.
Here’s more background. While Ike was president, Allen made Rich project manager for an insurrection in Cuba. The three of them based the plan on the success in Normandy, but with less military incursion and more civil revolt. Charles’ French Resistance forces had provided essential intelligence before the twentieth-century Normandy invasion and essential sweeping-up after, but the mission had cost Earth too many corporals. Too many loyal soldiers bled their lives into sand.
So, the Eisenhower plan for Cuba was to land not at the Bay of the Pigs. That area was sparsely populated, and the wish was to maximally apply the Cuban popularity of the insurrection. The project Rich hoped to manage was a landing at the city of Trinidad, with minimal military forcing, just enough for safe landing, a conspicuous landing, but a safe one. The conspicuousness would let the internal resistance know of the support, while safeness meant living long enough to provide the support.
Conspicuousness and safeness together meant assurance that the support be substantial but not an invasion by itself. The bottom line was that this would be an insurrection, with just enough help from outside friends to assure success.
Such was the spirit of General Eisenhower, who went to West Point because he hadn’t funds to pay college tuition. He learned all his lessons well, and he fulfilled all of his obligations well and never excepted his conscience from that. He was quite a Taoist himself, not overtly helping us much with civil rights, but assuring that doors stood open. His Cuban insurrection could have been a piece of quiet glory. It might have been his crowning glory as one learned person. But with little public notice.
“For our sins,” Ike might have said, weeping in a shadow.
But Normandy was noisier, and Fits Jr. wanted noise. He wanted his horn blown, and so he tried to turn Rich’s plan into a perfect imitation of Normandy. He promised more troops and changed the landing site to the Bay of Pigs.
“That’s a fine ideal you have,” he said to Rich. “But world opinion is important, and the United States has to take credit for this, and we can’t afford failure. We have the military might, and we can’t be sure that the Cubans you’ve recruited will hold up their side of the bargain. After all, they did let Castro take over their country.”
Rich didn’t remind Junior that the United States had trained Castro’s troops at Fort Jackson, South Carolina. He made a mental note to look up whether Fort Jackson was named for Old Hickory or Stonewall, and which Carolina held Fort Sumter. He wondered why the statue of Old Hickory in the square named for him in New Orleans so much resembles the statue in Lafayette Park, where homeless people sleep in front of the Whitehouse. He wondered why Fits Jr. didn’t care about such questions. He glanced out to the rose garden. He acquiesced. He smoldered. He dreaded.
“I’m here to serve,” he said, rising from his Louis XVI armchair.
“Well, it’s a go,” said Fits Jr., wincing in his Shaker rocker.
The invasion went as newly planned, up to a point. The landing-crafts landed at the Bay of the Pigs, and the troops stormed onto the beach, as their fellows had at Normandy. Not until the mud of Vietnam did the Pentagon design ground-gripping treads into combat-boots, and so there was a lot of slipping and sliding in the sand, as at Normandy. The new plan promised little conspicuousness, but the landing was plenty conspicuous nonetheless. Castro’s forces quickly defended.
Men lay dead on the beach, while the people of Trinidad and all of Cuba awaited the outcome, hoping to see it on television someday, if the United States prevailed. All of Cuba’s official government army concentrated fire on the hundreds of United States troops and a few expatriate freedom fighters, on the beach. The blood ran, and the water washed, and the sand blew and shifted, and the noise and smell of gunpowder, invented by some Chinaman, sang and reeked, in the air.
Some Chinaman, in the interest of science, or just to blow things up, or only for the noise? As Ahab said, standing at the rail of his ship, somewhere beyond that bloody water people were plowing their fields, not knowing much of Earth was happening. Chinamen and Chinawomen were fighting their own battles against communism or anything else that threatened their ability to feel at home, happy in the flowering of their fields. On good days, in pleasant forgetful minutes, they enjoyed the plowing with dreams beyond, with thoughts of family and friends and further. However, meanwhile, the Bay of Pigs was sucking blood, as no pig would.
A Massachusetts man named Melville told the story of Ahab at the rail of his ship, abysmally railing at the great white whale in the deep unsounded sea. As Melville tells the story, Captain Ahab’s first mate stood behind him at the rail, hearing Ahab try to sound the unsounded. Ahab hears the mate behind him but hardly heeds his presence, until suddenly and inexplicably remembering he’s not alone. So, suddenly and inexplicably, he turns to address the mate. We ask for what and do not know our hand. So Ahab turns to ask what we can know.
“But blanched to a corpse’s hue with despair,” says Melville, telling this tale of silly subservience, “the mate had stolen away.”
Rich stood behind his president, hardly heeded. Men were bleeding, dying on the beach, and the last resort was to send in the planes. It was part of the new plan, part of Fits Jr.’s compromise of the old plan, to send in air-support if the ground-invasion looked to fail. Rich stood behind his president and advised him that now was the time for that, as they stood in the war-room, hardly heeding the situation, through the technology, of the time. But Fits Jr. heeded not at all.
“I think it’s time,” said Rich. “For the air-support, I mean.”
“Not yet,” said Fits Jr.. “Half the force hasn’t hit the beach.”
Rich had dealt with two presidents of the United States and one of France, and he knew how to be polite and treat a war-room as a drawing-room, but everything he knew was telling him that everything was wrong with this. Now, having heard the response to the obvious assessment he’d understated, he knew the crux of the situation. Fits Jr. wished to be better than Eisenhower, and Rich was a pawn in his play.
“Arthur’s table was round,” said Rich.
“What?” said Fits Jr., reading from his rocking-chair the paper reports clacking from the code-machine. “This is like Normandy. I’ve studied Normandy. The air-support was minimal. And it was more than was necessary.”
He said that quietly as he rocked, his burr-head brush-cut pointing to the ceiling as he held the spooling paper in one hand. His other hand rested on its arm of the rocker, as his eyes gazed glazed at his advisor trying to be everyone’s mate. Whatever their direction, Fits Jr.’s eyes showed little recognition of any substance outside him.
“Half the force that’s hit the beach is dead,” said Rich.
“Ask what you can do for your country,” said Fits Jr.
So the troops died, and Castro continued, and we killed Fits Jr. Overweening pride is how the Greeks defined hubris, and Fits Jr.’s pride was about to overween this world. If we’d let him continue, the cold war couldn’t have been won for centuries, and might easily have turned hot enough to send the whole of Earth to hell.
“You see, I was right?” said Fits Jr., after the failure of his piggishness. “If we had landed at Trinidad, our landing force might have retreated into the mountains and told of your failure. If we had sent in the planes, the world would have thought the United States of America was responsible for your failure.
“So, now, I can plausibly deny our responsibility.”
“Ich bin ein Berliner,” said Fits Jr., after the futility of any diplomacy with him inspired the Soviets to build the Berlin wall, to let him and the world know that they weren’t making a career of blinking at this screwball. His next move to destroy Earth might have been over that. I thought we should not wait to see.
“Ich bin ein Berliner,” I quoted, thinking of Hitler’s bombast.
“And they call me dangerous!” agreed Slavey.
“Doesn’t he know anything at all?” asked Oliver.
“I think he has to go,” I had to offer.
“I think you’re right,” answered Theresa.
I waited for the rest of her answer, my head bowed like Lev’s at the river. Slavey and Oliver did not bow their heads but looked at Theresa, not with any push or pressure but patiently awaiting the answer they knew would come. Theresa’s head was bowed like mine, and tears were in her dark and lovely eyes.
“As soon as you can manage it,” she said.
By the time to kill Fits Jr., Beatrice and I had brought ourselves and Quincy and Ben to Houston, and Zapata Petroleum was just a sort of funny fringe of my involvement in the world oil-economy, of which Houston was the administrative capital, and I’d made many friends in Texas, large and small.
Two of the friends were Linden Johns and John Conundrum: the former Texas senator and then vice president of the United States, and the then governor of Texas; but I recruited a Republican friend also.
Dicky was easy to befriend, because of his ambition to spread his power from sea to sea and further. His hubris was crazy, but it was easier to control than Fits Jr.’s.
“Yassuh, boss,” I said to Dicky. “Uh huh.”
“Mm hm,” he said to me, and was my friend.
By that, I made the assassination of Fits Jr., the president of the United States, a bipartisan effort. Linden was the easiest to recruit, because his hubris was nearly as huge as Fits Jr.’s, while he was far less clever than Dicky. All I had to do to get him in line was to point out that he’d be president immediately after. Recruiting Conundrum required Tricky Dicky, before Dicky earned that nickname.
So, from that, the players play fell in place. It was no game, but Earthlings call such such, and Earthlings are so easy to recruit. Just tell them what to think they want from life. So all of this fell quickly into place.