You're Nobody 'Til Somebody Kills You Read Free Page B

aroused I’d have called them a liar. But all I could think was, this poor kid …
    “Marilyn, come on … you just told me how hard a shoot it was.”
    “Yes,” she said, “but the newspapers didn’t talk about that, didn’t talk about what John Huston had put him through … didn’t mention that he smoked three packs a day … or thathe’d lost forty pounds in a hurry to do the movie. No, it was all about me….”
    “But you know that wasn’t true.”
    “But it was,” she said, sitting back and dropping her hands. Tears made her face glisten, her eyes were wide with … with what? Fright? “He was like a father to me on that film, Eddie, and yet I made him wait and wait for me to get to the set … do you think I was trying to punish my father?”
    Well, now it was clear that Marilyn had been under
some
sort of analysis, because a shrink had to have put that thought in her head.
    “I don’t believe that for a minute.”
    She made an
O
with her beautiful mouth and then said, “You don’t?”
    Okay,
now
I was excited.
    I got back into my chair and crossed my legs.
    “Marilyn, do you think maybe it’s reporters following you?”
    “It could be,” she said, “but they come right at me with flash-bulbs going off. Oh, some of them hide behind trees, try to catch me sun bathing in the nude, or swimming, you know … but this is different.” She looked horrified then and added, “This is …
sinister!”
    I studied her face for a few moments, no hardship while I did some quick thinking. What was it Dean thought I could do for her? See if she was being tailed?
    “Are you planning to stop in Reno, or Vegas?” I asked.
    “No,” she said, “I have no reason to go to Reno, and I—I don’t like Vegas. Frank just said I could stay here for a while, to … to get away.”
    “And do you think you were followed here?”
    She looked down.
    “I don’t want you to think I’m crazy, Eddie.”
    “I don’t think that, Marilyn.”
    “I felt there was someone on the plane with me, and then atthe airport. Since I got here two days ago I haven’t gone out … I haven’t even gone near the windows, so … I don’t know if anyone is … out there.”
    I resisted the urge to go and look out the window.
    “How much longer will you be here?” I asked.
    “A couple of days,” she said. “I—I have to get back, I’m buying a house.”
    “Well, that’s good, right?”
    She didn’t answer, but rushed across the room and came back with a script, which she handed me.
    “And I’m reading this,” she said. “I’m supposed to make it with Dean, and Cyd Charisse.”
    Yikes, I thought, Cyd Charisse and Marilyn in the same movie? Where’s a guy supposed to look? I checked out the title page:
Something’s Got to Give
. It had screenplay by Arnold Shulman and Nunnally Johnson printed on it.
    “It’s being rewritten again, but it’s a remake of the Cary Grant and Irene Dunne film
My Favorite Wife.”
    I vaguely recalled the film. I’ve never understood the necessity of remakes. Wasn’t there enough new stuff out there waiting to be made?
    “Anyway,” she said, taking the script back, “I didn’t want to do it, but I owe the studio a picture, and I’ll get to work with George again.”
    I found out later that “George” was George Cukor, with whom she’d worked once before. I also found out that she’d been talked into doing the movie by the same people who talked her into buying a house alone. Marilyn could be talked into things.
    She could probably also be talked out of things, like the idea she was being watched. But first I had to make sure she wasn’t.
    “Eddie,” she asked, after putting the script back where she’d gotten it from, “can you help me?”
    What could I say?
    I stood up.
    “Let me see what I can find out, Marilyn,” I said. “Meanwhile, you relax here and read your script. Keep doing what you’ve been doing. Don’t go out and don’t go near the windows.”
    “Oh,