"What do I wear in bed? Why, Chanel No.5 of course!"
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My name is Norma Jeane, you know me as Marilyn, and I'm living proof that fame is fickle. Or dead proof anyway, because fame is worse than fickle, it's dangerous. Oh it has its compensations, but boy-oh-boy, it cost me. It cost me my life. Not my soul though. Never my soul!
You didn't think a bottle of barbies could kill this blonde bombshell did you? All she did was trade in her body for something less perishable--a modernist house in fact. Don't ask me how. Perhaps we all bolt from our bodies and fill our favourite places when we go
My new home is little more than a glass box with a flat roof... a blown up skirt of steel, if you like, floating over a scantily clad kitchen, sunken lounge and a couple of bedrooms. Of course, I don't wear makeup anymore; I don't need to paint on that person these days. And I used to say diamonds are a girl's best friend, but I've swapped mine for the glitter of sunlight on my pool. Palm trees surround me instead of ugly reporters, and instead of their ugly stories and obsessive fans--best of all-- the unstoppable gossip of songbirds.
Don't bother looking for this place, you won't find it on any Hollywood tour or in any cash-in book or interview. It was my bat cave when I was alive, and since I died, my skin. So for the last--goodness--sixty years of my death I've filled this house like I filled my clothes. Fabulously. You could say I swapped pantieless-in-silk for bodiless-in-glass!
So Marilyn is "jello on springs" no more. I skip in the air like my swallows, light as light, light as laughter. I giggle and flit in and out of rooms and, when I have guests, I flit in and out of them too. In and out of their bodies. We're born sexual creatures, thank goodness, and it turns out we can be sexy in death too.
And thanks to the movie studio that bought this house in a last ditch attempt to own me, I have many guests. They call my house, which is really me when you think about it, Love House. The studio uses it as a retreat for their talent, their top stars, before a stressful shoot.
I hated the studios when I was alive, and still do now I'm dead, so I slip inside everyone they send me and try to change their hearts and change their minds. All who come to me (and all who come in me!) find love, with each other or with themselves. These lovelies find my embrace warmer than cold mother studio, and they contemplate my fate and they ask themselves a single question: Has the movie studio got their best interest at heart, or is it a money making machine grinding their bones to make its bread? Worse, is it abusing them?
Oh, I can't say I've made a world of difference, but many actresses who've slept in my arms have found the strength to shop their abusers, so I won't stop now. I'll never stop. I call it my death's work.
And today, dear reader, as well as us ghosts, you and I, we have four new guests crossing the stepping stones of my moatish pool, as if into a very stylish fairy castle! Here's the cast of our sexy little drama, my latest lovelies:
Deshawn Troy: A mesmeric, hugely-muscled giant of an African American man. A shooting star thanks to the "Dead Beat" blockbuster franchise. But at just twenty-five, he's worried about being typecast and wants to flex some acting muscle. The studio is happy for him to flex all his muscles.
Yoon Ji-Lim: A luminous Korean actress, model, martial arts master and international phenomenon. She's been breaking bones and hearts since she was 16. That's twenty years, and now she wants to break out of her superhero movie prison. The studio is happy for her to throw off all her chains.
Kate Brown: A bleached blonde, apple-cheeked milkmaid of an English girl. The private chef and personal assistant to Deshawn Troy. Also his number one fan. Like me at twenty-two, she thinks fear is stupid, and so are regrets, and that imperfection is beauty, madness is genius and it's better to be absolutely ridiculous than absolutely boring.
Ted Malloney: Yoon's driver. Thirty-six going on ancient. A busted up, American bulldog of an ex-navy SEAL. He does whatever he's told--immediately and very, very well.
There they are on my doorstep, shaded by my swooping cantilevers. They peer into my dim, but don't see me or you waiting, just acres of marble, wood, and leather. They look into me because they're avoiding each other's eyes. Can't you sense that tension while Ted-- a walking buckaroo of everybody's luggage--fiddles with the key at my slab-of-oak door? A quick dip into them reveals that the tension is due to the glorious, but indulged, Deshawn Troy. He made a bad joke at Kate's expense in the car on the way up.
It'd been going so well, too.
Ted enjoyed driving Deshawn's chromed Humvee. It was a much softer ride than the beasts he barrelled across the deserts of Iraq back in the day. He was also impressed that the bottle-blonde Kate sat up front with him, rather than riding in back with the talent like PAs normally did. He also liked that she peeled and prepped fruit as they went, ready for the talent's snack when they arrived at Love House, and that every now and then she popped a cube of pineapple or flake of orange into his mouth.
Kate, dressed in her habitual sandals, rolled-up cargo shorts and linen oxford top, felt shabby next to Ted's starched shirt and tie combo. But she enjoyed how he filled it, as well his glinty squint as he drove and the square-fisted grip he had on the wheel. She liked his aura of silent calm too--as if she was sitting in the shade of a boulder. She wanted to read all his crags and scars using her fingertip like the needle of a vinyl record player. She supposed he'd lived the life Deshawn played in his movies. So perhaps, in some ways, she was really Ted's number one fan after all.
Yoon and Deshawn were equally excited and equally anxious. Their careers were about to blast into orbit. The new project would place them in the legion of the gods alongside Brando and (blush), yours truly.
The studio had sent them to my house to "get comfortable" before filming an explicit love scene in a "full blooded rebooty" of The Bodyguard. The original story of a beautiful diva falling in love with her rugged bodyguard, had been re-imagined so the pocket doll Yoon was to guard the massive body of a rapper played by Deshawn. Apart from this delicious twist, the movie's other USP was its climax: the world's most explicit, realtime, unsimulated love scene.
Hey, you know me, anything goes (except dullness). But Yoon and Deshawn shared a knot of anxiety about their love scene and I don't blame them. What the writer imagined as an ironic, even iconic romance, the enfant terrible director and money men had beaten into a very different shape. Yoon was offered the script first, because it'd been written for her, and the studio was so keen she should do it, they offered her the pick of Hollywood for her co-star. She chose Deshawn, publicly on a talk show, remarking she'd had a crush on him since "Dead Beat 1: Hard as Hell."
This fact turned the muscle giant to jelly every time he considered it. Nearly ten years her junior, watching Yoon's teenage martial arts flicks when he was a kid had got him into acting.
So while the front seats were a picture of workful calm, nerves crackled in the back. Deshawn overcompensated, popping his pecs and pretending to inflate his bicep by puffing on his thumb. Yoon's owlish expression seemed--to him--enraptured. He didn't know this expression was her armour. It beguiled but never let on how she really felt. So he went even further when boasting about Kate's cooking.
"I gotta say, Kate built this body as sure as any gym. She's tougher than my trainer. Regular balanced meals. High protein, high vitamin, low fat, low carb. No slob out TV dinners from my girl, she always serves me at the table." That's when the dirty thought bubbled up, along with the decision that it was his job to break the ice among these tight-asses. "And man she serves me well--"
"Thank you Mr Troy!" Kate spun in her seat. "But I don't think we need to share all my secrets do we?"
Deshawn clapped and blasted laughter at the sun roof. "Don't be so British! Listen, let me put it this way, Kate serves me AT the table and UNDER it... know what I'm saying?"
Yoon blinked, startled by the unexpected, and kind of unwanted mental image. Her smile, already tight, twitched at the corners. Deshawn wished he hadn't started, but sensed no one quite got his joke so he decided to go too far in the hope of rescuing himself. "And let's just say she wolfs down half the protein she puts on my plate!"
The car interior shrank. With a silent groan, Kate screwed into a ball. Yoon watched Deshawn howl at his own outrageousness. As she feared, he was immature, but gorgeous with it, and she'd met worse. Anyway, if the kid got overexcited, she could handle herself. And she had Ted if things got really scary. Still, if she didn't go along with his bawdy humour, she'd look prim. Not a good look just before a sex scene rehearsal.
She elbowed Deshawn's ribs and, behind her hand, stage whispered. "Ted only drives my car in the polite hours. In the impolite hours he drives my body!" Then she reached into her years of experience, and screeched a dirty laugh she'd learned voicing a hooker cat in a cartoon.