“Quit talking like an old Charlie Chan picture.”

“ All Charlie Chan pictures are old. What was she wearing?”

“Not much.”

He leaned against the leather seat and smiled to himself. He was gazing straight ahead-into that calendar he kept hidden under his gym socks. So I started up the Jag and headed through the lot to Soundstage 14.

Funny to think that Marilyn Monroe was the last hope of this dying beast. She’d been at odds with Twentieth Century-Fox almost from the start. Back in the middle 1940s, she’d struggled to get picked out of cattle calls, just another pretty blonde looking for extra work or bit parts. Then she’d tried to get noticed in small roles. Finally she worked her way up to being the worst-paid star on this or any other lot. Something’s Got to Give signaled her exit from Fox bondage-that one last picture she owed them.

From what I’d read, it wasn’t much of a picture, and of course getting stuck with lousy scripts had been why Marilyn had walked from Fox back in the fifties and gone east to form her own company. She’d wound up in the prestigious Actors Studio, a fairly unlikely berth for a bombshell.

Not that Marilyn was your average bombshell. She’d married Joe DiMaggio and Arthur Miller, hadn’t she? She even turned her bubbleheaded shtick into something more with her Bus Stop and Some Like It Hot performances. Who but Marilyn could have found nuances in dumb-blonde roles?

She was special, and I liked her, on-screen and off. She had a reputation for driving directors and costars and studio execs crazy, but I knew that came from a kind of cockeyed perfectionism born out of insecurity. The hard-drinking, drug-abusing Marilyn of rumor was a stranger to me. I’d always found her sweet and sexy and funny, if needy, and if she had a bad side, I’d been privileged not to see it.

Anyway, this Something’s Got to Give should have been an easy payday for her. She had a copasetic costar in Dean Martin-she hung around with the Rat Pack boys, having been Sinatra’s sweetheart off and on-and the director was on her very short approved list with the likes of Billy Wilder and Alfred Hitchcock.