Robert Patrick's Personal Blog

RIGHT BESIDE ME

A Zoom Room play

© 2021 by Robert Patrick

(NOTE: Depending on the available cast and technical facilities, it would be nice if Jock and Honey each had someone, tech people, to relate to, even though as you will see, they are fixed on one another.)

(SETTING: JOCK’s living room and HONEY’s. They can see each other only on monitors in their areas.)

(JOCK STETSON – an extremely well-built, handsome man in his eighties, in  Hollywood daytime attire, a plaid jacket, open-collared shirt and slacks, sits in an armchair looking about himself curiously. HONEY – a quietly aggressive woman in her 30s or 40s, fits a concealed mike in place on her chic dress.)

JOCK:  Okay, hello, is this thing on? Looks like a tie clip, right? Looks okay. Does it work? I’m liable to die anytime. Can we get started?

HONEY: Is he saying something? Can someone there ask him to wait? Is someone there? ask him to wait? Love, how are my lights?

JOCK:  There’s no one here but the world. Hello, world. God, it is the world isn’t it? Eight billion people, I understand, can catch anything we do.

HONEY: Yes, Hello, Jock. Good evening. We’ll be right with you.

JOCK:  Of course, I said that to my little great-niece the other night, about eight billion potential audience, and she said, “Uncle Jack, the average audience for the first five minutes of a live Zoom cast is eight people, and after that, nothing.”

HONEY: Ha, ha. Well, we hope to do you just a bit better than that. Hello, Jack, — or Jock? Jack?

JOCK: Jock is all right.

HONEY: All right! Then! Jock it is. And welcome to “Live It Up, Live It Down.”

JOCK:  Is that where I look? Where I’m looking now?

HONEY: Right at me, Jack, just watch me as if we were sitting across from each other. No, that’s slightly hiding your full face. Try this , Look right beside me.

JOCK:  Oooooooh. God.

HONEY: What’s wrong? Don, is anyone there? Get him a glass of water.

JOCK:  No, don’t. I’m all right. I’m all ready.  I just – wasn’t ready for that.

HONEY: For what, please? Did the mike wire entangle you? Are the lights too bright?

JOCK:  No, it’s just – you said something that was part of – the punch line really – I’d guess you’d call it – of something she said to me once. And to other people. She said it to other people, too. I read that she said it.

HONEY: I’m finding myself just a bit confused, Jack. What was it that I said, and she said, and you read she said?

JOCK:  “Right beside me.” She said, “Right beside me.” I asked her how it was going, and she said – with kind of a laugh, then a shrug, she said, “Well, it’s like it was all happening to somebody right beside me.” With a laugh and a shrug and a pout and maybe another shrug, “Well, you know, it’s like it all was happening – is happening to someone right beside me..”

HONEY: I see. And, Jack –

JOCK:  Yeah?

HONEY: By “she,” we mean, of course –

JOCK:  Marilyn. Norma Jeanne. Miss Mortensen. Doherty.  Mrs. Doherty

HONEY: Marilyn Mon –

JOCK:  Marilyn Monroe, yeah. Yes, Marilyn, of course, sure.

HONEY: And that’s as good a time as any to set our audience straight on who our guest today is on “Live It Up, Live It Down” and why we’re doing a special one-guest only half-an-hour with him. Mister Jack Stetson!

JOCK:  Born Jack Stillman. I can’t figure out whom to wave to.

HONEY: Well, on our live chat column, Linny Talkee of Aprilville Montana says, “You can wave at me, handsome!”

JOCK:  It’s difficult. It was always easy to wave at an audience for a movie, you just looked at the camera – and when I was doing my stage show there would be a spotlight in my eyes so I just waved out into the dark. But there’s nobody really here…

HONEY: Don, is nobody there with Mister Stetson? Stillman? Get somebody there!

JOCK:  No, it’s okay, I understand these little cameras don’t need anybody tending to them, they just get whatever you do. It’s all right. But where’s the “live column” you mentioned, where is that?

HONEY: Oh, you can’t see that, Jack. It’s a response feature for messages or questions or comments from the viewers. You can’t see it. It’s right beside me. Oh.

 JOCK:  Ha! You said it again.

HONEY: Yes. I – said it again. Something that was said to you by our imaginary guest, that icon your acquaintance with whom was the original reason we begged you to participate in this segment of “Live It Up! Live It Down!” That idol of millions –

JOCK:  I think she said it to me. I think she said it. I know I read she said it.

HONEY: Miss Marilyn Monroe. Now, tell us Jack, before we go into your own life and how you came to know – her – just when did you come to know –

JOCK:  She was my baby sitter.

HONEY: Oh?

JOCK:  I was three and she was thirteen. She lived with some people down near the beach, and the husband, father, man of that family was my father’s chauffeur. And they were always looking for a little money to help pay for having Norma Jean in the house extra, and someone suggested baby-sitting,

HONEY: I hadn’t known that. Well, that certainly was an innocent way of having – and please hold your comments, viewers, we’ve got to cover a lot – one great sex symbol meet another when one was here and the other thirteen!

JOCK:  My father was a movie producer. No one you ever heard of. Even now, when everyone is famous.

HONEY: Oh, and did he recognize Norma Marilyn’s promise?

JOCK:  No, no, this was 1939, she was just a little girl wearing pinafores made out of flour bags. That should be “flower” with a “dubbleya e,” not with a “u.’ You know how a long time ago then flour was sold in patterned bags so poor housewives could make dresses out of them?

HONEY: Ha – well – no – not quite – oh, but some of our viewers do! And I want to ask all of our viewers wait who are anxious to hear all about Mister Stillman’s life, remembering that he has come here today to talk not about himself but about that lovely goddess of the Golden Age of the Silver Screen, Miss Marilyn Monroe.

JOCK:  She was a pretty girl. She talked about the movies a lot.

HONEY: With your father?

JOCK:  I don’t know if Daddy ever met her. Her stepfather brought her to my house or me to hers. It was real convenient.

HONEY: And what did she…

JOCK:  She messed with her hair a lot. And the money she got to keep of what my father paid her, she spent on cheap makeup. With little round labels on it pasted on the bottom of the lipsticks with the manufacturer’s name for the color on it. “Taboo Perwinkle.” “Kitten Mauve.” And we leafed through all the movie magazines.

HONEY: This would be at your house?

JOCK:  What? Huh? No. We didn’t have those things. People in the movie industry didn’t look at those things, I never would have seen one of them if it hadn’t been for her. She bought them for a dime at the drugstore – either at that little soda shop in the boardwalk or right at Schwab’s in Beverly Hills. Where she lived later. Almost. Once in a while she had the chauffeur drop her off there. I guess she looked a little older than thirteen. She told me once a man bought her a movie magazine there, and a sandwich.

HONEY: And then –

JOCK:  And then World War II. And the people she lived with had to move, and she would have had to go back into the orphanage that had been paying them to take care of her, and nobody wanted her to have to go back into the orphanage, so they arranged she should marry this policeman they knew, and he got in the service and went away to war and left her there.

HONEY: And she worked in an airplane factory –

JOCK:  And they saw her there and started paying to take her picture… I remember when that happened for me a lot later. It seemed a lot later. 1953 – 54

HONEY: So were you out of touch with Marilyn then?

JOCK:  Nobody was out of touch with Marilyn by then. Did you ever see the picture of her in 1954 entertaining the troops in Korea? Outdoor stage, must have been cold as Hell. Half naked and you can count in the photo two thousand boys and there are clearly more beyond that.

HONEY: And she said,” I never knew what being a movie star meant till then!”

JOCK:  She did?

HONEY: I believe she did. Did she ever say that to you?

JOCK:  I don’t know. I was so surprised when the gay male magazines started paying to take my picture. At first I wasn’t gonna let ‘em. But I was getting nowhere auditioning for movies. Dad wasn’t big enough to be much help. I don’t think he thought I had much talent. I couldn’t decide what to do. Like a lot of boys like me, I wound up hanging around on the steps of that church on Selma where Las Palmas dead-ends? Looks like a church out of a Jimmy Stewart movie? That’s where we hung out – we beautiful guys who couldn’t make it into the movies. The steps of that church, they looked like an art gallery with us guys as Michelangelos and Graeco-Roman statues in T-shirts and every color of jeans! And sometimes I’d go home with some man who stopped there – not so much for money, but to be reminded that I did look good and if I wanted to, I could be in  porn movies. They called them “adult movies” then. She could have, too. But she went hungry rather than. Kept her thin, she said.

HONEY: She said that to you? So you were seeing her?

JOCK:  She said everything to everybody! And then she got real hungry, had a payment due on a car, they say, and posed nude. Really blonde. Incredibly clean. Brand new hair and chin – and instead of ruining her —

HONEY: Yes, I believe no one else had ever —

JOCK:  Posing nude in 1950. It would have killed anybody else. But there was a new magazine called “Playboy” coming out and they were going to do something no magazine had ever dared do before – have a nude foldout – female foldout – and they picked her – and – it made her – and it made them –

HONEY: For a photographer named “Tom Kelley,” she posed, “Tom Kelley,” I have that in my notes –

JOCK:  Yeah. He took the most famous single photograph in all human history. And now he’s only a footnote in the Marilyn Monroe story…Aren’t we all.

HONEY: Do you feel that you are –

JOCK:  I was the best known, highest-paid, most in-demand star in both gay and straight adult movies at one and the same time. Simultaneously. There was never anything like me –

HONEY: Well, Yes, I know, we wanted to be sure to tell—

JOCK:  I was deciding whether to take the first job after I turned eighteen, whether to pose nude for a stroke-book.  I was hanging around a couple of blocks away from the Salem Church – or living art gallery or whatever you want to call it. I was hanging around on the northeast corner of Sunset and Highland. In a T-shirt and jeans. I had just dyed my hair blonde and I looked, I think, like a flashy hood-ornament. And the sun was like flashbulbs any way you looked. And this pink Cadillac convertible – I swear it was pink, like the one women get for selling Mary Kaye Cosmetics – pulled up and stopped beside me, and the driver looked just like her, I swear and I swear it was her. And she looked me up and down and said, “Well, hello there, baby? How’s it going?” And I told her and everything , every single thing I said, she nodded and sighed and laughed, and finally I was laughing, too, and then she looked at her watch and sighed, “I gotta go or  someone’s world will end” And she looked in the back seat and pulled out a long pink silk glove and flipped it to me and drove away.

HONEY: And was that the last time you saw her?

JOCK:  And I went and posed for photos and I changed my name to match my boots. Jack Stillman – Jock Stetson. I was the best known, highest-paid, most in-demand star in both gay and straight adult movies at the same time. There was never anything like me –

HONEY: Our viewer’s comments are going wild –

JOCK:  And I’m just a footnote in the history of Marilyn Monroe. Because she was my baby-sitter.

HONEY: But no, you needn’t feel like that. You had a great career. And that story you just told…

JOCK:  I don’t know if it’s true.

HONEY: What? About your being highest paid?

JOCK:  I don’t know anymore if I ‘m always remembering right. For a long time since she died I had the picture in my head, exactly like an outtake from a movie, this tight-bodied young blond hustler standing there leaning on an immemorial palm tree at Sunset and Highland, and this pink Cadillac pulling up, and her and a hustler chatting like two professionals in the same line of work, and she gives him a pink silk glove to cheer him up –

HONEY: Yes, Jack, Jock, yes –

JOCK:  And I can’t remember if it’s true – I asked everybody I could think of on Facebook if it’s a story from a book by a hustler, or fiction, or non-fiction, and never got an answer – and I tried to find guys my age from the Selma stairs that I might have told the story to then or heard it from one of them even but they’re all dead already – And I remember like it must have happened “Right beside me.” She said, “Right beside me.” I asked her how it was going, and she said – with kind of a laugh, then a shrug, she said, “Well, it’s like it was all happening to somebody right beside me.” With a laugh and a shrug and a pout and maybe another shrug, “Well, you know, it’s like it all was happening – is happening to someone right beside me..”

HONEY: Jack, I’m afraid we have no more time. Thank you for a stunning show. I’m going to send you the best questions from our readers and we’ll do this all again just as soon as you want to, but I am so sorry and so afraid that we have no more –

JOCK: “We have no more?” I – Did she – did you really say, “We have no more?” I told you a story you’d never heard before about the best-known human being since Gandhi and you can say, all you can say is “We got no more?” “We have no more?” No more? I’ll tell you we have no more. I had everything, have everything, everything and I’m just a footnote. I have everything any human being in history could ever beg for and I feel like it’s happening to someone right beside me. We have no, have no, have no, have no more!

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