 THE
CASE OF THE VANISHING STRIPPER
It was 1960 when I met her, and I thought, "Man, I could really go for this chick." I'd been working back-to-back TV shows as an actor, doing some movies and buying some sharp duds at Lew Ritter's Men's Shop in Westwood Village. Pure high class, and before they moved to Beverly Hills. I bought a new blazer and charcoal slacks, and was walking south toward Wilshire Boulevard when I stopped at a window in a little shop of antique jewelry, beautiful clothes for classy women and odds and ends of smaller French Empire type furniture. What had caught my eye was a small gold pocket watch. The girl running the shop was tall, built a little like Marilyn Monroe, though with short, reddish hair. She had a beautiful mouth. Okay, I was looking at her more than the watch. I went in and snooped around the shop while she was on the phone a couple times. She had some sort of perfume that was reaching around different little areas of the shop. It was like an orchard, kind of, maybe a lily. Very little aroma to it but something you could sense riding in the air.
I bought the watch, wrote a check, and she stared at my name. "Jonathan Gilmore..." she said, thinking, then, "I saw you on television Friday night. You're an actor. I thought I recognized you."
I said, "Yeah," and asked what she saw. She said it was a western. We talked about TV for a few minutes as she was setting the time on the little gold watch and giving it a light polish. I said, "Hey, is it one o'clock? I haven't even had breakfast. What about you?" She said she'd had breakfast--hours ago. I said, "Well, what about lunch? Have you had lunch?"
 "No," she said. "Sometimes I don't eat lunch. But I am hungry...I've been on a diet." I asked if she'd join me for lunch and she said, "Well, all right..." sort of hesitantly, then said she'd have to close up with the "Back Soon" sign she'd painted in scrolling, unusual letters, with a kind of sunny, ocean scene background. I asked if she knew a good little place to eat and she said she did. "An outside cafe around the corner... Just so we're not gone very long."
She was dressed in a tailored suit, expensive heels, a soft silk
ascot about her neck. She locked the shop and as we headed for the
corner I said, "What's your name?"
"Marjorie," she said, and smiled. "Marjorie Brokenshire." Her cheeks slightly puffy, more like an allergy to something than extra flesh. She had beautiful blue eyes, very fair skin, almost as fair as a natural redhead.
We sat outside under an Italian umbrella and she picked at a spinach salad. She told me she managed the shop, was the buyer as well, but didn't live in Westwood. She lived in West Hollywood. I said I was living at the Park Sunset apartments on the Strip. I asked, "Where do you live in West Hollywood?"
She said, "Oh, north of Sunset," and quickly changed the
subject, started talking about the watch, how old it was -- where it had
been made. It was a ladies watch, she said, perhaps seventy-five
or more years old. She asked if I'd bought it as a gift for
someone. I said, no, I just bought it -- just liked it, but I'd
probably give it to someone. Maybe they'd wear it on a chain.
I asked, "You got a gold chain to go with it?"
She said, "I can't wear jewelry around my neck. Sometimes even on my wrists. My skin reacts to the metal.. I have very sensitive skin." She gave a kind of sad smile, and then said,. "I do have a chain. A lovely little chain..."
We talked about furniture, where the stuff in the shop had come from,
imported antiques. We talked about her taste and mine. "I go
for French Empire," I said. "Chairs with the heads of leopards
on the arms. I like leopard skins, antiques. Oak. But
I'm also really partial to the German designs like the Bauhaus lines of
the 1920's.
She nibbled at the salad. I could smell hints of the ocean in
the breeze coming west and her perfume lifted with it and moved around
us. Finished with her limited lunch, she ordered some herb tea. I
think it was mint. I can still smell it. In fact, whenever I get a
drift of that aroma Marjorie sort of slides into focus in my head, along
with that perfume that kept coming and going. I said: "I'd like to
see you again. Soon." She seemed to think it over.
I said, "We can have dinner at Frascati's on Crescent Heights and
Sunset. You like Frascati's?" She nodded. I said,
"How's Friday?"
"I'll call you tomorrow or if I can't for some reason, you might
call me at the shop. " I walked her back, shook her hand and
held onto it for a few months. I didn't want to let go and she
said, "Well, maybe Friday..."
She said maybe. I said, "I hope so."
I couldn't get her out of my mind and the next day when she hadn't
called, I phoned the shop and someone else answered. She wasn't in
that day. I asked if she could be reached and was told I could
leave a message. I did. I got in touch with her mid-week.
She said, "I'd love to have dinner tomorrow night. I know
it's a week late but is my invitation still open?"
She'd been on a buying trip in Palm Springs. "I see,"
I said. Everybody went to Frascati's. Fine table clothes and
wine, and candles on every table. Her eyes never left my face.
They were almost luminous. We'd had a bottle of Chianti and I took
her hand across the table. I said, "Would you like to stop
back by my place? It's just down the Strip."
She said she knew where the Park Sunset was. I said I had a
bottle of very good wine I've received as a present. The whole
place was one-room units and no kitchens. Full of show folks,
writers and out-of-towners. I thought maybe I was pushing my luck
a little but she nodded. She said, "I feel like getting
drunk."
 Her body was beautiful and she made love hard -- gasping, a heavy
pounding, fast, quick, almost abrupt. Surprised me. She kept
breathing like to catch her breath. Then she had to go -- it was
almost urgent. She got quiet, tense, like something was wrong.
"No, no," she kept saying. "Nothing's wrong.
I have to call a cab."
I said I'd drive her. No, she had to get a taxi -- had to go
somewhere first. She was insistent and I didn't push it. I
waited with her upstairs on Sunset -- not on the street but behind the
glass door waiting for the cab. It came and she left. Didn't
look back.
Two more times we got together, each time she was sort of missing in
between the events and soon as we'd made love she'd want to hit the
road. Fast. We got together to have dinner at Musso Frank's in Hollywood. Someone I knew
who knew Marilyn Monroe was there and we had a drink at the bar.
Talked about Marilyn. Marjorie said nothing. When we got to
the table she said, "I guess you think that's a long pregnant
pause."
That stuck in my head through another couple dates. She was
driving a leased car and soon as we'd make love she'd tense up. I
couldn't get in touch with her for days, and then she called me out of
the blue and said come up to the apartment. It was up Horn, up the
hill north off the Strip and above the drive-in restaurant on the Sunset
corner. She said I couldn't park in the driveway. Don't
worry. I'd walk over. It was a half mile.
One of the best little paintings I'd ever done was of a pregnant gal,
naked, one hand beneath the puffed belly and the other on her left
breast. I wrapped it in brown paper and took the painting down
Sunset to Horn and up the hill to Marjorie's pad -- some sort of secret
place. I wondered why she'd let me in on it.
She loved the painting and had me sign it. She set it on a
antique gilded chest opposite the king-sized feathered bed, a
masterpiece of bedding. You sank into it. Gilded headboard
that had to have cost a mint. Everything was speaking to me,
like this wasn't her pad, but the closets was full of her clothes.
I said it must cost a lot, the apartment--half empty as it was. I
asked, "Someone helping you along with the rent?"
She didn't want to talk. We drank and listened to Frank Sinatra
and Bobby Darin. She said, "Make love to -- kiss my body in
every place I have -- everywhere, kiss me all over!" She
threw herself on the feather bed and I devoured her like sinking into
pit of sweet, hot pulsating honey. Again, her orgasms pounded out
of her; she cried out like in pain. She beat her fists into the
feathers.
Then I had to go. Fast, she said. She kissed me at the
apartment door, her tongue like some crazy animal in my mouth trying to
get down my throat. "Hurry!" she said, half closing the
door.
 I was fucking falling in love but damned if I'd say a word!
I moved out of the Park Sunset into a small guest house in West
Hollywood -- on West Knoll, the street west of La Cienega, just north of
Melrose. It had a huge brick fireplace like in the old ranch house
I remembered from the Circle B Ranch. I'd light fires and make
love in the glow of the flames. Marjorie only once. Then a
second time -- middle of the day. She came by and bared her
breasts and I feasted on her. We went to the drugstore at the
corner of La Cienega and Beverly and had some lunch at the soda fountain
cafe. Her face was red and like she was breaking out in a rash.
She was nervous, anxious -- tense and flustered. She had something
so vital to tell me -- to ask me -- but she didn't. She kept it a
secret. I asked, more than once. Share it with me?
What's the matter? hinted that her life was changing and she might
even start thinking about acting. " Oh, yeah?" I said.
"That's great." She wanted to know if I could help her.
She said she was scared. She was petrified. She couldn't tell me
all of it. She said maybe some day some time she would. I
tried to tell her how I felt about her. I wanted to see her a lot
more! Her cheeks got a little less flushed and then she was off.
She had to leave. Okay, Marjorie. Goodbye, Marjorie.
Till next time.
It didn't come around. Marjorie Brokenshire disappeared.
It was like one of those pockets that pop open in L.A.'s dark had
swallowed her. Months passed. I was downtown on Main Street
walking past the Follies Burlesque theatre and saw the name NEVA SHAW
headlining. I slowed and looked at the pictures behind the glass.
It was her! Marjorie. She'd become Neva Shaw--a headline stripper.
I went in. She didn't do any bumps and grinds. She had a class
act like a young Lily St. Cyr who I'd met through the old actor Tom
Douglas. Neva Shaw wore some long black gossamer garb you were
looking right through at every curve and crevice of her body as she
danced around a kind of fountain or wishing well, air and spotlights
shooting out of this thing which was blowing her costume into the air.
It was artistic -- kind of miraculous in a way. Her dancing was
like early Martha Graham.
A few days later I was heading back downtown to try and make contact with her. I was
walking along Main heading towards the Follies and she was coming towards me, thinner now, tense beyond description; arms loaded with black costumes, her face pale, dressed in some sort of black outfit like Morticia on the
Addam's Family, and she was coming straight at me -- almost in a high-speed trot. But she wasn't even seeing me. A little fruity guy was running behind her with his arms loaded with things and crying loudly, "Wait, Marjorie! Wait for me!"
I never saw her again.
She posed as a figure model for a number of girlie magazines around 1962, and then she seems to have vanished from the
face of the earth. I wonder whatever happened to
Marjorie ...
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