Who doesn’t love Marilyn?

Mandi was a showgirl with a fantasy only Richard Asplin could help fulfil

  Her name wasn’t Lola. I think it was Mandy. Or possibly Mandi. But she was about as close to a showgirl as a thin, speccy tourist in a cheap suit was going to get.

  She walked past me, stopped, smiled and said hello, eyes sparkling like a game show host’s. She had far, far too many teeth, all straight and white and Californian, as if she was surreptitiously munching a piano.

  I was 6000 miles from home, hunched in the hard audience seats of a Los Angeles television studio, waiting for a sitcom recording to start. The lovely Mandi was the warm-up girl, belting out tunes between takes to keep the bored audience from slitting their wrists. She had hipster jeans, a sugar-rush psycho grin and eyes that pleaded, “Spot me! Spot me!”

  I pictured her one-room downtown Hollywood apartment. There would be lights around the bedroom mirror. She ached for fame.

No matter. She either had a weird thing for thin, speccy tourists or she’d mistaken me for someone else – a producer from Paramount, maybe. I smiled and said hello back.

  “Are you in TV?”

  “Me, heavens no,” I said. Something behind her eyes died, like she’d unplugged the Christmas fairy lights. I’m a writer. For some reason she thought this was good enough and plugged her lights back in.

  During the next break between scenes, the PZ blared out Greased Lightning, and Mandi danced up to me in the audience, grabbed my hand and pulled me out of my seat. Her desperation and Steinway grin won me over. Under the hot lights we belted “go greased lightning” at each other and danced: her a slinky, pouting Hollywood goddess; me like a spider at drama class.

  As the music pounded and the audience laughed, I told myself it wasn’t me she was interested in. She was hoping Jerry Bruckheimer was in the audience looking for someone for Flashdance II – The Macarena.

  During the next take, thought, she found me again. “You were good,” she whispered. “Rilly, rilly good…”

  It was a one-room apartment in downtown Hollywood, it turned out. With lights around the mirror. Every wall plastered with tatty Marilyn Monroe posters. Mandi fixed some tequilas and I shuffled nervously about her knick-knacks, worrying about my breath and the freshness of my pants.

  But then, my eyes catching something not quite right, I found something else to worry about. Over every face on every poster on every wall, Mandi had had taken a photocopy of her face, blown it up, cut it out and stuck it over Marilyn Monroe. Huge, peeling photocopied Mandis grinned out from Gentlemen Prefer Blondes, Bus Stop, The Misfits, all smiling blankly.

  “Great, huh?” she said, handing me a glass. “I, like, know all her scripts, her whole life. I think she’s, like, amazing.”

She downed her drink in one. I realised the bright lights in her eyes were fake. The sort one leaves on when one goes away on holiday to deter burglars. There was nobody home.

  I glanced around again, nervously. There Mandi’s face was, grinning between Lemmon and Curtis. And there she was again, by the mirror. On her wedding day.”

  “Oh, I like mine to wear glasses,” she quoted, badly, in a breathy pout.

  Writer? Thin? Suit?

  This Arthur Miller made his excuses and left.