According to our arrangement, I was not to think of her, consider her, or treat her in my capacity-however limited-as a psychiatrist. I was accidentally a doctor she knew, she didn't like doctors, and it was even hazardous to remind her of that phase of my being.

  But if this lovely woman who was already in her late twenties-and generally regarded as one of the big choices in town notorious for the excitability of its female content-did not achieve full sexual desire until so late in a life surrounded by cockerel provocations of every sort, she must harbor a background of frustrations pleading to be looked into.

  "I know I'm not supposed to ask you questions that sound as if I were probing professionally into your life," I began with her one afternoon at a half deserted cocktail-bar. "But the other day you said something to me  which concerns me so closely in my male vanity, that I feel that I'm entitled to an explanation. What do you say?"

  "Asked away," she answered. "The worst that can happen to you is that I'll empty the rest of this martini over the back of your neck and refuse to see you for a month or so."

  "No small risk,"I admitted. "But here goes. What exactly did you mean when you told me the other day that I was the first man you ever really wanted."

  "I don't think I should have to answer such a question," she said after a moment's pause. "Have you ever heard me say things I don't mean to people I like and especially to you?"

  "I didn't ask you if what you said was true. I want to know what made you think it and say it. With so many eager, good-looking men swarming about you for so may years-"

  "So what?" she interrupted. "I just never developed an appetite for one of them."

  "No appetite?" I repeated.

  "It may not be the exact word, dear. But it covers what I mean like a Navajo blanket."

  "No appetite," I repeated, as if I were trying to squeeze out of it the significance it had in Marilyn's mind. 

  "That's right. No appetite, dear," she said again.

  She looked quizzically at me, as if my amazement produced in her some strange species of intense pleasure.

  "But you did get up an appetite for me?" I insisted.

  She shook her head.

  "Come, I expect you to understand that there's more  to this than the satisfaction of the appetite  of a moment, Honey," she said. "As a matter of fact, there's a lit more behind this than I care to go into-with you especially. Why don't we just let it go till I'm an old lady ready not only to show my medals but to tell the story behind each one of them?"

  I seized her protesting hand

  "It won't do, darling,"   I said as solemnly as I knew how."I don't have to tell you that I'm as stuck on myself as the next gook. I know what I can accomplish with women but I'm just as painfully aware of my limitations in that field.

  "Picture this. I meet you, and I say to myself she's everything even a king of the world has a right to expect an covet. I let myself realize that I'd like nothing better than to make you, if only for the love of a minute, knowing that it might take as much as a lifetime to get near enough to you to kiss you. Then, one afternoon, you're in my arms, and there seems no danger that you'll as much as try to run away. How much linger do you think I can live at peace with myself without some idea of what happened between us that afternoon?"

  She was shaking her head again.

  "Sometimes you don't   seem smart at all,"  she said mournfully. "You treat me as if I was born into this plush apartment, as if I were always a woman who could  choose a man to her liking."

  "I still don't understand," I insisted

  "I wasn't always worshipped by the men who were attracted to me, honey," she went on. Love can seem pretty gruesome, dear. I know for instance how fond you are of Spam served with your morning eggs. Suppose the first time this delicacy handled you, you discovered after slicing a piece that your knife had halved the corpse of a dead roach. Is it likely you'd ever again have ordered Spam? That, my dear, was how sex was served out to me during the formative years of my life. Do you understand?"

  "I understand," I answered. "I just don't see how that can be possible-in your case."

  "You have to simply believe me," she said after an agonizing pause.

  "Suppose-since the matter is so distasteful-we don't go into it any more," I suggested.

  " But I would like to tell you about it," she said, "unless, of course, you would rather I didn't"

  For the rest of this memoir I will try to give the reader at least an inkling of the sexual horrors that were visited upon Marilyn Monroe between her sixth and her eleventh years. Eventually she learned to resist. But by that time they had all but ruined in that sweet soul the machinery of romance by which the human race steadily fools itself into continuing its hard and hopeless existence.

  The incidents about to be related could have happened-and probably do happen-in other populated parts of the world. They cast particularly heavy shadows in a city like Hollywood where people live not to love but to achieve some stupid, half-veiled, half-witted, intoxicated role they have set themselves to play on a stage over which the curtain lights never go on.

  It should not be taken for granted, because these incidents follow one another in a regular, quasichronological order, that they were all related at one sitting. Marilyn told me these things during a great variety of meetings between us" lunches and dinners, walks and boating parties and-most often-in bed.

  The earliest enemies of her sexual peace of mind were the little boys she played with-because their games were more attractive to her than the games played by little girls. There followed the older boys in school and even some of the male teachers. But all thus time-going back even earlier that the little boys-there were the shady, nondescript men who saw the child on the street and followed her about, sometimes moving into the rooming houses occupied by her indigent foster mothers, just to be present when an occasion-if the child appeared in sufficient isolation-offered itself for a successful assault. There was never a touch of hatred or resentment in her voice as she recounted to me these awful misadventures of hers. I could only wonder that after suffering the advances of this army of goons she could let me-or any man, for that matter-get near enough to her to touch her.

  I had to go through a routine of her own with me before she would begin to entrust me with her confidences.

  "In exchange for what I have to offer you, there's something our of your own life-your life with me-that I must ask you to tell me, dear" she said.

  "I call it barter, plain, shameless, unadulterated barter," I said, "But if it doesn't involve the betrayal of a patient's confidence I yield."

  "It's just a simple question to which I want you to give me a simple   answer, dear," she went on. "Can you remember our very first intimacy?"

  I felt drawn back somewhat, but pretended that her question was in the ordinary course of social conversation.

  "How could I forget it, darling?" I replied.

  "That's not answering my question,: she complained. "I need an honest, straightforward answer."

  "It would help if you explained it a little,"I suggested

  "What I mean is , did you find me quite ready for you?" she then asked.

  "Ready?" I replied, and I tried to put a touch of indignation into my voice. "Is readiness the best substitute you can imagine for a state of sheer exaltation?"

  "Don't poetize!" she ordered.

  I was in despair.

  "Do I have to tell you?"     I demanded. "Don't you really know?"

  "How should I know, dear?" she protested. "You never told me."

  "It would never occur to me that such a sensation can be put into words," I said, still resisting. But I saw by her eyes that  I  would have to tell her. "You'd really like to know?" I asked.

  There was a touch of passion in her answer.

  " I must know if I'm to get you to understand why I chose you begin my love-life with you, dear," she declared.