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Samuel McCord owner of Meilori's, here.
The leaves of the potted palms by my table hiss through the
shadows like claws through sand.
People sometimes ask me, "What is it like to have the
blood of the Angel of Death in your veins?"
As if I could conjure nightmare with mere words. No.
Rather I have images that give some small sense of what it is like.
Though it is March 9th outside. It is February 5th inside
Meilori's ... for I will it so. I remember
one February 5th.
It was 1959. Baroness
Karen Blixen-Finecke (Isak Dinesen) wanted to meet me, Hemingway, and Marilyn
Monroe for lunch.
Hemingway was out of the country so I had to do double duty.
Carson read OUT OF AFRICA at least once a year for most of her life.
The Baroness smiled upon hearing that, "Imaginary
friends are by far the best. They tend
to always agree with you and never disappoint."
As I watched bemused as Carson McCullers pecked a kiss on a
giggling Monroe, the Baroness fixed me with a strange look,
"I do believe what the natives told me, in the night
Africa murmurs a song of you.
The air over the Serengeti plain quivers with the color of
that lion's blood which you shed to save a small girl's life."
Her frail hand patted my gloved one.
"The children of her tribe invented a game in which
your name is chanted as some demi-god's.
They say the full moon throws a shadow over the gravel of the road which
makes the sound of your voice as if to hide from your memory."
Her eyes deepened as she sipped her champagne.
"It is said that the eagles of the Ngong Hills still look for you ... and that you can see when someone is near to dying.”
She was still driven:
though increasingly debilitated by the syphilis she had
contracted in her Out of Africa years, and reduced to about eighty pounds by
her anorexic diet (oysters, grapes and champagne).
She would still stay up chain-smoking, taking amphetamines
and telling her famous stories until there were no listeners, or she had talked
herself into a trance.
"I would ask you if you see death in me. But I already see the answer in your sad poet's eyes."
I heard Carson tell Marilyn,
"We are homesick most for the places we have never known. And I am homesick for the Africa the Baroness so deliciously described. What are you homesick for, my friend?"
Carson nodded, "That is wise."
"Wise?" sighed Marilyn. “A wise girl kisses but doesn't love, listens
but doesn't believe, and leaves before she is left.”
And I wanted to weep, for I saw the corpse green promise of
death over both their faces.
I closed my eyes but I could not blot out what I knew.
Partially paralyzed from a stroke, addicted to alcohol and
pills, Carson would be an invalid at age 35. Her close friend, Tennessee
Williams, said that Carson had known so much tragedy that it scared people.
He contended that it was her “nobility of spirit, and
profound understanding of the lonely, searching heart that make her, in my
opinion, the greatest living writer in our country, if not the world.”
The Baroness squeezed my hand.
"Do not grieve so.
Those two and I are casualties of our dreams. For really, dreaming is the well-mannered
people's way of committing suicide.”
Champagne, white grapes, oysters and soufflé were laid out
on my black marble table top.
Over lunch, Dinesen entertained the group with a story about
the killing of her first lion in Africa and how she sent the skin to the king
of Denmark.
She was a magnificent conversationalist and loved to talk.
Marilyn, with her beautiful blue eyes, listened in a ‘once-upon-a-time-way.'
She was preparing home-made pasta for a party, but it was getting late, the guests were soon arriving, and the pasta wasn’t ready, so she attempted to finish it off with a hair dryer.
The Baroness leaned in close to me and whispered,
"It is not that she is pretty, although she is
incredibly pretty – but that she radiates at the same time unbounded vitality
and a kind of unbelievable innocence.
I have met the same in a lion cub that my native servants in
African brought me. I would not keep her.”
Her breath smelled not of champagne, oysters, nor grapes ...
but of death.
I watched as Carson struggled to dance with Marilyn to the
music of Cole Porter.
No, damn it. I would
give them all one night of girlish fun.
I could at least do that much.
I got up and in the guise of helping to steady Carson, I
pressed certain acupressure points. I
walked back to "Tanya" as the Baroness insisted I call her and did
the same for her.
The four of us laughed belly-deep as I did as they wished
and boosted them to the black marble tabletop.
I watched the three soon-to-die women giggle, laugh, and dance in one
another's arms.
For one brief moment, they were young girls, safe and happy.
Three days after the Nyack luncheon, Isak Dinesen was rushed
to the hospital.
The doctors diagnosed her with acute malnutrition, noting
that her medical condition was similar to that of a World War II concentration
camp survivor.
Dinesen continued to waste away until she became so
emaciated that her skin bruised when touched. She died in her sleep – from
malnutrition – at age 77.
On August 5, 1962, Marilyn Monroe was found dead from an
overdose of sleeping pills in her West Los Angeles home.
She was 36 years old.
Carson McCullers endured eight more years of deteriorating
health. Then in August, 1967, she suffered a massive stroke and died.
So should you enter Meilori's any February 5th, do not sit
at my table.
I am sitting in the shadows, remembering:
Three beautiful souls laughing despite the certainty of
death and dancing on tabletops.
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