Читать книгу Madame Depardieu and the Beautiful Strangers - Antonia Quirke - Страница 9

Because Mischa and I weren't allowed to see each other we kept in touch by writing letters that Ben would deliver. Mischa had become very beautiful and began first to sign off as Marilyn Monroe and then to write as her. I responded as James Dean, and the two doomed stars began an affair. This grew into a very serious correspondence which required a great deal of biographical knowledge. I had a stack of Dean biographies and books of photos of him. (It never occurred to me to watch any of his films.) But Mischa was a couple of years older than me and when she went to try her luck as a trainee teacher in Tokyo, she wrote to me as herself rather than Monroe, as if Marilyn had dumped Jimmy – which offended Dean. He wrote to her from the set of Giant throughout those fraught early months of 1955. He was bewildered, hurt, jealous of Joe DiMaggio and suspicious that she might be forming an attachment with a playwright on the New York scene. But nothing came back from Tokyo, just chatter about food and friends. Was that what drove him to such near-suicidal recklessness? He burned her old letters. He'd be dead within the year.