Kisses of Death

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You can almost see it on the cover of Photoplay or Modern Screen, can’t you, circa 1954? “I Was Marilyn Monroe’s Bodyguard!” with a subhead reading, “A Private Eye’s Hollywood Dream Assignment!”... but in the end, “A New York Nightmare of Depravity” was more like it, worthy of Confidential or Whisper.

Not that Miss Monroe was involved in any of that depravity — no such luck — though we did have a promising first meeting, and it was in neither Hollywood nor New York, but in my native Chicago, at the Palmer House, where the A-1 Detective Agency was providing security for the American Booksellers Association’s annual convention.

I didn’t do any of the security work at the booksellers shindig myself — that was for my staff, and a few add-on ops I rounded up. After all, I was Nathan Heller, president of the A-1, and such lowly babysitting was simply beneath my executive position.

Unless, of course, the baby I was sitting was Miss Marilyn Monroe, curled up opposite me on a couch, sweetly sitting in her suite’s sitting room, afternoon sunlight coming in behind her, making a hazy halo of her carefully coifed platinum pageboy.

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