THE MISSING PERSON

FICTION:  THE MISSING PERSON/Doris Grumbach – G.P. Putnam’s Sons – 1981

This is a finely crafted, raw, emotional book, chronicling the unfortunate life of a Marilyn Monroe-like character.  Grumbach has a long, distinguished career in fiction and non-fiction, especially writing about gays and lesbians.

Starting in the 1930s, we become intimately involved with the details of a child and young woman (Fanny Marker) starting out in Utica, New York.  Her mother is resentful of her very existence and treats her harshly.  Mom has a long series of unsavory boyfriends living in their squalid apartment.  Fanny retreats to the movies and fan magazines, creating an alternate universe for herself.  Knowing that she is unusually beautiful, she pictures herself as a screen goddess.  One day, while her mother is at work, she is savagely raped by her mother’s current boyfriend.  Fanny goes inside herself to her protective fantasy life.  Eventually she runs away.  Working in a Utica hotel, she hangs around the lobby and starts to pick up men for sex.  She experiences no pleasure from the act, but it reinforces her only commody, as a beautiful sex object.

Fanny winds up in New York, finds an agent and Fanny has emerged as Franny Fuller.  It doesn’t take long for this newly packaged silver screen goddess to become the object of every male fantasy.  Somehow, people notice that this vulnerable, beautiful creature with her dazzling smile, sexy whisper of a voice and platinum hair is a mass of contradictions.  She marries a famous football player, retreats into her secret world, and becomes very clingy and needy.  The young, unsophisticated jock is being eaten alive by Franny’s neediness.  They divorce.  Franny has become a blank slate, ripe for whatever a devouring public would like her to be.  She starts to disappear, running off to seedy Hollywood bars, dressed in ragged, dirty clothing, needing badly to bathe.  Then she resurfaces as the screen goddess.  Her emotional episodes are overtaking her.  She is considered undependable and difficult in her studio commitments.  But driven by her box office potential she is put up with and has achieved superstar status.

She meets Arnold Franklin, the poet and playwright in New York.  The Jewish intellectual falls instantly for the goddess.  He proposes and they marry.  Now in a world of very educated literary heavyweights and skilled actors, she continues to question her self worth.  Beauty only goes so far.  She thinks she needs acting lessons, but never follows through.  The couple moves to Los Angeles where Franklin is totally miserable.  He can’t deal with everything Hollywood and is at a loss to keep looking for Franny after each disappearance.  He files for divorce.

This book is very insightful and gives us a glimpse of how ‘idols’ are manufactured and disgarded.  We see what becomes of a silent film star who is thrown overboard because is speaking voice is too squeaky for the ‘talkies.’  We find out what drives a Hollywood gossip columnist who fuels the insane machine.  Most of all, we learn how a fragile, tormented child is tossed into the ‘star’ process, gets mangled by it and her only mechanism is to smile and disappear.

This thoughtful, mature, revealing book is worth reading.  I hope you can find it.