Cold War

The Cold War is the novel’s climate of ideological suspicion: a public conflict that reaches into Hollywood’s labor disputes, performers’ political reputations, and even the private rooms of the powerful. It turns speech and association into potential evidence, while its language of national security can make the surveillance of a woman’s body and papers appear like routine state business. From loyalty scrutiny in the late 1940s to a tense conversation about Cuba and a covert search of Marilyn Monroe’s home, the novel shows political conflict entering lives through both institutions and intimacies.

Loyalty, protest, and the Hollywood blacklist

The political pressure is introduced through the aftermath of Executive Order 9835, issued by President Harry Truman in 1947. The order required federal employees to take loyalty oaths and participate in security programs; private businesses, too, began demanding loyalty pledges. In this setting, an unnamed Hollywood actor had protested with other performers, gathering signatures and making statements in support of constitutional liberties, especially freedom of speech and assembly. The novel places such advocacy in a landscape where defending civil rights could itself invite suspicion.

The same actor’s history with the Screen Actors Guild supplied further grounds for attack. In 1945, the Guild had negotiated for health care, improved working conditions, a higher minimum wage, and payments when films were rereleased. Accusations that the organization had been infiltrated by communists turned a labor dispute into a political liability. Anonymous anti-communist informants then alleged that the actor had long been associated with Communist Party members, including screenwriters Dalton Trumbo and Ring Lardner Jr. Within a year of his public protest, the actor had come under scrutiny from the House Un-American Activities Committee.

The threatened consequences were not limited to a formal appearance before the Committee in Washington, D.C. The actor faced damaging national publicity, possible boycotts by the American Legion and the Catholic Legion of Decency, and the danger of being placed on a blacklist whose existence the studios denied. I.E. Shinn, the actor’s agent, arranged an informal meeting with influential Republican congressmen at a lawyer’s villa in Bel Air, hoping to avert the summons and its consequences. The private dinner, with French wines, functioned as an unofficial political examination. The actor’s military service in the Second World War and his forthright patriotism mattered in a changing ideological landscape: the narrative recalls that the Soviet Union had recently been an American ally, before the two countries became enemies in the Cold War. The passage presents the dinner as an attempt to manage political danger, not as a simple resolution of it.

Political fear inside the studio system

The same atmosphere reaches Marilyn Monroe through professional warnings and silences. When she asks what another commission is, Shinn quickly presses a finger to his lips. The gesture is performed as a joke, with fluttering eyebrows, but the fear behind it is genuine. He tells her not to concern herself with Otto Öse or Cass Chaplin Jr.; the subject, he insists, is Marilyn herself. His abrupt redirection turns a vague institutional threat into a personal one: in Hollywood, political scrutiny can attach to the star as readily as to the people around her.

The novel also places Marilyn’s professional rise beside news that makes political anxiety ordinary. After I.E. Shinn calls to congratulate her on the positive reviews for her performance in La tua bocca brucia, newspaper headlines carry reports of American losses in Korea, the execution sentences imposed on Julius and Ethel Rosenberg, and Soviet nuclear tests. Her success arrives amid public stories of war, alleged espionage, and atomic danger. The contrast makes publicity unstable: praise for her acting and exposure to scandal belong to the same news-saturated world, where a performer can feel watched and vulnerable even as her fame grows.

Cuba, presidential power, and intimacy

In a later encounter, President Kennedy continues a telephone conversation while Marilyn is beside him in bed. The call grows more urgent and appears to pass to a more important interlocutor; its subject is Cuba. The scene places physical intimacy beside political business without allowing the two to settle into separate realms. Marilyn understands little of the conversation at first, but hears references to Castro, retaliation for the Bay of Pigs invasion, and possible Soviet missiles in Cuba. As the call continues past three o’clock, the national crisis occupies the President’s attention while Marilyn is left to infer what is at stake from fragments.

The narrative filters the political exchange through Marilyn’s impressions rather than presenting a briefing. She thinks of Castro as a figure whose public image has changed from revolutionary hero to communist enemy, and compares the two leaders as ambitious, celebrated men who claim to act for the people. These reflections do not make her an informed participant in the crisis: she is uncertain about what the men on the telephone are planning and does not want to appear to be listening. Her position is at once intimate and excluded. The President’s anger, the mention of missiles, and her comparison of his temper with that of her former athlete husband give political force a bodily, personal edge, while her awareness of an expected sexual role makes the bedroom feel like another performance under pressure.

Surveillance and the conversion of suspicion into evidence

The novel’s starkest Cold War image comes in the later account of an armed intruder entering Marilyn’s secluded house at 12305 Fifth Helena Drive. The Tiratore Scelto carries a key supplied by an informant and searches for material to pass to his superiors, who will assess it and destroy it. He is presented as an operative who does not investigate the meaning of his orders. That detachment is central to the episode: the political machinery acts on suspicions without requiring the person carrying them out to understand or question the larger purpose.

The operative has been told of Marilyn’s supposed involvement with subversive organizations in the United States and abroad, her marriage to a man described as a Jewish subversive, her sexual encounter with the Indonesian communist Sukarno, and her public defense of leaders such as Castro. He also knows of petitions described as challenges to national power. These details are presented as the operative’s political case against her, not as an independent verification of every allegation. His uncertainty about whether the mission is meant to protect the President from Marilyn or protect the President from damaging disclosures makes the supposed national-security rationale unstable: the Presidency and the agency are not necessarily aligned.

The first object he takes is a dusty tin-foil rose from a vase in the living room. He then finds Marilyn’s diary among books, magazines, scripts, dishes, and cups, and treats its handwritten pages as evidence to be confiscated. In that sequence, political suspicion converts intimate remnants into potential leverage. The Cold War’s reach is therefore measured not only by hearings, oaths, and public accusations, but by the vulnerability of private records to secret collection. The novel links the rhetoric of ideological danger to a system in which evidence can be gathered for later destruction, leaving the target exposed and the truth unresolved.