The Montezuma Drive residence is a borrowed villa in the Hollywood Hills that becomes a charged meeting point between Norma Jeane Baker, Cass Chaplin, and Eddy G. Robinson Jr. Cass uses its seclusion to work on music and choreography, while Norma Jeane’s visits make the house a place where longing, memory, and unexpected discovery converge.

Setting and Use

During the final week of Norma Jeane’s filming in Culver City, Cass stays for several days at the residence, a Moorish-style villa near Olympic Boulevard lent to him by a friend. Its owner is a screenwriter on the blacklist who has gone into voluntary exile in Tangier. Partly screened by a row of frail palms and tangled vines, the house offers Cass a refuge for work on the music and choreography of a ballet.

The villa is also a working space for Cass’s first love, music. Near its piano, he plays compositions for Norma Jeane and dances for her briefly in jest. One day, she watches him through a window: naked on the carpet, he bends over the piano to play a few chords, then writes in a notebook, perhaps notes or perhaps words. The scene fixes the house in her imagination as a private world she does not want to interrupt.

Norma Jeane’s Visits

After a preview, Norma Jeane calls Cass from a restroom telephone. He has a new number because he is staying for several weeks at the borrowed residence, and she pleads with him to answer and not leave her alone. The call establishes the distance between her urgent need for contact and the private retreat Cass has made for himself.

When she later goes to the villa, the steep gravel path does not betray the drunkenness someone has accused her of. The house looks deserted beneath sickly palms and a leafless vine; a dim light glimmers in a room at the back. The front door is shut, and Norma Jeane cannot find a key in her beaded purse. She calls softly, worried that Cass may be sleeping too heavily under medication to wake. The taxi waits at the entrance to the path as she removes her shoes and feels her way around to the back door, which Cass habitually leaves unlocked.

The House as a Threshold

Behind the house, Norma Jeane passes a small, empty ornamental basin strewn with palm fronds. The sight recalls an earlier hallucination in which she saw Irina floating face down in its muddy water. Cass had noticed her sudden pallor and asked what she had seen, but she had not answered. The basin thus carries a disturbing private memory into the setting of her visit, even before she enters the house.

Inside, whiskey hangs in the air. The kitchen is lit, but the rest of the villa is dark, and no light comes from the partly open bedroom door. When Norma Jeane opens it, the kitchen light reveals Cass in bed with another man. She recognizes Cass, but the other young man is a stranger; both are naked and sweating. Cass rises quickly, catches Norma Jeane by the wrist before she can flee, and identifies the man as Eddy G., calling him his twin. The residence’s secluded intimacy, once glimpsed by Norma Jeane as a refuge for Cass’s art, becomes the setting in which she encounters the reality of his bond with Eddy G. Robinson Jr.