Mike Mazurki


"Marilyn used to come and socialize with me every Saturday. We sat in my office and chatted away, and she seemed to enjoy herself. It was obvious she needed to talk to another woman. This was before she shared that apartment with Shelly Winters. She was a little girl who was very smart, who had everything, but for some crazy reason never felt terribly secure. And she always had some gentleman--some man--making decisions for her. It was a pattern she fell into early on. She seemed miserable. Over here, Honey!"

Heads turn toward the entrance and the gang waves and whoops. Mazurki has been upstairs at the offices of George Parnassus. Mike and George have been trudging down memory lane with their old grappling buddy Jim Londos, the Golden Greek, who has just come up from his avocado ranch in Escondido. Across the room Jimmy McLarnin is getting nobly besotted--the only person who gives the appearance of paying no attention to Mazurki. He keeps an eye on the popular wrestler the way Ernest Hemingway described Wyndham Lewis watching Ezra Pound in A Moveable Feast: "Carefully without seeming to look at him, as you do when boxing." Coincidentally, Hemingway wrote that at a time when Jimmy McLarnin was the most brilliant boxer on Earth--a time when men like Hemingway and Clark Gable stood outside Jimmy's dressing room hoping to shake his powerful hand.