Caitlin Fitzgerald - Marion and Me

 

 

So, I was in Los Angeles for my first pilot season as a young actor. I was staying with some family friends, a lovely couple named Brian and Pam. I was home in the house one night. It was just Brian and I. I was upstairs in my bedroom. I was feeling really, really sorry for myself. On this particular evening, I had the flu. I'd been on nine million plus unsuccessful auditions and I had no money. 

 

All of a sudden, there was a knock on the bedroom door. And Brian said, “Caitlin, I need to come into your room.” Before I could respond, he opened the door. And behind him was a very large man wearing a ski mask and holding a taser and a crowbar. I screamed and leapt out of bed. And the man in the mask said, “If you do anything stupid, I will kill you and I will kill him.” I was immediately compliant. I believed, naively, that if I just did everything that this man asked me to do, everything would be okay. 

 

He wanted money and jewelry, neither of which we had. I had $3 in my wallet, which I gave him. He handcuffed Brian and I together, and he had us lie face down on the bed. At some point, Brian's wife, Pam, came home, and she didn't have any money or jewelry either, so the man in the ski mask decided that the best course of action would be to take us to the ATM machine to get cash. 

 

So, we all got in the car. Pam was driving. We got to the ATM machine and parked the car. Pam was sent out with our debit cards around the corner to get money. And the man in the ski mask got in the driver's seat. I felt my fear like click up about six notches, because I could tell that he was off his script, that he hadn't planned this part of the evening. He was afraid, and his fear felt really dangerous to me. 

 

A few minutes later, we heard sirens and we saw flashing lights. And unbeknownst to us, Pam had called the police. And the man in the ski mask turned to Brian and I in the back seat, still handcuffed together, and said, “That's the cops. You guys are dead.” He peeled the car out of this parking lot and onto Sepulveda Boulevard, going against traffic, and cars are screeching around us. It has started to rain in LA and the tires are squealing and I know with absolute certainty that I am going to die. 

 

He turns the car into a residential neighborhood, and then down a dead-end street, we hit a tree going full speed ahead at the end of the street. And the man smashes the windshield of the car with his forehead and then gets out and runs. And suddenly, the car is surrounded by police with their guns drawn. I start screaming for help. 

 

And the next thing that I really remember, I'm in the back of an ambulance, strapped to a stretcher, and I'm thinking, oh, my God, never again for the rest of my life will I feel safe. But in the weeks and months and years that followed this incident that turned out not really to be true. And yeah, if I hear a weird noise in the night, sometimes I'll jolt awake in a way that I didn't before, or if a cab driver revs his engine at a particular frequency, I'll feel this adrenaline rush that it didn't used to happen. But for the most part, I was okay. The whole thing came to seem like this sort of bad Hollywood horror movie, like just enough fear to sort of titillate and make a good story, but not enough to actually traumatize me. So, untraumatized. Did I appear to be that multiple members of my family have said to me, “You know, I forget that even happened to you”? And I really did too for the most part. 

 

A few years after this incident, I finally booked the TV show that I'd been longing for. As it shot in Los Angeles and I was living here in New York, I had to move west. It's really important to know that while I lived in New York, I lived in some of the worst shitholes that New York has done. Truly, you think you've had bad apartments in New York? I have had bad apartments in New York, like the dregs of New York real estate. So, when I finally got the TV show and was moving west, I was like, “This is it. I'm going to get a great place to live.” And I did. I found this amazing apartment. These converted loft space with walls that actually met the floor at a right angle, and marble countertops and a washer and dryer like grown-ups and the rest of America have, and a security guard downstairs. I felt so happy and I felt so safe. I slept through the night just lulled by the dulcet tones of the 101 freeway outside my window. 

 

And shortly after I moved in, I was hanging out in this back courtyard section of the building where all the dog owners and the cool kids hung out. I was a dog owner and I really wanted to be a cool kid, so I spent a lot of time back there. And this particular evening, I was sitting with the cool kids, and we were drinking some artisanal cocktail someone had made, I was thinking, God, I've really arrived. Isn't this amazing? And someone said, “Hey, what unit are you in?” I told him and there was this silence. The cool kids started to look at each other a little uneasily, and one of them said, “Do you know what happened in that apartment?” I felt my blood go absolutely cold and I said, “No, I don't.” And he said, “Well. I'll tell you what. You have to promise not to Google it, because there are some things you can't unsee.” This is not a promise that I kept. 

 

It turns out that my beautiful building had been a hotel long ago. And in 1927, a young man very famously had kidnapped a 12-year-old girl named Marion Parker and brought her to this hotel. He'd sent ransom notes for a few days to her father. And then, there had been a botched exchange where the kidnapper had seen that the police were present and whisked Marion back to the hotel, at which point he must have decided that she had become a liability, because he put her in the bathtub and he strangled her and then he proceeded to dismember her and disembowel her. He wrapped her limbs in towels and hid them in Elysian Park across the street. This is how the cops later found him because of the logos on the towels. 

 

The cool kids take turns telling me the story. I remember being aghast by the strange pleasure they were getting in recounting this tale. And the way they were depicting Marion as this like monster figure, the stuff of nightmares, the stuff of scary stories. One of the kids said, “You know, I had to move units, because I couldn't even look at your unit from my unit.” And the other kid said, “Can I come stand?” When I opened the door, she was clearly disappointed that there wasn't a blood stain on the floor or a ghost hovering around. 

 

A couple days later, I discovered that my apartment was on a famous Murders of Los Angeles tour. Vans of tourists would pull up and take pictures and then zoom off to look where the Black Dahlia killer did his work. But I couldn't zoom off. I couldn't go anywhere. I had to live in this apartment. My beautiful, safe apartment no longer felt beautiful or safe. I felt this creeping darkness invading all the corners of my life. It colored everything. I started to have this reoccurring nightmare that I would wake up and Marion's limbless torso would be hovering over my bed, like the perfect horror movie motif. It wasn't just at night. If I went out into the city and forgot about Marion Parker for a moment, when I came home at night, I had to turn on Marion Avenue to get to my apartment, and the whole thing would come flooding back and I just felt awful. 

 

For the first time in my life, I really understood what people mean when they say they feel haunted. I mean, I was the girl who had survived kidnapping, living with the ghost of a girl who hadn't. I found myself really hating Marion Parker, and hating her for her naivete, and hating her for her fragility, and hating her for the burden of being female in this world and what that means, and hating her for being so totally compliant and for believing that if she just did everything her kidnapper asked, everything would be okay. And that feeling that I had in the moments after my own kidnapping, that never again would I feel safe, was coming horribly, horribly true. 

 

And then, one night, I had this dream. And in the dream, I was in my apartment. It was the sketch of my apartment. Out of the bathroom door was streaming all this really beautiful, bright white light. I knew that Marion's body was in the bathroom. I was terrified, but found myself walking into the bathroom anyway. And sure enough, there she was, her limbless torso in the bathtub. She was dead, but also, in the logic of dreams, somehow still alive and very aware of me. 

 

I found myself walking up to the bathtub and kneeling down. I put my hand on her face. And then, I put my hand on the place in her chest, over her heart. And then, I touched the place where her arm had been cut away from her body. I remember her blood being on my fingers. I realized in this moment that she wasn't a horror movie motif, she wasn't a monster. She was just skin and bone and blood. She was just a little girl. 

 

I very tenderly, very carefully picked her up and I held her, and I awoke just in floods of tears. After this dream, my fear, it just broke like a fever. I felt at peace in this apartment and I felt at peace with Marion. I came to feel really protective of her. When I would hear someone in the building talking about her in any salacious way, I would remind them that she was just a little girl who'd been really, really afraid. 

 

These days, I do sleep through the night for the most part. I pay attention to my dreams. They seem to know a lot of things. I turn down most of the horror movie scripts that my agents send to me. [audience laughter] I really get it. I get why, as a culture, we need to tell these stories and we need to relegate our deepest fears to the screen or to the pages of a book. I don't know for myself if I am more afraid or more free, because I know that sometimes the man in the ski mask can walk off of the screen and in through your bedroom door. I suspect a little bit of both, probably. I do know that safety has come to mean something very different than it did before. 

 

I don't live at the apartment on Marion Ave anymore. I'm back in New York. But every time I drive by, I give a little wave to Marion and I tell her that I'm thinking about her and that I care about her and that in my own deeply ineffectual human way, I am protecting her. Thank you.