T. S. Eliot and Groucho have dinner

On June 3, 1964, T. S. Eliot sent a car to London’s Savoy Hotel to bring Mr. and Mrs. Groucho Marx to dinner. Eliot told Groucho that their friendship had greatly enhanced his credit with the grocer across the street. Eliot was 75, Groucho 73. Both were masters of the wisecrack, coiners of famous epigrams, now measuring out their lives in coffee spoons.

A Book of Ages is full of people meeting who you'd never thought met each other, or perhaps wondered if they had. Freud giving advice to Mahler, having his portrait drawn by Salvador Dali, Salinger meeting Hemingway in Paris, Marilyn Monroe having tea with Isak Dinesen at Carson McCullers's apartment, William F. Buckley Jr. meeting John Kenneth Galbraith for the first time in an elevator on the way to Truman Capote's Black & White Ball. Life is full of crossed paths. You never know who you might meet tomorrow.

Marilyn

Today is the birthday of Marilyn Monroe, born Norma Jeane Mortenson at Los Angeles County Hospital in 1926, but baptized Norma Jeane Baker. Because of her mother's mental illness, Marilyn's childhood was spent in a series of foster homes. She lived with her mother for the first time, and only briefly, when she was eight years-old, in a house was just of Highland Avenue in Hollywood.

Monroe appears eight times in A Book of Ages, marrying at 16; at 19 dyeing her hair blonde and signing a $125-a-week contract with 20th Century Fox; meeting Truman Capote on the set of Asphalt Jungle at 24; marrying Joe DiMaggio at 27. A photograph she posed for in 1949 helped launch Playboy magazine in 1953. Her film persona was one of dim vulnerability, but she studied at the prestigious Actors Studio. She married brainy left-wing playwright Arthur Miller at a point when he was under fire for his political beliefs, and stood by him, risking being blacklisted herself. Her films show a performer of subtle and fragile complexity, of contradictions. She famously serenaded JFK on his 45th birthday in 1962, and died the same year at age 36.

Mother's Day

On the day after our maternal parents have been celebrated, kissed, given potted plants and cards drawn with crayon and plaster handprints of small children, we are left to wonder what it's all about. Motherhood is one of many themes in A Book of Ages. No surprise, really. It's a book about life's changes, the relationships we nurture and endure, and there is no relationship more profound than that of mother and child.

Famous people have mothers too. Mothers who died young, like Lincoln's, Somerset Maugham's, Poe's, Orson Welles's and Mary McCarthy's. Allen Ginsberg's mother was institutionalized when he was six, Cary Grant's when he was nine. Marilyn Monroe's mother was unable to raise her. Hitler's smothered him with affection. Buster Keaton's and Judy Garland's parents took them into the family business, which happened to be show business. Eudora Welty surrendered her New York writing career to care for her mother back in Mississippi. Child monarchs receive a legacy as heavy as any family curse. Most parents do the best they know how in the circumstances they are given, and their children muddle through. I found this again and again in the lives I describe in the book.

When P. G. Wodehouse was two his parents returned to British Hong Kong, leaving the youngster in the care of assorted maternal aunts. The adult Wodehouse didn't bear a grudge. Dickens's mother allowed him to be removed from school and put to work in a shoe polish factory at the age of twelve, and he never forgave her. In both cases, these events became part of their fiction. In an important sense we are children all of our lives, and as parents we re-enact what we learned.

"Hef"

Hugh Hefner was born on April 9, 1926. He was 26 when he quit his job at Esquire magazine to launch a magazine of his own, which he called Playboy. It had a philosophy and everything. More importantly it had a nude centerfold of Marilyn Monroe. He invested $600 of his own money in this first issue, which he laid out on his kitchen table. He soon prospered. Hef appears on pages 84, 192, 224 and 261 in A Book of Ages.