On this day in 1959, Carson McCullers hosted a small luncheon party in order that Baroness Karen Blixen-Finecke (Isak Dinesen) could meet Marilyn Monroe. Blixen was seventy-four and a grande dame of literature by this time, but still driven: though increasingly debilitated by the syphilis she had contracted in her Out of Africa years, and reduced to about eighty pounds by her anorexic diet (oysters, grapes and champagne), she would still stay up chain-smoking, taking amphetamines and telling her famous stories until there were no listeners, or she had talked herself into a trance. She had come to the U ... FULL STORY »
