Blonde

by Joyce Carol Oates

Always above such houses the sun shone mildly and did not glare. If there were clouds they were high vaporous fluffy white clouds on a perfect painted blue sky.

  “There, Cary Grant! And so young. And there, John Gilbert. Lillian Gish—only one of her former mansions. And there, the corner house, the late Jeanne Eagels—poor thing.”

  Norma Jeane promptly asked what had happened to Jeanne Eagels.

  In the past, Gladys had said simply, sadly, She died. This time she said contemptuously, “Eagels! A hophead drug fiend. Skinny as a skeleton, they say, at the end. Thirty-five, and old.”

  Gladys drove on. The tour continued. Sometimes Gladys began in Beverly Hills and looped her way back to Highland Avenue by the late afternoon; sometimes she drove directly to Los Feliz and looped back to Beverly Hills; sometimes she drove up into the less populated Hollywood Hills, where younger stars lived, or personalities-about-to-become-stars. Sometimes, as if drawn against her will, like a sleepwalker, she turned onto a street they’d already cruised that day and repeated her remarks: “See? Through that gate, the Spanish-style home of Gloria Swanson. And over there, Myrna Loy. Up ahead—Conrad Nagel.” The tour seemed to be growing in intensity even as Gladys drove slower, staring through the windshield of the tarnished-green Ford, which always needed washing. Or perhaps the glass was permanently covered in a fine film of grime. There would seem to be some purpose to the tour, which, as in a movie with a knotty, complicated plot, would shortly be revealed. Gladys’s voice conveyed reverence and enthusiasm as always, but beneath it there was a calm, implacable rage. “There—the most famous of all: FALCON’S LAIR. The home of the late Rudolph Valentino. He had no talent for acting at all. He had no talent for life. But he was photogenic, and he died at the right time. Remember, Norma Jeane—die at the right time.”

  Mother and daughter sat in the 1929 tarnished-green Ford staring at the baroque mansion of the great silent film star Valentino and did not want to leave, ever.

  8

  Both Gladys and Norma Jeane dressed for the funeral with fastidious care and taste—though stranded among more than seven thousand “mourners” thronging Wilshire Boulevard in the vicinity of the Wilshire Temple.

  A temple was a “Jewish church,” Gladys told Norma Jeane.

  A Jew was “like a Christian” except of an older, wiser, more tragic race. Where Christians had pioneered the West in the actual soil of the earth, Jews had pioneered in the film industry and had made a revolution.

  Norma Jeane asked, “Can we be Jews, Mother?”

  Gladys began to say no, then hesitated, laughed, and said, “If they wanted us. If we were worthy. If we could be born a second time.”

  Gladys, who’d been speaking for days of having known Mr. Thalberg “if not well, in admiration for his film genius,” was striking in a glamorous black crepe dress in a modified twenties style with a dropped waist, a swishy layered skirt to mid-calf, and an elaborate black lace collar. Her hat was black cloche with a black veil that lifted and fell, lifted and fell with her quickened warm breath. Her gloves appeared new: black satin to the elbow. Smoke-colored stockings, high-heeled black leather pumps. Her face was a waxy-pale cosmetic mask like a mannequin’s face, the features highlighted, exaggerated in the bygone style of Pola Negri; her perfume was sharply sweet, like the decaying oranges in their mostly iceless icebox. Her earrings might have been diamonds or rhinestones or an ingeniously faceted glass that winked as she turned her head.

  Never regret going into debt for a worthy purpose.

  The death of a great man is always a worthy purpose.

  (In fact, Gladys had purchased only accessories. She’d “borrowed” the black crepe dress from The Studio’s costume department, unauthorized.)

  Norma Jeane, frightened of the milling crowd of strangers, uniformed policemen on horseback, a procession of somber black limousines along the street, and waves of cries, shouts, screams, and even outbursts of applause, was wearing a dress of midnight-blue velvet with a lace collar and cuffs and a plaid tam-o’-shanter, white lace gloves and dark ribbed stockings, and shiny patent-leather shoes. She’d been made to miss school that day. She’d been fussed over, and chided, and threatened. Her hair had been washed (by Gladys, grimly and thoroughly) very early that morning, before dawn, for it had been one of Gladys’s difficult nights: her prescription medicine made her sick to her stomach, her thoughts were “all in a whirl, like ticker tape,” and so Norma Jeane’s snarled hair had to be forcibly unsnarled, with a pitiless rat-tailed comb, and then brushed, brushed, brushed until it gleamed—and with the aid of Jess Flynn (who’d heard the child crying at 5 A.M.) neatly braided and wound about her head so she looked, despite her teary eyes and mangled mouth, like a storybook princess.

  He’ll be there. At the funeral. One of the pallbearers or ushers. He won’t speak to us. Not in public. But he’ll see us. He’ll see you, his daughter. You’ll never know when but you must be prepared.

  A block from the Wilshire Temple, a crowd was already forming on both sides of the street. Though it wasn’t yet 7:30 A.M. and the funeral was scheduled for 9 A.M. There were mounted police, and police on foot; there were photographers milling about, eager to begin taking pictures of the historic event. Barricades had been set in the street and on the sidewalks, and behind these a vast seething throng of men and women would wait avidly, with a strange concentrated patience, for film stars and other celebrities to arrive in a succession of chauffeur-driven limousines, enter the temple, and depart again after a lengthy ninety minutes, during which time the murmurous crowd—barred from the private service as from any direct communication, let alone intimacy, with these celebrities—continued to swell at its edges; and Gladys and Norma Jeane, pushed against one of the wooden sawhorses, clutched at it and at each other. At last there emerged out of the temple’s front entrance a gleaming black coffin borne aloft by elegantly dressed, solemn-faced pallbearers—through the staring crowd their names were uttered in excited recognition: Ronald Colman! Adolphe Menjou! Nelson Eddy! Clark Gable! Douglas Fairbanks, Jr.! Al Jolson! John Barrymore! Basil Rathbone! And behind them swaying with grief the dead man’s widow Norma Shearer, the film star, clad head to toe in sumptuous black, her beautiful face veiled; and behind Miss Shearer a surge of celebrities began to spill from the temple like a stream of golden lava, somber in grief as well, their names evoked in a litany that Gladys repeated for Norma Jeane’s benefit, as the child crouched against the sawhorse, excited and frightened, hoping not to be trampled—Leslie Howard! Erich von Stroheim! Greta Garbo! Joel McCrea! Wallace Beery! Clara Bow! Helen Twelvetrees! Spencer Tracy! Raoul Walsh! Edward G. Robinson! Charlie Chaplin! Lionel Barrymore! Jean Harlow! Groucho, Harpo, and Chico Marx! Mary Pickford! Jane Withers! Irvin S. Cobb! Shirley Temple! Jackie Coogan! Bela Lugosi! Mickey Rooney! Freddie Bartholomew in his velvet suit from Little Lord Fauntleroy! Busby Berkeley! Bing Crosby! Lon Chaney! Marie Dressier! Mae West!—and here photographers and autograph seekers broke through the barricades as mounted police, cursing, nudging with their billy clubs, tried to drive them back.

  There was a confused melee. Angry shouts, screams. Someone may have fallen. Someone may have been struck by a billy club or trampled by a horse’s hooves. Police shouted through bullhorns. There was a sound of automobile engines, a swelling roar. The commotion subsided quickly. Norma Jeane, her tam-o’-shanter knocked askew, too panicked to cry, clung to Gladys’s rigid arm and Mother didn’t shake me off, she allowed it. By degrees, the pressure of the crowd began to diminish. The handsome black hearse like a chariot of death and the numerous chauffeur-driven limousines had departed and only onlookers remained, ordinary people of no more interest to one another than a flock of sparrows. People began to drift away, free to walk now in the very street. There was nowhere to go, but there was no point in remaining here. The historic event, the funeral of the great Hollywood pioneer Irving G. Thalberg, was over.

  Here and there women were wiping at their eyes. Many onlookers appeared disoriented, as if they�
�d suffered a great loss without knowing what it was.

  Norma Jeane’s mother was one of these. Her face seemed smudged behind the damp, sticky veil and her eyes were watery and unfocused like miniature fish swimming in divergent directions. She was whispering to herself, smiling tensely. Her gaze raked Norma Jeane without seeming to take her in. Then she was walking away, unsteady in her high-heeled pumps. Norma Jeane noticed two men, not standing together, watching her. One of the men whistled to her, questioningly; it was like the opening of a sudden dance scene in a Ginger Rogers and Fred Astaire movie, except there was no burst of music and Gladys did not seem to be aware of the man and the man almost immediately lost interest in her and turned yawning to stroll away. The other man, tugging absentmindedly at his crotch as if he were alone and unobserved, was drifting in the other direction.

  A clatter of hooves! Norma Jeane looked up astonished to see a uniformed man, riding a tall handsome chestnut horse with enormous bulging eyes, peering down at her. “Little girl, where’s your mother? You aren’t here alone, are you?” he asked. Stricken with shyness, Norma Jeane shook her head, no. She ran after Gladys and took Gladys’s gloved hand and was again grateful that Gladys didn’t throw off her hand, for the mounted policeman was watching them closely. It was going to happen soon. But not yet. Gladys, dazed, couldn’t seem to remember where she’d parked the car but Norma Jeane remembered, or almost remembered, and eventually they found it, the tarnished-green 1929 Ford parked on a commercial street perpendicular to Wilshire. Norma Jeane thought how strange it was, and this, too, like something in a movie that turns out right, that you have a key for a certain car; out of hundreds, thousands of cars your key is for only one car; a key for what Gladys called the “ignition”; and when you turn the key, the “ignition” starts the engine. And you aren’t lost and stranded miles from home.

  Inside, the car was hot as an oven. Norma Jeane squirmed with the need to go to the bathroom, badly.

  Gladys said petulantly, wiping at her eyes, “I only just want not to feel grief. But I keep my thoughts to myself.” To Norma Jeane she said with sudden sharpness, “What the hell happened to your dress?” The hem had snagged on a splinter in the sawhorse and ripped.

  “I—don’t know. I didn’t do it.”

  “Then who did? Santa Claus?”

  Gladys had the intention of driving to the “Jewish cemetery” but didn’t know where it was. When she stopped several times on Wilshire to ask directions, no one seemed to know. She drove on, now smoking a Chesterfield. She’d removed the cloche hat with the sticky veil and tossed it into the backseat of the car with the accumulation—newspapers, screen magazines, and paperback books, stiffened handkerchiefs, and miscellaneous items of clothing—of months. As Norma Jeane squirmed in discomfort she said, musing, “Maybe if you’re a Jew like Thalberg, it’s different. There must be a different perspective on the universe. The calendar isn’t even the same as ours. What is a perpetual surprise to us, so new, is not new to them. They live half in the Old Testament, all those plagues and prophecies. If we could have that perspective.” She paused. She glanced sidelong at Norma Jeane, who was trying to hold in her pee, but the pressure was so strong there was a hurt between her legs sharp as a needle. “He has Jewish blood. That’s part of the barrier between us. But he saw us, today. He couldn’t speak but his eyes spoke. Norma Jeane, he saw you.”

  It was then, less than a mile from Highland Avenue, that Norma Jeane wet her panties—in mortification, in misery!—but there was nothing to be done once it started. Gladys smelled the pee at once and began slapping and punching at Norma Jeane as she drove, furious. “Pig! Little beast! That beautiful dress is ruined and it isn’t even ours! You do these things deliberately, don’t you?”

  Four days later, the first of the Santa Ana winds began to blow.

  9

  Because she loved the child and wished to spare her grief.

  Because she was poisoned. And the little girl was poisoned.

  Because the city of sand was collapsing in flame.

  Because the smell of burn was saturating the air.

  Because by the calendar those born under the sign of Gemini must now “act decisively” and “display courage in determining their lives.”

  Because it was past her time of month, and the blood in her had ceased to flow. And she would no longer be a woman desired by any man.

  Because for thirteen years she had worked in the film lab at The Studio and thirteen years a reliable loyal devoted employee helping to make possible the great films of The Studio promoting the great stars of the American screen transforming the very soul of America, and now to discover her youth drained away, now she was deathly sick in her soul. They lied to her in the Studio infirmary, the Studio-hired doctor insisting her blood was not poisoned when her blood was poisoned, chemical poison seeping through even the double-strength rubber gloves and into the bones of her hands, those hands her lover had kissed saying they were beautiful delicate “hands of solace,” and into the marrow of her skeleton, coursing through her blood and into her brain and the poison fumes seeping into her unprotected lungs. And her eyes, the wavering vision. The eyes aching even in sleep. And her co-workers refusing to acknowledge their own sicknesses for fear of being fired—“unemployed.” Because it was a season of hell, 1934 in the United States and a season of shame. Because she had called in sick, and called in sick, and called in sick until a voice informed her she was “no longer on Studio payroll, Studio pass canceled, and admittance at security will be denied.” After thirteen years.

  Because never again would she work for The Studio. Never again work for a pittance selling her soul for mere animal survival. Because she must cleanse herself and the afflicted child.

  Because the child was her own secret self, exposed.

  Because the child was a freak of deformity, in disguise as a pretty little curly-haired girl. Because there was deception.

  Because the very father of the child had wished it not to be born.

  Because he had said to her he doubted it was his.

  Because he had given her money, scattering bills across the bed.

  Because the sum of these bills was but $225, the sum of their love.

  Because he told her he’d never loved her; she had misunderstood.

  Because he told her not to call him again, not to follow him on the street.

  Because there was deception.

  Because before the pregnancy he had loved her, and after he had not. Because he would have married her. She was certain.

  Because the child had been born three weeks before expected, that it must be a Gemini like herself. And so accursed as she.

  Because no one would ever love a child so accursed.

  Because the brush fires in the hills were a clear summons and a sign.

  It would not be the Dark Prince who came for my mother.

  All the rest of my life, the horror that one day strangers would also come for me to bear me away naked and raving and a spectacle of pity.

  She was made to stay home from school. Her mother would not allow her to go among their enemies. Jess Flynn was sometimes trusted and sometimes not. For Jess Flynn was an employee of The Studio and possibly a spy. Yet Jess Flynn was a friend bringing them food. Dropping by with a smile “just to see how things are.” Offering to lend Gladys money if it was money Gladys needed, or the carpet sweeper in Jess’s apartment. Gladys lay most of the time in bed, naked beneath the soiled sheet, the room darkened. A flashlight on the bedside table for the detection of scorpions, of which Gladys was very afraid. The blinds in all the rooms had been pulled to the windowsills so you could not tell night from day, dusk from dawn. A smoke haze in even bright sunshine. A smell of sickness. A smell of soiled bedclothes, undergarments. A smell of stale coffee grounds, rancid milk, and oranges in the icebox that contained no ice. The gin smell, the cigarette smell, the smell of human sweat, fury, and despair. Jess Flynn did “a little tidying up” if allowed. If not, not.
/>
  From time to time Clive Pearce rapped on the door. Talked to Gladys or to the little girl through the door. Though it wasn’t clear what was said. Unlike Jess Flynn, he would not enter. The piano lessons had ceased over the summer. He would say it was a “tragedy,” yet “might have been a worse tragedy.” Other tenants of the boardinghouse conferred; what to do? All were employees of The Studio. They were stand-ins and extras but also an assistant cinematographer, a masseur, a costumer, two script timers, a gymnastics instructor, a film-lab technician, a stenographer, set builders, and several musicians. Among them it was generally known that Gladys Mortensen was “mentally unstable”—unless she was just “temperamental, eccentric.” It was known by most of the tenants that Mrs. Mortensen lived with a little girl who, except for her curls, looked “uncannily” like her.

  It was not known what to do, or whether to do anything. There was a reluctance to become involved. There was a reluctance to incur the Mortensen woman’s wrath. There was the vague presumption that Jess Flynn was a friend of Gladys Mortensen’s, and in charge.

  The child, naked and sobbing, crawled to hide behind the spinet piano, defying her mother. Eluding her mother. Scrambling then across the carpet like a panicked animal. The mother struck at the piano keyboard with both fists, an outcry of sharp treble notes, a vibrating sound as of quivering nerves. And this too slapstick. In the spirit of Mack Sennett. Mabel Normand in A Displaced Foot, Gladys had seen as a girl.

  If it makes you laugh, it’s comedy. Even if it hurts.

  Scalding-hot cleansing water rushing into the tub. She’d stripped the child naked and was herself naked. She’d half carried the child, tried to lift her and force her into the water, but the child resisted, screaming. In the confusion of her thoughts, which were mixed with the acrid taste of smoke and jeering voices too muffled by drugs to be heard clearly, she’d been thinking the child was much younger, it was an earlier time in their lives and the child was only two or three years old weighing only—what?—thirty pounds, and not distrustful of her mother, and not suspicious, cringing and shoving away and beginning to scream No! No! this child so grown, so strong and willful, possessed of a will contrary to her mother’s, refusing to be led and lifted and set into the scalding-hot cleansing water, fighting free, running from the steamy bathroom and out of her mother’s bare clutching arms.