Blonde

by Joyce Carol Oates

  There was comfort in the photographer’s contempt. It spoke of standards higher than her own. Far higher than Bucky Glazer’s and higher even than Mr. Haring’s. She fell into an open-eyed dream, thinking of these men and of Warren Pirig, who’d spoken little to her except with his eyes, and there was Mr. Widdoes, who’d pistol-whipped a boy with that air of “putting things right” that was a masculine prerogative inevitable as the tide. In a dream sometimes Norma Jeane recalled that Widdoes had beaten her.

  Yet her own father had been so gentle! Never scolded her. Never hurt her. Cuddling and kissing his baby girl as Mother looked on smiling.

  One day I will return to Los Angeles to claim you.

  This photo session Otto Öse would remember through his life. This photo session that would be his claim on history.

  Not that he knew, at the time. Except he was liking what he did, and that was rare. Mostly, he hated his girl models. He hated their naked-fish bodies, their anxious hopeful eyes. If you could tape over the eyes. Tape the mouths in such a way that, though exposed, the mouths couldn’t speak. But Norma Jeane in her trance never spoke. He hardly needed to touch her, only just with his fingertips, to position her.

  Monroe was a natural even as a girl. She had brains but operated from instinct. I believe she could see herself through the camera eye. It was more powerfully, more totally sexual to her than any human connection.

  He was posing his model upright as the mermaid prow of an imaginary ship. Breasts bared, nipples big as eyes. Norma Jeane seemed unaware of the contortions he was putting her through. So long as he murmured, “Great. Ter-rific. Yes, like that. Good girl.” Such words as you murmur at such a time. He came forward stalking his prey, but his prey registered no alarm. His prey was so thoroughly his. Strange, when Norma Jeane Baker was clearly the most intelligent of his models. Even shrewd, in a way you’d expect only a man to be shrewd, a gambler willing to risk X in the hope of winning Y, though in fact there is little hope of winning Y and every possibility of losing X. Her problem wasn’t she was a dumb blonde, it was she wasn’t a blonde and she wasn’t dumb.

  Isaac Shinn had told Otto it was such a shock to Norma Jeane when she’d been dropped by The Studio, he worried she might do something to hurt herself. Otto laughed in disbelief. “Her? She’s the life force. She’s Miss Weed Vigor.” Shinn said, “It’s the most dangerous kind of suicidal, the poor kid hasn’t a clue herself. I have the clue.” Otto listened. He knew that Isaac Shinn for all his bullshit never spoke somberly except he spoke truth. Otto said maybe it was for the best The Studio had dropped “Marilyn Monroe” (ridiculous name nobody was going to take seriously); now the girl could return to a normal life. She could finish her education and get a reliable job and remarry and start a family. A happy ending. Shinn said, appalled, “Don’t tell her that, for Christ’s sake! She shouldn’t give up on a film career yet. She’s got terrific talent and she’s gorgeous and still young. I’ve got faith in her even if that fucker Z doesn’t.” Otto said with surprising earnestness, “But for Norma Jeane’s own good she should get out of this shit. It isn’t just the studios, but everybody’s informing on everybody else, it’s a hotbed of ‘subversives’ and police spies. Why doesn’t she think of it herself?” Shinn, who perspired easily, was tugging at the collar of his custom-made white silk shirt. He was a dwarf with a humped upper back and a massive head and a personality you might define as phosphorescent, glaring in the dark. A controversial but generally respected Hollywood figure in his mid-forties, I. E. Shinn was rumored to have made more money betting on horses than he’d made as an agent; he’d been an early member of the left-leaning Committee to Preserve Individual Freedom, founded in 1940 in resistance to the right-wing California legislature’s Joint Fact-Finding Committee on Un-American Activities. So he was courageous and stubborn; Otto Öse, briefly a member of the Communist Party until he’d become disillusioned, had to admire that. Shinn’s eyes were thick-lashed and intense and gave the impression of inward suffering at odds with the jocular tics and twitches of his face. He was uniquely ugly as Otto Öse believed himself, in his vanity, to be uniquely ugly. A pair. Twin brothers. Twin Pygmalions. And Norma Jeane our creation. Otto would have liked to photograph Shinn in dramatic chiaroscuro, Head of a Hollywood Jew, like a portrait by Rembrandt. But Otto Öse’s income was from girls. Shinn had said, shrugging, “She thinks she’s too dumb. She thinks because she stutters sometimes, she’s almost a moron. Believe me, Otto, she’s happy enough. And she’s going to have a career—I guarantee it.”

  Otto moved the tripod closer. Norma Jeane smiled up at him reflexively, as a woman might smile at a man advancing upon her to make love to her. “Great, baby! Now a little tip of the tongue. Hold it.” She did as she was instructed. She was asleep with her eyes open. Click! Otto himself had become entranced. He’d photographed many nudes but none like Norma Jeane. As if in the act of staring at her he was consuming her, yet at the same time being consumed by her. I live in your dreams. Come, live in mine. Posed against the crinkled-velvet background, she was a luscious piece of candy you’d want to suck and suck. On a whim he’d given her a sixteenth-century Italian anatomical text with the cryptic advice that she should memorize it. She was so eager! She wanted—well, so much! Love me. Will you love me? And save me. It was difficult to believe that this young woman in the prime of health and beauty could ever age as Otto Öse knew himself aging. He was rail-thin, yet his flesh seemed to him flaccid inside his loose-fitting clothes. His head was a skull encased with skin. His nerves were tight-strung wires. He smiled to see Norma Jeane’s toes curving under in a gesture of childlike modesty. What was this fixation of hers, not wanting him to photograph the soles of her feet? He had an idea. “Baby, I’m gonna try another pose. Get down from there.” Without hesitation Norma Jeane obeyed. If he’d wished he could have photographed her from the front, her small rounded belly with its faint pale sheen, the triangle of dark-blond pubic hair at the fork of her legs that looked as if she’d (shyly, slyly) trimmed it: she’d become as unselfconscious as a small child, or a blind child. One of those malnourished Mexican migrant children urinating at the edge of a field scarcely bothering to squat, unself-conscious as a dog.

  In excitement Otto repositioned the velvet drape, spreading it now flat on the floor. Like a picnic! Dragged a stepladder layered in cobwebs out of a corner of the studio so that, inspired, he could shoot Norma Jeane from several feet above her as she lay on the cloth below. “Baby, on your stomach. Now, on your side. Now stret-ch! You’re a big sleek cat, aren’t you, baby? A beautiful big sleek cat. Let’s hear you purr.”

  The effect of Otto’s words was immediate and astonishing. Norma Jeane obeyed Otto unquestioningly, laughing deep in her throat. She might have been hypnotized. She might have been a young bride unskilled in lovemaking beginning to enjoy love, her body responding instinctively. Naked on the crinkled velvet, stretching luxuriously, arms, legs, the sinuous-snaky curve of her back and buttocks as Otto clicked! clicked! the shutter of his camera, staring at her through the lens. Otto Öse, who boasted that no woman, and certainly no naked model, could surprise him. Otto Öse, whom sickness had both deprived and cured of his manhood. In this series of shots he was several feet farther from his subject, balanced on the ladder, aiming downward, so that the printed photo would place the girl surrounded by the velvet cloth, not dominating its space in the pose of the traditional nude as in her initial upright position. It was a subtle difference but a significant one. The upright alluring nude, gazing dreamily at the viewer, is an invitation to sexual love on the nude’s terms: a female freely beckoning to the (invisible, anonymous) male. But the reclining nude, seen from a short distance, stretched out on her stomach and reaching out, is perceived as physically smaller, more vulnerable in her nakedness, and not the viewer’s equal. She is to be dominated. Her very beauty suggests pathos. An exposed little animal, helpless, totally captured by the camera’s probing eye. The graceful curve of shoulders, back, and thighs, the swe
lling of her buttocks and breasts, the curious animal yearning in her uplifted face, the pale, vulnerable undersides of her feet—“Fan-tas-tic! Hold it.” Click, click!

  Otto’s breath was coming quickly. Perspiration broke out on his forehead and beneath his arms, stinging like tiny red ants. By this time he’d forgotten the beautiful model’s name (if she had a name) and could not have said for whom he was taking these remarkable shots; still less could he have said how much he would receive for them. Nine hundred. For selling her out. Why, when I love her? This is proof I don’t love her. He’d had two shots of rum with his former friend, former roommate, and former Commie comrade Charlie Chaplin, Jr., whose “filial identity” was synonymous with his “filial curse,” to prepare himself for the shoot, a sinus-clearing potent medicine in scummy jam glasses. He wasn’t drunk on rum but on—what? The blinding lights, the throbbing crimson color, the girl flesh luscious-as-candy stretched out before him writhing and stretching in the throes of sexual intercourse with an invisible lover. He wasn’t drunk on rum but on the transgression he was committing, for which he would be not punished but handsomely paid. From his vantage point above her Otto saw the girl’s life flow past him, from its squalid origins (she’d confided in him she was what she quaintly called illegitimate and her father who lived close by in Hollywood had never acknowledged her existence, and he knew that her mother was crazy, a paranoid schizophrenic who’d once tried to drown her—or was it scald her to death?—institutionalized at Norwalk for the past decade) to its equally squalid end (early death by drug overdose or alcohol, or wrists slashed in a tub, or a madman lover). The tragedy of the girl’s anonymous life pierced Otto Öse’s heart, who had no heart. She was a creature unprotected by society, no family, no “heritage.” A piece of luscious meat to be marketed. In her prime, and her prime would not last. Though at twenty-three she looked six years younger, strangely untouched by time and ill usage but, like the proletariat subjects of Otto Öse’s great mentor Walker Evans, the disenfranchised sharecroppers and migrant workers of the American south in the 1930s, she would one day begin to age suddenly and irrevocably.

  I force no one. Of their own volition they come to me. I, Otto Öse, help them to sell themselves who would have little value on the market except through me.

  How then was he exploiting Norma Jeane? Saying, tossing the rag of a curtain at her, “OK, baby. Done. You were terrific. Fan-tas-tic.” Blinking, dazed, the girl looked at him as if for the moment not recognizing him. As a brothel girl doped and medicated would not recognize the man who’s been fucking her, nor even exactly that she’s been fucked, and that it has been going on for quite a while. “All over. And it was good” Not wanting the girl to think how good it might be, how fantastic and even historic this session in Otto Öse’s studio was. That the nude photos of Norma Jeane Baker a.k.a. “Marilyn Monroe” he’d taken that day would become the most famous, or infamous, calendar nudes in history. For which the model would earn fifty dollars, and millions of dollars would be earned by others. By men.

  And the soles of my feet exposed.

  Behind the tattered Chinese screen, Norma Jeane fumbled to dress quickly. Ninety minutes had passed in a drugged dream. Her head throbbed with pain confused with traffic outside on Hollywood Boulevard, the stink of exhaust. Her breasts ached with a ghostly milk-to-be-sucked. If I’d had a baby with Bucky Glazer. Now I would be safe.

  She heard Otto talking to someone. He’d made a telephone call, probably. Laughing softly.

  Now the lights were out, the frayed crimson velvet cloth carelessly folded up and shoved onto a shelf, the used rolls of film ready to be developed. Norma Jeane wanted only to be gone from Otto Öse. Waking from her dreamy trance beneath the blinding lights she’d seen in the photographer’s skull face a gloating satisfaction that had nothing to do with her. She’d heard in his elated voice a happiness that had nothing to do with her. Not humiliated now, baring myself to a man who doesn’t love me. If I’d had a baby. She had to acknowledge that stripping bare in Otto Öse’s studio hadn’t been done exclusively for money, though she desperately needed money and hoped to visit Gladys this weekend. She’d stripped bare and humbled herself in the hope that if Otto Öse saw her naked, her beautiful young body and her beautiful young yearning face, he could no longer resist loving her who had in fact resisted loving her for three years. Norma Jeane wondered if Otto Öse was impotent. In Hollywood, she’d discovered what male impotence was. Yet even an impotent man might love her. They could kiss, cuddle, hug each other through the nights. She would be happiest with an impotent man, in fact. She knew!

  She was fully clothed now. In her medium-heeled shoes.

  She checked her reflection in a compact mirror clouded with powder through which her blue eyes surfaced like minnows. “I’m still here.”

  She laughed her new throaty laugh. She was richer by fifty dollars. Maybe her luck, which had been running bad for months, would now change. Maybe this was a sign. And who would know?—calendar “art” was anonymous. Mr. Shinn was hoping to arrange for an audition at Metro-Goldwyn-Mayer. He hadn’t given up on her.

  She smiled in the little round mirror in the palm of her hand.

  “Baby, you were terrific. Fan-tas-tic.”

  She snapped the compact shut and dropped it into her bag.

  Rehearsing how she would exit Otto Öse’s studio with dignity: Otto might be tidying up, or Otto might have poured a glass of rum, or two glasses of rum, in his scummy jam glasses, to celebrate the shoot, a ritual of his though he knew Norma Jeane didn’t drink, and certainly wouldn’t drink at this hour of the day. So he’d drink the second glass himself with a wink. She’d smile at him and wave—“Otto, thanks! I have to run!”—and walk out before he could protest. For he’d already given her the fifty dollars, safe in her wallet. She’d already signed the release.

  But Otto called out to her, in his drawling voice, “Norma Jeane, hey, sweetheart—I’d like you to meet a friend of mine. An old comrade from the trenches. Cass.”

  Norma Jeane stepped out from behind the Chinese screen astonished to see a stranger beside Otto Öse! A boy with thick dark hair, sloe eyes. He was considerably shorter than Otto and compactly built, slender yet strong-looking, a dancer, perhaps, or a gymnast. He was smiling at Norma Jeane shyly. It was clear that he was attracted to her! The most beautiful boy Norma Jeane had ever seen outside the movies.

  And those eyes.

  THE LOVER

  Because already we knew each other.

  Because he’d gazed upon me, those eyes, haunting soulful beautiful eyes, from a wall of Gladys’s long-ago apartment.

  Because he would say, seeing me, I knew you too. Fatherless like me. And your mother abandoned and debased like mine.

  Because he was a boy and not a man, though my age exactly.

  Because in me he saw not the tramp, the slut, the joke who was “Marilyn Monroe” but the eager hopeful young girl who was Norma Jeane.

  Because he, too, was doomed.

  Because in his doom there was such poetry!

  Because he would love me as Otto Öse would not, or could not.

  Because he would love me as other men would not, or could not.

  Because he would love me as a brother. As a twin.

  With his soul.

  THE AUDITION

  All acting is aggression in the face of annihilation.

  —From The Actor’s Handbook and the Actor’s Life

  How finally did it happen? It happened like this.

  There was a film director who owed I. E. Shinn a favor. He’d gotten a tip from Shinn regarding a thoroughbred filly named Footloose running at the Casa Grande Stakes and the director played the filly to win (at 11 to 1) with money borrowed in secret from a wealthy producer’s wife, and the director walked away from the racetrack with $16,500 which would help to pay off some of his debts, not all of his debts by any means because the director was an inveterate gambler and risk-taker, a genius in his craft some said, an irres
ponsible self-indulgent S.O.B. others said, a man not to be defined by ordinary standards of behavior, propriety, professional courtesy, decency, or even common sense: a “Hollywood original” who detested Hollywood but required Hollywood for the financial backing that made his idiosyncratic and expensive films possible.

  And the leading man in the director’s next film owed I. E. Shinn an even greater favor. In 1947, shortly after President Harry Truman signed the historic Executive Order 9835 requiring loyalty oaths and security programs for all federal employees, and “loyalty oaths” came to be demanded of employees by private businesses, the actor was one of a number of protesters in Hollywood, signing petitions and going on record as believing in such constitutional freedoms as freedom of speech and freedom of assembly. Within a year he was under investigation as a subversive by the dread HUAC (House Un-American Activities Committee), exposing Communists and “Communist sympathizers” in the Hollywood film industry. It was revealed that the actor had been involved in contract negotiations between the left-leaning Screen Actors Guild and the major studios in 1945, demanding for members of the Guild a health and welfare program, better working conditions, a higher minimum wage, and royalty payments for reissues of films; the Actors Guild was charged with having been infiltrated by Communists, or their sympathizers, or dupes. Worse, the actor had been secretly denounced to HUAC by volunteer anticommunist informers as having consorted for years with known members of the American Communist Party including the screenwriters Dalton Trumbo and Ring Lardner, Jr., prominently blacklisted.

  And so to escape the committee’s subpoena and a hostile grilling in Washington, D.C., which would have resulted in ugly national publicity for the actor and the boycotting of his films by the American Legion and the Catholic Legion of Decency and other patriotic organizations (consider the fate of the once-adored Charlie Chaplin, now denounced as a “Red” and a “traitor”) and inevitable blacklisting (no matter that the studios publicly denied the very existence of the blacklist), the actor was invited to meet privately with several key Republican California congressmen at the Bel Air home of a Hollywood entertainment lawyer who’d been put in contact with the actor by I. E. Shinn, the canny little agent. In this private meeting (in fact, a lavish dinner party complete with expensive French wines) the several congressmen questioned the actor informally and the actor impressed them with his soft-spoken masculine sincerity and patriotic ardor, for he was after all a World War II veteran, a G.I. who’d fought in Germany in the final grueling months of the war, and if he’d been attracted to Russian communism or socialism or whatever it was, please recall that Stalin, now a monster, was our ally at the time; Russia and the United States were not yet ideological enemies, the one a militant atheist state bent upon world domination, if not destruction, and the other the solitary hope of Christianity and democracy among the world’s troubled nations. Please recall that only a few years ago it was understandable that a passionate young man like the actor might be drawn to radical politics in response to fascism. Sympathy for Russia had been promoted by newspapers and family magazines like Life!