Blonde

by Joyce Carol Oates

  In rehearsals Calhern was nervous with Norma Jeane. He did despise her! His character was “Alonzo Emmerich,” and he was fated to put a bullet through his brain. Angela was his hope of renewed youth and life: a futile hope. He blames me. He can’t touch me. There’s rage, not love in his heart.

  She couldn’t find the key to him. The key to the scenes between them. She knew that, if they failed to play well together, she would have to be replaced with another actress.

  Obsessively she rehearsed her scenes. She had few lines, and most were in response to “Uncle Leon” and, later, to the police officers who interrogate her. She rehearsed with Cass when he was available, and when he was in the mood. He wanted her to succeed, he said. He knew what it meant to her. (“Success” meant relatively little to him, son of the most successful film actor of all time.) Yet quickly he became impatient with her. He shook her like a rag doll to wake her from her Angela trance. He teased her, trying to keep the anger out of his voice. “Norma, for Christ’s sake. Your director will lead you step by step through your scenes, that’s what movies are. Not real acting, like the theater; not where you’re on your own. Why work so hard? Turn yourself inside out? You’re sweating like a horse. Why does this matter so much?”

  The question hovered between them. Why does it matter so much? So much!

  Knowing it was absurd, what she could not explain to her lover—Because I don’t want to die, I’m in terror of dying. I can’t leave you. Because to fail in her acting career was to fail at the life she’d chosen to justify her wrongful birth. And even in her mildly deranged state she understood the illogic of such a statement.

  She wiped at her eyes. She laughed. “I can’t choose what matters to me, like you. I don’t have that power.”

  Help me to have that power. Darling, teach me.

  Norma Jeane’s insomnia worsened. A roaring in her head in which murmurous mocking voices lifted, jeering laughter, indistinct and yet familiar. Were these her judges, or spirits of the damned awaiting her? She had only Angela to pit against them. She had only her work—her performance—her “art.” Why does it matter so much? She was sleepless when she was alone in her tiny apartment in her Salvation Army brass bed or when Cass was with her, in that bed or in another. (Elusive Cass Chaplin! The beautiful boy had many friends in Hollywood, Beverly Hills, Hollywood Hills, Santa Monica, Bel Air, Venice and Venice Beach, Pasadena, Malibu, and everywhere in Los Angeles, and these friends, most of them unknown to Norma Jeane, had apartments, bungalows, houses, estates in which Cass was welcome at any time, night or day. He seemed to have no permanent address. His possessions, mainly clothes, and these clothes expensive gifts, were scattered among a dozen households and trundled about with him in a duffel bag and in a large battered leather suitcase with the scrolled gilt initials CC.)

  Prowling the early-morning hours barefoot and shivering. If Cass was gone from her she missed him painfully but if he was with her, sleeping, she was jealous of his sleep, which she could not penetrate and in which he eluded her. At such times she remembered her lost friend Harriet and her baby, Irina, who’d been Norma Jeane’s baby too. Harriet had told Norma Jeane that for a long time as a girl she’d been insomniac, too, then she’d gotten pregnant and fell asleep all the time and after her baby was born and her husband was gone from her she slept, slept as much as she could, and it was a peaceful dreamless sleep and one day maybe Norma Jeane would know this sleep if she was lucky. If I become pregnant. If I have a baby. But not now. But when? She could not imagine Angela pregnant. She could not imagine Angela beyond the script. She’d memorized Angela’s lines to the point at which the lines ceased to have meaning, like foreign words repeated by rote. She’d begun to exhaust herself in her first week on the set. Never had she guessed that acting was so physically draining. Like lifting her own weight! She began to cry, unless she was laughing. Wiping her eyes with the palms of both hands.

  And there was Cass, the beautiful naked boy, tousle-haired, approaching her where she stood on her tiny balcony, extending his opened palm on which lay two white capsules. “What are those?” Norma Jeane asked guardedly. “A potion, darling Norma, to help you sleep. To help us both sleep,” Cass said, kissing the damp nape of her neck. “A magic potion?” Norma Jeane asked. Cass said, “There is no magic potion. But there is this potion.” Norma Jeane turned away, disapproving. It wasn’t the first time that Cass had offered her sedatives. Barbiturates, they were called. Or whiskey, gin, rum. And she wanted badly to give in. She knew it would please her lover, who rarely slept without having drunk or taken pills or both. Mere exhaustion, Cass boasted, wasn’t enough to slow him down. He was saying, his breath warm in Norma Jeane’s ear and one of his arms gently around her, cradling her breasts, “There was a Greek philosopher who taught that, of all things, not to have been born is the sweetest state. But I believe sleep is the sweetest state. You’re dead, yet alive. There’s no sensation so exquisite.”

  Norma Jeane pushed her lover away, more forcibly than she intended. She didn’t love Cass Chaplin at such times! She loved him but was fearful of him. He was the very devil tempting her. She knew how Dr. Mittelstadt would disapprove. The teachings of Christian Science. Her great-grandmother Mary Baker Eddy. “No, it isn’t right. For me. An artificial sleep.”

  Cass laughed at her, but Norma Jeane refused the sleeping potion and that night remained awake and anxious as Cass peacefully slept and slept through the early morning when Norma Jeane prepared to leave for the studio, and through the long day at Culver City Norma Jeane was edgy, nerved up, and shrill, and faltered in the very lines she’d memorized, and she saw how John Huston regarded her, the man’s assessing eyes; he was wondering if he who never made mistakes in casting had made a mistake with her, and on the next night she accepted both capsules from Cass, who gave them to her solemnly, placed on her tongue like communion wafers.

  And how deeply, how peacefully Norma Jeane slept that night! Not in memory had she slept so profoundly. An artificial sleep but a healthy sleep, isn’t it? A magic potion after all.

  And next morning on the set, rehearsing with Louis Calhern, Norma Jeane suddenly realized: Clive Pearce!

  She would attribute her insight to Cass’s magic potion. A dreamless sleep but maybe not entirely. Maybe, in a dream, the elder man had appeared to her?

  For it seemed clear to her now: Louis Calhern who was her “Uncle Leon” was in fact Mr. Pearce. In the role of Alonzo Emmerich, Mr. Pearce.

  She’d been seeing the renowned Calhern as a stranger when in fact he was Mr. Pearce, returned to her, approximately the same age, approximately the same girth and body shape and wasn’t Calhern’s ravaged-handsome face the very face of Clive Pearce, years later? The furtive eyes, the twitchy mouth, yet the pride in his bearing, or a memory of pride; above all, the cultivated, slightly ironic voice. A light must have shone in Norma Jeane’s eyes. An lelectric current must have run through her supple, eager girl’s body. She was “Marilyn”—no, she was “Angela”—she was Norma Jeane playing “Marilyn” playing “Angela”—like a Russian doll in which smaller dolls are contained by the largest doll which is the mother—now she understood who “Uncle Leon” was and immediately she became soft, seductive, as wide-eyed and trusting as a child. Calhern noticed at once. He was an actor skilled in technique and could imitate emotion as if signaling it; he was not a natural actor, yet he noticed the change in “Angela” at once. The director noticed at once. At the end of the day’s rehearsal he would say, he who so rarely praised any of the cast and had said virtually nothing to Norma Jeane until now, “Something happened today, eh? What was it?” Norma Jeane, who was very happy, shook her head wordlessly and smiled as if she didn’t know, for how could she explain, who could not have explained it to herself?

  She could take direction, that was part of her genius. She could read my mind. Of course it might not have happened, it seemed to me accidental, as if I’d been sowing seeds on the ground and only one took hold.

  Their
single kiss. Norma Jeane and Clive Pearce. He’d never kissed her full on the mouth, as he’d wanted to. He’d touched her squirmy body and he’d tickled her and (she believed) he’d kissed her where she couldn’t see but never full on the mouth and now she melted against him, yearning and yet childlike, virginal, for it was her soul that opened itself to the older man, not her tight girl’s body. Oh! oh I love you! never leave me she would forgive Mr. Pearce for deceiving her, driving her to the orphans’ home and abandoning her; yet now that Mr. Pearce was returned to her, as the patrician lawyer Alonzo Emmerich, who was “Uncle Leon,” she immediately forgave him and after the remarkable breathless kiss she continued to lean into him, Angela’s eyes misty and intense and her lips slightly parted, and Louis Calhern who was a veteran actor of decades stared at her in astonishment.

  The girl wasn’t acting. It was herself. She became the Angela my character wished. His desire.

  From that hour onward, Norma Jeane would have no more anxiety as Angela.

  On the set Norma Jeane was quiet and respectful and watchful and shrewd. Now she’d solved the puzzle of her own role, it fascinated her to see how others had solved, or were struggling with, theirs. For acting is the solving of a succession of puzzles of which no single puzzle can explain the others. For the actor is a succession of selves held together by the promise that in acting all losses can be restored. It would be a curiosity that the young blond client of I. E. Shinn, “Marilyn Monroe,” would so intensely watch others’ scenes, rehearsals, and filming, showing up on the set even when she wasn’t scheduled to work.

  She slept her way up. Beginning with Z, then X. There was Shinn, of course. And Huston certainly. And the film’s producers. And Widmark. And Roy Baker. And Sol Siegel, and Howard Hawks. And anybody else you can name.

  Norma Jeane believed that, in the presence of gifted actors, her pores might absorb wisdom. In the presence of a great director, she might learn how to “direct” herself. For Huston was a genius; from Huston she learned the essential film truth that it doesn’t matter what goes into a scene, only what comes out. It doesn’t matter who you are or who you are not, only what you project onto film. And the film will redeem you and outlive you. On the set, for instance, Jean Hagen, who played Sterling Hayden’s lover, exuded personality and was much liked. Yet on the screen her character came off as overly emotional, jumpy, not seductive enough. Norma Jeane thought I’d have played that role slower, deeper. She isn’t mysterious enough.

  While the young blond Angela in her very shallowness exuded mystery. For you couldn’t be sure if that shallowness wasn’t instead an unfathomable depth. Is she manipulating the besotted old man with her innocence? Does she want her “uncle” destroyed? The unnerving blankness in her face was the reflecting pool in which others, including the audience, might gaze.

  Norma Jeane felt a thrill of elation, excitement. She was an actress now! Never again would she doubt herself.

  She surprised John Huston by asking if he would retake scenes with which he’d seemed satisfied. When he demanded to know why, Norma Jeane said, “Because I know I can do better.” She was nervous, but she was determined. And she was smiling. “Marilyn” smiled all the time. “Marilyn” spoke in a low, husky-sexy voice. “Marilyn” nearly always got her way. Though Louis Calhern might have been satisfied with his own performance he readily agreed to further retakes, beguiled by “Marilyn.” And it was so; each retake made her performance stronger.

  On the final day of filming, John Huston commented wryly to her, “Well, Angela. Our little girl’s all growed up, eh?”

  Never again doubt. I am an actress. I know. I can be. I will be!

  Yet as the date of the screening neared, Norma Jeane began to feel the encroachment of her old anxiety. For it was not enough to be satisfied with a performance and to have been praised by co-workers; there awaited still a vast world of strangers who would have their own opinions, and among these were Hollywood film professionals and critics who knew nothing of Norma Jeane Baker and cared no more for her than one might care for a solitary ant crossing a sidewalk upon which one might accidentally, unknowingly, tread. And goodbye, ant!

  Norma Jeane confessed to Cass she didn’t think she could bear to attend the screening. And especially not the party afterward. Cass shrugged, saying yes you will, it’s expected of you. Norma Jeane persisted, saying what if she became sick to her stomach? What if she fainted? Cass shrugged again. It was impossible to gauge if he was happy for Norma Jeane or jealous, if he resented her working with a renowned director like Huston or whether he was genuinely excited for her. (What of Cass Chaplin’s career? Norma Jeane didn’t ask him how interviews, auditions, callbacks turned out. She knew he was sensitive and hot-tempered. As he wryly admitted, he was as easily insulted as the Great Dictator himself. Offered a small part as a dancer in an upcoming M-G-M musical he’d accepted the role and a few days later changed his mind when he learned that another young male dancer, a rival, had been offered a larger part.) Norma Jeane pushed herself into Cass’s embrace and buried her face in his neck. He was more brother than lover now, a brother twin who could protect her from the world. How she wished she could hide in his arms! Forever and ever, in his arms.

  “But you don’t mean that, Norma,” Cass said, stroking her hair with his fingers distractedly, snagging his nails in her hair—“you’re an actress. You may even be a good actress. An actress wants to be seen. An actress wants to be loved. By multitudes of people, not just one lone man.” Norma Jeane protested, “No, Cass darling, that isn’t so! All I really want is you.”

  Cass laughed. Snagging his blunt bitten nails in her hair.

  Yes, but she was serious. She would marry him, she would have his baby, she would live with him and for him forever afterward in Venice Beach, for instance. In a small stucco house overlooking a canal. Their baby, a boy with dark tousled hair and beautiful sloe eyes, would sleep in a cradle close beside their bed. And sometimes their baby would sleep between them, in their bed. A prince of a baby. The most beautiful baby you ever saw. Charlie Chaplin’s grandson! Norma Jeane’s voice cracked with excitement. “Grandma Della, you won’t believe this. You won’t! My husband is Charlie Chaplin’s son. We’re crazy about each other, it was love at first sight. My baby is Charlie Chaplin’s grandson. Your great-grandson, Grandma!” The big-boned old woman stared at Norma Jeane in disbelief. Then her face broke into a smile. Then a grin. Then she laughed aloud. Norma Jeane, you sure have surprised us all. Norma Jeane, sweetie, we’re all so proud of you.

  And Gladys would accept a grandson as she’d never have wished to accept a granddaughter. It was just as well Irina had been taken from them.

  When your number’s up. It happens fast or not at all. Through a narrow slatted window of the bungalow on Montezuma Drive she saw the lithe naked figure moving across the carpet. It was Cass Chaplin, oblivious of her. He leaned over a piano keyboard and played several chords, faint fluid cascading notes, beautiful as Debussy or Ravel, who were his favorite composers, and with a pencil he seemed to be taking notes or inscribing music in a notebook. For several days during Norma Jeane’s final week of filming in Culver City he’d retreated to this hideaway house off Olympic Boulevard to work on a ballet composition and choreography. (The Spanish bungalow overgrown with leprous palm trees and tangled vines was the property of a blacklisted screenwriter currently in exile in Tangier.) Music was his first love, Cass had told Norma Jeane, and he was eager to return to it. “Not acting. I’m not an actor. Because I don’t want to inhabit other selves. I want to inhabit music, which is pure.” When he’d been in the vicinity of a piano, Cass had played parts of his piano compositions for Norma Jeane, which she’d thought very beautiful; he was always dancing for her, but only playfully and only for a few minutes. Now, standing on the leaf-littered front walk of this house scarcely known to her, Norma Jeane gazed through the slatted window at the wraithlike figure of her lover, a pulse beating in her head. I can’t interrupt him. It’s wrong to interru
pt him.

  She thought He would hate me for spying on him, I can’t risk that.

  She withdrew to the far side of the walk and for forty mesmerized minutes listened to the striking of chords, the rising and fading piano notes inside. A suspension of time she wished might go on and on, forever.

  When your number’s up.

  Shinn in the guise of truth-telling. Dropping his gravelly voice to inform her that contrary to what Chaplin junior wanted her to think, Chaplin senior had settled a small fortune on his ex-wife and son. He’d been forced to by lawyers. “Of course,” Shinn said, smirking, “it’s vanished now. Little Lita spent it twenty-five years ago.”