Blonde

by Joyce Carol Oates

  This poem. It was a religious poem you could figure, but printed in a peculiar way. A thick horizontal column of print at the top, a thinner vertical column, and a matching thick horizontal column at the bottom. It was a “metaphysical” poem (we’d been told) which meant it was a tough nut to crack but beautiful language you could let flow past like you’d listen to music. Gladys was nervous you could see but she turned a little in her desk to face us, propped up her book, took a deep breath, and began to read, and—well, it was wholly unexpected, not just Gladys’s husky dramatic voice, which managed to be breathless and powerful simultaneously, spiritual and sexy as hell, but the mere fact that she was reading to us at all, that she hadn’t refused or run out of the room when Prof made his request. On the page “The Altar” was a puzzle, but when that little blond girl read it, it suddenly made sense.

  When Gladys finished, we burst into applause. All of us. Even the schoolteachers you might’ve figured would be jealous of this performance. For there was Prof Dietrich gaping at this girl we figured for an office worker like he couldn’t believe his ears. He was half sitting against the teacher’s desk in his usual casual position, shoulders slouched and head bent over the text, and when Gladys finished he joined in the applause and said, “Young lady, you must be a poet! Are you?”

  Now fiercely blushing, Gladys hunched her shoulders and mumbled something we couldn’t hear.

  Prof Dietrich persisted, half teasing in his teacherly kindly way, like this episode, too, was something almost a little out of his control and he needed to use just the right words. “Miss Pirig? You are a poet—of some rare sort!”

  He asked Gladys why the poem was printed in such strange typography and Gladys again spoke inaudibly and Prof said, “Louder, please, Miss Pirig,” and Gladys cleared her throat and said, only just audibly, “It’s m-meant to be an altar, the way it looks?” but now her voice was hurried and lacking in timbre and it did seem she might be about to bolt from the room like a spooked animal. So Prof quickly said, “Thank you, Gladys. You are correct. Class, d’you see? ‘The Altar’ is an altar.”

  The damnedest thing! Once you saw it, you couldn’t not see it. Like one of those Rorschach ink-blot tests.

  “A Heart alone.” The girl’s voice intoning those words. “A Heart alone is such a stone.” Through our lives we’d hear it, every one of us in the room that evening.

  November 1951. A long time ago. Jesus! You don’t want to think how few of us are still living, this hour.

  Sure, we watched her after that. We talked to her more, or tried to. She wasn’t anonymous anymore. Gladys Pirig—she was mysterious and sexy. Mysterious is sexy. That ash-blond hair, that husky breathy voice. Maybe a few of us tried to look her up in the L.A. phone directory, but no “Gladys Pirig” was listed. Prof called on her once or twice more and she stiffened without answering him but it was too late. And she was looking familiar to us. Not to everybody in the class but to a few. No matter she dressed herself more than ever in secretary clothes and her hair rolled and pinned like Irene Dunne and if you tried to strike up a conversation with her she’d back off like a scared rabbit. What she seemed like, if you had to put a name to it, was a girl who’d been rough-handled by men.

  And there was the Thursday night one of us came to class early with a copy of Hollywood Reporter and passed it around and we stared in astonishment yet maybe not by this time entirely in surprise. “Marilyn Monroe. Jesus.” “That’s her? That little girl?” “She isn’t a girl, and she isn’t little. Look.”

  We looked.

  Some of us wanted to keep our discovery a secret, but we had to show Prof, we had to see the look on Prof’s face, and he stared and stared at the photo feature in Hollywood Reporter, both with his glasses on and his glasses off. For here was a luscious four-column photo of this dazzling blond Hollywood actress, not yet a star but you could see she’d be one soon, just about spilling out of a low-cut sequined dress and with her face so made up it looked like a painting: MARILYN MONROE, MISS MODEL BLOND 1951. Plus stills from The Asphalt jungle and the release of All About Eve. Prof said hoarsely, “This starlet—Marilyn Monroe. This is Gladys?” We told him yes, we were sure. Once you made the connection it was obvious. Prof said, “But I saw The Asphalt Jungle. I remember that girl, and our Gladys isn’t anything like her.” One of the seminarians who’d been looking on said, “I just saw All About Eve, and she was in it! It’s just a small role but I do remember her. I mean, I remember the blonde who must’ve been her.” He laughed. We were all laughing, excited and thrilled. Some of us, we’d lived through moments of what you’d call surprise in the war, when what you’d been thinking was one way was revealed suddenly and forever as not that way at all, and your very existence of no more substance or significance than a strand of cobweb, and this moment was a little like that, the surprise of it, the irreversible revelation of it, except of course it was a happy moment, a giddy moment, like we’d all won the lottery and were celebrating. The seminarian was enjoying the attention we gave him, adding, “‘Marilyn Monroe’ isn’t anybody you’d be likely to forget.”

  Next class period, a dozen of us arrived early. We had copies of Screen World, Modern Screen, PhotoLife—“Most Promising Starlet 1951.” Another copy of Hollywood Reporter with a photo of “Marilyn Monroe at a movie premiere, escorted by the handsome young actor Johnny Sands.” We even had back issues of Swank, Sir, and Peek. There was a feature in Look from last fall—“Miss Blond Sensation: MARILYN MONROE.” We were passing these around excited as kids when in walked Gladys Pirig in a khaki-colored raincoat and hat, a mousy little girl nobody’d have given a second glance to. And she saw us and the magazines and must’ve caught on at once. Our eyes! We’d meant to keep our secret but it was like a lit match held to dried sedge. One of the pushy guys went right up to her and said, “Hey. Your name isn’t Gladys Pirig, is it? It’s Marilyn Monroe.” He was crude enough to hold up Swank with her on the cover in a flimsy red nightie and red high heels and her hair tousled and her shiny red lips pursed in a kiss.

  “Gladys” looked at him as if he’d slapped her. Quickly she said, “N-no. That isn’t me. I mean—I’m not her.” There was panic and horror on her face. This was no Hollywood actress, just a frightened girl. She would’ve run out but some of us were blocking her way, not deliberately, it was just how we happened to be standing. And others coming into the room. The sharp-eyed schoolteacher contingent, who’d been hearing the rumor. And Prof Dietrich was early by at least five minutes. And this pushy guy was saying to her, “Marilyn, I think you’re great. Can I have your autograph?” He wasn’t kidding. He was holding out his Renaissance text for her to sign. Another guy, one of the veterans, was saying, “I think you’re great. Don’t let these crude assholes make you nervous.” And another guy was saying, in mimicry of Angela from The Asphalt Jungle, “‘Uncle Leon, I ordered salt herring for your breakfast, I know how you like it,’” and she even laughed at this, a small squeaky laugh—“Well. You’ve got me there, I guess.” And there came Prof Dietrich looking self-conscious but excited, too, his face flushed, and tonight he was wearing a decent-looking navy blue coat not missing a single button and pressed trousers and a bright plaid tie, and he said, awkwardly, “Um, Gladys—Miss Pirig—I’ve heard, I believe—we have a ‘starlet’ in our midst. Congratulations, Miss Monroe!” The girl was smiling, or trying to smile, and managed to say, “Th-thank you, Professor Dietrich.” He told her he’d seen The Asphalt Jungle and thought the movie was “unusually thoughtful for Hollywood” and her performance was “excellent.” You could see it made her uncomfortable to hear this from him. The big man’s gleaming eyes, broad eager smile. “Gladys Pirig” had no intention of taking her seat as usual but wanted only to escape us.

  Like the earth was shaking beneath her. Like she’d been deluded enough to think it would not, though this was southern California and what else could you expect?

  She was backing toward the door, and we were crowding and jostling around her,
talking in loud voices to get her attention, competing with one another for her attention, even the female schoolteachers, and her Renaissance textbook, which was a heavy, hefty book, slipped from her fingers and fell to the floor and one of us snatched it up and handed it to her but held on to it only just a little so she couldn’t rush away and she said, practically begging, “L-leave me alone, please. I’m not the one you w-want.” That look on her face! That look of hurt, pleading, terror, and female resignation in her beautiful face some of us would be deeply moved to see two years later in the climactic scene of Niagara, when the adultress Rose is about to be strangled by her maddened husband, that look on Monroe’s face we would believe ourselves the first to have seen, one rainy Thursday evening in November 1951 as “Gladys Pirig” managed to slip away, abandoning her book to us, and we gaped after her, and Prof Dietrich called out in dismay—“Miss Monroe! Please. We won’t make any more fuss, we promise.”

  But no. She’d left. A few of us followed her to the stairs. She bolted and ran. Down those stairs as fast as a boy might’ve run, or a terrified animal, and no looking back.

  “Marilyn!” we cried after her. “Marilyn, come back!”

  But she never returned.

  RUMPELSTILTSKIN

  What is this spell? How long will it last? Who has done this to me?

  Not the Dark Prince or even her secret lover V had begged her to marry him, but the dwarf Rumpelstiltskin.

  There were no lines provided for her. She dared not laugh. She protested in her soft, fading voice, “Oh, but you don’t mean it, Mr. Shinn!”

  He said, smiling—as a Hollywood wit once said of I. E. Shinn—like a nutcracker might smile if it could smile, “Please. You know me by now, dear. I’m Isaac. Not Mr. Shinn. You know me, and you know my heart. Call me Mr. Shinn and I will dissolve into dust like Bela Lugosi as Count Dracula.”

  Norma Jeane said, wetting her lips, “Is-aac.”

  “That’s the best your expensive acting coach has taught you? Try again.”

  Norma Jeane laughed. She wanted to hide her eyes from the agent’s shiny glaring all-penetrating gaze. “Isaac. Is-aac?” It was more a pleading than a reply.

  In fact, this was not the first time that the formidable Rumpelstiltskin had asked the Fair Princess to marry him, but she was in the habit of forgetting between proposals. Amnesia like morning mist obscured such episodes. They were intended to be romantic but a harsh jangling music interfered. As the Fair Princess she had so much to think about! Her life was being eaten up by a calendar of densely annotated days and hours.

  The Beggar Maid in disguise as the Fair Princess. Under an enchantment so that at least in the eyes of commoners like herself she appeared shining and resplendent as a Fair Princess.

  It was exhausting to play such a role but there was no other role for her (“with your looks, your talent”) at the present time, as Mr. Shinn was patient to explain. In every decade there must be a Fair Princess exalted above the rest and the role demanded not just extraordinary physical gifts but an accompanying genius, as Mr. Shinn was yet more patient to explain. (“You don’t believe that beauty is genius, sweetheart? One day, when you’ve lost both, you will.”) Yet looking into any mirror, she saw not the Fair Princess whom the world saw and marveled over but her old Beggar Maid self. The blue startled eyes, the slightly parted, apprehensive lips. As vividly as if it had happened only last week she recalled being banished from the stage at Van Nuys High. She recalled the drama teacher’s sarcasm and the murmurs and laughter in her wake. This humiliation seemed quite natural to her, a just assessment of her worth. Yet somehow she’d become the Fair Princess!

  What is this spell? How long can it last? Who has done this to me?

  She was being groomed for “stardom.” It was a species of animal manufacture, like breeding.

  Of course Rumpelstiltskin claimed credit, for he alone had the power to cast magic spells. Norma Jeane had come by degrees to believe that I. E. Shinn was indeed solely responsible: the dwarf magician who professed to adore her. (Otto Öse had long since departed from her life. Rarely did she think of him now. How strange, she’d once confused Otto Öse with the Dark Prince! But he was no prince. He was a pornographer, a pimp. He’d looked upon her naked, yearning body without tenderness. He’d betrayed her. Norma Jeane Baker was nothing to him, though he’d scavenged her out of a trash heap and saved her life. He’d disappeared from Hollywood sometime in March 1951 when served with a subpoena to testify before the California Joint Fact-Finding Committee on Un-American Activities.) These were the days when Shinn summoned Norma Jeane to his office on Sunset Boulevard, where he’d have spread out on a table an advance copy of a glossy magazine featuring “Marilyn Monroe” in poses she’d entirely forgotten—“Baby, look what your doppelgänger has been up to. Luscious, eh? This should make The Studio execs take notice.” Often he telephoned her late at night to gloat over a planted item in a gossip column, the two of them laughing uproariously like people who’ve won a lottery with a ticket found on the street.

  You don’t deserve to win with such a ticket.

  But then, who does?

  This evening it was the same marriage proposal with a startling variant: Isaac Shinn would draw up a prenuptial contract with Norma Jeane Baker a.k.a. “Marilyn Monroe” leaving her virtually all his estate when he died, cutting out his children and other current heirs. I. E. Shinn, Inc., was worth millions—and she would inherit all! This he presented to her as a magician might, with an exaggerated flourish, a phantasmagoric sight to a credulous audience; yet Norma Jeane could only squirm in her seat and murmur, deeply embarrassed, “Oh, thank you, Mr. Shinn!—I mean, Isaac. But I couldn’t do such a thing, you know. I just c-couldn’t.”

  “And why not?”

  “Oh, I—I couldn’t be the one to, the one to—oh, you know, hurt your f-family. Your real family.”

  “And why not?”

  In the face of such aggression, Norma Jeane suddenly laughed. Then blushed furiously. Then said, soberly, “I l-love you, but I—I’m not in love with you.”

  There. It was said. In the movie, it would have been said sadly but with eloquence. In Mr. Shinn’s office, it was uttered in a rush of shamed speech. Shinn said, “Hell. I can love enough for us both, sweetheart. Try me.” His tone was jocular but each knew he was deadly serious.

  With unconscious cruelty Norma Jeane blurted out, “Oh, but—that still wouldn’t be enough, Mr. Shinn.”

  “Touché!” Shinn clowned, clutching at his heart as if he were having a heart attack.

  Norma Jeane winced. This wasn’t funny! But so like Hollywood people, who played at the emotions they truly felt. Or maybe the emotions they truly felt could only be expressed in play? Everyone knew that I. E. Shinn had a cardiac condition.

  I can’t marry you just to keep you alive, can I?

  Must I?

  The Fair Princess was only a Beggar Maid. Rumpelstiltskin might clap his hands and she’d vanish.

  During the course of this conversation, neither Norma Jeane nor Shinn would allude to Norma Jeane’s secret lover V, whom she hoped to marry soon. Oh, soon!

  It was true, Norma Jeane didn’t love V with the abandon and desperation with which she’d loved Cass Chaplin. But maybe that was a good thing. She loved V with her saner emotions.

  Once V’s divorce was finally settled. Once his vicious ex-wife decided she’d sucked enough of his bone marrow.

  Exactly what Shinn knew of Norma Jeane and V, Norma Jeane couldn’t be sure. She’d confided in him as her agent and friend—to a degree. (She hadn’t confided in him that she’d swallowed an almost-full bottle of Cass’s barbiturates but got sick to her stomach and vomited them back up again, a slimy bilious paste, the morning after the night of Cass’s betrayal.) Norma Jeane had the uneasy sense that, being I. E. Shinn, he might know more about V and herself than she herself knew, for he had spies reporting to him on his favored clients. Yet he would not speak of V as he’d spoken so disparagingly and insul
tingly of Charlie Chaplin, Jr., because he liked and admired him as a “good, decent Hollywood citizen, a guy who’d paid his dues.” V had been a strong box-office attraction of the forties and was still a leading man in the fifties, in some quarters at least. V wasn’t Tyrone Power and he wasn’t Robert Taylor and he certainly wasn’t Clark Gable or John Garfield, but he was a solid, reliable talent, a ruggedly handsome freckled-boy face known to millions of moviegoing Americans.

  I love him. I mean to marry him.

  He has said he adores me.

  Shinn brought his pudgy dwarf fist down on his desktop, hard. “Your mind’s drifting, Norma Jeane. I’m on.”

  “I’m s-sorry.”

  “I realize you don’t ‘l-love’ me, sweetheart, in quite that way. But there are other ways.” Shinn spoke delicately now, choosing his words with care. “So long as you respect me, as I think you do—”

  “Oh, Mr. Shinn! Of course.”

  “And trust me—”

  “Oh, yes!”

  “And so long as you know that I have your best interests at heart—”

  “Oh, yes.”

  “We would have a strong unshakable foundation for a marriage. Plus the prenuptial agreement.”

  Norma Jeane hesitated. She was like a dazed ewe being herded expertly toward the pen. Balking just at the entrance.

  “But I—I can only marry for l-love. Not for money.”

  Shinn said sharply, “Norma Jeane! God damn, you haven’t been listening. Didn’t Huston teach you to listen to your co-actors? To concentrate? Your facial expression and your posture signal you’re only just ‘indicating’—you aren’t feeling. In which case, how the hell d’you know what you honestly feel?” What a question! Shinn pulled such tactics often with his clients. He assumed the director’s role, analyzing, assigning motives. You couldn’t quarrel with him. His eyes were tawny coals. Norma Jeane felt a sensation of falling, vertigo.

  Better to give in. Say yes. Whatever he wishes. The magic knowledge is his. He is your true father.