Blonde

by Joyce Carol Oates

  It was Norma Jeane who cheered the boys up when they needed cheering, which was a frequent phenomenon after their long antic nights and manic days. After Eddy G’s car crash, in a borrowed Jaguar. After Cass’s blood-platelet count dropped to an alarming low and he had to be hospitalized for three hellish days. After Eddy G, cast as Horatio in a local production of Hamlet and much praised by the L.A. press, woke one afternoon to his mind “struck blank—like somebody’d hosed it down” and could not make that evening’s performance or any performance following. After Cass, cast in a M-G-M musical in a chorus-boy role, broke his ankle during the first week of rehearsals—“Don’t hand me any Freudian bullshit, this was an accident.” Norma Jeane nursed them, and Norma Jeane listened to them. Sometimes not hearing what they said. Their aggrieved insulting words. For perhaps it matters less what people say than that they speak to you in earnest and without subterfuge, clutching your hand, gazing into your eyes. “Oh, Norma. I guess I do love you.” Eddy G, his spoiled-boy face suddenly crinkling like an infant’s on the verge of tears. “I’m jealous of you and Cass. I’m jealous of you and anybody who looks at you. If I could love any w-woman, it would be you.” And there was dreamy-eyed Cass, Norma Jeane’s first true love. Those eyes. The most beautiful eyes of any man. She’d first glimpsed them when she was a child, a long-ago lost Norma Jeane struck with wonder by all that she encountered to which she could have given no name in her mother’s glamorous and mysterious life. “Norma? When you say you love me, when you look at me, even—who do you see, truly? Do you see him?”

  “No. Oh, no! I see only you.”

  How eloquent they were, how brilliantly articulate and funny and inspired, Cass Chaplin and Eddy G talking of their famous/infamous fathers. “Cronus fathers” Cass called them, white-faced with hatred. “Gobbling up their young.” (“But who is Cronus?” Norma Jeane asked Eddy G, not wanting Cass to know how uneducated she was, and Eddy G told her vaguely, “It’s some ancient king, I think. Or maybe, wait—it’s Greek for Jehovah. Yeah, Greek for God. I’m pretty sure.”) In Hollywood there were numerous children of celebrities, and a cruel enchantment hovered over most of them. Cass and Eddy G seemed to know them all. They were the bearers of glamorous names (“Flynn,” “Garfield,” “Barrymore,” “Swanson,” “Talmadge”) that weighed upon them like physical infirmities. They appeared stunted and immature, though their eyes were old. Already as young children they were versed in irony. Rarely were they surprised by acts of cruelty, including their own, but they could be moved to helpless tears by simple acts of kindness, generosity. “But don’t be nice to us,” Cass warned. Eddy agreed vehemently. “Yeah! Like feeding a cobra. I’d use a ten-foot stick on me, myself.” Norma Jeane pointed out, “But at least you two have fathers. You know who you are.” “That’s exactly the trouble,” Cass said irritably. “We knew who we were before we were born.” Eddy G said, “Cass and me, it’s a double curse—we’re juniors. Of men who never wanted us born.” Norma Jeane said, “How do you know they never wanted you to be born? You can’t trust your mothers to tell you the absolute truth. When love goes wrong and a couple gets divorced—” Both Cass and Eddy G snorted with derision. “Love! Are you serious? Fucking bullshit ‘love’ little Fishie is telling us.”

  Norma Jeane said, hurt, “I don’t like that name—Fish. I resent that.” “We resent you telling us what we should be feeling,” Cass said heatedly. “You never knew your father, so you’re free. You can invent yourself. And you’re doing a terrific job of it—‘Marilyn Monroe.’” Eddy G said, excited, “Right! You’re free.” He seized Norma Jeane’s hand in his impulsive boyish way and nearly cracked her fingers. “You don’t bear the name of the fucker who fucked you into existence. Your name is so totally phony: ‘Marilyn Monroe.’ I love it. Like you gave birth to yourself.” They were addressing her but ignoring her; yet Norma Jeane understood that, without her presence, they wouldn’t have been talking so seriously, just drinking or smoking dope. Cass declared loudly, “If I could give birth to myself, I’d be reborn. I’d be redeemed. The children of ‘the great’ can’t ever surprise themselves because everything we might do has already been done, better than we can do it.” He spoke not with bitterness but with an air of lofty resignation, like an actor reciting Shakespeare. “Right!” said Eddy G. “Any talent we might have, the old man has it better.” He laughed and nudged Cass in the ribs. “Of course, my old man is practically shit next to yours. Two-bit gangster flicks. Anybody can imitate him sneering. But Charlie Chaplin. There was a time, practically, that guy was king out here. And he sure made a bundle.” Cass said, “I’ve asked you not to talk about my father, God damn you. You know shit, about him and about me.” “Oh, fuck yourself, Cassie, what’s the big deal? I’m the kid my old man screamed at, when I cried and wet my pants; he’s yelling at my mother and I rushed him—I was five years old and already nuts—and he kicks me halfway across the room. My mother swore to it in divorce court, and there’s hospital X-rays to corroborate her testimony.” “J had to testify in divorce court. My mother was too sick-drunk.” “Your mother? What about my mother?” “At least your mother isn’t crazy.” “Are you serious? You don’t know shit about my mother.”

  So they quarreled, hotly, peevishly, like brothers; Norma Jeane tried to reason with them, like June Allyson in one of those talky forties movies where reason might prevail, if you were also pretty and incensed. “Cass, Eddy! I don’t understand you. Either of you. Eddy, you’re an excellent actor, I’ve seen you. You’re inspired by serious roles, poetic language: Shakespeare, Chekhov. Not movies but the stage. That’s the true test of acting. Only you give up too soon. You want too much from yourself, and you give up. And you, Cass—you’re a wonderful dancer.” Norma Jeane was speaking more and more rapidly as the men stared at her in silent contempt. Their faces were as empty of expression as those of tombstone effigies. “You’re like music in motion, Cass! Like Fred Astaire. And the dances you’ve composed are beautiful. Both of you are—”

  Norma Jeane was appalled by the hollowness of her words, though she knew them to be legitimate. She wasn’t exaggerating! In certain quarters, the sons of Charlie Chaplin and Edward G. Robinson were known to be “gifted”—but “damned.” For merely “gifted” is of no use without other qualities of character: courage, ambition, perseverance, faith in yourself. Fatally, both young men lacked these qualities. Eddy G said, sneering, “So I have a knack for acting? What’s ‘acting,’ baby? It’s shit. They’re all shits. My old man and his old man, the fucking Barrymores, fucking Garbo. It’s faces, that’s all. Asshole audiences look at these faces and some kind of shit magic occurs. You got the right bone structure, anybody can act.” Cass intervened. “Hey, Eddy. That’s shit.” “Like hell it’s shit!” Eddy G said fiercely. “Anybody can act. It’s a fraud. It’s a joke. You get up there, a director coaches you, you say the lines. Anybody can do it.” Cass said, “Sure. Anybody can do anything. But not well.” Eddy G turned with sudden cruelty to Norma Jeane. “Tell him, baby. You’re an ‘actress.’ It’s a crock, right? Without your sweet ass and tits, you’d be nothing and you know it.”

  Not that night but another. This night. Welcoming Norma Jeane home from Niagara Falls. To what had been her “new” apartment now ravaged and ill-smelling well before the Château Mouton-Rothschild smashed on the living room floor and was too much trouble to mop up. But there was a bottle of French champagne, and this time Cass insisted upon opening the bottle. He filled their glasses to the brim; champagne bubbled over their fingers. A ticklish sensation! Cass and Eddy G gallantly lifted their glasses in homage—“Our Norma back with us. Where she belongs.” “Our ‘Marilyn,’ who’s so gorgeous.” “And who can act.” “Oh, yeah! Like she can fuck.” The men laughed, though not meanly. Norma Jeane drank and laughed with them. From their not-so-veiled allusions she understood that, sexually, she wasn’t much. Maybe most men preferred other men, or would if they had the option; obviously a man knows what another man wants, and Norma Jeane
hadn’t a clue. So she laughed and drank. It was wiser to laugh than to cry. Wiser to laugh than to think. Wiser to laugh than not to laugh. Men loved her when she laughed, even Cass and Eddy G, who saw her up close, without makeup. Champagne was her favorite drink. Wine gave her a headache but champagne aerated her brain, lifted her heart. She was so sad sometimes! Though she’d put her guts into “Rose Loomis” and she seemed to know (without vanity, without elation) that Niagara would be a hit because of her, and her career would be launched if she wished it, yet she felt so sad sometimes. . . . Well, champagne was her wedding drink. She told Cass and Eddy G about that wedding, and they listened and laughed. They were haters-of-marriage, haters-of-weddings; this was delicious to them. The borrowed twice-soiled wedding garments. The pain she’d endured during her first “intercourse.” Her eager young husband heaving, pumping, sweating, groaning, snorting, and gasping. Through their brief marriage, the slippery-medicinal odor of condoms. And ol’ Hirohito grinning atop the radio console—“Sometimes the only person I had to talk to all day.” And Norma Jeane was all the time having her period, it seemed. Poor Bucky Glazer! He’d deserved a better wife than Norma Jeane. She hoped, now that he was remarried, he’d found a woman who didn’t have practically a miscarriage every time she had her period.

  Why am I saying these terrible things?

  Anything to make men laugh.

  Cass led them outside onto the balcony. When had the sun disappeared? It was a vivid damp night, but which night? The city of Los Angeles sprawled below. To the north were hills, more sparsely lit. Part of the sky was cobbled in cloud and part was open, a gigantic crevice into which you might stare and stare. Norma Jeane had read that the universe was billions of years old and all that astrophysicists knew was that its age was forever being readjusted, moved back into “deep time.” Yet it had begun in a single nanosecond’s explosion out of—what? A particle so small it could not have been seen by the human eye. Yet, looking at the sky, you “saw” beauty in the stars. You “saw” constellations with human and animal figures in them, as if the stars, scattered through time and space, were on a single flat surface, like comics. Cass said, “There’s Gemini. See? Both Norma and I are Geminis. The ‘fated’ twins.”

  “Oh, where?”

  He pointed. Norma Jeane wasn’t sure that she saw, or even what she was supposed to be seeing. The sky was an immense jigsaw puzzle and she was missing too many pieces. Eddy G said impatiently, “I don’t see it. Where?”

  “They. The twins are they.”

  “What twins? This is so weird.”

  Months ago, Eddy G had told Norma Jeane and Cass that he, too, was a Gemini, born in June. He’d been eager to be identical with them. Now he seemed to have forgotten. Cass tried to point out the elusive constellation another time, and this time Norma Jeane and Eddy G saw, or believed they saw. Eddy said, “Stars! They’re overrated. They’re so far away, it’s hard to take them seriously. And their light is extinct by the time it reaches Earth.”

  “Not their light,” Cass corrected. “The stars themselves.”

  “Stars are light. That’s all they are.”

  “No. Stars have substance, originally. ‘Light’ can’t be generated out of nothing.”

  There was friction between the men. Eddy G wasn’t one to be corrected. Norma Jeane said, “And that’s true for human ‘stars’ too. They must be something, not just nothing. There must be substance to them.”

  Poor blundering Norma Jeane! Here was an allusion, however indirect and well intentioned, to her lovers’ monster fathers. Cass said with savage satisfaction, “The fact of a star is, it burns out. Celestial stars or human.”

  Eddy G giggled. “I’ll drink to that, baby.”

  Eddy G had brought the champagne bottle outside with them, resting it precariously on the narrow railing. He refilled their glasses. In the fresher air he seemed to have revived, which was typical of Eddy G in those days. “What the fuck is ‘Gemini,’ Cass? You said twins?”

  “Yes and no. The principle of the Gemini is that they aren’t two, essentially. They’re identical twins with a strange relationship to death.” He paused. Like any actor, he knew when to pause.

  Of the two men, Cass Chaplin was by far the better educated: he’d been sent by his distraught mother to a Jesuit boarding school, where he’d studied medieval theology, Latin, and Greek. He’d dropped out before graduation, or had possibly been expelled, or he’d had one of his several breakdowns. At the time of their first love affair, when Norma Jeane had loved him so passionately, she’d examined all his possessions she could get her hands on, without his knowing; she’d discovered in one of his shabby duffel bags a voluminous looseleaf journal titled GEMINI: MY LIFE IN (P)ART. It was filled with musical compositions, poetry, strikingly realistic drawings of human faces and figures. There were erotic studies of nudes, both female and male, making love to themselves, faces contorted with anguish or shame. But this is myself! Norma Jeane had thought. Since Charlie Chaplin, Sr., had been publicly interrogated by the House Un-American Activities Committee a few years before and pilloried in the daily press as a “Commie traitor,” and had fled into exile in Switzerland, it seemed to Norma Jeane that Cass had become more scattered in his energies; he was overly excitable and then depressed for days; he was as insomniac as she and required Nembutal to sleep; he was drinking more. (At least, unlike Eddy G, he wasn’t smoking the latest Hollywood rage, hashish.) It was months since he’d auditioned for any role. He wrote music and tore it up. Norma Jeane wasn’t supposed to know, but several mean-spirited acquaintances including her agent had taken pains to inform her that Cass Chaplin had been arrested and held overnight by Westwood police for public drunkenness and disturbing the peace. Making love with her, he was sometimes impotent; at these times, as Cass said, Eddy G would have to serve for them both.

  Which Eddy G, inexhaustible or seeming so, his cock a perpetual source of wonderment to his friends, was happy to do.

  Cass was saying, “The Gemini were twin brothers named Castor and Pollux. They were warriors and one of them, Castor, was killed. Pollux missed his brother so badly, he begged Jupiter, the king of the gods, to be permitted to give his own life as a ransom for his brother. Jupiter was moved to pity—sometimes, if you efface yourself enough and get them in the right mood, the old-bastard gods come through—and allowed Castor and Pollux both to live, but not at the same time. Castor lived one day in the heavens, while Pollux was in Hades, or hell; then Pollux lived one day in the heavens, while Castor was in hell. They alternated life and death but they didn’t see each other.”

  Eddy G snorted in derision. “Jesus, what crap! It’s not only loony, it’s banal as hell. It happens all the time.”

  Cass continued, speaking to Norma Jeane. “Then Jupiter took pity on them again. He rewarded their love for each other by placing them up there in the stars together. See? The Gemini. Forever.”

  Norma Jeane hadn’t yet seen the star pattern, really. But she raised her eyes upward, smiling. It was enough to know that the Gemini were there, wasn’t it? Did she have to see? “So the Gemini are twins in the sky, and they’re immortal! I always wondered—”

  Eddy G cut in. “And what’s it got to do with death? Or with us? I sure feel goddam human and mortal. I don’t feel like any fucking star in the sky.”

  The champagne bottle fell to the balcony floor and broke. It didn’t shatter as badly as the wine bottle and there wasn’t much liquid left. “Je-sus! Not again.” But Cass was laughing, and Eddy G was laughing. In the wink of an eye they were Abbott and Costello. Eddy G scooped up some of the broken pieces of glass and brayed, his expression drunken-beatific, “Blood vow! Let’s make a blood vow! We’re the Gemini, the three of us. Like twins but there’s three.”

  Cass said excitedly, his words slurred, “That’s a—what-d’you-call-it—triangle. A triangle can’t be divided in two, like two can be.”

  Eddy G said, “Never forget one another, OK? The three of us? Always love one anoth
er like right now.”

  Cass said, panting, “And die for each other, if needed!”

  Before Norma Jeane could stop him, Eddy G raked a piece of glass across the inside of his forearm. Blood immediately sprang out. Cass took the glass from him and raked it across the inside of his forearm; even more blood sprang out. Norma Jeane, deeply moved, unhesitatingly took the glass from Cass and with shaky fingers drew it across her forearm. The pain was swift and sharp and potent.

  “Always love one another!”

  “‘The Gemini’—always!”

  “‘In sickness and in health—’”

  “‘For richer or poorer—’”

  “‘Till death do we part.’”

  They pressed their bleeding arms together like drunken children. They were breathless, laughing. The sweetest act of love Norma Jeane had ever known! Deep in his throat, mock-gangster-style, Eddy G growled, “Till death? Hell, beyond death! Beyond death do we part.” They stumbled together, kissing. Their hands pulled at one another’s already disheveled and stained clothing. They were on their knees and would have made clumsy love there on the balcony except a glass shard pierced Cass’s thigh—“Je-sus!” They stumbled back inside the apartment, arms around one another, and fell together, as yearning and crazed for affection as puppies, onto Norma Jeane’s long-unmade bed, where in a delirium of passion they would make love intermittently through the night.

  That night I believed Baby must be conceived. But it was not so.

  The Survivor. The premiere of Niagara! For some, a historic night. Even before the lights went down, everybody knew. Cass and I couldn’t sit with Norma; she was with The Studio bosses up front. They hated her guts, and she hated theirs. But that’s how things were in Hollywood in those days. They’d got her under contract for $1,000 a week. She’d signed when she was desperate and would be fighting them for years. In the end, the bosses won. The night of Niagara, this cruel bastard Z is seated beside Norma but getting up to meet people, shake hands, he’s blinking like he doesn’t get it, he wants to get it but he can’t. A man convinced he’s got a sow’s ear, and people are acting like he’s got a silk purse instead! Can’t figure it out. All through the career of “Marilyn Monroe,” which would make millions for The Studio and hardly a fraction of that for her, these guys can’t figure it out. That night, there was “Marilyn” in a red-sequin dress with bare shoulders, mostly bare breasts, a costume they’d sewn her into, entering the theater and walking down the aisle in these mincing baby steps; she’s being gaped and gawked at like a freak. Five hours was the minimum the makeup people spent on her for these occasions. Like preparing a cadaver, Norma said. And I can see she’s looking around for Cass and me (up in the balcony) and can’t find us. And she’s this lost little girl in a whore costume. And anyway gorgeous. I poked Cass and said, “That’s our Norma.” It was like we could’ve bawled.