Blonde

by Joyce Carol Oates

  The lights go down, and Niagara begins, with a scene at the Falls. And a man looking small and powerless beside all that rushing, roaring water. Then switch to Norma—I mean “Rose.” In bed. Where else? Naked under just a sheet. She’s awake, but pretending she’s asleep. Through the movie this “Rose Loomis” does one thing and pretends another and the audience is in on it but not her dumb-fuck husband. The guy is some kind of war-combat psycho, a pathetic case, but the audience doesn’t give a shit about him. Everybody’s always waiting for “Rose” to come back on-screen. She’s just luscious and over-the-top evil. She’s way beyond Lana Turner. You’d swear, remembering Niagara, there was at least one complete nude scene. In 1953? You just can’t take your eyes off her. Cass and me, we’d see Niagara a dozen times. . . . It’s because Rose is us. In our souls. She’s cruel in ways we are. She’s without any morality, like an infant. She’s always looking at herself in the mirror just like we’d look if we looked like her. She’s stroking herself, she’s in love with herself. Like all of us! But it’s supposed to be bad. In those bed scenes, you’d wonder how they got past the censor. She’s got her knees spread, and you swear you can see her blond cunt through the sheet. You’re just mesmerized, staring. And her face, that’s a special kind of cunt. The wet red mouth, the tongue. When Rose dies, the movie dies. But her dying is so beautiful, I almost came in my pants. And this is a girl, this is Norma, who truly can’t fuck worth shit, you had to do ninety-five percent of the work, and she’s going ‘Oh-oh-oh!’ like it’s acting class and this is some line she’s memorized. But in the movies, “Marilyn” knew. It was like only the camera knew how to make love to her the way she needed, and we were voyeurs just hypnotized watching.

  About midway in the movie, when Rose is mocking and laughing at her husband for not being able to get it up, Cassie says to me, “This isn’t Norma. This is not our little Fishie.” And the hell of it was, it wasn’t. This Rose was a total stranger. This was nobody we’d laid eyes on before. Out here, people thought “Marilyn Monroe” was just playing herself. Every movie she made, no matter that it was different from the others, they’d find a way to dismiss it—“That broad can’t act. She’s just playing herself.” But she was a born actress. She was a genius, if you believe in genius. Because Norma didn’t have a clue who she was, and she had to fill this emptiness in her. Each time she went out, she had to invent her soul. Other people, we’re just as empty; maybe in fact everybody’s soul is empty, but Norma was the one to know it.

  That was Norma Jeane Baker when we knew her. When we were “the Gemini.” Before she betrayed us—or maybe we betrayed her. A long time ago, when we were young.

  Happiness! Not the morning after Niagara opened but a few mornings later. And Norma Jeane, who’d been sleeping badly for months, woke after a night of deep restful sleep. A night without Cass’s magic tablets. She’d had astonishing dreams. Skyrocket dreams! Rose was dead but Norma Jeane in these dreams was alive. “The promise was, I would always be alive.” And she was a healthy alive woman, tall and strong and as quick-moving in her body as an athlete. Not a bleeding-draining cut of humiliation between her legs but the curious poking-out sexual organ. “What is this? What am I? I’m so happy.” In the dream she had permission to laugh. To run along the beach barefoot and laughing. (Was this Venice Beach? But not Venice Beach now. Venice Beach of long ago.) Grandma Della was there, wind whipping her hair. What a loud belly laugh Grandma Della had, Norma Jeane had almost forgotten. The thing between Norma Jeane’s legs, maybe Grandma Della had one too? It wasn’t a man’s cock, nor was it a woman’s vagina exactly. It was just—“What I am. Norma Jeane.”

  She woke laughing. It was early: 6:20 A.M. It had been a night she’d slept alone. Solitary in her bed and she’d missed the men until falling asleep, where she hadn’t missed them at all. Cass and Eddy G hadn’t come home from—where? A house party out in Malibu, or maybe Pacific Palisades. Norma Jeane hadn’t been invited. Or maybe she’d been invited and said no. No no no! She wanted to sleep, and she wanted to sleep without magic tablets, and she’d slept, now waking early and a strange passionate strength suffusing her body. So happy! She splashed her face with cold water and did acting-class warm-up exercises. Then dancer’s warm-up exercises. How like a foal her body felt, yearning to run! She put on pedal pushers, leg warmers, a baggy sweatshirt. Tied her hair into two stiff, short braids. (Hadn’t Aunt Elsie braided her hair for one of Norma Jeane’s races at Van Nuys? To keep her long curly-kinky hair from getting in her face.) And out she went to run.

  The narrow palm-lined streets were almost deserted, though on Beverly Boulevard traffic was beginning. Since the opening of Niagara her agent telephoned her constantly. The Studio telephoned her constantly. Interviews, photo sessions, more publicity. There were movie posters of “Rose Loomis” everywhere in America. There were the current covers of PhotoLife and Inside Hollywood. Reviews were read excitedly to her over the phone and the name “Marilyn Monroe,” so repeated, came to sound unreal, the name of a preposterous stranger, a name to which other preposterous words accrued, and these words, too, the invention of strangers.

  A bombshell of a performance. A raw disturbing primitive talent. A frankly sexy no-holds-barred female like no other since Jean Harlow. The elemental power of nature. A serpentine performance. You hate Marilyn Monroe—but you admire her. Dazzling, brilliant! Sexy, seductive! Move over, Lana Turner! Shocking near-nudity. Compelling. Repulsive. More lascivious than Hedy Lamarr. Theda Bara. If Niagara Falls is one of the seven wonders of the world, Marilyn Monroe is the eighth.

  Listening to this, Norma Jeane became restless. Paced about holding the receiver loosely against her ear. She laughed nervously. She lifted a ten-pound dumbbell with her free hand. Stared into a mirror, out of which stared back at her, timid and uncomprehending, the girl in the long beautiful beveled mirror at Mayer’s Pharmacy. Or suddenly she bent, swayed, touched her toes rapidly ten times in a row. Twenty times. These words of praise! And the name “Marilyn Monroe” like a litany. Norma Jeane was uneasy, knowing these words recited in triumph by her agent and by studio people might be any words.

  These words of strangers possessing the power to determine her life. How like the wind they were, ceaselessly blowing. The Santa Ana wind. Yet there must come a time when even the wind would stop blowing, and these words would vanish, and—then? Norma Jeane told her agent, “But there isn’t anyone there. ‘Marilyn Monroe.’ Don’t they know? It was ‘Rose Loomis’ and she was just—on the screen. And she’s d-dead. And it’s over.” It was her agent’s habit to laugh at Norma Jeane’s naïveté as if she meant to be witty. He said reprovingly, “Marilyn. My dear. It is not over.”

  For forty rapturous minutes she ran. When, panting, her face gleaming with sweat, she turned into the front walk of her apartment building, there were two young men making their way unsteadily to the front entrance. “Cass! Eddy G!” They were disheveled and unshaven and pasty-skinned. Cass’s expensive dove-gray silk shirt was unbuttoned to the waist and stained with a urine-colored liquid. Eddy G’s hair lifted in snaky-manic tufts. There was a fresh scratch beside his ear, curved like a red hook in the flesh. The men stared appalled at Norma Jeane in her UCLA sweatshirt, pedal pushers and sneakers, and braided hair, the healthy sweat sheen on her face. Eddy G whimpered, “Norma! Are you up? This hour?” Cass winced as if his head was pounding. Reproachfully he said, “Jesus! You’re happy.” Norma Jeane laughed, she loved them so. She hugged them, and kissed their scratchy cheeks, and ignored their reeking smells. She said, “Oh, I am! I am happy! My heart could burst almost, I’m so happy. Know why? Because now there’s Rose, people can see it isn’t me. People in Hollywood. They can say, ‘She created Rose, look how different she is. She’s an actress!’”

  Pregnant! Under the name “Gladys Pirig” she’d been seeing a gynecologist-obstetrician in a part of Los Angeles as remote from Hollywood as if it were in another city. When he told her, yes, she was pregnant, she began to cry. “Oh, I kn
ew. I guess I knew. I’ve been feeling so swollen. And so happy.” The doctor, mishearing, seeing only this young blond woman’s tears, reached for her hand, which was ringless. “My dear. You’re healthy. It will be all right.” Norma Jeane drew away, offended. “I’m happy, I said! I want to have this baby. My husband and I have been t-trying for years.”

  Immediately she called Cass Chaplin and Eddy G. She would spend most of the afternoon trying to track these two down. She was so excited she forgot a luncheon appointment with a producer, and she forgot an interview scheduled with a New York journalist and appointments at The Studio. She would postpone her next film, which was to be a musical. She could make money being photographed for magazines for a while. How many months before she showed? Three? Four? There was Sir! pleading for a cover photo, and now their fee was a cool $1,000. There was Swank, and there was Esquire. There was a new magazine, Playboy; the editor wanted “Marilyn Monroe” for the first cover. After that, she would let her hair grow out to its natural color. “If they keep bleaching it like this, it will be ruined.” The wild thought came to her: she would call Mrs. Glazer! Oh, she missed Bucky’s mother! It was Mrs. Glazer she’d adored, not Bucky. And Elsie Pirig. “Aunt Elsie, guess what? I’m pregnant.” Though that woman had betrayed her, still Norma Jeane missed her and forgave her. “Once you have a baby you’re a woman forever. That makes you one of them, they can’t deny you.” Thoughts were flying swift as bats in her head. She couldn’t sort them out. Almost, she might have believed they weren’t her thoughts. And wasn’t there someone she was forgetting? Someone she should telephone?

  “But who? I can almost see her face.”

  The Celebration. That night she met Cass and Eddy G at their neighborhood Italian restaurant on Beverly Boulevard. A place where “Marilyn” was rarely recognized. And in her ragtag clothes, hair hidden beneath a scarf, no makeup, and practically no eyebrows, Norma Jeane was safe. Eddy G said, sliding into the booth beside her, kissing her cheek with widened eyes, “Hey, Norma, what’s it? You look—” And Cass said, sliding into the booth across from her, grinning and in dread, “—fraught.” Norma Jeane had been planning to whisper into their ears, each in turn, Guess what! Good news! You’re going to be a father. Instead, she burst into tears. She took their limp stunned hands in hers and kissed the hands in turn, wordless, and the men were frightened of her, exchanging a glance between themselves. Cass would say afterward, sure he’d known, he’d known Norma must be pregnant, she hadn’t had a period recently, and her periods were so painful, such a massive physical assault upon the poor girl, and a trial to any lover; of course he’d known, or must have known. Eddy G would profess absolute shock. And yet—surprise? How could he be surprised? With all their lovemaking, and his inexhaustible flaring-up cock in particular? For sure, he was the father. It wasn’t a distinction he maybe wished for, not one hundred percent, though there was a thrill of pride in it, he couldn’t deny. A baby of Edward G. Robinson, Jr.’s, with one of the most beautiful women in Hollywood! Both men knew how Norma yearned for a baby; this was one of Norma’s endearing traits for as long as they’d known her, how naive, how sweet, what faith she had in the redeeming power of “being a mother,” though her own mother was a certified nut who’d abandoned her and (the rumor circulated through Hollywood) had once tried to kill her. Both men knew how Norma yearned to be what she believed to be normal. And if a baby didn’t make you normal, what would?

  So that evening when Norma began to cry and kissed their hands, wetting their hands with her tears, Cass said quickly, with as much sympathy as he could manage, “Oh, Norma. You think you are?” And Eddy G said, voice cracking like a teenager’s, “This is what I think it is? Ohhhh, man.” Both were grinning. Panic clutched at their hearts. They were not yet thirty, and still boys. So long had they been out-of-work actors, even simulating emotions came clumsily to them. In their exchanged glance was the knowledge that, with this kooky girl, there would be no abortion, no easy way out. Not just that Norma wanted a baby, she’d many times spoken with horror of abortion. In her sweet dumb heart she was a Christian Scientist. She believed much of that crap, or wanted to believe. So there would be no abortion; it was pointless to bring up the subject. If her Gemini lovers had been planning that “Marilyn Monroe” would be making serious money soon, this was an upset in their plans. In their fantasy travels, a definite roadblock. But, if they played their cards right, only just temporary.

  Norma Jeane fixed her beautiful anxious glistening eyes on theirs.

  “Are you h-happy for me? I mean—us? The Gemini?”

  What could they say but yes.

  The Stuffed Tiger. An episode you’d think must be a dream. Yet it was real. It was real, and shared by the Gemini. Though drunk on red wine (she’d had only two or three glasses while the men finished off two bottles), Norma Jeane wouldn’t recall it clearly afterward. She, Cass, and Eddy G had been celebrating the news, giddy and excited and tearful, and around midnight they’d left the restaurant, and up the street and around a corner they passed a darkened toy shop, a small shop they must have passed many times before without noticing, unless Norma Jeane had paused to gaze wistfully into the front window now and then at the exquisite handmade stuffed animals, a big family of dolls, carved alphabet blocks, toy trains, trucks, automobiles, but neither Cass nor Eddy G had ever seen the toy shop before, they’d have sworn, and what a coincidence, Cass declared, that night of all nights—“It’s the movies. The kind of thing that happens only in the movies.” Drinking didn’t dull Cass’s senses but made him sharper, more lucid; of that, he was convinced. Eddy G said, growling out of the corner of his mouth, “The movies! Everything we live, the fuckers have got to it first!” Norma Jeane, who rarely drank and vowed not to drink again during her pregnancy, swayed, leaning against the window. Her breath steamed the glass into an exclamatory O. Was it possible she was actually seeing what she saw? “Oh!—that little tiger. I had one like him once. A long time ago when I was a girl.” (Was this so? The little stuffed tiger toy, Norma Jeane’s lost Christmas present at the orphanage? Or was this tiger larger, fuzzier, more expensive? And there was the tiger Norma Jeane had sewn for little Irina out of dime-store materials.) With the swift brutal agility for which Edward G. Robinson’s son was known in the Hollywood demimonde, Eddy G swung his fist against the window and smashed it, and after the broken glass rained down, and Norma Jeane and Cass stood staring in astonishment, calmly he reached inside for the toy.

  “Baby’s first plaything. Cute!”

  The Guilty Reparation. Late next morning, stricken with guilt and feeling headachy and hung over and slightly nauseated, Norma Jeane returned to the toy shop. “Maybe it was a dream? It didn’t seem real.” In her shoulder bag was the little stuffed tiger. She hadn’t been wanting to think that the store window had truly been broken as a consequence of her impulsive remark. But there was no mistaking the fact that Eddy G had handed her the toy, and she’d slept with it under her pillow that night, and it was in her shoulder bag right now. “But what can I do? I can’t just give it back.”

  There was the toy shop! HENRI’S TOYS. In smaller letters, Handmade Toys My Specialty. It was almost a miniature store, the facade measuring no more than twelve feet across. And how wounded it looked, a section of its display window broken and awkwardly replaced with plywood. Norma Jeane peered through the glass and saw with dread that, yes, the store was open. Henri was inside, at the counter. Shyly she pushed the door open and a bell tinkled overhead. Henri glanced up at her with mournful eyes. The shop was dimly lighted like the interior room of a castle. The air smelled of a long-ago time. Nearby on Beverly Boulevard there was a heavy midday traffic but in HENRI’S TOYS there was a restful, soothing calm.

  “Yes, miss? Can I help you?” It was a tenor voice, melancholy yet unaccusing. He won’t blame me. He isn’t one to judge.

  Norma Jeane said, with childlike emotion, stammering, “I—I—I’m so sorry, Mr. Henri! It looks like somebody broke your window? Was it
a robbery? Was it just last night? I live right around here and I—hadn’t seen the window broken before.”

  Mournful-eyed Henri, a man of no age Norma Jeane might have guessed, except he wasn’t young, smiled a bitter little smile. “Yes, miss. It was last night. I have no burglar alarm. Always I’ve thought, who would steal toys?”

  Norma Jeane clutched her shoulder bag, trembling. She said, “I h-hope they didn’t take much?”

  Henri said with muted anger, “I’m afraid, yes, they did.”

  “I’m so sorry.”

  “As many toys as they could carry, and the most expensive. A hand-carved train, a life-size doll. A hand-painted doll with human hair.”