Blonde

by Joyce Carol Oates

  Instead, she’d burst into tears. Wetting the front of her navy-blue rayon housewife dress.

  An actress draws upon all she’s lived. Her entire life. Her childhood especially. Though you don’t remember childhood. You think you do but you don’t, really! And even when you’re older, in adolescence. Much of memory is dreams, I think. Improvising. Returning to the past, to change it.

  But, yes! I was happy. People were good to me. Even my mother who got sick and couldn’t be a mother to me, and my foster mother in Van Nuys. One day when I’m a serious actress in plays by Clifford Odets, Tennessee Williams, Arthur Miller, I will pay homage to these people. Their humanity.

  “Oh. That’s me?”

  The surprise was, The Seven-Year Itch was so funny. The Girl Upstairs who was Tom Ewell’s summer-fantasy girl was funny. Norma Jeane began to relax. She pressed her knuckles against her mouth, she laughed. Why, she’d been so dreading this, and dreading the sight of herself, it was a revelation to her: what Hollywood people and what the critics had said was true.

  Marilyn Monroe is a natural comedienne. Like Jean Harlow in her sexy-flaunting roles. Like a little-girl Mae West.

  This was the first time she’d seen The Seven-Year Itch since the Hollywood premiere in June, when she’d lapsed into a panic-fugue state even before the film began, or maybe she’d been exhausted by melancholy, a combination of Nembutal and champagne and the strain of the divorce, and she’d seen the giant Technicolor screen in a haze as if underwater hearing laughter around her buzzing in her ears and she’d had to fight sleep in her gorgeous stitched-in body in a strapless evening gown so tight in the bust she could barely breathe, her brain deprived of oxygen, and her eyes glazing over inside the ceramic Marilyn mask her makeup man Whitey had sculpted over her sick sallow skin and bruised soul. Made to rise to her feet at the end of the movie, she and her co-star Tom Ewell blinking smiling into an acclaiming audience, she’d only just managed not to faint and afterward would remember little of the evening except she’d gotten through it. And during filming in New York City when her marriage was disintegrating like wetted tissue and afterward in Hollywood at The Studio she’d refused to attend the daily rushes for fear she might see something that would have made it impossible for her to continue. For the Ex-Athlete’s judgment was harsh and rang in her ears: Showing yourself like that. Your body. You promised this movie would be different. You’re disgusting.

  But, no! The Girl Upstairs wasn’t disgusting. Tom Ewell wasn’t disgusting. Their mock-love story was just. . . comedy. And what’s comedy but life seen as laughs, not tears? What’s comedy but refusing to cry, and laughing instead? Was laughter always inferior to tears? Was comedy always inferior to tragedy? Any comedy, any tragedy? “Maybe I am an actress already? A comedienne?” You had to think, seeing Marilyn Monroe on the screen in this frothy movie, that she was an accomplished actress, fully in control, stealing most scenes with her baby-breathy voice, the wriggly movements of her voluptuous body, her little-girl-innocent face. You perceived The Girl Upstairs through the yearning eyes of Tom Ewell so you laughed at him in his fumbling adolescent fantasy of The Girl who was so near to being won, yet so far; so seemingly available for sex, yet elusive. And this was funny! Thwarted lust in an adult man, a married man, a would-be adulterer, was funny. The audience at the Sepulveda was laughing, and Norma Jeane was laughing. And how good to laugh with others. It makes us human together. I don’t want to be alone.

  Almost, Norma Jeane felt a thrill of pride. There was her blond-actress self on the screen, making strangers relax, laugh, and feel good about human folly, and about themselves. Why had her former husband scorned her talent? And her? He was wrong. I’m not disgusting. This is comedy. This is art.

  Yet not everybody in the movie house was laughing. Here and there scattered through the rows were solitary men, staring up at the screen with fixed-grin grimaces. One, fattish and middle-aged, a wedge of flesh like a misplaced chin at the nape of his neck, had slipped into a seat close by Norma Jeane, and he was glancing at Norma Jeane even as his attention was fixed upon Marilyn Monroe on screen; not recognizing her, maybe not even seeing her, except as a young woman seated by herself only a few feet from him in a darkened movie house. He’s bringing me into his Marilyn fantasy. He wants me to see what he’s doing with his hands.

  Quickly Norma Jeane rose from her seat and took another seat several rows behind and to the side of the solitary man. Near a young married couple who were laughing at the movie. Oh, she felt despoiled! Truly, that was disgusting. Or was it just pathetic. The solitary man with the fleshy neck didn’t glance back at Norma Jeane but continued with whatever it was he was doing, slyly, surreptitiously, hunched down in his seat. Norma Jeane ignored him and fixed her attention upon the movie. She tried to recall what she’d been feeling—pride? A sense of accomplishment? Maybe the positive reviews hadn’t been exaggerated, Marilyn Monroe really was a gifted comedienne? Maybe I’m not a failure. No reason to give up. To punish myself. Yet even as she was smiling at The Girl Upstairs as perceived by sex-starved Tom Ewell, a summer bachelor, Norma Jeane was distracted, thinking how many times as a girl she’d had to move her seat in a theater when she’d come alone to the movies. Gazing with rapture at the Fair Princess and the Dark Prince, she’d had to realize that others, solitary men, were gazing at her. Here in the Sepulveda and elsewhere. Oh, Grauman’s on Hollywood Boulevard had been the worst! When she’d been a little girl and lived on Highland Avenue. Lone men in the late-afternoon movies, their eyes snatching greedily at her out of the dark. As if they couldn’t believe their good fortune, a little girl unaccompanied at the movies. Gladys warned her not to sit “too close” to men in the theater, but the problem had been: men moved their seats to be close to her. How many times could she change her seat, as a child? Once, at Grauman’s, an usher had shone his flashlight on her and scolded her. Gladys had warned her never to speak to men, but what if men spoke to her? She’d instructed her always to walk near the curb on her way home. Out by the streetlights. So I’d be seen. If somebody tried to grab me. Was that it?

  Norma Jeane settled into her seat, laughing with others, even as she became aware of another solitary man to her left, only two seats away. Why hadn’t she noticed him before sitting down? He leaned forward abruptly to peer at her. A man of youngish middle age with round winking glasses and a receding chin, rather boyish features that reminded her of—Mr. Haring? Her English teacher? But he’d lost most of his fair fine hair. Norma Jeane didn’t dare look too closely. If this was Mr. Haring, they’d discover each other at the end of the movie; if not, not. Norma Jeane forced herself to smile at the screen in preparation for the next scene. This was the most famous scene in the movie: The Girl Upstairs out on the street, in her ivory crepe sundress with the tight halter top, bare legs, and high-heeled shoes on the subway grating as air rushes up to lift her skirt and traffic on Lexington Avenue virtually stops. Yet the movie scene, Norma Jeane knew, was very different from the publicity stills. In order not to be condemned by the Catholic Legion of Decency, The Studio had censored the scene considerably: The Girl’s skirt is lifted only to about knee level, and there are no flashes of the notorious white panties. This was the single scene for which audiences waited, having seen sensational photos reproduced worldwide, the flaring white skirt, the blond head flung back, the dreamy-happy smile of ecstasy, as if the very air were making love to The Girl or, somehow, her hands hidden in her floating dress, she were making love to herself: a pose seen from the front, from the side, from the rear, in three-quarters profile, as many camera angles you might think as there were eyes to perceive her. Norma Jeane waited for this scene, conscious of the solitary man in the seat close by. Could it be Mr. Haring? But hadn’t Mr. Haring been married? (Maybe he was divorced, and living alone in Van Nuys?) Would he know her? He must recognize “Marilyn” in the movie, his former student, but would he recognize her? It had been so many years. She wasn’t a girl now.

  So strange! The Girl U
pstairs seemed a separate being from the desperately worried, anxious actress who’d portrayed her. Norma Jeane remembered insomniac nights even when she’d taken Nembutal. And Doc Bob prescribed Benzedrine to wake her up. She’d been sick with worry about her marriage. The Ex-Athlete had insisted upon visiting the set, though he hated moviemaking, the tedium of it and what he called, with mind-numbing literalness, “how phony it all is.” As if he’d thought movies were real? Actors spoke their own spontaneous lines, and didn’t follow scripts? Norma Jeane hadn’t wanted to think that she’d possibly married an ignorant man, not just an ignorant and uninformed man but a stupid man; no, she truly loved her husband, and certainly he loved her. She was the center of his emotional life. His very manhood depended upon her. So she had to perform The Girl, she had to perform frothy comedy, quicksilver comedy, even as her husband stood staring, silent and glowering, at the edge of the set. He’d made everybody uncomfortable but there he was, rarely missing a day, though in his professional life as a promoter of baseball and a so-called consultant to sports equipment manufacturers, he should have had plenty to do. Nervous in his presence, Marilyn asked to do retake after retake. “I want to get it right. I know I can do better.” The director had been exasperated by her sometimes, but he’d always given in. For no matter how good a scene is, can’t it be improved? Yes!

  As in grim disapproval like Ol’ Hirohito on the radio cabinet, the Ex-Athlete stared. Grinding his teeth to think of his family back in San Francisco, his beloved Momma, seeing it. This trash! Sex trash! After this movie no more, you hear?

  What infuriated him was the ease with which Marilyn and her co-star Ewell got along. Those two, laughing together! When he and Marilyn were alone, she wasn’t funny at all; she rarely laughed; he rarely laughed; she tried to talk to him, then gave up and they sat, at dinner for instance, eating silently. Sometimes she even asked if she could read a script or a book! She’d urged him to watch TV, if there was sports or sports news on. Oh, he’d never forgiven her for going off and leaving him in Japan, “entertaining” the troops in Korea. The worldwide publicity that followed, eclipsing the Ex-Athlete in Japan where, though he’d been met by large, admiring crowds, they were nothing like the crowds that greeted Marilyn Monroe. In all, more than one hundred thousand U.S. soldiers were to see her perform, in her low-cut purple-sequin dress and open-toed high heels, singing “Diamonds Are a Girl’s Best Friend” and “I Wanna Be Loved by You” outside in subfreezing weather, breath steaming. He’d suspected her of having a brief affair with the adoring young corporal from Stars & Stripes who’d been her escort in Korea. He’d suspected her of having an even briefer affair, maybe a single swift fuck, with a young Japanese translator from Tokyo University who, to the Ex-Athlete, looked like an upright eel. In New York, on the movie set, he had strong reason to believe that Marilyn and Tom Ewell slipped away during breaks to make love in Ewell’s dressing room. There was a warm sexual-joking connection between those two! The Ex-Athlete wasn’t jealous but everybody on the set knew, and probably everybody in Hollywood. They were laughing at him, the wronged husband!

  His father and brothers had been frank with him. Can’t you control her? What kind of marriage is it, you and her?

  In the end, he hadn’t been able to love her. To make love to her. As a man. As the man he’d been—the Yankee Slugger. And he’d hated her for that too. Most of all for that. You suck a man dry. You’re dead inside. Not a normal woman. I hope to God you never have babies.

  She was protesting why did he hate Marilyn, when he’d loved Marilyn? Why did he hate The Girl Upstairs? The Girl was so sweet and good-hearted and thoughtful and nice. Of course she was a male sex fantasy, a sex angel, but it was meant to be funny, wasn’t it? Wasn’t sex funny? If it didn’t kill you? The Girl Upstairs invited you to laugh at her and with her, but it wasn’t a cruel laughter. “They like me because I have no irony. I haven’t been wounded, so I can’t wound.” An adult learns irony as he learns hurt and disappointment and shame but The Girl Upstairs can erase that knowledge.

  The Fair Princess as a New York career girl of the mid-1950s.

  The Fair Princess without a Dark Prince. For no man is equal to her.

  The Fair Princess advertising toothpaste, shampoo, consumer goods. It’s funny, not tragic, that pretty girls are used to sell products; why couldn’t Otto Öse see the humor in it? “Not everything is the Holocaust.” It was in fact (as she’d told Mr. Wilder, the director) a profound and wonderful reversal that in The Seven-Year Itch in the invented person of “Marilyn Monroe,” Norma Jeane should have the opportunity to relive certain humiliations of her young life, not as tragedy but as comedy.

  Now came the skirt-blowing scene! More than four hours of filming in New York, during which her marriage ended, and not a second of that footage was used. The final footage was filmed at The Studio in Hollywood on a private sound stage. No gawking men crowded against police barricades. The skirt-blowing scene was only just playful and brief. Nothing to be shocked by. Not much to titillate. The Ex-Athlete had never seen this scene in the actual movie. The Girl squeals and laughs and beats at her skirt to keep it down, her panties don’t show, and—that’s it.

  “Miss! Miss!” The solitary man seated close by Norma Jeane was hissing at her, hunched low and sly in his seat. Norma Jeane knew she should ignore him but glanced helplessly in his direction, half thinking he was Mr. Haring after all and he’d recognized her, even as she knew, staring at the man’s immature, curiously corroded features, the damp blinking eyes behind round lenses, the oily-sweaty forehead, that he was no one she knew. “Miss—Miss—Miss!” He was panting. Excited. Shifting the lower part of his body in the seat, both hands working at his groin partially hidden by a canvas bag or rolled-up jacket, and as Norma Jeane stared in shock and revulsion he moaned softly, his eyes rolled white, the entire row of seats jerked as if somebody had kicked them. Norma Jeane sat in a paralysis of confusion. Hadn’t this happened to her once, long ago? Or more than once? And she was thinking It’s him? Mr. Haring? Oh, can it be? Hunched gnomelike in his seat the man dared to reveal one of his hands to her, held low so that no one else could see, shiny-sticky liquid on the trembling palm and fingers. Norma Jeane gave a little cry of hurt and disgust. Already she was on her feet, walking up the aisle, as the man-who-resembled-Mr.-Haring laughed quietly in her wake, a sound like gravel being shaken blending with the larger, louder laughter of the rest of the audience.

  The usher with acne cheeks, lounging at the rear, seeing Norma Jeane striding up the aisle, and the look on her face, said, surprised, “Ma’am? Is something wrong?”

  Norma Jeane walked past him without a sidelong glance.

  “No. It’s too late.”

  THE DROWNED WOMAN

  Was it Venice Beach she’d come to? She knew without seeing.

  There was something wrong with her eyes; she’d been rubbing them raw with her fists. Sand in her eyes. And overhead the sky at dawn was breaking like a jigsaw puzzle breaking into pieces. And if loosed, never could they be fitted together again. Why was her blood beating! beating! her heart beating! terrified she could hold it in her hand like a hummingbird.

  I didn’t want to die, it was to defy death. I didn’t poison myself. God dies if he is not loved but I was not loved and I did not die.

  It was Venice Beach, the ribbed hard-packed sand and gusts of mist like veils and seaweed like drowsing eels and the first of the surfers strange and silent, too, like sea creatures, streaming water, staring at her. Somebody had torn the front of her cerise chiffon dress, her breasts hanging loose. Nipples hard as pits. Her matted hair and grinning-swollen mouth and the oily Benzedrine sweat coating her body.

  Hello there, what’s your name? I’m Miss Golden Dreams. Do you think I’m beautiful? desirable? lovable? How’d you like to love me? I know I could love you.

  First, she’d driven to the Santa Monica pier. That was hours ago. In chiffon and bare legs and no panties. She’d ridden on the Ferris wheel, she’
d paid for a child’s ticket and taken a little girl with her, the girl’s parents smiling and confused seeming to recognize her but not altogether certain (for there were so many Hollywood blondes) and she’d made the car rock and the little girl squealed in her arms Oh! oh! oh! flying into the sky. She wasn’t drunk. Smell her breath! Sweet as citrus. If there were needle tracks in her arms, in the soft flesh inside the elbow, she had not injected herself. Parts of her body had gone numb and floated away. Where her brawny ex-husband had squeezed her wrist, her arm, her throat. Strong beautiful fingers. Years ago there’d been one of them who could make love only to her breasts, his swollen eager penis between her breasts, he’d cup her breasts in trembling hands and squeeze himself until with a sob of anguish he came, his semen wetting her but Norma Jeane wasn’t there, eyes blank and unseeing as stones. It doesn’t hurt. It’s over fast. Immediately, you forget. She’d asked if the pretty little girl could come live with her for a while. Trying to explain to the parents who were upset after the Ferris wheel ride that they could come to visit too. And why was the Ferris wheel operator angry? No one had been hurt. It was all in play! She gave the man a twenty-dollar bill and his agitation ceased. And the little girl was safe, clutching at the pretty blond woman’s hand and wanting never to let go. As another little girl had clutched at her hand. The stuffed tiger I sewed for Irina. It vanished with her. Where? These killings in Los Angeles County, there’d been another one last month, a “red-haired model” the papers described her, only seventeen years old. Sometimes the murderer buried the girl in a “shallow grave” and rain washed the sandy soil away to expose the body, or what remained of the body. But no harm had ever come to Norma Jeane. Each of the eight or nine or ten raped-and-mutilated girls was known to her, or might’ve been known to her, sister starlets at The Studio or sister models at the Preene Agency, or models of Otto Öse’s, yet were not ever her. What did that mean? That she was destined for a longer life? A life beyond the age of thirty and a life beyond Marilyn?