Blonde

by Joyce Carol Oates

  She’d been trailing her bedraggled feather boa along the floor just like Cherie. She spoke in Cherie’s earnest Ozark drawl, so soft a voice we almost couldn’t hear. “Oh, gosh. I’m so sorry. I beg your forgiveness. I did what Cherie wouldn’t have done, I lapsed into despair. I wasn’t a responsible member of this production. I’m so ashamed!”

  What the hell. We immediately forgot our hurt, our anger, our frustration with her. We burst into spontaneous applause. We adored our Marilyn.

  Things are going very well now with my new movie after a shaky start. It is called “Bus Stop.” I hope you’ll like it!

  She was in the daughterly habit of sending postcards to Gladys at the Lakewood Home. She’d sent cards from New York City.

  I love this city. It’s a true city, not like the City of Sand. If ever you would like to visit me here, Mother, I could arrange it. Planes fly all the time back & forth.

  It made her uneasy to telephone Gladys, since departing Los Angeles. She believed that Gladys blamed her for abandoning her. Though on the phone, Gladys was unaccusing. Norma Jeane had called her from New York when she’d first fallen in love with the Playwright and knew she would marry him and he would be the father of her babies.

  I have new wonderful friends here one of them a world-famous acting teacher and another a distinguished Pulitzer Prize-winning American playwright. I have seen some of my friend from Hollywood Marlon Brando.

  She’d told Gladys about buying books at the Strand. It was a used-book store and she’d searched for some of Gladys’s old books but hadn’t found them. A Treasury of American Poetry. Was that the title? She’d loved that book! She’d loved Gladys reading poetry to her. Now she read poetry to herself, but in Gladys’s voice. To such remarks, Gladys would reply, almost inaudibly That’s nice, dear.

  So she didn’t call Gladys any longer, only just sent picture postcards of the Southwest.

  Someday when I’m rich we can visit here. It’s “the end of the world” here for sure!

  So fearful was Norma Jeane of seeing daily rushes, so in dread of discovering that Marilyn had let her down, she had no idea what Bus Stop was becoming apart from her scenes. And her scenes were shot and reshot so many times, so suffused with the strain of her performance, and her heart knocking against her ribs, she had no idea how they might appear to a neutral observer. Like Cherie she plunged ahead, blind and “optimistic.” She would trust, as her lover advised, to instinct.

  So Norma Jeane didn’t see Bus Stop in its entirety, from its noisily comic opening to its sentimental-romantic ending, until a preview at The Studio in early September. She wouldn’t see how brilliantly she’d portrayed Cherie until then, months afterward. By then a married woman. Sitting with her husband’s hand gripping hers in the darkened preview room in the first row of plush seats. In a haze of Miltown and Dom Perignon. Norma Jeane was “Marilyn” but calmly sedated. The crises of the previous spring in Arizona were as remote to her as the crises of a stranger. It was a shock to her that Bus Stop had turned out so well. As Cherie, she’d given the most inspired performance of her career. Out of terror still another time she’d risen to an achievement of which she need not be ashamed but possibly even proud. Yet it seemed to her an ironic victory, like that of a swimmer who only barely manages to cross a turbulent river that nearly drowns her. The swimmer staggers to shore; the audience that has risked nothing bursts into applause.

  And so the audience in the preview theater burst into applause.

  The Playwright held her protectively, his arm around her shaking shoulders. “Darling, why are you crying?” he whispered. “You were wonderful. You are wonderful. Listen to the response here. Hollywood adores you.”

  Why was I crying? Maybe because in actual life Cherie would’ve been drinking, a lot. She would’ve been missing half her teeth. She would’ve had to sleep with the bastards. It didn’t make any sense she could avoid them except the screenplay was sentimental and corny and in 1956 you couldn’t risk getting an X-rating from the Legion of Decency. In actual life Cherie’d have been beaten and probably raped. She’d have been shared by men. Don’t tell me the Wild West wasn’t like that, I know men. She’d have been used by them until she got knocked up or her looks went or both. There wouldn’t have been any good-looking yokel-cowboy Bo to throw her over his shoulder and carry her away to his ten-thousand-acre ranch. She’d have been drinking and taking drugs to keep going until the day she couldn’t get up from bed any longer, couldn’t even get her eyes fully open, and after that she’d be dead.

  THE (AMERICAN) SHOWGIRL 1957

  Miss Monroe! This is your first visit to England. What are your impressions?

  It was the Kingdom of the Dead. Whose inhabitants moved soundless as ghosts. Faces pale as the opalescent sky and misty shadowless air. And she among them, the (American) Blond Actress, beneath that same spell.

  On these isles in the North Sea it was as likely to be winter as spring. There was no predicting one day to the next. Crocuses and daffodils bloomed in bright brave colors in a bone-piercing cold. The sun was a faint crescent in the mist-sky.

  Soon, you ceased to care.

  “Darling, what’s wrong? Come here.”

  “Oh, Daddy. I’m so homesick.”

  The Prince and the Showgirl. Her co-star was the renowned British actor O.

  She was the (American) showgirl. In a traveling troupe in a mythical Balkan country. Busty, and swivel-buttocks in shiny satins. When first you see the Showgirl, hurriedly taking her place in a line to curtsy to the monocled Grand Duke, one of her shoulder straps breaks and her gorgeous inflated bosom is virtually exposed.

  “It’s cheap. It’s vaudeville. It’s the Marx Brothers.”

  “Darling, it’s comedy.”

  The Blond Actress was a plucky Irish-American platinum blonde from Milwaukee, Wisconsin. She was Cinderella, she was the Beggar Maid. Whose improbable knowledge of the German language complicates the flimsy cobweb of a plot. O was the prig Prince Regent. Played by the renowned British actor with the zest and subtlety of a wind-up toy.

  “What is it, his acting? Parody? I don’t understand.”

  “I don’t think he means his performance to be parody, exactly. He interprets the script as drawing-room comedy, which means a certain stage style. A certain air of the artificial. He isn’t a Method actor—”

  “He’s sabotaging the film? But why? He’s the director!”

  “Darling, he isn’t ‘sabotaging’ the film. His technique is just different from yours.”

  The Prince and the Showgirl were fated by the script to fall in love in this fairy tale. Except their falling-in-love was no more credible than love between two life-sized animated dolls.

  “He’s contemptuous of his role. And of me.”

  “That can’t be true.”

  “Watch him! His eyes.”

  Through O’s lusterless monocle eye she was forced to see herself: the busty American actress, the cotton-candy fine-spun platinum-blond hair and glossy red lips and shivery mannerisms. The Showgirl was an outspoken young woman of the (American) people, the Prince was the reticent, tradition-bound (European) aristocrat. Off the set, O was coolly polite, even gracious to the Blond Actress, but on the set, before the cameras, he scorned her. She was as out of place amid these Academy-trained Shakespearean actors as poor Cherie the chanteuse would have been.

  Marilyn Monroe was the (American) cash cow in O’s Brit fantasy of wealth via Hollywood. O’s contempt for Hollywood and for “Marilyn” was a smell her desperate perfumes couldn’t disguise.

  The way O uttered “Mari-lyn.”

  O, as director of the doomed movie as well as leading man. His Brit accent like a knife striking china.

  Addressing her as you might address a retarded child. Yet without smiling. “Mari-lyn. My dear, can you speak a little more clearly? More coherently.”

  She would not reply. He might have leaned over and spat into her face. She was Norma Jeane Baker trussed up in a dress barin
g much of her bosom, her scalp stung from that morning’s peroxide touch-up, mind slow as a winding-down alarm clock. Suddenly sunk in a dream. Four hours, forty minutes late that day. Coughing, so scenes had to be reshot. She fumbled her lines; she’d begun to forget the simplest dialogue. Where once she’d memorized so easily. Where once she’d memorized even other actors’ dialogue. The pores of her forehead and nose oozed grease through the thick pancake makeup.

  O stared at her through the monocle. Removed the monocle and forced a grimace of a smile.

  You could see he meant this to be witty. Drawing-room witty.

  “Mari-lyn, dear girl. Be sexy.”

  The previous week she’d been ill with a stomach flu. Vomiting through the night. The Playwright was her nurse, her devoted and anxious husband. She’d lost six pounds. Her costumes had to be readjusted. Her face was thinner. Would the scenes she’d already done have to be reshot? Last week she’d been able to work only a single full day, morning to late afternoon. The other actors regarded her with wary sympathy. As if my sickness might be catching. Oh, I wanted them to love me!

  It was an exquisite revenge. American-girl revenge. The renowned British actor O had expected emotional outbursts, crude hysteria; he’d been warned that the Blond Actress was “difficult.” He had not expected so passive and lethal a revenge.

  Thinking I was dumb-blond Desdemona. My secret is, Marilyn is Iago!

  She crept away to hide. She laughed. No, she was frantic with hurt, confusion.

  “It’s O who is making me sick. He’s put a curse on me.”

  “Don’t think that way, darling. He does admire you—”

  “When he has to touch me, his skin crawls. His nostrils contract. I see it.”

  “Norma, you’re exaggerating. You must know—”

  “Look, do I stink? What is it?”

  Fact is, Marilyn, here’s a man who doesn’t desire you. A man you’ve failed to seduce. Who’d as soon fuck a cow as you. One in millions.

  The Playwright! What was he to think, and what was he to do?

  This woman his wife. The Blond Actress, his wife.

  Here in England he was beginning to comprehend the nature of the task before him. As an explorer on foot begins to comprehend, as terrain shifts and a new, abrupt, stunning, and unexpected vista opens before him, the challenge that lies ahead.

  He’d become so swiftly her nurse! Her only friend.

  Yet he was a friend to O too. He’d long been an admirer of O. His plays were not suitable for an actor of O’s background and training; still the Playwright revered O and was grateful for O’s company and conversation. He supposed that O had agreed to undertake this project primarily for the money; yet he believed that O was too professional an actor, and too decent a man, not to perform to the very best of his ability.

  As a man of the theater the Playwright had been prepared to be fascinated by moviemaking and to learn what he could. In fact he’d begun writing a screenplay, his first.

  A screenplay for the Blond Actress his wife.

  But moviemaking shocked and confused him. He hadn’t been prepared for the commotion, the incessant busyness. So many people! The brightly lit space in which actors performed was surrounded by a bevy of technicians, cameraman, the director, and his assistants. Scenes were begun and interrupted and begun again and interrupted and again begun and interrupted; scenes were shot and reshot; there was a fanatic, frantic concern with makeup and hair; there was an artificial dreamlike quality to the enterprise, a cheapness and shoddiness of the spirit that offended him deeply. He began to understand why O, trained as a man of the theater, performed so oddly, so archly, for the camera. The Prince was wholly artificial while the Showgirl was “natural.” It seemed sometimes as if the two were speaking different languages; or that two radically different genres, drawing-room comedy and a type of realism, had been yoked together. In fact, of the cast only the Blond Actress seemed to know how to play to the camera while behaving as if she were playing to the other actors; but her confidence had been shaken so early in the production, her girlish enthusiasm dampened by O’s chill, she, too, had been thrown off stride.

  “Daddy, you don’t understand. This isn’t the theater. It’s . . .”

  The Blond Actress’s voice trailed off. For what, in fact, was she trying to say?

  Later that night, coming to him and tugging at his arm as if she’d been preparing these lines to recite. “Daddy, listen! What I do is, I tell myself I’m alone. And there’s this other person with me, or maybe more than one person? I don’t know who they are but there’s a purpose. To us being there. Why we’re there in that place that’s meant to be a room, or we could be outdoors or in a car, there’s a logic to it? We figure out why we’re there and what we mean to each other by playing out the scene.” She smiled anxiously at him. How badly she wanted him to understand; his heart was touched. He stroked her feverish cheek. “See, Daddy, like you and me right now? We’re alone here together, and we’re making sense of why. We fell in love . . . and we came together to make sense of why. It isn’t like we can know ahead of time. We can’t! We’re in a circle of light and outside us is darkness and we’re alone together in the sea of darkness like we’re floating in a boat, see? We’d be frightened of this except there is a logic to it. There is! So even when I’m scared, like I guess I am here in England, with people hating me. . . . Stanislavski says, This is solitude in public.’”

  The Playwright was astonished by his wife’s impassioned words though he hadn’t understood most of what she’d said. He held her tight, tight. Her hair had been newly bleached at the roots and hairline that morning and exuded a harsh sickening chemical odor that made the Playwright’s nostrils contract. This odor, the Blond Actress had long since ceased to smell.

  Now in the Kingdom of the Dead she began to sink. The very marrow of her bones turned to lead. In this chill undersea kingdom with its fish inhabitants hideous to her.

  They hate me. Their eyes!

  The Playwright was O’s emissary as he was, or hoped to be, O’s friend. Both the Playwright and O the renowned British actor were men married to “temperamental” actresses.

  She heard jeering laughter! The Playwright pronounced, like a straight man in a Marx Brothers movie, “Darling, no. It’s just the plumbing.”

  The plumbing! She had to laugh.

  “Darling, what’s wrong? You’re frightening me.”

  The Blond Actress dreamt of lead pythons shuddering to life close beside her bed. In these sumptuous quarters in an old stone house in the kingdom of perpetual damp. It was true, the aged pipes groaned, writhed, spat. Jeering laughter was communicated through such pipes as through a speaking tube. The Playwright was alternately concerned, cajoling, impatient, patient and pleading, and on the verge of threatening, and again concerned, anxious, sympathetic and cajoling, impatient, and patient and pleading on the verge of desperation.

  Norma darling there’s been a car waiting for you downstairs for an hour why don’t you get up take a shower and dress Shall I help you darling please wake up

  She pushed him away, whimpering. Her eyelids were stuck shut. The voice came to her muffled as through cotton batting. A voice she recalled dimly having loved once as, hearing an ancient recording, you recall the mysterious emotions that recording once stirred.

  Later, as the afternoon quickly waned and the cotton batting voice grew more urgent Darling this is serious you’re frightening me everyone’s hopes are on you don’t let them down

  Sunk in a dream. Oh, she’d ceased to be anxious! The new medication seeped into her bones’ marrow and held her fast.

  The Playwright was frantic; what to do? What to do?

  In this chill inhospitable place so far from home. In this borrowed old stone house where the plumbing shrieked and the single-pane windows leaked a perpetual mist.

  Those unmistakable symptoms: glassy bloodshot eyes. If he lifted one of her eyelids with his thumb, she was unseeing. His thumb left an indentat
ion in her puffy flesh that was slow to fill in. Like the flesh of the dead.

  When she did manage to get up, she moved awkwardly and seemed uncertain of her balance. She sweated, yet she was shivering. And her breath like copper pennies held in the hand.

  Why was he thinking, panicked, of Bovary’s dying? The hideous protracted agony. The protruding tongue, the beautiful pale-skinned woman contorted in death. The black liquid running from Bovary’s mouth when she died.

  The Playwright was ashamed of himself thinking such thoughts.

  Why did I marry her! Why did I imagine I was strong enough!

  The Playwright was ashamed of himself thinking such thoughts.

  I love this woman so much. I must help her.

  Ashamed of himself, searching the silk compartments of her suitcases for pills.

  These, her “surplus” pills. Her cache he wasn’t supposed to know about, she’d smuggled in secret to England.

  She kicked at him, furious and weeping. Why didn’t he leave her alone for Christ’s sake?

  Let me die! It’s what you all want, isn’t it?

  You made of the smallest issues a test of my loyalty. Our love.

  Smallest issues! You didn’t defend me against that bastard.

  It wasn’t always clear who was in the wrong.

  He despised Marilyn!

  No. It was you who despised Marilyn.

  Except if Daddy could make her pregnant she would love Daddy again.

  How she yearned for a baby! In her nicest dream the rumpled pillow was a baby, soft and cuddly. Her breasts were swollen and aching with milk. There was Baby just outside the circle of light. There was Baby with glistening eyes. There was Baby smiling in recognition of his mother. There was Baby, needy of her love, and her love alone.