Blonde

by Joyce Carol Oates

  Stage fright. The Beggar Maid’s curse! To repeat to repeat to stammer & repeat & begin again & again begin & stammer & repeat & retreat & lock herself away & return at last only to repeat & repeat repeat to get it perfect to get whatever it is perfect to get perfect what is not perfectable to repeat & repeat until it was perfect & unassailable so when they laughed they would be laughing at a brilliant comic performance & not at Norma Jeane, they would not be aware of Norma Jeane at all.

  . . .

  Stage fright. This is animal panic. The actor’s nightmare. A rush of adrenaline so strong it can knock you off your feet & your heart is racing & so much blood pumping through it you’re in terror it might burst & your fingers & toes turn to ice & there’s no strength in your legs & your tongue is numb, your voice is gone. An actor is his voice & if his voice is gone he’s gone. Often there’s vomiting. Helpless & spasmodic. Stage fright is a mystery that can hit any actor at any time. Even an experienced actor, a veteran. A successful actor. Laurence Olivier, for instance. Olivier was incapable of acting on a stage for five years in the prime of his career. Olivier! And Monroe, hit by stage fright in her early thirties, really hit, in front of movie cameras & not even live audiences. Why? It’s always explained that stage fright must be a simple fear of death & annihilation but why? why would so general a fear strike so randomly? why for the actor specifically, & why so paralyzing? why this panic at this time, why? will your limbs be torn from you, why? your eyes gouged out, why? guts pierced, why? are you a child, an infant to be devoured, why, why, why?

  Stage fright. Because she could not express anger. Because she could express beautifully & subtly all emotions except anger. Because she could express hurt, bewilderment, dread, & pain yet could not convincingly present herself as an instrument of such reactions in others. Not on stage. Her weakness, her quavering voice if she lifted it in anger. In protest, in rage. No but she couldn’t! And someone would shout at the back of the rehearsal space (this was in Manhattan, at the New York Ensemble; she wasn’t miked), Sorry Marilyn can’t hear you. The man who was her lover or who had wished to be her lover, like all her lovers a man possessed of the certainty that he alone knew the secret of undoing the puzzle, the riddle, the curse of Monroe, told her she must learn to express anger as an actress & she would then become a great actress or would at least have a chance to become a great actress & he would guide her career, he would choose her roles for her & direct her, & he would make her into a great actress of the theater; teasing & chiding her even as he made love to her (in his peculiar slow & bemused & almost abstract way never ceasing to speak except at the very moment of climax & then but briefly, as in a parenthesis) that he knew why she wasn’t able to express anger, and did she? & she shook her head wordlessly no, & he said Because you want us to love you, Marilyn you want the world to love you & not destroy you, as you’d wish to destroy the world, & you fear us knowing your secret isn’t it so? & she’d fled him, & loved his friend the Playwright, & would marry the Playwright who knew her as his Magda, who would know her scarcely at all.

  . . .

  Stage fright. When she fell, striking her belly on the steps, when the bleeding began, the contractions in her womb & somehow she was lying upside down & her legs twisted beneath her screaming in pain & terror & her boast of having no fear of physical pain was revealed as the reckless boast of an ignorant & doomed child, & her wickedness would be punished, losing this baby she loved, oh she’d loved more than life itself yet had not the power to save. So Sugar Kane recalls & freezes midway in a comic recognition scene kissed by C as a female impersonator before a nightclub audience.

  She’d freeze she’d walk off the set staggering like a drunk woman sometimes she’d shake her hands at the wrists so hard, it was like a hurt bird trying to fly she wouldn’t let any of us touch her if the husband was there she wouldn’t let him touch her the poor bastard in this shimmering mostly transparent gown they’d concocted for Monroe showing these mammoth boobs & the twin cheeks of her fantastic jelly-ass & the dress dipped low in the back showing the entire back to practically her tailbone there was this tragic terrified woman emerging out of Sugar Kane like a confectioner’s sugar mask melting & it’s Medea beneath it was a sobering sight Monroe would press her hands against her belly sometimes her head, her ears, like her brain was going to explode she’d told me she feared a hemorrhage I knew she’d had a miscarriage in the summer, in Maine she’d said You know it’s just a network of veins? arteries? holding us together? & if they burst & start bleeding? In the rushes there was this entirely different person there was the true Monroe I always thought “Sugar Kane” by any other name If she’d have let herself be just “Marilyn” she’d have been all right Yes I hated her then I’d have fantasies of strangling the bitch like in Niagara but looking back I feel differently all my years of directing, I guess I’d never worked with anyone like Monroe she was a puzzle I couldn’t solve she connected with the camera, not with the rest of us she’d look through us like we were ghosts maybe it was Monroe beneath that made Sugar Kane special she had to get through Monroe, to get to Sugar Kane who’s all surface maybe what’s “surface” has to be achieved by going deep by being badly hurt & by hurting others

  There was a rumor, Marilyn & Doc Fell “had a thing going.” We’d hear giggling in her dressing room, & the door shut.

  DO NOT DISTURB.

  There was a rumor, Marilyn & W “had a thing going, & it went sour.” We’d hear W cursing her, not to her face but her departing back. He’d try to call her on the phone, when she was late for work or wasn’t showing up, & couldn’t get through to her, sometimes she’d be five hours late, six hours late, or wouldn’t come at all. W’s back trouble began with Some Like It Hot, it went into spasms. One of us, W’s assistant, was sent to fetch her at her trailer (we were on location then at Coronado Beach for the “Florida” sequence) & there was Sugar Kane all made up & costumed in her bathing suit, she’d been ready an hour or more & we’d been waiting & she was just standing inside in this strange urgent way reading something it must’ve been sci-fi called Origin of Species & W’s assistant said, “Miss Monroe? W is waiting” & not missing a beat or even glancing at him Marilyn says “Tell W to fuck himself.”

  Her starlet start. Monroe was both shrewd & practical. Dividing her numerous drug prescriptions (Benzedrine, Dexedrine, Miltown, Dexamyl, Seconal, Nembutal, etc.) among several drugstores in Hollywood & Beverly Hills as she divided herself among several doctors each unknowing & unsuspecting (at least, they would so claim after her death) of the others. But her favorite drugstore, she would say in interviews, would always remain Schwab’s. “Where Marilyn got her starlet start with Richard Widmark staring at her ass.”

  Not sweet Sugar Kane but that tramp Rose sprawling naked & languid across the disheveled sheets of an unmade bed in the cinderblock Sunset Honeymoon Motel off the Ventura Freeway. Rose yawning & brushing her platinum-blond peroxide hair out of her face. That dreamy look of a woman who’s been with a man, whatever the man has done to her or with her, whatever she’s actually felt with him or pretended to have felt or might feel hours later, in her own bed elsewhere, in dreamy retrospect. In the adjoining bathroom a man, also naked, was pissing noisily into a toilet bowl & the door not half closed. But Rose had turned on the TV & watched as the screen cleared to show the likeness of a smiling blond girl, photographer’s model age twenty-two, resident of West Hollywood, & her body had been found in a culvert near a railroad track in East Los Angeles, she’d been strangled & “sexually mutiliated” & undiscovered for several days. Rose stared at the smiling blonde & herself smiled. When Rose was nervous or confused, Rose smiled. It gives you time to think. It throws the other guy off. But what was this? Some kind of ugly joke? The blond girl was Norma Jeane. At that age. Otto Öse must have given them Norma Jeane’s picture.

  They’d given this dead girl a different name. It wasn’t Norma Jeane’s name or any of her names.

  “Oh, God. Oh God help us.”

>   Yet the thought came to her. She knows who she is, now. She’s a body in the morgue.

  The pissing man, whoever he was, she wouldn’t share either the murder news or the revelation.

  This man she’d picked up at Schwab’s at breakfast for sentimental reasons though even with that face & big burly body he wasn’t an actor, & his precise identity she would not know. He had not recognized her as Rose Loomis or even as Monroe, it wasn’t a day in which in fact she was “Monroe.” He was standing now at the bathroom sink running water noisily from both faucets & talking to her in a loud-pitched voice like somebody on TV. She made no effort to listen. It was empty movie dialogue, a way of filling out the scene till it ended. Or she’d already sent the guy away & the noise of the faucets & of plumbing was from the adjacent room. No, he was still here, wide-shouldered & freckles across his back like splotches of dried sand. She would ask his name & he would tell her & she would forget & would be embarrassed to ask him another time & could not recall if she’d told him My name is Rose Loomis or possibly Norma Jeane or even Elsie Pirig, which was a name comically jarring to the ear, yet no man ever laughed. The dead girl might’ve been Mona Monroe. In the car she’d driven & he’d noticed her wedding band & made a comment almost wistful & she’d quickly explained she was married to The Studio, she was a film cutter & he seemed actually impressed & asked if she saw “movie stars” on her job & she said no, never; only on film, cutting & splicing film, & they were nothing but images on celluloid.

  It was a later time. The freckled man had vanished. The TV screen was a blizzard of crooked & quavering lines & when the lines were transformed into human faces they were not faces she recognized, the strangled Mona Monroe had vanished & a boisterous quiz show was under way. “Maybe it hasn’t happened yet?”

  Suddenly she felt happy again, & hopeful.

  The wronged husband. Returning to him in early evening, whoever he was, this man, the semen of another man leaking from her cunt & the stink of the other’s cigarette smoke (Camel’s) in her matted hair, she who did not smoke, she might have expected if this was a movie scene, & ominous movie music beneath, that there would be a dramatic exchange, a confrontation; in the days of the Ex-Athlete, a savage beating & possibly worse. But this wasn’t the movies. This was nothing like the movies. This was but the borrowed house on Whittier Drive shuttered against the pitiless sun & the silent wounded figure with his carved-wood face, he whom she’d once so much admired & now could barely tolerate, a man as out of place in southern California as any New York Jew waking to the Land of Oz; a co-actor cast with her in a prolonged scene meriting no more notice than any co-actor in any such scene to be endured on the way to another, more exciting scene: in this case a long steaming-hot soaking bath & the door locked against husbandly intrusion for she was so terribly tired, so tired! pushing from him with averted face & wishing only to pass out by languorous degrees in the marble bath sipping gin (out of Sugar Kane’s very flask, she’d brought home with her) & dialing Carlo’s private number (but Carlo was on location somewhere making a new film, & Carlo was newly in love) without success, then lapsing into reverie searching for a vision to make her smile & laugh for she was Miss Golden Dreams & not morbid-minded by nature, that’s not the American-girl way, & she thought of how at The Studio that morning they’d have been awaiting her—“Marilyn Monroe”—& making their usual frantic telephone calls until such time that it would become clear, to even the most hopeful among them, that “Marilyn Monroe” would not be coming that day to impersonate & demean herself; & W would have to film around her another time. W, daring to give her direction! Oh, it was funny! She laughed aloud, envisioning the misery of pretty Brooklyn-boy C, who’d made it known he hated Monroe’s guts, forced to stand around in makeup & high heels & female drag like a cross between Frankenstein & Joan Crawford, & if the wronged husband hovered anxiously outside the locked door heard this shrill girlish laughter maybe he’d interpret it as happy?

  The wronged husband. “I only just wanted to save her. I wasn’t thinking of myself, those years. My pride.”

  The Magic Friend. Three miles away at The Studio they were beginning another vigil awaiting Monroe who’d assured them through her agent that she would certainly be arriving for work that day, she’d been ill “with a virus” but was now nearly recovered; filming was to begin at 10 A.M. & not earlier in concession to Monroe who, a notorious insomniac, often failed to get to sleep until 4 or 5 A.M. & already it was 11 A.M. & would soon be noon & blazing sun outside the shuttered house & the phone began to ring & the receiver left off the hook & in a bedroom at the rear she stood, & sat, & paced, & peered into the mirror awaiting the arrival of her Magic Friend, she was not too proud to whisper, “Please. Please come.” Already at 8 A.M. she’d begun her vigil waking dazed & sober & with but a vague memory of the previous day & the cinderblock motel & determined now to make amends & at first she’d been patient & not anxious or alarmed, calmly cleansing her face with cold cream & rubbing in moisturizer, “Please. Please come.” Yet the minutes passed, & the Magic Friend did not appear.

  And soon she was an hour late at The Studio, & soon she was two hours late, & minutes passed cruel as the ticking of the grandfather clock in the Captain’s House chiming the quarter hour even as her living baby hemorrhaged out of her in a mass of clots & clumps like something but partially digested & she knew the truth of it: her womb was poisoned, & her soul. She knew she did not deserve life as others deserve life & though she had tried, she had failed to justify her life; yet must continue to try, for her heart was hopeful, she meant to be good! she’d contracted to play Sugar Kane & she would do a damned good job! & by noon she’d begun to be frantic & amid a flurry of calls it was arranged that Whitey, Miss Monroe’s personal makeup man, would come to the house on Whittier Drive & do a preliminary makeup before the actress left the privacy & sanctuary of her house, for she had not the courage otherwise, & what relief to see Whitey! beloved Whitey! tall & grave & sacerdotal bearing his makeup kit that contained far more jars, vials, tubes, pastes & powders & paints & pencils & brushes & creams than she possessed; what joy to see Whitey in this place of dishevelment & dismay; almost, she would have seized & kissed Whitey’s hands, except knowing that Monroe’s faithful circle of assistants preferred their mistress aloof to them, as their rightful superior.

  Seeing her misery, & the absence of all magic from her wan, sallow, frightened face, Whitey murmured, “Miss Monroe, don’t be upset. It will be all right, I promise.” It was said of Monroe, on the set, that, some days, she spoke in an addled way, as if words confused her; Whitey now heard his mistress stammer, “Oh, Whitey! Must ‘Sugar Kane’ want to get there, more I’m meaning than life itself!” & knowing exactly what his mistress meant, Whitey instructed her to lie down on the hastily made-up bed & begin her yoga breathing exercises (for Whitey, too, was a practitioner of yoga, of the school called Hatha Yoga) & thoroughly relax the tension in her face & body & he vowed he would conjure up “Marilyn” within the hour, & this they tried, gamely they tried, but Norma Jeane found the position uncomfortable atop her bed, the heavy brocade spread drawn up over rumpled sheets smelling of night panic, too much a ritual of death she felt it, this prone posture, herself in the mortuary & her embalmer laboring over her with pastes & powders & pencils & tubes of color, her lover embalmer, her first husband who’d broken her heart & denied her Baby, how then was she to blame that Baby was gone; in that posture tears began to leak from the corners of her eyes & Whitey murmured, “Tsk! Miss Monroe.” She felt too a hideous sensation of her skin slack on her bones & the cheeks rubbery & yielding to a new tug of gravity—Otto Öse had teased her, she had a round boneless baby face that would soon sag—& at last Whitey himself conceded, his magic was not working. Not yet.

  So Whitey led the trembling Beggar Maid to the vanity with its triumvirate of mirrors & white lights where she cringed hopeful in her black lace bra & black silk half-slip like a supplicant in prayer, & Whitey’s gentle but practiced han
ds removed the failed makeup with cotton swabs & cold cream & there came damp warmed gauzy cloths like bandages to soothe her skin that had become roughened, coarsened as if by some cruel caprice of the previous night (or had it been the wide-shouldered freckled lover, a giant troll who’d rubbed his stubbled jaws against her sensitive skin?) & Whitey somberly & without haste began his rites a second time, with the application of astringent, & moisturizer, & foundation makeup, & blusher, & powder, & eye shadow, & eye pencil, & mascara, & the blue-red lipstick devised for Sugar Kane though the film was in black & white & could not show her to her full advantage; & as the minutes passed, there emerged out of these mirrors a familiar if elusive presence, at first no more than a winking glisten of the eyes, then a twitching of the lips in that teasing-sexy smile, & the beauty mole was made to appear, no longer at the left corner of her painted mouth but now an inch or so lower, beneath the lip; for so Sugar Kane’s face had been designed in a way subtly different from previous Monroe faces in previous films; & both mistress & servant began to feel a quickening of excitement—“She’s coming! She’s almost here! Marilyn!”—like the tension before a thunderstorm or the sensation following an earthquake tremor, the awaiting of the next tremor, the next jolt; & finally as Whitey fussily erased, & redid, the brown arching eyebrows, in bold contrast to the pale hair, there emerged laughing at the Beggar Maid’s fears the most beautiful face she’d ever seen, a wonder of a face, the face of the Fair Princess.