Blonde

by Joyce Carol Oates

  “Just give Roslyn more to do,” she’d pleaded.

  Into their bemused male silence.

  To the press it would be leaked that Marilyn was “being difficult” even before production of Misfits began. Marilyn was “making her usual outrageous demands.”

  Yet she would not be cheated of Roslyn & of the strongest performance of her career. Roslyn was an older sister of Sugar Kane, except no madcap comedy & quivering musical numbers. No ukulele & luscious love scenes. Roslyn was painful because “real” & yet (as any woman in the audience would recognize immediately) only just a “real dream” (a man’s dream). To become Roslyn, she could not remain Norma Jeane; for Norma Jeane was smarter & shrewder & more experienced than Roslyn; Norma Jeane was better educated, if only self-educated. When Roslyn’s lover Gay Langland speaks of her approvingly—“I don’t like educated women; it’s nice to meet a woman who has respect for a man”—Norma Jeane would have laughed in the man’s face, but Roslyn listens & is flattered. Oh, the male things said of Roslyn to flatter & seduce & confuse! “Roslyn, you have a gift for life.” “Roslyn, here’s to your life, I hope it goes on forever.” “Roslyn, why are you so sad?” “Roslyn, you just shine in my eyes.” “Roslyn, you’ve got to stop thinking you can change things.” Oh, yes, I can change things. Just watch me!

  The phone was ringing. Like hell she’d answer it. She would wash her face & douche her eyes with cold water & swallow a painkiller or two & throw on makeup, & a blouse & slacks, & her dark glasses, & leave the Zephyr by a rear exit, through the kitchen; she had a friend in the kitchen (she was a girl who’d always have a friend in a hotel kitchen), & she would arrive on the set unexpected by 3:20 P.M., now that she was feeling so much better, & her strength flooding back at the thought of the looks on their faces, the bastards. (Except Clark Gable; she revered Clark Gable.) She would become Roslyn: shampooed & set shimmering-blond hair, makeup to accentuate her moon-white skin, & tight white V-neck dress decorated with cherries. The Fair Princess, in the Nevada desert city! To the amazement of the Misfits crew she would put in what remained of the first day of filming & she would demand as many takes as required for her initial scene (at the vanity mirror, talking wistfully about her impending divorce with an older woman) until her Norma Jeane armor was worn down & tremulous fearful forgiving Roslyn emerged. She would impress H, who was not an easy man to impress; H who’d so condescended to her, ten years before, H who didn’t respect her, H the renowned director who was hoping, she knew damned well, that Monroe would crack up early on so he could cast another, more malleable actress in her place.

  “But there’s only one Monroe. That, the fucker must know.”

  It was a miracle sometimes. That’s a cliché but happens to be true. Monroe would show up hours late and the rumor might be she was in the Reno hospital (tried to kill herself the night before!) yet suddenly there she’d arrive sweet and shy-seeming & stammering apologies, and a cheer would go up no matter we’d all been cursing the bitch. When Monroe arrived you saw she was no bitch only a force of nature like a high wind or lightning storm, you saw she was in the grip of this force of nature herself and you were eager to forgive her; even her co-star Gable with his ailing heart said she couldn’t help it, he didn’t like it but he understood. And Whitey and the Monroe crew went to work on her like resuscitating a corpse and transformed this white-skinned blond woman you’d almost not recognize into Roslyn the angelic beauty; and it would happen many times during the weeks of the filming, too many times maybe; and not always a cheer would go up, and not always the bitch was transformed into the angel, but usually. The thing Monroe projected through the camera—none of us could figure it out. We’d seen plenty of actors and actresses and nobody like Monroe. See, there were days she’d seem flat and almost ordinary except for that moon-white skin and she’d interrupt a scene and ask to begin again like an amateur & most scenes she’d demand to do over and over and over a dozen times, twenty times, thirty times, and you could see only the smallest change from take to take yet somehow it added up, Monroe was building up, getting steadily stronger as her co-actors weakened and became exhausted, poor Clark Gable who wasn’t young, who had hypertension and a bad heart, but Monroe was impervious to such exhaustion; as she was impervious to other people; and impervious to H hating her guts; or maybe she believed, maybe Marilyn always believed, everybody had to love her, she was so pretty and this orphan waif you absolutely had to love. There was a Marilyn slogan she’d infected us all with, she said it so often—If your number’s up it’s up, and if not, not. This was appropriate for Reno, Nevada, we thought. So it seemed not to matter how late Monroe arrived to work, or how distraught or dazed, once she emerged from her dressing room made up and costumed and actually acting it was like another self inhabited her, and she’d become Roslyn, and how could you blame Roslyn for some crap Marilyn had done? You couldn’t. You would not wish to. And whatever the thing was she projected on the set, through the cameras, at the rushes you’d stare almost in disbelief thinking Who the hell’s that? That stranger?

  Absolutely, Monroe was the only one of her kind.

  This was before. What would happen hadn’t yet happened.

  In a waking dream of excitement & hope she was gliding barefoot through the upstairs of the Captain’s House. The ill-fitting floorboards & crooked windows & beyond, an opaque-misty sky. She knew it hadn’t happened yet because Baby was snug inside her beneath her heart. A special purse—a pouch?—beneath the heart. Baby had not yet departed. One day (she’d imagined this elaborately!) Baby would be an actor, & would depart upon his mysterious actor journeys, breaking with whoever he’d been, but that was far into the future, & this was a dream to comfort, wasn’t it? Baby had not yet left her in clots & rushes of dark uterine blood. Baby was the size of a medium cantaloupe swelling her belly in a way she loved to stroke. And somehow this was linked to my good feeling about Roslyn & the film, now we were in the third week. And (this was confusing!) it might have been in Baby’s dream not her own (for babies too dream in the womb; Norma Jeane had dreamt her entire life sometimes, she believed, in Gladys’s womb!), she entered barefoot the long narrow chilled workroom of the man with whom she lived, the man to whom she was married, the man believed to be Baby’s father, & saw papers scattered across his desk; she knew—she knew!—she should not examine these papers for they were forbidden to her; yet like a bold, naughty girl she took them up & read; & in her dream these words were not visual but spoken in men’s voices.

  DOC: Mr, I’m afraid I don’t have very good news for you.

  Y: What—is it?

  DOC: Your wife will recover from the miscarriage though there may be occasional pain & spotting. But . . .

  Y (trying to remain calm): Yes, Doctor?

  Doc: I’m afraid her reproductive organs uterus is badly scarred. She’s had too many abortions—

  Y: Abortions?

  DOC (embarrassed, man-to-man): Your wife . . . seems to have had a number of rather crude abortions. Frankly, it’s a miracle she ever conceived at all.

  Y: I don’t believe this. My wife has never had—

  DOC: Mr., I’m sorry.

  Y exits (quickly? slowly? a man in a dream)

  LIGHTS DOWN (not blackout)

  END OF SCENE

  Marilyn was so outrageous! The things she’d say. Knowing we couldn’t quote her in our straitlaced publications so she’d come out with the wildest remarks, for instance when she and Gable were doing The Misfits there was lots of media interest and Life flew me out to Reno to interview her and her co-stars and director and playwright husband, all men, and we were arranging to meet in a Reno bar and I made some half-assed joke like you do when you’re nervous, asking how’d I recognize her, what would she be wearing, and Marilyn doesn’t miss a beat; in this breathy-cooing voice she whispers over the phone, “Oh hey!—you can’t miss Marilyn, she’ll be the one with the vagina.”

  Maybe all there is is just the next thing maybe all there is is just the ne
xt thing maybe all there is is just just the next just the next thing maybe all there is is just the next maybe all there is is is just is just the next thing Roslyn’s words stuck in her head & she could not stop repeating them Maybe all there is is just the next thing like a Hindu mantra & she was a yogin murmuring her secret prayer Maybe all there is is just the next thing

  She thought, That’s a comfort!

  Stinging red ants crawled inside her mouth as she lay in a paralysis of phenobarbital sleep. Her mouth was open, at a slant. The ants must’ve been tiny red Nevada-desert ants. Stung and discharged their toxins and were gone. But later, Whitey asked worriedly, “Miss Monroe, is something wrong?” for the Blond Actress was wincing as, while he made her up, she tried to drink her usual steaming-hot black coffee with a tablet or two of codeine dissolved in it, and she whispered to Whitey in a voice he almost couldn’t hear, Whitey who could hear his mistress’s words not only hoarse and croaking across a room but miles and eventually years distant from the actual woman, “Oh, Whitey. I d-don’t know.” She laughed, then began without warning to cry. Then stopped. She hadn’t any tears! Her tears were dried up like sand! She poked a forefinger gingerly into her mouth and touched the stinging sores. Some were canker sores and others were tiny blisters.

  Sternly Whitey said, “Miss Monroe, open up and let me look.”

  She obeyed. Whitey stared. A dozen one-hundred-watt lightbulbs framing the mirror made the scene bright as any film set.

  Poor Whitey! He was of the tribe of trolls in the employ of The Studio, under-earth folk, yet grown to an unusual height of over six feet; with massive shoulders and upper arms and a doughy-kindly face. A whitish fuzz covered his head, which was the shape of a football. His colorless eyes were myopic yet possessed a reassuring ferocity. Except for these eyes, you would not have thought that Whitey was an artist. Out of mud and colored paints he could fashion a face. Sometimes.

  In the Blond Actress’s service this expert cosmetician had grown stoic; always he was a gentleman, hiding from the Blond Actress’s anxious eye any visible signs of concern, alarm, repugnance. He said quietly, “Miss Monroe, you’d best see a doctor.”

  “No.”

  “Yes, Miss Monroe. I’ll call Doc Fell.”

  “I don’t want Fell! I’m afraid of him.”

  “Another doctor, then. You must, Miss Monroe.”

  “Is it—ugly? My mouth?”

  Whitey shook his head mutely.

  “Things have bitten my mouth. The inside. While I was asleep I guess!”

  Whitey shook his head mutely.

  “Or it could be, I guess, something in my blood? Allergy? Reaction to medication?”

  Whitey stood in silence, head bowed. In the brightly lit mirror, his eyes did not lift to meet his mistress’s.

  “Nobody’s kissed me for a long time. Not deeply I mean. Not as a l-lover I mean. I can’t blame a poison kiss, can I.” She laughed. She rubbed her eyes with both fists, though her eyes were sand-dry.

  Silently Whitey slipped away to fetch Doc Fell.

  When the men returned, they saw that the Blond Actress had laid her head on her arms. She was slumped forward as if unconscious and breathing shallowly. Her silvery hair had been shampooed and styled in preparation for Roslyn. She hadn’t yet been fitted for her costume and was wearing a soiled smock and slacks, and her muscled dancer’s legs were white and bare and twisted oddly beneath her. So shallow and erratic was her breath, Doc Fell would experience a moment’s panic. She’s dying. I will be blamed. But he was able to revive her, and would examine her mouth, and scold her for mixing medications against his orders, and for betraying him with other doctors, and he would provide further medication to heal the sores, unless the sores were past healing. Then Whitey would return to the challenge of her face. He would remove the makeup he’d put on, cleanse her skin gently, and begin again. He would chide her—“Miss Monroe!”—as her eyes slipped out of focus and her mouth, even as he penciled in bright lipstick, grew slack. On the set they’d been awaiting Roslyn for two hours, forty minutes. Repeatedly with dogged masochistic rage H would send an assistant to the Blond Actress’s dressing room to see how much longer it might be. Whitey murmured diplomatically, “Soon. We can’t be hurried, you know.” The imminent scene was more complex than previous scenes because it involved a good deal of blocking, four actors, music and dancing. The men would gaze upon Roslyn with an intensity of passion borne of their frustration, misery, rage; the camera would record devotion, hope, love shining in their eyes like reflectors. The scene belonged to Roslyn. Roslyn would drink too much and dance alone displaying her beautiful-waif body and she would run outside into the romantic dark and embrace a tree in a “poetic” moment and the Dark Prince would proclaim Roslyn you have the gift of life, here’s to your life I hope it will go on forever.

  The estranged husband. “Y’know, mister?—nobody likes being spied on.”

  Loving her was the task of his life and he’d come to feel in this sun-glaring desert city that he might not, for all his devotion, be equal to the task. The Misfits was to have been his valentine to her and now the tomb of their marriage. He had wished to enshrine her luminous beauty in Roslyn and could not see how he’d failed, or why he must fail; yet she was increasingly impatient with him, even rude to him, as her work with her screen lover Gable deepened. Am I jealous? If that’s all, so ignoble, maybe I can live with it. Yet she continued to take drugs. Too many drugs. She lied about her drugs, to his face. She had built up so deadly a tolerance she could chew and swallow codeine tablets even as she talked, laughed, “did Marilyn” with others. They would say, “Marilyn Monroe is so witty!” They would say, “Marilyn Monroe is so—alive!” While he, the somber husband, the husband of four years, the husband-who-seems-too-old-for-Marilyn, the censorious husband, stood to the side, observing.

  “Fuck, I told you: I don’t like being spied on. You think you’re so perfect, mister, go look in the mirror.”

  Her brain was broken like a cheap wind-up clock yet she was desperate to improve her mind. Desperate!

  Not just Origin of Species she’d been reading & annotating for months. Now this book Carlo had given her. Oh, she was so moved by Pascal! So long ago, such thoughts, it didn’t seem possible, the story of Origin of Species was things improving, more refinement in time, “reproduction with modification” for the better, & yet: Pascal! In the seventeenth century! A sickly man who would die young, age thirty-nine. He had written her own deepest thoughts she could never have expressed even in rudimentary stammering speech.

  Our nature consists in motion; complete rest is death. . . . The charm of fame is so great that we revere every object to which it is attached, even death.

  These words of Pascal, copied in red ink in Norma Jeane’s schoolgirl journal.

  Carlo had inscribed the little book To Angel with Love from Carlo. If only one of us makes it. . . .

  “Maybe I could have his baby someday? Marlon Brando.”

  She laughed. Oh, it was a crazy thought but . . . why not? They wouldn’t have to be married. Gladys hadn’t been married. The Dark Prince was better off not married. She was thirty-four years old. Two or three more years of childbearing.

  The lovers kissed! Roslyn & the cowboy Gay Langland.

  “No. I want to try again.”

  Again, the lovers kissed. Roslyn & the cowboy Gay Langland.

  “No. I want to try again.”

  Again, the lovers kissed. Roslyn & the cowboy Gay Langland.

  “No. I want to try again.”

  These were new lovers. Clark Gable who was Gay Langland who wasn’t young, & Marilyn Monroe who was Roslyn who was a divorcée past the bloom of first youth. Long ago in the darkened theater. I was a child, I adored you. The Dark Prince! She had only to shut her eyes & it was that long-ago time in the movie house to which she would go after school on Highland Avenue & pay for her solitary ticket & Gladys would have warned her Don’t sit by any man! Don’t speak to any man! & she lifted h
er eyes excited to the screen to see the Dark Prince who was this very man who kissed her now & whom she kissed with such hunger, the hot stinging agony of her mouth forgotten; this handsome dark man with the thin-trimmed mustache now in his sixties, now with lined face & thinning hair & the unmistakable eyes of mortality. Once, I believed you were my father. Oh tell me, tell me you are my father!

  This movie that is her life.

  These were new lovers & the feeling between them delicate & evanescent as a spider’s web. Sleeping Roslyn in bed her beautiful body covered only by a sheet & her lover Gay leaning gently over her to wake her with a kiss & Roslyn quickly rose to slip her bare arms around his neck & kiss him in return with such yearning that, for the moment, the hot-stinging agony of her mouth & the terror & misery of her life were forgotten. Oh, I love you! Always I have loved you! She saw again the framed photo of this handsome man on Gladys’s bedroom wall. It was a long-ago time yet so vivid! The building was The Hacienda. The street was La Mesa. It was Norma Jeane’s sixth birthday. Norma Jeane, see?—that man is your father. Roslyn was naked beneath the sheet, Gay was dressed. To be naked onscreen & against a crumpled crimson velvet cloth is to be exposed & vulnerable as a sea creature prized out of its shell & if the soles of your feet are exposed, what shame! And the dark erotic thrill of such shame. When they kissed, Roslyn shivered; you could see her pale skin lift in goose pimples. Stinging red ants! The tiny sores would course through her veins & blossom in her brain & destroy her one day but not just yet.

  A kiss should hurt. I love your kisses, that hurt.

  Monroe was superstitious and rarely saw daily rushes, but that evening she came by with Gable and the scene came on and we were astonished at how it played. H took Monroe aside and loomed over her gripping her hands and thanking her for her work that day. Jesus that was good, he said. It was so subtle. It was beyond sex. She was a real woman in the scene, and Gable a real man. You ached for them. None of the usual movie bullshit. H had had a few whiskeys and was in a repentant mood for he’d been cursing Monroe behind her back for weeks and making us laugh describing the ways he’d have liked to murder her. “If ever I doubt you again, honey, give me a good swift kick in the ass, eh?”