Blonde

by Joyce Carol Oates

  Be natural. Say what you feel. If you don’t feel anything say what you’d imagine you might feel if you weren’t sedated with Demerol.

  “They are g-great men. Great Americans. I revere them as human beings of fame and achievement in their fields though I c-could not remain married to them as a woman.” She begins to cry. She lifts a clutched tissue—no, it’s a white handkerchief—to her eyes. A brassy-voiced female reporter for one of the tabloids dares to ask if MARILYN MONROE feels she has “failed as a wife, a woman, a mother” and there’s a collective gasp from the assemblage at such audacity (just the question everyone was dying to ask!); the Blond Actress’s attorney frowns, a press representative/media consultant from The Studio who stands close behind her frowns, clearly the Blond Actress isn’t required to answer so rude a question, but bravely, lifting her stricken eyes to search out her persecutor, she says, “All my life I have t-tried not to fail. I have tried so hard! I tried to be adopted out of the orphanage. That’s the Home, on El Centro Avenue. I tried to excel in sports in high school. I tried to be a good housewife to my first husband who left me at the age of seventeen. I’ve tried so hard to be a good actress, not just another blonde. Oh you know I’ve tried, don’t you? Marilyn Monroe was a pinup, you r-remember I was a calendar girl, nineteen years old, I was paid fifty dollars for ‘Miss Golden Dreams’ and it almost ruined my career, it’s said to be the bestselling calendar photo in history and the model received only fifty dollars for it back in 1949, but I’m not b-bitter. I’m upset I guess but I’m not b-bitter or angry or—I just keep thinking about what might have been, having a b-baby and—oh and Mr. Gable is gone and Marilyn Monroe is even being blamed for that!—though I loved him—as a friend—though he’d had heart attacks before—oh I miss him!—I miss him I guess more than I miss my marriage—my marriages—”

  No more. The mood we want is elegiac, not melodramatic. If the genre is tragic it’s classic, Greek: the bloody messes are offstage and only reflection remains.

  “I’m sorry. Oh, forgive me! I c-can’t say anything more.” She is crying seriously. She hides her face. Camera flashes have been intermittent and continuous through the press conference and now dozens of cameras flash simultaneously; the effect is of a miniature A-bomb! The Blond Actress is escorted by her two male companions to a waiting limousine (the Divorce Press Conference has been staged on the front lawn of the Beverly Hills residence in which the Blond Actress is currently residing, courtesy of her agent Holyrod or maybe Z of The Studio or “a Marilyn film devotee”) and the media people, disappointed at the brevity of the press conference, press forward now, lunging out of control like maddened dogs, a pack of journalists, columnists, radio people, photographers, camera crews, many more than the select few invited for this exclusive event; the newsreel sound track picks up isolated frenzied shouts—“Miss Monroe, one more question please!”—“Marilyn, wait!”—“Marilyn, tell our listeners in radioland: will Marlon Brando be your next?”—and despite several Studio security guards fending off the crowd, a wily little Italian-looking reporter with satyr ears manages to slip under the attorney’s arm and thrusts a microphone into the Blond Actress’s face with such violence he strikes her very mouth (and chips a front tooth!—to be repaired by a Studio dentist) shouting in accented English, “Mari-lyn! Is’t true you hava many times tried to suicide?” Another audacious party, apparently not a bona fide journalist, brawny and sweatily gleaming with up-tufted hair like a toothbrush and a face that appears boiled-looking on film, manages to thrust an envelope at the frightened Blond Actress which she takes, seeing it’s addressed to MISS MARILYN MONROE in red ink and attractively decorated with several red Valentine hearts.

  Then the Blond Actress is in the limousine. The rear door is shut. The windows are dark-tinted, impossible to see through from the outside. Her escorts speak sharply to the crowd—“Give the girl a break, will you!”—“She’s suffering, you can see!”—and climb into the limousine and it moves off, slowly at first, for photographers are blocking the street; then it’s gone. The crowd in its wake still clamoring for attention and cameras still flashing until the newsreel breaks off.

  2

  “Am I d-divorced now? Is it over?”

  “Marilyn, you were divorced a week ago. Remember? In Mexico City? We flew down together.”

  “Oh, I guess. It’s all over then?”

  “All over, dear. For the time being.”

  The men laughed as if the Blond Actress had uttered witty lines.

  They were in the rear of the speeding limousine behind dark-tinted windows. No longer on camera. It should have been real life but it did not seem real. It was no easier to breathe now, or to focus her eyes. Her front teeth ached where a hard object had struck her but she told herself it had been an accident, the reporter hadn’t meant to hurt her. Her attorney whose name she didn’t immediately recall and the Studio PR man Rollo Freund were congratulating her; she’d performed beautifully in a stressful situation. It was my real life. But yes it was a performance.

  “Excuse me? I’m d-divorced, now?” She saw by their faces she must’ve asked this question already and knew the answer. “Oh, I mean—will I have more papers to sign?”

  Always, more papers to sign. In the presence of a notary.

  MARILYN MONROE signed such documents averting her eyes. Better not to know!

  In the speeding limousine that was a kind of Time Machine. Already she was forgetting where she’d been. She had no idea where she was being taken. Maybe there was more publicity to do for The Misfits. “Rollo Freund” was in fact “Otto Öse” and maybe he was still a girlie photographer? She was too tired to sort it out. She fumbled in her handbag for a Benzedrine tablet to wake her up but couldn’t find any. Or her fingers were too clumsy. Oh, she missed sinister Doc Fell now he was gone! (Doc Fell, resident physician at The Studio, had vanished from The Studio. A new physician resembling Mickey Rooney had taken his place. There was a cruel rumor circulating in Hollywood that Doc Fell had been found dead seated on a toilet in his Topanga Canyon bungalow, trousers around his ankles and a syringe in his scarred arm; in some versions of the story he’d died of a morphine overdose, in other versions of a heroin overdose. A tragic end for a physician who resembled wholesome Cary Grant!)

  She was clutching the Valentine envelope in her fingers. For months she’d been nervously awaiting another letter from her father but supposed this would not be it. “I’m so lonely. I don’t understand why I’m so lonely when I’ve loved so many people. I loved girls in the Home, my sisters!—my only friends. But I’ve lost them all. My mother hardly seems to know me. My father writes to me but keeps his distance. Am I a leper? A freak? A curse? Men say they love me but who’s it they love? ‘Marilyn.’ I love animals, especially horses. I’m helping some people in Reno start a fund to save the wild mustangs of the Southwest. I wish no animals ever had to die. Except natural death!”

  One of the men cleared his throat and said, “Your interview is over now, Marilyn. Why don’t you relax.” She was trying to explain how unfair, how unjust it was to be blamed for Clark Gable’s death—“When I was the one who loved him. So much! He was the only man I’ve ever truly admired. My m-mother Gladys Mortensen knew Mr. Gable a long time ago when they’d both been young and new to Hollywood.” Another time she was gently told, “The interview is over, Marilyn.” She said as if pleading, “Why love goes wrong, it’s a mystery. I didn’t invent that mystery, did I? Why am I to blame? I know you’re supposed to play the dice until you lose. You’re supposed to be brave, a good sport. I’m going to try. Next time I’ll be a better actress, I promise.”

  The men were fascinated by this famous film actress. Seeing close up how her face was a girl’s innocent face beneath that crust of theatrical makeup. Such makeup is ideal for photography but jarring to the naked eye. They noted how pathetically she was clutching the Valentine envelope, as if a message from an anonymous fan, a declaration of love by a stranger, might save her life. “Don’t s
tare at me, please! I’m not a freak. I don’t care to be memorized for anecdotal purposes. Nor do I want to sign any more legal documents. Except for my mother’s trust fund. To keep her at the Lakewood Home after I’m”—she paused, confused: what did she mean to say?—“in case something unexpected happens to me.” She laughed. “Or expected.”

  Both men quickly protested she shouldn’t speak like that. MARILYN MONROE was still a young woman and would live a long, long time.

  3

  This strange thing! “Wish I had somebody to tell.”

  Rollo Freund, the press representative/media manager hired by The Studio to oversee their star MARILYN MONROE was no one else but Otto Öse! Returned to her, after more than a decade.

  Yet the man refused to acknowledge he’d once been Otto Öse. As Rollo Freund he claimed to be a “native New Yorker” who’d migrated to L.A. in the late fifties to pioneer in a new science called “media management.” Within a few years he’d become so successful, the film companies were bidding for his services. For those megastars (like MARILYN MONROE) who seemed always to be involved in sensational publicity and scandal, stars possibly inclined to self-destruction, an expert media manager was a necessity. Otto Öse, or Rollo Freund, was tall and brooding as Norma Jeane remembered, and as thin, with a hawkish, pockmarked face, a drooping left eyelid that gave him a perpetually ironic look, and those curious thornlike scars on his forehead. His crown of thorns. Him, Judas! His once-black hair had faded to the color of used steel wool and now covered his bony skull in a peculiar oleaginous fuzz. He must have been in his fifties. He hadn’t aged so much as calcified. His small shrewd eyes seemed to peep at you, watery and alert, out of an imperturbable plaster mask. His teeth had been beautifully capped, Hollywood style. The ugliest man I’ve ever seen. Yet not dead!

  Rollo Freund drove a bottle-green Jaguar and dressed in expensive shark-colored suits custom made (as he boasted) by “my tailor in Bond Street, London.” These suits fitted his pencil-thin body so tightly he had to sit bolt upright in a posture familiar to the Blond Actress when she was sewn into her straitjacket gowns. When first introduced she’d been sharp-eyed Norma Jeane and not the sweetly myopic and self-absorbed Blond Actress and she’d recognized Otto Öse at once though he’d grown an ashy goatee and was wearing amber-tinted steel glasses and one of his custom-made suits. She’d stared at this man in astonishment. She stammered, “But don’t we know each other? Otto Öse? I’m Norma Jeane, remember?”

  Rollo Freund, like any practiced liar or actor, regarded this remark with equanimity. He was not one to allow any situation involving him to be commandeered by another. He smiled politely at the clearly confused woman. “‘Oz’? I’m afraid I’m unacquainted with any ‘Oz.’ You must be mistaking me for another man, Miss Monroe.”

  Norma Jeane laughed. “Oh, Otto, this is ridiculous. Calling me ‘Miss Monroe.’ You know me, Norma Jeane. You’re the photographer who took my picture for Stars & Stripes and you’re responsible for Miss Golden Dreams—you paid me fifty dollars!—and you haven’t changed so much I can’t recognize you. You’d have to be more than dead, Otto, for me not to recognize you.” Otto Öse, or Rollo Freund, laughed heartily as if the Blond Actress had uttered one of her witticisms. She said, pleading, “Please, Otto. You must remember. I was Mrs. Bucky Glazer in those days. Wartime. You discovered me and changed my l-life.” Ruined my life, you bastard. But Otto Öse, or Rollo Freund as he insisted upon being called, was too canny to be seduced even by the Blond Actress.

  She had to admire him. What a character!

  It was 1961 now, and in Hollywood, as elsewhere, it was no longer a traitorous thing to be or appear to be Jewish. The era of Red Scare anti-Semitism had subsided; hatred of Jews had gone underground or had become more subtly codified, a matter of country club memberships and neighborhood restrictions, not a matter of blacklists and “Commie” persecution; the Rosenbergs had long since been electrocuted and their martyred zeal gone to ashes; Senator Joe McCarthy, the Attila of the right wing, had died and been dragged by devils down into the raging Catholic hell he’d hoped to evoke on earth for others. Otto, or Rollo, made no secret of seeming Jewish; he spoke with a New York Jew inflection that sounded, to Norma Jeane’s ear, she who’d lived with a New York Jew for four years, not entirely convincing. Yet when they were alone together Otto, or the intrepid Rollo, refused to acknowledge their shared past. Norma Jeane said, “I get it, I think. ‘Otto Öse’ was blacklisted so you changed your name?” Still the man shook his head, as if mystified. “I was born Rollo Freund. If I had my birth certificate with me, I’d show you, Miss Monroe.” Always he called her “Miss Monroe” and, in time, “Marilyn.” These names in his mouth sounded subtly mocking. Hadn’t he once accused her of selling herself like merchandise? Hadn’t he once predicted for her a lonely junkie’s death? He’d said the female body is a joke. He loathed women. Yet he’d introduced her to the writing of Schopenhauer, he’d given her The Daily Worker to read. He’d introduced her to Cass Chaplin, who’d made her, for a time, so happy. “Oh, Otto. I mean, Rollo. I won’t torment you. I’ll be Marilyn.”

  She had to admire the media manager for his skill in organizing the Divorce Press Conference and for orchestrating it, in the borrowed house, like a director. He’d carefully blocked out not only MARILYN MONROE’s movements, as she left the house to face the press, but her attorney’s and his own as well. Even the security guards were rehearsed. “The tone we want to avoid is melodrama. You’ll dress in black linen, I’ve ordered just the perfect costume for you from Wardrobe, and you’ll look like a widow. You want to impress these cynics as a widow suffering irrevocable loss, not a divorcée relieved to be free of a dead marriage.” They were in Z’s office when Rollo Freund made this speech. She’d been drinking vodka and the Blond Actress laughed in her new gut-laughter way, like a North Carolina farm girl who didn’t give a shit for the film industry or her own beauty or talent. “You said it, Rollo. A dead-doornail marriage. A fucking boring old dead-doornail marriage to a boring old dead-doornail (if kind and decent and ‘talented’) husband. Help!” When the Blond Actress sailed into one of her riffs, like Fred Allen, Groucho Marx, the late W. C. Fields, observers stared at her in a kind of shock. Rollo Freund and his male companions laughed nervously. MARILYN MONROE was frequently the only female at such gatherings, if you didn’t count secretaries and “assistants”; as she’d have specified, the “only practicing vagina”; men were wary of seeming to encourage her though they certainly stared avidly at her, memorizing and storing up anecdotes; for was it true, MARILYN MONROE never wore underwear? (it was! you could see!) and went for days without bathing (she did! you could smell her talcumy sweat). But the men never laughed more than briefly.

  You didn’t want to encourage Monroe. With a hysteric an outburst is only a fraction of a second away. Handle with kid gloves. Never forget this sleek blond pussy has claws.

  Sitting that afternoon on Z’s plush sofa, leaning forward and clasping her hands around her crossed knees. Her manner was schoolgirl earnest in the way of a contract-player starlet. She spoke soberly. “When did I agree to a ‘divorce press conference’? Divorce isn’t a tragedy maybe but it’s a private sadness. Four years of marriage to a man and I can’t—” She paused, trying to think. Can’t what? Can’t remember why the hell she’d ever married the playwright? A man nearly old enough to be her father and in temperament old enough to be her grandfather? Not one of the ribald-jolly Jews (like Max Pearlman she’d adored) but a rabbinical-scholarly Jew? Not her type at all? Can’t remember his name? “I can’t understand where I m-made my mistake so how can I learn from it? There’s this French philosopher says ‘Heart, instinct, principles.’ Shouldn’t I be guided by mine? I’m a serious person really. Why don’t we cancel it? I’m just feeling so sad and, I don’t know, retreating.”

  Z and the other men stared at the Blond Actress as if she’d spoken in a demon’s tongue, unknown to their ears. Rollo Freund smoothly leapt in, seeming to agre
e with her. “You feel genuine emotion, Miss Monroe! That’s why you’re a brilliant actress. That’s why people see in you a magnified image of themselves. Of course they’re deluded, but happiness dwells in delusion! Because you live in your soul like a candle that lives in its own burning. You live in our American soul. Don’t smile, Miss Monroe. I’m serious, too. I’m saying that you are an intelligent woman, not just a woman of ‘feeling’; you’re an artist, and like all artists you know that life is just material for your art. Life is what fades, art is what remains. Your emotions, your anguish over your divorce or Mr. Gable’s death, whatever—” with an airy impatient gesture taking in all of the world she’d inhabited in thirty-five years or even envisioned: the very memory of the Holocaust evoked out of much-thumbed secondhand books rescued from a used-book store, vessels of Jewish fortitude and suffering and eloquence even in suffering, the stale-rancid odors of the California madhouses of her mother’s captivity, all the memories of her personal life, as if they were of no more significance than a screenplay—“you may as well see your trauma as a newsreel, because others will.”

  “Newsreel? What newsreel?”

  “The press conference will be taped. Not just by us, but by the media of course. Parts of it will be played and replayed. It will be a precious document.” Seeing the Blond Actress was shaking her head, Rollo Freund continued, with passion, “Miss Monroe. You may as well concede the ultimate form of your raw emotions. Actual life is but the means of achieving form.”

  Norma Jeane was too shaken to protest. Staring at her old friend Otto, who’d never been her lover or even, in fact, her friend. He was all she had from the days of her youth. She said in her Marilyn voice, so soft and whispery it was almost inaudible, “Oh. I guess. You argue so forcefully. I surrender.”