Blonde

by Joyce Carol Oates

  Instead, she’d let him brush her hair.

  For here was her true father. He would hurt others for her sake, but never her.

  She’d lost Frank Widdoes. He had disappeared from her life with the Pirigs, Mr. Haring, her long curly dark-blond hair and slightly crooked front teeth. Yet there was the movie character “Jed Powers” staring at her. Richard Widmark was the actor’s name.

  Seeing not Widmark—who meant no more to me by that time than a movie poster of the famous actor—but Frank Widdoes, who had entered my soul. What passion in Nell! Her skin heated, and her body primed for love! She’s behaved recklessly, signaling to this stranger with a flurry of venetian blinds. She’s a baby-sitter in a big-city hotel. She’s stepped into a fantasy. Glamorous borrowed clothes, borrowed perfume, jewelry, and makeup, that have transformed mousy Nell into a seductive blond beauty ready to take on “Jed Powers” with her young eager body. Every action requires justification. You must locate a reason for everything you do onstage. Nell has only just been discharged from a mental hospital. She’s tried to commit suicide. Her scarred wrists. She’s terrified as Gladys was terrified at the prospect of leaving Norwalk. Gladys’s hands taut as claws. Gladys’s thin body stiffening when Norma Jeane pleaded Maybe you can come stay with me, some weekend? There’s Thanksgiving. Oh, Mother!

  The stranger arrives, knocking at Nell’s door. His taunting eyes move upon her; his appraisal is unmistakably sexual. He has brought a bottle of rye, he’s excited and nervous too. Her eyelids quiver as if he’s stroked her belly; her childish voice drops—“You like the way I look?” Later they kiss. Nell moves into the kiss like a hungry sinewy snake. “Jed Powers” is taken by surprise.

  Widmark was taken by surprise. Never would he know who was “Marilyn,” who was “Nell.” It wasn’t Widmark’s style of acting. He was a skilled technical actor. He followed a director’s direction. Often his mind was elsewhere. There was something humiliating about being an actor, if you were a man. Any actor is a kind of female. The makeup, the wardrobe fittings. The emphasis on looks, attractiveness. Who the hell cares what a man looks like? What kind of man wears eye makeup, lipstick, rouge? But he’d expected to walk away with the movie. A crappy melodrama that might’ve been a stage play it was so talky and static, mostly a single set. “Richard Widmark” was the sole box-office name in the cast and he took it for granted he’d dominate the movie. Swagger through Don’t Bother to Knock as the love interest of two good-looking young women who never meet. (The other was Anne Bancroft, in her Hollywood debut.) But every fucking scene with “Nell” was a grapple. He’d swear that girl wasn’t acting. She was so deep into her movie character you couldn’t communicate with her; it was like trying to speak with a sleepwalker. Eyes wide open and seemingly seeing, but she’s seeing a dream. Of course, the baby-sitter Nell was a kind of sleepwalker; the script defined her that way. And, seeing “Jed Powers,” she doesn’t see him, she sees her dead fiancé; she’s trapped in delusion. The script failed to explore the psychological significance of the issue it raised as melodrama: where does dreaming end and madness begin? Is all “love” based upon delusion?

  Afterward Widmark would tell the story of how the cunning little bitch Marilyn Monroe stole every scene they were in together! every scene! It wasn’t evident at the time, only when they saw the day’s rushes. And even then it wasn’t as clear as it would be at screenings when they saw the movie in its entirety. In fact, every scene Marilyn Monroe was in, she managed to steal. And when “Nell” wasn’t on camera, the movie died. Widmark hated “Jed Powers”—all talk. He didn’t get to kill anybody or even to punch, kick, maul; it was the psycho baby-sitter blonde who had the juicy action scenes, tying and gagging the bratty little girl, almost shoving her out a high window. (At the screening even among Hollywood veterans half the audience was gasping and pleading “No! no!”) The hell of it was, on the set Marilyn Monroe appeared scared stiff. A poker up her ass. “What a dummy. That beautiful face and figure, and you wanted to steer clear of her, like what she had was contagious. In those ‘love’ scenes with her it was like my guts were being sucked out of me, and frankly I don’t have guts to spare. Either she can’t act at all or she’s acting all the time. Her entire life’s an act, like breathing.”

  What really pissed Widmark off, Nell had to do every fucking scene over and over. This breathy stubborn voice—“Please. I can do better, I know.” So we’d redo what we’d already done and the director had said was good. Sure, possibly it was improved next time, and improved a little more the next time, but so what? Was that crappy little melodrama worth it?

  Maybe she was fighting for her life, but he wasn’t.

  3

  So strange. There was a morning she realized. Only “Marilyn Monroe” was known here, not Norma Jeane.

  4

  I did want to kill the child! She was growing too tall, she wasn’t a child any longer. She was losing what had made her special.

  Saying to the director, “Her motive for wanting to kill the child is: the child is her. The child is Nell. She wants to kill herself. She doesn’t want to grow up, and if you don’t grow up you must die. I wish you’d let me add lines of my own! I know I could do better. Nell is a poet, you see. Nell has taken a night-school course in poetry and she has written poetry about love and death. Losing her love to death. She was hospitalized and now she’s out but still she’s behind bars, her mind has imprisoned her. Why are you looking at me like that? It’s the clearest thing. It’s obvious. Let me play Nell my way, I know.”

  5

  Nijinski, too, was a child abandoned by his father. His handsome dancer-father. Abandoned, and a prodigy. Dance, dance! His debut at the age of eight, his collapse twenty years later. What can you do but dance, dance? Dance! You dance on fiery coals and the audience applauds, for when you cease dancing the fiery coals devour you. I am God, I am death, I am love, I am God and death and love. I am your brother.

  6

  Calm as a wind-up doll. Yet invisibly she was tense, quivering. Her skin was clammy-pale (Nell’s skin was clammy-pale) yet heated to the touch. When we kissed I sucked his soul into me like a tongue. I laughed, the man was so frightened of me! She was not mad (Nell was mad in her place) yet she saw with the piercing eyes of madness. Of course she was not Nell but the young capable actress who “played” Nell as one might “play” the piano. Yet she contained Nell. An actor is greater than the parts he contains, so Norma Jeane was greater than Nell because she contained Nell. Nell was the germ of madness in the brain. Nell promised in a whisper, “I will be any way you want me to be.” At the end she whispered, as she was taken away, “People who love each other . . .” Nell the Beggar Maid. Nell with no last name. She dared to transform herself into a princess by appropriating a rich woman’s possessions: an elegant black cocktail dress, diamond earrings, perfume, and lipstick. But the Beggar Maid was unmasked and humiliated. Even her attempt to kill herself was thwarted. In a public place, the foyer of a hotel. Strangers gawking at her. Never so happy as when I brought the edge of the razor against my throat. And there was Mother’s voice urging Cut! Don’t be a coward like me! But Norma Jeane replied calmly No. I am an actress. This is my craft. I do what I do to simulate, not to be. For while I contain Nell, Nell does not contain me.

  It was a time of self-discipline. She starved herself and drank ice water. She ran the early-morning streets of West Hollywood as far as Laurel Canyon Drive until her healthy young body thrummed with energy. She had no need of sleep. She took no magic potions to help her sleep. Through the nights alternating between her vigorous actor’s warm-up exercises and reading books, most of them secondhand or borrowed. Nijinski fascinated her. There was such beauty and certitude in his madness. It began to seem to her that she’d known Nijinski years ago. Several of his dream experiences were her own.

  She contained Nell, but certainly Norma Jeane wasn’t Nell. For Nell was an immature woman, emotionally stunted. She could not live without a lover to keep her fr
om madness and self-destruction. She had to be defeated, banished. Why didn’t Nell take her revenge? Norma Jeane was tempted to shove the fretful child actress out the window in their suspenseful scene. As Mother had been tempted to drop her girl baby onto the floor. Screaming at the nurse It slipped from my hands! I’m not to blame. Norma Jeane halted production, asking the director, N, please could she rewrite part of a scene? Just a few lines? “I know what Nell would say. These aren’t Nell’s words.” But N refused her. N was perplexed by her. What if every actress wanted to rewrite her lines? “I’m not every actress,” Norma Jeane protested. She didn’t tell N that she was a poet and she deserved words of her own. She was furious with the injustice of Nell’s fate. For madness must be punished in a world in which mere sanity is prized. The revenge of the ordinary upon the gifted.

  Even I. E. Shinn was beginning to take note of the changes in his client. He’d visited the set of Don’t Bother to Knock several times. The look on Rumpelstiltskin’s face! Norma Jeane had been so deep into Nell she’d hardly been aware of him, as of other observers. Between takes she hurried away to hide. She wasn’t “sociable.” She missed interviews. The other actors didn’t know what to make of her. Bancroft was in awe of her intensity but wary of her. Yes, it might be contagious! Widmark was sexually attracted to her but had come to dislike and distrust her. Mr. Shinn cautioned her not to “wear herself out”—not to be “so intense.” She wanted to laugh in his face. She was moving beyond Rumpelstiltskin now. Let him cast his spells. As if “Marilyn” was his invention. His!

  It was a time of self-discipline. She would recall it, this season of Nell, as the true birth of her life as an actress. When she first realized what acting might be: a vocation, a destiny. Her “career” was vulgar publicity arranged by The Studio. It had nothing to do with this rapt inner life. Alone, she lived and relived Nell’s scenes. She’d memorized Nell’s words. She was groping to find a body for Nell, a speech rhythm. In the night, too restless to sleep after the intensity of the workday, she was reading Michael Chekhov’s To the Actor and she was reading Constantin Stanislavski’s An Actor Prepares and she was reading a book urged upon her by a drama tutor, Mabel Todd’s The Thinking Body.

  The body is unstable,

  that is why it has survived.

  This seemed to her poetry, a paradox that is truth. She knew her acting was sheerly gut instinct and perhaps she was not acting at all and this expenditure of spirit would burn her out by the age of thirty. So Mr. Shinn warned. Norma Jeane was like a young athlete eager to push to the limit and beyond, trading her youth for the applause of the crowd. That had happened to the prodigy Nijinski. Genius has no need of technique. But “technique” is sanity. Her teachers told her she lacked “technique.” But what is “technique” but the absence of passion? Nell was not accessible by way of “technique.” Nell was accessible only by plunging into the soul. Nell was fiery and doomed. Nell must be defeated, her sexuality denied. Oh, what was Nell’s secret? Norma Jeane came near yet couldn’t penetrate it. She could “be” Nell only to a point. She spoke with N, who had no idea what she was talking about. She spoke with V, saying she’d never realized, acting might be so lonely.

  V said, “Acting is the loneliest profession I know.”

  7

  Never did I exploit her, I did not. I did not steal from her. This was her gift to me. I swear!

  It was an urgent morning when in a borrowed Buick convertible Norma Jeane drove to Norwalk State Hospital. It was a free morning. She was free of Nell for the day. No scenes of Nell’s were being rehearsed or filmed that morning. As usual, Norma Jeane brought Gladys presents: a slender book of poems by Louise Bogan, a small wicker basket of plums and pears. Though she had reason to believe that Gladys rarely read the poetry books given to her and was mistrustful of food gifts. “But who would poison her? Who but herself?” Norma Jeane would leave money for Gladys as usual. She was embarrassed she hadn’t visited Gladys since Easter and it was September now. She’d sent her mother a money order for twenty-five dollars but hadn’t yet told her the good news about Don’t Bother to Knock. Norma Jeane hadn’t told Gladys good news of her life and career for some time, reasoning Maybe it isn’t true exactly? Maybe it’s a dream? They will take it all away?

  For the visit to the hospital Norma Jeane wore stylish white nylon slacks, a black silk blouse, a diaphanous black scarf looped around her gleaming platinum-blond hair, and shiny black pumps with a high-medium heel. She was gracious, soft-voiced. She was not anxious, edgy, watchful; she was not Nell, she’d left Nell behind; Nell would be terrified of entering a mental hospital, Nell would be paralyzed at the gate and incapable of entering. “How clear it is, I am not Nell.”

  Telling herself It’s only a role. A part in a movie. The very concept of “part” means “part of a whole.” Nell is not real, and Nell is not you. Nell is not your life. Nor even your career.

  Nell is sick, and you are well.

  Nell is but the “part,” and you are the actress.

  This was true. This was true!

  Now this morning she was the Fair Princess visiting her mother at Norwalk. Her “mentally disturbed” mother, whom she loved and had not forsaken. Her mother, Gladys Mortensen, whom she would never forsake, as so many daughters, sons, sisters, and brothers had forsaken family members committed to Norwalk.

  Now she was the Fair Princess, whom others observe with hope and excited admiration, measuring the distance between themselves and her and wanting that distance to be exact.

  Now she was the Fair Princess admonished by The Studio as by the Preene Agency to appear in public perfectly groomed and costumed, not a hair out of place, for never are you unobserved at such times, the eyes and ears of the world are turned upon you.

  Immediately she was aware of the receptionist and the nurses observing her with smiling interest. As if an upright flame had entered the dreary hospital. And there came Dr. K, who’d never before appeared so quickly. And a colleague, Dr. S, whom Norma Jeane had never seen before. Smiles, handshakes! All were eager to see Gladys Mortensen’s film-actress daughter. None of these people had seen The Asphalt Jungle or All About Eve but they’d seen or believed they’d seen photographs of the glamorous starlet “Marilyn Monroe” in newspapers and magazines. Even those who knew no more of “Marilyn Monroe” than of Norma Jeane Baker were determined to catch a glimpse of her as she was led through a labyrinth of corridors to distant Wing C. (“C” for “Chronic Cases”?)

  She is pretty, isn’t she? So glamorous! And that hair! Of course it’s fake. Look at poor Gladys, her hair. But they resemble each other, don’t they? Daughter, mother. It’s obvious.

  Yet Gladys seemed scarcely to recognize Norma Jeane. It was her sly-stubborn habit to withhold a quick recognition. Sitting on a sagging sofa in a corner of the dim-lit and smelly lounge like a sack of laundry. Maybe this was a lonely mother waiting for her daughter’s visit, but maybe not. Norma Jeane felt a stab of disappointment and hurt: Gladys was wearing a shapeless gray cotton dress very like the one she’d worn on Easter Sunday, though Norma Jeane had told her they’d be going out for brunch. Today, too, they were going out, into the town of Norwalk. Had Gladys forgotten? Her hair looked as if it hadn’t been combed in days. It was limp, greasy, and a strange graying-brown metallic hue. Gladys’s eyes were sunken yet watchful; beautiful eyes still, though smaller than Norma Jeane recalled. As Gladys’s mouth was smaller, bracketed by severe knife creases.

  “Oh, M-mother! Here you are.” It was an inane unscripted remark. Norma Jeane kissed Gladys’s cheek, instinctively holding her breath against the stale yeasty body odor. Gladys lifted her mask face to Norma Jeane and said dryly, “Do we know each other, miss? You smell.” Norma Jeane laughed, blushing. (There were hospital workers within earshot. Pointedly lingering at the doorway. Greedily absorbing what they could see and hear of “Marilyn Monroe’s” visit to her mother.) This was a joke, of course: Gladys disliked the chemical smell of Norma Jeane’s bleached hair mi
xed with the scent of the rich Chanel perfume that V had given her. Embarrassed, Norma Jeane murmured an apology and Gladys shrugged forgiveness, or indifference. She seemed to be waking slowly from a trance. How like Nell. Yet I did not steal from her, I swear.

  Now came the brief ritual of gift giving. Norma Jeane sat beside Gladys on the sagging sofa and handed over the poetry book and the fruit basket, speaking of these objects as if they were significant items and not props, stage business, something to do with her hands. Gladys grunted thanks. She seemed to enjoy receiving presents if in fact she had little use for them and very likely gave them away as soon as Norma Jeane was gone, or took no care to prevent their being stolen from her by her fellow inmates. I did not steal from this woman. I swear! Norma Jeane would do most of the talking, as usual. She was thinking that she must not allow Gladys to know of Nell; Gladys must know nothing of the lurid melodrama Don’t Bother to Knock, with its portrayal of a mentally disturbed young woman who abuses and comes close to killing a little girl. Such a movie would be strictly off-limits for Gladys Mortensen, as for any Norwalk patient. Still, Norma Jeane couldn’t resist mentioning to Gladys that she’d been working lately as an actress—“serious, demanding work”; she was still under contract to The Studio; there’d been a feature on her as one of a new crop of Hollywood starlets in Esquire. Gladys listened to this in her usual somnambulist way, but when Norma Jeane flipped open the magazine and showed her the glamorous-gorgeous full-page photo of “Marilyn Monroe” in a low-cut white-sequined dress, smiling joyously into the camera, Gladys blinked and stared.

  Norma Jeane said apologetically, “That dress! The Studio provided it. I don’t own it.” Gladys scowled. “You don’t own a dress you’re wearing? Is it clean? A clean dress?” Norma Jeane laughed uneasily. “This doesn’t look much like me, I know. They say Marilyn is photogenic.” Gladys said, “Huh! Does your father know?” Norma Jeane said, “My f-father? Know what?” “About this ‘Marilyn.’” Norma Jeane said, “He wouldn’t know my professional name, I guess. How could he?” But Gladys had become animated. She was staring with pride, maternal pride, wakened from her trance of years and contemplating the splendid display, like ripened fruits, of six beautiful young starlets, any one of whom might be her daughter. Norma Jeane felt a sting as if she’d been rebuked. She would use me to reach him. That’s my value to her. She loves him, not me.