It was like Norma Jeane’s Magic Friend of childhood. Her Magic Friend in the Mirror, who was so much more beautiful when naked, and Norma Jeane’s secret.
One night she told Cass and Eddy G about her Magic Friend. Eddy G laughed and said, “Just like me! I’d set up a mirror to watch myself on the toilet, even. Anything I did in the mirror, I could hear waves and waves of applause.” Cass said, “In our household, which was essentially under an evil spell, my father ‘Chaplin’ was all the magic. A great man draws magic into himself, like reverse lightning. There’s nothing to spare for anyone else.”
Norma Jeane’s new apartment was on top, the eighth floor of the building. Where it was less likely they’d be observed. But when Norma Jeane spent the night with Cass and Eddy G elsewhere, in one or another of their borrowed residences, who knew who might be watching from outside? Only when a house was surrounded by dense foliage or protected by a high fence did Norma Jeane feel entirely safe. Her lovers teased her for being a prude—“‘Miss Golden Dreams,’ of all people.” Norma Jeane protested. “What scares me is somebody taking pictures. Just looking with their eyes, I wouldn’t mind that.”
The eyes and ears of the world. One day that will be your sole place of refuge, but not just yet.
4
Around this time, too, Norma Jeane acquired a new car: a 1951 lime-green Cadillac sedan convertible with a broad grinning chrome grille and flaring tail fins. Whitewall tires, a six-foot radio antenna, genuine palomino-hide seat covers front and rear. It was bought through a friend of a friend of Eddy G’s, a bargain at seven hundred dollars. Yet Norma Jeane saw this vehicle, parked on the street like a nightmare tropical drink in glass-and-metal mutation, with the coolly appraising eyes of Warren Pirig. “Why’s it priced so low?” Eddy G said, “Why? ’Cause my friend Beau has been admiring ‘Marilyn Monroe’ from afar. Says he fell for you hard in The Asphalt Jungle but first laid eyes on you as ‘Miss Paper Products’—something like that? You were this dazzling blonde he says in a paper swimsuit and high heels and the swimsuit caught fire? Remember any of that?” Norma Jeane laughed at this but persisted in her questions. (Norma had such prole-bulldog ways sometimes! Right out of Grapes of Wrath.) “Where’s your friend Beau this minute? Why can’t I meet him?” Eddy G shrugged and said with charming evasiveness, “Where’s Beau? This minute? Where Beau don’t feel the social embarrassment of a lack of wheels. Where Beau is, you could say, ensconced.”
Norma Jeane had further questions, but Eddy G shut her mouth by pressing his own against it, hard. They were alone in Norma Jeane’s new, barely furnished apartment. It was rare for Norma Jeane to be alone with only one of her lovers! Rare for her even to glimpse Eddy G without Cass, or Cass without Eddy G. At such a time the absence of the other was palpable as any presence, maybe more so, for you kept waiting uneasily for the absent man to enter the room. It was like hearing footsteps ascending a stairs—and never coming to the top. It was like hearing that faint tinkling ring that sometimes precedes a phone’s ringing, if no ringing actually follows. Eddy G grabbed Norma Jeane around the rib cage and shut her in his embrace so hard she could scarcely breathe. Eddy G’s snake tongue in Norma Jeane’s mouth, so Norma Jeane’s protesting tongue was silenced.
It wasn’t right to make love without Cass, was it?—how could they even touch each other without Cass?
Eddy G seemed angry. Such authority in anger! Eddy G, who’d sabotaged his acting career by mocking his lines at auditions, arriving late or drunk if hired, or both late and drunk on the set, or failing to arrive at all—Eddy G swooping down upon Norma Jeane like an avenging angel. Bright brown eyes and dark quilled hair and pasty pallor beautiful to her. Eddy G deftly pushed Norma Jeane to the floor, no matter it was a hardwood floor, there was a doglike urgency in his need to copulate, and to copulate at once; he spread her knees and her thighs and penetrated her, and Norma Jeane felt a stab of shame, of hurt, of regret, it was Cass Chaplin she loved, it was Cass Chaplin she wanted to marry, Cass Chaplin who was destined to be the father of her baby; yes, but she loved Eddy G, too, Eddy G, standing six feet tall and yet compactly built like his famous father, tight-muscled, his spoiled boy’s face pale and pettish and almost pretty, and his lips fleshy, pouty, made for sucking. Without knowing what she did, Norma Jeane clutched at Eddy G. Her arms, her legs, her tender chafed thighs. Chafed from so much lovemaking. Starved for love and lovemaking. And like a warm sweet balloon the sensation, opening up, and up inside her, astonishing her who felt always so tight inside herself, a snarled convolution of thoughts-gone-wrong, thoughts-forbidden-to-be-uttered, there in the pit of her belly in those secret places for which available words like vagina, womb, uterus were inadequate and yet such a word as cunt had only a cartoon meaning, coined by the enemy. The balloon opened, and opened. Norma Jeane’s spine was a bow, curving tight, tighter. Writhing on the hardwood floor, head turning from side to side and eyes struck blind.
This is what Rose loves. Rose loves to fuck and to be fucked. If the man knows how.
Norma Jeane screamed and would have torn off a chunk of Eddy G’s lower lip except, feeling her muscles begin to contract, knowing she was about to come and how powerful this starved girl’s orgasms were, canny Eddy G lifted his head so those teeth couldn’t catch him.
She wasn’t a perfect fuck by any means. Basically I guess she never knew how. Or how to give a blow job, either: you’d just fuck her mouth, and it was a luscious mouth so that was OK but it was something you did for yourself, like jerking off. Which is weird considering who she was, or would become: the number-one sex symbol of the twentieth century! The thing you’d hear about her in those years was mostly she’d only just lie there and let it be done to her like a corpse practically with her hands clasped together on her chest. But with Cass and me it was the exact opposite; she’d get so excited, so crazed, there wasn’t any rhythm to it, she’d never masturbated as a kid she told us (we had to teach her!) so maybe that was why, her body was this gorgeous thing she’d stare at in the mirror but it wasn’t her exactly, and she didn’t know how to operate it worth shit. Funny! Norma Jeane having an orgasm was like stampeding for an exit. Everybody screaming and trying to push out the door at the same time.
When the two of them woke an hour later, prodded out of a stuporous sleep by Cass’s foot, whatever Norma Jeane had meant to ask Eddy G about the lime-green Caddy, whatever had seemed so crucial for her to ask, had long been forgotten.
Cass smiled down at them. He sighed. “You two! So peaceful. It’s like that sculpture of Laocoön, if the serpents and the boys had fucked instead of the serpents squeezing the boys to death? And they all fell asleep afterward, twined together? And that way, and not the other, became immortal?”
Beneath the soiled palomino hide covering the rear seat of her new car, Norma Jeane was to discover a scattering of small dark stains like sticky raindrops. Blood? Beneath a soiled plastic mat on the car’s floor, Norma Jeane was to discover a manila envelope containing perhaps four ounces of a white fine-grain powder. Opium?
She licked a few grains with her tongue. No taste.
When she showed the packet to Eddy G, he quickly took it from her. Winked at her and said, “Thanks, Norma! Our secret.”
5
“Rose had a baby, I think. And the baby died.”
She was stubborn yet smiling. Unconsciously (consciously?) stroking her breasts from beneath, as she spoke. Sometimes she’d even palm herself, slowly, thoughtfully, as if the circling self-caressing gesture was part of thinking, her hand against the pit of her belly, her groin all but outlined in the tight-fitting costumes.
Like she was making love to herself right in front of you. Like a small child might do, or an animal rubbing itself.
On the Niagara set, as in Hollywood generally, there were competing theories. The first was that the female lead “Marilyn Monroe” could not act and did not need to act because in sluttish “Rose Loomis” she was only playing herself and that was why the studio bosses h
ad cast her (for it was well known through Hollywood that the bosses, from Mr. Z down, despised Marilyn Monroe as a common tramp hardly better than a hooker or porn-film performer); the second was a more radical theory, advanced by her directors and certain of her fellow actors, that she was a born actress, a natural, in that way a kind of genius, however “genius” is defined, and what was “acting” to her had to be discovered the way a drowning woman flailing her arms, kicking her legs, might discover through desperation how to swim. Swimming “came to her” naturally!
The actor uses his face, his voice, and his body in his craft. He has no other tools. His craft is himself.
Within the first week of filming, the director, H, began to call Norma Jeane “Rose” as if he’d forgotten her professional name. This was flattering to her, amusing. It did not seem to her immediately insulting. Both H and her co-star, Joseph Cotten, a gentleman actor uncertain in his role, a leading man of the generation of Norma Jeane’s former lover, V, and resembling V in numerous ways, behaved as if they were in love with “Rose” or were so fascinated by her they could look nowhere else but at her; or were they revulsed by her, her flagrant female body and flaunted sexuality, feared and loathed her, and so could look nowhere else? The actor who played Rose’s lover, and who got to kiss her in protracted love scenes, was so sexually aroused by her Norma Jeane had to laugh at him; if she hadn’t belonged to the Gemini (as Cass and Eddy G playfully called themselves), she’d have invited him to come home with her. Or to make love with her in her dressing room, why not? It was maddening how “Rose” absorbed most of the light in any scene no matter how meticulously it was lighted. Maddening how without seeming effort she absorbed most of the life of any scene no matter how the other actors expended their actorly selves. In the daily rushes they were revealed as two-dimensional cartoon figures while “Rose Loomis” was a living person. Her pale luminous skin that gave the suggestion of being hot, her uncanny eyes of the translucent blue of a churned winter ocean slivered with ice, her languid somnambulist movements. When she began to stroke her breasts on camera it was difficult for the mesmerized H to stop the scene; though such scenes would never pass the censor and would have to be cut. In a crucial scene, laughing at her desperate husband, mocking him for his impotence by suggesting she’d have sex with the next man she met, Rose rubbed the palm of her hand against her groin in an unmistakable gesture.
Why? It was obvious why. He couldn’t give her what she wanted, she’d give it to herself.
But this was strange. It was much-repeated, and advanced as strange. How on the set of Don’t Bother to Knock not a year before, the young blond actress Marilyn Monroe had had a reputation for being prudish, stiff, painfully shy, shrinking from physical contact and even eye contact; she’d hidden in her dressing room until summoned and was even then reluctant to appear, panicky-eyed like her screen character and not “acting.” Yet on the more open, more frequently visited and reported-on set of Niagara, the same young blond actress betrayed no more self-consciousness than a baboon. She would have walked out nude for her shower scene except a wardrobe girl intercepted her with a terry-cloth robe; she would have tossed away the bath towel she wrapped herself in after the shower, except the same wardrobe girl intercepted her with the same terry-cloth robe. It was the actress’s decision to strip naked for bed scenes where another actress, even a screen siren like Rita Hayworth or Susan Hayward, would have worn flesh-colored undergarments that would be undetected beneath the white sheet. It was the actress’s spontaneous decision to raise her knees beneath the sheet and spread her legs, her manner bawdy and suggestive and anything but “feminine.” Here’s a woman who promises not to be meek and passive in bed! During filming, the sheet often slipped to reveal a nipple or an entire pearly breast. H had no choice but to stop the scene, mesmerized as he was. “Rose! We’ll never get this past the censor.” H was the watchful father, his was the moral responsibility. Rose was the wayward sexually wanton daughter.
That damned woman. So beautiful you couldn’t take your eyes off her. When Gotten finally strangled her, some of us burst into spontaneous applause.
Part of Niagara was filmed in Hollywood on The Studio’s lot; part was filmed on location at Niagara Falls, New York. It was on location that the character of “Rose Loomis” became even more forceful and unpredictable. The actress demanded stronger lines for her. She objected to her “clichéd” speeches. She pleaded to be allowed to write dialogue of her own; when refused, she insisted upon miming parts of scenes, not speaking them. Norma Jeane believed that “Rose Loomis” was an underwritten, unconvincing role that was a clumsy steal from Lana Turner’s seductress-waitress-murderess in The Postman Always Rings Twice. She believed the studio bosses had set her up for humiliation. But she would show them, the bastards.
She insisted that scenes be repeated and repeated. A half-dozen times. A dozen times. “To make it perfect.”
Anything less than perfect threw her into a panic.
One day while preparing to film the long teasing tracking scene in which “Rose Loomis” walks—briskly yet seductively—away from the camera, Norma Jeane suddenly turned to H and his assistant and said, not in her character’s voice but in a normal, matter-of-fact tone, “It came to me last night. Rose had a baby, I think. And the baby died. I didn’t realize it consciously but that’s why I play Rose this way. She has to be more than the script says; she’s a woman with a secret. I can remember how it happened.”
H asked doubtfully, “What? How what happened?”
He was stymied, as he’d been by “Rose Loomis” for weeks. Or by “Marilyn Monroe.” Or—whoever she was! Not knowing if he should take this woman seriously or dismiss her as a joke.
She said, as if he hadn’t interrupted, “This baby. Rose shut it in a bureau drawer, and it suffocated. Not here, of course. Not in a motel room. Somewhere in the west. Where she was living before she married this husband. She was in bed with a man and didn’t hear the baby crying inside the drawer, and when they were finished they never knew the baby was dead.” Her eyes were narrowed, peering beyond the garishly lit set as into the shadowy regions of the past. “Later, Rose took the baby out of the drawer and wrapped it in a towel and buried it in a secret place. No one ever knew.”
H laughed uneasily. “So how the hell do you know?”
A dizzy blonde he’d want to call her. That was the quickest strategy of dismissal. Was he worried she’d undermine his authority as director, the way “Rose Loomis” undermined the authority and the manhood of her husband?
“Hey, I know!” Norma Jeane said, surprised that H might doubt her. “I used to know Rose.”
6
A giant woman! And that woman was her.
In Niagara Falls she began to dream as she’d never dreamt in California. These were waking dreams vivid as cinematic flashes. A giant woman, a laughing yellow-haired woman. Not Norma Jeane and not “Marilyn” or “Rose”—“but it’s me. I’m inside her.”
Instead of a shameful bleeding gash between her legs there was a protuberance like an enlarged swollen pudendum. This organ pulsed with hunger and with desire. Sometimes Norma Jeane merely brushed her hand against it, or dreamt of brushing her hand against it, and in that instant, like a match flaring up, she came to climax and woke moaning in her bed.
7
The Slut. Rose is taunting her husband because he’s no good to her, he’s not a man. She wants him dead and gone. Because he’s not a man, and a woman needs a man. If a man isn’t a husband to her, she has a right to get rid of him. In the movie the plan is for Rose’s lover to push him into the Niagara River so he’ll be swept over the Falls. It’s a nasty truth for 1953: a woman might be a man’s wife yet not belong to him. Not her body and not her soul. A woman might be a man’s wife and not love him, and who she wants to make love with is her own choice. Her life’s her own even to throw away.
I loved Rose. Maybe I was the only woman in the audience but I’d guess not, the movie was such a smash,
long lines waiting to get in like a kids’ Saturday matinee. Rose was so beautiful and sexy, you wanted her to get her way. Maybe all women should get their way. We’re sick of being sympathetic and understanding. We’re sick of forgiving. We’re sick of being good!
8
“Like a message might come at any time. Whether I understood or not.”
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