Blonde

by Joyce Carol Oates

  This much is clear. After the Ex-Athlete says passionately I want you to be happy, the Blond Actress smiles in confusion and says something, but her words are lost in static. An indefatigable lip-reader, having studied this footage repeatedly, has speculated that the Blond Actress says Oh!—but I am happy, I’ve been happy all my l-life. Then like an exploding nova the Ex-Athlete and the Blond Actress in their desperate embrace amid the tangled silken bedsheets of the pharaoh-sized bed sizzle and flame into bodiless light—as the very film melts.

  It’s a fact of history. Appropriate if ironic. We’ve learned to live with it as with any irremediable fact of history. Our instinct is to immediately rewind the film and replay the footage, hoping this time it will turn out differently and we’ll hear more clearly the Blond Actress’s stammered words. . . .

  But no, never will we hear.

  3

  At the clamorous premiere of Gentlemen Prefer Blondes at the refurbished Grauman’s Egyptian Theatre on Hollywood Boulevard amid klieg lights and camera flashes and whistles and hoots and applause there had come, stealthy as a lioness, Mr. Z’s trusted Yvet to murmur mysteriously into the Blond Actress’s ear, “Marilyn. I’ve just learned. Be sure to go alone to your hotel suite tonight. Someone special will be waiting for you there.”

  The Blond Actress cupped a hand to her diamond-laden ear.

  “Someone s-special? Oh. Oh!”

  That glass sliver in the heart. Amid a fluttery-delicious Benzedrine rush, virtually every remark made to you is freighted with destiny, a sweet-painful stab in the heart. And Benzedrine and champagne, what a combination! The Blond Actress was only just discovering what everybody else in Hollywood knew.

  “Is it—my f-father?”

  “Who?”

  Deafening music from the sound track—“A Little Girl From Little Rock.” The clamoring crowd and an announcer’s amplified voice and Yvet didn’t hear, nor did the Blond Actress exactly mean her to hear. (Reasoning with Benzedrine logic if the mystery visitor was indeed the father of Norma Jeane Baker/Marilyn Monroe he’d have hidden his identity from strangers; his identity would be revealed solely, and privately, to her.) Yvet in svelte black velvet and a single strand of pearls, pewter hair, and bemused pewter eyes boring into the Blond Actress’s soul. I know you. I’ve seen your bloody cunt. Your insides scooped out like a fish’s. I’m the one who knows. Yvet pressed her forefinger against her lips. It’s a secret! Can’t tell. The Blond Actress—who hadn’t realized she was gripping the older woman’s wrist like a scared euphoric teenage girl—decided not to be insulted by this warning but to express, as Lorelei Lee herself might have, simple gratitude. “Thank you!”

  So I wouldn’t bring a man back with me. Get drunk, pick somebody up. That’s how they think of Marilyn.

  The Ex-Athlete, to the extreme disappointment of The Studio’s PR staff, was not accompanying the Blond Actress to the premiere. She would be escorted in her dazzling blond finery by Studio executives, her mentors Mr. Z and Mr. D. The Ex-Athlete was far away on the East Coast being honored in the Baseball Hall of Fame. Or was he in Key West marlin fishing with Papa Hemingway, one of the Slugger’s biggest fans? Or was he in New York City, his favorite city, where you could be almost anonymous, dining with Walter Winchell in Sardi’s, or dining with Frank Sinatra in the Stork Club, or at Jack Dempsey’s Restaurant on Times Square at the ex-heavyweight champion’s table, drinking and smoking cigars and signing autographs beside the legendary Dempsey himself.

  “Know what ‘celebrity’ is, kid? Being paid to bullshit the rest of your natural life.”

  As soon as Dempsey won the heavyweight title in 1919, he’d lost his hunger for boxing. For the ring. For fans. Even for winning: “Winning’s for chumps.” The Ex-Athlete admired like hell his fellow ex-champ in a sport more masculine and more dangerous and therefore more profound than baseball, this Dempsey in battered elephant skin, overweight, winking, and laughing—Hey, I made it. The great Dempsey!

  The Blond Actress wasn’t jealous of the Ex-Athlete’s boyish brotherly need for macho men. The Blond Actress could share in that need herself.

  How many arduous-tedious hours had been required to prepare the Blond Actress for this festive evening! She’d arrived at The Studio at 2 P.M., already an hour late, in slacks, jacket, sailcloth flat-heeled shoes. She’d arrived at The Studio wearing no makeup except lipstick. No eyebrows! She hadn’t yet swallowed her prescription Benzedrine so she was in a clear and acerbic mood. Her platinum-blond hair tied back into a ponytail, she looked possibly sixteen, a pretty but unextraordinary southern California high school cheerleader with an unusually well-developed bust. “Why the hell can’t I just be myself?” she complained. “For once.” She liked to entertain the Studio help. She liked their laughter and liked their liking her. Marilyn’s one of us. She’s great. There was perceived in her at times a frantic need to win the affection of hairdressers, makeup artists, wardrobe women, cameramen, lighting technicians, the army of Studio employees with only first names like “Dee-Dee,” “Tracy,” “Whitey,” “Fats.” What’s Marilyn Monroe really like?—terrific! She gave them gifts. Some of these were gifts pressed upon her, others were purchased new. She gave them complimentary tickets. She remembered to ask them about their mothers’ illnesses, their impacted wisdom teeth, their cocker spaniel puppies, their tumultuous love lives that seemed to her so much more absorbing than her own.

  Don’t let me hear you say anything against Marilyn, I’ll shove your fucking teeth down your fucking throat. She’s the only one of them who’s human.

  The day of the Blondes premiere, a half-dozen expert hands laid into the Blond Actress as chicken pluckers might lay into poultry carcasses. Her hair was shampooed and given a permanent and its shadowy roots bleached with peroxide so powerful they had to turn a fan on the Blond Actress to save her from asphyxiation and her hair was then rinsed another time and set on enormous pink plastic rollers and a roaring dryer lowered onto her head like a machine devised to administer electric shock. Her face and throat were steamed, chilled, and creamed. Her body was bathed and oiled, its unsightly hairs removed; she was powdered, perfumed, painted, and set to dry. Her fingernails and toenails were painted a brilliant crimson to match her neon mouth. Whitey the makeup man had labored for more than an hour when he saw to his chagrin a subtle asymmetry in the Blond Actress’s darkened eyebrows and removed them entirely and redid them. The beauty mark was relocated by a tenth of a fraction of an inch, then prudently restored to its original position. False eyelashes were glued into place. In exasperation the priestly Whitey intoned, “Miss Monroe, please look up. Please don’t flinch. Have I ever stabbed you in the eye?” The eyeliner pencil moved dangerously close to the Blond Actress’s eye but did not in fact go in. By this time the Blond Actress had taken a Nembutal tablet to steady her nerves for she’d been feeling not anxious about the premiere that evening (there’d been numerous screenings of Blondes, sneak previews, and early reviews proclaiming the movie a surefire hit and Marilyn Monroe a perfect Lorelei Lee) but strangely angry and impatient. And maybe she missed the Ex-Athlete? She worried that he was staying away from the premiere because he resented so much attention lavished on her.

  When the Ex-Athlete was gone from her, the Blond Actress keenly felt his absence. When the Ex-Athlete was with her, the Blond Actress often had little to say to him, and he to her.

  “But maybe that’s how marriage should be? Two souls. Still.”

  The Ex-Athlete was glowing-proud to be seen with the Blond Actress on his arm in public places. He was nearly forty; she was much younger and looked younger still. After such excursions, the Ex-Athlete was primed to make love with the vigor of a man half his age. Yet the Ex-Athlete was roused to anger if other men stared at the Blond Actress too pointedly. Or if vulgar remarks were made in his hearing. He didn’t generally approve of the Blond Actress’s public performances, her Marilyn self. He wanted her to dress provocatively for him, yet not for others. He’d been shocked and disgu
sted by Niagara, both the film and the lascivious and ubiquitous billboards. Didn’t she have any contractual control over the way they marketed her? Didn’t she care that she was being advertised like meat? When “Miss Golden Dreams” was resurrected to run as the centerfold in the first issue of Playboy, the Ex-Athlete had been infuriated. The Blond Actress tried to explain that the nude photo wasn’t hers to control; it had been purchased from the calendar company without her permission and without payment to her. The Ex-Athlete fumed he could kill the bastards, every last one of them.

  In the mirror, she stared eye to eye. “And maybe that’s how marriage should be, too? A man who cares about me. Who’d never exploit me.”

  Before leaving for the theater, the Blond Actress swallowed one, maybe two, Benzedrines to counteract the effect of the Nembutal. Her heart felt like it was slowing. Oh, what a powerful need she had, she had such a powerful need to curl up on the floor and sleep. On this the happiest most triumphant evening of her life wanting nothing more than to sleep, sleep, sleep like death.

  The Benzedrine would change that. Oh, yes! You could count on bennies to quicken the heartbeat and bring a delirious fizz to the blood and the brain. That sweet-hot rush hitting the brain like a lightning bolt out of the sky. But there was no danger here, for the Blond Actress’s drugs were exclusively legal. Never would the Blond Actress succumb to the shabby fates of Jeanne Eagels, Norma Talmadge, Aimee Semple McPherson. Never would she deviate from doctor’s orders. The Blond Actress was an intelligent, shrewd young woman, hardly a typical Hollywood actress. Those who knew her well knew her as Norma Jeane Baker, an L.A.-born girl who’d clawed her way up from the gutter. The Studio physician Doc Bob provided her with only appropriate drugs. She knew she could trust him, for The Studio would not risk its million-dollar investment. Benzedrine, sparingly: to “lighten a dark mood,” to “provide quick and valuable energy” sorely needed by an exhausted actress. Nembutal, sparingly: to “calm the nerves,” to provide a “restorative, dreamless sleep” sorely needed by an exhausted, insomniac actress. The Blond Actress worriedly asked Doc Bob if these drugs were addictive and Doc Bob laid a paternal hand on her dimpled knee and said, “Dear girl! Life is addictive. Yet we must live.”

  4

  Five hours and forty arduous-tedious minutes were required to replicate the Blond Actress as Lorelei Lee of Gentlemen Prefer Blondes. But those cheering crowds along Hollywood Boulevard! Chants of “Marilyn! Marilyn!” You had to accept it was worth the effort, didn’t you?

  She’d been stitched into her gown. This feat alone had required more than an hour. It was the Lorelei Lee hot-pink silk strapless, cut low to reveal the tops of her creamy breasts, and it fitted her like a straitjacket. Small measured breaths, she was cautioned. On her arms, gloves to her elbows tight as tourniquets. In her tender ears, around her powdered neck, and on her arms were glittering diamonds (in fact, zircons, property of The Studio) and, on her platinum cotton-candy head, the “diamond” tiara she’d worn briefly in the film. A white fox stole from The Studio over her bare shoulders, and on her already hurting feet spike-heeled hot-pink satin slippers so tight and teetering the Blond Actress could walk only in mincing baby steps, smiling, leaning on the tuxedo arms of Mr. Z and Mr. D, dignified as funeral directors. Traffic along Hollywood Boulevard had been rerouted for blocks and thousands of spectators—tens of thousands? hundreds of thousands?—were seated in bleachers across the Boulevard and pressing up raucously behind police barricades. As the convoy of Studio limousines passed, the decapitated heads of fresh-budded red roses were tossed. A crazed chanting of the crowds—“Marilyn! Marilyn!”—you had to accept this was worth any effort, didn’t you?

  Spotlights blinded her, whoops and whistles and microphones shoved into her face. “Marilyn! Tell our radio audience: Are you lonely tonight? When’re you two gonna get married?”

  Wittily the Blond Actress said, “When I make up my mind, you’ll be the first to know.” A wink. “Before he does.”

  Laughter, cheers, whistles, and applause! A flurry of red rosebuds like deranged little birds.

  With her glamorous brunette co-star Jane Russell, there was the Blond Actress blowing kisses and waving into spotlights, her eyes animated now and her rouged cheeks glowing. Oh, she was happy! She was happy! *GEMINI* (the film) preserves that happiness forever. If Cass Chaplin and Eddy G were out there anywhere in that crowd, staring at the Blond Actress—hating her, their Norma, their Little Momma, their pet Fishie; how the bitch had betrayed them; how she’d cheated them of the fatherhood they’d believed to be at the outset preposterous if not monstrous but had come to accept, in time, as an extraordinary if ungovernable destiny—even the beautiful boys of the Gemini couldn’t deny the happiness of the Blond Actress, she-who-was-so-shy, confronting her first large crowd. Fans! The Benzedrine rush in its purest form. Hollywood loved it (or so it was said) that on the set of Blondes, the brunette Jane Russell and the blond Marilyn Monroe hadn’t been rivals but friends. The girls had gone to the same high school! “What an amazing coincidence. Somehow you have to think. Only in America.” In the presence of Jane Russell, the Blond Actress was inclined to be witty-sardonic, a bit naughty, while Jane, a devout Christian, was inclined to be naive and easily shocked. Just the reversal of the film. As the two lavishly dressed glamour girls stood on the platform beaming and waving at the crowd, both stitched into straitjacket low-cut gowns, both breathing in small measured gasps, the Blond Actress said out of the corner of her lipstick mouth, “Jane! Us two could cause a riot, guess how?” Jane giggled. “Strip?” The Blond Actress gave her a sidelong flirty look and jagged her, lightly, just below her enormous jutting breast. “No, baby. Kiss.”

  The look on Jane Russell’s face!

  Such delicious moments, unknown to biographers and Hollywood historians, *GEMINI* (the film) preserves.

  5

  “Am I dead? What’s all this?”

  Floral displays crammed into her dressing room, which already she’d outgrown. Piles of telegrams and letters. Amateurishly wrapped gifts from “fans.” These were the faceless, anonymous, devoted individuals who bought movie tickets across the vast North American continent, who made The Studio possible, and the Blond Actress. At first the Blond Actress had been flattered, of course, in the early giddy weeks of fame. She’d read and wept over her fan mail. Oh, some of these heartfelt, sincere letters! Aching-heart letters! Letters of the kind Norma Jeane might herself have written, as a star-struck young adolescent. There were letters from the handicapped, and from mysteriously ill and incapacitated long-term patients at V.A. hospitals, and from the elderly or the elderly-seeming, and from those who signed themselves like poets: “Wounded at Heart,” “Devoted to Marilyn Forever,” “Faithful Forever to La Belle Dame Sans Merci.” These, with the help of her assistants, the Blond Actress answered personally. “It’s the least I can do. These poor, pathetic people—writing to Marilyn as you’d write to the Virgin Mary.” (Already, even before the success of Gentlemen Prefer Blondes, “Marilyn Monroe” was receiving as much fan mail as Betty Grable at the height of her career, and far more than the aging Grable received now.) All this attention was exciting but disturbing. All this attention entailed responsibility. The Blond Actress told herself gravely This is why I am an actress, to touch such hearts. She signed hundreds of glossy photos of blond Studio images of Marilyn (as a bebop sweater girl with her hair in braids, as a sultry glamour girl with Veronica Lake hair, as sexy-lethal Rose suggestively stroking her bare shoulder, as the baby-faced showgirl Lorelei Lee) with the fixed-smiling diligence of the girl who’d put in exhausting uncomplaining eight-hour shifts at Radio Plane. For wasn’t this, too, a kind of patriotism? Didn’t this, too, require sacrifice? Since childhood, her first movies at Grauman’s Theatre, in thrall to the Fair Princess and the Dark Prince, she’d understood that movies are the American religion. Oh, she wasn’t the Virgin Mary! She didn’t believe in the Virgin Mary. But she could believe in Marilyn—sort of. Out of kindness
to her fans. Sometimes she imprinted a lipstick kiss on her photo and in the swooping signature she’d learned to replicate she signed,

  until her wrist ached and her vision swam. Tasting panic, then realizing The hunger of strangers is boundless and can never be appeased.

  By the very end of the Year of Wonders 1953, the Blond Actress had become skeptical. To be skeptical is to be melancholy. To be melancholy is to be publicly funny. Like a stand-up comedian the Blond Actress developed a comic routine to make her assistants laugh. “These flowers! Am I a corpse, this is a funeral home? A corpse needs a makeup man! Whitey!” The more they laughed, the more the Blond Actress clowned. She called “White-eey” in the drawn-out wail of Lou Costello’s “Ab-bott!” She complained, flailing her arms in stage distress, “I’m a slave to this Marilyn Monroe. I signed up for a luxury cruise like Lorelei Lee, I’m in fucking steerage paddling.” In her comic turns, the Blond Actress spoke as nowhere else: a wonderful demonic flame touched her; she could be profane, and she could be vulgar; the studio assistants were sometimes scandalized, but they laughed, laughed until tears ran down their faces. Whitey said, reproachful as an elder uncle, “Now, Miss Monroe. You don’t mean a word of what you say. If you weren’t Marilyn, who’d you be?” Dee-Dee said, wiping her eyes, “Miss Monroe! You’re cruel. Any one of us, anybody in the whole world, would give their right arms to be you. And you know it.”

  Crestfallen, the Blond Actress stammered, “Oh!—I d-do?”

  She’d shift from one mood to another so fast! You couldn’t figure it. Like a butterfly or a hummingbird.

  It wasn’t drugs! Anyway, not at first.