Blonde

by Joyce Carol Oates

  It would astonish the Playwright when he came to know the Blond Actress better how, when she didn’t wish to be recognized, she rarely was, for “Marilyn Monroe” was but one of her roles and not the one that most engaged her.

  While he, the Playwright, was always and forever himself.

  No, he would not have arranged this meeting. He would not have acquired the Blond Actress’s telephone number, as she’d acquired his, and called him. He knew of her marriage to the Ex-Athlete. All the world knew, at least its rudiments. A fairy-tale marriage that had lasted less than a year, its failure eagerly recorded in the public press. The Playwright recalled having seen in one of the newsmagazines an astonishing photo, taken from the roof of a building, of a mob scene in Tokyo, thousands of “fans” crowding a public square in the hope of catching sight of the Blond Actress. He would not have supposed the Japanese knew much of “Marilyn Monroe” or would have cared. Was this some new lurid development in the history of mankind? Public hysteria in the presence of someone known to be famous? Marx had famously denounced religion as the opiate of the people, now it was Fame that was the opiate of the people; except the Church of Fame carried with it not even the huckster’s promise of salvation, heaven. Its pantheon of saints was a hall of distorting mirrors.

  Shyly the Blond Actress smiled. Oh, she was pretty! An American-girl prettiness to wrench the heart. And how earnest, telling the Playwright how much she “admired” his work. What an “honor” it was to meet him, and to read the role of Magda. The plays of his she’d seen in Los Angeles. The plays she’d read. The Playwright was flattered but uneasy. But flattered. Drinking scotch and listening. In the bar’s festive mirrors the Playwright had passed like a tall wraith. A figure of dignity with something wounded, ravaged, in his face. Slope-shouldered, lanky. Born in New Jersey, having lived most of his life in the New York City area, the Playwright yet exuded an air of the West. He looked like a man with no family, a man with no parents. A not-young hatchet-faced man with creased cheeks and a receding hairline and a watchful manner. When he smiled, it was an unexpected occasion. He became boyish! Kindly. A man of brooding imagination but a man you could trust.

  Maybe.

  Out of her oversized handbag the Blond Actress took a copy of The Girl with the Flaxen Hair and laid it on the tabletop between them like a talisman. “This girl Magda. She’s like the girl in The Three Sisters? Who marries the brother?” When the Playwright stared at the Blond Actress she said, uncertainly, “They laugh at her? The sash of her dress that’s the wrong color? Except, with Magda, it’s the way she speaks English.”

  “Who told you that?”

  “What?”

  “About The Three Sisters and my play.”

  “Nobody.”

  “Pearlman? That I’d been influenced?”

  “Oh, no, I r-read the play myself, by Chekhov. Years ago. I wanted to be a stage actress first but I needed money, so I went into films. I always thought I could play Natasha? I mean, somebody like me could play her. Because she doesn’t belong in a good family and people laugh at her.”

  The Playwright said nothing. His offended heart beat hard.

  Quickly, seeing he was angry, she tried to rectify her mistake, saying with schoolgirl eagerness, “I was thinking, what Chekhov does with Natasha, he surprises you because Natasha turns out so strong and devious. And cruel. And Magda, you know—well, Magda is always so good. She wouldn’t be, in real life? I mean, all the time? I mean”—the Playwright could see the Blond Actress shifting into a scene, face animated, eyes narrowed—“if it was me, a cleaning girl—and I used to do work like that, laundry, dishes, mopping, scrubbing toilets, when I was in an orphanage and a foster home in Los Angeles—I’d be hurt, I’d be angry, how life was so different for different people. But your Magda . . . she never changes much. She’s good.”

  “Yes. Magda is good. Was good. The original. It wouldn’t have occurred to her to be angry.” Was this true? The Playwright spoke curtly, but he had to wonder. “She and her family were grateful for her job. Though it didn’t pay much, it paid.”

  Rebuked, the Blond Actress could only agree. Oh, now she understood! Magda was superior to her, a higher form of herself. Oh, yes.

  The Playwright signaled for a waiter and ordered two more drinks. Scotch for himself, a club soda for her. He wondered if she didn’t drink? Or didn’t dare? He’d heard rumors. . . . In the awkward silence the Playwright said, trying to keep all irony out of his voice, “And what other thoughts do you have about Magda?”

  The Blond Actress sat shyly, touching her lips. She seemed about to speak, then hesitated. She knew the Playwright was angry with her and in an instant had decided he hated her. Whatever sexual attraction he’d been feeling for her welled up in him now as rage. She knew! She was as experienced a female (the Playwright sensed) as a prostitute who’d been put out on the street as a girl, as sensitive to the rapid shifts in a man’s attention and in a man’s desire. For her life depends upon it. Her female life.

  “I guess . . . I said something wrong? About Natasha?”

  “Certainly not. It’s helpful.”

  “Your play is nothing like . . . that one.”

  “No, it isn’t. I’ve never been much drawn to Chekhov.”

  The Playwright spoke with care. He forced himself to smile. He was smiling. Confronted with a woman’s obstinacy, as with his wife’s, and long ago his mother’s. The women he knew were susceptible to single, simple ideas that lodged in their brains like pellets and could not be dislodged by argument, common sense, logic. I am nothing like the poet Chekhov. I am a craftsman of the school of Ibsen. My feet solid on the ground. And the ground solid beneath my feet.

  The Blond Actress had one more thing to say. Did she dare say it? She laughed nervously and leaned toward the Playwright as if imparting a secret. He stared at her mouth. Wondering what desperate foul things that mouth had done. “One thing I was thinking? Magda wouldn’t know how to read? Isaac could show this p-poem to her, he’d written to her, and she’d pretend she could read it?”

  The Playwright felt his temples pounding.

  That was it! Magda was illiterate.

  The original Magda had probably been illiterate. Of course.

  Quickly the Playwright said, smiling, “We don’t need to talk about my play any longer, Marilyn. Tell me about yourself, please.”

  The Blond Actress smiled in confusion. As if thinking which self?

  The Playwright said, “I should call you Marilyn, shouldn’t I? Or is that just a stage name?”

  “You could call me Norma. That’s my true name.”

  The Playwright pondered this. “Somehow, Norma doesn’t seem to suit you.”

  The Blond Actress looked hurt. “It doesn’t?”

  “Norma. The name of an older woman, of a bygone era. Norma Talmadge. Norma Shearer.”

  The Blond Actress brightened. “Norma Shearer was my godmother! My mother was her close friend. My father was a friend of Mr. Thalberg’s. I was just a little girl when he died, but I remember the funeral! We rode in one of the limousines, with the family. It was the biggest funeral in Hollywood history.”

  The Playwright knew little about the Blond Actress’s background, but this didn’t sound right. Hadn’t she just said she’d been an orphan, living in a foster home?

  He decided not to question her. She was smiling so proudly.

  “Irving Thalberg! The New York Jew-boy genius.”

  The Blond Actress smiled uncertainly. A joke? A way that Jews can speak of other Jews, familiarly, fondly, even in scorn, and non-Jews dare not?

  The Playwright, seeing the Blond Actress’s confusion, said, “Thalberg was a legend. A prodigy. Young even at his death.”

  “Oh, was he? At his d-death?”

  “He wouldn’t have seemed young to a child. But yes, in the eyes of the world.”

  The Blond Actress said eagerly, “The funeral service was in a beautiful synagogue—temple?—on Wilshire Boulevard. I was to
o young to understand much. The language was Hebrew?—it was so strange and wonderful. I guess I thought it was the voice of God. But I’ve never been back since. I mean, to any synagogue.”

  The Playwright shifted his shoulders uncomfortably. Religion meant little to him except as a mode of ancestor respect, and that he took with a grain of salt. He wasn’t a Jew who believed that the Holocaust was the end of history or the beginning of history, even that the Holocaust “defined” Jews. He was a liberal, a socialist, a rationalist. He wasn’t a Zionist. In private he did believe that Jews were the most enlightened, the most generally gifted, the best-educated and best-intentioned people among the world’s quarrelsome multitudes, but he attached no special sentiment or piety to this belief; it was only just common sense. “I’m not inclined to mysticism. Hebrew isn’t, to my ears, the voice of God.”

  “Oh—it isn’t?”

  “Thunder, maybe. Earthquake, tidal wave. A voice of God unhampered by syntax.”

  The Blond Actress gazed at the Playwright with widened eyes.

  Beautiful long-lashed eyes in which you could fall, and fall.

  The Playwright signaled for another drink, for himself. He was thinking how like most actors and actresses the Blond Actress appeared younger than she photographed. And smaller in stature. And her head, her beautiful shapely head, too large. For such freaky individuals photograph well; on screen sometimes they appear as gods, who knows why? Beauty is a question of optics. All sight is illusion. He wanted not to love this woman. He told himself he couldn’t possibly become involved with an actress. An actress! A Hollywood actress! Unlike theater actors, who scrupulously learn their craft and must memorize their dialogue, film actors can get by with virtually no work—brief rehearsals, coached by indulgent directors to utter a few lines of dialogue, to be reshot and reshot and reshot—the most egregiously stupid “act” by reading their lines off placards held up to them off-camera. And some of these “actors” receive Oscars. What a mockery of the art of acting! And then, their private lives. The Playwright recalled having heard rumors of the Blond Actress: her promiscuity before (and during?) her troubled marriage, her drug-taking, her suicide attempt (or attempts), her association with a wild decadent crowd of Hollywood-fringe characters, one of them the alcoholic heroin-addict son of blacklisted Charlie Chaplin.

  Now he’d met the Blond Actress, he didn’t believe any of this for a minute.

  Now he’d met his Magda, he wouldn’t believe anything about her not his own discovery.

  Shyly she was saying, like a schoolgirl imparting a secret, “What I revered in Magda, she had her baby because she loved it. Before it was born, she loved it! It’s only a little scene, when she speaks to it, a soliloquy . . . and Isaac doesn’t know, nobody knows. She finds a man to marry so the baby can be born and . . . not given away and scorned. Another girl might have given birth in a secret place and killed her baby. You know, that’s what they did in the old days, girls who were poor and not married. My best friend in the orphanage, her mother tried to kill her . . . drown her. In scalding water. She had scars up and down her arms like lacy scales.” The Blond Actress’s eyes flooded with tears. The Playwright instinctively reached out to touch her hand, the back of her hand.

  I would rewrite her story. That was in my power.

  The Blond Actress wiped at her eyes, and blew her nose, and said, “Norma Jeane is the name my mother gave me, actually. I mean, my mom and dad. Do you like that better than Norma?”

  The Playwright smiled. “A little better.”

  He’d relinquished her hand. Wanting to take it again, and lean across the tabletop to kiss her.

  It was a movie scene: not original, yet so compelling! If he leaned over the tabletop the young blond woman would lift her head wide-eyed in expectation and he, the lover, would frame her face in his hands and press his mouth against hers.

  The beginning of everything. The end of his long marriage.

  The Blond Actress said, apologetically, “I don’t like M-marilyn much. But I can answer to it. It’s what most people call me, now. Who don’t know me.”

  “I could call you Norma Jeane, if you prefer. I could call you”—and here the Playwright’s voice wavered with the audacity of what he said—“my ‘Magda.’”

  “Oh. I’d like that.”

  “My Secret Magda.”

  “Yes!”

  “But maybe Marilyn when others are around. So there wouldn’t be any misunderstanding.”

  “When others are around, it doesn’t matter what you call me. You can whistle. You can call me, ‘Hey you!’” The Blond Actress laughed, showing her beautiful white teeth.

  He was touched to the heart, she’d been made happy so quickly.

  The Playwright, too, had been made happy so quickly.

  “Hey you.”

  “Hey you.”

  They laughed together like giddy children. Suddenly shy of each other and frightened. For they hadn’t yet touched. Just that brushing of hands. They hadn’t yet kissed. They would leave the bar at midnight, the Playwright would see the Blond Actress into a cab and they would then kiss, quickly, hungrily yet chastely, and they would squeeze hands, and look yearningly at each other, and nothing more. Not that night.

  In a delirium of emotion the Playwright would walk the few blocks back to his darkened apartment. Happy to be in love, and happy to be alone.

  15

  Like my Magda, a girl of the people.

  No scars on her arms. No scars on her body.

  My life would begin again with her. As Isaac! A boy again to whom the world is new. Before history and the Holocaust, new.

  In fact even after they became lovers, the Playwright would rarely call the Blond Actress Marilyn in public, for that was the name by which the world familiarly knew her; and he, her lover, her protector, was not the world. Nor would he call her, in private, Magda or My Magda. Instead he found himself calling her darling, dear, dear one, dearest. For these tender names the world had no right to call her.

  Only him.

  When they were alone, she would call him Daddy. At first playfully, teasing (all right, yes, he was older than she by almost twenty years, why not make a joke of it), then in earnest and with love and reverence shimmering in her eyes. When they were with others she would call him darling, and sometimes honey. Rarely would she call him by his first name, and never a diminutive of that name. For this, too, was the name by which the world knew him.

  Inventing a private language, each time we love. The codified speech of lovers.

  Oh, but Daddy!—you would never speak of me, would you? To anyone else.

  Never.

  Or write about me? Daddy?

  Darling, never. Haven’t I told you?

  16

  An American epic. At last Pearlman called. Knowing that something was wrong (for his old friend the Playwright had avoided him since the reading) but determined not to give a sign. He talked nonstop for an hour praising and dissecting The Girl with the Flaxen Hair and said he hoped the Ensemble might produce it next season and then his voice dropped (exactly as the Playwright anticipated in this scene) and he said, “About my Magda—what d’you think? Not bad, eh?”

  The Playwright was trembling with fury. He could bring himself to mutter only a polite assent.

  Pearlman said, excited, “For a Hollywood actress. A classic dumb blonde with no stage experience. Remarkable, I thought.”

  “Yes. Remarkable.”

  A pause. This was an improvised scene, but the Playwright wasn’t pulling his weight. Pearlman said, as if they’d been arguing, “This could be your masterpiece, my friend. If we work on it together.” Another pause. Awkward silence. “If—Marilyn could play Magda.” His pronunciation of “Marilyn” was tender, tentative. “You saw how scared she is. Of ‘live acting,’ she calls it. She’s terrified of forgetting lines, she says. Being ‘exposed’ on the stage. Everything’s life or death to her. She can’t fail. If she fails, it’s death. I respect that, I�
�m exactly the same way or would be, except I’m the sanest person I know.

  “You learn by your mistakes, Marilyn, I told her. ‘But people are waiting for me to make mistakes. They’re waiting for me to fail, to laugh at me,’ she says. She was so scared before the reading, at our run-through that afternoon, she kept excusing herself to use the bathroom. I said, Marilyn, dear, we’re gonna get you a potty for right under your chair, and that cracked her up; she relaxed a little after that. We had two rehearsals. Two! To us that’s nothing but to her it must’ve seemed like a lot. ‘I should be better,’ she kept saying. ‘My voice should be stronger.’ True, she’s got a small voice. Any theater more than one hundred fifty seats, she wouldn’t be heard in the back. But we can develop that voice. We can develop her.

  “That’s my business, I told her. Give me talent, I’m like Hercules. Give me rare talent, I’m Jehovah. ‘But the playwright will be there, the playwright will hear me,’ she kept saying. That’s the idea, Marilyn, I told her. That’s what a contemporary play means: a playwright working with you.”

  “With us, this woman could realize her true talent. In your play, in that role. It’s made for her. She’s a ‘woman of the people’ like Magda. See, she’s more than a movie star. She’s a born stage actress. She’s like nobody I’ve worked with, except maybe Marlon Brando, they’re alike in their souls. Our Magda, eh? What a coincidence, eh? What d’you say?”

  The Playwright had ceased listening. He was in his third-floor study staring out a window at the cobbled winter sky. It was a weekday. A day of irresolution. Yes but he’d decided, hadn’t he? He could not hurt his wife and humiliate her. His family. Could not be an adulterer. Not for my own happiness. Or even hers. As five years before, the Playwright had been one of those individuals who’d quietly refused to aid the House Un-American Activities Committee in their persecuting of Communists, Communist sympathizers, political dissenters. He could not inform on acquaintances of whom, in fact, in secret, he didn’t approve, reckless men, self-destructive men, Stalinist sympathizers who boasted of a bloody apocalypse to come. He could not inform on acquaintances who might have (oh, he didn’t want to think this!) betrayed him, in his place. For his was the intransigence of the ascetic, the monkish, the stubborn, the martyred.