Blonde

by Joyce Carol Oates

  Never would it be very real to her. The last film with which MARILYN MONROE would be associated.

  THE PRESIDENT AND THE BLOND ACTRESS: THE RENDEZVOUS

  In the week following Easter 1962 the summons came!

  “Did I doubt him? I did not.”

  Please dress inconspicuously Miss Monroe she’d been told. A male voice, unidentified, on the phone. There had been a series of telephone messages, some straightforward enough and others coded. She sensed she was embarking upon the most exciting and profound adventure of my life as a woman. So she’d prepared herself privately for the experience. No professional makeup man, no costumer from Wardrobe. She’d purchased new clothes (on credit, Saks Beverly Hills) in understated cream and heather tones; her platinum-blond hair was freshly brightened but partly hidden beneath a stylish cloche hat. Only her lipstick was bright but isn’t lipstick meant to be bright? It was a Lorelei Lee look but her manner would be gracious and restrained as befits a friend of the president and that man an American aristocrat. Yet the Secret Service men who were her escorts regarded her with shocked disapproving eyes that shifted to indignation and disgust like coagulation. “You were expecting maybe Mother Teresa?”

  She was The Girl who wrote her own lines. Sometimes, no one laughed or even acknowledged hearing.

  The Secret Service men were Dick Tracy and what was his name, the little man with the wife Maggie—oh, yes: Jiggs. Strange escorts to bring Marilyn Monroe to a secret rendezvous in the elegant C Hotel on Fifth Avenue, Manhattan!

  Soberly she told herself These men have pledged their lives for their President. In the event of bullets, they will shield his body with their own.

  To fly from Los Angeles to Manhattan within the space of a few hours is to be hurtled rapidly forward in time. Yet, arriving several hours later in the day of your embarkment, you can’t shake off the feeling that you’ve arrived in past time. Years ago?

  My Manhattan life. Married life. When?

  She never thought of the Playwright. A man with whom she’d lived for five years. Her agent had sent her a page torn from Variety, a positive but qualified review of The Girl with the Flaxen Hair. She’d stopped reading at the words what is lacking in this earnest production is a genuinely mesmerizing Magda. For such a role to be credible, one would need. . . .

  In Manhattan there were ginkgo trees in bud, and on Park Avenue daffodils and tulips so beautiful, but was it cold! The Blond Actress felt the shock, a reproach to her California blood; she hadn’t brought sufficiently warm clothing for her romantic overnight visit to Manhattan. This was a different season. The very light looked different. She was feeling shaky, disoriented. But spring is April isn’t it? and realizing a syntactical error April is spring isn’t it, I mean. They were in the bulletproof limousine moving soundlessly north on Park Avenue and the larger of the Secret Service men, the sharp-jawed humorless fellow who put her in mind of Dick Tracy, said tersely, “This is spring, Miss Monroe.”

  Had she spoken aloud? She hadn’t meant to.

  The other Secret Service escort, stumpy, doughy, with a bland potato face and empty white eyes, a dead ringer for Jiggs, sucked at his lips and stared glumly ahead. These were plainclothes police officers. Possibly they resented today’s Presidential mission. The Blond Actress would have liked to explain. “It isn’t sexual. Between the President and me. It has little to do with sex. It’s a meeting of our souls.” The limo driver must have been another Secret Service officer, grim-faced as the others, wearing a fedora. He’d barely nodded at Miss Monroe at the airport. He bore an uncanny resemblance to the comic-strip character Jughead.

  Gosh it’s scary sometimes! Comic-strip people populating the world.

  The day before by special-delivery bicycle messenger there’d come the Blond Actress’s first-class airline tickets (purchased for her under the code name “P. Belle,” which she’d been given to know, by way of the President’s brother-in-law, meant “Pronto’s Beauty”) and during the flight from West Coast to East Coast she had reason to suspect that the pilot and his crew were aware of her connection with the White House. “Not just I’m ‘Marilyn.’ But this special day. This special flight.” In the perversity of her happiness it seemed to her the airliner must crash! Yet it did not. The flight was intermittently turbulent but otherwise uneventful. Oh, there was Dom Perignon, Miss Belle. Especially for you, Miss Belle. She’d been given two seats to herself at the front of the first-class cabin. Treated like royalty. The Beggar Maid as the Fair Princess. Oh, she was deeply moved. A stewardess assigned to watch over her, to see that no one disturbed the Blond Actress traveling incognito lost in a dreamy reverie of A rendezvous. With him. They had spoken only three times on the phone in the intervening weeks and then but briefly. Except for the President’s likeness in the newspapers and on TV (which now she watched, nightly) she would perhaps not remember what he looked like; for in the uncertain light of the bathhouse (Bing Crosby’s Palm Springs house, near the golf course, wasn’t that where they’d met?) he might have been any man of youthful middle age and vigor with a handsome boyish American face and a powerful sexual appetite. That morning she’d medicated herself with Miltown, Amytal, and codeine (one tablet, for she seemed to be running a mild fever) in careful dosages. This was a time in her life, she would have sworn it would be a temporary time, when she was seeing two, three, perhaps four doctors and each man in presumed innocence of the others’ existences supplied her with prescriptions. Just to help me sleep, Doctor! Oh, just to help me wake up. And to calm my nerves like ripped silk.

  Doctor, no, of course I don’t drink.

  Don’t eat red meat it’s too coarse for my stomach to digest.

  At LaGuardia on shaky legs she’d been the first to disembark. “Miss Belle? Let me assist you.” A stewardess led her along the tunnel ramp from the plane and there at the gate were waiting two grim unsmiling men in sharkskin suits and fedoras and she felt a stab of panic Am I under arrest? What will happen to me? She was The Girl, smiling inanely. Her hands shaking, almost she dropped her overnight bag, and the larger of the Secret Service officers took it from her. They called her “Miss Monroe” and “ma’am” as if in shame and mortification of being heard even by her, their charge. Pointedly they averted their policeman eyes from her fuchsia mouth and generous bosom of which they did not approve, the coldhearted bastards. Just jealous aren’t you. Of your boss. ’Cause he’s a real man, huh? But she was determined to be sweet to them. Chattering in the sunny-friendly way of The Girl as the silent men escorted her briskly through the airport (attracting the startled stares of many individuals but lingering for none) to a waiting limousine. The vehicle was sleek and blackly gleaming and large enough inside to seat a dozen persons. “Ohhh. Is this bulletproof, I hope?” She laughed nervously. Settling herself on the plush rear seat, tugging her skirt below her knees, all female perfumy excitement as the Secret Service men sat on either side of her, against the windows. She wondered if the President had instructed them to shield her from bullets, too? Did that come with a Presidential summons? “Gosh, all this attention makes me feel like an R.I.P.”—laughing nervously into their male silence—“no, I mean V.I.P. That’s what I mean?”

  Doughy-faced Jiggs grunted what might’ve been amusement. Though maybe not. Dick Tracy in profile gave no sign of hearing.

  She thought These men. These three. They’re carrying guns!

  Well, she was hurt. A little. For clearly they disapproved of her beautiful creamy-white-and-heather-colored cashmere knit suit from Saks Beverly Hills, the low neckline, the prominent bust and shapely hips. Her dancer’s legs. Feet in open-toed alligator pumps, four-inch heels. She’d painted her finger- and toenails a tasteful frost hue. Bright fuchsia lipstick and blond-blond hair and the unmistakable Marilyn radiance beating off her unnaturally white skin like white-painted stucco in tropical heat. Yet these men disapproved of her as a woman, as an individual, and as a historical fact. She hoped she wouldn’t make a wrong move somehow and they’d draw
their guns and shoot her?

  How uneasy the Blond Actress was made in the thirty-sixth year of her life, in the prime of her celebrity, by men who gazed upon her without desire. Oh, but why? When I could love you so.

  Dick Tracy was telling the Blond Actress, with averted eyes and a priggish grim satisfaction, that the President’s plans had been suddenly changed and so her plans would be changed. There was an emergency situation calling him back to the White House and he would be flying out that afternoon. He would not after all be staying the night in New York. “Your airline ticket, ma’am”—he was handing her the packet—“for your return to Los Angeles this evening. You will take a taxi from the hotel to La Guardia, ma’am.” Through a roaring in her ears the Blond Actress was able to think with surprising clarity, in self-consolation My lover is not a private citizen, he is a figure of History. Murmuring only, “Oh. I see.” She couldn’t hide that she was surprised, hurt. Disappointed. The Girl was only human, wasn’t she? But refusing to give Dick Tracy the satisfaction of asking what the emergency was and being told it was classified information.

  The limousine turned onto a side street. Headed toward Central Park. She heard a childlike voice inquire, “I g-guess you can’t tell me what it is? The emergency? I hope it isn’t a n-nuclear war! Something nasty in the Soviet Union!” and as if on cue, though quietly, without gloating, Dick Tracy said, “Miss Monroe. Sorry. That’s classified information.”

  Another disappointment: the limousine pulled up not in front of the famous old C Hotel on Fifth Avenue but at a rear entrance, in a narrow alley behind the massive landmark building. The Blond Actress was given a raincoat to slip on over her clothing, a cheap wrinkly-plastic black garment with a hood to hide the cloche hat and her hair; she was furious but complied, for this was turning into a familiar sort of movie scene, mild slapstick comedy, and no scene lasts more than a few minutes. Oh, how eager she was to escape these cold men and press herself into the arms of her lover! Next, Jiggs dared to hand her a tissue requesting her to please remove the “red grease” from her mouth, but she was indignant and refused. “Ma’am, you can put it back on again inside. As much as you wish.” “I will not,” she said. “Let me out of this car.” She did remove from her handbag a pair of very dark glasses that hid half her face.

  Jiggs and Dick Tracy conferred in grunts and must have decided she was sufficiently disguised to walk a distance of perhaps twenty feet, for they unlocked the limousine doors and cautiously climbed out and escorted the Blond Actress in her absurd hooded raincoat through a rear entrance in a ventilator blast of hot rancid cooking odors, and quickly inside she was ushered into a freight elevator to be carried creakily upward to the sixteenth penthouse floor where the door opened and she was urged out, in haste—“Miss Monroe, ma’am”—“Step along please, ma’am.” She said, “I can walk by myself, thank you. I’m not crippled”—though stumbling a little in her high-heeled shoes. They were Italian-made, the most expensive shoes she’d ever owned, with V-pointed toes.

  The Secret Service men knocked on the door of the appropriately named Presidential Suite. The Blond Actress was stricken with a sudden unease. Am I female meat, to be so delivered? Is that what this is? Room service? But she’d removed the raincoat and handed it to her escorts; the slapstick-comic scene had ended. The door was opened by another frozen-faced Secret Service officer, who admitted them with no more than a curt nod at the Blond Actress and a muttered expletive—“Ma’am!” From this point onward the scene would move in a swerving zigzag course as if the camera were being jostled. The Blond Actress was allowed to use a bathroom—“Should you wish to freshen up, Miss Monroe”—and in the elegantly appointed gilt-and-marble cubicle she checked her makeup, which was holding up fairly well, and her eyes, her large frank wondering crystal-blue eyes, the whites still discolored from myriad broken capillaries slow to heal, and the faint white lines beside her eyes she hoped a gentler bedroom light would not expose to her lover’s scrutiny. The President would be forty-five years old on May 29, 1962; the Blond Actress would be thirty-six years old on June 1, 1962; she was a little old for him, but perhaps he didn’t know? For Marilyn did look good! looked the part! Perfumed and primped and primed and her body shaved and the hair on both her head and her pubis recently bleached, hateful purple paste stinging her sensitive skin, so she was looking the part, the platinum-doll Marilyn, the President’s secret mistress. (Though she’d had a bad spell on the plane. Vomiting into the miniature toilet in the miniature lavatory despite the fact she hadn’t been able to eat in twenty-four hours. Having to repair damage to her makeup with a shaky hand while peering into a poorly lighted mirror.) Yes, and she had to admit she was “feeling kind of sad” to be told so rudely that her tryst with the President would be truncated; their rendezvous was to have been for a full night and a day. The Blond Actress swallowed a Miltown tablet for her nerves; and, for quick energy and courage, a Benzedrine. She used the toilet and washed herself between the legs (in Palm Springs, the lusty President had kissed her lavishly there, as elsewhere on her body); she would not notice, in a wastebasket beside the toilet, crumpled wads of damp toilet paper not unlike those she was dropping into the basket, and tissues blotted with a chic plum-colored lipstick. No! Would not notice.

  “This way, ma’am.” A Secret Service officer whom she hadn’t seen before, with an overbite like Bugs Bunny’s and something of that cartoon character’s springiness of step, escorted her along a corridor. “In here, ma’am.” Breathless then the Blond Actress found herself entering a spacious but dimly lighted bedroom as one might enter a dimly lighted stage whose dimensions are lost in shadow. The room was as large as her Brentwood living room and furnished in what her unpracticed eye supposed were authentic French antiques. Some kind of antique, at least. What luxury! What romance! Underfoot, a thick-piled oriental rug. The heavy brocaded drapes of several tall narrow windows were drawn against the acidic sunshine of April in Manhattan as her own bedroom drapes were drawn against the warmer sunshine of southern California. There was a commingled odor in the room of tobacco smoke, burnt toast, soiled linens, bodies. On the canopied four-poster bed there sprawled the naked President, telephone resting on his chest as he spoke rapidly into the receiver; amid rumpled bedclothes and disheveled pillows he lay, his prince’s face sulky and flushed and so handsome! How could any First Lady be cold to him? Embarking upon a stage with only a fellow actor with whom to play the scene. The dimensions of the stage, as of the vast murmurous audience, unknowable. I stepped into History!

  But it was a scene already begun. Beside the President, on the bed, was a silver tray bearing china plates dirtied with coagulated egg yolk and scorched toast crusts, coffee cups, wineglasses, and a depleted bottle of burgundy. The President, a forelock of graying-brown hair over one eye. His handsome manly body was covered in a fine glinting-brown fuzz that thickened on his torso and legs; it looked almost as if he wore a vest. Pages of the New York Times and Washington Post were scattered across the king-sized bed and, precariously balanced against an upended pillow, was an opened bottle of Black & White scotch whisky. Seeing the Blond Actress make her entrance, a vision of creamy hues and radiant fuchsia smile, the President swallowed hard, smiled eagerly, and beckoned her to him, even as he held the receiver to his ear. His limp penis stirred too in an acknowledgment of her beauty among its tangle of bristly hairs like a large affable slug that would grow larger. Now here was a greeting worthy of a three-thousand-mile pilgrimage!

  “Pronto. Hiya.”

  The Blond Actress, removing her cloche hat and shaking out her fine-spun platinum hair, laughed gaily. Oh, this was a scene! She felt her nervousness drain away, her anxiety. If there was an audience, the audience was invisible; the stage floated upon darkness; the lighted space belonged to her and to the President exclusively. What surprised her was the tone: for this was a funny, droll, relaxed meeting, an encounter of such erotic ease that a neutral observer would be led to believe that the President and the Blond Actre
ss had many times met in rendezvous like this, had for many years been lovers. The Blond Actress, who felt so little sexual desire, inhabiting her voluptuous body like a child crammed into a mannequin, stared in wonderment at the President. The most attractive man I’ve ever loved! Except for Carlo maybe. She would have leaned gracefully over to kiss the President in greeting, except he held the damned receiver against his mouth and was murmuring, “Uh-huh. Yup. Gotcha. OK. Shit.” He gestured for her to sit beside him on the bed, which she did; he embraced her playfully with a bare muscled leg and with his free hand stroked her hair, her shoulders, her breasts, the shapely curve of her hip, with the expression of an awestricken adolescent boy. He whispered, half in pain, “Marilyn. You. Hel-lo.” She whispered, “Pronto. Hel-lo.” With a low groan he murmured, “Am I glad to see you, baby. This has been one hell of a day.” She said, in a breathy warm rush she was certain the First Lady with her patrician poise could not have imitated, “Oh, gosh, I’ve been told, darling. How can I help?” With a toothy grin, the President took her hand that was caressing his unshaven jaw and closed the fingers around his now-upright penis; this was abrupt but not unexpected; in Palm Springs, she’d been a little shocked by the man’s boldness, yet there was solace in such immediate intimacy, wasn’t there; you eliminated so much and were rewarded with so much, so quickly. Gamely the Blond Actress began to stroke the President’s penis, as one might stroke a charming but unruly pet while its owner looked on proudly. Yet, to her annoyance, the President didn’t hang up the phone.

  The conversation not only continued but shifted to another degree of seriousness; another party must have come onto the line, with more urgency, a White House adviser or cabinet member (Rusk? McNamara?). The subject seemed to be Cuba. Castro, the President’s glamorous Cuban rival! The Blond Actress felt the thrill of the challenge though not yet knowing any facts. She recalled the handsome bearded Cuban revolutionary on Time’s cover a decade before; within recent memory, Castro had been a hero in the United States in many quarters. Of course, his image had radically shifted and he was now one of the Communist enemy. And only ninety miles from U.S. territory. Both the youthful President and the even younger Castro were actors of a romantic, heroic mode; both were self-styled “men of the people,” vain and self-displaying and merciless with their political enemies, idolized by their followers, who would forgive them anything; the one, the American President, committed to protecting “democracy” globally; the other, the Cuban dictator, committed to that extreme form of political and economic democracy called communism, which was in fact totalitarianism. Each man was the son of a wealthy family yet would publicly align himself with the “people”; one would eloquently criticize “Republican business ties” and the other would lead a bloody revolt against capitalism, including American capitalism. It was part of the Castro fable that the dashing Cuban in army fatigues and combat boots disdained security measures; though under constant threat of assassination, Castro eluded his bodyguards to mingle with the idolatrous “masses.” The American President yearned to be so courageous, or to be so perceived! Both men had been brought up Catholic and trained by Jesuits and may have been infused from boyhood with the Jesuitical sense of being above not God’s law but man’s, and if God doesn’t exist, who gives a damn about man’s law?