Blonde Read online

  DEDICATION

  For Eleanor Bergstein, and for Michael Goldman

  AUTHOR’S NOTE

  Blonde is a radically distilled “life” in the form of fiction, and, for all its length, synecdoche is the principle of appropriation. In place of numerous foster homes in which the child Norma Jeane lived, for instance, Blonde explores only one, and that fictitious; in place of numerous lovers, medical crises, abortions and suicide attempts and screen performances, Blonde explores only a selected, symbolic few.

  The historic Marilyn Monroe did keep a journal of sorts and she did write poems, or poem-fragments. Of these, only two lines are included in the final chapter (“Help help!~”); the other poems are invented. Certain of the remarks in the chapter “The Collected Works of Marilyn Monroe” are taken from interviews, other are fictitious; the lines at the end of the chapter are the conclusion to Charles Darwin’s Origin of Species. Biographical facts regarding Marilyn Monroe should be sought not in Blonde, which is not intended as a historic document, but in biographies of the subject. (Those consulted by the author are Legend: The Life and Death of Marilyn Monroe by Fred Guiles, 1985; Goddess: The Secret Lives of Marilyn Monroe by Anthony Summers, 1986; and Marilyn Monroe: A Life of the Actress by Carl E. Rollyson, Jr., 1986. More subjective books on Monroe as a mythic figure are Marilyn Monroe by Graham McCann, 1987, and Marilyn by Norman Mailer, 1973.) Of books consulted about American politics, especially in Hollywood in the Forties and Fifties, Naming Names by Victor Navasky was most helpful. Of the books on acting cited or alluded to, The Thinking Body by Mabel Todd, To the Actor by Michael Chekhov, and An Actor Prepares and My Life in Art by Constantin Stanislavski are genuine books, while The Actor’s Handbook and the Actor’s Life and The Paradox of Acting are invented. The Book of the American Patriot is invented. A passage from the conclusion of H.G. Wells’s The Time Machine is twice cited, in the chapters “Hummingbird” and “We Are All Gone into the World of Light.” Lines from Emily Dickinson appear in chapters titled “The Bath,” “The Orphan,” and “Time to Get Married.” A passage from Arthur Schopenhauer’s The World as Will and Idea appears in “The Death of Rumpelstiltskin.” A passage from Sigmund Freud’s Civilization and Its Discontents appears, in paraphrase, in “The Sharpshooter.” Passages from Blaise Pascal’s Pensées appear in “Roslyn 1961.”

  . . .

  Parts of this novel have appeared, in differing versions, in Playboy, Conjunctions, Yale Review, Ellery Queen Mystery Magazine, Michigan Quarterly Review and TriQuarterly. My thanks to the editors of these magazines.

  Special thanks to Daniel Halpern, Jane Shapiro, and C. K. Williams.

  CONTENTS

  Cover

  Title Page

  Dedication

  Author’s Note

  Epigraph

  PROLOGUE 3 AUGUST 1962 Special Delivery

  THE CHILD 1932–1938 The Kiss

  The Bath

  City of Sand

  Aunt Jess and Uncle Clive

  The Lost One

  The Gift Givers

  The Orphan

  The Curse

  THE GIRL 1942–1947 The Shark

  “Time to Get Married”

  The Embalmer’s Boy

  Little Wife

  War

  Pinup 1945

  For Hire

  Daughter and Mother

  Freak

  Hummingbird

  THE WOMAN 1949–1953 The Dark Prince

  “Miss Golden Dreams” 1949

  The Lover

  The Audition

  The Birth

  Angela 1950

  The Broken Altar

  Rumpelstiltskin

  The Transaction

  Nell 1952

  The Death of Rumpelstiltskin

  The Rescue

  That Night . . .

  Rose 1953

  The Gemini

  The Vision

  “MARILYN” 1953–1958 “Famous”

  The Magi

  “Can’t Get Enough of Polish Sausage”

  The Ex-Athlete: The Sighting

  The Cypresses

  “Where Do You Go When You Disappear?”

  The Ex-Athlete and the Blond Actress: The Date

  “Für Elise”

  The Scream. The Song.

  The Ex-Athlete and the Blond Actress: The Proposal

  After the Wedding: A Montage

  The American Goddess of Love on the Subway Grating New York City 1954

  “My Beautiful Lost Daughter”

  After the Divorce

  The Drowned Woman

  The Playwright and the Blond Actress: The Seduction

  The Emissary

  “Dancing in the Dark”

  The Mystery. The Obscenity.

  Cherie 1956

  The (American) Showgirl 1957

  The Kingdom by the Sea

  The Farewell

  THE AFTERLIFE 1959–1962 In Sympathy

  Sugar Kane 1959

  Rat Beauty

  The Collected Works of Marilyn Monroe

  The Sharpshooter

  Roslyn 1961

  Club Zuma

  Divorce (Retake)

  My House. My Journey.

  The President’s Pimp

  The Prince and the Beggar Maid

  The Beggar Maid in Love

  The President and the Blond Actress: The Rendezvous

  Whitey Stories

  “Happy Birthday Mr. President”

  Special Delivery 3 August 1962

  “We Are All Gone Into the World of Light”

  About the Author

  Praise

  Also by Joyce Carol Oates

  Credits

  Copyright

  About the Publisher

  EPIGRAPH

  In the circle of light on the stage in the midst of darkness, you have the sensation of being entirely alone. . . . This is called solitude in public. . . . During a performance, before an audience of thousands, you can always enclose yourself in this circle, like a snail in its shell. . . . You can carry it wherever you go.

  —Constantin Stanislavski,

  An Actor Prepares

  (translated by Elizabeth Reynolds Hapgood)

  The acting area is a sacred space . . . where the actor cannot die.

  —Michael Goldman,

  The Actor’s Freedom

  Genius is not a gift, but the way a person invents in desperate circumstances.

  —Jean-Paul Sartre

  Prologue

  3 AUGUST 1962

  SPECIAL DELIVERY

  There came Death hurtling along the Boulevard in waning sepia light.

  There came Death flying as in a children’s cartoon on a heavy unadorned messenger’s bicycle.

  There came Death unerring. Death not to be dissuaded. Death-in-a-hurry. Death furiously pedaling. Death carrying a package marked *SPECIAL DELIVERY HANDLE WITH CARE* in a sturdy wire basket behind his seat.

  There came Death expertly threading his graceless bicycle through traffic at the intersection of Wilshire and La Brea where, because of street repair, two westbound Wilshire lanes were funneled into one.

  Death so swift! Death thumbing his nose at middle-aged horn honkers.

  Death laughing Screw you, buddy! And you. Like Bugs Bunny flying past the gleaming glittering hulks of expensive new-model automobiles.

  There came Death undeterred by the smoggy spent air of Los Angeles. By the warm radioactive air of southern California where Death had been born.

  Yes, I saw Death. I’d dreamt of Death the night before. Many nights before. I was not afraid.

  There came Death so matter-of-fact. There came Death hunched over rust-stippled handlebars of a clumsy but stolid bicycle. There came Death in a Cal Tech T-shirt, laundered but uniro
ned khaki shorts, sneakers, and no socks. Death with muscled calves, dark-haired legs. A curvy knucklebone spine. Adolescent bumps and blemishes on his face. Death nerved-up, brain-dazzled by sunshine flashing like scimitars off windshields, chrome.

  More horn honking in Death’s flamboyant wake. Death with a spiky crew cut. Death chewing gum.

  Death so routine, five days a week, plus Saturdays and Sundays for a higher fee. Hollywood Messenger Service. Death hand-delivering his special packages.

  There came Death unexpectedly into Brentwood! Death flying along the narrow residential streets of Brentwood near-deserted in August. Here in Brentwood the touching futility of meticulously tended “grounds” past which Death pedals briskly. And routinely. Alta Vista, Campo, Jacumba, Brideman, Los Olivos. To Fifth Helena Drive, a dead-end street. Palm trees, bougainvillea, red climber roses. A smell of rotting blossoms. A smell of sunscorched grass. Walled gardens, wisteria. Circular driveways. Windows with blinds drawn tight against the sun.

  Death bearing a gift with no return address for

  “MM” OCCUPANT

  12305 FIFTH HELENA DRIVE

  BRENTWOOD CALIFORNIA

  USA

  “EARTH”

  Now on Fifth Helena, Death was pedaling more slowly. Death was squinting at street numbers. Death hadn’t given the package so strangely addressed a second glance. So strangely gift-wrapped in candy-cane-striped tinsel paper with a look of having been used before. Adorned with a ready-made white satin bow affixed to the box by transparent adhesive tape.

  It was a package measuring eight inches by eight inches by ten. Weighing only a few ounces, as if empty? Stuffed with tissue paper?

  No. If you shook it, you could tell there was something inside. A soft-edged object made of fabric, perhaps.

  There came, in the early evening of August 3, 1962, Death ringing the doorbell at 12305 Fifth Helena Drive. Death wiping his sweaty forehead with his baseball cap. Death chewing gum rapidly, impatiently. Hearing no footsteps inside. And he can’t leave the goddam package on the doorstep, has to get a signature. Hearing just the vibratory hum of a window air-conditioning unit. Maybe a radio inside? This is a small Spanish-style house, a “hacienda,” just one floor. Fake adobe walls, glaring orange tile roof, windows with drawn venetian blinds, and a look of grayish dust. Cramped and miniature like a dollhouse, nothing special for Brentwood. Death rang the doorbell a second time, pressing hard. And this time, the door was opened.

  From Death’s hand I accepted the gift. I knew what it was, I think. Who it was from. Seeing the name and address I laughed and signed without hesitation.

  The Child

  1932–1938

  THE KISS

  This movie I’ve been seeing all my life, yet never to its completion.

  Almost she might say This movie is my life!

  Her mother first took her when she was two or three years old. Her earliest memory, so exciting! Grauman’s Egyptian Theatre on Hollywood Boulevard. This was years before she’d been able to comprehend even the rudiments of the movie story, yet she was enthralled by the movement, the ceaseless rippling fluid movement, on the great screen above her. Not yet capable of thinking This was the very universe upon which are projected uncountable unnameable forms of life. How many times in her lost childhood and girlhood she would return with yearning to this movie, recognizing it at once despite the variety of its titles, its many actors. For always there was the Fair Princess. And always the Dark Prince. A complication of events brought them together and tore them apart and brought them together again and again tore them apart until, as the movie neared its end and the movie music soared, they were about to be brought together in a fierce embrace.

  Yet not always happily. You couldn’t predict. For sometimes one knelt beside the deathbed of the other and heralded death with a kiss. Even if he (or she) survived the death of the beloved, you knew the meaning of life was over.

  For there is no meaning to life apart from the movie story.

  And there is no movie story apart from the darkened movie theater.

  But how vexing, never to see the end of the movie!

  For always something went wrong: there was a commotion in the theater and the lights came up; a fire alarm (but no fire? or was there a fire? once, she was sure she smelled smoke) sounded loudly and everyone was asked to leave, or she was herself late for an appointment and had to leave, or maybe she fell asleep in her seat and missed the ending and woke dazed as the lights came up and strangers around her rose to leave.

  Over, it’s over? But how can it be over?

  Yet as an adult woman she continued to seek out the movie. Slipping into theaters in obscure districts of the city or in cities unknown to her. Insomniac, she might buy a ticket for a midnight show. She might buy a ticket for the first show of the day, in the late morning. She wasn’t fleeing her own life (though her life had grown baffling to her, as adult life does to those who live it) but instead easing into a parenthesis within that life, stopping time as a child might arrest the movement of a clock’s hands: by force. Entering the darkened theater (which sometimes smelled of stale popcorn, the hair lotion of strangers, disinfectant), excited as a young girl looking up eagerly to see on the screen yet again Oh, another time! one more time! the beautiful blond woman who seems never to age, encased in flesh like any woman and yet graceful as no ordinary woman could be, a powerful radiance shining not only in her luminous eyes but in her very skin. For my skin is my soul. There is no soul otherwise. You see in me the promise of human joy. She who slips into the theater, choosing a seat in a row near the screen, gives herself unquestioningly up to the movie that’s both familiar and unfamiliar as a recurring dream imperfectly recalled. The costumes of the actors, the hairstyles, even the faces and voices of the movie people change with the years, and she can remember, not clearly but in fragments, her own lost emotions, the loneliness of her childhood only partly assuaged by the looming screen. Another world to live in. Where? There was a day, an hour, when she realized that the Fair Princess, who is so beautiful because she is so beautiful and because she is the Fair Princess, is doomed to seek, in others’ eyes, confirmation of her own being. For we are not who we are told we are, if we are not told. Are we?

  Adult unease and gathering terror.

  The movie story is complicated and confusing, though familiar or almost familiar. Perhaps it’s carelessly spliced together. Perhaps it’s meant to tease. Perhaps there are flashbacks amid present time. Or flash-forwards! Close-ups of the Fair Princess seem too intimate. We want to stay on the outsides of others, not be drawn inside. If I could say, There! that’s me! That woman, that thing on the screen, that’s who I am. But she can’t see ahead to the ending. Never has she seen the final scene, never the concluding credits rolling past. In these, beyond the final movie kiss, is the key to the movie’s mystery, she knows. As the body’s organs, removed in an autopsy, are the key to the life’s mystery.

  But there will be a time maybe this very evening when, slightly out of breath, she settles into a worn, soiled plush seat in the second row of an old theater in a derelict district of the city, the floor curving beneath her feet like the earth’s curve and sticky against the soles of her expensive shoes; and the audience is scattered, mostly solitary individuals; and she’s relieved that, in her disguise (dark glasses, an attractive wig, a raincoat) no one will recognize her and no one from her life knows she’s here, or could guess where she might be. This time I will see it through to the end. This time! Why? She has no idea. And in fact she’s expected elsewhere, she’s hours late, possibly a car was scheduled to take her to the airport, unless she’s days late, weeks late; for she’s become, as an adult, defiant of time. For what is time but others’ expectations of us? That game we can refuse to play. So too, she’s noticed, the Fair Princess is confused by time. Confused by the movie story. You take your cues from other people. What if other people don’t provide cues? In this movie the Fair Princess is no longer in the first bloom of
her youthful beauty, yet of course she’s still beautiful, white-skinned and radiant on the screen as she climbs out of a taxi on a windswept street; she’s in disguise in dark glasses, a sleek brown wig, and a tightly belted raincoat, closely tracked by the camera as she slips into a movie theater and purchases a single ticket, enters the darkened theater, and takes a seat in the second row. Because she’s the Fair Princess, other patrons glance at her but don’t recognize her; perhaps she’s an ordinary woman, though beautiful, no one they know. The movie has begun. She gives herself up to it within seconds, removing her dark glasses. Her head is forced back by the angle of the screen looming over her, and her eyes are cast upward in an expression of childlike, slightly apprehensive awe. Like reflections in water, the movie light ripples across her face. Lost in wonderment she’s unaware of the Dark Prince having followed her into the theater; the camera broods upon him as, for several tense minutes, he stands behind frayed velvet drapes at a side aisle. His handsome face is veiled in shadow. His expression is urgent. He is wearing a dark suit, no necktie, a fedora hat slanted over his forehead. At a music cue he comes quickly forward to lean over her, the solitary woman in the second row. He whispers to her and she turns, startled. Her surprise seems genuine though she must know the script: the script to this point, at least, and a little beyond.

  My love! It’s you.

  Never has it been anyone except you.

  In the reflected shimmering light from the gigantic screen the faces of the lovers are charged with meaning, heralds from a lost age of grandeur. As if, though diminished and mortal, they must play out the scene. They will play out the scene. Boldly he grips her by the nape of her neck to steady her. To claim her. To possess her. How strong his fingers, and icy; how strange, the glassy glisten of his eyes, closer than she’s ever seen them before.

  Yet another time, she sighs and lifts her perfect face to the Dark Prince’s kiss.