Blonde Page 3

  Now Norma Jeane saw where Gladys was pointing.

  It was not a man. It was a picture of a man, hanging on the wall beside the bureau mirror.

  2

  On my sixth birthday seeing his face for the first time.

  And not having known before that day—I had a father! A father like other children.

  Always thinking the absence had to do with me. Something wrong, something bad, in me.

  Had no one told me before? Not my mother, not my grandmother or grandfather. No one.

  Yet never to look upon his actual face, in life. And I would die before him.

  3

  “Isn’t he handsome, Norma Jeane? Your father.”

  Gladys’s voice, which was sometimes flat, toneless, subtly mocking, was thrilled as a girl’s.

  Norma Jeane stared speechless at the man said to be her father. The man in the photograph. The man on the wall beside the bureau mirror. Father? Her body was hot and tremulous as a cut thumb.

  “Here. But, no—mustn’t touch with sticky fingers.”

  With a flourish, Gladys removed the framed photo from the wall. It was a real photo, Norma Jeane could see, glossy, not something printed like publicity posters or a page torn from a magazine.

  Gladys cradled the photo in her glamorously gloved hands, at about Norma Jeane’s eye level yet far enough from the child that she couldn’t have touched it without effort. As if at such a time Norma Jeane would have wished to touch this!—knowing from past experience, too, not to touch Gladys’s special things.

  “He—he’s my f-father?”

  “He certainly is. You have his sexy blue eyes.”

  “But—where is—”

  “Shh! Look.”

  It was a movie scene. Almost, Norma Jeane could hear the excited skittering music.

  How long, then, mother and daughter stared! In reverent silence contemplating the man-in-the-picture-frame, the man-in-the-photograph, the man-who-was-Norma-Jeane’s-father, the man who was darkly handsome, the man with sleek oiled wings of smooth thick hair, the man with a pencil-thin mustache on his upper lip, the man with pale shrewd just-perceptibly drooping eyelids. The man with fleshy almost-smiling lips, the man whose gaze coyly refused to lock with theirs, the man with a fist of a chin and a proud hawk nose and an indentation in his left cheek that might have been a dimple, like Norma Jeane’s. Or a scar.

  He was older than Gladys, but not much. In his mid-thirties. He had an actor’s face, a certain posed assurance. He wore a fedora tilted at a jaunty angle on his proudly held head, and he wore a white shirt with a soft flaring collar, like a movie costume from some other time. The man who seemed to Norma Jeane about to speak—yet didn’t. Listening so hard. It was like I’d gone deaf.

  Norma Jeane’s heartbeat was so fluttery, a hummingbird’s wings. And noisy, filling the room. But Gladys didn’t notice and didn’t scold. In her exaltation staring greedily at the man-in-the-photograph. Saying, in a voice rushing and ecstatic as a singer’s, “Your father. His name is a beautiful name and an important name but it’s a name I can’t utter. Not even Della knows. Della may think she knows—but she doesn’t. And Della must not know. Not even that you’ve seen this. There are complications in both our lives, you see. When you were born, your father was away; he’s at a great distance even now, and I worry for his safety. He’s a man of wanderlust who in another era would have been a warrior. In fact, he has risked his life in the cause of democracy. In our hearts, he and I are wed—we are husband and wife. Though we scorn convention and would not wish to acquiesce to it. ‘I love you and our daughter and one day I will return to Los Angeles to claim you’—so your father has promised, Norma Jeane. Promised us both.” Gladys paused, wetting her lips.

  Though she was speaking to Norma Jeane she seemed scarcely aware of the child, staring at the photograph from which, it almost seemed, a splintery light was reflected. Her skin was clammy-hot and her lips appeared swollen, as if bruised, beneath bright red lipstick; her net-gloved hands trembled slightly. Norma Jeane would recall trying to concentrate on her mother’s words despite a roaring in her ears and a sick, excited sensation deep in her belly, as if she had to go to the bathroom badly but dared not speak or even move. “Your father was under contract to The Studio when we first met—eight years ago on the day following Palm Sunday; I will always remember!—and he was one of the most promising young actors but—well, for all his natural talent and his screen presence—a ‘second Valentino’ Mr. Thalberg himself called him—he was too undisciplined, too impatient and devil-may-care to be a film actor. It isn’t just looks, style, and personality, Norma Jeane, you must be obedient too. You must be humble. You must swallow your pride and work like a dog. It comes more easily for a woman. I was under contract too—for a while. As a young actress. I transferred to another department—voluntarily! For I saw that it was not to be. He was rebellious, of course. He was a stand-in for Chester Morris and Donald Reed for a while. Eventually he walked away. ‘Between my soul and my career I choose—my soul,’ he said.”

  In her excitement Gladys began to cough. Coughing, she seemed to give off a stronger scent of perfume, mingled with that faint sour-lemon chemical odor that seemed absorbed in her skin.

  Norma Jeane asked where her father was.

  Gladys said irritably, “Away, silly. I told you.”

  Gladys’s mood had shifted. It was often this way. The movie music, too, shifted abruptly. It was saw-notched now, as were the rough, hurtful waves thrown onto the beach, where Della, short of breath from “blood pressure” and scolding, walked with Norma Jeane on the hard-packed sand for the sake of “exercise.”

  Never would I have asked why. Why I hadn’t been told until then.

  Why I was being told now.

  Gladys rehung the photo on the wall. But now the nail sunk into the plasterboard wasn’t so secure as it had been. The lone fly continued to buzz, striking itself repeatedly and yet hopefully against a windowpane. “There’s the damn fly ‘buzzed when I died,’” Gladys remarked mysteriously. It was Gladys’s way often to speak mysteriously in Norma Jeane’s presence, though not necessarily to Norma Jeane. Rather, Norma Jeane was a witness, a privileged observer like the eye of the movie watcher of which the principals, in the movie, pretend to be unaware—or are in fact unaware. When the nail was in, and seemed not about to fall out, it took some fussing to ascertain that the frame was straight. In such household matters Gladys was a perfectionist, scolding Norma Jeane if the child left towels hanging crooked or books unevenly aligned on shelves. When the man-in-the-photograph was safely back up on the wall beside the bureau mirror, Gladys stepped back, relaxing just a little. Norma Jeane continued to stare up at the photo, transfixed. “So, your father. But it’s our secret, Norma Jeane. Enough for you to know that he’s away—for now. But he’ll return to Los Angeles one day soon. He has promised.”

  4

  It would be said of me that I was unhappy as a child, that my childhood was a desperate one, but let me tell you I was never unhappy. So long as I had my mother I was never unhappy and one day there was my father, too, to love.

  And there was Grandma Della! Norma Jeane’s mother’s mother.

  A sturdy olive-skinned woman with eyebrows thick as brushes and a sly glimmering of a mustache on her upper lip. Della had a way of standing in a doorway or on the front stoop of her building, hands on her hips like a double-handled jug. Shopkeepers feared her sharp eye and sarcastic tongue. She was a fan of William S. Hart, the straight-shooter cowboy, and she was a fan of Charlie Chaplin, the genius of mimicry, and she boasted of being of “good American pioneer stock,” born in Kansas, moved to Nevada, then to southern California and met and married her husband, who was Gladys’s father, gassed, as Della said reproachfully, in the Argonne in 1918—“At least, he’s alive. That’s something to be grateful for to the U.S. government, eh?”

  Yes, there was a Grandpa Monroe, Della’s husband. He lived with them in the apartment and Norma Jeane was give
n to know he didn’t like her, but somehow Grandpa wasn’t there. When asked about him, Della’s response was a shrug and the comment, “At least, he’s alive.”

  Grandma Della! A neighborhood “character.”

  Grandma Della was the source of all Norma Jeane knew, or imagined she knew, of Gladys.

  The primary fact of Gladys was the primary mystery of Gladys: She could not be a true mother to Norma Jeane. Not at the present time.

  Why not?

  “Just don’t blame me, any of you,” Gladys said, agitatedly lighting a cigarette. “God has punished me enough.”

  Punished? How?

  If Norma Jeane dared to ask such a question, Gladys would blink at her with beautiful slate-blue bloodshot eyes, in which a scrim of moisture continually shone. “Just don’t you. After what God has done. Understand?”

  Norma Jeane smiled. Smiling meant not that you understood but you were happy not-understanding.

  Though: it seemed to be known that Gladys had had “other little girls”—“two little girls”—before Norma Jeane. But where had these sisters disappeared to?

  “Just don’t blame me, any of you, God damn you.”

  It seemed to be a fact that Gladys, though very young-looking at thirty-one, had already been the wife of two husbands.

  It was a fact, which Gladys herself cheerfully acknowledged, in the way of a movie character with a comical habit or tic, that her last name was often changing.

  Della told the story, it was one of Della’s aggrieved-mother stories, of how Gladys had been born and baptized Gladys Pearl Monroe in Hawthorne, Los Angeles County, in 1902. At seventeen she’d married (against Della’s wishes) a man named Baker so she’d become Mrs. Gladys Baker, but (of course!) that hadn’t worked out for even a year and they’d divorced and she’d married the “meterman, Mortensen” (the father of the two vanished older sisters?), but that hadn’t worked out (of course!) and Mortensen was gone from Gladys’s life, and good riddance. Except: Gladys’s name was still Mortensen on certain documents she hadn’t changed, and would not change, since anything to do with records, legal matters, frightened her. Mortensen was not Norma Jeane’s father, of course, but Mortensen had been Gladys’s name at the time of Norma Jeane’s birth. Yet—and this was a fact that infuriated Della, it was so perverse—Norma Jeane’s last name was officially Baker, not Mortensen.

  “Know why?” Della might inquire of the neighborhood, of whomever might be listening to such folly. “Because Baker was the one my crazy daughter ‘hated less.’” Della went on, working herself up into genuine upset. “I lie awake nights grieving for this poor child, all mixed up who she’s supposed to be. I should adopt the child and give her my own name that’s a good decent uncontaminated name—‘Monroe.’”

  “Nobody is adopting my little girl,” Gladys said vehemently, “while I’m alive to prevent it.”

  Alive. Norma Jeane knew how important it was, to remain alive.

  So it happened that Norma Jeane Baker was Norma Jeane’s legal name. At the age of seven months she’d been baptized by the renowned evangelist preacher Aimee Semple McPherson in her Angelus Temple of the International Church of the Foursquare Gospel (to which, at the time, Della belonged), and this would remain her name until such time as her name would be changed by a man, a man acquiring Norma Jeane as his “wife,” as eventually her full name would be changed by a decision of men. I did what was required. What was required of me was that I remain alive.

  In a rare moment of maternal intimacy, Gladys informed Norma Jeane that her name was a special name: “‘Norma’ is for the great Norma Talmadge, and ‘Jeane’ is—who else?—Harlow.” These names meant nothing to the child, but she saw how Gladys shivered at their very sound. “You, Norma Jeane, will combine the two, d’you see? In your own special destiny.”

  5

  “So, Norma Jeane! Now you know.”

  It was wisdom blinding as the sun. Profound as the back of a whipping hand. Gladys’s red-lipsticked mouth, which so rarely smiled, smiled now. Her breath came short as if she’d been running.

  “You’ve looked upon his face. Your true father, who isn’t named Baker. But you must never tell anyone, d’you hear? Not even Della.”

  “Y-yes, Mother.”

  Between Gladys’s fine-penciled brows the sharp crease appeared.

  “Norma Jeane, what?”

  “Yes, Mother.”

  “That’s more like it!”

  The stammer was still inside Norma Jeane. But it had shifted from her tongue to her hummingbird heart, where it would be undetected.

  In the kitchen Gladys removed one of her glamorous black-net gloves, and this she drew against Norma Jeane’s neck, as a tickling caress.

  That day! A haze of happiness like warm damp fog drifting over the flatlands of the city. Happiness in every breath. Gladys murmured, “Happy birthday, Norma Jeane!” and, “Didn’t I tell you, Norma Jeane, this is your special day?”

  The telephone rang. But Gladys, smiling to herself, didn’t answer.

  The blinds at the windows were carefully drawn to the sills. Gladys spoke of “inquisitive” neighbors.

  Gladys had removed her left glove but not the right. She seemed to have forgotten her right glove. Norma Jeane noted how the slightly reddened skin of her bare left hand was stippled with small diamond shapes imprinted from the tight-fitting net glove. Gladys wore a maroon crepe dress with a tightly cinched waist, a high collar, and a full skirt that made a breathless swishing sound when she moved. It was a dress Norma Jeane had not seen before.

  Each moment invested with such significance. Each moment, like each heartbeat, a warning signal.

  At the table in the kitchen alcove, Gladys poured grape juice for Norma Jeane and a strong-smelling “medicated water” for herself into chipped coffee cups. The surprise was an angel-food birthday cake for Norma Jeane! Whipped vanilla icing, six little pink wax candles, syrupy crimson frosting that spelled out—

  HAPPY BIRTDAY

  NORMAJEAN

  The sight of the cake, its wonderful smell, made Norma Jeane’s mouth water. Though Gladys was fuming. “The hophead bastard of a baker, spelling ‘birthday’ wrong, and your name—I told him.”

  With a little difficulty, her hands shaking, though maybe the room was vibrating, or the earth strata far beneath (in California you never know what is “real” or what is “just yourself”), Gladys managed to light the six little candles. It was Norma Jeane’s task to blow out the pale, nervously flickering flames. “And now you must make a wish, Norma Jeane,” Gladys said eagerly, leaning forward so that she nearly touched the child’s warm face. “A wish for you-know-who to return to us soon. Come on!” So Norma Jeane, shutting her eyes, made this wish and blew out all but one of the little candles in a single breath. Gladys blew out the remaining candle. “There you are. Good as a prayer.” It took awhile for Gladys to locate an adequate knife with which to cut the cake, rummaging through a drawer; finally she found a “butcher knife—don’t be scared!” and the blade of this long sharply glinting knife shone like sunshine on the surf at Venice Beach, hurting the eyes, yet you couldn’t not look, but Gladys did nothing with the knife except to sink it into the cake, frowning in concentration, steadying her gloved right hand with her gloveless left hand as she cut large pieces of cake for each of them; the cake was slightly damp and sticky at the center, and the pieces spilled over the edges of the saucers Gladys was using as plates. So good! That cake tasted so good. Let me tell you there was never a cake in my life that tasted so good. Mother and daughter both ate hungrily; for each this was breakfast, and already the day had careened beyond noon.

  “And now, Norma Jeane: your presents.”

  Another time the telephone began to ring. And Gladys, brightly smiling, didn’t seem to hear. She was explaining that she hadn’t had time to wrap Norma Jeane’s presents properly. The first was a pretty pink crotcheted sweater in light cotton wool, tiny embroidered rosebuds for buttons, a sweater for a younger chi
ld maybe since it was tight on Norma Jeane who was small for her age, but Gladys, exclaiming over the sweater, didn’t seem to notice—“Isn’t that charming! You’re a little princess.” Next were smaller items of clothing, white cotton socks, underwear (price tags from the dime store still attached). It had been many months since Gladys had provided her daughter with such necessities; also, Gladys was several weeks behind on payments to Della, so Norma Jeane was excited to think that Della would be pleased about this. Norma Jeane thanked her mother, and Gladys said, with a snap of her fingers, “Oh, this is just preliminary. Come.” With a dramatic flair Gladys led Norma Jeane back into the bedroom, where the handsome man-in-the-photograph hung prominently on the wall, and teasingly tugged open the top bureau drawer—“Presto, Norma Jeane! Something for you.”

  A doll?

  Norma Jeane stood on tiptoe, eagerly, clumsily lifting out a doll, a golden-haired doll, a doll with round blue glass eyes and a rosebud mouth, as Gladys said, “D’you remember, Norma Jeane, who used to sleep in here—in this drawer?” Norma Jeane shook her head, no. “Not in this apartment but in this drawer. This very drawer. Don’t you remember who used to sleep in here?” Again, Norma Jeane shook her head. She was becoming uneasy. Gladys stared at her so, with widened eyes as if in mimicry of the doll, except Gladys’s eyes were a pale washed-out blue and her lips were bright red. Gladys said, laughing, “You. You, Norma Jeane. You used to sleep in this very drawer! I was so poor then I couldn’t afford a crib. But this drawer was your crib when you were a tiny infant; it was good enough for us, wasn’t it?” There was a shrill edge to Gladys’s voice. If there was music in this scene it would be a quick staccato music. Norma Jeane shook her head, no, a sullen look settled over her face, her eyes clouded with not-remembering, will-not-remember, as she didn’t remember wearing diapers or how hard it had been for Della and Gladys to “potty-train” her. If she’d had time to examine the topmost drawer in the pine bureau and the way the drawer could be shoved shut she would have felt sickish, that sickish-scared sensation in her belly she felt at the top of a flight of stairs or looking out a high window or running too close to the edge of the surf when a tall wave broke, for how could she, a big girl of six, have ever fitted into so small a space?—and had someone shoved the drawer shut, to muffle her crying?—but Norma Jeane hadn’t time to think such thoughts for here was her birthday doll in her arms, the most beautiful doll she’d ever seen close up, as beautiful as Sleeping Beauty in a picture book, wavy golden hair to her shoulders, silky-soft as real hair, more beautiful than Norma Jeane’s wavy fair-brown hair and wholly unlike the synthetic hair of most dolls. The doll wore a little lace nightcap and a flannel nightgown in a floral print, and her skin was rubbery-smooth, soft, perfect skin, and her tiny fingers were perfectly shaped! And the small feet in white cotton booties tied with pink ribbons! Norma Jeane squealed with excitement and would have hugged her mother to thank her, but Gladys stiffened just perceptibly so the child knew not to touch her. Gladys lit a cigarette and exhaled the smoke luxuriously; her brand was Chesterfields, which was Della’s brand (though Della believed smoking was a dirty, weak habit she was determined to overcome), saying, in a teasing voice, “I went to a lot of trouble to get that doll for you, Norma Jeane. Now I hope you’ll accept the responsibility of the doll.” The responsibility of the doll hung strangely in the air.