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Gladys held the offending hand, her right, out for her daughter to examine, and it did seem to be so; strangely, after the alarm of smoldering bedclothes and middle-of-the-night distress, Gladys’s slender hand didn’t shake, just hung limp from her wrist as if it were nothing of hers, nothing volitional, nothing of her responsibility, the faintly lined palm held open and outward, pale yet roughened and reddened skin, a beautifully shaped hand, empty.
There were other such mysteries in Gladys’s life, too many to enumerate. Monitoring them required constant vigilance yet, paradoxically, an almost mystical detachment—“It’s as every philosopher from Plato to John Dewey has taught: you don’t go until your number’s up, and when your number’s up, you go.” Gladys snapped her fingers, smiling. To her, this was optimism.
Which is why I’m a fatalist. You can’t quarrel with logic!
And why I’m so good at emergencies. Or was.
It was normal life day-to-day I couldn’t play.
But that night the fires were real.
Not miniature fires in bed to be pounded out or doused with glasses of water but fires “raging” in southern California after five months of drought and high temperatures. Brush fires posing a “serious danger to life and property” within even the city limits of Los Angeles. The Santa Ana winds would be blamed: blowing in off the Mojave Desert, gentle at first as a caress, then more protracted, more intense, bearing heat, and within a few hours firestorms were reported erupting in the foothills and canyons of the San Gabriel Mountains, pushing west toward the Pacific. Within twenty-four hours there had erupted hundreds of fires, separate and congruent. There were searing-hot winds whipped to velocities of one hundred miles an hour in the San Fernando and Simi valleys. Walls of flame twenty feet high were observed leaping across the coastal highway like rapacious living creatures. There were fields of fire, canyons of fire, fireballs like comets within a few miles of Santa Monica. Sparks, borne by the wind like malicious seeds, erupted into flame in the residential communities of Thousand Oaks, Malibu, Pacific Palisades, Topanga. There were tales of birds bursting into flame in midair. There were tales of stampeding cattle shrieking in terror and running ablaze like torches until they dropped. Enormous trees, hundred-year-old trees, burst into flame and were consumed within minutes. Even water-soaked roofs caught fire, and buildings imploded in the flames like bombs. Despite the effort of thousands of emergency firefighters, brush fires continued to “rage out of control” and heavy, sulfurous white-gray smoke obscured the sky for hundreds of miles in all directions. You would think, seeing the darkened sky by day, the sun reduced to a sickly thin crescent, that there was a perpetual solar eclipse. You would think, the mother told her frightened daughter, that this was the end of the world promised in the Book of Revelation in the Bible: “‘And men were scorched with great heat, and blasphemed the name of God.’ But it’s God who has blasphemed us.”
The sinister Santa Ana winds would blow for twenty days and twenty nights bearing grit, sand, ash, and the suffocating smoke odor, and when at last the fires subsided, with the onset of rain, seventy thousand acres of Los Angeles County would be devastated.
By that time, Gladys Mortensen would have been hospitalized in the State Psychiatric Hospital at Norwalk for nearly three weeks.
She was a little girl and little girls aren’t supposed to think hard, especially pretty little curly-haired girls aren’t supposed to worry, fret, calculate; still, she had a way of frowning like a midget adult, pondering such questions as: How does fire begin? Is there a single spark that’s the first spark, the first-ever spark, out of nowhere? Not from a match or a lighter but out of nowhere? But why?
“Because it’s from the sun. Fire is from the sun. The sun is fire. That’s what God is—fire. Put your faith in Him and you’ll be burnt to a cinder. Put your hand out to touch Him, your hand will be burnt to a cinder. There’s no ‘God the Father’; I’d sooner believe in W. C. Fields. He exists. I was baptized in the Christian religion because my mother was a deluded soul, but I’m no fool. I’m an agnostic. I believe in science to save mankind, maybe. A cure for TB, a cure for cancer, eugenics to improve the race, and euthanasia for the hopeless. But my faith isn’t very strong. Yours won’t be either, Norma Jeane. The fact is we weren’t meant to live in this part of the world. Southern California. It was a mistake to settle here. Your father”—and here Gladys’s husky voice softened as it invariably did when she spoke of Norma Jeane’s absent father, as if the man himself might be hovering near, listening—“calls Los Angeles the ‘City of Sand.’ It’s built on sand and it is sand. It’s a desert. Rainfall below twenty inches a year. Unless there’s too much rain and flash floods. Mankind isn’t meant to live in such a place. So we’re being punished. For our pride and our stupidity. Earthquakes, fires, and the air smothering us. Some of us were born here, and some of us will die here. It’s a pact we’ve made with the devil.” Gladys paused, out of breath. Driving a car, as she was now, Gladys quickly became breathless, as if being in rapid motion were a physical exertion, yet she’d been speaking calmly, even pleasantly. They were on a darkened Coldwater Canyon Drive above Sunset Boulevard and it was 1:35 A.M. of the first full night of the Los Angeles fires and Gladys had screamed to wake Norma Jeane and pulled her, in her pajamas and barefoot, out of the bungalow and into Gladys’s 1929 Ford, urging her to hurry, hurry, hurry and be very quiet so the other tenants didn’t hear. Gladys herself was in her black lace nightgown, and over this she’d hastily flung a frayed green silk kimono, a gift from Mr. Eddy of years ago; she, too, was barefoot and bare-legged and her disheveled hair was tied back in a scarf, her slender face masklike and regal in cold cream only just beginning to be sullied by wind-borne ash and dust. What a wind, what dry, heated, malevolent air rushed along the canyon! Norma Jeane was too terrified to cry. So many sirens! Men’s shouts! Strange high-pitched cries that might have been the shrieks of birds or animals. (Coyotes?) Norma Jeane had seen the lurid firelight reflected upon clouds in the sky, the sky at the horizon beyond the Sunset Strip, the sky over what Gladys called “the healing waters of the Pacific—too far away”; the sky silhouetted in the foreground by wind-agitated palm trees, trees whose dried, desiccated leaves were being shredded, and she’d been smelling smoke (not just scorch burns in Gladys’s bed) for hours, but it hadn’t struck yet, nor did it exactly strike her now for I wasn’t a questioning child, you could say I was an accepting child, I mean a desperate hopeful child that her mother was driving the Ford in the wrong direction.
Not away from the fire-splotched hills but toward them.
Not away from the stinging suffocating smoke but toward it.
Yet Norma Jeane should have known the signs: Gladys was speaking calmly. In that voice of hers that was pleasant, logical.
When Gladys was herself, her truest self, she spoke in a flat, toneless voice, a voice from which all pleasure and all emotion had been squeezed, like the last drop of moisture wrung with force from a washcloth; at such times she didn’t look you in the eye; it was her power to look through you, the way an adding machine might look if it had eyes. When Gladys was not-herself, or easing into that not-self, she began to speak rapidly in snatches of words inadequate to keep pace with her racing bubbling mind; or she spoke calmly, logically, like one of Norma Jeane’s schoolteachers saying things everyone knows. “It’s a pact we’ve made with the devil. Even those of us who don’t believe in the devil.”
Gladys turned sharply to Norma Jeane to ask if she’d been listening.
“Y-yes, Mother.”
Devil? A pact? How?
By the side of the road there was a pale glimmering object, not a human baby but possibly a doll, a discarded doll, though your first panicked thought was that it was a baby, abandoned in the fire emergency, but of course it must’ve been a doll. Gladys didn’t seem to notice as the car swung past but Norma Jeane felt a stab of horror—she’d left her doll behind, on the bed! In the confusion and upset, wakened from sleep by her agitat
ed mother and hurried outside to the car, sirens and lights and the smell of smoke, Norma Jeane had left the golden-haired doll behind to burn; the doll wasn’t so golden-haired now as it had once been, and its fair rubber-smooth skin not so spotless, the lace cap long vanished and the floral-print nightgown and the little floppy feet in white booties irrevocably soiled, but Norma Jeane loved her doll, her only doll, her doll-with-no-name, her birthday doll she’d never named except to call her “Doll”—but, more often, tenderly, just “you”—as you’d speak to your mirror self, needing no formal name. Now Norma Jeane cried, “Oh, what if the house burns down, M-mother? I forgot my doll!”
Gladys snorted in contempt. “That doll! You’d be fortunate if it did burn. It’s a morbid attachment.”
Gladys had to concentrate on her driving. The 1929 tarnished-green Ford was second- or third-hand, purchased for $75 from a friend of a friend expressing “sympathy” for Gladys, a single divorced mother; it wasn’t a reliable car, and the brakes were peculiar, and she needed to grip the steering wheel tight with both hands near the top of the wheel, and lean far forward, to see clearly through the windshield, with its faint weblike cracks, and over the hood. She was in a calm state, a premeditated state, she’d swallowed down half a glass of a potent drink, a drink to soothe, to provide certainty, not gin, not whiskey, not vodka, but driving on the Strip and up into the hills was a challenge tonight, for there were emergency vehicles with their blaring sirens and blinding lights, and on Coldwater Canyon Drive there were other cars on the narrow road headed in the opposite direction, downhill; their headlights were so blinding that Gladys cursed, wishing she’d worn her dark glasses; and Norma Jeane, squinting through her fingers, caught a glimpse of pale, anxious faces behind windshields. Why are we going uphill, why into the hills, why on this night of fires? was a question the child did not ask, though possibly thinking how when her grandmother Della had been alive she’d warned Norma Jeane to watch out for Gladys’s “changes of mood” and made Norma Jeane promise that if things got “dangerous” Norma Jeane should telephone her at once—“And I’ll come in a taxi if I have to, if it costs five dollars,” Della had said grimly. It wasn’t Grandma Della’s actual telephone number she’d left with Norma Jeane but the number of Della’s apartment building supervisor, since there was no phone in Della’s apartment, and this number Norma Jeane had memorized since coming to live with Gladys, brought in triumph to live with Gladys more than a year ago in Gladys’s new residence on Highland Avenue, near the Hollywood Bowl, this number Norma Jeane would recall through her life—VB 3-2993—though in fact she never dared call it, and on this night in October 1934 her grandmother had been dead for many months, and her grandfather Monroe had been dead even longer, and there was no one at that number she could call had she dared to use it.
There was no one, at any number, that Norma Jeane could call.
My father! If I’d had his number, no matter where he was, I would call him. Saying, Mother needs you now, please come help us, and I believed he would have come, I believed this.
Ahead, at the entrance to Mulholland Drive, there was a fire barricade. Gladys cursed—“God damn!”—and braked her car to a jolting stop. She’d intended to drive them high into the hills, high above the city, no matter the fire risk, no matter the sirens, the sporadic flashes of fire, the whistling heat-borne Santa Ana wind buffeting the car even along sheltered stretches of Coldwater Canyon Drive. In these secluded prestigious hills, as in Beverly Hills, Bel Air, and Los Feliz, there were the private residences of film “stars” past whose gates Gladys had frequently driven Norma Jeane on Sunday excursions when she could afford the gasoline, happy times for both mother and daughter it was what we did together instead of church but now it was the middle of the night and the air was thick with smoke and you couldn’t see any houses and possibly the private residences of the stars were burning and that was why the road was barricaded. And that was why, a few minutes later when Gladys tried to turn north onto Laurel Canyon Drive, where flares had been set in the roadway and emergency vehicles were parked, she was stopped by uniformed officers.
Asking her rudely where the hell did she think she was going, and Gladys explained that she lived on Laurel Canyon, her residence was there and she had a right to drive home, and the officers asked where exactly did she live, and Gladys said, “That’s my business,” and they came closer, shining a flashlight virtually into her face; they were suspicious, skeptical, asking who was in the car with her, and Gladys said, laughing, “Well, not Shirley Temple.” One of the officers came to speak with her, he was a Los Angeles County sheriff’s deputy, he was staring at Gladys, who even in her greasy cold-cream mask was a woman of poise and beauty, a woman in the classic mode of the enigmatic Garbo, if you didn’t look too closely; her dark-dilated eyes were enormous in her face, her nose long, fine-boned, and waxy-tipped, and her mouth was swollen and lipstick-red; before fleeing into the night on this night of all nights she’d taken time to apply lipstick for you never know when you’ll be observed and judged; and the deputy understood that something was wrong, here was a distraught youngish woman only partly dressed, in a falling-off-the-shoulder silky green kimono and what appeared to be a tattered black nightgown beneath, small breasts hanging loose and limp, and beside her a frightened child with uncombed curly hair, in pajamas and barefoot; a small-boned chubby-faced child with a fevered skin and cheeks streaked with sooty tears. Both the child and the woman were coughing, and the woman was muttering to herself—she was indignant, she was angry, she was coquettish, she was evasive, she was insisting now that she’d been invited to a private residence at the very top of Laurel Canyon: “The owner has a fireproof mansion. My daughter and I will be safe there. I can’t say this man’s name, officer, but it’s a name you all know. He’s in the film industry. This little girl is his daughter. This is a city of sand and nothing will long endure but we’re going.” There was a belligerent edge to Gladys’s husky voice.
The deputy informed Gladys he was sorry, she’d have to turn back; nobody was being allowed up into the hills tonight, they’d been evacuating families to lower ground, she and her daughter would be safer back in the city: “Go home, ma’am, and calm down, and put your little girl to bed. It’s late.” Gladys flared up. “Don’t you condescend to me, officer. Don’t you tell me what to do.” The deputy demanded to see Gladys’s driver’s license and auto registration, and Gladys told him she didn’t have these documents with her—this was a fire emergency, what did he expect—but she handed over to him her studio pass, which he examined briefly and handed back, saying that Highland Avenue was in a safe part of the city, at least for the time being, so she was lucky and should return home immediately; and Gladys smiled angrily at him, and said, “Actually, Officer, I want to see Hell up close. A preview.” She spoke in her sexy-husky Harlow voice; the abrupt change was disconcerting. The deputy frowned as Gladys smiled seductively and loosened her hair from the scarf, shaking it onto her shoulders. Once so self-conscious about her hair, Gladys hadn’t had it trimmed or styled for months; there was a vivid snowy-white streak, jagged as a cartoon lightning bolt, above her left temple. Embarrassed, the deputy told Gladys she had to turn back, they could provide her with an escort if she needed one, but this was an order or she’d be placed under arrest. Gladys laughed. “Arrested! For driving my car!” Then said more soberly, “Officer, I’m sorry. Please don’t arrest me.” And in a murmur, not wanting Norma Jeane to overhear, “I wish you could shoot me.” The deputy said, losing patience, “Lady, go home. You’re drunk or doped up and nobody’s got time for it tonight. You’re saying things to get you into trouble.” Gladys clutched at the deputy’s arm, you could see he was just a man in a uniform, middle-aged, with sad-pouchy eyes and a tired face, and that glinting badge, and that uniform, and that heavy leather belt around his waist, and the pistol hidden in its holster; he felt sorry for this woman and her little girl, the smeary cold-cream face, the dilated eyes, and a smell of alcohol on the
woman’s breath, and that breath in any case stale, not healthy, but he wanted them gone, the other deputies were waiting for him, they’d be up through the night. Politely the deputy detached Gladys’s fingers from his arm and Gladys said, playfully, “Even if you shot me, Officer, if I tried to run that barricade, for instance, you wouldn’t shoot my daughter. She’d be left an orphan. She is an orphan. But I don’t want her to know it even if I loved her. I mean, if I don’t love her. We all know it’s nobody’s fault, being born.”
“Lady, you’re right. Now go home, OK?”
The L.A. County deputies watched as Gladys in the tarnished-green 1929 Ford struggled to turn in the narrow canyon road, they shook their heads, bemused and pitying, and how like a striptease it was, Gladys fumed, strange men looking on: “Thinking their private, dirty, men thoughts.”
But Gladys did manage to turn the car around and drove south on Laurel Canyon, back toward Sunset and into the city. Her face shone with grease and her red-lipsticked mouth was trembling with indignation. Beside her, Norma Jeane sat stricken with a confused adult shame. She’d heard, but hadn’t quite heard, what Gladys had told the deputy. She believed, but wasn’t quite sure if this was true, that Gladys had been “acting”—as Gladys often did, in these incandescent states in which she wasn’t herself. But it was a fact, an incontestable fact, like a movie scene, and others had witnessed it, too, that her mother, her mother Gladys Mortensen, who was so proud and independent and loyal to The Studio and determined to be a “career woman” accepting charity from no one, had been, just now, so stared at, so pitied and crazy. It was so! Norma Jeane wiped at her eyes, which stung from the smoke, wouldn’t stop watering, but she wasn’t crying; she was mortified with a shame beyond her years, but she wasn’t crying; she was trying to think: Could it be true that her father had invited them to his house? All these years, he’d lived only a few miles away? At the top of Laurel Canyon Drive? But why then had Gladys wanted to turn up Mulholland Drive? Had Gladys intended to mislead the deputies, to throw them off the trail? (It was a frequent fond expression of Gladys’s—“Throw them off the trail.”) When, on their Sunday drives, Gladys drove Norma Jeane past the mansions of the stars and others “in the film industry,” she sometimes hinted that your father might just be living close by, your father might just have been a guest at a party here, but Gladys never explained further; it was meant to be taken lightly, as some of Grandma Della’s warnings and prophecies were meant to be taken—if not lightly, at least not literally—these were hints, like winks; you were meant to feel a stab of excitement but only that. So Norma Jeane was left to ponder what the truth was, or if in fact there was “truth,” for life wasn’t anything like a gigantic jigsaw puzzle really; in a puzzle all the pieces fit together, neatly and beautifully together, it didn’t even matter that the landscape-in-the-puzzle was beautiful, like a fairyland, only just that the completed picture was there: you could see it, you could marvel over it, you could even destroy it, but it was there. In life, she’d come to see, even before the age of eight, nothing was there.