Blonde
These months Widdoes saw a number of women. He didn’t think of Norma Jeane as a woman. It might’ve been sex that drew him to her but it wasn’t sex he got from her. At least, not in any way the girl knew or needed to acknowledge.
How did it end between them? Unexpectedly. Abruptly. Not an incident Widdoes would have wanted anybody to know about, especially his superior officers in the Culver City P.D., where already in Frank Widdoes’s file there were several citizen complaints of “excessive force” in making arrests. And this wasn’t an arrest. One evening in March 1942 he’d come to pick up Norma Jeane on a street corner a few blocks from Reseda and for the first time the girl wasn’t alone. There was a guy with her; it looked as if they were arguing. The guy was possibly twenty-five years old, husky and looking like a garage mechanic in cheaply flashy clothes, and Norma Jeane was crying because this “Clarence” had followed her and wouldn’t leave her alone though she’d begged him and Widdoes shouted at Clarence to get the fuck away and Clarence said something in response to Widdoes he shouldn’t have said and might not have said if he’d been wholly sober and if he’d been able to get a good look at Widdoes; and without another word Widdoes climbed out of his car and as Norma Jeane looked on in horror calmly unholstered his Smith & Wesson revolver and pistol-whipped the fucker across the face, cracking his nose in a single blow and spraying blood; Clarence sank to his knees on the pavement and Widdoes rammed him on the back of the neck and down goes the fucker like a shot, his legs twitching, and he’s out cold. And Widdoes pulls the girl into the car and drives away but the girl’s scared stiff, literally scared rigid and unmoving, so scared she can hardly speak and can’t seem to hear Widdoes’s words meant to comfort that maybe sound angry, aggrieved. Even later she won’t let him touch her, even her hand. And Widdoes has to admit he’s scared, too, now he’s had time to think it over. Things that are allowed and not-allowed and he’d crossed the threshold in a public place and if there’d been witnesses? if the kid had died? He sure as hell didn’t want anything like this to happen again. So he didn’t see little Norma Jeane again.
Never even saw her another time to say goodbye.
4
She was beginning to forget.
There was a magic way she linked forgetting with the monthly period she didn’t think of as bleeding exactly but expelling poison. Every few weeks it would happen to her and it was a good, necessary thing, her headache and feverish skin and nausea and cramps were a sign of her weakness and not real. Aunt Elsie explained to her how it was natural and every girl and woman had to endure it. “The curse” it was called but Norma Jeane never called it that. For it was from God and could not be anything but a blessing.
The very name “Gladys” was not a name she now spoke aloud or even to herself. If she spoke of her mother in this new place (which she did rarely and then only to Aunt Elsie), she would say “my mother” in a calm, neutral voice the way you might say “my English teacher” or “my new sweater” or “my ankle.” Nothing more.
One morning soon she would wake to discover all memory of “my mother” vanished the way, when her period ran its course after three or four days, it stopped as mysteriously as it began.
The poison gone. And I’m happy again. So happy!
5
Norma Jeane was a happy girl, always smiling.
Though her laugh was odd, unmusical: high-pitched and squeaky as a mouse (so poor Norma Jeane was teased) being stepped on.
No matter. She laughed often because she was happy and because other people laughed and in their presence so did she.
At Van Nuys High she was an average student.
Except for her looks, an average girl.
Except for something taut and nervous and excitable and flamelike in her face, an average girl.
Tried out for cheerleading. Only the prettiest and most popular girls with good figures and good athletic ability were chosen to be cheerleaders, but there was Norma Jeane sweating and queasy at tryouts in the gym. I did not even pray because I believed God should not be prevailed upon where a prospect is hopeless. For weeks she’d been practicing the cheers and knew each by heart and the leaps, contortions of the spine, outspread arms and legs; she knew herself capable as any girl at the high school yet as the hour approached she grew ever weaker and more panicked and her voice was choked and at last she could not speak at all and there was so little strength in her knees that she nearly collapsed on the mat. Among the forty or more girls who’d assembled in the gym that afternoon there was an embarrassed silence. Quickly the captain of the cheerleading squad said, in her brisk bright voice, “Thank you, Norma Jeane. Who’s next?”
Tried out for Drama Club. Auditioned for Thornton Wilder’s Our Town. Why? There must have been desperation in it. This need to be normal, and more than normal; this need to be chosen. And there was the anticipation that, in this play that seemed so beautiful to her, and in acting in this play, she, Norma Jeane, would find a home; she would be “Emily” and be called by that name by others. She’d read and reread the play and believed she understood it; there was a part of her soul that understood it. Though years from the realization I have put myself into the very center of imaginary circumstances, I exist at the heart of an imaginary life, in a world of imaginary things and this is my redemption. But standing on the stark lighted stage, blinking and squinting into the front row of seats where those who would judge her were sitting, she felt suddenly overcome by panic. The drama teacher called out, “Next? Who’s next? Norma Jeane—begin.” But she could not begin. She held the script in a trembling hand, the words blurred on the page, her throat seemed to close. Lines she’d committed to memory only the evening before now swirled in her head like demented flies. At last she began to read in a hurried, choked voice. Her tongue was too large for her mouth! She stammered and faltered and lost her way. “Thank you, dear,” the drama teacher said, dismissing her. Norma Jeane looked up from the script and said, “P-please, can I try again?” and there was an awkward pause. She heard murmurs and muffled laughter. “I think I could be Emily. I k-know—I am Emily.” If I could take off my clothes. If I could stand before you naked as God created me, then—then you would see me! But the drama teacher was unmoved. Saying, in a voice laced with irony, so that other, favored students might laugh at his wit and at the object of his wit, “Hmm. Is it—Norma Jeane? Thank you, Norma Jeane. But I doubt that Mr. Thornton Wilder would see it that way.”
She left the stage. Her face was burning, but she meant to retain her dignity. So, in a film, you might be called upon to die. So long as others were watching, you must retain your dignity.
In Norma Jeane’s wake came a single wolf whistle.
Tried out for girls’ choir. She knew she could sing, she knew!—she was always singing at home, she loved to sing and her voice was melodic in her ears, and hadn’t Jess Flynn promised that her voice could be trained? She was a soprano, she was certain. “These Foolish Things” was her best song. But when the choir director asked her to sing “Spring Song” by Joseph Reisler, which she’d never seen before, she’d stared at the sheet music unable to read the notes; when the woman sat at a piano, played through the song, and asked Norma Jeane to sing while she accompanied her, Norma Jeane lost her confidence and sang in a breathy, wavering, disappointing voice—not hers!
She asked please could she try a second time.
The second time, her voice was a little stronger. But not much.
The choir director dismissed her politely. “Maybe next year, Norma Jeane.”
For her English teacher, Mr. Haring, she’d written essays on Mary Baker Eddy, the founder of Christian Science, and on Abraham Lincoln, “America’s greatest president,” and on Christopher Columbus, “a man not afraid to venture into the unknown.” She’d showed Mr. Haring some of her poems, carefully written in blue ink on sheets of unlined paper.
Into the sky—so high!
I know that I will never die.
I know that I would never be
blue
If I could love you.
If there is a way
for those on Earth to say—
“I love you!”
and make it always be true.
As God tells us “I love you—
and you—and you—”
and always IT IS TRUE.
When Mr. Haring smiled uneasily and told her the poem was “very good”—the rhyming “perfect”—Norma Jeane blushed with pleasure. It had taken her weeks to build up her courage to bring these poems in, and now—what a reward! And she had many more poems! Her diary was spilling over with poems! And she had poems her mother had written a long time ago as a young girl living in northern California, before she’d been married.
The red blaze is the morning
The violet is noon
The yellow day is falling
And after that is none.
But miles of sparks at evening
Reveal the width that burned
The Territory Argent that
Never yet consumed.
This peculiar poem Mr. Haring read and reread, frowning. Oh, if she’d made a mistake showing it to him! Her heart began to pound like a frightened rabbit’s. Mr. Haring was a disciplinarian with his students though a young man of twenty-nine, wiry-thin, sandy-haired, beginning to go bald, and walking with a limp from a boyhood accident: a young husband struggling to support his family on a public-school teacher’s salary. He looked like a weaker, less amiable Henry Fonda in The Grapes of Wrath. He wasn’t always of a cheery disposition in class and was given to occasional outbursts of sarcasm. You never knew with Mr. Haring how he might react, what strange things he might say, but you hoped he would smile at you, at least. And usually Mr. Haring smiled at Norma Jeane, who was a quiet, shy girl, a startlingly pretty and precociously shapely girl who wore sweaters a size or two too small and whose manner was unconsciously provocative—at least, Haring supposed her manner was unconscious. A fifteen-year-old sexpot yet not seeming to know it. And those eyes!
Norma Jeane’s mother’s poem, lacking a title, did not seem to Haring to be a “finished” poem. At the blackboard with a stick of chalk (this was after school; Norma Jeane had come in for a private consultation), he demonstrated to her how the “rhyme scheme” was deficient. “Morning” and “falling” were meant to be A-rhymes, but as Norma Jeane could see they didn’t really rhyme. The B-rhyme (“noon,” “none”) was even worse. In the second stanza, there was no C-rhyme at all (“evening,” “that”) and the D-rhyme (“burned,” “consumed”) was flat. Poetry is musical, after all, you hear it with the ear, you don’t just see it with the eye. And what was “Territory Argent”? He’d never heard of such a place and doubted it existed. “Obscurity and coyness”: these were typical weaknesses in female poetry. A strong rhyme scheme is needed for strong poetry, and the sense of a poem should never be unclear. “Otherwise the reader shrugs his shoulders and says, ‘Eh? I can write better than this.’”
Norma Jeane laughed, because Mr. Haring laughed. She was deeply embarrassed by the flaws in her mother’s poem (though stubbornly she would continue to think it was a beautiful, strange, mysterious poem); but she’d have had to admit she didn’t know what “Territory Argent” meant herself. Apologetically, she told her English teacher that her mother had not finished college. “Mom married when she was only nineteen. She wanted to be a real poet. She wanted to be a teacher—like you, Mr. Haring.”
Haring was touched by this. The girl was so sweet! He kept the desk between them.
Something in Norma Jeane’s quavering voice signaled him to ask, gently, “Where is your mother now, Norma Jeane? You don’t live with her?”
Mutely Norma Jeane shook her head. Her eyes filled with moisture and her young face tightened as if in danger of shattering.
It came then to Haring that he’d heard this girl was a ward of L.A. County. Living with the Pirigs. The Pirigs! He’d had their foster kids in his English classes before. He was frankly surprised this one was so well-groomed, healthy, and intelligent. Her dark-blond hair wasn’t greasy, her clothes appeared neat and clean if rather eye-catching: the cheap tight red sweater outlining her amazing little breasts and the cheap tight gray serge skirt that all but showed the crack of her buttocks. If he’d dared to look.
He hadn’t looked and wasn’t going to. He and his exhausted young wife had a four-year-old daughter and an eight-month-old son and that fact, stark and pitiless as the desert sun, hovered before his bloodshot eyes.
Yet he said, quickly, “Look, Norma Jeane. Bring in poems—yours, your mother’s—any time. I’m happy to read them. That’s my job.”
So it happened in the winter of 1941 that Sidney Haring who was Norma Jeane’s favorite teacher at Van Nuys High began to see her after class once or even twice a week. Tirelessly they talked of—oh, what did they talk of?—mainly novels and poems Haring gave Norma Jeane to read, Emily Brontë’s Wuthering Heights, Charlotte Brontë’s Jane Eyre, Pearl Buck’s The Good Earth, slender volumes of verse by Elizabeth Barrett Browning, Sara Teasdale, Edna St. Vincent Millay, and Haring’s own favorite, Robert Browning. He continued to “critique” her schoolgirl poems. (She never brought in another of her mother’s—fortunately.) One winter afternoon it happened that Norma Jeane suddenly realized she’d stayed too late, she was expected home by Mrs. Pirig to do chores, and Haring offered to drive her home; after that, when Norma Jeane dropped by his office, he usually drove her home, a distance of about a mile and a half. This way, they had more time to talk together.
It was all innocent, he would swear. Wholly innocent. The girl was his student, and he was her teacher. Never once did he touch her. Opening the car door for her to climb inside, he may have brushed against her hand with his, and he may have brushed against her long hair. He may have unconsciously inhaled her scent. He may have gazed at her a little too longingly and sometimes, talking animatedly with her, he may have lost the thread of his words and stumbled and repeated himself. He would not have wished to acknowledge that he was guilty of carrying back with him to the fatigued and overwrought household in which he was husband and father the vivid memory of the girl’s childlike smiling face and the promise of her young body and that unnerving liquidy-blue gaze of hers that seemed always just slightly out of focus as if allowing him entry.
I live in your dreams, don’t I? Come, live in mine!
Yet in the several months of their “friendship” nothing the girl said hinted of sexual flirtation or subterfuge. Truly she seemed to want to talk only of the books Haring gave her and of her poems, which he seemed sincerely to believe held promise. If the poems spoke of love and were addressed to a mysterious you, Haring could not assume that this you was in fact Sidney Haring. Only once did Norma Jeane surprise Haring, and that was when they’d drifted onto another subject. Haring happened to mention that he didn’t trust FDR, he believed the war news was being manipulated, he didn’t trust any politicians on principle; and Norma Jeane flared up, saying no, no, that wasn’t right—“President Roosevelt is different.” “Yes? How do you know that Roosevelt is ‘different’?” Haring asked, amused. “You don’t know the man personally, do you?” “Of course not, but I have faith in him. I know his voice from the radio.” Haring said, “I know his voice from the radio, and I think I’m being manipulated. Anything you hear over the radio or see in the movies is scripted and rehearsed and played to an audience; it isn’t spontaneous and can’t be. It may seem from the heart but it isn’t. It can’t be.” Norma Jeane said, excitedly, “President Roosevelt is a great man! He’s as great as Abraham Lincoln, maybe.” “And how do you know that?” “I have f-faith in him.” Haring laughed. “D’you know my definition of faith, Norma Jeane? ‘Believing in that which you know isn’t true.’” Norma Jeane said, frowning, “That’s not right! You have faith in something you know is true even if you can’t prove it.” “But what do you ‘know’ about Roosevelt, for instance? Only what you read in the papers and hear on the radio. I bet you didn’
t know the man’s a cripple.” “A—what?” “A cripple. He had polio, they say. His legs are paralyzed. He’s in a wheelchair. In his photos, you’ll notice he’s only seen from the waist up.” “Oh, he is not!” “Well, I happen to know from a reliable source, an uncle of mine who has a job in Washington, D.C., he is” “I don’t believe it.” “Well, then”—Haring laughed, enjoying this—“don’t believe it. FDR is untouched by what Norma Jeane Baker out in Van Nuys, California, believes or wishes not to believe.”