Blonde

  She’d known she must medicate herself to get through the crisis. It was her first instinct, as at another time in her life her first instinct might have been prayer. Nude photo. “Marilyn Monroe.” Found out. Hollywood Tatler. Wire services. Studio furious. Scandal. Catholic Legion of Decency, Christian Family Entertainment Guide. Threats of censor, boycott. Quickly she’d taken two codeine painkillers of the kind prescribed for her by a studio physician for menstrual cramps and migraine, and when these didn’t take immediate effect she panicked and swallowed a third.

  Now through a telescope she could observe the blinking blond woman surrounded by furious men. The blond woman was smiling the way you’d smile on a tilting surface to indicate that you weren’t aware of the tilting. Telling herself that the situation was grave. In a Marx Brothers movie it would be comedy. Dumb broad. Sad, sick cow. The Studio meant to market the blond woman’s body but only on its own strict terms. Downstairs there was a milling gang of reporters and photographers. Radio and TV crews. They’d been notified that Marilyn Monroe and a Studio spokesman would soon be issuing a statement regarding the nude calendar photo. But wasn’t this ridiculous? Norma Jeane protested, “It’s like I’m General Ridgway making some pronouncement in Korea. This is only a silly picture.”

  The men continued to stare at her. There was Mr. Z, who had not exchanged a word with Norma Jeane since she’d come to see his aviary nearly five years ago. How young she’d been then! Since that occasion, Mr. Z had been promoted to head of productions. Mr. Z, who’d hoped to destroy Marilyn Monroe’s career to punish her for being a tramp and for having bled on his beautiful white fur carpet. Unless that never happened? But why would I remember it so clearly? Never would Mr. Z forgive Marilyn though she was under contract at his studio; never could Mr. Z rid himself of Marilyn because he feared she would be hired by a competitor. He was a raging father, she a repentant and yet provocative daughter.

  Norma Jeane was pleading, “Why’s it so important? A nude photo? Of just me? Did you ever see those photos of the Nazi death camps? Or of Hiroshima, Nagasaki? Piles of corpses like lumber? Little children and babies too.” Norma Jeane shuddered. Her words were upsetting her more than she’d intended. This was all unscripted, and she was getting unmoored. “That’s something to be upset about. That’s pornography. Not some sad dumb broad desperate for fifty dollars.”

  Which was why we never trusted her. She couldn’t follow a script. Anything might come from that mouth.

  Next morning the phone she’d purposefully left off the hook was ringing her out of sleep. She would swear she’d heard vibrations! Her heart leapt, thinking this would be Mr. Shinn, forgiving her. Wouldn’t he have to forgive her, since The Studio had? Since The Studio decided not to fire her? At the press conference, she’d performed brilliantly as “Marilyn Monroe.” Telling the reporters just the truth. I was so poor in 1949, I was desperate for just fifty dollars, I never posed for nude photos before or since and I’m sorry now but I’m not ashamed. I never do anything I’m ashamed of, that’s my Christian upbringing.

  Norma Jeane fumbled to replace the receiver seeing it was almost 10 A.M. and immediately the phone rang and eagerly she lifted the receiver. “H-hello? Is-aac?” but it wasn’t Mr. Shinn, instead it was Mr. Shinn’s assistant, Betty (who Norma Jeane had reason to believe was an F.B.I. spy? though she couldn’t have explained why this might be so, nor did it seem probable, given Betty’s steadfast devotion to her boss)—“Oh, Norma Jeane! Are you sitting down?” Betty’s voice was cracked and choked. Norma Jeane was sprawled naked in her smelly bed almost calmly gripping the phone receiver, thinking Mr. Shinn is dead. His heart. I have killed him.

  Sometime later that morning Norma Jeane swallowed the remainder of the powerful codeine tablets, approximately fifteen pills. Washed down with slightly rancid buttermilk. Naked and shivering she lay down on the bedroom floor to die staring at the finely cracked, shadowy ceiling Now Baby is lost to us, to both of us forever. Would it have been a baby with a twisted spine? It would have been a baby with beautiful eyes and a beautiful soul. Within a few minutes she vomited everything up, a slimy-chalky bilious paste that would harden like concrete between her teeth though she brushed, brushed, brushed until her tender gums bled.

  THE RESCUE

  April 1953 when the Gemini entered Norma Jeane’s life. If I’d known they were watching over me, I would have been stronger.

  Things happened. And would continue to happen. A dump truck loaded with all the glittering tinselly Christmas gifts she’d never gotten at the Los Angeles County Orphans Home pulled up and unloaded its riches on top of her. “Oh!—is this happening to me? What is this that is happening to me?” A life that had been inward and brooding as a lonely child practicing scales on a piano was now outward and festive as a musical-comedy score turned up so high you can’t hear the lyrics, only the music. The din.

  “It scares me, y’know?—because I am not her. Absolutely I am not Rose.”

  “I mean, I am not a slut. I’d love a man like Joseph Cotten, I would! He’s been injured in his mind, in the War. Maybe in his body too. He’s—what you call ‘impotent,’ I guess? It isn’t clear. There’s this one scene we’re kind of—loving. Rose is manipulating him but he doesn’t know it; he’s laughing, he’s crazy about her, you can tell. This scene, I’ll play straight. Like Rose would play it with him. I mean—she’s acting, but I’ll play her like she isn’t acting. One thing, I’d be scared as hell to mock a man to his face, a man who, y’know, can’t—isn’t—a man. In that way.”

  The Studio (“after I sucked all their cocks one by one around the table”) forgave her for the nude photo scandal and raised her salary to $1,000 a week plus incidental expenses. Immediately, Norma Jeane made arrangements to transfer Gladys Mortensen from Norwalk to a much smaller private mental hospital in Lakewood.

  Her new agent (who’d taken over I. E. Shinn, Inc.) advised her: “Keep it quiet, honey, OK? Nobody need know ‘Marilyn Monroe’ has a mental patient mother too.”

  In Monterey, in the resort hotel to which they’d come off-season. The suite overlooking the Pacific, the cliffs. Giant boulders like madness rolling around in the brain. Blinding-glaring sunset. So V says, “Now we know what hell looks like, at least. I mean, at least what hell looks like.” Norma Jeane, bright and perky as “Marilyn,” quips, “Oh, hey! It’s what hell feels like. That’s the thing.” And V laughs, sipping his drink. What’s he murmur? Norma Jeane can’t quite hear—“And that too.”

  The lovers have come to the resort hotel in Monterey to celebrate “Marilyn’s” new contract at The Studio. Star billing in Niagara, her name over the title. More important, V’s child-custody settlement. And there is V’s recent starring role on Philco Playhouse, for which he’s received good reviews nationwide. So V says, “Hell, it’s only TV. Don’t be condescending.” Norma Jeane says in her serious-throaty “Marilyn” voice, “Only TV? TV is the future of America, I’d say.” V shudders. “Jesus, I hope not. That tacky little black-and-white box.” Norma Jeane says, “Movies started out, they were a tacky little black-and-white box too. You wait, darling.” “Nope. Darling can’t wait. Darling ain’t that young anymore.” Norma Jeane protests, “Oh, hey—whaaat? You are! You’re the youngest guy I know.” V finishes his drink. Smiles into the glass. His broad boyish-freckled face looks like papier-mâché. “You’re young, baby. Me, maybe I’ve had my career.”

  They would return to Hollywood, to their separate places, noon Sunday.

  These invented scenes. Improvised after the fact. They would plague her through the remainder of her life.

  Nine years five months of that life.

  And the minutes rapidly ticking.

  Could there be an hourglass of time in which time runs in the opposite direction? Had Einstein discovered that time might run backward, if a ray of light could be reversed?

  “But why not? You have to wonder.”

  Einstein dreamt with his eyes open. “Thought experiments.” That wa
s no different really from an actor improvising as Norma Jeane did, after the fact. Which was why “Marilyn Monroe” would be increasingly late for appointments. Not that Norma Jeane Baker was paralyzed with shyness, indecision, self-doubt staring at her luminous beautiful-doll face in whatever mirror of desperation and hope; no, it was the invented improvised scenes that held her.

  See, if there’d been a director and he’d said, OK, let’s run through this again, you would, wouldn’t you? Again and again—however many times required to get it perfect.

  When there is no director you must be your own director. No script to guide you?—you must compose your own script.

  In that way, so simple and clear a way, seeming to know what is the true meaning of a scene that eluded you in the living of it. The true meaning of a life that eluded you in the dense thicket of living it.

  In all this external search, says Constantin Stanislavski, an actor must never lose his own identity.

  “Never would I be a tramp like Rose! I mean . . . I respect men, I’m crazy about men. I love men. The way they look, talk . . . smell. A man in a long-sleeved white shirt, y’know?—a formal shirt?—with cuffs and cuff links. That drives me crazy. I could never mock any man. Especially a veteran like Rose’s husband! A ‘disabled’ person mentally. That’s the meanest, cruelest. . . . Yeah, I’m kind of worried what the public’s gonna think? ‘Marilyn Monroe’s such a slut, and she’s just played a psychotic baby-sitter? This Rose is not only unfaithful to her husband but mocking him to his face and conspiring to kill him? Oh, gee.”

  These invented scenes, improvisations. Soon she’d be so plagued by them, she could not recall a time when her mind had been freer.

  “It’s just so simple. You want to get it right.”

  Deserve to live? You? What a sad, sick cow. What a slut. She wouldn’t ask V for his advice. She wouldn’t wish to show her lover such weakness. Yet she had to wonder: Had Nell something to do with this? Nell and Gladys. For Gladys-was-Nell. In disguise. Norma Jeane had appropriated Gladys’s hands, not guessing that Gladys had taken her over as a demon may inhabit a body. (If you believe in such superstitions. Norma Jeane did not.) That morning driving to Norwalk, she’d stepped into a contagious atmosphere. It’s said that hospitals are swarming with (invisible) germs, why not mental hospitals? They’d be worse. More lethal. Norma Jeane was reading Sigmund Freud, The Interpretation of Dreams, the book’s pages blotched and peeling from chemical bleach, from the hairdresser’s. How everything is determined from infancy. Yet you have to figure what about actual germs? viruses? cancer? cardiac failure? these are real.

  Maybe, once she was settled at Lakewood, Gladys would forgive her?

  At a Bel Air party, on the terrace above the shrieking peacocks. So dark (only just flickering candle flames) you couldn’t see faces until they loomed up close. This one, a Robert Mitchum rubber mask. The sleepy-droopy eyes, the sly downturned smile. That drawl like the two of you are in bed together and it’s a humdinger of a close-up. And he’s tall, not some runt. Norma Jeane is transfixed, seeing a movie idol face-to-face and the man’s warm boozy breath in her ear, and this once she’s grateful that V has drifted off from her. Robert Mitchum! Eyeing her. In Hollywood, Mitchum’s got the kind of reputation that would get another actor suspended from his studio. How he’s escaped the attention of HUAC, nobody knows. Over the peacocks’ manic screams there’s this conversation Norma Jeane will play and replay to herself like a record.

  MITCHUM: H’lo there, Norma Jeane. Don’t be bashful, honey—I knew you before “Marilyn.”

  NORMA JEANE: What?

  MITCHUM: A long time before “Marilyn.” Over in the Valley.

  NORMA JEANE: You’re Robert M-mitchum?

  MITCHUM: Call me Bob, honey.

  NORMA JEANE: You’re saying you know me?

  MITCHUM: I’m saying I knew “Norma Jeane Glazer” a long time before “Marilyn.” Back in ’forty-four, ’forty-five. See, I worked at Lockheed on the assembly line with Bucky.

  NORMA JEANE: B-bucky? You knew Bucky?

  MITCHUM: Naw, I didn’t know Bucky. I just worked with Bucky. I didn’t approve of Bucky.

  NORMA JEANE: Didn’t approve—? Why?

  MITCHUM: Because that half-ass sonbitch brought in these photos of his pretty teenage wife he’d pass around to the guys, bragging on them, till I gave him what for.

  NORMA JEANE: I don’t understand. What?

  MITCHUM: Hell, it was a long time ago. He’s out of the picture, I guess?

  NORMA JEANE: Snapshots? What snapshots?

  MITCHUM: Go for broke, “Marilyn.” The Studio gives you shit, do like Bob Mitchum and give ’em worse shit right back. And good luck.

  NORMA JEANE: Wait! Mr. Mitchum—Bob—

  V was watching now. V making his careful way back. V in an open shirt, a single button of his pale linen sport coat buttoned. V the All-American freckle-faced boy pushed to the limit of his endurance by the Nazi enemy, ripping a bayonet out of the hands of a German and stabbing it into his guts and the All-American audience cheering like it’s a touchdown at the high school. V took hold of Norma Jeane’s bare shoulder and inquired what Robert Mitchum was saying to her, she looked so intrigued, practically falling into the bastard’s arms, and Norma Jeane said Mitchum had once been a friend of her ex-husband’s. “A long time ago, I guess. They were boys together over in the Valley.”

  It was that party, the mega-millionaire Texas oilman with the eye patch wanting to invest in The Studio, the amazing bird and animal menagerie outdoors amid tall candles on posts, and a trick translucent paper moon above the palm trees lighted from within so guests thought there were two moons in the sky!—that party, the Gemini (who’d come uninvited but driving a borrowed Rolls) were watching over Norma Jeane from a distance. They’d seen Mitchum but hadn’t heard his words. They’d seen V and hadn’t heard.

  “Just I feel, sometimes—my skin isn’t there? A layer’s missing? Everything can hurt. Like sunburn. Since Mr. Shinn died. I miss him so. He was the only one who believed in ‘Marilyn Monroe.’ The studio bosses didn’t, for sure. ‘That tramp’ they called her. I never did, much. There’s so many blondes. . . . After Mr. Shinn died, I wanted to die too. I caused him to die, I broke his heart. But I knew I had to live. ‘Marilyn’ was his invention, he claimed—maybe that was so. I would have to live for ‘Marilyn.’ Not that I’m religious, exactly. I used to be. Now, I don’t know what I am. I don’t truly believe anybody knows what he or she believes; it’s just what they tell you, what they think they should say. Like these loyalty oaths we have to sign. Everybody has to sign. A Communist would lie, right? So what’s the point? But, see—I figure there’s a certain obligation. A responsibility? This story of H. G. Wells, The Time Machine? The Time Traveler travels into the future on this machine he can’t completely control, travels far into the future, and there’s this vision: the future is already there, ahead of us. In the stars. I don’t mean superstitious stuff like—is it astrology? Palm reading? Trying to predict the future, and always such petty things! I could see in the future, I’d ask what’s the cure for cancer? Or for mental illness? I mean, the future is ahead of us like a highway not yet traveled, maybe not yet paved. You owe it to whomever would be your descendants, the offspring of your children, to remain alive. To assure the children are born. Does that make sense? I believe that. There’s a baby-dream of mine . . . so beautiful. Well, I won’t talk about it, it’s private. Only I wish, in the dream, there’d be a hint who’s the father!”

  April 1953. There was Norma Jeane in retreat, hidden away in a powder room crying. Loud music outside, screams of laughter. She was so hurt! Insulted. The Texas oilman touching her to see if she was “real.” Wanting to dance the boogie with her. He hadn’t the right. Not that kind of dancing. What if V had seen? And bat-faced Mr. Z and cruel leering Mr. D looking on. I am not your whore for hire. I am an actress! Times like these, Norma Jeane missed Mr. Shinn so. For V loved her but didn’t seem to like her much. That
was the plain truth. Also, it seemed lately he was jealous of her: her career! V, who’d been famous when Norma Jeane was in high school, mooning up at his freckled-boyish face on the screen. And maybe V didn’t love her either. Maybe V only liked to fuck her.

  It required ten minutes to repair the damage done to her mascara alone. Ten minutes to coax pretty bouncy life-of-the-party blond Marilyn back. “Oh, just in time!”

  An elegy for I. E. Shinn.

  In the caverns of the sky

  The spirits of the departed lie.

  But this is a lie.

  It’s only just—we don’t want them to die!

  The only poem Norma Jeane had written in a long time. And it was a lousy poem.

  Sometimes in bed in the arms of the very man she’s in despair of losing. Her mind jumps like a flea on a griddle! She’s sighing, moaning, groaning as she draws her fingers through his curly still-thick hair. Entwined happy as an eel in his freckled fatty-muscled arms. (There’s a tiny American-flag tattoo on his left bicep. So kissable!) And he rolls on top of her, kissing her wildly, penetrating her as best he can and if his erection holds (you hold your breath hope-hope-hoping!) he makes love to her in gasping lurching pumplike motions; as he approaches the end it shifts gear to become a quirky-jumpy-whimpery-quivery motion, every man has his unique style of lovemaking in contrast to every man you’re required to suck off where it’s always the same, skinny cock or fat cock, short cock or long cock, smooth cock or ropey-veined cock, lard-colored cock or blood-sausage-red cock, soapy-clean cock or mucus-crusted cock, tepid cock or steaming cock, smooth cock or wrinkled cock, youthful cock or decrepit cock, always the same cock, and it’s repulsive. When Norma Jeane loves a man as Norma Jeane loves V she gives an Oscar performance. True, she’s always had a difficult time feeling physical sensation with V that’s genuine. As she’d had a difficult time feeling much with Bucky Glazer snorting and puffing giddy-ap horsey! and coming all over her belly like a nasty sneeze, if he remembered to yank out in time. Oh, she wants so much to please V! Seeming to know beforehand, as Screen Romance, PhotoLife, Modern Screen reveal in their coverage of the stars, it’s only love that matters, true love, not “just a career.” Well, Norma Jeane knows this already. It’s only just common sense. With V she simulates in her mind what it might feel like, sexual pleasure; a slow and then a quicksilver rising to orgasm; recalling those long languorous times with Cass Chaplin, in a stupor of pleasure not knowing if it was night or day, morning or late afternoon, Cass never wore a watch and rarely wore clothes, indoors dampeyed and unpredictable as a wild creature, and when they made love every part of their sweaty bodies stuck together, even their eyelashes!—finger-and toenails! Oh, but Norma Jeane loves V more than she ever loved Cass. She believes this. V is a real man, an adult citizen. V has been a husband. So with V, who’s a proud man like all men she’s ever known, Norma Jeane wants him to feel like the King of the World. Wants him to feel she’s feeling something special. The few porn films she’s seen, she always feels ashamed thinking the girls could try harder to make it seem like it mattered.