Blonde

  It was the Ex-Athlete who’d been officially invited to Japan, to launch the 1954 Japanese baseball season, but it was the Blond Actress whom reporters, photographers, and TV people were wild to see. It was the Blond Actress whom large crowds were wild to glimpse. At the Tokyo airport, security police held back hundreds of staring yet strangely expressionless and silent Japanese. Only a few called to the Blond Actress, in an eerie, near-uniform chant—“Monchan! Monchan!” Some of the younger fans dared to throw flowers, which dropped to the soiled concrete pavement like shot songbirds. The Blond Actress, who’d never been in a foreign country, still less on the far side of earth from her home, gripped the arm of the Ex-Athlete. Security guards escorted them briskly to their limousine. It had not yet dawned on the Blond Actress, though it was insultingly clear to the Ex-Athlete, that the crowds had come out for her and not him. “What is ‘mon-chan’?” the Blond Actress asked uneasily and was told by their escort, with a shivery giggle, “You.” “Me? But my husband’s the one your country has invited, not me.” She was incensed on his behalf; she gripped his hand indignantly. Outside the limo, on either side of the airport access road, more Japanese crowded to see the monchan seated stiffly in the rear of the limo behind tinted protective glass. They were waving more vigorously than those inside the terminal had dared to wave, and tossing flowers more vigorously, more flowers, and larger flowers, landing with soft splattering thumps on the roof and windshield of the limo. In eerie near-unison like robots they chanted “Monchan! Mon-chan! Mon-chan!”

  The Blond Actress laughed nervously. Were they trying to say “Marilyn”? This was how “Marilyn” sounded, in Japanese?

  At the elegant Imperial Hotel, more crowds waited in the street. Traffic had been blocked off. A police helicopter droned overhead. “Oh! What do they want?” the Blond Actress whispered. This was a mad scene out of a Charlie Chaplin film. A silent-film comedy. Except the crowd here wasn’t silent but impatient, clamorous. The Blond Actress wanted to protest; weren’t the Japanese supposed to be a restrained people? Bound by tradition, exquisitely polite? Except in wartime, the Blond Actress recalled with horror, oh, remember Pearl Harbor! remember the Japanese P.O.W. camps! Jap atrocities! She was thinking, too, of ol’ Hirohito’s skull on the radio cabinet. Those empty socket eyes boring into her own eyes if she grew careless. “Mon-CHAN! Mon-CHAN!” came the thunderous chant. The Blond Actress and the Ex-Athlete, both visibly shaken, were escorted into the hotel while hundreds of Tokyo police struggled to hold back the swarming crowd. “Oh, what do these people want with me? I thought this civilization was superior to ours. I was hoping.” The Blond Actress spoke earnestly but no one heard. No one was listening. The Ex-Athlete’s face was heavy and grim with blood. They’d been traveling for so long, his jaws were shaded with stubble.

  There were hurried formalities, in the hotel lobby and in the luxury suite on the eighth floor reserved for the Ex-Athlete and his wife. There was a ceremonial greeting by one set of hosts and there was a second ceremonial greeting by another set of hosts. All the while, outside the windows, the chant Mon-chan! Mon-chan! Mon-chan! rose from the street below. It had become more demanding, like lapping waves stirred by a sudden wind. The Blond Actress tried to speak to one of their Japanese hosts about Zen poetry and the “stillness at the core of agitation” but the man smiled and nodded so eagerly, making little bows with his head, murmuring agreement, she soon gave up. She was tempted to peer out the window but dared not. The Ex-Athlete, ignoring the crowd on the street below, ignored her as well. Were they trapped in the hotel? How could they venture out onto the street? Now my punishment is beginning she thought. I let them kill my baby. It’s followed me here. It wants to devour me.

  She was the only woman in the room. She laughed suddenly and ran into a bathroom and locked the door.

  Sometime later she emerged smelling faintly of vomit, shaky and pale except for a fierce red-lipstick mouth. The Ex-Athlete who was Daddy when they were alone together but not Daddy now spoke quietly with her, his arm around her waist. Their Japanese hosts had suggested to him through a translator that, if she’d consent to appear on the balcony for just a few seconds, to acknowledge their presence and accept their homage, the crowd would be appeased and disperse. The Blond Actress shuddered. “I c-can’t do that.” The Ex-Athlete, deeply embarrassed, tightened his arm around her waist. He told her, haltingly, that he’d be beside her. The Tokyo police chief would precede her on the balcony and explain to the crowd through a bullhorn that Miss Marilyn Monroe was very tired from her plane flight and could not entertain them at the present time but that she thanked them for coming to see her. He would say that she was “deeply honored” to be visiting their homeland. She would then present herself demurely to them, say a few words, smile and wave in a friendly but formal manner, and that would be all. “Oh, Daddy, don’t make me,” the Blond Actress said, sniffing. “Don’t make me go out there.” The Ex-Athlete assured her he’d be close beside her. It would be a matter of less than a minute. “This is for them to ‘save face.’ So they can go home, and we can have dinner. You know what that is, ‘saving face’?” The Blond Actress eased away from the Ex-Athlete. “Whose face?” The Ex-Athlete laughed as if this made sense, and was funny. Carefully he repeated what his Japanese hosts had suggested, and when the Blond Actress stared at him unhearing, he said again, more forcibly, “Look. I’ll be standing right beside you. It’s just Japanese protocol. ‘Marilyn Monroe’ brought them here, and only ‘Marilyn Monroe’ can release them.” The Blond Actress seemed finally to hear this.

  She agreed to the request, at last. The Ex-Athlete, face roiled with shame, thanked her. She withdrew to a bedroom to change her clothes and surprised the Ex-Athlete by reappearing so quickly, in a dark tailored wool suit, a red scarf tied around her neck. She’d rubbed rouge onto her cheeks and powdered her face and done something to her hair to make it fuller and more luminously blond than it had been, flattened and disheveled after the long plane flight. All this while the crowd had continued their dirgelike chanting: “Mon-chan! Mon-chan!” There were sirens. Several helicopters droned overhead. In the corridor outside their suite, a sound of footfalls and men’s voices lifted in shouted commands. Was it the Imperial Japanese Army, occupying the hotel? Or did the Japanese Army no longer exist, demolished by the Allies?

  The Blond Actress didn’t wait to be escorted onto the balcony but stepped quickly forward, followed by the Ex-Athlete. Eight stories below, in the street, spilling out onto the pavement in their privileged position in front of the Imperial Hotel, a small mob of photographers and TV crews were recording the scene for posterity. Spotlights glared out of the night like deranged moons. Through a bullhorn, the chief of Tokyo police addressed the crowd, which was now respectfully subdued. Then the Blond Actress, escorted by the Ex-Athlete, came forward. Shyly she lifted a hand. The vast crowd below murmured. The chanting began again, more musically now, sensuously—“Mon-chan. Mon-chan.” Smiling, suffused suddenly with a bitter sort of happiness, the Blond Actress leaned both hands on the balcony railing and gazed down into the crowd. Where there are no faces visible, there’s God. As far as she could see the crowd extended, a great multiheaded beast, rapt and expectant.

  “I am—‘mon-chan.’ I love you.” The wind blew away her words, yet the crowd listened in hushed silence. “I am—‘mon-chan.’ Forgive us Nagasaki! Hiroshima! I love you.” She hadn’t spoken into the bullhorn and her husky-whispery words went unheard. Only a few yards above the hotel roof a helicopter skidded by, deafening. In a flamboyant gesture the Blond Actress lifted both hands to her hair, took hold of the luxuriant platinum-blond wig and detached it from her own hair (which was brushed back flat and secured with bobby pins), tore it free, and tossed it to the wind. “‘Mon-chan’—loves you! And you! And you!”

  Rapturous the Japanese faces far below, struck dumb by the swath of bright blond hair that for some teasing seconds rode the wind—and a cold northerly wind it was—then began to drop, driftin
g and turning as in a spiral, gliding laterally like a hawk, to disappear at last into a vortex of upraised yearning hands.

  That night, when at last they were alone together, the Blond Actress turned from the Ex-Athlete when he touched her. Bitterly she said, “You never answered me—‘Whose face?’”

  In her Tokyo journal, this terse notation.

  The Japanese have a name for me.

  Monchan is their name for me.

  “Precious little girl” is their name for me.

  When my soul flew out from me.

  He didn’t want her to go. He didn’t think it was a “good idea” at this time.

  She asked what was “this time.” What distinguished “this time” from another time.

  He had no reply. His sullen face resembled his bruised knuckles.

  Afterward the Blond Actress would plead: It was purely chance, wasn’t it? How could it be her fault?

  That in Tokyo, at a party at the American embassy, she would meet this Colonel of the U.S. Army. So suave! And so many medals! The Colonel, drawn to the Blond Actress like every other man in the room, asked her if she would be willing to entertain U.S. troops stationed in Korea?

  The time-honored American tradition of “boosting morale” among the enlisted. The time-honored American tradition of Hollywood stars performing gratis before enormous G.I. audiences, their photos in Life.

  How could the Blond Actress not say yes? Excitedly recalling newsreels of the forties: glamorous Rita Hayworth, Betty Grable, Marlene Dietrich, Bob Hope, and Bing Crosby and Dorothy Lamour entertaining the troops overseas.

  Said the Blond Actress in her little-girl breathy voice Oh, yes sir, thank you! It’s the least I can do.

  Except she wasn’t sure why U.S. troops were stationed in Korea? Hadn’t there been an armistice the previous year? (And what exactly was an “armistice”?) The Blond Actress told the Colonel she didn’t approve of American-imperialist military intervention in foreign nations but she understood that American G.I.s, far from home, away from their families and sweethearts, must get terribly lonely.

  Politics isn’t their fault. And it isn’t mine!

  Fortunately she’d brought the low-cut purple-sequin gown the Ex-Athlete loved her in. And the ankle-strap spike-heeled silver sandals.

  Fortunately she could sing by rote, like a big animated doll, songs from Gentlemen Prefer Blondes. How many times she’d sung “Diamonds Are a Girl’s Best Friend,” “When Love Goes Wrong,” “A Little Girl from Little Rock.” There was the disturbing smoldering-sexy “Kiss” from Niagara. And “I Wanna Be Loved by You” and “My Heart Belongs to Daddy.” These were painstaking recordings she’d made as Marilyn Monroe that had involved as many as twenty-five sessions apiece, after which The Studio’s crafty singing coach dissected the separate pieces of tape and reassembled them to make a perfect seamless recording.

  All this flashed through the Blond Actress’s mind even as the Colonel spoke. And the realization that, though this was her and the Ex-Athlete’s honeymoon, the Ex-Athlete might love her even more if she wasn’t always there warming the bench.

  Deadpan she told the Colonel Oh, know what?—I can do some Shakespeare soliloquys. And I can do mime! An old, old woman on her death bed, I performed just last month. How’s that sound?

  The look on the Colonel’s face. The Blond Actress squeezed his hand; almost she’d wanted to kiss him. Oh, hey. Just kidding.

  So it happened, the Ex-Athlete would remain alone in Japan. This was his and the Blond Actress’s honeymoon but there were professional obligations too—he’d explained to the goddam reporters who trailed him everywhere in public—they had to honor. The Ex-Athlete traveled to exhibition games through all of Japan, without his blond-actress wife but accompanied by an entourage, and everywhere he was honored, tall and gracious, as the Great American Baseball Player. Day following day he was honored at luncheons and interminable multicourse dinner banquets. (Where, sometimes, he’d swear he saw movement in the repulsive delicacies he was expected to eat, Christ how he yearned for a cheeseburger and fries, spaghetti and meatballs, even a gummy risotto!) Maybe a drunken evening with geishas? The least a man deserves, in Japan. A man traveling without his wife, by temperament a bachelor, furious with the wife after whom everybody persists in asking Where is Mari-lyn?

  When it was he, the Ex-Athlete, who’d been invited to Japan.

  He was pissed with her, the more he thought about it. Running off and leaving him. And she’d only pretended, before they were married, she’d liked baseball! He’d been shocked to overhear her tell a Japanese journalist Every baseball game is like every other baseball game, with some changes each time. Like the weather? One day to the next?

  No, he’d never forgive her. She’d have a lot of making up to do before he did.

  Amid a frenzy of photographers and TV crews the Blond Actress was escorted by military personnel on a bumpy flight to Seoul, capital of South Korea, then by bumpier helicopter to marine and army encampments in the countryside. The Blond Actress wore olive-drab army-issue long johns, pants, shirt, windbreaker, and heavy lace-up boots. Her head was protected from icy winds by an army cap buckled beneath the chin. (For, though the time of year was April, this was not April in L.A.!) How like a girl of maybe twelve she looked, except for her gorgeous long-lashed widened blue eyes and lipstick-red mouth.

  Was Marilyn scared? Hell, no. She wasn’t scared at all. Maybe she didn’t know that helicopters have accidents, especially in high winds like we had. Maybe, she even thought, if Marilyn’s in the helicopter, it can’t crash. Or maybe, like she assured us, in this little-girl voice to die for—If my number’s up it’s up. Or not.

  A corporal, a reporter for Stars and Stripes, was designated to accompany the Blond Actress to the camps. For a cover feature, he’d report how the Blond Actress amazed everyone in the helicopter—especially the pilot!—by asking could they please fly low over the camp before landing, so she could wave to the men? So the pilot flies low over the camp and the Blond Actress presses against the glass, waving excitedly as a little girl at a few scattered men who happen to be outside, and glance up, and recognize her. (Of course every guy in the camp knows Marilyn Monroe is due sometime. But not exactly when.)

  Do it again, please coos the Blond Actress, and the pilot laughs like a kid and swings the copter around and takes it back over the camp like a pendulum, and the wind shaking us, and the Blond Actress waves at the men again, and already there’s a lot more men, and this time the men are waving back, yelling and running after the copter like crazed kids. We’re thinking Now we’re gonna land, but next the Blond Actress amazes us even more saying Let’s surprise them, huh? Open the door and hang on to me? and we can’t believe what this gorgeous crazy broad wants to do but she’s got the idea she needs to do it, like it’s a movie scene maybe; she can see how it would play from the ground, the aerial view and the ground view alternating, and it’s a suspenseful scene, too, so she lies down on the copter floor and instructs us to grab on to her legs, and suddenly we’re all in this movie; we slide the door open partway, and the wind’s practically enough to capsize us, but Marilyn is determined, she even takes off her cap—so they can see who it is! And she leans out the door, and is almost falling, not scared but laughing at us ’cause we’re scared shitless, holding her legs so hard she’d be bruised by our fingers for sure, and it must’ve hurt, not to mention the icy wind, her hair whipping like crazy, but the pilot does what she requests, by this time he’s figuring, like her, like all of us, if anybody’s number is up it’s up and if not, not.

  So we carom over the camp with Marilyn Monroe hanging out of our aircraft waving and blowing kisses to the men, screaming Oh! I love you! You American G.I.’s! not once, not twice, but three times. Three times! By this time the entire camp’s out: officers, the camp commander, everybody. Guys on K.P., guys in the infirmary in pajamas, guys in latrines stumbling outside and holding up their pants. “Marilyn! Marilyn!” everybody’s yelling. Guy
s climb up onto roofs and water tanks and some of them fall and break bones, the poor saps. One guy out of the infirmary slips and falls in the stampede and is trampled. It’s a mob scene. Feeding time in the zoo, apes and monkeys. M.P.s have to beat the most reckless guys back from the landing strip.

  The copter lands, and there’s Marilyn Monroe climbing out flanked by us guys, looking like we’d been electric shocked and loved it. Marilyn’s got frostbite-white cheeks and nose and those big bright glassy blue eyes and long lashes and her hair’s in wild clumps, that hair of a color we’d never seen before except in movies and you wouldn’t think it’s real, but it is, and she’s got tears in her eyes crying Oh! oh! this is the h-happiest day of my life and if we hadn’t stopped her she’d have run right out and grabbed guys’ hands where they were reaching for her, she’d have hugged and kissed them like she’s everybody’s sweetheart from back home. The mob would’ve torn her limb from limb loving her, for sure they’d have torn her wild-beaten blond hair out by the roots, crazy with love for Marilyn, so we had to hold her back, and she didn’t fight us but she’s saying, like it’s a profound Zen truth that hit her square between the eyes This is the happiest day of my life, oh, thank you!

  Absolutely, you could see she meant it.

  THE AMERICAN GODDESS OF LOVE ON THE SUBWAY GRATING

  New York City 1954

  “Ohhhhh.”

  A lush-bodied girl in the prime of her physical beauty. In an ivory georgette crepe sundress with a halter top that gathers her breasts up in soft undulating folds of the fabric. She’s standing with bare legs apart on a New York subway grating. Her blond head is thrown rapturously back as an updraft lifts her full, flaring skirt, exposing white cotton panties. White cotton! The ivory-crepe sundress is floating and filmy as magic. The dress is magic. Without the dress the girl would be female meat, raw and exposed.