American Beauty

When does the freedom of fiction become license? That question occurs on reading Joyce Carol Oates’ novelization of Marilyn Monroe’s life, a question particularly relevant since, in a statement sent with the book, the author claims permissive authority over her subject: “the sole voice of ‘Blonde’ is Norma Jeane’s, as if she’s speaking to us, at last, out of her body and out of time. . . . I felt her fingers encircling my wrist. . . . I came to feel that Norma Jeane had no one but me to tell her story from the inside. How it felt, how it feels, to have been her . . . to be her. . . . “

Oates’ musings would not be out of place in a coven of Hollywood channelers, nor in the mind of a Method-y actress auditioning for a role she won’t get. Coming from a reputable author, they require scrutiny. Oates has taken on a formidable subject, Norma Jeane, who became Marilyn Monroe.

Indeed, the legend of Marilyn Monroe may eventually overtake that of Helen of Troy. Her image reigns over all others on the outside wall of Mann’s Chinese Theatre. Her visage enthralls on street murals. Psychics proclaim visitations from their gorgeous Madonna. Accounts of the 20th century acknowledge her commanding presence, right along with Einstein’s. A single name evokes her: Marilyn!

While Helen’s face launched a thousand ships, Marilyn’s has launched a thousand books. She is a Rorschach test for authors. In nonfiction accounts, Truman Capote discovered a playmate, Norman Mailer a dead mistress, Gloria Steinem an embarrassment for many women before tragedy transformed her. (This reviewer mythologized a possible daughter of hers and Robert Kennedy’s.)

Did she suspect she would inspire such staggering attention? Biographical evidence indicates otherwise. She had been discarded by two most powerful men, John and Robert Kennedy. (But history will link them to her forever.) She feared she had inherited her mother’s insanity, once committing herself into a psychiatric ward, unable to get herself out. Believing her beauty gone (though final photographs reveal greater beauty), addicted to prescription drugs, her career in disarray, she died despondent at 36 in 1962.

Her real last name is ambiguous--Baker or Mortensen?--her father unknown. She revised important details of her life (contending her mother was dead; instead, she was in an institution). When she was discovered dead in her bedroom in the only house she ever owned, mystery swirled around her. Was she murdered? Did she commit suicide? Did she surrender to an accidental overdose? She died virtually insolvent but, in harsh paradox, her estate, controlled by a woman she never knew--the second wife of Lee Strasberg, a man Marilyn purportedly intended to remove as her heir--is worth millions; even in death, her features are owned, jealously guarded, expensively rented.

She is now lovingly celebrated and grossly used. The fact that she was a real woman--with a life of her own, with feelings of her own--is increasingly forgotten, undermined or ignored. The result is the almost-daily exploitation, the reckless looting, of her life and death. In his biography, “Goddess: The Secret Lives of Marilyn Monroe,” Anthony Summers included a brutal photograph of her face after autopsy. At Christie’s, everything she touched went to the highest bidder. The dress she wore when she sang “Happy Birthday, Mr. President” was sold for $1,267,500. An advertisement for unofficial stamps commemorating that auction exhorted: “Own a piece of Marilyn!”

And now along comes Joyce Carol Oates claiming to “be” Norma Jeane. In order to deal with her novel as a novel, one must try to keep in abeyance her eerie claim of ghostly intervention.

Oates’ characterization of Norma Jeane’s mother as a wounded monster is plausible. Believing herself threatened by fire rimming the city, Gladys flees in a ragged car with Norma Jeane, then shifts toward the fire. “I want to see Hell up close. A preview,” she says.

Oates effectively converts the burial of MGM mogul Irving Thalberg into a funeral of contrasts: Behind barricades, a throng waits “for film stars and other celebrities to arrive in a succession of chauffeur-driven limousines, enter the temple, and depart again after a lengthy ninety minutes, during which time the murmurous crowd . . . appeared disoriented, as if they’d suffered a great loss without knowing what it was.”

A good scene depicts surfers saving Marilyn from a possibly suicidal drowning, then quietly recognizing her. Oates’ sharp eye for the grotesque creates Bosch-like surrealism throughout. Here, fans are “creatures of the under-earth. Hunchbacked gnomes & beggar maids & homeless females with mad eyes & straw hair. Those among us mysteriously wounded by life.”

Matters go quickly awry. In turning Los Angeles into a hellish city as a backdrop for her dour narrative, Oates shoves the grotesqueness into hysterical parody. She conjures an annihilation of children, “nowhere in greater numbers than in southern California . . . [T]heir little corpses, often charred beyond recognition, were hastily swept off Los Angeles streets by sanitation workers, collected in dump trucks to be buried in unmarked mass graves. Not a word to the press or radio! No one must know.” Soon, “Death” bicycles through “the warm radioactive air of southern California where Death had been born.”

Chapter titles like “The Lost One” and “The Vision” and references to the “Fair Princess” and the “Dark Prince” augur imposed allegory. Foggy loftiness sweeps into the language in italics: “For what is time but others’ expectations of us?” That vasty tone is further elevated by the recurrence, even in dialogue, of the archaic conjunction “for,” several on virtually every page, at times even in dialogue, and hundreds of biblical “Ands.” “For there is no meaning to life apart from the movie story. And there is no movie story apart from the darkened movie theater.”

Allegory drains life from Oates’ characters; and although at its best the agitated prose assumes urgency, her familiar literary stunts (exclamatory running sentences, racing ampersands, gasping blank spaces) only serve to interrupt an intrinsically powerful story.

Oates emphasizes: “Improvising, you don’t know where you’re headed. But sometimes it’s good.” Often, it isn’t. As the novel stretches, the impression grows that it is an unusually rushed improvisation by this admirably prolific author. How else to account for pages of loose writing, resulting frequently in unintended humor? “Elsie kept Norma Jeane out of school for part of the morning to help her with the leaky Kelvinator washing machine and the wringer that was forever getting stuck and toting baskets of clothes outside. . . .”

How else to account for effects that have no discernible adventurous stylistic or narrative reason and that cause bafflement? Essential information (the death of Norma Jeane’s grandmother, Gladys’ contamination from film-cutting chemicals) is mentioned, then explored, chapters later, as if introduced for the first time.

How else to account for murky observations straining for profundity? “Film is the repository of that which, failing to be remembered, is immortal.” How to account for forgetful narrative reversals? A doll scorched by fire turns up again. How to account for an invasion of “suddenlys” and “somehows” instead of clear narrative reasons? “ . . . for suddenly I realized. . . .” “Yet somehow it happened.” How to account for endless repetition and double-talk? “The Fair Princess . . . is so beautiful because she is so beautiful and because she is the Fair Princess. . . . “ How to account for enigmatic made-up epigraphs on acting? “The power of the actor is his embodiment of the fear of ghosts.”

*

How to account for this? Halfway into the novel a character--not a Canadian--appears who ends sentences by asking, “eh?”--and soon everyone is asking, “eh?” Ava Gardner enters briefly and asks, “eh?” The “President’s Pimp” asks, “eh?” Then “the President” asks, “eh?” Finally Marilyn asks, “eh?”

An “Author’s Note” informs: “ ‘Blonde’ is a radically distilled ‘life’ in the form of fiction . . . synecdoche is the principle of appropriation.” Several such statements anticipate criticism; that disclaimer reads like a blurred excuse.

Of course, Oates is in firm territory within the literary tradition of fictionalizing real figures. Recent practitioners include Susan Sontag, E.L. Doctorow, Gore Vidal; all used historical persons, none cited visitations. Many writers have fictionalized Marilyn without employing her name (Paddy Chayefsky, Doris Grumbach). Michael Korda used Marilyn’s name in “The Immortals,” a dismissible novel of almost sublime vulgarity, told from the point of view of a reporter.

Oates’ synecdochic “appropriation” differs from all others in its presumed seizure of Norma Jeane’s voice, an intermittent first-person voice that pretends to reveal Marilyn’s most intimate thoughts in self-recrimination (“her own harsh judgment of herself,” Oates unabashedly insists). Thus, she takes lines from an actual interview in which Marilyn Monroe praised her own sexuality (“sex is a part of nature . . . I go along with nature”) and, without differentiating, Oates interjects her own lines, finally twisting Marilyn’s celebration into the author’s verdict: “sad, sick cow . . . piece of meat . . . c--- that’s dead inside.”

Writers are free to roam uncensored whatever territory they choose. But Oates should be called into account for taking a few salient and familiar events (“a selected symbolic few”) from an actual life (one proximate in living memory) and from the lives of others still living (including Marlon Brando, Arthur Miller and Marilyn’s first husband) and then attaching lurid contrivances in order to fit them into evidence for her preconceived judgment upon that life, even going so far as to assert that her subsequent distortion has been spookily spoken--”at last”--by the subject of that distortion.

Rejecting a trashy script about Jean Harlow, Marilyn Monroe reportedly said, “I hope they don’t do that to me.” Reacting to proofs of photographs by Bert Stern, she drew X’s with red ink over those she disapproved of. They survive, shamelessly blown up, published. The slashes seem inked with blood.

“When confronted with the choice of enhancing Norma Jeane, or degrading her, as others have, I opted always for enhancing,” Oates has said. Yet evidence abounds that to fulfill the allegorical requirements for “Blonde” martyrdom, she needed more abuse and added her own: Is it conceivable, otherwise, that Norma Jeane’s “fingers encircling [Oates’] wrist” would guide the author’s hand to write passages included in this novel? Ignoring Oates’ silly arrogation of Norma Jeane’s identity, one may wonder how Marilyn, protective of her image, would react to portions of this book. She would encounter the following among many more linked to her name, some of which cannot be included in a family paper:

* A scene in which her first husband (“the Embalmer’s Boy”), redolent of embalming fluid, makes her up with cosmetics used on corpses and takes erotic “before” and “after” pictures of her.

* References to her soiling herself, her “hot scalding” urine, harsh periods, demeaning sexual positions.

* Remarks ascribed to a nameless chorus but which Oates invents: “Look at you! Cow. Udders and c--- in everybody’s face.” “Can’t get enough of Polish sausage.” “You no more could predict what might emerge from that luscious Marilyn mouth than you could guess, or estimate . . . “ et cetera.

* A scene of her being sodomized with a “[t]hing . . . of hard rubber,” next to an aviary of “dead stuffed birds.”

* An account--necessarily paraphrased here--of her returning to “the Playwright” in graphic squalid disarray from an earlier sexual encounter, with “the stink of the other’s cigarette smoke (Camel’s) in her matted hair. . . . “

* A list of “Her lovers!”--including “Z, D, S, and T . . . Tonto . . . Bela Lugosi, Boris Karloff . . . Roy Rogers and Trigger . . . Lassie. . . .”

* An incident during which “a Valentine” turns out to be toilet paper with the word “WHORE” written in excrement.

* A passage during which she fellates an indifferent “President,” after which she’s raped anonymously, urinates, is slapped by a Secret Serviceman, bleeds and has a “wad of toilet paper” pressed to her wound.

* A crassly cruel joke--again only suggested here--exchanged between “the President” and “one of his buddies” (in the presidential box!--as she coos “Happy Birthday” to him on stage), derisively comparing her singing with her sexuality.

Yet Oates’ Marilyn pleads with a photographer--as the real Marilyn pleaded with her last interviewer: “Don’t make me into a joke . . . I beg you.”

If, indeed, Oates opted for “enhancing” Norma Jeane when another choice would “degrade” her, and because those passages and others more audacious (the worst is reserved for her death) are Oates’ fabrications, what would Oates consider degrading?

In constant expressions of disdain for her own male characters, Oates repeatedly describes their penises: “angry as a fist,” a “tumescent sword,” an “unruly pet,” “frantic bobbing,” “limp and spent . . . like an aged slug.” Even the ringing of a telephone becomes: “That jarring sound, that sound of mockery . . . that sound of male reproach.”

In the single understatement explaining her novel, Oates acknowledges the “harshness of certain male portraits,” but she hastens to add that “these are from the perspective of Norma Jeane.” (So! Norma Jeane made her do it. . . .)

In a further bizarre distortion, Oates transforms two heterosexual men (minor Hollywood actors remembered only because of their famous fathers) into a pair of malicious gay lovers. Marilyn’s brief affair with Charles Chaplin Jr.--known for affairs with women--ended when he found her with his brother. In Oates’ reversal, Marilyn finds Chaplin Jr. in bed with Edward G. Robinson Jr., himself not known to be gay. To extend their villainy beyond the grave, she has Chaplin Jr. die before Marilyn. (He outlived her by six years.) He leaves behind a note that finally reveals a vicious years-long charade the two devised involving Marilyn’s lost father. The note is carried to her by “Death” mounted on a bicycle.

Is there a touch of resentment in morose accounts of Marilyn’s life that attempt to undermine the fact that she accomplished what she set out to do, at least early in her life--to become a quintessential figure of desire? That is no mean attainment, for a woman or a man. Is there a touch of envy in compromising Marilyn’s exultation of her beauty? Is it possible to view her famous photographs and doubt that she delighted, justifiably, in her glorious body and face, and in the projection of her sensational sensuality?

*

However tragic Marilyn Monroe became, however abused by men (and she did become tragic, and she was abused by men and by the women who ridiculed her) in turning her into a symbolic martyr, Oates demeans Marilyn’s genuine sensuality, strips her dignity, reduces her strengths: surviving ruinous scandals, remaining financially independent during marriages to dominating men and not relying on alimony afterward, challenging the House Un-American Activities Committee, founding her own production company, proving herself a splendid actress and a highly intelligent woman.

Despite Oates’ many disclaimers, the emergent portrayal is one of scorn for Marilyn Monroe. Without denying Oates’ right to convey it, one may, with equal authority, assert one’s indignation.

But no one, finally, can diminish Norma Jeane’s grand triumph, the creation of the most astonishing figure in Hollywood history, the masterpiece called Marilyn Monroe. *