American Beauty

Joyce Carol Oates’ “Blonde,” a novelization of the life of Marilyn Monroe, can also be read as a 738-page map of Los Angeles. Daughter of Van Nuys, glamour girl of Hollywood, pill-popper of Brentwood, Norma Jeane Baker and her alter ego Marilyn Monroe are an atlas of the schizophrenic city itself--secret, wide-open, sunshine, noir. A dumb blond with her nose in Pascal, she was fake and frank, craving motherhood all the way home from the abortionist. “White suits you dear,” says her agent in the book, but her fate was as dark as the pits of La Brea, as dark as the roots of her platinum hair.

I’ll say this for Oates, she doesn’t shy away from her subject’s inherent strangeness. If, on the celluloid surface, Marilyn Monroe is a symbol of joy, a red-lipped, red-blooded American girl with her skirt in the air, she is also, deep down, possibly the weirdest person of the 20th century, and it was a century with no shortage of weirdos. Gentlemen might prefer her jiggling around in that pink satin gown, but she oozes ooze, a giggling, gurgling billboard of flesh. “The female body is a joke,” points out the photographer who takes the nudie shots that would come back to haunt her. “All this--fecundity.”

I find Monroe impossible to watch and yet I can’t take my eyes off her. To see her is to squirm, to laugh with, then at, to envy her high-heeled sashay only to bristle when she pulls on those jeans. Sometimes when she’s on the late show, I have to turn off the sound; considering she’s shaped like the Venus of Willendorf, why must she have the voice of a child? Like her protagonist, Oates is profound and funny, unless she’s being silly and obscene. After a foreshadowing prologue set in 1962 (which is as thrillingly poetic as it is impossible to understand), the book is a more or less chronological account of one woman’s life.

“Blonde” is defiantly Freudian, if only in the TV talk-show sense. Pop psychology is its guiding force. Asking how the child gives birth to the adult is one of the jobs of any life story. The woman Norma Jeane / Marilyn, while stunning and talented, was also a drug-addicted multiple divorcee with a punctuality disorder, so it stands to reason that hers wasn’t the most charming of childhoods. Oates milks this. Little Norma Jeane never knew her father. She was tossed into an orphanage when her mother went mad. So she longed for parental love. This yearning propels some of the book’s eeriest, most compelling scenes but also some of its cheapest. The woman’s tendency to call all her husbands “Daddy” never fails to astonish. The abundance of phrases such as “if Daddy could make her pregnant she would love Daddy again” is creepy, but it isn’t boring. On the other hand, the book’s last sentence--an exploitation of the orphan angle--is truly embarrassing and straight out of Sally Jessy Raphael.

With tales as implausible as this one, we nonfiction writers do not envy our novelist comrades. Nonfiction is allowed every damn kook and coincidence because life is full of them, but fiction’s supposed to seem believable. If a reader had never heard of Marilyn Monroe and assumed the character sprang from the author’s imagination, said reader would scream, “The father abandoned her, the mother went mad so she ended up in an orphanage, became a movie star, married the ballplayer not to mention the playwright and screwed the president before she overdosed? C’mon!”

One would think that the point of fictionalizing a historical figure would be the wiggle room. Of course, there’s the freedom to make up scenes to imbue meaning. The little girl, Norma Jeane, just adores her blond baby doll, just as she loves the movies, wink wink. But the greatest liberty fictionalization affords is the freedom from lawyers. Here Oates has taken an interesting if questionable approach. Though she zooms in on Norma Jeane / Marilyn’s thoughts and feelings, not to mention some steamy threesome shots, Oates just as often pulls back her lens before things get too personal.

In the section treating Marilyn’s marriage to baseball star Joe DiMaggio, Oates insists on never mentioning DiMaggio’s name. She calls him the “Ex-Athlete” and refers to Monroe during their rise and fall as the “Blond Actress.” This ploy could be a penetrating insight into the nature of icons. Oates could be making a bemused point about fame, that celebrities are but cartoons instead of individuals with names, even stage names. Which might be profound but isn’t remotely new. The tactic is also bad musicianship on Oates’ part. For what name has more melody, more rhythm, than Joe DiMaggio? Is that not part of his appeal, that rhyme, those Italian syllables, as in magic words like De Niro, Pacino, Sinatra, America? Oates does the same thing to Monroe’s next husband, Arthur Miller, calling him only the “Playwright,” as well as denoting directors John Huston and Billy Wilder as merely “H” and “W.” With all those distracting initials and job descriptions to wade through and with Oates’ insistence on strewing her narrative with pretentious epigraphs drawn from imagined poetry by Marilyn as well as bits of Freud, Darwin and Schopenhauer, for Pete’s sake, there is a high school beatnik quality to the book that seems alarming considering that it is the author’s 34th tome.

The loveliest, the smartest and the most readable section of “Blonde” is the one with the least marquee value. During World War II, Norma Jeane enjoys a brief but glorious period working for the war effort when her first husband sails off to fight. It is the character’s, as well as the reader’s, only respite from Norma Jeane’s constant, grating neediness, her one true moment of self-sufficiency, the only time she isn’t being manhandled or hurt. Oates writes of this Norma Jeane perfectly, lovingly, with the full force of her craft. It is a remarkable, straightforward portrait of a feeling experienced by thousands of women. Nothing special, save the blessings of liberty. Paying her own way, working hard and long at an airplane factory, Norma Jeane blossoms. Oates writes, “Except that people were dying and being injured and the world filling up with smoldering rubble, Norma Jeane liked the War. . . . You could talk about the War with any stranger. . . . Everyone listened. Everyone had an opinion.” She wasn’t a little girl lost or a movie star or a faltering wife, she was just another citizen, gathered with her compatriots around the radio fire. She was nobody, but she was free.

Of course, no fixated fan of Marilyn the movie star is going to give a hoot about her stint as an anonymous Rosie the Riveter. Norma Jeane as war worker isn’t mysterious, because happiness never is. Desire, perfection, obsession, debasement: Those are the vices literature is made of. Los Angeles, too. Getting through this whopper is as fun and aggravating as a trip to L.A. When you’re not asking yourself, “Why don’t I live here?” you’re wondering, “When can I leave?” *