The Blonde Read online

  THE

  BLONDE

  THE

  BLONDE

  A NOVEL

  ANNA GODBERSEN

  Copyright © 2014 by Anna Godbersen

  All rights reserved. No part of this book may be used or reproduced in any manner whatsoever without the written permission of the Publisher. For information address Weinstein Books, 250 West 57th Street, 15th Floor, New York, NY 10107.

  Cataloging-in-Publication data for this book is available from the Library of Congress.

  ISBN: 978-1-60286-223-4 (e-book)

  Published by Weinstein Books

  A member of the Perseus Books Group

  www.weinsteinbooks.com

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  Handgun photo © Coprid used under license from Shutterstock.com

  Book design by Natalie C. Sousa

  First edition

  10 9 8 7 6 5 4 3 2 1

  FOR ERIN

  CONTENTS

  Prologue

  I: 1959

  Chapter One

  Chapter Two

  Chapter Three

  Chapter Four

  Chapter Five

  Chapter Six

  Chapter Seven

  Chapter Eight

  Chapter Nine

  II: 1960

  Chapter Ten

  Chapter Eleven

  Chapter Twelve

  Chapter Thirteen

  Chapter Fourteen

  Chapter Fifteen

  Chapter Sixteen

  Chapter Seventeen

  Chapter Eighteen

  Chapter Nineteen

  Chapter Twenty

  Chapter Twenty-One

  Chapter Twenty-Two

  Chapter Twenty-Three

  III: 1961

  Chapter Twenty-Four

  Chapter Twenty-Five

  Chapter Twenty-Six

  Chapter Twenty-Seven

  Chapter Twenty-Eight

  Chapter Twenty-Nine

  Chapter Thirty

  Chapter Thirty-One

  Chapter Thirty-Two

  IV: 1962

  Chapter Thirty-Three

  Chapter Thirty-Four

  Chapter Thirty-Five

  Chapter Thirty-Six

  Chapter Thirty-Seven

  Chapter Thirty-Eight

  Chapter Thirty-Nine

  Chapter Forty

  Chapter Forty-One

  V: 1963

  Chapter Forty-Two

  Chapter Forty-Three

  Chapter Forty-Four

  Epilogue

  Acknowledgments

  PROLOGUE

  SHE was a beautiful child.

  There was no one else left to remember, and yet her memory of the little girl she used to be wasn’t sentimental. A woman like that puts about ten thousand miles between herself and the little girl she used to be if she has any chance of getting up in the morning. “Detached,” her shrink had said on occasion, except that they never did so much of that kind of talk. (Mostly they both liked the sound of her voice, and of course he wasn’t shy about prescriptions.) She wasn’t beautiful the way the world wants children to be beautiful—pink cheeks, blonde curls. Her hair wasn’t blonde yet, and she had learned to control a blush before she learned to talk. She was beautiful the way grown women are beautiful, all slim limbs and knowing eyes, which is perhaps why men were inspired to treat her like a woman early.

  Those unflinching eyes went a long way to explaining everything that happened later. Not the fame—the secret part. The strange clicks on the line late at night, the trench coats in the crowd, the paranoia of being trailed. How she’d fallen in with dangerous people, and why she had pursued Jack in the first place. How she came to betray her country, and all of that.

  When she was born, in June of ’26, there had been no daddy to point to—her mother was wild and pretty, and she got low the way her daughter later would. She was her mother’s third to come to term, and her mother wasn’t any more prepared than she had been for the first two, although those babies at least had a father. The third baby was a child nobody wanted; that was the lattice upon which she grew. She was sent away to live with folks called Bolender, who boarded babies for people who couldn’t care for their own, out on the fringes of Los Angeles County. Eventually her mother did manage to buy a house for them to live in together, on Arbol Drive. Doesn’t that sound lovely, Arbol Drive? Her mother thought so, too. She bought a lot of furniture she couldn’t afford, all in white. That was when the little girl first saw that white is sometimes just a story we tell, innocence a feint.

  The Bolenders taught her songs about Jesus, but on Arbol Drive they listened to big band on the phonograph and the grown-ups played cards and drank gin until their laughter got loud and they danced around the living room. Her mother and her mother’s best friend, Grace, worked at one of the studios, and they’d stare at the little girl sometimes and say how pretty she was, how she could be a movie star when she grew up, and they wouldn’t have to worry about money anymore. There was never enough money—this was the Depression—and they were forced to take in boarders, a Mr. Kennel and his wife, but this seemed fine. The Kennels were actors, and they talked in a plummy, movie aristocrat way, and they’d invite friends over who worked in the pictures and always came with gossip about the business.

  He was one of these. His name was Perry and he had been a bit player, too, but he’d shown up drunk at work too many times, and the studio terminated his contract. He wasn’t a bad drunk, though. He got very happy and made everybody laugh. He was handsome, and when his eyes were red from drink they glittered in a way that made her feel special.

  So it was on an evening when everyone was feeling loose and some tall, dark fellow was dancing her mother close. Perry came to the corner where she sat, observing the grown-ups from a safe distance. He must have noticed how Mr. Kennel stared at the little girl, touched her, asked her to sit on his lap, tried to get her alone whenever he had the chance. “A girl as pretty as you needs to know how to defend herself,” Perry told her, with a grave and comical lowering of the eyes. “All men aren’t so kindly as me.”

  She was so shy she could barely speak, but she smiled to reward him for looking out for her, and he gave her a dime and told her to go see the new Jean Harlow picture. Someday, he said, she’d be even bigger than Harlow.

  Not long after that her mother stopped paying the bills or talking sense. Her eyes went dead and she was shouting up the stairwell for days before Aunt Grace called the ambulance and had them take her away. Grace said she’d look after little Norma, but she wasn’t a real aunt, and she was busy trying to keep the attention of a younger man. For a while Norma Jeane went to the pictures every day. She watched Jean Harlow over and over and learned how her gaze changed after settling on a man. It was during that period that Perry made good on his promise—she was walking to Grauman’s Egyptian, and he pulled up in his old Ford and told her to get in. “Today’s the day I teach you how to defend yourself,” he said.

  As they drove, she was very impressed by how fast you can leave a place in a car, how smoothly this one rolled into the sun-dappled afternoon. It was a hot, dry day, the dirt rising off the road and the hills that scorched, California umber. The air smelled of eucalyptus and chaparral, and as they traveled away from the familiar streets, she was conscious of the earth spinning very slowly and how truly alone she was.

  They pulled off the road into an open space with a lot of long, dry grass and a hazy
view of snowcapped mountains. First he set the cans up on an old split-rail fence and then he showed her the gun, and it was just like the six-shooters that men in the movies wear in holsters under pinstriped suits.

  “Do you want to load it?” he asked, gently putting six bullets in her palm. Then he showed her how to open the chamber and slip them in. She must have appeared frightened, because he told her that there was nothing to be afraid of and brushed the hair off her forehead. Then he warned her that when the gun went off it would make a loud noise and that its force might knock her backward. She’d have to stand firmly, legs apart, and hold it with both hands, and he bent to put her feet in place. Then he moved her fingers, showing her how to cock the gun so that it was ready to hammer a bullet.

  The first shot was a thunderclap inside her ears, and she was sure she’d never hear again. But then she noticed him chuckling, and knew she hadn’t hit a thing. Determination rose up inside her. That was how she’d always been—by that age she’d figured out nobody was going to stick around long enough to raise her right, and so she took her lessons where she found them, paid fierce attention when there was something to learn.

  The canyon was quiet, and she gripped the gun and concentrated on the cans glinting in the sun. She imagined the bullet inside the chamber and how it would hurtle straight to that can and knock it from the fence. She gave the bullet a little talking-to, so it knew she was going to have her way, squeezed the trigger, cocked the gun, squeezed again. The sound was just as loud but it didn’t bother her this time, because she’d hit her targets. Two cans had flown right off the fence, and the burning in her palms was a pleasure.

  Perry clapped his hands. “Hot damn!”

  He’d been crouching behind her, and now he lay down, folding his arms under his head. She turned around for approval, but saw right away that he wasn’t smiling in the goofy way he did on Arbol Drive. Now he was smiling like a wolf.

  “Did I do it right?” she whispered and for a long time he made no answer. The sun was very bright, and sweat pooled on her upper lip.

  “Forgive me, Norma Jeane,” he said when he reached up her skirt. With one hard pull he took her underpants to her knees. “But I just can’t help myself.”

  Perhaps he forgot the gun in her hand, or maybe he believed she was as she appeared. Whatever went through his mind at that moment, it was the last thing he ever thought. She stared down at him, childlike and trusting. Her eyes got wide, and there was a moist dark sliver between her lips. He grinned and she twice rehearsed how to do the thing. Then she cocked the gun, lifted it with both hands, and blew his face away. One moment his grin was there, framing his slick, shining slug of a tongue, and the next it was gone. There must have been a great deal of blood, but she tried not to see that. She dropped the gun on his belly and walked back down the canyon while her heart kept marching time.

  It was almost thirty years before she heard her heart beat like that again.

  “This isn’t how you imagined it’d feel to be alone with Marilyn Monroe, is it?” she asked the man who sat across from her. He wore a black suit, an ominously straight tie, kept his eyes cold and impassive, but she held his gaze. “You figured I’d be a hundred and twenty pounds of quivering delight, whispering cotton candy and blowing kisses. Well. All that burbling sweetness isn’t a lie, not totally, but men can be so stupid when it comes to vulnerability. They forget that vulnerability can be itself, and it can also be a shield, and also a knife. Any old thing can be a weapon, so long as you know how to use it right.”

  The man showed no reaction, only prompted her by clearing his throat. But she had known he would come eventually, and was not about to be hurried.

  “You want me to get on with it,” she observed. “Stop talking about myself, tell you how I met Prez, why I wanted to reach him so badly. Get me a cigarette and a drink, and I’ll tell you everything. I deserve it, you know. All appearances to the contrary, the story I am about to tell you is a love story.”

  I

  1959

  ONE

  New York, March 1959

  THE biggest spectacle in Manhattan, on the eve of Easter Sunday, was at the corner of Forty-fifth and Broadway, where Billy Wilder’s new picture was having its premiere and the press swarmed the sidewalk to document the famous faces emerging from the chandelier-dappled lobby of the Loews State Theater. There were so many onlookers and full-time fans jockeying for position in the street that the police several times had to push them back. The last of the film’s stars to appear was the blonde who’d played Sugar Kane. The temperature had just dropped into the thirties, and she wore a sleeveless, low-cut gown that appeared to have been made out of a thousand silver filaments clinging by some magnetism to every rise and fall of her sure body.

  “Here.” Her husband, a step behind her, tried to pull the white fur over her pale shoulders, but she moved away from him, toward the crowd, the red heart of her mouth trembling and swelling before it spread into a broad smile. The camera flashes and the desperate waving of hands became orgiastic, and for a few moments, for anybody lucky enough to look on her, at her naked shoulders and her half-naked breasts wagging against their triangular silver constraints, the whole world was made up of diamonds and palm trees and soft, suggestive kisses.

  The crowd convulsed and called her by her first name. Microphones were thrust in her direction. She had been famous a long time by then, and the rabidity of crowds had ceased to frighten or thrill her as before. Their pitch continued to increase, and the likelihood of some kook who meant her harm being out there, amongst the sweet boys who kept her picture under their mattresses, was surely the same as it had ever been. But the idea of harm no longer troubled her. In fact, she went toward it. By now she knew perfectly well that empty rooms could swallow her whole, even after the bright frenzy of a night like this. Anyway, it was too late; she had promised to be this way and was too familiar with the pain of broken promises to betray her public by being anything less.

  “Marilyn, did you enjoy the picture?”

  Resting a hand on her hip, she moved to face the reporter, a young man with his fedora pushed back on the crown of his head. In the movie, you could make out the curve in her middle and guess that she had been pregnant, and watching it had reminded her that the months she’d spent on set had cost her another one.

  “I thought it was Mr. Wilder’s best yet,” she almost whispered, her breath suspended in the cool air between them like a veil. “Did you enjoy the picture?”

  Of course she knew he hadn’t seen the picture, and before he could attempt an answer, ten more questions were hurled her way. “What’ll you do now?”

  “Well, we all worked very hard, so I expect we’ll go to the party and celebrate and enjoy ourselves a little.”

  Another voice, this one more charging than reverent: “Is it true that the studio plans to put a weight clause in your future contracts?”

  Marilyn gazed back at the question, and her lids sank slightly to protect her eyes from the cameras’ light. Suddenly her false lashes were too heavy, and she felt her stomach turning over the white chalk she’d had in lieu of dinner. The smile sank and rose again, curling the edges of her lips. “My husband likes me a little plump.” She issued a soft, careless laugh and looked up at Arthur in his bow tie and black-rimmed glasses, who returned her smile enigmatically. He was so tall; for a moment she remembered why she had thought he could give her shelter. The creases of the smile lingered in his healthy, olive skin—the marks of a person so distinguished he was beyond intimidation. “That’s all that matters, really. Don’t you think?”

  Another question: “Did you read Mr. Wilder’s comments in Parade this morning?”

  “No, I didn’t. Is that a newspaper or something?” She winked and tipped herself forward. “I live in New York now, so I read the New York Times in the morning.”

  The flashbulbs had become explosive, atomic. They had no center.

  “What do you think of Mr. Lemmon and Mr. Curtis
?”

  “Oh, they’re cutups, both of them, and Tony especially is such a darling, I could just eat him!”

  “All right,” Arthur said, his mouth at her ear. Then he was steering her, and she let him, even as she kept her gloved hand raised and her lashes batted back and her face gently radiating her own girlish femininity, which she had once practiced so assiduously but now had the purity and force of habit. The white moon of her face turned toward the crowd, as though what she really wanted was to shine on them. “Come,” he urged, once he had spotted the limousine the studio had hired, his big, tapered fingers strong and goading. “Come, my dear.”

  She loved it when he talked that way. They were still calling her name, and her heart stretched out, and she wanted to show them once more how much she had given. But she loved it when he said my dear, and couldn’t say no. He opened the door for her, and lifted up her glinting train so that it would not get caught. Delicately he arranged it around her satin high-heeled shoes, and he paused a moment so that she could wave again before closing the door and coming around the other side.

  They rushed toward her window. Several sets of eyes—human, and the bug-eyed camera kind—stared at her through the glass, and she gazed back from beneath drooping lids and tilted herself forward in offering. They were still taking her picture and she was still gazing back at them when Arthur slammed the door. The limousine was halfway down the block and the sound of her name was beginning to fade before she looked at him.

  He was lighting a cigarette and did not meet her eyes. “Sutton Place and Fifty-Seventh,” he said, playing up the Brooklyn in his gravel voice.

  It was not the first time the sound of their home address had disappointed her. “But what about the party?”

  She’d spoken in the high, childish cadence that once would have made him do anything for her—saying party as though it signified a kind of candy that little girls cannot resist—but now he went on without meeting her eyes. “I’m going up to the country early tomorrow.” He exhaled in the direction of the passing city. “I’m going to work.”