The Blonde

by Anna Godbersen

Genres: Biographical

Synopsis

At the height of the Cold War, Marilyn Monroe was the most infamous woman in the world. But what if she was also a secret Soviet spy? In 1947, a young, unknown Norma Jeane Baker meets a mysterious man in Los Angeles who transforms her into Marilyn Monroe, the star. Twelve years later he comes back for his repayment, and Marilyn is given her first assignment from the KGB: uncover something about JFK that no one else knows. But a simple job turns complicated when Marilyn falls in love with the bright young President, and learns of plans to assassinate Kennedy. More than anything, Marilyn wants to escape her Soviet handlers and save her love -- and herself. Desperate, ruthless and brilliant, what she does next will leave readers reeling. From New York Times bestselling author Anna Godbersen comes a whip-smart re-imagining of the life of Marilyn Monroe, set in a world of silver screen glamour and political intrigue. At once a crackling portrayal of Old Hollywood, an intimate portrait of the larger-than-life star, and a cat-and-mouse thriller, The Blonde is history rewritten as it could have -- and might have been.

Release date: May 13, 2014

Publisher: Hachette Books

Print pages: 288

Sample

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.”

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.”

In the silence that followed, the crowds and the noise began to seem abstract, like something she’d read about once long ago, or a story she told when she was on the couch, and she felt the supple self she had been presenting for the last several hours begin to frost over.

“If you want to go, I won’t stop you,” he went on without turning his head. “But I don’t have the patience tonight.”

“The patience for what?”

The flat, judgmental faces of New York’s buildings passed by, and Arthur said nothing.

“The patience for what?” Now she was almost shrieking, even though it would worsen his silence. They both thought how it wasn’t the voice of the woman he’d meant to marry. How it was the voice of some other creature, bent on making the party, and everything else, a special hell. How she would send him off to mix just the right amount of scotch and soda in a champagne glass so everyone would think she was drinking bubbly. How her pulse would quicken in his absence and her whole body would seek the most admiring male gaze. How she would purr at Billy and Jack and Tony and say flattering things to their wives and then, later, rage about how they’d trashed her in the press, the nasty, unkind things they’d said to put her down, keep her in her place, justify paying her too little, and on and on. The fury she’d set loose, and the unquiet night to follow.

“Who needs the party?” Her voice was weightless again, a very fine imitation of unself-conscious delight.

Arthur said nothing.

“Maybe I’ll come with you, to the country. The dogs would like it, wouldn’t they? I’ll bake you bread while you write, and maybe a berry pie. It will be just like when we were first married, the night it rained so hard? I made you a pie and we drank bourbon and played cards and you knew how much I loved you.” She smiled at the back of his head. But he didn’t turn around, so she swung in the other direction and gave it to the passing street. The pale mask of her face was reflected in the window, not quite as vivid as the red on her mouth. “I have so much reading to catch up on anyway,” she went on, although now she was speaking more slowly, as one does when they have begun to employ the future impossible. “And it would be so nice to see the Diebolds’ children.”

The night was silent, and so was Arthur, as their limousine glided along Fifty-Seventh Street past the Art Students League, where the bearded young man she’d gone down on in the bathroom of the Subway Inn last week had said he was taking figure-drawing classes, and past the diner where she sometimes liked to have a BLT alone in her black wig and pretend she was just another rich housewife wasting away the afternoon. The headlights of the passing cars were big as squid’s eyes, and just as seemingly innocuous. She told herself they were not squid’s eyes. They were celestial orbs; they were bioluminescent eggs; they were jewels sent from another planet to honor her otherworldly beauty; they were symbols of fertility; everything was going to be all right.

Everything is going to be all right, she thought as they went through the lobby, and she actually believed it until they were in the elevator, and she saw him press the button for the floor with his long index finger—the one he pressed against his temple when he was thinking about things she couldn’t understand, the one he pointed at her when he was angry. The button said 13, and she shuddered, remembering how they’d fought over that one. He’d said it was a silly superstition, and she hadn’t wanted him to think her silly, and let him win. The apartment was affordable, he’d insisted, the bookshelves already built in. Of course he didn’t know, and how could he, how vigilant she was, how carefully she read the signs, how assiduously she avoided bad omens of any kind. Now the elevator was lifting her, slowly, to the unlucky apartment where she should have known everything would go wrong.

Arthur said nothing as he crossed the white carpeted living room and put Billie Holiday on the record player. The fragile music filled the room, and Marilyn lingered at the large entryway mirror while the door drifted closed behind them. She had hung it there—why? For this, she supposed. To see her mystery faded, her face slack with disappointment, with the sheer effort of buoying herself up, while all the while her hair remained set, a helmet of floss. Perhaps the things they said about her were true. She was crazy and unreliable and couldn’t remember lines. She would never make another picture, for who would want to work with her? But this was the kind of thinking she could not allow, and with a brightening of the eyes she let her fur slip off her shoulders and went swiveling and tiptoeing across the floor to the chair where Arthur sat, smoking his pipe by a lamp, one long leg crossed over the other, his focus on the book spread open in his lap.

“Poppy?” she said as she sank down beside him. A strap slid down her shoulder; the dress strove to contain her breasts.

Arthur said nothing.

“Poppy, take me with you to the country, why don’t you? I’ll be a good little wife.”

Not looking up: “I’m going there to work.”

“But I won’t make a sound. I’ll darn your socks and bring you tea. Just don’t leave me here alone. Please?”

The passage of Arthur’s gaze from the pages of his book took an era—whole species came and went in the time it took him to look at her—and by then she no longer wanted to go to the country with him. She wanted to tell him: One phone call, Joe DiMaggio will be over to knock your teeth out, but she had used that line before, and Arthur had only laughed and left the room. His eyes were weary, and they barely blinked as they stared into hers. His nostrils were hatefully wide, and the sigh that came through them was violent with unsaid things.

“If you come to the country you’ll miss your appointments with Dr. Kurtz …” Each word issued from his thick lips was a pretense of patience. “No, I think you had better stay here and let me get a little work done. It will go quickly, you won’t even miss me. You have so many friends.”

As he stared at her she blinked and blinked. Like a fish, her lips parted and closed, parted and closed. Her shoulders were so heavy and her feet so pinched and red and her heart felt waterlogged and ill-used. She knew what he was thinking. He thought of her the way Wilder did, as a bitch and a child, a destroyer of other people’s plans. This was not paranoia (as Dr. Kurtz might carefully have suggested); she had read his diary, those many lines of eloquent disappointment.

“Oh, never mind,” she said hatefully. She tore off the dress and left it in a heap on the carpet as she proceeded to the far side of the apartment.

When she was single and suffering sleeplessness, she’d at least had the consolation of the telephone. She’d get a man on the line (any lover or friend would do), provoke him to say reassuring things. Using a soft, halting voice, asking simple and naïve questions, usually did the trick. How big was the universe, and where did it end? How had he made his first fortune, and what was the weather like where he was calling from, and did he think everything might still turn out all right? She was soothed by the sound of their confident pronouncements, which perhaps they really did believe, and after a while her eyes might close and her thoughts grow quiet.

But she wasn’t single, and she knew she’d just be crazy and wide-awake as long as she stayed in the apartment with Arthur. She was careening through the rooms, her mind lit up with some heady combination of emotion and pills wearing off and a sweating need for a stiff drink. An old slip going over her naked body, and a navy fisherman’s sweater over that, and then the London Fog jacket she’d bought when she first moved east after divorcing Joe. She took Arthur’s hat from the hook by the door and put it over her hair. Ha, she thought when she glanced in the mirror, I’m Sam Spade.

“Fuck you,” she shouted at the living room as she went through the front door and put all her energy into jamming her finger against the elevator button, hoping he’d come after her, and hoping he wouldn’t. In her mind: fuck you fuck you fuck you.

The cool, quiet air did nothing for her anger, and she walked several blocks without thinking of direction or registering any faces. She thought about how ugly New York was, how California would be better. They had already discussed it—a trial separation—and Arthur had tried to pass the arrangement off as her idea. Maybe she really would go now, see how he liked it, how he did without having her body when he wanted it. Perhaps if she’d had a father, she thought, he would have warned her not to fall for creeps, and she wouldn’t find herself so often alone, on some street late at night.

She turned off an avenue and saw, through a canyon of apartment buildings, the lights of a barge on the water. Then she heard the voice, and wondered if she were hallucinating.

“N.J.” The voice was quiet, almost disembodied.

“What are you, CIA? FBI? Isn’t it enough you tap my phones?” She took three swift steps backward from the building’s shadows, not wanting to catch the stems of her heels in the gaps of the sidewalk. She couldn’t remember now if it had originally been Arthur’s paranoia or hers, that sense of someone always listening in, or if she had been born with the fear of a constant, hovering presence that intended no good.

“N.J., it’s me,” he said again, and this time she could not pretend with herself that that vaguely accented voice, with its touch of European courtliness, was not familiar.

“Fuck you.” She went toward the river, trying to loosen the fearful grip that voice had on her throat. But she wouldn’t run, she wouldn’t sacrifice the dignity of walking on the way she always did—ankles practically knocking against each other—just to get away.

It took no special effort for him to match her speed, and soon he was walking alongside her at barely more than an amble.

“N.J.,” he said as he laced his arm through hers. It was a gentle gesture, but firm, and she had no choice but to turn and look at him. Those sun-washed blue eyes, the nose like a downward pointing anchor carved of gypsum. He smiled with one side of his mouth, revealing a dimple, and as he gazed at her his exhalation relaxed his shoulders. “Remember me?”

“Of course I remember. Nobody ever called me that but you.” Her smile shone brilliantly through the darkness; the words were true, the smile false.

“It’s cold—you’ll catch cold. Let’s get you indoors.” She had forgotten this about him, the solicitousness. Unusual for her—when she noticed the impulse to protect in a man, she rarely forgot. Even now, there was a map of safe harbors fixed in her memory, men like Joe who were always willing to play hero when she was in distress.

“The Subway Inn. I like it there. Nothing fancy, but they treat me just like any other drunk,” she said with a wan, self-effacing smile.

“I know you do. You spend too much time there,” he said, with faint disapproval, and his arm swooped around her shoulder. “But it will do for now.”

TWO

New York, March 1959

SHE let him lead her past the neon storefront into the mostly empty bar. The air was dense with cigarette smoke, and the only bodies left belonged to true drunks, the kind who wouldn’t slow their march to oblivion by seeking trouble.

“I’ll have a double bourbon,” she informed him and crossed the tiled floor to a booth upholstered in cracked oxblood leather. There were no eyes to meet—nobody looked up. She threw her coat across the seat, but left her hat on.

Beneath the brim she let her eyes close, and for a moment she was in Schwab’s again, and everything was different. There was all that wonderful electric light, for starters, and the cigarette smoke was mixed with wholesome smells, like cheese sandwiches melting on the griddle, and she was hungry (she hadn’t eaten for days, and the hunger cut pleasantly into her torso), and she was desperate to catch anybody’s eye. All around her were people who worked in the movies, some of them big time. That was why she’d worn a skirt that was too tight and her fur stole, in the hope of being noticed. She was already Marilyn Monroe, but the name didn’t mean anything yet.

The hours passed and the crumbs of her grilled cheese got stale on the plate and the ice from her Coke melted in its voluptuous glass, and then she finished even that thin brown liquid. The boy behind the counter started watching her, and she knew he was beginning to suspect that she couldn’t pay for lunch. They liked her there—people usually did at first—but they could smell bad luck. Show business people are worse than baseball players when it comes to superstition. The boy left the check in front of her without comment, and walked to the other side of the bar and put his elbow against the counter and started up a conversation with Joe Gillis, the screenwriter.

Seventy-five cents. She read the check like an indictment of every breath she’d ever taken. After her first divorce, when she was just twenty and it seemed every day a stranger told her how pretty she was, how the country needed a beauty like her to lift its war-trodden spirits, she thought if she could just get in the pictures she’d always be all right. Well, now she had been in the pictures. She’d done everything they told her to. She’d changed her hair and her walk and her name. She’d gone down on her knees on hard pool tile, and she’d let studio big shots poke at her with their geriatric cocks. But she didn’t have a job or a home. She didn’t have seventy-five cents for lunch,