In many of my classes we read Joyce Carol Oates’  famous short story “Where Are You Going, Where Have You Been?”  It’s about a naïve high-school girl caught up in her own beauty.  Everywhere she goes, she is  flicking her hair back and checking her lipstick.  She’s obsessed with her image to the distraction of everything else.  I didn’t know this until recently, but JCO’s original title for this story was “The Death and the Maiden.”  Here, the Maiden’s name is Connie. She’s pretty and she’s knows it.  She’s a flirt!  Based on the original title, you can guess what happens to her at the end of the story.  JCO uses the same theme in her novel Blonde.  Here, the Maiden’s name is Marilyn Monroe.

I think my students appreciate this JCO short story,  for they are not too far removed from high school.They know a lot of Connies.  I wish there was a way to share the novel Blonde in my class, but my copy is 738 pages long.  It begins with two-year-old Norma Jeane’s first entrance into Grauman’s Egyptian Theatre on Hollywood Boulevard; you don’t need to know anything else about JCO’s writing style to know how it ends.   This may be one of the BEST novels I have ever read, but it’s so big, I wouldn’t know what to do with it.

Instead of assigning the book to my students,  I download and copy short articles about Marilyn’s life.  We read the William Inge play Bus Stop; this is the one Marilyn translated to film (starring Marilyn Monroe, of course!)  I also show an instructive video relating the mystery behind Marilyn’s death.  She died face down, naked, in the bedroom of her Brentwood home.  ALONE.  It was a Saturday night, and she didn’t have a date.  On her nightstand were empty bottles of seconal and nembutal.  When the police found her, her lips were blue and her cold fingers were clutched around her telephone. Death and The Maiden.  Both her life and her death seem to capture my students’ imagination like nothing else I’ve ever brought to class.

Initially, I  couldn’t imagine anyone more polar opposite of Marilyn Monroe than Joyce Carol Oates, but maybe that’s what it takes to turn out a masterpiece.  JCO sees Marilyn from the inside, out.  She captures  her soul at every stage of her life.  Now that I write that, I can feel a spiritual connection in my fingertips with the turning  of each page of the novel.  JCO  recognized  “The Sad Poet” inside the woman most of us refer to as “The Blonde Bombshell.” 

Whatever I tell my students about Marilyn Monroe’s character, Cherie, in Bus Stop comes straight from JCO’s vision.  I’m just a conduit. One of my favorite scenes in Blonde comes when Marilyn sees her complete Bus Stop for the first time is a private screening.   JCO gets right inside Marilyn’s heart and her head.  At this point in Marilyn’s life, she had turned her back on Hollywood studio because they wouldn’t offer her the serious roles she aspired to.   She walked away from the Big Money and created her own Marilyn Monroe Productions Company. The  first screenplay she purchased would be Bus Stop. The first character she would play was Cherie, the 3O-year struggling nightclub singer with a dream.   And Marilyn killed it.  Everyone who saw movie recognized her inspired performance.  They critics raved about it.  Upon seeing  another side to her, her fans screamed for more.  According to JCO, the only one not happy with the movie, was Marilyn. She cried upon seeing herself in the role of Cherie.  “Why?” asked her husband, Arthur Miller.  “Darling, why are you crying? He was sitting next her, holding her trembling hand from beginning to end.  Why?  I can’t remember if she looked at him or not, but she knew Cherie better than she knew herself.  She had laid her soul bare in front of the cameras, but in the end she knew there would be no happy ending for a 30-year-old dreamer like Cherie. “In actual life,” JCO wrote these words to come out of the Blonde Actress’s mouth,” Cherie would have been drinking, a lot. She would’ve been missing half her teeth. She would have to sleep with the bastards…” She would have been beaten and raped, even worse. Marilyn was no Dumb Blonde; she could separate what happens on the screen from what happens in real life.  Her playwright husband could feel it in her touch and smell it in the darkness – his wife’s performance of Cherie was going to burn down the house.

Marilyn fought her whole career for serious roles, but it meant giving up the little girl inside of her that grew up in foster homes and orphanages. JCO describes it her as “The Beggar Maid disguised as the Fair Princess.”  She acted like her life depended on it. Marilyn was willing to sacrifice everything for her art.  And what did that leave her?   All the seconal and champagne she wanted.