Joyce Carol Oates on Blonde and Marilyn Monroe: ‘I think she died from extreme despair’

If you want to understand what led the American novelist Joyce Carol Oates to Marilyn Monroe, start with a small farmhouse in Millersport, New York. This is where Oates grew up. As a child, she was in charge of feeding the chickens. There were few, if any, books in the household. It was a huge event in her life when her grandmother gave her Alice’s Adventures in Wonderland by Lewis Carroll.

What, you may wonder, does that have to do with Monroe, whose story is told in Andrew Dominik’s impressionistic and often horrifying new film Blonde, adapted from Oates’s 2000 novel? The answer lies in the journey that Monroe went on.

“The story of the rise to fame of any ordinary person is interesting,” says Oates. “Elvis Presley was from an extremely poor background . . . and yet he rose to this enormous celebrity. I also wrote about Mike Tyson, from a very poor background. And, of course, Norma Jeane Baker [who became Marilyn Monroe]. My fascination is how they come from obscurity, very poor and in some cases broken families. Then they rise.”

What also unites these three figures is that their life stories are tumultuous. Their celebrity overwhelmed them, they became addicted to drugs, Presley and Monroe died young. Oates has enjoyed a very different kind of life. A sprightly 84-year-old who still likes to jog, she remains remarkably prolific. She has written about 60 novels, many of them award-winners. Her most recent, the Detroit-set serial killer story Babysitter, was published a few weeks ago.

Oates and I are sitting in the gardens of the Beau-Rivage hotel in Neuchâtel, Switzerland, where she has come to serve as head of the jury at the Neuchâtel International Fantastic Film Festival. Very few of her books have been successfully adapted for the cinema, which is why Dominik’s Blonde means so much to her.

“I saw the original screenplay, which I thought was excellent, a long time ago. Then I just forgot about it,” Oates says. “Other projects, other novels that people are going to adapt, they just disappear.”

Blonde itself hasn’t had an easy path to the screen — it has taken 10 years. Oates can’t help but note the “painful” irony that the original stars chosen to play Marilyn, first Naomi Watts when the project was announced in 2010, then Jessica Chastain a few years later, “aged out”. The film is “about a young woman who is used up by Hollywood” in the 1950s and 1960s, and yet the same mentality still exists today.

When I looked at her photograph and she was 16 years old, I thought: this looks like a girl I went to school with

At first, Oates was wrongfooted by Dominik’s decision to cast Ana de Armas, Cuban star of Knives Out and Bond movie No Time to Die, as Monroe. “I thought that is surprising. She has got brunette hair. But then I thought: well, he knows what he is doing.”

She thoroughly approves of Dominik’s adaptation, which shows events from Monroe’s point of view. “Rather than seeing it from the outside, the male gaze looking at a woman, he has immersed himself in that perspective.”

As a result, parts of Blonde are tough viewing. It shows Monroe strung out from lack of sleep, addicted to drugs and in a state of extreme anxiety as she tries to live up to the expectations of those around her. “It’s very painful and touching, not a feelgood movie, not Gentlemen Prefer Blondes . . . It’s about a woman who has been exploited by Hollywood, exploited by men.”

It was this, says Oates, that drove Norma Jeane Baker to adopt the Marilyn Monroe persona. “She didn’t always sleep that well, so sometimes she didn’t look that great. So Whitey, her make-up artist, would put on the make-up and do all these magical things. They were waiting for Marilyn to come out in the mirror . . . It’s kind of horrible because if that image doesn’t come, you can’t go out to face the camera. She is so anxious . . . and the viewer shares the anxiety. They don’t know if it is going to work.”

Monroe died from an overdose at 36. Oates disputes the idea that she died by suicide but believes that she felt “degraded and humiliated and inadequate” at being made to play “dumb blonde” roles. “I think she may have died of something like extreme despair.”

At the time of her death in 1962, in spite of the success of many of her movies, Monroe wasn’t rich. When her body was discovered, it was taken to the county morgue, not to a private funeral parlour. “There wasn’t enough money for a proper funeral,” Oates says. “She made millions and millions of dollars for other people. She didn’t make much money for herself.”

Oates tried to “envision a kind of emotional life for Monroe” that went far beyond what is found in biographies. Her technique is to focus intensely on specific incidents. “She was in several orphanages and foster homes but I just write about one of each. She had several miscarriages. I just write about one. She had several abortions and I just write about one.”

She also placed great emphasis on Monroe’s relationship with Charlie Chaplin Jr and Edward G Robinson Jr, who both became her lovers. “They respected her but they also excluded her . . . she was their mascot. It was kind of a touching relationship. She is always questing, trying to find an ideal relationship, maybe looking for this father who never acknowledged her.”

Oates sometimes slips into the present tense when discussing Monroe, as if her subject were still alive. “Any character that you invest with a good deal of your own personality,” she acknowledges, “it seems still alive to you.”

Her book and Dominik’s film both deal in depth with Monroe’s childhood. Little Norma Jeane’s schizophrenic mother, a studio “cutter” played by Julianne Nicholson, abuses the child mentally and physically until finally she is taken into care. Oates was fascinated by this dark American fairy story because it chimed with her own childhood, which was spent in the countryside, living in a one-room school house.

“We didn’t have much money. It was a farm but not prosperous,” she says. “I grew up in a world not different from Norma Jeane Baker, and my mother was about that age. So when I looked at her photograph and she was 16 years old, I thought: this looks like a girl I went to school with.”

In the mythology Oates has created for herself, Alice’s Adventures in Wonderland was her magical amulet that transformed her life. “I was only eight or nine years old. So it just entered my heart. When you’re young, you don’t have very many memories. The brain is still filling up the reservoir. So anything that happens when you are young makes a strong impression.”

She calculates that she has read maybe 50,000 books since then, but Alice is still the one that registers most strongly. She regards it today not as a work of fantasy but as psychological realism, examining the clash between Victorian values and Darwinism.

Blonde is a kind of nightmarish, all-American version of Alice. Its heroine endures even more phantasmagoric and terrifying experiences than those experienced by Carroll’s protagonist, but what shines through is her humanity.

“The great iconic figures come from such humble beginnings . . . As a writer I find it so interesting to focus on that — the life story . . . The consumer culture takes them and makes them into this product and yet they’re still human beings.”

‘Blonde’ is in cinemas from September 23 and on Netflix from September 28