Bleached Pubes

Memoirs from my youth

Starting at around the age of fifth grade, I idolized Marilyn Monroe. So did my good friend Melissa, who lived next door to me throughout my junior high years. Melissa was the older of the sister pair that lived next door, that my sister and I were besties with. The sisters we camped out with in a tent in our backyard, sharing a night of first kisses as we passed around the neighborhood hottie in a steamy game of truth or dare, one giddy and hormone-charged summer night. Melissa and I were both blonde, but both of our sisters were brunette. Maybe that’s why it was just the two of us that shared the Marilyn Monroe obsession. We both had blonde brain damage syndrome inflicted on us by society. Maybe to my sister and Leah, Marilyn Monroe wasn’t relatable, but to two California blonde pubescent girls, she was the top of the blonde food chain. Like all girls, the world taught us, from a very young age, that the sharpest and most powerful weapon a woman could yield was her beauty. It was beat into our subconscious—at every turn, at every billboard, commercial, or even just by observing human behavior in the classroom and playground—that the strongest currency women and girls could possess was, not the American dollar or the British pound, but her bone structure, her pout, her luscious locks, and the shape of her silhouette. Society, at large, had seemed to agree that Marilyn Monroe was the most beautiful woman that had ever lived. So of course we idolized her.

I’ve always been a big reader. Not as much now that my leisure time is sparse, but certainly as a kid. I devoured novels and biographies of the pop culture and rock and roll icons I worshipped. I remember Melissa telling me juicy stories from the Marilyn Monroe biography she was reading. So of course I had to borrow it the second she was done with it. It was a weathered paperback, written by a housekeeper of Marilyn Monroe’s. She was there a lot, I think every day, and she had an explicitly intimate view of the bombshell’s personal life. She had a lot of beans to spill about M.M, as of course a housekeeper would. I learned that Monroe would sashay around her apartment in the nude, at frequent. I would say I picked that up from her, but I know I probably just picked up this habit from my hippie mom, who, like me, was very casual about moseying around the house or doing chores in her underwear. (Which would often embarrass me during sleepovers at mine, as a self-conscious tween, in a conservative neighborhood. Love ya, Mom.) I also learned that Marilyn’s sheets were often as bloodied as a crime scene. I think this is what they call “free-bleeding” nowadays. (It’s turned into some sort of feminist revolution, so I’ve heard.) This must be why I’ve never been embarrassed about my own body’s crimson art on my white linens. Sullying sheets was one of far too many bad habits I picked up from very questionable role models at an impressionable young age.

But the most peculiar fact I learned from the book was that one time, her housekeeper walked in on Marilyn Monroe, sitting naked with her legs spread open on her bathroom floor, bleaching her pubes with a brush and a bottle of peroxide. Marilyn Monroe, caught in the act, apparently shouted “YOU KNOW MY SECRET! YOU KNOW MY SECRET!” manically and playfully to her housekeeper. I guess she wanted the carpets to match the curtains, to convince any skeptics that she was, of course, a natural blonde. The proof was in the pudding, I mean the pubes.

Is this story actually real? I hope so. I think it probably is. Who would make that up. I just love this weird story so much. I love this kind of shit. I love how strange and creative humans are, especially in the privacy of our own homes. I loved this story so much that I had the genius idea of re-creating it with several of my girlfriends at a slumber party in seventh or eighth grade. A tribute, if you will. More on that later.

Part 2