Every Saturday morning the hair colorist of the late Jean Harlow would board her plane in San Diego and arrive in Los Angeles where Marilyn's car would be waiting for her at the airport and would bring her to our kitchen, or rather the kitchenette of Bungalow No. 21.

Before allowing her to remove the bottles from her old carrying bag (products long since made obsolete by more modern techniques), Marilyn would ply her with food from a buffet-a combination of brunch and cocktail party ingredients-she had carefully prepared. The old lady would indulge with gusto. Marilyn would knock on my door, telling me to bring my towels, and then the hair-dyeing party would begin.

Now the old lady began to relive her life. While the two of us blonded, she would tell all about the color she had concocted for Jean Harlow's head thirty years earlier, which had been the secret of her success. Her tales were full of silk dresses, white foxes, lam'e shoes, and parties. They were full of silences-for she prefered not to tell everything she might have told. Her stories always ended with the funeral of the "platnum-blond bombshell." While she talked, the two of us wallowed in nostalgia, winking at each other when the old lady would stop in her tale because she was too full of emotion to go on. Then her stick with the white cotton swab at the end, coated with precious liquid that was supposed to be applied to the equally precious roots of our hair, would fly through the air instead of coming down, lending an incalculable factor to the incubation time of this delicate operation.

As Marilyn worried only about her widow's peak, there, things became serious; when it was a question of the enemy, the stick must not fly through the air. But the rest of the time she would sink back and let herself be rocked in the cradle of the old lady's anecdotes.

As soon as the widow's peak had been treated in seriousness and silence, the old lady, punctuating her story with "dearies," "sweeties," and "sugars," would take up her tale where she had left off. Listening to her, you might come to the conclusion that Jean Harlow had her hair dyed twenty-four hours out of the day, since it would appear that this lady had never been absent for a minute of the daily, conjugal, and amorous life of the star, nor of course from her deathbed.

After another meal, she would take her plane back to San Diego. When she left, the two of us would be impeccably blond-Marilyn platnum and I on the auburn side. Then Marilyn and I would clean up the kitchen, since the artist has always left a lot of cotton swabs lying around on the floor.

It amused me enormously to have my hair tinted by the lady who pretended to have created the myth who was splashed across the newspaper pages of my adolescence. But it didn't amuse my neighbor, Marilyn. It was no accident that she had tracked down the address of this retired lady. She believed in her.

She liked her and respected her. She was perfectly willing to pay for her round trips from the Mexican border, her limousine rides, and her caviar. It was a kind of association through a third person between the Blond Mark I and the Blonde she turned into. And in retrospect I think it was also a hand stretched out to someone who had been forgotten. Copyright © 1998,1999,2000,2001 N.O.B Creations. All rights reserved.