Bullock’s is the Beverly Hills department store where a chance encounter reconnects Norma Jeane with Clive Pearce, the man who once cared for her and accompanied her to the orphanage. Its escalators and busy sales floor bring the past back through music: hearing Für Elise, Norma Jeane recognizes the pianist as Clive. The meeting turns a place of ordinary shopping into the setting for a personal reunion, and ultimately links her Hollywood career to the return of a piano associated with her childhood.

A private visit in a public store

Norma Jeane visits Bullock’s on a Monday, when she has no studio rehearsal, intending to pass as an unrecognized Beverly Hills shopper rather than as Lorelei Lee. She wears dark sunglasses, a loose sand-colored linen blouse and trousers, flat canvas shoes, and a blue headband. Her errands are personal: gifts for Whitey, her makeup artist, and Yvet, Mr. Z’s assistant, as well as a nightgown for Gladys at the Lakewood clinic. She plans to send it with a note identifying herself as Gladys’s daughter, Norma Jeane.

Between the ground floor and first floor, music comes down through the store. At first Norma Jeane cannot identify it amid the musical-theater tunes and dance rhythms in her mind. Then she recognizes Beethoven’s Für Elise, whose sound recalls Clive playing it for her on the white spinet before taking her to the orphanage. A familiar melody interrupts the anonymity she has tried to claim inside the store.

Recognizing Clive Pearce

Norma Jeane approaches the pianist from behind so she will not distract him. He is seated beside the escalator at a grand Steinway, dressed in a tailcoat and playing from memory without sheet music. She recognizes Clive Pearce, though eighteen years have passed. He is now thinner and gray-haired, his once-handsome face marked by age, but the care in his playing brings the old relationship sharply into view. The shoppers around him seem largely indifferent to the music; Norma Jeane, by contrast, regards him as an artist whose performance deserves attention.

The encounter recalls an earlier intimacy shaped by music and separation. Clive had guided Norma Jeane’s fingers across a keyboard and encouraged her to try, then played Für Elise before accompanying her to the orphanage. At Bullock’s, the piece returns not as a lesson but as recognition: the store’s public bustle cannot erase what the melody means to her.

The reunion’s material consequences

The meeting leads to two concrete outcomes. Clive agrees to appear in Gentlemen Prefer Blondes as a piano player in a scene set in the salon of a luxurious cruise ship. Norma Jeane also buys back a Steinway spinet that had once belonged to Fredric March. It costs $1,600, which she borrows from Ex-Atleta. The piano connects the remembered childhood instrument to her present means and work: Clive returns to her professional world, while the instrument returns to her possession.

Fame, looking, and privacy

Bullock’s also offers a contrast to the machinery that has made Norma Jeane visible to strangers. In the period surrounding this chapter of her life, Marilyn Monroe’s name and photographs appear across newspapers, magazines, posters, and billboards. A nude photograph made when she urgently needed money is republished in Playboy without her authorization; she no longer owns either the negative or the rights, having sold them for fifty dollars. The image’s circulation makes the division between a private person and a commercially managed star difficult to control.

That public exposure echoes the novel’s treatment of Otto öse’s photographic gaze, in which the camera becomes a mirror through which Norma Jeane experiences herself, while the photographer’s framing can make her body seem vulnerable and subject to another’s look. At Bullock’s, she tries to move unseen, but the encounter with Clive restores a form of recognition grounded not in a reproduced image but in shared memory. The store thus holds together two opposing conditions of her life: being made into a public image and being known through a personal history.