Norma Jeane reunites with Clive Pearce at Bullock’s and buys back the piano

At Bullock’s in Beverly Hills, Norma Jeane Baker (Marilyn Monroe) hears Für Elise and recognizes the music as a fragment of childhood: Clive Pearce once played it for her on a white Steinway spinet before she was taken to an orphanage. The encounter reunites her with the piano teacher she remembers as both beloved and troubling, and reveals that he still owns her mother’s instrument. She buys it for $1,600 and helps Pearce return to film work by arranging a small role in Gentlemen Prefer Blondes. A chance meeting thus reconnects a famous actress with the child she was, while making an old family object the material center of a bargain between them.

An Unrecognized Visit

The meeting takes place on a Monday, when Norma Jeane has no rehearsal at the Studio. Disguised in the ordinary clothes of a Beverly Hills shopper, she is sure no one will recognize her. She has come to Bullock’s to buy a present for her makeup artist, Whitey, and another for Yvet, Mr. Z’s assistant, who has treated her with patience and kept her secret. She also plans to send a nightgown to her mother, Gladys Mortensen, at the Lakewood clinic, with a note signed as her daughter. Her errands show her attending to personal loyalties even as she moves through public life under a manufactured celebrity identity.

As she rides the escalator, music comes down from above. Her mind is already crowded with musical-comedy tunes and syncopated dance rhythms, but this is classical music, played live. She identifies it as Beethoven’s Für Elise, whose melody strikes her with the force of a painful memory. She recalls Clive Pearce playing the piece on the white spinet before leading her to the orphanage. The sound reaches her before she knows who is making it, allowing memory to guide her toward the pianist.

Norma Jeane approaches from behind so as not to interrupt him. Pearce is seated at an elegant Steinway grand piano beside the escalator, an elderly man in formal evening dress playing from memory while shoppers and clerks talk around him. His skill remains apparent to her, and the indifference of the store’s customers sharpens her sense of the mismatch between his artistry and his present circumstances. After he finishes, she applauds enthusiastically and introduces herself as Norma Jeane.

Recognition and the Piano’s History

Pearce looks at her for a long moment, then asks whether she is Marilyn Monroe. Norma Jeane acknowledges that Marilyn is who she is now, but reminds him that she was once Norma Jeane, the child who lived in the same Highland Avenue building as Gladys. She tells him she was nine years old in 1935 and that he taught her piano, including Für Elise. Pearce initially doubts her account, treating it as an improbable joke rather than a memory he shares. The passage of eighteen years has made the former pupil instantly recognizable to the public but almost unrecognizable to the person who knew her before fame.

She tries to restore the connection by recalling the names she used for Pearce and another adult in her childhood, and then the instrument on which he taught her. The detail of the spinet finally unlocks his memory. Pearce says that he still has it. Norma Jeane’s astonishment is not simply that the piano survives, but that a possession belonging to her mother has passed into the hands of the man who taught her to play.

Pearce explains that the landlord had taken some of Gladys’s belongings over unpaid bills. The spinet had been slightly damaged in a fire, and Pearce offered to buy it; he had it repaired and kept it ever since. He describes the instrument as one he would not willingly part with. The piano’s history therefore carries the traces of both loss and care: it was removed from the family during financial hardship, damaged, restored by Pearce, and preserved as part of his own life. What Norma Jeane had remembered as a childhood instrument returns to her not through inheritance, but through negotiation.

A Bargain Between Past and Present

Norma Jeane asks whether Pearce might part with the spinet for enough money. He considers the request and agrees that he could make an effort for her. The exchange does not erase the uneasy history behind the instrument, or the remembered intimacy of their lessons; instead, it gives those memories a practical consequence. She buys the Steinway spinet for $1,600, borrowing the money from Ex-Atleta. The amount and the loan make the reunion more than a sentimental recovery: getting the piano back requires a financial commitment that reaches into her present marriage.

The bargain works in both directions. Norma Jeane secures the return of the piano, while Pearce receives a part in Gentlemen Prefer Blondes, playing piano in a scene set in the lounge of a luxurious cruise ship. The film role gives the neglected pianist a place within the work of the actress he had once taught. Their reunion thus turns on reciprocal help, though the balance is not equal in form: she can use her current position to open a professional door for him, while he can return an object that connects her to a life before her screen name.

Memory in the Life of a Star

The scene makes the split between Norma Jeane and Marilyn Monroe visible without treating either identity as wholly separate from the other. At Bullock’s she is deliberately dressed to pass unnoticed, yet the music carries her back to an earlier self that she cannot simply leave behind. When Pearce asks whether she is Marilyn Monroe, her answer holds both names together: she is Marilyn now, but she was Norma Jeane before. The public identity can secure Pearce’s film appearance and the purchase of the piano, but it cannot make him remember her childhood until she supplies the intimate details herself.

The recovered spinet also connects the encounter to the book’s recurring concern with objects that outlast the circumstances that first gave them meaning. The instrument has been taken from Gladys, damaged in a fire, repaired by Pearce, and finally purchased back by her daughter. Its passage through different hands preserves a history that neither fame nor the passage of time has fully erased. The encounter ends with a concrete restoration, but not a return to childhood: Pearce has his role, Norma Jeane has the piano, and the bond between teacher and pupil survives through music, memory, and a transaction.