Casting Norma Jeane
Read Casting Norma Jeane Online
Authors: James Glaeg
Tags: #Biography & Autobiography, #Marilyn Monroe, #Nonfiction, #Retail
Copyright © 2012 by James Glaeg
Published in the United States of America
All rights reserved.
ISBN: 0615612067
ISBN-13: 9780615612065
eBook ISBN: 978-1-62345-383-1
Contents
Chapter One: Planes and Angles
Chapter Three: Particles of Light
Chapter Four: Ford Sports Coupe
Chapter Six: Five O’Clock Girls
Chapter Eight: Hypnotist’s Watch
Chapter Thirteen: Celluloid Kingdom
Chapter Fourteen: Smoke in the Wind
Chapter Sixteen: Scroll of Life
Chapter Seventeen: Arcing Wave
Chapter Eighteen: Mimosa Blossoms
Chapter Nineteen: Voice from Olympus
Chapter Twenty: Parade of the Stars
Chapter Twenty-One: Artichoke Queen
At 20th Century-Fox Pictures on a Tuesday morning in July of 1946, Ben Lyon was surprised out of a daydream. He’d heard a rustle of movement in the room and looked up from his desk. There at the door stood a stunning twenty-year-old blonde who seemed to have materialized out of nowhere. She’d stepped into his office without any appointment—or at least that was the way, years afterward, Lyon would remember their first meeting. He was, at the time, the studio’s director for new talent.
She looked absolutely gorgeous, he would recall. Golden hair falling down to her shoulders. A look of unusual freshness, of childlike innocence. Dressed in a beautifully cut, inexpensive cotton print dress. The executive felt he’d never before seen anyone so attractive.
He asked her to sit down by his desk. “What can I do for you?”
“I want mm—mm—” Her exquisite complexion flushed. Lyon supposed it was because she was struck, like himself, with a feeling they’d met somewhere before. But she tried again and this time completed her sentence with a slight stutter. “I want mm—more than anything to get into pictures.”
Suddenly it flashed on Lyon why she looked so familiar. He slyly rejoined, “Honey, you’re
in
pictures!”
For her face and figure were already fully on public display as the cover adornments for several gentlemen’s magazines currently on the newsstands. What had specially caught Lyon’s eye was that an unknown girl should have found her way onto three or four of these covers during the same month. He’d also been aware, on picking up one of the issues from the rack, of a certain pleasurable awakening at his pulse even though her expression on the cover had looked rather more sweet than naughty.
The two chatted about her background as a photographer’s model. He carefully ascertained that she’d recently been signed for representation by talent agent Helen “Cupid” Ainsworth. She then read some lines from a sample script for him with no further signs of stuttering. Meanwhile, Ben Lyon—himself once a film actor of no small renown who sixteen years earlier had been instrumental in the discovery of Jean Harlow—studied the girl more closely. Of his conclusions he was later to say, “You can tell with some faces, the way the flesh sits on the bones, the planes and angles. They’ll photograph well.”
Ace makeup man Whitey Snyder had seen screen beauties of every description out of makeup before—but never one looking quite so nondescript as the twenty-year-old blonde who appeared at his makeup-room door two days later. She could have been some fresh-faced farm kid who’d just stepped off the train from Iowa or Indiana.
Snyder asked her name to make sure there hadn’t been some mistake. And yes indeed, it was Norma Jeane Dougherty. So he steered her coolly toward a chair while wisecracking to himself silently,
Obviously the guys buzzing about her here and there around the lot haven’t seen her yet at five o’clock in the morning!
Nor was the supposedly stunning new blonde done with her surprises for Whitey Snyder. Once seated—and just as if he’d spoken all his unflattering thoughts out loud—she warded him off by thrusting a large black portfolio into his hands while she set about establishing herself in front of the makeup table alone. It soon became astonishingly clear that she wasn’t planning to let the veteran makeup artist touch her face.
The clock overhead indicated barely an hour before the camera had to roll on her tightly scheduled screen test. Snyder saw exactly what kind of train wreck was coming, but for the moment he wisely contented himself with earning his steep paycheck while seated partway down the table paging idly through her book of clippings and magazine covers.
Meanwhile, the girl began her vital preparations by sliding one forefinger with deep concentration back and forth over the surface of the makeup table in a weaving gesture as if to block Snyder completely out of her mind. She next consumed several long moments peering critically at the prosaic face that stared back at her in the mirror. And very gradually, as her hands stirred to the complex motions of her cleansing routines, the signs of an inexorable momentum and purpose appeared, until by the time she finished laying down her makeup base, her entire body had taken on the animation of a Flemish painter in the act of preparing his master canvas. In this attitude she then probed into her bag, at length producing out of it a single, quite ordinary and well-used lipstick brush with which she proceeded to apply, from a series of small pots arranged on the table in front of her, a painstaking assortment of lines and dots and splashes of color to every part of her face.
While the girl worked, Whitey Snyder glanced from time to time with a studied carelessness across into her mirror. Reflected there, the deftness of her handstrokes forced him to admit that she was possessed of uncommon skill at his own craft. Yet notwithstanding a striking transformation gradually being wrought on her previously lackluster features, it rose to Snyder’s level of competence to understand what no girl straight out of print modeling, like herself, ever understood. Which was that makeup techniques capable of working wonders in still photography were apt to be totally wrong for pictures that moved. Particularly if those pictures moved in Technicolor.
Truthfully, with time running ever shorter, Whitey Snyder was toying with the idea of allowing a disaster to happen. After all, he’d been treated with far more deference in his day by legends of the screen who’d needed him far less than did this virtual nobody seated at the mirror next to him.
But two things occurred to make him reconsider.
For one, his furtive glances in her direction had not been lost on her. She’d caught each one of them in the looking glass, meeting his eyes there for an instant and locating in them something which she then seemed to roll over and over in her mind while she continued to work. Many minutes had first to pass, but in time she decided to speak—using only a word or two to start with, and these uttered as though merely to herself, but ultimately proffering more and more of her remarks to the quietly observing Snyder until at last she was laying bare to him all of her deliberations as she manipulated the colors on her face.
Again it felt to Whitey Snyder as if the girl were reading his own crisp, professional thoughts even as they entered his mind. Behind every stroke of her lipstick brush, she had some reason for making it, which she now acknowledged to him in a thin, distracted voice tinged always with a minor note of distress. She needed the right side of her chin brought out to appear more prominent than it really was. Or she wanted the end of her nose shaded to appear less prominent. There were dozens upon dozens of crucial adjustments needing to be made, and while making them she would take cautious sidelong glances in the mirror toward Snyder, which told him instantly that she did not believe herself attractive enough for the career she was attempting.
So candid an admission, even if an unspoken one, Whitey Snyder had never encountered in these circumstances before. Joined to the plaintive timbre of her voice and to an open-ness—an almost blankness—about her face, it proclaimed a truthfulness of soul that fell on him like a current of fresh mountain air into the close fetid atmosphere of the show-business jungle in which he’d moved and breathed for too long, where modesty was unknown and where people devoured each other like beasts for their pleasure. To Snyder it was enormously appealing—and not least because everything she said was no more than correct. Of all the would-be movie goddesses who’d ever sat in that makeup chair, he couldn’t think of one of them who without makeup had looked quite so much like a passive lump of clay as this twenty-year-old with the long awkward name that tended to slip his mind. Not, to be sure, that any reasonable person would ever have called her downright unattractive. Indeed, she was decently pretty, but in a very plain and not at all impressive way.
The other revelation to unfold—while Whitey Snyder allowed the girl to coax back his sympathies—was what he found in turning over the pages of her modeling portfolio. A
Family Circle
cover there, from two or three months back, showed her out of doors in a flowery field, wearing a pinafore and bending over a lamb. Captured in her childlike pose was a wondrous freshness of springtime which was all owing, really, to a quality about her face. Similarly, she’d achieved covers—during this present month of July alone—on an astonishing total of four different magazines. Obviously, with names like
Click
,
Pic
,
Laff
, and
Sir
, these showed her in considerably less than a pinafore. But in each case it was toward her fresh-appearing, singularly open face that the prospective magazine buyer’s eye was actually drawn. And there—to be detected only by such cognoscenti as Whitey Snyder—her cosmetic hand had been masterfully at work. Underscoring certain features, highlighting others, and suppressing or concealing a good many more. Designing a miniature landscape, as it were, worthy of the notice of an MGM, a Paramount, or a Twentieth Century-Fox.
This
girl, then—the one in the photographs—was the one whom people were buzzing about in various quarters of the studio. Whereas that other girl—the one who’d stepped into his makeup room at five o’clock this morning—had resembled her not one bit.
Except that now, wonder to behold, as that same girl stood up from the table, she
did
look almost like the girl of the magazine covers. Almost, but not quite. What might be the factor still missing, Whitey Snyder could not divine. But there was one thing concerning her makeup about which he remained absolutely sure. Right now a Technicolor motion picture camera was going see her as painted up like a clown. And just maybe—Snyder finally decided as the girl hurried behind the partition to get into her waiting costume—it would be better if she learned this lesson on her own.
They appeared on the set with time to spare. Snyder presented the newcomer to Leon Shamroy, the Academy Award-winning cinematographer whom by a miracle Ben Lyon had secured to shoot her screen test. Shamroy took one look at the girl.
“What the hell is that on her face?!” he bellowed. “Did
you
do that, Whitey?”
Snyder acted as if momentarily caught speechless.
“No,
I
did it,” came the girl’s voice.
“We can’t photograph her that way! Whitey, take this girl back in there,” growled Shamroy. “Wash this damn stuff off, do her face up right, and then get her back out here!”
Within minutes Whitey Snyder was darting around her chair, solicitously shaping into her face all the very same cosmetic effects that the girl had been striving for on her own. Only to these, his swift hands were now adding the patented blending tricks which he’d perfected over his years of enhancing the Technicolor allure of stars like Betty Grable and Linda Darnell.
Meanwhile, strangely, the girl’s overconfidence had not only been reduced to the degree Snyder had hoped, but it had vanished altogether. The closer her time came, and the readier she appeared for her screen test, the closer she came to the verge of panic.