Casting Norma Jeane (5 page)

CHAPTER TEN

Carole Lind

For Norma Jeane’s part, the stirrings of the day had had everything to do with a riddle still vexing her at the studio. The thought occurred to her now of applying to the sprightly minds of her new acquaintances in the Publicity Department for help in finding a solution. “The casting directors want me to change my name,” she was soon telling three of them. “They don’t like
Norma Jeane Dougherty
.”

In publicist Jet Fore’s workday, being interrupted by Norma Jeane was coming to be no rare thing. “I shared an office at Fox with two other guys,” he would later remember. “We were the ‘planters’ who handled the main contacts between the studio and the press. Sort of the hub of the department. So Norma Jeane would come in there all the time—every day. Often she’d be wearing this low-cut, polkadot dress, and she’d bend over our desks on purpose with those beautiful breasts of hers. Sure, she was selling herself, so to speak. And it was a great sell.” The three men, in fact, couldn’t bring themselves to take her to task for consuming too much of their valuable time.

As to her name, Jet Fore agreed with the folks downstairs in Casting.
Norma Jeane
made her sound too much like some kid fresh off the farm back in Indiana. The man in charge of new talent, Ben Lyon, had already dreamed up a more professional-sounding designation for her:
Carole Lind
. But they’d been trying this out, and the consensus was that something about this new name too still missed the mark.

“Do you have any ideas?” Jet Fore now asked Norma Jeane.

“Well,” she essayed in a sweetly hesitant tone, “my grandfather Monroe was related to the president—James Monroe. I’d like to keep that for a last name, and they sort of like it downstairs. But now they want me to come up with a first name.”

Wheels started churning inside the publicity men’s heads. One of the three, Hugh Harrison, was muttering, “Hmmm, lemme see, uh—” when in a flash he struck upon a near rhyme with
Carole Lind
. “
Marilyn!
How about
Marilyn
Monroe?”

Norma Jeane went suddenly still. “Oh, I like that.” She paused over it another instant before saying again, “I like that!”

Immediately, as Jet Fore would remember, Norma Jeane took the idea downstairs to Casting. In about an hour she came back, her mood exhilarated. “Hey, they loved it!” she told the three. “They thought it was great.”

“She liked it herself,” Jet would add. “It was catchy.
Marilyn Monroe
.”

CHAPTER ELEVEN

Sacred Space

To Aunt Grace too, Norma Jeane came directly with the heretofore-missing piece of the puzzle.

“
Marilyn
,” pronounced Grace in her piping voice. The choice made here had to be the absolutely correct one. A world depended on it. Yet the small woman hardly paused before reacting, “That’s a nice first name.”

Merely voicing its three sprightly syllables produced an effect of catapulting Grace’s mind forward and setting her aglow with an idea for a last name. As for the one already being discussed at the studio, it hadn’t been mentioned yet by Norma Jeane, who was later to write, “I tried the name out in my mind, but kept silent. My aunt was smiling at me. I felt she knew what I was thinking.”

At last Grace spoke for both of them. “It fits with your mother’s maiden name.”

Norma Jeane pretended to consider the idea for the first time.

Grace rolled the full name over her tongue. “
Marilyn Monroe
. That sounds real pretty.”

“Well, I don’t know,” hesitated Norma Jeane.

“Why
not
use Monroe?!” insisted Grace. “It would make your mother so proud.”

Bursting into laughter, Norma Jeane fairly shouted to Aunt Grace, “I thought so too! It’s a wonderful name!” Grace also began laughing, and the two hugged.

So this was the glorious step.
Marilyn Monroe
. It was a little like the moment of magic in a photographer’s darkroom when a long-sought-after image stirs to breathtaking life in the tray of developing fluid where there’d only been a rectangle of white paper before. Likewise, here was a magnificent name to fill what for so long had been only an impenetrable empty space. Never in her life in fact had Norma Jeane really had a surname of her own. At different stages she’d been called by the names of Gladys’ two former husbands, but neither Jasper Baker nor Edward Mortensen was legally her father. Even Jim Dougherty’s name, Norma Jeane felt, would very soon no longer really be hers when their divorce became final. It was one of those things—and there had been many of them—that she’d always had to wait for. How many times had she and Aunt Grace verged on the matter in their conversation but lacked for any actual name to say? In the forecourt of Grauman’s Chinese Theater, for instance, ever since Norma Jeane had been eight years old. Whenever they’d “pay their respects,” as Grace put it, by touching the imprints left in the concrete by the delicate hands and tiny high heels of Jean Harlow. Over Norma Jeane’s shoulder Aunt Grace would be whispering, “Someday it’ll be
you
putting your handprints and footprints in the cement. Do you know that? Can you
believe
that in the way that I can see it happening?” Surrounding Jean Harlow’s square of cement would be those of all the other great stars about whom Grace overflowed with stories culled largely from the fan magazines she devoured. Mary Pickford and Douglas Fairbanks. Norma Talmadge. Charlie Chaplin. Fay Wray. Gloria Swanson. Each of whom on some brilliant past occasion had adorned his or her sacred space with the final flourish of a unique and personal signature. That someday Norma Jeane would take her place among these shining immortals was one of the few certainties of the child’s life. But precisely what the name would be that she’d inscribe there in the wet cement had always—being unknown—needed to be left unspoken.

Until now. “Now I’m Marilyn Monroe!”

“That’s my girl!” cheered Aunt Grace.

CHAPTER TWELVE

Cat and Mouse

Breathlessly one of the next mornings, Norma Jeane swept up to the studio gate and distracted the guard by stopping to fish out her pass while Berniece strode straight onto the lot without one.

“Hurry up or we’ll be late,” called Berniece over her shoulder. “They’re going to be furious with me!”

Quite well done!
thought Norma Jeane at her sister’s handling of the little ruse, which had required some careful coaching from herself. More and more her eyes were opening to Berniece’s possibilities as a sister, an ally, and a friend.

The game was a slightly different one an hour or two later when she introduced Berniece to Ben Lyon, who cordially invited them to take seats by his desk. Norma Jeane had prepared her sister for this encounter too, albeit not so explicitly.

“Norma Jeane—” commenced Berniece nervously before quickly correcting herself, “—
Marilyn—
has been telling me how you helped her decide on her screen name.”

The words had a slightly rehearsed ring which the suave Mr. Lyon allowed to hang in the air for a telling second before he indulged in a knowing private glance toward Norma Jeane that said,
Let’s not get ahead of ourselves here, sweetheart
.

At this look Norma Jeane felt instantly crestfallen. Not that she’s wasn’t aware that the studio—in other words that Mr. Lyon as director of new talent—had every bit as much say-so as she herself did in the picking of her new professional name. If for that reason alone, she’d been quite prepared to tread softly with the executive whose brainchild in this process had been the less than thrilling appellation of
Carole Lind
. However, several days ago Lyon had appeared nothing less than delighted when in her excitement she’d brought him the name of
Marilyn Monroe
. As a result she’d dared hope the question was now all settled. Of course it was no use simply asking him if it were settled. She’d tried that, only to have him study her strangely and not answer. For 20th Century-Fox Pictures, she’d found, was just an exaggerated version of every other human community she’d ever dealt with since childhood. You could never be direct, honest, and clear with people. That only caused them to misunderstand. You had to speak in sign language. To communicate in riddles. To read people’s lips. You had to bring your sister into the studio and hope to stumble on the truth of the matter secondhand.

Her mind returned to Berniece sitting next to her, waiting uneasily for Mr. Lyon to pick up the thread of conversation she’d opened. Clearly, Norma Jeane observed, Berniece was impressed by the man she saw. Lyon, in his midforties now, was no longer quite the household name he’d once been as an actor, yet certainly there were millions across the land who like Berniece and Norma Jeane still remembered him well. His screen romps over several decades had been opposite leading ladies ranging all the way from Pola Negri to Gloria Swanson to both of the Bennett sisters, Constance and Joan, not to mention Claudette Colbert and Jean Harlow. Therefore, when Lyon finally spoke, the deep resonance of his voice had—as specially modulated for the benefit of Norma Jeane’s sister from the hinterlands—both a pleasing familiarity and an authority conferred by fame that made it not unlike that of a god speaking down from Mount Olympus.

“You two have very interesting resemblances,” he said.

Lyon, in keeping with the charm for which he was famous, had hit on an icebreaker ideally calculated to pierce through Norma Jeane’s preoccupation of mind. At home the sisters had minutely examined their faces for every trait they held in common and which therefore could be traced to the Monroe side of the family. Now Norma Jeane and Berniece lost themselves in showing the executive their respective hairlines, featuring luxuriant strands that waved off the foreheads of each from an identically prominent widow’s peak. Next they compared for him their distinctively pretty mouths, each of which mirrored the other one’s perfectly, down to their large, exceptionally white front teeth which came to just a pleasing tad short of being protruding. However, as Lyon ushered their conversation forward, Norma Jeane began to feel him exercising a subtle discrimination between his two visitors. Toward Berniece he was cordial and forthright, pronouncing himself intrigued by her married name, Miracle—to which Berniece rejoined that it was more common in parts of Kentucky than Smith, although always with the first syllable pronounced so as to rhyme with “fire.” But when on the other hand their attention turned to Norma Jeane, Lyon spoke not to her but still to Berniece. He was pleased, he told her, with how well Norma Jeane had been settling into her classes and training. “Right now Marilyn is very
cooperative
,” Lyon said, giving that word a cryptic emphasis, “but one day she’ll probably become like most other movie queens—demanding.” And at the phrase “movie queens,” he laughed with what Norma Jeane took to be a faint note of disdain.

By no means of course had Norma Jeane missed Mr. Lyon’s use of the name
Marilyn
. Berniece too had glanced over at her upon hearing it, for it seemed to indicate that the studio was at least going along with the first name passionately favored by Norma Jeane. Nor was there any doubt that in voicing that name, Lyon was conceding to her something of value—but only in a kind of barter, as it were, for in the same breath he took something else away. Berniece wouldn’t have noticed this, being unaware of the significance held by the word “cooperative” for insiders at 20th Century-Fox. As Lyon said the word, his eyes had smoldered secretly at Norma Jeane as if to say,
I’m the man who pulled out of you a crackerjack of a screen test
, a
nd now I want to become much more to you than merely Fox’s point man with respect to your screen name.

Or so, at least, it had appeared to Norma Jeane.

Until getting that look from Lyon, she’d felt reasonably resolved that any small and perfectly meaningless intimacy that may already have passed between the two of them was not going to be enlarged upon. Certainly the last thing in the world she ever intended to become was a Five O’Clock Girl.

In this fashion, Ben Lyon—even as he courteously chatted with Berniece—kept his subduing glance on Norma Jeane until at last he’d found his own roundabout and teasing way back to the subject originally broached by Berniece on her sister’s behalf.

He was aware, he explained to her, that Marilyn already had two names taken from the screen, since her mother had obviously named her after Norma Talmadge and Jean Harlow. But now he wanted her to have a shorter and more glamorous name than
Norma Jeane Dougherty
. Something both catchy and fitting. Several months earlier, her modeling agent Miss Snively had hit on the idea of turning her two first names around and calling her
Jean Norman
. From there Lyon had altered it to
Clare Norman
, which before many days had metamorphosed into
Carole Lind
—the presageful designation in which Hugh Harrison had heard his inspired rhyme of
Marilyn
.

Lyon glanced impishly from Berniece over to Norma Jeane. “Marilyn likes the sound of
Adair
,” he announced abruptly. “She wanted to be
Jean Adair
.”

Berniece turned with surprise to Norma Jeane, who merely softened her face into a complaisant smile to convey to them both that the matter of
Jean Adair
now seemed to her a thousand years rather than just a couple of weeks in the past.

Thought Norma Jeane,
Better for me now to say not one word more, but only to read lips. Only to interpret sign language.
Nonetheless she felt that at this perfect juncture her sister must inevitably flash on their maternal surname and speak it out loud, so bursting with new flair and meaning had it become for both of them ever since their trip with Aunt Grace to Boyle Heights.

However, it was left for Ben Lyon to utter the momentous word.

“—But perhaps we’ll use
Monroe
,” he said with another of his glances at Norma Jeane. That’s a family name, and the two M’s would be nice.”

Not without pain, the new stock player set about reconciling her nearly intractable will to the fact that the end of
Norma Jeane Dougherty
was not yet. It was obvious Lyon hadn’t started the required paperwork for
Marilyn Monroe
on its way through studio channels. He knew the name was right—of this Norma Jeane was very sure. But he was playing cat-and-mouse games with her. Men always did this. They were games Ben Lyon would never have played with her sister, sensed Norma Jeane, because he respected Berniece in a way that he didn’t respect herself. And why else, really, had she tried to place Berniece between them today, if not to shelter herself behind that respect? Berniece had had, all her life, a father to look out for her. That circumstance had equipped her with a certain backbone that anyone could see, even as Berniece simply sat in a chair talking and listening. She had reserves of confidence that clothed her no matter how shy and uncertain she might happen to feel at a given moment. Whereas Norma Jeane went naked in the world. She was forever doomed to cast every man she encountered as her provider and protector. This was her terrible need. She could find no control over it. And it showed. It opened her up to these stultifying games men were forever playing.