Casting Norma Jeane (8 page)

CHAPTER SEVENTEEN

Arcing Wave

It might be just fine for a Jane Russell or a Bob Mitchum. Both those earlier close acquaintances of Jim Dougherty’s had hides thick enough to fend off Hollywood’s nastiest tricks and blows. But Norma Jeane had no such protection. Anyone who wanted to crush her could do so with the slightest rudeness. During their marriage Jim had needed to be constantly on the lookout for it, whether coming from himself or from others.

His deepening conviction on the subject had bothered the twenty-four-year-old sailor as he disembarked at the San Francisco harbor and had continued to bother him as he took the train southward to Los Angeles. Arriving there, he sought out Aunt Ana, whom he arranged to meet at an hour when she was alone at the Nebraska Street house. But in pouring out his fears to her, he discovered a woeful blind spot in the dear old woman’s otherwise lofty thinking. “She seemed awestruck,” he would later write, “by the very notion that Norma Jeane might become a movie star.” No argument on Jim’s part could shake the deep presentiments Aunt Ana seemed to harbor in this regard, nor cure her of a naive assumption that stardom—should anyone as unprepared as Norma Jeane ever manage to attain such a goal—spelled automatic happiness for the girl.

Similarly, when a dispirited Dougherty brought his signed divorce documents over to Norma Jeane a day or two later, he found her in extraordinarily high if, he thought, illusionary spirits. Mercifully for Jim, her state of elation had nothing to do with the papers he held out to her at her front door. She barely even glanced down at these. Instead there was news she was bursting to tell him—two things left unmentioned by Aunt Ana in order that her niece might break them to Jim herself. 20th Century-Fox, she gushed, had now made it official. In the weeks since he’d been away at sea, her contract—the one that had been pending the last time they’d spoken—had been signed by the studio! She was in training to become a movie star! Furthermore, they’d even given her a new name!

Jim’s first reaction was to scornfully say in his own mind,
So what the hell does she think I care about all that?
! But clearly he did care about it, because it felt as if a bar of red-hot iron were burning a hole from his heart down to his belly. And what seemed damned remarkable to him was that Norma Jeane could stand there without the slightest inkling of what he felt—that she actually expected him to rejoice with her about this news!

“What’ll they be calling you?” he asked her, adopting out of pride the most neutral and detached attitude he could muster as he placed the ignored papers down atop the little table just inside her door.

“From now on, Jimmie,” she beamed, “I’ll be called Marilyn Monroe.”

“What?” In no way did this bizarre concoction of syllables correspond with his idea of Norma Jeane Dougherty.

She repeated, “Marilyn Monroe,” and kept looking up at him expectantly.

“Where’d they dream that name up—Marilyn Monroe?”

Norma Jeane hastily proffered a story to the effect that the first name had come from one of her grandmothers and the last name from the other one. Jim could easily recall having heard about her grandmother Della Monroe before, but it was news to him that she now claimed to have a second grandmother by any name sounding so recently coined as
Marilyn
. Asked Norma Jeane, “What do you think of it?”

Jim turned the strange sounds over in his mind for a moment before hesitantly conceding, “It’s—beautiful…” Which was a thing he could probably say honestly if he considered the name apart from anyone he knew. At the word “beautiful,” Norma Jeane’s expression changed to her broadest grin. “Isn’t it the most beautiful name you ever heard?!” she cried. “It’s just so,
so
beautiful!” Breaking into a dance of joy, she sang out the name, “Marilyn Monroe!—Marilyn Monroe!” Momentarily she stopped and looked back up at him. “Oh Jimmie, please, tell me you like the name! It’s important to me that you like it. Please! What do you think of it?”

All Jim could wonder was,
Here she is, having dumped our marriage, having dumped
me
in effect.
Why should it matter to her now what I think of her crazy new name? Yet without question it matters to her!
And dutifully he repeated aloud, “It’s just beautiful.”

Norma Jeane lifted her arms over her head and began twirling about the room. Her face beamed with happiness as she sang out the name over and over again in her clear, sweet voice, “Marilyn Monroe! Marilyn Monroe! Isn’t it just too perfect?!” In so doing, she glided past stacks of magazines lying on various counters and tables, all of them bearing pictures of her, either on their covers or—as Jim had found out on his earlier stay in her apartment—filling their inside pages. “Marilyn Monroe! Oh, isn’t it lovely?!”

Jim had seen Norma Jeane carried away by joy before, but never like this. The scene was becoming, in fact, surreal. Before him was a whirling, swaying, chanting, blonde-haired creature in whom he no longer recognized any trace of the shy, chestnut-haired, prematurely sensible sixteen-year-old Norma Jeane he’d once married. It called to mind a certain image he’d been entertaining on shipboard during the past few weeks, which today seemed to be coming true right in front of his eyes. What he’d visualized, there on the ship, was the whole arc of their relationship in the form of a giant ocean wave that had crashed ashore and engulfed the two of them in passionate love for three or four delirious years—but was now sliding back out to sea again and with it was taking her away from him forever. In real life, at this moment, his darling Norma Jeane seemed to him, for the first time now, truly and utterly gone.

Jim turned to leave. Norma Jeane’s dancing stopped, and they walked out onto the porch together. She continued to beam with delight. He looked down at her and, with effort, smiled too. He wanted to reach out for her, but for a second all he could manage was the smile. Then suddenly he did reach out for her—only just as suddenly to pull back again. He thought he could feel tears wetting his cheeks. He hoped his voice would sound normal when he said goodbye. What came out was just a rough growl as he walked away.

To be sure, Norma Jeane had offered to still live with him even while divorced. And of course that offer had been very tempting to Jim Dougherty. However, his pride, his morals, his plans, and his decision of mind were such that she could only be a memory to him now—albeit a memory he still loved so much that sometimes he felt his heart would burst asunder.

CHAPTER EIGHTEEN

Mimosa Blossoms

Berniece Miracle could detect no reason for holding Jim Dougherty in anything less than the highest esteem. And for that matter, neither did Norma Jeane claim to love him any less now than she’d ever done before. Yet despite everything Berniece kept hearing about her personable ex-brother-in-law, somehow she never got to meet the young sailor when he was known to be home on leave between his troop-hauling stints from the Far East. Exactly why Norma Jeane—or
Marilyn
, as she now insisted on being called—made no real effort to bring the two of them together, considering how amicable were the terms still in place between her and Jim, only some lapse in her normally good manners could quite explain. But Berniece adjusted to this oversight without complaint. It only brought home to her how thoroughly Marilyn was distracted by the career hopes smoldering beneath her deceptively quiet exterior like so much red-hot magma about to blow the top off a long-dormant volcano.

More disquieting, however, was another lapse that came to light toward the end of Berniece’s several months’ stay in Los Angeles. The sisters were on a break during one of the last of their sightseeing jaunts, sipping Cokes in the chic coffee shop just off the Ambassador Hotel’s posh main lobby, when Marilyn announced, “I have something on mm-my mm-mm-mind I want you to know about.”

Her slight stutter had momentarily reappeared.

“What is it, honey?” Berniece asked.

“I p-posed nude for a photographer.”

The silence that followed—though an exceedingly brief one—carried an effect on Berniece not unlike the distant, low, crackling rumble lately being presented over the radio as the recorded sound of one of the actual atomic bombs that had brought a miraculous and horrific end to war in the Pacific.

“Really?” Berniece said reflexively, not having any idea what she could possibly say next.

Certainly this was news outlandish in the extreme. In a rush, walls and foundations were crumbling and collapsing all across the seemly tableau that until now had been serving in Berniece’s head to depict Marilyn’s professional world. Starting with a certain much-talked-of shrine which the two of them had just been strolling out over the palatial hotel’s lush lawns and gardens to see—the Blue Book Agency and Modeling School. There, hardly more than a year ago, in a bungalow of offices charmingly set amidst the lemon and orange and banana trees that clustered along walkways scented with jasmine and mimosa blossoms, Norma Jeane’s life had first undergone its daring transformation. In that time, to be sure, plenty of magazine covers had rolled off the presses bearing her growingly familiar image. But how quickly it had all come to this! Was it possible for Blue Book’s presiding genius, Miss Emmeline Snively, to be mixed up in anything sounding so gauche?—Miss Snively, with her discreet British accent and her exquisitely white-gloved hands?!

Of course, it was all about money. Money being that troublesome commodity Marilyn was constantly running out of. No one anywhere near the girl could ignore her woeful ineptitude at the handling of her finances, which until this present moment had been Berniece’s only serious worry regarding her younger sister’s fledgling career. Almost never could Marilyn give any credible accounting for where her money was going. Admittedly her seventy-five dollars a week from Fox was no star’s salary, but working girls her age all over America were living perfectly well on far less. And here was Marilyn, perpetually broke and always having to take these modeling jobs on the side to make ends meet. Probably now she’d gotten herself into some frightful new jam over another debt and had figured that her only way out of it was by compromising everything.

Oh honey!
thought Berniece.

Marilyn’s large blue-gray eyes—the beautifully wide-set eyes that were perhaps what really made hers the face of a model and starlet—were leveled coolly on Berniece. It was as if she could see the thoughts running through her companion’s mind and had no respect for them.

“I’m not ashamed,” Marilyn stated with confidence, her stutter now completely gone. “I did it, and that’s that. But I don’t want Aunt Ana to know. She wouldn’t approve.”

Berniece quickly checked her dismay and managed to rejoin, “Well, maybe Aunt Ana won’t see the pictures. Why should she? Would someone show them to her? I really doubt that possibility. What—what magazine will they be in?”

“I don’t know. I guess the photographer will let me know,” answered Marilyn. Then, exhaling a conclusive breath, she composed her face into an attractive smile. This was a signal that they wouldn’t be delving any further into the subject right now. And if Marilyn was like their mother Gladys in any one thing, it was that you couldn’t invade certain sectors of her mind when she’d decided to hold them private and apart. Everyone—all the aunts and uncles and even Gladys herself—knew and respected this. “You’re right,” continued Marilyn. “I shouldn’t worry. Ana may never see the pictures. I’ll decide what to do about it if it ever happens.”

During that moment’s revelation, each of the sisters had taken a giant step toward the other in a spirit of sisterhood. But suddenly each had seen an abyss yawning between them. And each had cautiously stepped backward again.

CHAPTER NINETEEN

Voice from Olympus

“Please, could I keep my mother’s maiden name?!” blurted out Norma Jeane on stepping into Ben Lyon’s office one afternoon in late November. He’d asked her to come by. She would be making a public appearance for the studio tonight, so the last possible minute had come to write an end to their charade over her screen name.

Lyon deliberated Norma Jeane’s plea—or appeared to do so, for he’d known all along that he was going to give her what she wanted. And
Monroe
was the perfect last name anyway. That had been abundantly clear to him for months, ever since the day Hugh Harrison, upstairs in Publicity, had dreamed up the melodious first name of
Marilyn
to go along with it. The first and last names went together like a pair of silken gloves, and together they set the starlet off as becomingly as had the solid-sequined gown she’d worn for her screen test. The surname
Monroe
—were Lyon to now try and rationalize what one can really only divine by happy instinct—added just the sober and dignified note needed to counterweight the childlikeness of her face and expression. Ironically the elevation and propriety of
Monroe
was also needed to offset a certain sheer physicality always playing dangerously close to the surface in the way she moved her body. This latter characteristic in fact had been pronounced too downright raw by no less an authority than Darryl F. Zanuck, whom Lyon could foresee having to coax at option time merely to keep Norma Jeane under contract. The capricious studio boss, initially impressed by her silent screen test, had turned skeptical upon sizing her up in person. Everything about her manner and even about her voice had struck the all-powerful head of production as too unsophisticated for the Fox roster.

Marilyn Monroe
. Maybe the name would help, reasoned Ben Lyon, who on the contrary and quite aside from any personal grounds he might have for being excited about the girl, considered her to be no run-of-the-mill stock player. Whatever her qualities off-camera, the screen test had shown her capable of an on-camera allure that might even take her as far as stardom—depending of course on a host of other things—on her improvement under coaching, on the story properties coming their way for production, on how he might contrive to get her cast in them, on whether or not producers liked her, even on the future career whims of Betty Grable, whose replacement Norma Jeane might in time conceivably become. And not least under the mysterious laws of the game, casting Norma Jeane in the role of a star depended on selecting the right name. But this, curiously, the girl had already managed to do for herself.

Not that Ben Lyon needed to tell her so right away. He rather enjoyed the way she leaned toward him from a chair opposite his desk, a look of desperate entreaty filling her wide blue eyes. He wondered,
What a thing of urgency this is to her! It makes the situation appear almost comedic.
Has she no appreciation for how many other girls—girls far prettier, far more poised and more prepared than she, although possibly less talented than she in her one special way—come and go within the great walls of 20th Century-Fox in the course of a single month or year?
Nevertheless, Ben Lyon carefully suppressed any show of mirth. It appealed to the actor in him to play all his interviews with pretty young screen hopefuls for the big scenes the girls themselves imagined them to be. With immense gravity, therefore, he now sat back in his chair, leaned his chin on one hand, and studied every part of Norma Jeane’s anatomy while secretly savoring the profound excitement this scrutiny aroused in her. It was obvious she’d poured not just hours but days and weeks into planning for, into daydreaming of, this one crucial exchange between them. For several long moments he said nothing, and her quickened breathing was the only sound in the room. Then suddenly, with an air of momentous decision, he spoke out in his large voice still well-known to millions of movie and radio fans, as if he were thundering down a wondrous new appellation from the heights of Mount Olympus. “All right,
Monroe’s
in,” he announced. “It was good enough for a president. We’ll use it.”

A tiny murmur of inarticulate relief escaped from Norma Jeane.

But Lyon, lest she say some word to break his concentration, quickly raised the forfending palm of his hand and knitted his brow with magisterial concern to pursue in a zinging voice, “Now for a first name.”

The valiant Norma Jeane stirred not a muscle, but Lyon saw the blood draining out of her face. She’d calculated the rest of the battle as already won, he perceived, given that she’d been beguiling him privately into calling her
Marilyn
for months. Thus secure in having reduced the starlet to utter defeat, Lyon now mercifully deigned to raise her up again by spinning impulsively round in his chair, springing to his feet, and pacing back and forth behind his desk in order to probe the farthest reaches of his fertile memory in search of the two choicest and most dazzling among all the possible options for a first name. There were, he finally told the increasingly suspense-wracked starlet, two women of whom she reminded him. He’d known them both extremely well. One was the luminous Jean Harlow, his costar in Howard Hughes’ illustrious and landmark 1930 talkie
Hell’s Angels
. The other was Broadway’s dazzling singer, dancer, and comedienne Marilyn Miller, whom he’d romanced on screen in her starring vehicle of 1931,
Her Majesty, Love
.

Jean
? Or
Marilyn
? Which name did she prefer? The choice was hers.

Norma Jeane cast her eyes downward while pressing a forefinger against her lips, hesitating in the way she frequently did before voicing any important thought. Lyon’s gaze fell on her long, glistening golden hair so like Marilyn Miller’s. Truth be told, from the first moment that the name
Marilyn
had been broached for Norma Jeane, she’d become in his eyes a virtual reincarnation of Marilyn Miller, whom Lyon had passionately loved before marrying his present wife. Perhaps the twenty-year-old Norma Jeane had divined something of this. Or perhaps it was simply that he’d endearingly called her
Marilyn
one too many times, so that she no longer had any doubts about which name he himself liked best. At any rate, thought Lyon, here was why Darryl F. Zanuck might be wrong in his assessment of Norma Jeane Dougherty. At this moment—even if it would have killed her not to come into possession of the name
Marilyn
—she hesitated because there was a chance of upping her ante. She saw this chance and threw the dice. Yes, Lyon had found Norma Jeane to be an awkward and peculiar girl in many ways, a loner, a dreamer, difficult to read, difficult to connect with, someone having a long hard road ahead of her to travel. But there was a mettle to this girl that he’d never seen in any aspirant her age before. Instead of desperately seizing on the clear opportunity being dangled in front of her, in her shrewdness she recognized that it never looked good for an ingénue to do all the plumping for herself. She wanted the record to show it was the studio that had named her
Marilyn Monroe
.

Norma Jeane glanced trustfully at Lyon, who said to himself:
OK
,
this is the way it works in Hollywood. Norma Jeane has done plenty for me.
Now it’s my turn to do for her.

“You are to me a Marilyn,” he prompted her in his low and mellifluous voice.

The reassurance contained in these words emboldened the starlet to pull out all the rest of the stops in her embellishment of the scene to be played.

It was a lovely name, she agreed. Yet she wasn’t totally convinced. It still had a strange ring to it. Would
Marilyn
perhaps sound too artificial? Maybe she’d better just take the name
Jean,
which, after all, was one of her own given names?

“
Marilyn
goes better with
Monroe
than
Jean
,” countermanded Lyon without hesitation. “It’s got a nicer flow—with the two M’s.
Marilyn Monroe
. Say it.”

“Mm-mm—” Norma Jeane began, suddenly evincing the slight stutter that now and then came upon her rather appealingly out of nowhere.

They both began to laugh. She tried again.

“That’s it!” Lyon clapped his hands when she succeeded in pronouncing the name. “What do you think, sweetheart?”

“Well,” sighed the starlet, “I guess I’m Marilyn Monroe.”