Marilyn Monroe (12 page)

Once her hair had been fixed, Snively decided that it was time for Norma Jeane to be ‘discovered’ again and on 6 March she sent her along to photographer Joseph Jasgur for some more ‘test shots’. Jasgur didn’t think much of her to start with, deciding that her hips were too broad, her clothes too tight and her figure imperfect, but he did like her eyes; he took test shots of her on a street behind Beverly Boulevard and then took her for something to eat afterwards. Snively later revealed that he believed she was too thin and unsexy, and would always feed her hamburgers when he thought she looked hungry.

And so began a quick succession of modelling jobs for the newly transformed model. On 10 March she had another session with Jasgur, this time at the Don Lee Towers, above the Hollywood sign, and then on 11 March, she posed for photographer Earl Moran, who painted her portrait for potential advertising customers. On 12 March 1946, she was snapped by a young photographer called Richard Miller (who was to use her throughout March and April), and on 18 and 23 March she went with Jasgur to Zuma beach, where she was photographed alone in the sand, and also with the cast of a local production called
The Drunkard.
(Many years later, Jasgur published a book entitled
The Birth of Marilyn,
which included a photo of Norma Jeane apparently showing six toes. These photos caused huge media interest and are still talked about today, but the extra ‘toe’ in the Jasgur photos is merely a bump in the sand.)

Amongst the abundance of modelling jobs coming her way, Norma Jeane was also being told she should get into the movies. This got her thinking about the next stage in her career, and she mentioned briefly to Emmeline Snively that she might be interested in doing bit parts. She didn’t immediately share this with her husband, however, who was later shocked when he found a screen test script when he came home on leave.

Declaring that she just had the script out of curiosity, Jim tried to persuade his wife that thousands of young women wanted to be a star, but it fell on deaf ears. ‘I used to confide in my husband sometimes, my childish dreams of becoming an actress. He’d laugh and assure me I’d never make it,’ she remembered. Shortly after, Jim reluctantly drove his wife to a screen test, only for her to discover that it wasn’t a real test at all; the ‘producer’ had borrowed the office from a friend. Once in the room, he told Norma Jeane to recite her lines while performing a variety of reclining poses. ‘He was getting sillier by the minute and I maneuvered over toward the door and made a hasty exit,’ she recalled in 1953. As she got back into Jim’s car, she slumped in the seat and looked at her husband. ‘You’re right,’ she said, ‘They’re just a bunch of fresh guys.’

Old flame Bob Stotts was to bump into Norma Jeane that year, after his discharge from the Army. He saw immediately that she had turned into a beautiful woman but noticed a subtle change in her personality – as if she was acting a part in front of him. Norma Jeane told Bob that she was modelling and interested in getting into the acting business. ‘She seemed all starry-eyed about the whole thing, but she didn’t see it as the ultimate goal in her life. I had seen a news stand with half a dozen magazines, all with her image on them and she told me that modelling was more fun than acting tryouts. Screen tests were hard, difficult she said and certainly not as easy as modelling.’

In the entire time Stotts knew her, Norma Jeane had never mentioned a career in the movies: ‘If she had any theatrical aspirations, we never knew about it. Her main ambition seemed to be to eventually become a good housewife.’

‘The last thing in the world that I would have picked was a movie star,’ wrote Stotts’ mother Dorothy. ‘She was a good dancer, but a movie star, well . . .’

Norma Jeane asked Bob to dinner that night, but knowing that her husband was overseas he decided against it. This was the last time any of the Stotts family saw Norma Jeane. ‘We often wished we’d kept in touch somehow,’ wrote Dorothy. ‘Possibly doing so would not have altered the course of events, but friends – real friends – might have made a difference.’

Meanwhile, Norma Jeane was receiving far too much attention from men desperate to ‘make her a star’, and this led Snively to introduce Norma Jeane to Helen Ainsworth, a theatrical agent at the National Concert Artists Corporation. She walked into the office, and immediately the string on her hatbox snapped, leaving a trail of hairpins, lipstick, curlers and make-up strewn all over the floor. Ainsworth’s colleague, Harry Lipton, looked up from the magazine he was reading and saw a young girl who was flushed, confused and looked like ‘a freshly cut piece of strawberry shortcake’. Picking up the entire contents of the box, he made a joke, and was happy when Norma Jeane smiled and seemed to relax.

The interview went well but she didn’t speak much and changed the subject immediately when asked about her personal life; the only thing she did divulge was that she had always dreamed of being an actress. At the end of the interview, both Ainsworth and Lipton agreed that she had possibilities and signed her to the agency, assigning her to Lipton to handle personally. This was the start of Norma Jeane’s venture into the movies, and she couldn’t have been happier – professionally at least.

At home, things couldn’t have been worse. She and Jim were still arguing and on 9 March, when he shipped out again, he left a note for his wife, saying, ‘I’ve gone. After I’ve finished sailing and can settle on the beach we can give it another try if you like. Don’t think there’s someone else, there isn’t, but well I’ve told you how I feel.’ Determined not to give up on the relationship,
Jim left on his trip hoping that things could be patched up, but it was not to be.

On 26 April 1946, Norma Jeane appeared on the cover of
Family Circle
for the very first time, and shortly after started jotting down reasons why she wanted to divorce Jim Dougherty. ‘My husband didn’t support me,’ she wrote. ‘He embarrassed me; he ridiculed me, and treated me like a child’. Finally, she made plans to travel to Las Vegas, where she would have to stay from May to July, in order to legally divorce Jim, who was at this time blissfully unaware that their problems had come this far.

In the months prior to the trip, Norma Jeane become close to her agent, Harry Lipton, often calling him at odd hours of the night, just to be able to talk to someone. She told him that she believed Jim had married her because otherwise she would have had nowhere else to go, but described him as ‘a very nice man’. As a result of her opening up to Lipton, he helped arrange the trip to Vegas, but as he put her on the train, he noted that she showed, ‘neither relief nor joy nor distaste at getting a divorce. Her reaction was that of someone leaving a fairly close acquaintance – not a husband.’

Once in Las Vegas, Norma Jeane settled into 406 South Third Street, home of Grace Goddard’s aunt, Minnie Willett, the widow of Uncle Kirby who had died in a traffic accident almost ten years before. Minnie, aged sixty-nine, was a very well-respected member of the Las Vegas community who was active in civic affairs and establishments such as the Rebekah Lodge, the Old Timers club auxiliary and various other organizations. She was friends with a number of high-profile Las Vegas families, and after her husband’s death had continued her hobbies with great abandon.

While Minnie’s days were a great rush of activities and goals, she hadn’t had the easiest of lives. Before she had married Grace’s Uncle Kirby, she had given birth to a boy named Frank, who was later raised as one of the Willett family. Frank was a sporty boy who took part in basketball and boxing, but he also
had his problems; going missing for weeks at a time and forcing his family to advertise in newspapers to trace his whereabouts.

In 1923 he married Annie Beadle, but the marriage was unhappy and ended in 1928 when she shot herself with Frank’s shotgun, moments after he had stormed out after a huge argument. All this news was reported back to Grace in Los Angeles and it is safe to say that Norma Jeane would have been privy to this family scandal during the course of growing up.

By the summer of 1946, Frank had long since moved away and Minnie was quietly living alone, continuing her civic affairs and organizing various get-togethers. As a result, when Norma Jeane moved into the house she was immediately invited to days out with prosperous Las Vegas families, but even so, she was not at all happy at the thought of staying in Nevada for the entire summer. She didn’t want to leave her Los Angeles modelling career; there were rumours of movies in the pipeline; and to make things worse her health was not excellent. In a letter to an unknown friend, she lamented: ‘I was in the hospital twice – first with an acute mouth infection (I had four wisdom teeth pulled). I was out of the hospital for just one day and they put me back with the measles. Oh what an awful time.’

However, her luck changed one day when she walked on to Aunt Minnie’s porch, wearing white shorts and a halter top, with her hair pulled back and tied with a ribbon.

At that moment, a young man by the name of Bill Pursel was talking to a former high-school friend who was raking the yard. ‘My friend introduced her to me, and she came off the porch so we could shake hands. There was a picket fence between us but our eyes were locked. Her first words were, “Pleased to meet you” and I said “Same here.” We then just stood there staring at one another for a few seconds. Finally I said, “Would you like to go for a walk?” She said “Sure” and we took off.’

The new friends ended up in a Las Vegas restaurant called Corey’s. There Norma Jeane told Bill that she was in the city to obtain a divorce from her husband, James Dougherty. ‘She left the impression that she just wanted to be free,’ says Bill. ‘She
was not bitter.’ That night the couple went to see a movie, and from that moment they became firm friends and spent almost every day together.

Bill remembers: ‘She was a beautiful gal. We were just two young adults going out; we’d go to the movies, the lake, and all over the place: we went to Mount Charleston, west of Las Vegas, Hoover Dam, and to Lake Mead, which was a great place to go for a swim as well as fishing or boating. We would find a café or somewhere out of the way and sit opposite each other. She would stare right into my face and it would make me nervous because she was so beautiful. We would often write notes to each other on napkins and pass them to each other while we were dining.

‘One Sunday we drove to Southern Utah to visit a National Park. It was crowded that day and I noticed there was quite a bit of attention from a gathering of girls. A female park ranger approached and recognized Norma Jeane from a magazine cover she had done, which explained the attention we were drawing.

‘We also visited Bryce Canyon, where many western movies have been filmed. It was along there where Norma Jeane told me she would like to become a movie actress, and I think also it was the first time we kissed.’

As well as spending time with Bill, Norma Jeane also took time to get to know his family, and was a dinner guest on at least two occasions at the family home at 925 South 3rd Street.

‘She was a lovely, lovely girl; a very sweet girl,’ remembered Bill’s sister, Jeanne Chretien. ‘She could have been the girl-next-door – my mom liked her a lot and Mom was very particular about people! In fact Norma Jeane later wrote to Mom, who was very approving of her going out with Bill. She would also speak with her on the phone – she wouldn’t speak to just anyone, but she loved Norma Jeane.’ Jeanne was married and both she and her husband Henry would tease Bill about the relationship: ‘What a beauty – how are you getting such a gorgeous doll?’ was one of their light-hearted comments. Around the dinner table,
however, their talk was that of a more serious nature: ‘She was a very down-to-earth person,’ said Chretien. ‘She was very intelligent, smart, sweet and wholesome. She liked poetry and talked a lot about the poet Carl Sandburg.’

‘She dearly loved his writing,’ recalled Bill Pursel. ‘She loved to read and Sandburg was at the top of her list.’

Bill remembers the relationship Norma Jeane developed with his mother. ‘Mom was very inquisitive about the girls my brother and I dated. There seemed to be an immediate close relationship between Mom and Norma Jeane, and Mom was very impressed by the way Norma Jeane pitched right in to help get supper on the table and to clean up afterwards. The connection they had impressed me because they took to each other so naturally.’ However, while Mrs Pursel may have liked her young visitor, that still didn’t stop her demanding to know if Norma Jeane had washed her hands before allowing her to help with dinner, much to the amusement of the other house guests.

While Norma Jeane left a good impression on the Pursel family, she seems to have been just as fond of them. ‘You’re really swell and I enjoyed your company very much,’ she later wrote to Bill.

There have been countless rumours that Norma Jeane travelled back and forth to Los Angeles when she was supposed to be resident in Las Vegas, but Bill Pursel doubts this: ‘I don’t know if she went back and forth to LA during her time here, but I doubt it because after we met we saw one another nearly every day. She also would call me at the service station where I worked, and, she brought her little Ford in for me to service. I think she stayed the whole six weeks, and I think she stayed at this same home on South 3rd Street.’

She was certainly a resident in Las Vegas when Jim Dougherty telephoned her. He had received a letter and divorce papers from her lawyer while he was at sea, and was gutted. He didn’t return the papers, nor did he write to his estranged wife; instead, he cancelled her allotment (the portion of military pay set aside for dependents). The moment he reached dry land, he tracked
her to Las Vegas and dialled the number. In shock and not wanting to believe what he had read in the letter, he was dismayed when she answered the phone with a bright, ‘Hi Bill.’ When she realized that she was speaking to Jim and not Bill Pursel, she proceeded to scold him for cutting off her allotment, which she said she found out about when she was in the hospital. Still in denial, Jim decided to visit his wife when he arrived in Los Angeles shortly afterwards.