by Lois Banner
Norma Jeane’s actions reflected the transitional sexual behavior of the 1940s, in which a resurgent sexuality during World War Two provoked a conservative reaction. America’s entry into the war, after the Japanese attacked Pearl Harbor on December 7, 1941, produced social dislocations. Young men joined the military, and young women took over their jobs. servicemen were sent to coastal bases to be deployed overseas, and young women became available for a sexual fling or for marriage. Prostitution was contained at the bases, but teenage girls out for a good time got by. They were called “Victory Girls” or “V-Girls.”29 Resembling the flappers of the 1920s, they were the vanguard of a new teenage culture whose participants danced the jitterbug to the music of big bands, while its female members swooned over Frank Sinatra—a thin young man with a big voice whom they wanted to both love and mother.
As they had for decades, respectable families tried to restrain their adolescent children, and conservatives in churches and women’s clubs joined them. Traditionalism in the form of “plain folk Americanism” also appeared by the mid-1930s, as the nation turned inward to regenerate a national spirit in the face of the ongoing Depression and the advancing totalitarian regimes abroad—Hitler in Germany; Mussolini in Italy; Franco in Spain. American democracy and its small towns became the ideal. In his famed realistic paintings, Norman Rockwell idealized simple values; composers like Aaron Copland incorporated folk tunes into their work. The new traditionalism appeared on the screen in the “girl next door” and the “all-American girl.” MGM’s Louis B. Mayer created these types, and they swept the industry. Actresses like Jane Powell played women who lived in houses surrounded by white picket fences in picture-postcard towns, embodying a storybook life.30 In her early photographs and films, Norma Jeane/Marilyn often posed as a “girl next door.”
Norma Jeane, like many “good girls” of the era, tried to be respectable by engaging in sex play without intercourse. Yet in My Story, Marilyn recounted a different version of her teenage sexuality. She stated there that sex hadn’t interested her. She didn’t think of her voluptuous body that appeared with puberty as connected to sex but rather as a “friend” who had mysteriously appeared. She envied the boys she knew because they liked sex so much that she worried she might be missing out on something important. But she didn’t respond to them; they might as well have desired “a bear in a log.” She wondered if she was “frigid” or “lesbian,” although in sources other than My Story she reported being attracted to older men, like Hary Keel.31 These issues bothered her even more as she became older and achieved success as the world’s great heterosexual sex queen, and yet was attracted to women. How could she hold this position and desire women? Why had she been given a stunning body and an interior filled with abnormalities and pain? No previous biographer has addressed her bisexuality, which was a major issue in her life, as was her inability to find a cure for her menstrual issues or to bear a child.
America of the 1950s demonized homosexuality. During the war servicemen lived with each other for long periods of time in barracks and on battlefields, which raised the specter of same-sex behavior among them. The end of the war produced a backlash against homosexuality as strong as that against Communism. Alfred Kinsey’s two best-selling reports on human sexuality, Sexual Behavior in the Human Male (1948) and Sexual Behavior in the Human Female (1953), were considered definitive on their subjects. Kinsey, whose researchers interviewed ten thousand individuals, found high rates of homosexual encounters among both men and women. His findings prompted psychologists, many of whom were schooled in Freud in this period, to emphasize Freud’s belief that everyone is bisexual at birth, while they enter a stage of latent sexuality in later childhood, in which they suppress their early sexual desires. About the age of twelve, they begin to desire the opposite sex. But same-sex desire remains present, beneath the surface. It can resurface at any point.
The fear was that individuals might not give up their homosexual inclinations. Thus heterosexuality needed reinforcement. Federal and state governments passed laws identifying homosexuals and lesbians as dangerous perverts. California passed a law sentencing those convicted of homosexual behavior to state mental institutions, with electroshock therapy administered to change sexual orientation.32
Given such attitudes, Norma Jeane sometimes felt like an “anomaly” because she didn’t respond to men. At times she didn’t feel human; sometimes, she said, she wanted to die because of her same-sex desire. She described these feelings in My Story. But her moods were contradictory. A crush on Howard Keel? That involvement didn’t go beyond a few kisses, but he had an impact on her. He was the kind of man from Clark Gable on that attracted her. Moreover, Marilyn liked athletic male bodies; that’s one reason she married Jim Dougherty, a high school athlete. She also liked Joe DiMaggio’s athletic body: he looked like a Michelangelo statue to her. But female bodies also attracted her. “There was also the sinister fact that a well-made woman had always thrilled me to look at.”33 Note her use of the word “sinister.” It indicates her recognition of the power of an uncontrollable desire, which frightened her.
During her last semester at Emerson Junior High, in the spring of 1941, Norma Jeane moved in with Grace and Doc, who could now accommodate her. Their finances were finally stable. With a possible war looming ahead, the Los Angeles aircraft industry boomed, and Adel Precision Products hired Doc at a full-time job. He and Grace bought one of Ana’s houses in Van Nuys. It was large enough to house Doc’s three children and Norma Jeane. She and Bebe Goddard slept together in an enclosed front porch.
That fall, along with Bebe, Norma Jeane entered Van Nuys High School in the tenth grade. She began crafting an image. Her makeup and clothes were noticed; Jim Dougherty’s girlfriend called her a “little sexpot.” She tried out for a school play because, she said, she had a crush on Warren Peck, who played the lead in the play. But her audition was embarrassing: she froze when she had to speak lines she had memorized perfectly. When the teacher gave her the cue, “I opened my mouth—and nothing! There was a long silence and then curtain!”34 Once again, as at Emerson, Norma Jeane seemed unable to act. Van Nuys High had an extensive acting program, and Norma Jeane might have taken advantage of it. Four years previously, Jim Dougherty had been a star of that program, along with Jane Russell, who later became a Hollywood star. Norma Jeane didn’t take acting courses at Van Nuys, and in fact she stayed at the school for only one semester.
She still dreamed of film stardom. She became friendly at the school with a Mexican boy who was one of sixteen children and who was scorned by the other students because of his ethnicity. The school was in a well-to-do area; Norma Jeane and the Mexican boy came from less well-to-do areas. Hurt by the racial prejudice at the school, he felt like a misfit. Norma Jeane reached out to him. She told him that she felt out of place because she was an orphan. They spent time together during breaks from classes and after school. Despite her negative feelings about herself, she told him that she was going to be a movie star.35
Grace, however, found another possible future for her, this one in the form of marriage. In the fall of 1941 Adel Precision Parts offered Doc a job in West Virginia as manager of their East Coast sales division. But Grace and Doc couldn’t take Norma Jeane with them: neither Gladys nor the state of California would permit it. Ana Lower’s health had slipped again, so moving in with her on a long-term basis wasn’t an option. Norma Jeane was only fifteen; she couldn’t live on her own. Grace asked the Howells if they would adopt her, but with three children of their own—the twins plus another child—they didn’t want to take on an additional child.
The only option for Norma Jeane was to return to the orphanage until she reached the legal adult age of eighteen. But Grace knew she wouldn’t stand for this solution; she had detested the place. So Grace offered her an alternative. Ethel Dougherty and her family lived in a house across the alley from the Goddards, and Grace had become friendly with her. In their conversations they came up with a solution
to Norma Jeane’s plight. She could marry Ethel’s son Jim, whose girlfriend had broken up with him. Ethel liked Norma Jeane, and Grace liked Jim.
The scheme wasn’t as absurd as it sounds at first. Norma Jeane hadn’t received good grades in school—in fact, she hadn’t seemed that interested in her classes. Since she was wooden in her movements on stage and stuttered in speaking, it was hard to see how she could become an actress, much less a film star. Marriage to Jim would solve her problems. He was a catch. He had been a star at Van Nuys High, where he’d been a halfback on the football team, student body president, and a leading actor in school plays. It was Jim, not Norma Jeane, who seemed to have the talent to succeed as an actor. After all, he had played the lead in a school play opposite Jane Russell. According to Jim’s sister, it was Jim, not Jane, who had received the acting plaudits. Jim played the guitar, and he’d formed a band with three Mexican classmates. He was still renowned when Norma Jeane entered the high school. Five years older than she, he was masculine and athletic, but he was also kind. He could take care of her, which was what Grace wanted.
By Christmas 1941, Norma Jeane’s sex appeal became an issue, as the numbers of servicemen in Los Angeles soared with the attack on Pearl Harbor on December 7. Fearful that the Japanese would bomb Los Angeles, the government rushed troops to the city. San Pedro became an embarkation point for sailors bound for the Pacific; the racetracks—Hollywood Park and Santa Anita—were turned into military bases; even Van Nuys was home to an army base. On December 10 the streetlights throughout Los Angeles were turned off—and the city remained dark until the end of the war. Antiaircraft guns were placed throughout the city. Jim Dougherty remembered, “Pearl Harbor turned the country upside down. We were all afraid.”36
Fears of prostitution and venereal disease were widespread. In February 1941, the Los Angeles Times proposed that young women join the “crusade” against venereal disease by marrying the men who were going to war and with whom they were having sex. “You cannot stifle the instincts of a man,” the paper warned, as it pointed to “the health problems created by concentrations of large numbers of our male population removed from home environments.”37
Ana and Grace worried about Norma Jeane’s sex appeal and her dating. In fact, Grace was surprised when Norma Jeane told her she didn’t know anything about sex, given the many men she dated. Grace had been a promiscuous “party girl” as a young woman, but as she grew older she became critical of such behavior and enforced a strict moral code on Norma Jeane. Harry Keel was an issue: Marilyn later stated that she married Jim Dougherty partly because her feelings about Keel frightened her.38 In addition, Mary Baker Eddy glorified marriage, and even Ana Lower supported the scheme to marry Norma Jeane to Jim. Perhaps they feared that Norma Jeane, like her mother, might become promiscuous and then get caught in the trap of illegitimacy that had destroyed Gladys.
But Norma Jeane wasn’t opposed to marrying Jim. Although she dreamed about stardom, she was also an adolescent girl who fantasized about marriage. In those days few working-class girls went to college, and most married soon after high school. Football players, models for the tough warrior masculinity the nation prized in wartime, held top position in the popularity system. School communities expected that their star athlete would marry the high school beauty, bringing the prince and the princess of the fairy tales together. This model of heterosexual marriage was a national fantasy by the 1940s, as the high school years assumed the position they still hold in the United States today as the central period in everyone’s life. They were enshrined in the figures of the “all-American girl” and “all-American boy.”
Norma Jeane said she had a crush on Warren Peck, but Jim’s picture hung on the wall outside the drama classroom, honoring his success as an actor at the school. When Norma Jeane met him, he worked on the night shift at Lockheed Aircraft, helping to support his large family. But his past glory, not his present status, impressed her. Like the Doughertys, many of the families who had raised Norma Jeane were working class. She had no illusions about marrying a doctor or a lawyer. Nor was she encouraged to continue her education. The fact that she had become something of a leader at Emerson Junior High was forgotten. For a girl with a background like hers marrying a high school star was a signal achievement.
Norma Jeane seduced Jim into marriage. Grace was manipulating her at this point, but Norma Jeane honestly believed that’s what she wanted. Grace maneuvered him into driving Bebe and her to school, and she sat close to him in the car. Scheming with Ethel Dougherty, Grace persuaded him to take her ward to the Adel Precision Parts Christmas dance. As they danced with bodies pressed together, Norma Jeane’s sensuality was in full force. She was feminine and sweet, deferring to Jim, asking him about himself—a technique guaranteed to please. She represented the security of commitment. Several days after the Christmas dance, a Japanese submarine torpedoed an American carrier in Catalina Channel. It was a frightening experience for a city already on the edge.39
They courted all spring, going to movies, to dinner, on family picnics, on hikes in the mountains. Because Grace, Doc, and Bebe left for West Virginia in the middle of the spring of 1942, Norma Jeane moved back to Ana’s house, attending University High School in West Los Angeles for the second semester of her tenth-grade year. A dutiful suitor, Jim made the drive over the Santa Monica Mountains from Van Nuys to West Los Angeles to see Norma Jeane. At a Dougherty family picnic she brought three homemade lemon pies she said she’d made from her mother’s recipe: by “mother” she probably meant Ana Lower. Jim played his guitar at that picnic and Norma Jeane sang, following his accompaniment in a high, sweet voice.
Before Grace left for West Virginia, she told Norma Jeane that she was illegitimate, which Norma Jeane hadn’t known. She had been told that her father had died soon after her birth (which wasn’t true), but she hadn’t been told that her mother, Gladys, hadn’t been married to him; and Grace assumed Stanley Gifford was Norma Jeane’s father. Jim was also told this family secret, since he might consider it serious enough to break off their engagement. But he didn’t. He was a kind man, and he took it in stride. He hadn’t been put off by the presumed insanity in Norma Jeane’s family or by her position as a charity case. He had come to relish the role of being her savior, of taking this sweet “love child” under his protection. He was not the last man to cast himself in the role of Norma Jeane’s protector—a standard role for men in relationships with girlfriends and wives in the 1950s. He honestly loved her for her loving spirit, her beauty, her kindness and grace.
The wedding occurred on June 19, 1942, three weeks after Norma Jeane’s sixteenth birthday, when she attained the legal age of sexual consent. It was an eerie repetition of Gladys’s situation at her marriage, which had also been arranged with the age of sexual consent in mind. Norma Jeane and Jim were married at the home of the Howells, people of means whose impressive house in Westwood had an elegant curving staircase, like the ones in movies Norma Jeane had seen. She walked down the staircase in white bridal splendor. Ana Lower had made Norma Jeane’s wedding dress—a traditional one of white satin and lace—and she gave her foster daughter away. The ceremony was held in front of the fireplace in the Howells’ living room.
Loralee and Doralee Howell were flower girls. Grace was in West Virginia with Doc and Bebe, but six of Norma Jeane’s foster mothers were there. By my calculation they included Ida Bolender, Ana Lower, Maude Atkinson, Olive Monroe, Doris Howell, and Enid Knebelkamp. Lester Bolender and his wife were also there. (Bryan and Lottie Atchinson, Grace’s brother and sister-in-law, with whom Norma Jeane had lived for several months, were out of town.) Gladys wasn’t present; she was still in Agnews State Hospital in Northern California. After years of living in other people’s homes, Norma Jeane finally had a family of her own.40
Jim had saved enough money to pay for a wedding reception and dinner at the Florentine Gardens, a local nightclub. The floor show went on during the wedding banquet. Called “Red, White, and Beauti
ful,” it featured showgirls playing famous film stars, in a recapitulation of the history of Hollywood glamour. Showgirls impersonated Greta Garbo, Marlene Dietrich, Dorothy Lamour, Katharine Hepburn, and Hedy Lamarr. Norma Jeane could hardly have missed it when one of the showgirls pulled Jim on stage and had him dance with her. The world of entertainment was all around her in Los Angeles, and even at her marriage she was experiencing it firsthand.41
In a previously unknown letter from Norma Jeane to Grace that I discovered, Norma Jeane describes how excited she is to set up her new home. The letter is dated September 1942, nearly three months after she married Jim Dougherty. She and Jim had rented a one-room apartment with a Murphy bed that they pulled down to sleep at night. Although the place was small and compact, she was spending all her time keeping it spotless, shopping for food, and cooking their meals. A friend, she said, had told her that being a housewife was time-consuming, and her friend was right. But, she added, “it really is a lot of fun.” She described her love for her husband. “Jimmie is so swell to me; in fact, I know that if I had waited 5 or 10 years I couldn’t have found anyone who would have treated me better. I just think the world of him and we get along so nice. He is just so sweet about every little thing.” Was Norma Jeane telling Grace the truth? Or had she retreated into a fantasy world? Jim once characterized her in their early marriage as seeming like a child playing a game of house. After all, she was only sixteen.
She described her wedding gifts with enthusiasm. They were items typically given at showers and weddings in the 1940s—an age of chips and dips, casseroles, glass candy dishes, and glass salad sets. Aunt Ana gave her starting sets of basic household items like towels and kitchen utensils. Mr. and Mrs. George Yeager (he worked with Jim at Lockheed) gave them a set of liquor glasses, although Norma Jeane hastened to add that they would use them for something other than liquor. Hazel and Chester Patterson gave them “the cutest little electric clock” shaped like a teapot. Aunt Doris and Uncle Chet (Howell) gave them a “very beautiful” picture that his mother had painted. They were given glass Pyrex dishes for baking and a number of glass salad bowls with glass plates. Sterling silver pitchers, serving pieces, and crystal glassware were typically given at weddings of the well-to-do in this era. They are notably absent from Norma Jeane’s wedding gifts.42