by Lois Banner
Once married, they spent a lot of time with his family. It was large and tightly knit, since the Doughertys had survived years of poverty during the early 1930s, when they lived in tents in public parks and ate at soup kitchens. They had once lived in a tent they pitched in the backyard of a Mexican family who took pity on them. With wartime prosperity their finances improved, but they were far from well-to-do. With her sweet ways and her desire to please, Norma Jeane fit into their family. She seemed like a daughter to Jim’s mother, Ethel, and a sister to his brothers and sisters. She loved to take care of Jim’s young nieces and nephews. Such behavior would become standard for her, as she entered families and left them, testing her ability to charm again and again. She adjusted herself to Jim’s needs, but that’s what she had done with her foster families.
Sometimes Norma Jeane and Jim went dancing or to the movies. They also hunted and fished, pursuing Jim’s interests; they socialized mostly with his friends. On weekends they went to Muscle Beach in Venice, a famed hangout for bodybuilders, so that Jim could participate in the contests there. Norma Jeane liked going there because the young men on the beach flirted with her, until she held up her hand with her wedding ring on it and they moved away. She liked to show off her body and experience her attractiveness to men.
In ghostwritten articles and books, Jim later described his marriage to Norma Jeane as perfect. He stated that she willingly went hunting and fishing with him, and she kept the house spotless. She was also a good cook—she made delicious lamb and venison dishes—and she loved going to prizefights. In essence, she did anything that Jim wanted her to do. She was also extraordinary in bed, he maintained, and they had sex all the time.
Was any of it true, or did Jim make it up? Norma Jeane was undoubtedly a good housekeeper. Throughout her life she liked to do housework and to cook, but as a Hollywood star—even an aspiring starlet—she didn’t have time for it. She told reporter Lisa Wilson that when married to Jim she clipped recipes from magazines, listened to cooking experts on the radio, and asked neighbors for advice. That’s how she learned to cook.43 Her emerging drive for perfection led her to construct herself as a perfect partner for Jim. And she was beginning to develop the ability to play a role in a life situation. She tried to please, to make herself into the person others wanted her to be.
With Grace gone and Ana Lower living at a distance, she became dependent on Jim. She exhibited a fear of abandonment when she was with him, clinging to him and calling him Daddy. Such behavior is typical of victims of childhood sexual abuse, as they cope with adult life. In a 1953 Photoplay article, Jim said she easily became hysterical; in a 1976 article in McCall’s, he said her moods were sometimes scary and it took a lot of reassurance to get her over them. The infantile part of her self would suddenly appear, and she would become like a baby. She would then do a speedy turnaround and become a mature woman. His statements are the first indication that Norma Jeane’s fragmented self was showing through.44
Other incidents contradict the rosy picture Jim painted of their time together, events indicating that Norma Jeane sometimes behaved strangely. Late one night she ran outside in a nightgown after they quarreled and came back sobbing that a man had been following her. (This episode has been cited as evidence of mental illness, but it’s possible that a man was following her.) Moreover, she tried to pull a cow into their apartment in the middle of pouring rain to stop it from being soaked. She put too much sugar in coffee and poured a large amount of bourbon into drinks she was making. She was too insecure to tell Jim she didn’t like hunting and fishing.
What about Jim’s claims that they had wonderful sex? When his former wife became the world’s sex icon, his masculine self-esteem demanded that he claim they both had performed superbly at sex. But Marilyn stated that she hadn’t liked their sex. “The first effect marriage had on me was to increase my lack of interest in sex.” And “my husband either didn’t mind this or wasn’t aware of it.” But, she continued, they were too young to discuss such an embarrassing topic. According to Elia Kazan, Marilyn told him that she hadn’t enjoyed sex with Jim, except when he had kissed her breasts. He had made no effort to satisfy her. After he was satisfied, he’d fall asleep. It sounds as though Jim didn’t understand female sexual response, which wasn’t uncommon among young men and women in the 1950s.45
Jim often was fixated on himself and his male activities. When reporter Jane Wilkie interviewed him for Photoplay, she found him macho and not overly bright. Robert Mitchum, Jim’s workmate at Lockheed who later became a Hollywood star, described him as decent and good-humored. “He looked like a large brick,” Mitchum said, “red-haired, square-shouldered and solid all the way down.” Jim admitted to Wilkie that he stayed out late at night shooting pool with his buddies, even though this upset Norma Jeane. When she talked about her dreams of becoming a film star, he replied that there were plenty of girls seeking stardom in Hollywood, all of whom could sing, dance, and act. What makes you think you’re better than they are? he had asked. A traditional man, he didn’t want her to work outside the home. He noticed that she spent a lot of time on her appearance, washing her face many times a day, fixing her makeup, eating wholesome food, and exercising; but he thought she did it for him.46
Yet he could be kind and considerate. He didn’t complain when she told him she didn’t want to become pregnant because childbearing might cause her body to sag. (She told others she thought of bearing a child as in the distant future. “Women in her family,” she said, “had always made such a mess of mothering.”)47 Jim also worried about the mental illness in her family; he thought they should wait until she was older to place the stress of childbearing on her. Norma Jeane also feared she might go insane; her emerging emotionalism allowed her to feel more in touch with herself, but she was concerned that it also might indicate some abnormality in her brain. The diagnosis of a disintegrating brain given to Gladys at Norwalk State Mental Hospital would always haunt Norma Jeane, as would the demons and monsters of her dreams. Pressured by Jim, she got a diaphragm.
Jim signed up for the military in the spring of 1944. Given his immersion in male culture, he responded to the pressure on young men to serve their country in wartime. All his friends were enlisting in the services or being drafted into them, and he didn’t want to be shamed for staying behind. Norma Jeane became hysterical when he brought up the subject. He was her major support, the one person who hadn’t abandoned her. To soothe her, he joined the merchant marine, in which shore duty was more likely than in the other services. Indeed, he was sent to Catalina Island, which had been turned into a merchant marine base. Promoted to physical education instructor and given officer status, he was permitted to rent a house on the island and to move Norma Jeane there to live with him. They remained on Catalina Island for nine months, until he was assigned to duty in the South Pacific.
Those months on Catalina brought Jim and Norma Jeane closer together, but they also strained their marriage—while they became important to the genesis of the sexualized Marilyn Monroe. The economy of Catalina depended on the tourist trade, which was suspended during the war. With the ferry to the island taken over by the military, much of the island’s population, especially its women, moved to the mainland, leaving the island to the thousands of men stationed there. “You never saw so many sailors, so many men,” Marilyn remembered.48 Norma Jeane was one of the few women on the base. Other officers brought wives along, and she became friendly with them. She went to the beach with them, exchanged recipes, and helped them care for their babies. Yet her fame as a sensual woman spread. When she walked into town or on the beach, men watched her.
Jim was her protector; no one would take on the tough athletic instructor. Norma Jeane often wore tight sweaters and shorts, or a bathing suit, displaying her body, which infuriated Jim. He accused her of dressing that way to stimulate male desire. “Don’t you realize,” he said to her, “that the men are raping you in their minds?”49 His admonitions made her angry, since she d
idn’t think she was dressing differently from the other women on the island. This was in many ways her first exertion of independence in a marriage in which her husband felt he should be in control.
Substitute the camera eye for the eyes of those men. Norma Jeane was at the center of attention. She was seductive, posing, a model in the making. She welcomed the male gaze. Norman Rosten, later a close friend who wrote a memoir of her, described her as enjoying the idea of men desiring her. “It aroused, flattered, and excited her. Such attention, constantly directed toward her, denied her inner and overwhelming dread of not being wanted.”50 Perhaps she saw power in it, a means of controlling men. Perhaps she couldn’t stop herself from doing so. Perhaps she was angry at Jim Dougherty for his sexual demands and was getting back at him.
As a professional model she later faced the camera boldly, confronting the male gaze. Photographer Philippe Halsman stated that Marilyn “knew that the camera lens was not a glass eye but a symbol for the eyes of millions of men.” His remark was a metaphor for her performance. She was able to direct “the entire impact of her personality” on Catalina Island, engaging the eyes of the men there. She could look people in the eye in personal encounters; she could do the same in front of a camera.51
Life magazine first brought the pinup into mainstream culture in 1939. That figure combined the big-breasted babe with the sweet all-American girl.52 She must have seen the pinups the men collected, the photos of young women—usually starlets in bathing suits and negligees—that movie studios distributed by the hundreds of thousands and that were featured in the military publications such as Stars and Stripes newspaper and Yank magazine. Moreover, the government subsidized an edition of Esquire, the day’s major upscale men’s magazine, that was sent to the troops. In every issue Esquire published an illustration by Alberto Vargas of an airbrushed, perfect woman, known as a Varga girl, lush, voluptuous, and long-limbed. His perfect woman was a smash hit. The policy of distributing these magazines and pinups to the troops was intended to create “morale,” to inspire soldiers to remember they were fighting to preserve American ideals, represented by their girlfriends and wives. That goal seems preposterous until one realizes that the faces of the pinups were modeled after the sweet, innocent face of the “girl next door.”
Norma Jeane could be clingy and dependent, shy and insecure. But she could also tap into the independence she’d developed at Emerson Junior High, when she designed an unusual wardrobe to attract attention from the boys, and on Catalina, when she had defied Jim Dougherty by wearing sexy clothes. She also became friends with Howard Corrington, a former Olympic weight lifting champion who was in her husband’s unit, and she studied weight lifting with him. It was a rebellious act. In the 1950s, women were permitted to engage in sports like tennis and swimming, but weight lifting was out-of-bounds. It was designed to develop muscles, which women weren’t supposed to have. Norma Jeane said that she lifted weights to keep her breasts firm and to hold her weight down. She also must have realized its benefits for modeling and acting: she needed to be strong, with a flexible body, to stand the rigors of those careers.
Meantime, Jim had become annoyed with Norma Jeane’s emotionalism and her flirtatious behavior. He needed a break from her. He asked for duty overseas, and he was assigned to the South Pacific. It suddenly seemed to Norma Jeane that she was being abandoned. Reverting to the devoted wife, she begged him to allow her to become pregnant, so that she would have a baby to care for. He didn’t do that, and Norma Jeane moved in with his parents on the mainland. Even more than on Catalina, men on the streets must have stopped her and told her that she could be a model, even a movie star. That was a typical male come-on to beautiful women in an era when the film industry dominated the city. But Norma Jeane didn’t act on these comments. It wasn’t until photographer David Conover found her working on an aircraft factory assembly line and pointed her toward modeling as a career that her life was transformed.
Chapter 4
Photographers and Producers, 1944–1946
In April 1944, Jim Dougherty left for the South Pacific, and Norma Jeane moved in with his parents. Ethel Dougherty, coconspirator with Grace Goddard in marrying Norma Jeane to her son, was now watching over her, in what amounted to a reprise of the foster families of her childhood. Norma Jeane was still doing what she was told to do, dependent on others to make her decisions for her. When she became restless, starting to want a life of her own, Ethel found her a job on the assembly line of Radioplane, a munitions factory in Burbank where Ethel worked in the infirmary. Norma Jeane was now a Rosie the Riveter. Still a perfect wife, she wrote Jim every day.
Radioplane made remote-controlled drones that served as practice targets for fighter planes and antiaircraft artillery. After an initial assignment inspecting the parachutes that were attached to the drones to bring them back to earth, Norma Jeane was transferred to the “dope room,” where she painted varnish on the drones’ canvas fuselages and sanded the finish smooth. She worked long hours, mostly standing.1 The varnish was smelly, and the work exhausting. The conditions were reminiscent of the long hours and smelly glue in her mother’s film editing labs that she had rejected when she saw the RKO sign from her bedroom window at the orphanage and decided to become a star. Yet Norma Jeane tried to be outstanding in her work and, indeed, she was so good at it that Radioplane awarded her a gold medal.
Disliking the work in the “dope room,” she found a desk job at the local Van Nuys army base. She quickly returned to Radioplane, however, when she realized that her coworkers at the base would all be men. That raised the specter of Catalina, where Jim had become angry at her for causing the men to ogle her. She now had to deal with her motherin-law, her husband’s standin. “There are enough of those wolves at Radioplane,” she wrote Grace, “without a whole army full of them.”2
Despite living with the Doughertys, Norma Jeane remained loyal to Ana Lower and Christian Science. In August 1944 she took the ultimate pledge of fidelity by becoming a church member, signing a document affirming her support of the church. Such signing parallels the rite of confirmation in other Christian churches. Norma Jeane’s membership document was witnessed by Ana Lower and Emma Easton Newman, a renowned healer who had been trained by Mary Baker Eddy. Such a link to the founder conferred great prestige, validating Ana’s importance in the church and her hopes for her foster child.
In October Norma Jeane traveled to Chicago and Detroit for two months to visit Grace and to meet Berniece Miracle, her half-sister from Gladys’s first marriage, with whom she had been corresponding. Grace was living temporarily in Chicago; Berniece lived in Detroit. Ana sent Norma Jeane the letter that chided her for having car sickness—only an illusion to a healer—and counseled her to seek God’s love. In her memoir of Marilyn, Berniece describes their good times together in Detroit shopping and reminiscing about their childhoods, but she notes that Norma Jeane stammered throughout her visit.3
In December, soon after she returned to Radioplane, Norma Jeane’s fortunes drastically changed when a group of army air corps filmmakers arrived at the plant to make a training film for new recruits. Pinup photographer David Conover was among them. He was on the lookout for young women to photograph for Yank and Stars and Stripes. When he saw Norma Jeane on the assembly line he was immediately attracted to her and he asked if he could photograph her. She agreed. He then asked her to put on a sweater, since he was taking “morale” photos and the shape of her body needed to show. She put on a red sweater she had with her. It was, Conover stated, “a flashy red cashmere that enhanced her astonishing figure delightfully.” Once again a red sweater was her “magic sweater.” She would often wear it in subsequent pinup photos, since the models had to provide their own clothes for photographs.4
The Conover photos showed that Norma Jeane was very photogenic: she possessed that rare quality of skin tone and vitality that radiates on film. And she had a look of knowing innocence. In those photos, as in all her early pinup photos, she is
a child-woman enjoying her body and seeking attention, sometimes coyly, sometimes boldly, although she never looks vulgar. Conover was so impressed that he told Norma Jeane that she should be on magazine covers, not on an assembly line.
It was a transformative moment. The click of the camera flashed with clarity, like the moment at a revival meeting when the participant realizes God’s grace and is “born again” as a new person with new goals. Mary Baker Eddy had taken charge of her chronic pain in a moment of inspiration when she read the Bible passage about Christ healing a crippled man by telling him to throw away his crutches and walk. As a Christian Scientist, Norma Jeane was steeped in Eddy’s life story, and so her success seemed like a sign from God. She too could transform herself into a new person. Aside from her sweet nature and a maturity beyond her years, Norma Jeane hadn’t displayed any special abilities so far, except her drive for perfection, apparent in her perfect behavior as a wife and as a factory worker. Not much else, aside from her dreams about stardom, suggested she would turn into a dynamo of ambition when her goal seemed possible. Conover’s photos released a genie inside of her.
The most recent writers on genius, creativity’s greatest manifestation, agree that it can appear at any point in the life cycle, not just in childhood. They reject the nineteenth-century romantic belief that it exists only in a small set of heroic people. They find three factors key to what they see as a more general phenomenon. First is a grandiose and mystical sense of the world, what Einstein called “cosmic religiosity.” Such an elevated mood can appear in the hypomanic phase of the up-down cycle of someone with a bipolar disorder, as depression lifts and elation appears. The second element of genius is an ability to concentrate obsessively on a goal and to strive for perfection in reaching it. The third element is a resonance to one’s historical era, being in sync with current ideals, living when one’s gift or invention can be appreciated.5