by Lois Banner
The process was time-consuming and complicated. First her hair was straightened, using chemicals. Then blonde dye was applied. The hair was then permed to get some of the curl back. Finally, it was fixed in curls close to her head with bobby pins and dried under a floor-standing dryer. It was arduous, but Norma Jeane was willing to do whatever it took to succeed as a model.
At this stage in her career, she cooperated with photographers, mostly showing up on time. She was willing to work for them on “spec,” which meant that she posed for free, using her own clothes and doing her own makeup. When they sold a photograph, she received a percentage of the fee. But photographers were notorious for not paying under such an arrangement and many models refused to work on spec. “She was a go-getter,” stated photographer Andre de Dienes. “Her success wouldn’t have happened if she hadn’t cooperated so whole-heartedly with so many photographers.” Her cooperation led her to sign releases that gave photographers control over their photographs of her. Enthused by success, Norma Jeane didn’t realize that granting such rights would later cause problems—namely that she might be oversold, resulting in fewer requests to photograph her in the future, since advertisers could use existing photos. At the beginning of her career, she felt she had to be accommodating to get assignments.20
Norma Jeane’s waiflike persona brought out Snively’s maternal feelings. Unlike many of her models, Norma Jeane didn’t have a mother to watch out for her. Neither Grace nor Ana showed up to help her, although she was only nineteen years old. Marilyn claimed in My Story that they were working hard to support themselves and she didn’t mind managing her career herself. Generous to a fault, Norma Jeane gave them money when she had it, and she talked to Grace frequently on the phone. “She started out with less than any girl I ever knew,” Snively stated, “but she worked the hardest … she wanted to learn, wanted to be somebody, more than anybody I ever saw before in my life.” The photographers were charmed by her interest in them. “When I introduced her to a photographer,” Snively stated, “she would look him straight in the eye and cling to his every word. She made everyone she talked to feel as if he were the only one in the world.” Added to her personal charm was her compelling photogeneity; sometimes she seemed to glow.21
In another indication of her chameleonlike abilities, she modified her manner to suit each photographer. With William Carroll she was a confidante. They discussed her failing marriage, and she suggested that if he intended to display her photo in camera shops, she should wear shorts or a playsuit, not a bathing suit, so that mom-and-pop customers wouldn’t be offended. She approached Bruno Bernard—a courtly European—as a paternal figure. But he photographed her in a yellow bikini swimsuit that she had made out of several scarves, tied at the sides with string. She attached a brief skirt to it, which she removed for some photographers. The bikini was so abbreviated that it showed off her midriff and most of her breasts. In 1945 the bikini swimsuit had only recently been invented by a French swimsuit designer, who named it after the South Pacific atoll where the hydrogen bomb had first been tested. Only a few women were wearing it, and certainly no Americans. In 1950 photographer Anthony Beauchamp called her bikini costume “explosive” and “a parody of a bikini.” Pinup photographer Laszlo Willinger liked it so much when Norma Jeane put it on for him that he not only photographed her in it but also had other models he photographed wear a copy of it.22
The most insightful description of Norma Jeane during this period is in Andre de Dienes’s memoir of their month-long trip to Death Valley, Yosemite, and Oregon in December 1945. They went to those places to shoot photos of her in natural settings. Posing for de Dienes was a coup, since he was known internationally for his work. Born in Transylvania, he was raised by an elderly relative after his mother committed suicide and his father moved to Budapest. At the age of eighteen, he moved to Paris. Self-trained as a photographer, he met the prominent fashion photographer George Hoyningen-Huene one day when he was photographing Parisian street scenes. The older photographer, impressed with his work, became de Dienes’s mentor.23
De Dienes had a volatile personality, talked nonstop, and was considered to be an eccentric. He was also ten years older than Norma Jeane. The year before he met her, he had photographed Shirley Temple and Ingrid Bergman for Look magazine. He’d lived in New York, but at the end of 1945 he’d moved to Los Angeles to find a model to pose for him nude in natural settings as they toured unsettled areas of the West.
Photographing the naked female body had become his passion. He loved the female body, loved to look at it, loved to make love to it. As a photographer he saw it as a landscape of lights and shadows, hills and valleys, and he aimed to glorify it in his photographs. A pioneer in what came to be known as aesthetic nude photography, he shot naked women in terms of the high-art tradition that had entered photography with the nudes of Clarence White and Edward Steichen in the 1900s.24
He asked Emmeline Snively to find him a model. Although posing nude was considered scandalous, Snively thought Norma Jeane might do it, perhaps because she was married and thus accustomed to being naked in front of a man. She sent Norma Jeane to de Dienes’s room in the fashionable Chateau Marmont on Sunset Boulevard, an upscale hotel that was bound to impress her. Norma Jeane was also impressed by his portfolio, which was filled with his photos of celebrities and stars.
She turned on her charm, and de Dienes fell for her. A replica of a beloved peasant girl from his childhood in Transylvania, she also resembled his favored Shirley Temple. She had Temple’s innocent look, curly hair, and enchanting laugh. She also seemed to appreciate his jokes and stories, which he told endlessly. De Dienes often fell in love with his models—he’d fallen in love with Temple—and he fell for Norma Jeane. She kept him at arm’s length. She flirted with him, refusing to say whether or not she would pose for him nude, although she went into the bathroom in his hotel room and put on a two-piece bathing suit she had along with her so that he could evaluate her body. She asked him many questions, showing interest in his life and work, flattering him. She said little about herself.
She refused to go with him on his trip without Ana Lower’s permission, and so she invited him to dinner at the Sawtelle apartment to meet Ana. Norma Jeane told Ana about his fame as a photographer, while making certain that Andre saw the religious pictures on the wall and heard them say grace before the meal. It was her way of putting up boundaries, of showing him that she was a “good girl.” After all, she was still married to Jim Dougherty.
While Norma Jeane was dealing with de Dienes, Jim returned on leave after many months overseas, and he moved in with her in Ana Lower’s downstairs apartment. Pleading their need for money, Norma Jeane refused to cancel her trip with de Dienes. Once on the road, she sent Jim a postcard stating how much she missed him. She addressed the card to “My Dearest Daddy,” and she signed it “Your baby.”25 She was doing her best to maintain the seductive wifely voice that would convince Jim of her loyalty. She was still afraid of losing him.
Norma Jeane’s trip with de Dienes turned into a madcap adventure. They drove through uninhabited land, encountered hoodlums, had flat tires, and lost a wallet. When Norma Jeane telephoned Grace, now back from her eastern adventures and living in Van Nuys, Grace told her that Gladys had been released from Agnews and was living in a hotel in Portland. Norma Jeane hadn’t seen her mother for six years. De Dienes agreed to take her to see Gladys, since they were planning on being near there anyway. It was a miserable visit. Gladys was mostly silent and morose. Then she told Norma Jeane that she wanted to live with her—a startling statement after six years of absence, although Gladys would show up that spring (1946), and Norma Jeane would take her in.
Norma Jeane was quiet on the trip, but de Dienes talked continually. She read from a Christian Science prayer book and slept a lot, keeping calm to prevent an attack of motion sickness. He read to her from a book of quotations he had, philosophical thoughts of great men about spirituality, and she read to him from her p
rayer book.26
They exchanged nicknames: she called him W. W., for worry wart, and he called her Turkey Foot because when they reached Mount Hood in Oregon her hands turned purple from the cold, resembling the feet of a turkey. It doesn’t seem especially affectionate, but it amused Norma Jeane, who loved nicknames. The attempts at affection turned more serious when he pressed her for sex: she refused, telling him once again she was married. But the night after they visited her mother, he said she gave in. De Dienes claimed the sex was superb (of course he would say that). On Christmas Day she failed to lock the car door, and some of his photography equipment was stolen. She called Aunt Ana from a pay phone, interrupting her as she was eating Christmas dinner with Jim Dougherty. She said she was miserable and wanted to come home. It’s not surprising that the visit to Gladys, followed by an ambivalent sex episode and the loss of de Dienes’s equipment, plunged her into a funk. From an adventurer she turned into a little girl who wanted to come home.
De Dienes persuaded her to continue the trip. After all, he was a famous photographer. He decided they were engaged, and Norma Jeane went along with the fantasy. He talked about moving to the desert, growing their own food, and having many children. Or they would settle in New York, and she would be his muse. When he asked her what she would do there, she surprised him by replying that she would go to Columbia Law School and then help the poor. But she didn’t really intend to marry him. She told a friend that she liked de Dienes a lot, but after the years with Jim she wasn’t interested in marriage.27
De Dienes found Norma Jeane extraordinary. Everywhere they went she discovered something in nature to admire: the mist on the distant mountains, tiny bugs she held in her hand. She seemed on a transcendent high. When their car got stuck in a snowbank in the mountains, she became spellbound by the silence of the woods around them, covered by a blanket of snow. She filled the backseat of the car with pine branches because she wanted to take the scent with them. That touching gesture overwhelmed him.28
They cut their trip short when de Dienes learned that a close friend of his in New York had died. They hurried to Los Angeles so that he could catch a nonstop train to New York. When he returned several months later, Norma Jeane was with another man, although they remained friends. She went with him on a tour of Spanish missions near San Diego—San Gabriel and San Juan Capistrano—and to the beach, where he read lines of poetry to her and she memorized them. In January 1947, she sent him a copy of Science and Health. In the frontispiece she noted a passage. “Divine Love always has met and always will meet every human need”: in other words, she didn’t want a physical relationship with him.
De Dienes’s photos were important to Norma Jeane’s success. On their trip in December 1945, he photographed her in a variety of settings. She was a woodland sprite, a girl frolicking in the snow in a snowsuit; a peasant girl wearing a pinafore and holding a lamb. The lamb photo was the first photo of her to appear on a nonmilitary magazine cover—Family Circle, a magazine for housewives. De Dienes shot three of the first five mainstream cover photos in which Norma Jeane appeared: Family Circle, in April 1946; U.S. Camera in May 1946; and Pageant magazine in June 1946.29 He sold her photographs to European publications as well as American ones, initiating her transatlantic reputation. But she never agreed to pose for de Dienes in the nude. The famous 1949 nude photo of her was taken by Tom Kelley, a photographer with a modest reputation as a photographer of nudes.
Jim Dougherty was there when Norma Jeane returned from the trip with de Dienes; he had moved into Ana’s downstairs apartment, where Norma Jeane had been living. He couldn’t do anything about his wife’s behavior, so he stoically retreated emotionally, even though he discovered that not only had she used up the stipend from his salary she was sent during the months they had been apart but she also had cleaned out their savings and pawned their jewelry to pay for her modeling expenses. She was able to charm Jim into forgiving her. And she was on a roll. In February 1946, Snively sent her to sit for famed illustrator Earl Moran. During the next two years, she modeled for him once a month. He took photos of her, sketched a charcoal outline of the photos, and went over them with colored chalk, producing an idealized image of her. Yet, in the many illustrations by Moran for which she posed, she looks like just another blonde, nothing special. Sometimes she violated the day’s conservative morality by posing topless for him, but her look was so unexceptional that even when she was a star no one identified her as the model for those illustrations.30
Wellknown Hollywood photographers shot her: Lazlo Willinger, Earl Leaf, David Miller, Earl Theisen, and others. (Theisen had worked at Consolidated Industries years before and had known her mother.) Jim Dougherty was amazed at the number of magazines and ads featuring her—on covers, on inside pages, in advertisements for makeup, shampoos, clothing, shoes, cars. Bruno Bernard even photographed her with his dog and sold the photograph for a dog food ad.31
Did Marilyn have sex with any of these photographers? In 1956 she told Colin Clark she did. Clark was an elite Brit, the son of art critic Kenneth Clark, and Laurence Olivier’s assistant on The Prince and the Showgirl. He became friendly with Marilyn when she starred in that film opposite Olivier in 1956. In 1960 she also told Jaik Rosenstein she had slept with photographers. Rosenstein was a maverick journalist who published a mimeographed newsletter, Hollywood Closeup, in which he exposed Hollywood’s hidden sexual side: prostitution, call-girl rings, extortion schemes. Once a legman for Walter Winchell and then for Hedda Hopper, he became disgusted with their reporting, which he found biased and sometimes made up. In 1960 he was one of the few journalists to support Marilyn’s version of her affair with Yves Montand, in which Montand was the seducer as much as she. Grateful to Rosenstein, she gave him a candid interview, including telling him about her past behavior.32
Marilyn told Colin Clark she slept with photographers as a way of thanking them; she told Jaik Rosenstein she slept with them because of the competition for modeling jobs. We should also remember that morality was freer during World War Two than before. With Jim often absent and men coming on to her, Norma Jeane may have become a “V-Girl,” one of the young women who slept with servicemen. As for the photographers who shot her, Conover and de Dienes claimed to have had brief affairs with her. Joseph Jasgur stated that he and Norma Jeane “respected” her marriage and only cuddled in the back seats of movie theaters.
On the other hand, photographer William Carroll told me that the Blue Book Model Agency was connected to a call-girl ring. The models weren’t required to participate in it, he said, but they made a lot more money if they did. The agency had its offices in the Ambassador Hotel, a Hollywood landmark, where call girls hung out. The hotel was on Wilshire Boulevard, not far from the studios; it occupied twenty-two acres and included a large swimming pool, a golf course, many fashionable shops, and the Coconut Grove nightclub, a center of Hollywood nightlife.33
Visiting dignitaries and businessmen stayed there, and call girls were available to them. Malcolm Boyd was a junior executive in a Hollywood advertising agency and then a producer at Republic Pictures. In both jobs he arranged for visitors to have an expensive dinner, a Cuban cigar, and the services of a call girl. Hollywood had a reputation as being sexually unfettered, and male visitors without wives along sometimes expected their fantasies to be fulfilled. Emmeline Snively seemed to keep her distance from the call-girl rings. She called her agency Blue Book, using the title given to the books in many cities listing the members of high society. She always wore a hat and gloves, signaling her respectability. In 1951 Charles Stocker, head of the Vice Squad of the Los Angeles Police Department (LAPD), called her Blue Book Model Agency the most elite agency on the West Coast.34 It’s possible, of course, that she offered her models a chance to make money on the side through prostitution and that her public respectability was a cover.
As a model Norma Jeane had entered a world of beautiful young females and randy male photographers, a sensual, sexual world. Living as a teen
with Ana Lower, she had kept her virtue intact, but at some point after her disillusionment with Jim Dougherty and her signing with Twentieth Century–Fox in August 1946, she became fascinated with her body, began to go nude in her private life, and engaged in extramarital sex. Her demons probably drove her to it, but she justified what amounted to sin in the eyes of the Christians who had raised her through a “free-love philosophy.” Such a point of view circulated sub rosa throughout the twentieth century, especially in artistic and bohemian circles. It promoted nudity as the ultimate in healthy activity and regarded sex as a natural outgrowth of friendship. Columnist Earl Wilson, her close friend, said “nakedness, nudity, sex, child of nature” had always been her platform. New York clothing manufacturer Henry Rosenfeld, another close friend, said she regarded sex as an act that brought friends closer together. That attitude was also a way of justifying what amounted to promiscuous behavior.35
She probably derived some of these free-love ideas from the photographers, especially de Dienes, Willinger, and Bernard. They were sophisticated Europeans who photographed nudes and justified the practice as aesthetic, not pornographic. Bernard came from Germany, and Willinger had studied in Berlin; Germany had a large nudist movement. Bernard wrote, “The artist’s fascination with the female figure is rooted not in simple allure but in the aesthetic satisfaction he gets during the quest for beauty.” She followed both their ideas and free-love doctrines when she stated that sex was the key to life and that all aesthetic endeavors came from it—literature, art, music, poetry.36
Aside from her dream of walking nude over a church congregation, Norma Jeane hadn’t shown any interest in going nude as a child, even though such behavior isn’t unusual among young children. Living with Norma Jeane in the early spring of 1945 and again in early 1946, while she was modeling, Jim Dougherty noticed that she wasn’t wearing underwear for a modeling assignment. When he asked her why, she replied that she wore her clothing tight to show off her body, and underwear might cause ridges. She made the same statement repeatedly in later years when she wore no underclothes; although other behaviors of hers and comments she made indicate that her drive toward nudity had deep roots in her internal self.